As I have been working on my research and writing project that I am now calling, “The ‘Good War’ That Wasn’t—And Why It Matters,” I have drawn a great deal of inspiration from a book from several years ago that also expresses deep skepticism about the moral legitimacy of this war. I posted the following reflections on this book almost four years ago when I first started my PeaceTheology.net site. I think it’s worth a revisit as I put the finishing touches on my book.

As could be expected, Nicholson Baker’s  Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (Simon & Schuster, 2008) has received mostly hostile reviews both in the mainstream media and among academic historians. I think it is a terrific book, though. It was one of the most absorbing 400+ page books I have ever read.

Describing the lead up to World War II

The book is made up of hundreds, probably close to 1,000, short vignettes that trace the events leading up to World War II and its prosecution until the end of 1941 (which, for the U.S., marked our country’s entry into the War).

These vignettes are mostly simple, descriptive statements; only rarely is Baker’s voice apparent. An example of an editorial comment, though, may be found on page 452: A December 10, 1941, Gallup poll had shown that two-thirds of the American population would support the U.S. firebombing Japanese cities in retaliation for Pearl Harbor. “Ten percent—representing twelve million citizens—were wholly opposed. Twelve million people still held to Franklin Roosevelt’s basic principle of civilization: that no man should be punished for the deeds of another. Franklin D. Roosevelt was not one of them.”

As should be obvious (and reviewers have all taken pains to note), the reader should not mistake the objective tone of Baker’s reportage for a merely descriptive intent on his part. Baker clearly has an agenda—though precisely what that agenda is remains for us to discern from the book’s contents. It has no introduction or commentary beyond a very brief “Afterword.” However, by what he includes and excludes, Baker tells a story filtered through his own lenses and reflecting his own concerns.

The final paragraph of the afterword is telling: “I dedicate this book to the memory of Clarence Pickett and other American and British pacifists. They’ve never really gotten their due. They tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right.” (474)

Opposition to the Nazis could still be morally problematic

These two quotes I have cited do, I think, give us a sense of what Baker is up to. Though he is far from a Nazi apologist (some of his vignettes about Nazi actions evoke visceral outrage), Baker makes clear that opposition to Nazism in itself did not settle the question of what the best response to their actions would be.

The response of British and American leaders horrify Baker. He makes it clear that neither country did even close to what could have been done to save Jewish and other refugees nor to provide aid to starving children and others in Europe (he has a number of telling quotes from former President Herbert Hoover who was deeply frustrated in his efforts to take aid to needy people in Europe). That is, to allude to Baker’s subtitle, he presents this war as anything but a war to save civilization and support humane values.

As a pacifist myself, I exulted as I read this book. I did this not because Baker provides anything close to a set of clear answers to the big questions pacifists face in response to World War II—he does nothing of the kind. However, he uncovers a voice, a perspective, a record of action that is completely ignored in most discussions of World War II.

Baker makes a strong case for acknowledging two crucial points. (1) There were pacifists, such as Quaker leaders Clarence Pickett and Rufus Jones, who faced head on the unspeakable evils and sought to bring healing to the brokenness. Theirs was far from an ethic of withdrawal, passivity, or parasitism. (2) And, the responses of the leaders of the “Free World” only compounded the evils set loose by the Nazis and Japanese militarists.

Only adding to the “criminal spirit”

This is what I especially drew from the book: When faced with extraordinary crimes against humanity, the defenders of Western civilization with little resistance succumbed to the same criminal spirit. We learn just how bloodthirsty Winston Churchill and other British war leaders were—insisting on horrific violence against German civilians in face of clear evidence that such violence was ineffective, even counter-productive. Churchill had the asinine belief that if the British starved and traumatized the German people enough, they would rebel. Of course, the opposite happened—the Allied actions only strengthened the Nazis hold on the people’s loyalty (which, of course is precisely what happened in Britain in face of German air strikes). This reality is clear already by the end of 1941—Baker’s book stops long before Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.

By taking Pickett and similar pacifists seriously, Baker shows that there were alternative approaches. This is not to say that he is even hinting that “Hitler could have been stopped” by the pacifists (he makes this clear with a number of somewhat jarring quotes from Gandhi that convey a pretty strong sense of naiveté). I think his point (or at least my point) would be rather that simply responding to evil with evil not only is profoundly immoral and destructive of the core values that the Nazis’ opponents sought to defend, it also does not work very well. Surely a more humane and moral approach by the Allies to resisting the Nazis would have saved untold lives on all sides and greatly heightened possibilities of internal resistance to Nazi governance.

The enormous challenge humanity faces if it is to have a future is how we might, to quote Walter Wink, “oppose evil without becoming evil ourselves” (the opening words to his wonderful book Engaging the Powers).

The issue that arises from the book for me is its challenge to the easy (and extraordinarily corrupting) assumptions that World War II in some sense was a “good war” that in some sense successfully defended the core values of western humanism. In fact, it seems clear that the true winner of the War was the spirit of violence. A good book for confirming this point for the United States is James Carroll’s House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power.

A response to Baker from the political “left”

I have found it quite instructive to read a few responses to Baker’s book from supposedly politically progressive reviewers. The one I will focus on is a column by The Nation’s Katha Pollitt [April 21, 2008]. Pollitt states that she finished the book feeling, for the first time in her life, “fury at pacifists.” As a pacifist, when I read this comment at the beginning of the column, I naturally perked up, looking for reasons for this fury. Strangely, though, she never really explains why she is mad at pacifists—except, I guess because she thinks they are naïve. But “fury”?

Pollitt’s only reference to actual pacifists is to quote “the good kind Rufus Jones” (Clarence Pickett’s close colleague) when he sought to convince some Nazi leaders to allow the Quakers to aid needy people in Germany: “We noted a softening effect on their faces” (108-09)

She gives a very misleading impression with this quote, however. First, the “softening effect” on the Gestapo agents’ faces followed Jones’ recital of the work Quakers had done during and following World War I in Germany, feeding more than one million children a day at the program’s peak. That is, they were not simply making naïve appeals to the goodness of the hearts of the Nazis (Jones himself characterized these agents as “hard-faced, iron-natured men”), but seeking to remind the Germans of the work the Quakers had already done. More importantly, the appeal in this case actually was successful. After deliberating, the Gestapo agent gave this response: “I shall telegraph tonight to every police station in Germany that the Quakers are given full permission to investigate the sufferings of Jews and to bring such relief as they see necessary.”

Now, this was November 1938, many months yet before the war in Europe began. Jones concluded from this encounter, “It is the settled purpose of the German government to drive out Jews….Until a plan of rapid emigration…is established, the authorities consider the problem unsolved, and further outrages are likely to occur, bringing greater suffering and injustice.”

Pollitt concludes, Jones “didn’t grasp what he was up against. Say what you will about Churchill and Roosevelt, at least they got that right.” This seems to me to be extraordinary unfair—and inaccurate. It depends on what one especially cares about, I guess. Jones seems clearly to have known what he was up against, which is why he and his colleagues sought to move heaven and earth to help the threatened people in Nazi-dominated territories to escape. Roosevelt refused to support even extraordinarily small-scale efforts to provide refuge for Jews in the U.S (59, 101, 103, 125). And six million were killed. If the goal was to save lives, Jones seemed much more prescient and realistic than Churchill or Roosevelt.

These seem to be Pollitt’s assumptions: War can be good. Violence can be necessary. Violence can be redemptive. World War II proves this. It was the only way Hitler could be stopped. Pacifism is utterly irrelevant. She surely shares these assumptions with a large majority of liberals and progressives in this country—not to mention, of course, those further to the right.

The power of Nicholson Baker’s book is that it puts the possibility that these assumptions might be mistaken on the table. Maybe that is why Pollitt is furious. For myself, I am very grateful for Baker’s challenge.

P.S.  While most of the reviews I have read of Human Smoke have been pretty negative, here is a positive one from theL.A. Times.

“Look up at those great clouds while [...] I fuck the planet earth.”

Published in 2011, House of Holes is described on the back as “a modern-day Hieronymus Boschian bacchanal set in a pleasure resort where rules don’t apply.”

I don’t know what some of those words mean. I’d describe it as a filthy, fun, sci-fi porno enriched by Baker’s wonderful gift for language, but fails to hold my undivided interest for the entire thing. In that sense, it’s almost exactly like a porno. I’ll go back to it occasionally, but not to re-read the whole thing. I’ll just flip to the money shots.

Like these: “You mean I’m supposed to wank while Crackers does a lap dance?” (97) Even in context, I find this line LOLable.

Or this dry exchange: “Thank you,” said Kazumi. “I will let you feel my breasts now.” “Okay, great. Thanks.” Wade felt her breasts. (117)

Anything that isn’t completely out there and/or repugnant (like a woman being shrunk to a half-inch in size and stuck in a man’s penis, forcing him to masturbate her out.) is given nary any page space. “Mindy cooked him a three egg omelet and he ate it.” (228) And then back to the bangin’!

Holes is a collection of loosely related stories with recurring characters. Each one has a setup usually involving two strangers who have absolutely no qualms about discussing their most private and kinky sexual fantasies with each other. Then they do them. And anything is possible in the strange sci-fi world of the House of Holes, especially when it starts off with a girl named Shandee finding a disembodied arm that then feels up her roommate (causing Shandee to get fo’ realz jealous), that then transports them to a magical sex carnival.

This man has the filthiest imagination ever. Image from the Post-Gazette. Click for an interesting article titled "Is House of Holes necessary?"

The set-up, brief exposition, XXX action, and money shot would get tiring if it wasn’t so incredibly out there and imaginative.

Still, after almost 200 pages of this, I started to wonder: Why?

It’s not until page 167 until any of his characters seem to show any form of human emotion, but in a very robotic fashion.

“And what after all is a soul mate?” “A soul mate is when you really think someone is great. You really like her a lot. You like when she explains things to you. You love her. That’s a soul mate.” “Oh,” said Trix. “Will you take me to the groanrooms?” Then they go to a pitch-black room and moan at each other. It’s like an aural orgy.

Later, there’s a very interesting chapter about Ned, who has his head detached (don’t worry, he’s fine), which leaves his body to have sex all by itself and the woman named Reece who rents out his body in the Headless Bedroom. She kind of has to teach the body what to do, sexwise, and grapple with her own feelings about casual sex. What’s more casual than having sex with a body that can’t think, speak, or respond?

If the tables were turned, and the woman was headless, it would come across as quite sexist at the least. But Baker never makes his women objects. They have their own desires and drives, and they always get what they want too. Even though all the sex is exclusively hetero, it’s a very inclusive book, spanning many different fetishes.

Holes has a surprisingly wholesome message: Two consenting adults can and should be able to do whatever the heck they want without any judgment. Your imagination is the only thing holding you back.

Baker occasionally makes other points beyond just “ngghghghghgh.” When magically removing a client’s tattoos Hax says, “[Tattoos are] something that hides you. It is a way of not being naked while being naked” (110). And when magically growing back Jessica’s pubic hair, Hax says about shaving, “That, too, is a way of hiding. No hair means you are dressed in hairlessness. You are finding a way to be clothed when you aren’t clothed. Hair is your true nakedness. Do you want your nakedness back?” (110) I hate living in such a shaved and plucked society. Hair is a statement. Hairlessness is the cowardly way out, and Baker put into words something I didn’t even know I had been thinking for a long, long time.

The book has what seems to be an almost backwards ending. A small couple made out of silver living in an egg (ignore the silver skin and egg part if you must) discover their own private parts, that they give them pleasure, and that they’re attracted to one another. On the last day the House of Holes is open for business, the egg hatches and the couple copulates in front of a cheering crowd of hundred.

Yes, this kinky book ends with a couple in love having vanilla sex with one other. Of course it’s voyeuristic, but every book taps into that voyeuristic desire to see and analyze someone’s private life. Back to the point, this couple is cheered and celebrated in its innocence.

So what do we learn, along with the residents of the House of Holes? Despite your kinkiest desires (and may they bring you the greatest of pleasure when you act them out safely and responsibility), loving sex of any kind, no matter how plain, is to be celebrated and revered.

I also recently finished Baker’s The Mezzanine, which, as far as Holes go, is startlingly clean. But it has the same wide-eyed appreciation for seemingly mundane aspects of life that I really connect with. I’ll write about that book soon.

1. the book jacket caught my eye with its pre-stained  with coffee cup rings and
2. the reference to Nick Hornby on the back (“Nicholson Baker’s deliciously off-beat comic story does for poetry what Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity did for pop music” – New Statesman). Oddly enough I’ve actually never read anything by Nick Hornby but a number of authors I’ve read and enjoyed have been compared to him.

The novel is written as Paul’s stream of consciousness beautifully jumping from life’s daily tasks and observations to wonderfully rich diatribes on poetry and poets. Paul is a fellow who’s floundering in both his career (as an occasionally published poet) and his life. The seemingly simple task of writing an introduction for a poetry anthology is proving insurmountable for Paul .  Not only do you learn about poetry but you slowly see the details of Paul’s life unfold.  You grow to understand the man’s passion for poetry and for love lost and longed for.

It was certainly the one of the best $5 (that’s 2 and 1/3 café lattes) I’ve spent in Australia.  I really enjoyed because of the writing style and the honesty and believability of the story.  Normal life and its oddities make the best stories.

As a refresher here’s my book rating system:

• ReRead  – a really great book, as anyone who knows me knows  that while my book shelf is growing I don’t reread books.
• Recommend – a good book that I’d suggest to friends
• Return – a book that I’ll likely forget about

Like many others, I loved Spurious and looked forward to the second book in the announced trilogy, Dogma.  In between the two I saw the two prize movies of the year and pondered how complimentary they are with one another.  Midnight in Paris celebrates America’s love for Paris and the French movie The Artist celebrates the French love for Hollywood.  Together they bookend the twentieth century in iconic ways.  Both have a lightness of spirit, brilliance, wit, joy, and both give a loving send-up to the objects of their affections.

I could say they are both echoed in Lars Iyer’s lovely books but that would be taking it too far.  Maybe.  What I want to get at instead is the chance complimentarity I found in the book I ended up reading while I was waiting for Dogma to come out and a copy to get into my hands.  After Spurious, what to read, what to read?  I tried this and that, including more dipping into Pessoa’s Disquiet.  A good choice for a while but even that just wasn’t right.  Then I nooked Nicholson Baker’s recent book, The House of Holes.  And this is the suggestion I would make to all fans of Iyer.  Baker’s book, especially when sandwiched with Dogma and Spurious, either in the middle of, or at either end of the threesome, make a perfect, exquisite and unique reading experience.  Perfect until Iyer’s concluding tome appears and even then I bet I will continue my suggestion and make it a “found” Quartet.  Baker’s book involves a number of characters, not just the two wastrels in Iyer’s works, who wander a good deal in search of various pleasures.  House compliments Iyer’s books by being very opposite in many ways, and yet there is a lightness of brilliance, a sense of the infinitude of inventiveness, the ongoing flirtations with the void, the twists and turns on the road to meaning and meaning after no meaning, the abandonment of paradox and the paradoxes of abandonment, and on and on.  All three books engage weighty issues, flotsam and jetsam of all sorts from the histories of philosophy and heavy thought and the ragbag of literary strategies familiar to us all in our post-colonial, post-theory, post-postness of exaltation and boredom, delay and tedium, distraction and vagueness in the face of every crisis we can imagine.  Class warfare too, for sure.  Iyer is a distant half-nephew of the famous older travel writer-philosopher, Pico Iyer (from ancient Brahmin clans all) and Baker is on record with his much earlier adulatory book on John Updike, so in these works too they both work out off stage the ways they angle for higher position with in the palaces of prizes.  But forget further argument or suggestion.   Try it yourself and see what you think.  Read House of Holes before, after, along side Spurious and Dogma and enjoy the sub-textual, secret nuances of correspondence vibrating among the unholy trinity.  See if Baker doesn’t amplify Iyer and Iyer Baker in ways no one could have foreseen nor quite understand afterwards.

In his Paris Review interview, Nicholson Baker says that “one of the questions House of Holes is trying to answer” is: is “there still a point to writing words about sex when you can see anything you want, and a lot of things you don’t want to see, on the Web?” The book answers a goofy, gooey, bright-hearted “yes” to this question, unfolding its pornographic vignettes in a surreal Ovidian holiday, a midsummer’s night sexfest that sails lusty and smiling over the borders of morality, social convention, and plain old biology. Baker creates an organic, oozing world where genitalia is swapped freely between lovers, where one might exchange an arm for a bigger dick, where old tattoos get fucked away, where a woman and a tree can make sweet, sweet love:

She looked out from her high-splayed vantage and she said, “I’m a treefucking woman!” Dappled sunlight shone and emptied itself onto her. She squeezed her Kegeling love muscle around the smooth, thickened branch within, and when the wind came up again all the leaves twittered and shook. The tree itself shuddered: It was having some kind of orgasm.

If it seems like I’m getting ahead of myself, citing text before outlining plot, I assure you I’m not: There really isn’t much of a plot to House of Holes. Well, if there is one, it’s something like this: Lila, a large-breasted madame runs The House of Holes, an equal-opportunity brothel/fantasy factory that can only be accessed through portals that appear in strange spaces. This pornographic Arcadia operates on slippery wet-dream logic in which strangers cheerfully and eagerly engage in all sorts of raunch. Characters of varying physical attributes screw their way through a surreal holiday. There are a few conflicts, most of which are too light to touch on (this is a light book, for sure).

Two conflicts stand out with some (slight) weight though:

First, there’s the Pornmonster, “a personification of polymorphousness unlike anything the world of human suck-fuckery has ever known.” The Pornmonster is the mutant offspring of all the bad porn slurry collected on a pornsucking mission (don’t ask). The Pornmonster is typical of Baker’s tone throughout House of Holes, and its polymorphousness embodies the book’s depictions of sexual metamorphoses. This monster is tamed through playful, loving lust, and becomes a good guy, its raw sexual energy redirected for the forces of good (i.e., good sex). This is a book full of good guys.

Second, there’s the Pearloiner, an embittered, sexually-jealous TSA agent who steals clitorises (two of our heroines are afflicted by this heinous crime). The Pearloiner is a product of post-Homeland Security draconian measures, and her inclusion is about as close to contemporary culture criticism that House of Holes approaches. Sexy fun times interest Baker more.

Like the Pornmonster, the Pearloiner finds herself redeemed at the end of the book; moral shifts of allegiance are as easy as physical transformations in House of Holes. The Pearloiner and the Pornmonster alike atone their sins with a facile simplicity that fits the ludic silliness of Baker’s book. They are invited to participate in the handjob contest that (quite literally) climaxes the book. It’s an easy, orgasmic end to an easy, orgasmic book.

In some ways, House of Holes is more remarkable for what it’s not. Most of the so-called pornographic literature (or literature of pornography, if you prefer) that I’ve read has a darker streak. (I’m thinking of Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, de Sade,The Story of O, Alan Moore’s The Lost Girls, etc.). Holes shares Willliam Burroughs’s sense of surreal transmogrification and picaresque rambling and J.G. Ballard’s infatuation with the bizarre intersections of sex and technology, but it’s never sinister or cruel, or honestly, even disturbing.

“House of Holes is a fundamentally good-natured book,” suggests Baker in his Paris Review interview, also pointing out that it’s a work of “crazy joy”—and he’s absolutely right: The book is joyous, good-natured, affable even. When Baker approaches a remotely Sadean cuckold fantasy he punctures it with a politeness that’s humorous—but he also dramatically lowers any stakes that may have been in play. In short, this is a novel of pure fun, of infinite gain and no loss (quite literally—Lose an arm? Get it back. Lose a clit? Get it back). Holes is silky and slippery and light, more ephemeral than ethereal in the end.

But shame on me. I seem to be faulting the book for not doing something it never sets out to do (namely, I seem to be faulting Holes for a lack of depravity and depth and darkness, three “d’s” the book’s rubric never sets out to register). It’s pure fantasy stuff, reminiscent of the partner-swapping exercise A Midsummer Night’s Dream (I am not saying Baker is Shakespeare) or the erotic shifts in Metamorphoses (ditto: Baker is no Ovid) or the voluptuous Victorian serial The Pearl: dreamy, and perhaps (small r) romantic, but not turbulent—sure, Holes will ruffle unwitting feathers (let’s be clear, it’s pointedly sexually graphic), but it’s unlikely to damage anyone’s soul. (If you’re worried about soul-damage, check out the editorial style-sheet for Holes, which lays out Baker’s invented porn-lexicon).

Is House of Holes a novel or a flimsy pornographic riff? Baker is less interested in ideas than he is in sensations, or rather representations of sensations (which is the most literature can do anyway, I suppose). Holes is unwilling to offer any answers or explications about the deep mysteries behind human desire, but it does pose questions about those desires, and it poses those questions with shameless glee. A fun, breezy read.

At a previous house a skirting board became a constant round-the-room re-telling of the Queen Mother’s death, and is additionally now, however left-behind, a tracking also of the tragic loss of Gary Speed, because when the Queen Mother’s death was announced, Gary had just begun his ‘alongside me in the commentary box’ debut on a match on Radio Five Live; and I remember willing him on whilst reloading a brush; though by then long-gone from Leeds, he was one of that midfield, and our pin-up, and I wanted him always to do well. I don’t recall the game, just that Gary’s first job was cut short for the ready obituaries. The windows at the weekend, here, are not so sadly matched; in their reflection just the sacking of the Chelsea boss. But it’s not a competition.

Amazed how, midst decorating duties, how much of the old Five Live lot remain. That Alan Green is still at it, for one. I like Alan Green. I know he’s not everyone’s bag, but his steel-strung voice has been a backing track for long, or unusual, periods in my life. Saturdays in my past with the station on from eleven til two the next morning. Didn’t mean idle days. Little lost, maybe, but busily being so.

The word, evident from the title, was ‘muntins’. Nice, isn’t it? Means the pieces of wood between panes of glass in windows. The little interludes that hold the light in place.

Image courtesy kickedeaves.blogspot.com, A Renovation Journal

As I typed the word ‘windows’, the sun, which is, as far as I know, making its afternoon way around our neighbours’ house, sprung at me, just, in a white shock reflected from a tilted-open Velux window two streets away, and now as I type I have a furry cursor of Tiffany blue-green on the white-screen page, obliterating this word. Then this.

I’ve just googled “Tiffany Bluegreen”, in those exact commas, and saddened to find there’s no drag act or fictional spy of that name.

What was odd – strange to have learned it when I did, I said – about the ‘muntins’ find, was that it was in the book I’m reading, and in the bit I read last night; the book, A Box of Matches, by Nicholson Baker. I am a big Nicholson Baker fan. Every spell of wintery weather I re-read A Box of Matches. It’s a good NB to start with, if you’re interested. Maybe don’t start with Vox, or The Fermata, or, seriously, House of Holes. I have House of Holes here in this room, and to check if its title had a ‘The’, I only had to tilt back and slide aside a tall, pump container (really) of Elemis Something, which was obscuring precisely that spine; like a mullion in a window of books. Satisfying to have things in leaning reach; it’s cockpit-esque. Don’t go for them as starters, is my advice. Actually, go nuts. But A Box of Matches will make you want to get up earlier next winter and make coffee in the dark. Maybe get a duck. (I defend my right to be besotted with its surface themes.) I’m late to the re-reading this year. Spring light.

Well, there was the word ‘muntins’, which I’d never before in re-reading taken in, but it appeared now with our own window pane negatives blinked upon the bedtime page. I underlined it with a paint-struck fingernail and, holding the book open, showed it to B. who was reading beside me.

“Isn’t that a great word?” I said. And I repeated it under my breath.

© Copyright, Steve Mitchell and Fisher Lane, 2012

The writer Thomas McGuane goes to his study every day at a set time and stays there for an allocated period. He says “I don’t have to write, but I can’t do anything else.”

Oh, if only I had a study…..if only I had a desk! lol.

I’ve tried a timetable, I’ve tried a schedule, but theres something just not right about having to use the dining room table

Writing is hard. You need to find the right balance that combines willpower, relaxation, stubbornness, joy and determination. It’s not the easy option as a career move.

I don’t have any trouble writing every day, as such, but I do find it hard to get motivated and not just faff lol. Do you think Thomas McGuane faffs?

I think I have too much time to write lol…..don’t laugh, it’s not funny

Author Nicholson Baker said that through the years he has turned down tons of jobs because his life would be too easy, a regular income would lessen his need to write (Ian Rankin said the opposite when I attended a talk he gave, he needed the lack of time).

Soooo, does that mean I need to get a job? Lol….or that I just need to be a bit tougher on myself? Or even softer on myself? I’m not sure which

I need to remember the times when my creativity flowed, when writing was easy. Capture the feeling, the circumstances. The time of day, my mood, where I was and most importantly, what kind of thing I was working on. Set myself goals, short term ones, and rewards of course….I need lots of rewards!

Then think about all the obstacles that stand in my way. Decide how to overcome those obstacles.

But most importantly…..accept that the biggest obstacle is me and that if I really wanna do this, I need to stop procrastinating.

Yesterday’s prompt about stolen goods ended up being a little tale about a husband who brought home a present for his wife for mothers day…..a stolen gift Today’s prompt is write about staying awake and believe me, I know all about that one

This illustrated book is intended as a compact introduction to the historical study of these objects, which — though removable from the books they cover — are essential parts of those books as published. The present work offers a concise history both of publishers’ detachable book coverings (primarily British and American) and of the attention they have received from scholars, dealers, collectors, and librarians. It also surveys their use by publishers (as protective devices and advertising media) and their usefulness to scholars of literature, art, and book history (as sources for biography, bibliography, cultural analysis, and the development of graphic design). In effect, the book constitutes a plea for the preservation and cataloguing of this significant class of material, so that it will be available for future examination. Following the text is a list of some of the surviving pre-1901 examples of British and American publishers’ printed book-jackets and other detachable coverings. This list, with 1,888 entries, is the outgrowth of a process the author began in 1969: he has kept a record of every pre-1901 jacket that he came across or learned about. Because surviving jackets from the nineteenth century are scarce (most having been thrown away by the original booksellers or purchasers of the books), and because the large majority of those that do survive are known in only a single copy, it is important to have a listing that indicates their whereabouts, or at least the basis for knowing that they exist or once existed. The list thus provides a guide to the body of evidence on which generalizations about the history of nineteenth-century jackets must be based, until more examples are reported. The book also contains two image sections: the first containing eight black-and-white plates, and the second containing sixteen color plates.

By the way, even before Nicholson Baker’s brave campaign to preserve historic archives of major metropolitan newspapers, ably advocated in his book Double Fold, Thomas Tanselle has been concerned with the preservation of print materials. He argues in Texts and Artifacts in the Electronic Era:

The latest forms of book burning are not only wasteful but preventable. Both technological progress and wise policy decisions can save books. (Widespread use of the Gottschalk prismatic camera, for example, which can photograph the facing pages of a book opened at only a 60-degree angle, would drastically reduce the damage from microfilming.) Some segments of the library and scholarly community are beginning to recognize that microfilming and electronic scanning do not fully extract the useful information from books. It is encouraging, for instance, that the Modern Language Association in 1995 gave wide dissemination to a “Statement on the Significance of Primary Records”–with primary records being defined as the objects carrying texts, and not simply the texts themselves. If an organization as influential as the Commission on Preservation and Access were similarly to recommend that libraries keep microfilmed books, that action would be an important step in spreading the message that saving our verbal heritage means saving both texts and objects.

In 1847 Augustus De Morgan said, “The most worthless book of a bygone day is a record worthy of preservation.” The study of our intellectual history since Gutenberg depends on our incorporating this point into our plans for the electronic age.

Of course, these days book jackets are, in the main, the palette for some very talented designers (arguably the best known of which is the ebullient Chip Kidd ) and the venue for the questionable practice (at least among some literati)of blurbing. Recently The Millions published two amusing and erudite essays on this issue—Alan Levinowitz’s I Greet You in the Middle of a Great Career: A Brief History of Blurbs and Bill Morris’s To Blurb or not to Blurb.
Whether the expenditure of a couple of thousand words on this biblio-emphera is of value is, of course, up to the reader.

Its worth noting that there is no great groundswell of support for the blurb. As far as I know, no one as expended much energy arguing for the existence of the much maligned blurb. Personally, I find blurbs amusing— as in Harold Bloom’s tribute to William Giraldi’s Busy Monsters. Or when a writer whom I know acknowledges a book— since I have faith that this is a sincere recommendation and not a case of logrolling.

By the way the most egregious cases of logrolling are obvious in the movie business (Spy magazine made a career of lampooning Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers’ gushing and ephemeral quotes). And there was the famous case of Sony Pictures fabricating a reviewer and reviews. But that’s a story for another day.

Currently reading Jack Holmes and his Friend by Edmund White (Bloomsbury)

Generally speaking. And it was a thumping opener.

Google any hot sauce supplier and in seconds you’ll be dealing with ‘Ultimate Ring Sting’, ‘Bum Burner’, and ‘Death Rectum 5000’.

These are the condimental cousins of the ‘Old Willie Droop’, ‘Piddlesniffer’, and ‘Bachelor’s Bowels’ paraded in pubs on pump clips designed by snickering wank-addled gurners, who one trembling afternoon at Keele University, or slack-jawed at something they witnessed on a farm, decided they’d forever nail their masts to the shithouse door.(1)

It’s little wonder that they – beer and chilli sauce – would, at the heavy-breather altitudes of aficianados, be similarly positioned: they’re an established cultural pairing anyway; twinned complements of shared legends. And leagues of beardos and bald-headed men have indexed one to the other exactly because they are both totems of good nights out and the liquid gold of mornings after… and the capital of good nights out. Sociable circular references for fans of hoops. Ring cycles, if you will.

Cracking. But, image-wise, just not to my tastes.

I love hot chillies and hot chilli sauces. I love hot food. Like all great loves, this was not one easily come by; was never just there on a plate. Really, never. I was raised at a table of very plain comforts. B., by her own insight, makes a joke that the spiciest food I encountered growing up was probably Stork margarine (occasionally she’ll offer a comedy swap-out of Butterscotch Angel Delight). To be clear, there’s no right or wrong, progress or want, implied in that diet’s presence or absence of hot stuff; it’s just funny compared with my ways now – oh, and as a reference to my family’s deep-seated beliefs about spiciness: on which I’ll not elaborate here, but suffice to say that spaghetti continues to be spurned in my familial home on the grounds that it (the naked pasta) sounds like it’ll hurt you.

Away from home is where I had my hot awakenings. As with all emergent addictions (there, the ‘A’ word is out), there were bumpy beginnings. One incident involved a pizza in Nottingham at sixteen. A second, English mustard in a steakhouse: and let’s be very clear – as clear as one’s sinuses after a spoonful – English mustard is impressively hot; I love that it’s hot and that it’s English; that you can patriotically turn your nose up at that of other nationalities, knowing ours will turn your nose inside out: as mustard it (hot English) appears to be excluded from a meaningful Scoville heat rating, but in fairness it’s a very particular type of gustatory impact, and as a positive trade-off seems exempt from the T-shirt-slogan-tittering of the arse-fixated brotherhood. (2)

And the third – in the tradition of Goldilocks’s porridge and Jesus’s choice of rising days – was the one that moved the story on. Up the Hinckley Road in Leicester (how is it that some roads are so ennobled with a ‘the’?), one in the morning, two of us dashed on the rocks of premier nightspot Mosquito Coast, and my first full union with a doner. “Salad chilli sauce everything?” “Yeah – sure,” I echoed the unpunctuated mantra: “salad chilli sauce everything.”

Years later me and Rob walked down The Hinckley Road again. The blue plaque was in place, marking the moment I began chasing my dragon. Okay, not a blue plaque, but a horrible acid shadow low down on the brickwork of a shop mere yards from my first dealer.

One of my other ‘coping mechanisms’ that night was a strangely instinctive inhaling; a peculiar jet-suck of air across my palate, like a backward flautist: intended to cool and becalm but serving only to have Rob in stitches. For someone in search of oral relief it was both deeply ineffective and disturbingly intense. But then you should have seen me in Mosquito Coast.

But I was hooked.

Chilli sauce everything.

Chillies get their hooks into you. Such was the science available at the beginning of the Internet; that the surface of the chilli seed was physically peppered (sorry) with microscopic Velcro-like hooks, that pricked ahold of the tongue to create a devillishly heatful pain. And that’s what I, of a Q.I. mind, told others in turn.

Only relatively recently did the yang to that yin reveal itself to me: that the pain – which is actually more to do with the respective electrons (good name for a band) of nosh and gob (ditto) wrangling in a kind of chemical romance (nah) – triggers a balancing burst of endorphins, designed to reinstate karma and well-being. It was to that flood of my own happy moonbeams I had become addicted.

(And isn’t endorphins such a lovely word? If the name wasn’t taken, Endorphin would be a Pokemon; a benignly smiling porpoise face with a headcrest of purple velvet jags; its special power to tell you in its fluting song how very much you are and will always be loved.)

That the pleasure of very hot food is therefore aligned to bodies celestial, rather than bodies lowered in tearing haste onto the bog, is key to my cocking a deaf ‘un towards the category’s dominant ‘tone of voice’.

The Simpsons, brilliant purveyors of beer and spice, present this endorphinfest in a delicious episode devoted entirely to the chili (3): the result of Homer’s taste trials being a trip of self-realisation across melting deserts in the company of hallucinated guest stars, inner voices and a deep coyote. (4)

I’ve never yet attained that state, but it’s important to have goals.

All of which angle, naturally, makes my chilli business a personal one, manifested – in this world at least – in bottles in cupboards and packets in the fridge. Going, and being, public, I and others can find awkward (aside from the beautifully tolerating B., and my ever-implicated bezzie, Rob); an awkwardness most keenly felt when eating out at Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Bengali restaurants et al.

I have a good friend, Mat, a man of genuine storyteller wit, and Birmingham’s finest Brian Sewell impersonator, whose running gastronomic gag refers to my detachment from the ‘shared order’ dining experience. His regionalist radar wants to root this in my Yorkshire-bred thrift: “nay, lad, ah shall ate as what’s been paid fer, an’ ah’ll thank yer fer doin’ t’same. Waiter – package yon chutney up fer me.” Truth is, when I know that there’s a chance I’m mere feet away from a fresh naga chilli (allow me my fantastical view of how the kitchen is arranged, and the ingredients sourced), and the people-angels able to integrate it into a dish, I will not, and whimperingly cannot, pass up that precious proximity for a sociable scoop of incidental custard jollied up from a centralised hot plate. (5)

In exchange – and to be fair – my selfish drugging usually provides a spectacle of sorts: and I take the ‘guts of steel’ banter as well as it’s intended, knowing my behaviour is marked enough, without my announcing there’s an intergalactic DJ playing MMMBop in my brain. (6)

Addict, I am furtive. Were there anyone at the table of similar tastes, my instinct would be to play it all down. And certainly not to bond on it. A hero author, Nicholson Baker, wrote about the territorial hissings of two gentlemen accidentally brushing sleeves in their reaching for top-shelf publications; and the mutual disgust in their evident porno-mutuality: don’t touch me, you freak! I don’t think I’d be that bad; but I’m happy not to know.

On the heat of others, many years ago I had reason to take in to work with me a handful of Scotch Bonnets.(7) Off the top of the head (see what I did?), Scotch Bonnets are chillies characteristic of Caribbean hot sauces, riding respectably high in the Scoville Championship, just outside the play-off places. I introduced the Bonnets to my then-boss and still dear mentor, Griff; the only person I know with ‘my’ proclivity for piquancy. Perversely spurred on by my pantomimic caution in the handling of them, Griff popped a whole one in his mouth and munched.

I watched him.

“Yeah, that was okay,” he smiled, and took his typical sip on his trademark black coffee.

I watched him for the rest of the day. And all that week. And I watched him over the next nine years he remained a colleague.

But nothing.

Then, between his leaving the company and mine, I came across a folder in an office clear-out. Its wad of papers – inch-thick, and illuminated with map-like diagrams and hieroglyphs, all dating from the time of the Scotch Bonnet – was in Griff’s unmistakably neat, pencilled, hand. I tremble as I reach for it now.

I made that bit up, about the folder. And with Griff it was more likely to be a micro-cassette from his voice recorder: “Idea for a beer, number 786.” But he really did eat that chilli like it was a foam-backed Haribo.

Which interchange stays as the closest I’ve been to a chilli-off… a ‘challenge’ I never even took part in.

And I like it that way. I wouldn’t want to force hot stuff down anyone else’s throat. Where would be the enjoyment in that?

Which reminds, finally, of one cultural positioning of chilli sauce that knocks our own snickering Finbarrs into a cocked (“poot!”) hat.

Demandez beaucoup-beaucoup de sauce piquante (ou harissa dans le Sud) avec votre ‘kebap’ en France, and the vendor monsieur will respond with a Les Dawson-esque phwooarr!-accompanied leveraging of the forearm and fist – convinced and delighted that the thrills that he’s supplying will, electrifyingly, have you rendered a complete stranger to ‘Old Willie Droop’.

Notes:

(1) I really do hate all that stuff. Including the ‘cheeky fun’ of Top Totty. But this note is really to reference the excellent Pump Clip Parade – a blog-exposée of “aesthetic atrocities from the world of real ale” – with an additional name-check for the ever-funny beer person, Kristy McCready (@kristym809), who champions this blog and others in her tireless promotion of beer fabulousness. Naturally, none of what I say here is endorsed by her; nor by Jeff Pickthall, the passion behind Pump Clip Parade. Take a look:

http://pumpclipparade.blogspot.com/

2) The Scoville Scale (named for Wilbur Scoville – try not picturing an overbite and enormous spotty bow tie) is the recognised measure and rating of chilli hotness. For a couple of weeks about a year ago, the chart was topped by an English farmer and his Naga Viper. Isn’t that great? An English bloke beat the damn hot world! Who’s writing the screenplay of that?

(3) Oh, bloody hell, the spellings of chilli. UK, it’s ‘ll’ In the US, it’s chili. Then there’s with ‘e’s and without. Blah.

(4) Season 8, Episode 162. And in a nice nod to organoleptic evolution across generations, an episode elsewhere has Grampa Simpson asking for a ‘sody pop’ and then yelling for help: “The bubbles are burning my tongue!”

(5) Possibly on account of my unexotic pallor, which in the unflattering glare of restaurant lighting can have me mistaken for Gillian Anderson’s recent knockabout portrayal of Miss Havisham, waitstaff in the ‘ethnic dining sector’ really do take my naga requests with a pinch of salt – or directly replace them with such. I’ve had waiters very sternly insist the heat will ‘overpower the flavours’; I’ve had management come out to speak with me – even pulling up a chair to converse in a hushed conspiracy. And I’ve had B. simply giving me a look. I should just carry a card. Or extra chillies.

(6) Gut-wise, once – only once – post-heat, did I find myself in times of trouble. In the car and ready to set off one workday morning after a birthday evening meal I decided I should rather just nip back in and ‘settle’ my stomach. On re-entering the house I spotted a leak from our kitchen ceiling and quickly found a burst pipe in the bathroom. Water off and plumbers called. Had I not gone back into the house I would have returned at six to ruin. The Secrets of the Naga. Listen to your gut, readers.

(7) The Scotch Bonnet chillies were taken to work to fuel an off-agenda-but-usefully-creative noodling with some ‘spicy beer’ concepts. (This was over a decade ago and a business whose name no longer exists – I don’t think I’m being indiscreet.) Thankfully, the concepts weren’t progressed beyond the noodling. Thankfully, because the problem with spicy beer, as in chilli beer – brashly distinct from the clever brewer’s subtle casting of spice-note hops – is, of course, that it’s always crap. And it results in the exponential growth of double-whammy T-shirt slogans.

© Copyright, Steve Mitchell and Fisher Lane, 2012

The evocatively titled Bookshelf Porn would not be a enough to excite ordinary people, but for a writer and book lover such as myself, I would categorise it as purely top-shelf stuff.

All puns aside, this simple photographic blog that was compiled by Anthony Dever (who, I must say, I’m completely sold on; his tag line is ‘I really like Robots.’) is seriously enjoyable.

I suggest that next time you are feeling Jaded, don’t reach for your early 90′s Grunge collection or even fire-up Pornotube. Instead seek solace in a physical beauty books can provide.

And on a final note: E-books and e-reads, your Kindles and iPads etc. may be practical. However, they’re pretty ugly in comparison. Just think of the irreplaceable smell of new pages.

Kindle vs Book - I know which side I'm on

I found this article ‘A  New Page’ on the New Yorker’s Website. It makes an interesting read/exploration into the world of Kindle. I can’t help but notice the advertising, not at all subtly, plastered the length of the article – Tablet e-reader version of The New Yorker. Get it today!

Nice.

Ned tapped the ball on the seventh green, using his new teryllium putter. It made an odd tight circle around the hole and then dropped in. “Did you see that weirdness?” said Ned, looking around for his golfer friends. But they were talking and hadn’t seen it. No matter. Ned leaned to pull out the ball and heard strange sounds coming from the hole. He got down on his stomach to listen better. A woman’s voice said, “Hi, Ned, my name is Tendresse. Come talk to me at the House of Holes.”

“All right,” said Ned. Immediately his head was jerked and stretched and twisted and atomized, and he was sucked powerfully down into the seventh hole. And then, a minute later, he rematerialized on a hillside full of clover and Queen Anne’s lace, still wearing his golf hat, still holding his teryllium putter, but now without any pants on, just his black Eddie Bauer sports briefs. A small discreet sign in the grass said “All Bets are Off.” In the distance was a yellow Cape house with a wraparound porch surrounded by softly swaying pale-green trees. Other bulky, oddly shaped buildings were visible behind it—in fact there seemed to be a whole complex of structures, including some sort of amusement park. A ridge of mountains hung smokily in the distance.

The Review: A curious little book, this one.  A good friend of mine and fan of the show recommended it quite a while ago – I can’t entirely remember under what circumstances, other than being generally a book conversation – and I put it on my wishlist… but without much urgency.  Wanted the British edition (a far better cover, for sure) and sister came through in spades at Christmas.

It’s a short book – a novella, really – but it requires far more active reading than you’d expect out of a short book about frivolous things.  For one thing, the main character is smart and the speed of his thoughts prove it.  The constant jumping from point to point, story to story – hell, the layering of thoughts within thoughts via footnotes (a conversational tactic I’ve been accused of abusing) is enough to ensure that you are DEFINITELY paying attention when you read.

It’s interesting to read this book after having been exposed to the footnote gambit for quite a long time.  I mean, Terry Pratchett has been doing it since before Baker wrote this book – but David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers and Lisa Lutz all owe a huge debt to Baker: this book feels like the true start of that trend.  Wallace’s footnotes are more akin to these – they don’t serve as an observation on the plot but rather as a tangential thought, at the end of which you will return to the primary thought and continue along your way.  Eggers and Pratchett and Lutz (although I’m loathe to categorize Eggers alongside two actually-talented authors) use footnotes in this way but they also use them to make witty asides or dash a bit of random humor into a scene.  Baker’s footnotes, while amusing, aren’t necessarily intended to be – they just simply exist and if you find them funny, then great.

There’s not really a plot to the book – it’s truly a stream of consciousness… although now that I say that, I’m not sure that it is, actually.  It doesn’t flow uninterrupted from one point to the next and there are some occasionally jarring transitions.  It isn’t, as I sort of thought going in, like the unadulterated ramblings of a crazy person like me.  And Baker hints at this as you get into the novel, revealing that he’s writing from the future (well, the future to that 23-year-old self) – and there are even some jumps in time and space.  So I’m having trouble actually rooting the book down to anything in particular.

The thoughts themselves are interesting and occasionally hilarious.  The observations on straws, shoelaces, escalators, driving, etc etc etc are all thoughts that I’ve had or, when brought up here, made me stop and consider the thought in question.  But as a result, I wonder if the profundity of the novel was less for me than it might’ve been for someone else who doesn’t spend serious amounts of time considering the way things work and why things are the way they are in a very fundamental way.  This isn’t a judgment – it’s just an observation, as it were.  I can’t say for sure, it’s just a thought.  Nothing about this book feels lasting to me other than the impact the book had on later writers – because I can see Baker in so many other authors but I can’t honestly say that this primary source is so wildly exciting, having lived with the others for so long.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.  The book is funny and thought-provoking to an extent, but it’s also just… a blip.  It’s more profound than Perec’s observations on the mundanities of life (perhaps because it doesn’t overstay its welcome…) but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily Profound in the way a good piece of philosophy can be.  It’s an interesting oddity of a book but I can’t say I’ll see it having any lasting place in my memory down the road.

There is a point and it will be made. Bind me to that.

Tom Wolfe’s talent is in his invention. Updike’s is in what he sees and how he describes it.

I need coffee. I want coffee. Perhaps I want s. Maybe I need it, too. You think it will make me happy? You think it will solve my problems? I don’t have problems that need solving, just this general indifference. Love might cure it, but s seems cheaper. I mean if they do the same thing why wouldn’t I opt for the cheaper cure? Not that either one is available. Somebody write me a prescription.

4000 words remain elusive. I think 4000 words would really be the ceiling. Because there are things I’ll have to take out. I’m resigned to that. Just to be sure this thing gets done. That’s the only thing I really care about.

I need to write the story now because I have a report this afternoon. I won’t have time after lunch. X and Y really are of the same predicament. Should I intervene? No. let’s let them figure things out for themselves. I love this new position I’ve put myself in. As if I’m really this nice kind friend who gives a shit. Nothing is sacred. Although what’s wrong with pretending to care when you can’t and you should? Beats complete indifference. Where were we? He’s been told she’s marrying a doctor. Now what? What do you do after you’ve been told the woman you love is marrying a man you hate?

You do nothing. You chill and take a drink from the blessed pool and go on ahead. Unless you have a story to tell in which case the only decent recourse is to kill someone. Is it, though? Who? That is the question. The million-dollar question. Give me a million and I’ll tell you.

There is this man called Nicholson Baker who wrote a book-length essay in praise of Updike and a 150-page essay on the origin of the word lumber and yet refrains from calling himself obsessive. They call him the chronicler of neglected minutiae. Relevance – social, moral, etc. – the immensity of the subject, narrative, plot, and other devices – all may be foregone in pursuit of what one feels is true and beautiful.

There. I love the word there. There is. I love the phrase there is.

There are

-The Anthologist

Anyway, anyway, anyway, I thought I’d have a stab at explaining why I called this blog permanent positions. So I’m listening to Louis Andriessen‘s ‘Hout’ as I write this. The link there is to a piece called ‘Worker’s Union’. And this is all pertinent because? Because for one, I trained as a composer – did a music degree at Cambridge graduating 2001. One of the things I want to do in the blog is understand how my journeys through different art-forms have been probably heading in the same direction (the direction of developing cultural thought?), though at different speeds. I wanted to show the (im)permanency of any (im)positions.

I remember being introduced to Andriessen’s music on a summer school for teenage composers back in, like, ’96, by a composer called Steve Martland. I remember getting a kick out of the driving energy of Andriessen, but not necessarily loving it overall. The politics certainly passed me by. I seem to have spent a lot of time avoiding explicit political expressions.

I read a poem to my collaborator Leiza McLeod yesterday and she said it sounded like the most political thing she’d heard me write. She made the comment in the context that I used to try to prevent the songs our band in Bristol (Cheap Bent Electrode) did from being too political because I wasn’t comfortable with it. She’s right though, what I’ve just written is a bit political – it even had ‘manifesto’ in the title. I think I’m starting to get a sense of my political compass, finally, and funnily enough, I’ve probably found it through poetry, which I might at one point naively have thought was less prone to politics. (Believe me, I don’t think that now – there are so many Marxist poets in my world!)

Of course, I’m now understanding that the politics might have been embedded in the music I was listening to back in 1996. Was I deaf to them? I think I was a bit. I probably thought of the Andriessen piece as a bit like a noisy crowd of football fans passing me in the street (I might be back-projecting). Well, I probably thought of it as ‘other’, just filtering it out. If someone asked me to pick out a piece of music I’d composed at uni, I’d probably say the best things were delicate little trio pieces with the ghost of a folk tradition in them. There are so many ways that I can now relate that to how I might have been understanding my own personal perspective at the time, though I suspect I really didn’t half understand what I was communicating.

Now that I’m perhaps more savvy on political implications of creative output, I’m interested to see how I take that knowledge back into my process/intentions.

The end of The Anthologist did itself proud by the way. The plot gave me what I needed remarkably neatly. I think Joe Dunthorne in his review in Psychologies got Louise Gluck mixed up with Louise Bogan, because Gluck wasn’t in it. There’s a Bogan line quoted in the book which goes:

At midnight tears

Run into your ears.

and that was me, happily, and well past midnight, as I read the last chapters. It’s a great book. And I take back what I said about Stephen Fry a bit, because this book doesn’t necessarily agree with the perspective of its narrator, and you can empathise with the character without needing to agree (which I don’t much) with his theories on poetry.

My general thought is that I’ve kind of loved it, though I think I’d have liked it more if it hadn’t been so like Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled, which has a lot of the same jokes, ones which somehow don’t quite convince you to want to take in the laborious point of metre they’re illustrating. Stephen Fry’s book doesn’t pretend it’s anything other than amusing pedagogy though, and it’s more of a problem for Nicholson Baker’s book that it sometimes seems to neglect any consistent delivery of plot or drama. But really though, I’ve kind of loved it. It’s great at getting across the dissipated nature of day-to-day drip-drip creative effort mixed with slow life and this line

‘Chitle chirtle. Chirtle. Chirtle. Nice chirpin’ there, Mister Birdie! Good one. I like what you did there. That’s good! Funky bitch! Love your work!’

has been one of several that have made me laugh, as they say, out loud.

I’m writing an article on an Emily Dickinson poem – ‘Proud of my broken heart, since thou didst break it’. It’s been one of my obsessions for a while now and has caused me a few actual real sleepless nights this week as I’ve been nutting it with my head, trying to get at what it’s getting at. Anyway, I think I might have broken through a non-comprehension barrier and I’m feeling completely subsumed into the poem. I’m really living with it. I’m feeling great about that. Would like to get it published in a magazine, so I’ll let you know if that happens, dear blog!

Today’s been a good creative day all-in-all. In freak new year’s behaviour, got up two hours early for work and wrote. That was primarily because it was School of Poets at the Scottish Poetry Library tonight and I wanted to try out my new three-silly-pillars style poems (first time I’ve tried to articulate what they are. Hmmm. Will revisit) in the read-round at the end. Good news, they enjoyed ‘a brilliant character dies early on’ and a wee extract from my Venice cemetery sequence too.

It was good to read ‘a brilliant character dies early on’ in front of an audience before doing it on the 26th Jan at Electra Mass. Thanks Zorras myspace for the handy link. The chaps behind it aren’t big on web publicising….

New books I loved in 2011

The Pale King – You’ve heard all the buzz by now: it’s David Foster Wallace’s outstanding posthumous novel. There was big controversy over whether it was even fair or right to have allowed this to be published, considering that Wallace left no instructions as to how it should be treated, but he did organize his notes before dying, which at least indicates he knew they’d be culled by an editor and was okay with that. But more importantly, as I said in my NPR review of the book, the book doesn’t even feel so unfinished. The characters are fleshed out and engaging, the story gets off the ground. If you’ve only read Wallace’s nonfiction, this book, though difficult at times, is worth it. And it’s a good starter course (at 500+ pages, I wouldn’t dare call it an appetizer) for Infinite Jest, still his crowning fiction achievement and definitely a harder book than this one.

The Art of Fielding - Sometimes when a book gets so much praise, you want to be snarky and say “Overrated!” but Chad Harbach’s debut novel is every bit as good as everyone says. It’s not exactly an intellectually challenging book—in fact I’ve recommended it to many people I know that are not what you’d call “big readers,” and all of them loved this (perhaps that leaves it open to one snobby criticism from some, which would be that it’s something of a breeze to read, which, in the view of some, would perhaps lessen its serious weight)—but it truly tells a story that has it all, including college life, young love, sex, sports, academia and death. Plus a lot of Melville references! I reviewed it for The Rumpus.

The Marriage Plot - Like The Art of Fielding, this book was mostly a delight, which is not to say it didn’t have serious themes to it, but just that the pages keep turning and turning and the entire experience is a pleasure. I do, however, imagine this book being very difficult for serious fans of Wallace. I know it was for me. In interviews, Eugenides has refused to confirm that the character of Leonard is based on DFW, but it’s absurdly obvious. The tobacco-chewing, the bandana-wearing, calling his friends and talking incessantly about his troubles, the depression and the stints in McLean-like facilities… it’s Wallace. And it feels a bit manipulative and cruel for Eugenides to have exploited this man to the extent he did for a fictional character (yes, yes, everyone culls their real life acquaintances as bases for characters, but still, this is like a 1:1 ratio from real life to the page). But that’s just one part, a bittersweet aspect, of a terrific book that really nails its time period well and also doesn’t coddle its characters. Maddy can be a brat, Mitchell is too self-doubting to get what he wants and deserves, Leonard goes out with a clumsy sort of melodramatic exit that I don’t think we’re even meant to take 100% seriously, and in the end the conclusion for all three members of the love triangle seems fair, if not particularly wonderful.

It’s kind of lame to give those wildly-praised releases (all by white men, yikes, I know) as my top three titles of the year, but sometimes the books that are on every single Top 10 list are on them because they’re truly deserving. And these three are. Each one is brilliant in its own way, each one an achievement, and each of them I could not put down (which is saying a lot for the DFW title, considering it’s far denser than the other two). Where two of them vividly paint the undergraduate experience and transport you back to a college campus, the other does the same but for a different sort of communal grounds: the IRS training center. These are three works from three writers in the prime of their careers (well, one of them is just beginning his, but what a promising debut), and it’s all the more upsetting that one of them is no longer with us. Of course, though these three titles went by the fastest and stayed with me the longest, there were other books I enjoyed as well this year.

House of Holes - There’s no real way to describe this book without making it sound boring, only because, for a book so very dirty, it’s very straightforward: the plot is that people looking for sex get transported, through a portal, to a sort of sex camp. Within that, though, there’s very little plot. What makes the book so hilarious and unique is the spoken dialogue between two people (or three, or eight or fifty, in some cases) that are doing sexual things. They talk in such a direct, glib manner that it almost sounds like a parody of bad porno, the ‘oh baby, oh baby, oh yes, do me, do me, do not stop’ variety. Characters say things like “I’m going to fuck your tattoo free now. Uh. Uh. Fuck it away, uh.” (There’s also magic throughout the story; this particular character can remove your tattoos for you by fucking them off.) Then there are the more flowery, ridiculous exultations, like “More come, more come! Jerk it out! Ice my cake, dickboys! I want to feel like a breakfast pastry!” Needless to say, the book is a pure diversion, completely lacking any deeper meaning (regardless of what anyone might argue), existing solely for joy and hilarity, making it a must-read, totally raunchy inside joke.

The Deal from Hell – Somehow this book went generally unnoticed, or at least, was not in any of the “best of the year” roundups I saw. Perhaps places like the Times or any other major newspaper doesn’t want to lavish praise on a book that wages war on a peer newspaper. But that’s what The Deal from Hell does—like Scott Raab in The Whore of Akron, James O’Shea has an axe to grind with the Chicago Tribune and the L.A. Times, except that he does an even better job, or at least a more professional one, at laying out the facts of the reporting first and then allowing his own bias and resentment in. Come for the story of a wonderful paper’s ruin, stay for the insidery anecdotes, like one about Randy Michaels getting a blowjob on the top floor or Tribune Tower.

Steve Jobs – Everyone, of course, is talking about or has already read by now Walter Isaacson’s gargantuan biography (more like an autobiography that just happens to have written by someone other than its subject) of the late Apple genius Steve Jobs. Months after its release it remains the #1-selling overall book in the Amazon store. But the reason people are so enjoying it really isn’t because it’s particularly well-written (it’s not), but because the subject is simply so fascinating. He was a creative genius and a shrewd businessman, but also, the book makes clear, a raging asshole. It makes the book, which truly is presented as a “just the facts” chronology, almost riveting. And I do give Isaacson credit for placing the quotes he’s gathered in such a way as to often be truly deadpan and hilarious, such as here: “At one point his father found some dope in his son’s Fiat. ‘What’s this?’ he asked. Jobs coolly replied: ‘That’s marijuana.’” or here: “Raskin had one problem: Jobs regarded him as an insufferable theorist or, to use Jobs’s own more precise terminology, ‘a shithead who sucks.’”

Disappointments

The Tragedy of Arthur – The concept of this book is really clever and impressive, and as such the book has received all sorts of praise from the various literary tastemakers, but I found it to be two very different books in one. The concept is that a character, also named Arthur Phillips (the author’s name) has been given, by his dad, a supposedly undiscovered Shakespeare play. This book even contains the play, and though it’s at the back, the introduction suggests that you read the play first. I did, and the play is wonderful. It truly reads like a Shakespeare play, though more modern and a bit more casual, and for that, Phillips deserves huge credit. It really is incredible, and the play is entertaining and funny. There are even footnotes from a fictional Shakespeare scholar as well as Phillips the character, who points out to the reader, cynically, the little bits that he believes prove the play is a fake (he does not trust his father, who went to jail repeatedly for forgeries, and is now dead). But then you read the first 250 pages, which are meant to be a long introduction to the play, written by Phillips. This section—the vast majority of the book—is really kind of boring, whiny, and meandering. When I first began it, I was loving it. Phillips describes his upbringing and his spirited, irresponsible father (I loved this memory of the father: ”not bookish, as Jews in his day were meant to be, but flamboyantly literary. Not self-hating, but self-creating. Not interested in himself as a Jew at all, but by no means interested in anonymity.”), and recounts various poor behavior and adventures that the elder Phillips enacted on his two children. But the story quickly becomes a whiny complaint about how Arthur falls in love with his lesbian sister Dana’s lover. Again, Phillips does have the capacity to be very funny in a bawdy, young dude sort of tone, like here, when Arthur is explaining how his sister Dana would talk him up to girls and make him sound like a great guy and brilliant writer: “She described my labors sitting on our fire escape going over my words again and again… exhausted and happy because I’d managed in those long hours to write a few lines that reached to the heart of what it felt like “to be a woman today,” she said to the unbelievable hottie with the rack that just would not quit.” But too much of it is tedious and dry. Just one example comes from when Arthur’s mother speak frankly to him after his father’s funeral (she has long since divorced him and remarried). Arthur reflects: ”I didn’t know yet that her words were being banked, in some part of my cunning mind, converted to useful currency.” He means to show his guilt for taking her honest words and eventually exploiting them for use in his writing. But this is no longer an interesting avenue for fiction to take, the route of debating the ethical problems of mining one’s personal relationships for story fodder– we know every writer does it, and that it’s unavoidable, and the discussion of that practice is to me not a compelling one. Nor is the end of Arthur’s love triangle really very interesting, instead it sort of just feels like a stretch, and a boring one. Again, though, it may be worth reading if just to see how he does it, how he presents a very believable Shakespeare play and then presents a far-fetched story of its discovery. Also, the book is often useful in a sheerly factual, encyclopedic way, like when Phillips recounts just how many books or other works have taken Shakespeare lines as their titles: Pale Fire, Exit Ghost, Infinite Jest, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Sound and the Fury, Unnatural Acts, The Quick and the Dead, Against the Polack, To Be or Not to Be, Band of Brothers, Casual Slaughters.” That’s quite a list. And this was a book that clearly took a lot of scholarly work.

The Visible Man - Why does Chuck Klosterman continue to try writing fiction? It doesn’t work. At the outset of The Visible Man, through an email from the “author” of the account (a shitty psychiatrist) to her editor, we get the basic teaser for the book, and it’s a rather compelling setup: We learn that her patient, Y__ has “consumed people’s lives without their consent” and “became exclusively interested in the unseen reality of human behavior” and “did not think it was possible to study such behavior if the person knew they were being studied.” This is a pet topic of Klosterman’s—voyeurism and how people behave when no one is looking. It’s one he explored in one of the best two essays of Eating the Dinosaur. As the narrative progresses, Y__ continues to make smart, Gladwellian little points that are both interesting and seem very true (like this one: “I’ll never understand why people [sign up for therapy and then claim to hate talking about themselves]. Do they feel some kind of social pressure to prove they’re not self-absorbed, even though the basis of this entire process is a critical examination of one’s own self-absorption?”) but these little mini-screeds seem out of place in what’s meant to be a work of fiction. In other words, is Klosterman trying to tell a compelling story using created characters, or does he want his protagonist to be a mouthpiece through which to argue Chuck Klosterman’s own opinions on various life lessons? He hasn’t fully decided, which is why the entire “novel” feels like half story, half opinion piece, much like Downtown Owl did, though the main problem with that book (which was his first attempt at a novel) was the constant pop-culture references, a mistake that this book suffers from too, but not quite as much. When Y__ says, “You enter therapy in order to confront four-word sentences: Why am I here? Where am I going?” he is blatantly lifting the questions from The Sopranos—a series that Klosterman himself adores and references by name twice in this book. In a famous episode from the first half of the final season, Tony, in a coma, springs awake for a moment and stares at Carmela with vacant eyes, still dreaming, and asks, feverishly, “Who am I? Where am I going?” He repeats the same two questions again. Whether Klosterman is consciously paying tribute or unaware of the influence, there’s just no way that these two questions didn’t come into his imagination via The Sopranos. Only a handful of pages later, the same pop-culture reference problem occurs when Y__, recalling his first voyeuristic experience peeping in on a classmate, tells the psychiatrist: “When his window was ajar, I could sit in my tree and faintly hear the music he would mimic: Rush. He listened to Rush.” [Here, in the margins, I literally wrote "O god, here we go..." and I was right. Further down the page, it gets worse]… “I always wanted to ask him about it. I wanted to just casually walk up and say, ‘Hey, Swanson. So, what do you think of Canadian power trios? Any opinion? Do they inspire your every being? Any plans to do an oral book report on Anthem?‘” This is awful writing, because there’s a person speaking here, busting out arcane music references that don’t belong, and that person is not the character. It’s Chuck Klosterman. Later, again, he recalls one guy whose house contained a lot of artwork of “vaguely sexualized women” (the premise is that the character has a special bodysuit that, when worn, makes him basically invisible and allows him to enter people’s homes). He says, “Did you ever listen to Duran Duran? These paintings were sort of like the cover of the Duran Duran album Rio.” A comparison like this is so useless to most readers as to be almost momentum-killing for the narrative. The vast majority of readers cannot instantly visualize that album cover even if they do like the band, so what should we do, Google the image? It’s as though we’re meant to believe that every one of Chuck Klosterman’s characters have the same studied, elite taste in music as the author himself. It just doesn’t make sense. Klosterman even asked himself in Killing Yourself to Live, a nonfiction memoir, “Has it really come to this? Have I become so reliant on popular culture that it’s the only way I can understand anything? If wolves killed my mother, would I try to eulogize her with lyrics off Blood on the Tracks?” It seems the answer is yes. Occasionally, Klosterman smartens up and instead of these hyper-specific references, allows the character to make vaguer recollections. These are far more plausible and entertaining. For example, when Y__ tries to describe a group of women watching Lost and arguing over the various plot twists (a very funny inside joke to those who’ve seen the show, and one he pulls off better by not actually naming the show), he says, “At 9:20 they turn on the television. They’ve digitally recorded that popular program about the good-looking airline passengers who accidentally travel through time.” Much better. Another damaging issue in the book, though, is that the psychiatrist’s notes grow increasingly obnoxious (perhaps CK would say that’s intentional) as she describes the difficult process of dealing with this patient. Eventually, they become so facile as to make us think the problem is with Klosterman’s writing. “My confidence is shaken,” she writes. Then: “I’m losing my grip on this process.” At this point, 65 pages in, we’ve seen that happen. We do not need or want to hear her spell out the obvious. It would be like a character having a terrifying near-death experience and then, a few pages after the exciting scene, reflecting, “That experience was very frightening for me.” And yet, on page 107 (of a slim 224 pages), Y__ recounts sitting in the home of a woman who had a compulsive, horrifying sort of routine in which she’d smoke a ton of weed, gorge on food, then work out like crazy as an act of self-punishment. The cycle would then repeat. There’s a long description of her lifestyle next to which, in the margins, I wrote, “Finally. The entire book should have begun with this section– more exciting, medias res, etc. Could have lost the entire first 90 pages or so.” Of course, none of this is to say that Klosterman’s two worst indulgences—the mini-rants and the music references—can’t be sometimes entertaining. They sure can. For example, when Y__ gives his theory about how people behave when staying alone in hotel rooms (“People aren’t natural when they stay in hotels… The ability to just drop towels on the floor changes the way people view themselves… Men inevitably masturbate”), it strikes you as completely true and funny at the same time—the best type of opinion-issuing. And a few pages later, Y__ makes a pop culture reference that literally had me laughing out loud, perhaps, admittedly, because I “got” this one: “I watch There Will Be Blood in my bedroom. Not the whole movie. Just the middle part. The part where the oilman is talking to his fake brother by the fire and says, ‘I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed.’  I watch that scene over and over and over again… It feels so good to watch.” But, overall, just too much of the same, too much of the style and content that makes Klosterman’s nonfiction essays so delightful, but, sadly, also makes it a better bet for him to stick to that type of work, and leave fiction alone.

Swamplandia! - It just occurs to me that the books mentioned in this blog post are nearly 100% by male authors, which probably looks awful, like I only read men. In addition to Swamplandia I actually read a handful of three books (yikes, this is a problem—not intentional, but I need to work on this in 2012) by women this year: A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore, Red Hook Road by Ayelet Waldman and Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta. I liked each of them but none was among my very favorites. Anyway, I’m willing to admit this is a problem and I need to make a concerted effort to read more fiction by women. Now to Swamplandia, which is a very impressive debut novel, especially from someone so young, but is flawed, and is more impressive for its inventiveness and writing skill than the actual reading experience it offers. I believe this book grew completely overrated (I was especially surprised to see it on the Times list of the 10 best books of the year; I guess it’s because Janet Maslin looooooooved it). People rave about Karen Russell constantly, but I found Swamplandia! to have a very promising premise and then a disappointing execution. I really enjoyed the first half of the novel, which sets up the family, their alligator shows, the sad collapse of the Bigtree business, and then quickly breaks into the dual narratives of Ava off on her own and Kiwi infiltrating the competition (his sections were the comic relief). It reminded me, again and again, of Geek Love, a book I adored. But then, once Ava sets out with the Bird Man, the book became really upsetting and kind of hard to handle. Now, I don’t quite know how to eloquently describe what I mean, but I can only say that many scary or disturbing books are wonderful; I know that. Take A Clockwork Orange or most Stephen King books. But this was different. It became really menacing, and not in an enjoyable way. As the Bird Man brings Ava further and further down the river, [spoiler alert] you keep wondering whether this book is going to turn out to be fantasy or not, and then, when you finally find out what you suspected all along, it’s really horrifying, and in addition, the entire journey starts to seem implausible: hard to really believe that Ava, who’s such a smart young girl, would go with him; hard to believe that officer they run into wouldn’t sense that something is fishy; and hard to believe Ava would get rescued and not die out there alone in the woods. And in the end, I closed the book feeling shaken and not too wowed. That being said, one reason Russell is receiving so much interest and praise is because her language is just terrific, and in terms of its diction and the craft of its sentences, Swamplandia! is a real achievement.

Open City - I’m not sure why everyone was so taken with this book. I think that a wonderful review by James Wood really helped, but for me, it was simply boring. At first the plot (there really isn’t any; it’s just the protagonist, Julius, wandering around New York talking about ideas and historical events) seems charming, but soon enough I was miserable. It’s saying a lot that, even though it’s only 250 pages (short for most novels) I found the book to be a slog and spent a few weeks finishing it. Perhaps it all went over my head, but I can’t help but feel that this was a slight, unremarkable, stream-of-consciousness novel masquerading as something deep and brilliant. I also felt it was one of those books in which, when the characters speak (in the rare event that they do speak; this book has very little dialogue), they don’t talk in a plausible, realistic way but instead a flowery, overwritten manner. I’ve seen a lot of authors do this, and I think they often know they’re doing it but choose to do so anyway because, well, it’s prettier. It’s not believable. For example, when discussing his sadness over the death of a professor friend, Julius says “I had hoped for grace, not for immortality” and then, “I had hoped for a graceful, strong exit for this professor of mine.” The second sentence seems like something that a human being would indeed say aloud; the first does not. Julius himself is also hard to like. He meanders around the city with no direction, telling long-winded stories about his encounters with random characters. And yet, in his sporadic way, he’ll then meet one who is just like the others (in other words, a random person that we fully expect him to get into a long conversation with and befriend), but instead, he says with surprising coldness (about a chatty man working in the post office): “I made a mental note to avoid that particular post office in the future.” It doesn’t make sense, the inconsistency. All that being said, the author, Teju Cole, is really interesting to follow on Twitter. He’s smart and insightful, and most of his tweets are what he calls fait divers (small fates) and they are truly special. So I look forward to his next book.

Books I read in 2011 (and loved) that weren’t published in 2011

Nemesis – Philip Roth has truly embraced this late stage of putting out only slim, angry novellas (Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling) and although I wonder if we’ll ever see one last big book from him, I’m on board with this trend. Not all of these have been winners (The Humbling was garbage), but Indignation is terrific and Nemesis almost takes the same plot devices (a young Jewish man as its protagonist, an upsetting personal twist, a fraught romance) but does it even better, and ends up being an even more entertaining book. This is saying a lot considering that Indignation was, at least for the first half, much lighter in content, whereas Nemesis is upsetting and serious from the beginning, dealing with a hard subject: the death of children from Polio. What’s clear is that Roth, who may be known for his adept portrayals of troubled old men (The Human Stain, American Pastoral, countless others), is equally good, if not better, at writing about young people (Letting Go, Indignation, Nemesis).

Union Atlantic – This year I read two novels that were supposedly both about the financial crisis (see my post on novel pairings): this one, by Adam Haslett, and The Privileges by Jonathan Dee. The two overlapped in topic, but only barely. The latter was the more praised by critics, and probably the more refined in writing style, and I liked it a lot. But it’s Union Atlantic that has stayed with me—its protagonist is by no means a good guy, but I’ve thought a lot about what happens to him and the decisions he makes, and I have an itch to reread the book.

Mr. Peanut – Adam Ross’s surprising whodunnit (it’s almost unfair to call it that, though, it diminishes what is a very serious book that asks serious questions about marriage and happiness) is written from the perspective of David Pepin, who is also writing a novel of his own as he tells his story (so be careful; pay attention). When I read this in May and loved it, I then devoured all the various commentary that existed online about the book, which is not without its controversies. Then I reviewed it here and issued my own analysis of the ending and what exactly happened. The author responded to my post. Give Mr. Peanut your time and then, as a lighter dessert, read this year’s Ladies and Gentlemen, Ross’s second book, a collection of very good, O. Henryesque short stories that I reviewed for The Rumpus.

The Instructions - I read this book in one feverish three-day trip to Orlando for a work assignment. That means I had it on the plane, in my hotel bed, at the table in the hotel where I ate breakfast alone, and I even held it in my hands above the water level one night while literally pacing back and forth in the shallow end of the pool, reading the book. It’s a long one (very, very long) but never feels like a slog, and the language and dialogue are hilarious and quirky. And now I’m looking forward to Levin’s short story collection, Hot Pink.

Tepper Isn’t Going Out - I was familiar with Calvin Trillin through his New Yorker articles but had never read fiction by him. This book is a slim little piece of dessert—I finished it in two days—and will feel especially biting and relevant to you if you’ve ever had a car in New York City. Trillin is an expert on the city tabloid culture, the political scene, and on the joys and miseries of driving up and down every block searching for a parking spot. You will laugh out loud.

The Children’s Hospital – When I was only about thirty pages into this, the first book I’ve read by Chris Adrian (though I loved his short story “The Warm Fuzzies” that ran in The New Yorker‘s 20 Under 40 series), I tweeted something like, “Chris Adrian is the most talented young writer out there today, no question.” I believe it. The premise of the book (the entire world has flooded again, killing everyone, except for the doctors and patients in one hospital, which is now floating along like an ark) is just so inventive, beautiful and quirky that I was blown away, but then it’s the way that it’s narrated that really impresses you (four different angels tell the story: the preserving, recording, accusing and destroying angel). His sentences are varied and funny. He has the ability to write something crushingly sad and, in the next sentence, make you laugh out loud. Much of this book is also tragic and funny at the same time. When one character, Dr. Snood, finds young Dr. Chandra standing in a window preparing to jump out to his death, and begins talking to him to try and talk him out of it, this is what Snood says after Chandra asks him why he shouldn’t jump: “‘I don’t like suicide.’ It was true, but it was the wrong thing to say.” Then Chandra jumps. It’s equally chilling when the preserving angel first overtly makes it clear that the rest of the world is gone. A doctor (no one yet knows what has happened) calls up her boyfriend, who does not work in the hospital, and after they talk for a moment she loses him suddenly. She thinks the connection simply went dead, but then a voice comes over the line and says matter-of-factly, “He is gone, my love. Gone forever, not to be seen again in this world. He is already drowned, but not you. You I will protect and preserve and love for your allotted time.” The writing is often even charming, in a deadpan way, and one sentence even reminded me of Tao Lin: “She sat down on the stairs, put her head in her hands, and thought of the boobs, a hundred boobs and a hundred hands reaching out, hesitating and uncertain, to touch them. Go away, she said to them, and the kaleidoscope vision fractured and fell in on itself.” It’s even funnier when the residents of the hospital decide they need to elect a president, which they dub “the universal friend,” and the people running put up campaign posters with great slogans, like Dr. Snood’s DON’T CHANGE HORSES IN THE MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN or Ishmael’s YOU KNOW ME. (They really don’t.) The novel is far from perfect—it could have lost about 200 pages by cutting out most of the sections about Jemma’s childhood. But it is an experience you will never forget. Its ending will leave you devastated.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet – There probably is very little I could say about this book that hasn’t been said before (see James Wood’s great New Yorker piece on Mitchell) so I’ll just write that I have zero interest in historical fiction and therefore wouldn’t have tried this book, but I judged a book by its cover (the paperback of this is lovely) and picked it up, and I’m glad I did. It’s beautiful, moving, funny, smart. In the beginning, it’s confusing, and you worry, with all the accents and dialogue, that you’ll lose track of the characters, but soon it all naturally falls into place, as happens with the best narratives. When the story ends, you’ll be sad to leave its world, and to say goodbye to red-haired Jacob, his love, and the whole crazy cast.

Books I’m most looking forward to reading in 2012:

The Angel Esmerelda – I have had a challenging history with DeLillo. In high school, at the suggestion of no one, I picked up Underworld and enjoyed the entire thing, though of course, like everyone, I found the excitement dies down pretty drastically after the opening section (Pafko at the Wall). Then my girlfriend and I read White Noise together and we both couldn’t stand it. We felt it was exhausting, boring, beating us over the head with its consumerism message. Not at all subtle by any means, but neither was it smart in its maximalism like Wallace’s writing can be. However, I’ve read a couple of these stories already and have heard great things about the collection. It’s exciting to me (to everyone, clearly) that it’s DeLillo’s first short story collection.

The Leftovers – My DeLillo experience mirrors my history with Perrotta—some duds, some masterpieces (though with DeLillo, the book I hated is often cited as his very best work, whereas Perrotta’s Abstinence Teacher no one seemed to like). I first read Little Children and found it gripping. I admired Perrotta’s pitch-perfect dialogue between bored adults (see also: The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas) and his depiction of young motherhood and its occasional malaise. Then I went back and read Joe College, which I also loved even though it was very clearly a less mature work. Fun, light, easy to whip through. That led me to highly anticipate his new book, The Abstinence Teacher, which I read with a friend, and both of us were floored by just how inconsistent it was. The book started out wonderfully, oscillating between the lives of two characters whose lives approach each other but never join. Then, at the very end, the two characters finally do meet in a very strange, serious, dramatic moment—and that’s it, the book ends. And it isn’t a clever, winking sort of Sideways thing (the movie) where “you choose your own ending” but instead one that I promise you feels abrupt, empty, almost like it’s missing another hundred pages. I sort of swore off Perrotta but now his new one, about The Rapture, has had some nice press, and I really liked the first few pages, which I read on Kindle sample.

The Cat’s Table – Wait a minute, I’m starting to see a pattern here. Not sure if this just shows that it’s rare to love every book that one author has written, or if it says something about me as a reader, but as with DeLillo and Perrotta, I have read two Ondaatje books and loved one, hated the other. My first entry to him was Divisadero, which I found to be absolutely enthralling, elusive, and lush with memory and childhood. I read it with a book club. After that, I felt I had to go back and read The English Patient, his most famous work. But I disliked its abstract, almost smug bullshit and tedious, slow buildup. I’m hearing great things, though, about his new book, and have read that it’s a bit of a departure for him. Sounds nice.

Blue Nights – I read Didion’s first memoir of loss, The Year of Wishful Thinking, and, like every single other person in the world, found it stunning, moving, devastating. I need to work up the courage before I can pick this slim little heartbreaker up, but I know it’ll be equally terrific.

Stoner – Keep hearing from anyone and everyone how surprisingly good this book is, which was written back in 1965 but was reissued in 2006 by Barnes & Noble Classics. It’s about an English teacher and sure looks like one of those books that could surprise me.

Phone sex isn’t for everyone. For one, you need a good imagination and a talent for timing because every misplaced utterance directly affects your listener. With sound as your only ammo, I’m tempted to think that this kind of sexual intimacy opens itself solely to an intelligent set of participants. Part of what gets you off isn’t the act itself (unlike actual sex) but more the mental stimulation…or so I think after reading Nicholson Baker‘s erotic novel, Vox.

My copy came to me by accident as it was hidden under heaps of other books. I bought the slim, unassuming, black volume immediately after seeing Baker’s name. I figured since I was so taken by his other work (The Mezzanine), that any book of his is sure to be a winner. Later, while cataloging it on Goodreads, the mystery of Baker’s novel was unveiled and no sooner than that was I on page 1.

The book is a chronicle of one long conversation between two people who have dialed an adult chat line and decided to keep their conversation private. Few things change in the novel’s plot–a can of soda is opened, sheets are moved, clothing comes undone–and all this culminates in rapture…but I suppose anyone who writes or reads something about phone sex knows this before words are set into paper and images rolled in the mind. This may repulse others and cause them to think twice about Baker’s novel but let me say: sex is hardly the point. Emotional vulnerability might be more accurate.

Today, on a separate note, I read an interview on Michael Fassbender and his new role as a sex addict. In it he says that indeed, at the beginning, its easy to make fun of the role and the affliction but as his study of the role pans out, he discovers that what truly plagues his persona in this film is a sense of emotional detachment. This is one key undertone I felt I heard upon reading Vox.

We are lonely, sad creatures who yearn not only for affection but connection–that sense that others are listening and responding to us. It’s no surprise then that Baker’s protagonists dial a sex chat line because sex, regardless of whether its done in the presence or absence of the physical Other, requires a heady sense of nakedness. The beauty of the novel however doesn’t lie in its inherent sadness but rather in the humor with which Baker writes. You never get bogged down by the emotions of the protagonists. If anything, they don’t need to dwell on these because in the beginning they already admit to having been lonely and thus making the call. Baker’s also very intelligent and halfway through the book I was certain that he could make any ordinary napkin appear sexy in a few syllables.

I enjoyed reading this book also for the digressive dialogue which revealed what kind of hopes and dreams these protagonists have. It’s funny because reading excerpts makes you realize just how similar some of your thoughts are with those who are having this conversation. A part of me felt so comfortable, I found myself recounting the exchange and talking back trying to figure out how each character would respond. In hindsight, that just adds a feather to Baker’s cap since he chose to publicize the very private act of speaking to someone on the phone. I’m immediately thrilled to be listening in and the feeling’s quite reminiscent of reading correspondences between people. I’m not sure how my moral compass reacts to all this but I can tell you honestly that my excitement is genuine.

In conclusion, as this is the first read of the year, I must say, Nicholson Baker is always worth picking up. Now get to it.

Note on the images: These prints of Gustav Klimt are taken from the Ver Sacrum.

In Nicholson Baker’s 2009 novel, The Anthologist, a second rate poet, Paul Chowder, struggles to win back his girlfriend, and complete his anthology of rhyming poems.  Along the way, and without listing the poems in the fictional Only Rhyme, he gives us his thoughts on poetry.  Why iambic pentameter is a misnomer, on unrealised beats at the end of lines, on why enjambment hurts, unless it’s your thing. He tells us about Louise Bogan and Ted Roethke’s passionate short-lived affair, Mina Loy and Filippo Marinetti’s slightly longer one, about many poetic suicides, and Ezra Pound’s editing.  And he bangs on about rhyme – why it’s good, why we like it, but why you can have too much of it.

There is a partial list of poets from the book on Wikipaedia, and I really should have been happy with that, but for some reason I started to make a complete list and couldn’t stop.  Must get out more.

* Chowder/Baker has something definite to say.  Mentioned poems in italics.

Adams, Leonie.
Arnold, Mathew
Ashbery, John
Attridge, Derek.
*Auden, WH. Song of the Master and Boatswain.   Musee des Beaux Arts
Auslander, Joseph.
*Barratt Browning, Elizabeth. The sonnets
*Bashō, Matsuo
Bell, Marvin.
*Berryman, John.
*Behn, Aphra
*Bishop, Elisabeth. The Fish. Filling Station
*Bogan, Louise. Solitary Observation Bought Back from a Sojourn in Hell. Roman Fountain.
Bridges, Robert.
Browning, Robert.
Byrd, William
Byron, Lord
Campion, Thomas
Carey, Alice.  Nobility
Causley, Charles.
Chaucer, Geoffrey
*Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Kubla Khan. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Collins, Billy.
Cooke, Edmund Vance.  How did you die?
*Cope, Wendy.  The Aerial.
*Cummings, EE.  Buffalo Bill’s
*Daniel, Samuel.  Certaine small poems lately printed.
De la Mare, Walter.
Doolittle, Hilda.
*Dryden, John.
*Eliot, Thomas Stearns.  The Love Song of J Arthur Prufrock.  The Waste Land
*Fenton, James.   In Paris with you. I’ll Explain.  The vapour trail
Ferlingetti, Lawrence.
*Frost, Robert.   The Road Not Taken
Garrison, Deborah.
Gascoigne, George
*Geisel, Ted (Dr Seuss)
Ginsberg, Alan.
Goldsmith, Oliver
Gosse, Edmund.
Graham, Jorie
Hiatt, John
Heaney, Seamus
*Hardy, Thomas.  A Singer Asleep.
Hass, Robert
Henley, William Ernest.
Herrick, Robert
*Hill, Selima.  A Small Hotel.
Hollander, John.
Horace,
*Houseman, AE.   White in the moon the long road lies.
Hughes, Ted.
*Hunt, Leigh.   Jenny kissed me.
Isherwood, Christopher.
*Johnson, Samuel   The vanity of human wishes
Jollimore, Troy.
Joyce, James.
Keats, John.
Kooser, Ted.
Kinzie, Mary.
*Kipling, Rudyard.   The Benefactors
Kunitz, Stanley.
Lanier, Sidney
*Larkin, Philip
*Lear Edward.  The Pelican chorus.  The Pobble who has no toes
Lehman, David.
Levy, Newman
Lewis, Wyndham.
*Lindsay, Vachel.   Factory Windows are Always Broken.  The Congo
*Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth.  The Day is Done.   The Arrow and the Song.  Driftwood
*Lowell, Amy.
*Loy, Mina.  Songs to Johannes
*Macaulay, Thomas Babington.   Lays of Ancient Rome
Macleish, Archibald
*Marinetti, Filippo Thommaso.
Marvell, Andrew.
*Masefield, John.   Cargoes
*Merrill, James
*Merwin, William Stanley.  The Vixen.   To the corner of the eye
*Meynell, Alice.
Millay, Edna St Vincent.
Milne, AA.
Milton, John.
Moore, Marianne.
Morley, Christopher.
Moss, Howard.
*Muldoon Paul.
Nash, Ogden.
Nemerov, Howard.
Nicholas, Christopher.
Ochester, Ed.
O’Hara, Frank
*Oliver, Mary.   Singapore.   The Summer Day
Olsen, Charles.
*Parker, Dorothy.    The Dark Girl’s Rhyme
*Patmore, Coventry.   Magna Est Veritas
Pinsky, Robert.
Plath, Sylvia.
Plumly, Stanley.
*Poe, Edgar Allen.   The Raven.
*Pound, Ezra.
*Raleigh, Walter.   His Pilgrimage
Regnier, Henri de.
Rimbaud, Arthur
Ritter, Mary Louise.
*Roethke, Ted.   In Evening Air.   Meditation in Hydrotherapy
Rohrer, Matthew.
Rosetti, Christina
Rosetti, Dante Gabriel
Rukeyser, Muriel.
Ryan, Kay
Sandburg, Carl
*Scott, Sir Walter.   Song of the Mermaids and Mermen.
*Shelley, Percy Bysshe.  Ozymandias
Shapiro, Karl.
Simic, Charles
Silverstein, Shell.
*Snodgrass, William De Witt.   Lobsters in the Window
Stafford, William.
Stevens, Wallace.
Strand, Mark
Swenson, May.
*Swinburne, Algernon Charles
*Teasdale, Sarah.   The answering voice – an anthology of love poems by women.   Blue Squills
*Tennyson, Alfred Lord.   Princess.   Break, Break, Break.   The Charge of the Light Brigade
*Transtromer, Thomas.
Updike, John.
Virgil
Warren, Robert Penn.
Whitman, Walt.
Whittier, John Greenleaf.
Williams, William Carlos.
*Wordsworth, William. A slumber did my spirit seal
*Wright, James.   Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
Wyatt Thomas.   The lover showeth how he is forsaken of such as he sometime enjoyed.
Yeats, WB.

It would be a fine anthology.

Jim Thornton

Nicholson Baker (above) shows us where he writes.

• A. N. Devers’ gives her top 5 Longreads read in the bathtub for the year that is about to end.

• Huffington Post Books pick their favorites of 2011.

• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo hasn’t done too hot at the box office, does that mean the sequels will be scrapped?  (Via Sarah Weinman)

• Sam McPheeters writes about laundromats for Vice.  (If you aren’t familiar with Sam, check out our interview with him, and consider pre-ordering his book.)

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A thank-you is very much in order. I don’t often address you, reader, but here I am now, to extend my enormous gratitude. Thank you for being here; without you my work would have a very different meaning.

When I started this project in January, I had trouble settling into my voice. I thought that because Bookside Table was a blog I had to use cute, conversational conventions. You can see it in my first post for the project, on Roland Barthes’ Roland Barthes. You can see it in my original about page, where I recklessly absolved myself of the responsibility of criticism, telling you that “I’m not a reviewer: I’m a reader. I’m in this purely for love.” I think I’ve been a mostly phenomenological reader, looking to the book itself and evaluating my experience of the thing. Only rarely have I tried to ‘situate a work,’ and for the most part I haven’t explicitly said ‘I like this’ or ‘I don’t like this.’ But you can tell, probably, which were the ones I loved best.

My year in reading post, over at The Millions, makes clear the two books that ‘lit me up.’ The ones I was compelled to read twice.  But, to be fair, I also went back to sections or stories from The Odious Child, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, The Mezzanine, and Ghosts. I’ve also opened The Obituary at random to revel in its enlightened weirdness, to feel my eyes trying to stitch together the violent, beautiful fragments. Re-reading is one of my greatest pleasures, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I dip back in now and then. There is no great intimacy built without familiarity, even if strange  limerance is its own reward.

I will tell you that sometimes this little hobby was troublesome, and there were a few rough patches. After I finished Nightwood I didn’t much feel like reading another book, more fiction. I wanted to let it simmer for a long time. It was a feeling like the strange sickness I had in 2009, after finishing Infinite Jest for the first time, when I couldn’t force myself to read fiction for a full ten months afterwards. Nightwood was like that, I felt ruined on books because here was something so dark and perfect in it’s power, so claustrophobic and complex that I needed to breath on it. I felt such a sense of readerly justice being miscarried that I couldn’t stew on it, that I had to keep going. I sat on it for a week, and read the next book, Memories of  my Melancholy Whores in a single sitting on the Sunday afternoon before the post went up. I wrote about it immediately after I put it down.  I figured it would be okay, because it’s ‘minor’ Marquez, and now the post on it makes me cringe. I was so ungenerous and clumsy. But the project contains itself, so it stays where it is.

While regret is too strong a word, at times I wish I had been a little less gentle, just a little harder on some of these books. I really wish I’d told you that only 65% of The Fortress of Solitude was worth much more than the paper it was printed on. I liked it a lot, that 65%, and it more than justifies the miss steps Lethem made there. Sometimes I think I was a little bit cowardly, a little too unsure. But I hope I never let you down.

I think that the major responsibility of a book reviewer, of any cultural critic, is to inspire hunger in other people. To stir up the public appetite for better and more nourishing things. I think I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to do this, so I hedged my bets and tried to shirk that responsibility. Thankfully, I couldn’t always escape that harness.  Some of the feedback I’ve received through out the year, from reader (and occasionally author)  emails, new and not so new friends, and on twitter has been from people kind enough to encourage me to keep going, to tell me that my little corner of the internet makes them hungry for more and better books. I couldn’t be more grateful for this kind of connection. Reading these books has made me a little better than I am, but telling you about them has changed my whole life.

Really that shouldn’t be an issue. Just go to the store and buy a replacement pair.  It just doesn’t work.  I think shoe companies have a deal with shoestring makers.  Replacements are two long or too short.  They are too thick or too thin.  There are no “baby bear” shoestrings.  After a few failed replacement attempts, the customer/user/me comes to believe that he needs new shoes.

My goal, get a replacement pair of strings that truly match the originals.

On a sise note, the best book ever written about broken shoestrings is Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine.