Saturday, November 28, 2009

Albums of the Decade

If you want worthwhile opinions of popular music, it makes sense to begin with the British:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/series/albums-of-the-decade

I owned The Streets, years ago. How often one forgets music that once seemed essential.

In this regard, especially, music is like love—is a form of love.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

The English 1B Book Club

For the curious, these are the books I'll be using in my English 1B class @ Foothill College this winter. The class, as you can see from the list, will examine artistic representations of erotic love.

The Symposiumby Plato, translated by Alexander Nehamas & Paul Woodruff

The Satyriconby Petronius, translated by William Arrowsmith

Romeo and Julietthe Arden edition

Love Poems: Everyman's Library Pocket Poets

Giovanni's Roomby James Baldwin

A Sport and a Pastimeby James Salter

Fool for Love, by Sam Shepard

The Unbearable Lightness of Beingby Milan Kundera

Break It Down: Storiesby Lydia Davis

Those are the assigned texts. I'll also ask the students to listen to Blood on the Tracks. I guess we'll watch a movie, too—perhaps the old Zeffirelli Romeo and Julietif only to gaze for a while upon the luminous beauty of Olivia Hussey.

Also, we'll read excerpts from The Double Flame: Love and Eroticismby Octavio Paz, at least one essay by Cynthia Ozick ("The Din in the Head"), and passages from Literature and the Godsby Roberto Calasso.

The North American Chekhov

A worthwhile article about Mavis Gallant, North America's greatest living short story writer:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/nov/21/mavis-gallant-interview

Gilead, by Marilynn Robinson

It's one of the great ironies of contemporary American life that a learned, moderate, resolutely decent Christian voice—the voice of John Ames, the narrator of Gilead—sounds like the voice of a heretic.

Robinson means for it to. Ames's voice is the essence of Gilead—its purpose, its theme, the locus of beauty in its world. Addressing us with meek sensitivity, it's an indictment of the menacing anti-intellectualism of modern Christian fundamentalism and, as fiercely, of the anodyne feel-good Christianity of liberal America's middle and upper-middle class.

John Ames's voice dominates the narrative to such a degree that Gilead borders on monologue.

To a certain extent I mean that as a criticism. Reading it I sometimes yearned for another force to take over the story for a while. If one understands art as a site of conflict and novels as inherently heteroglossic, Gilead might feel less like a novel than a theological meditation.

But the narrator's voice is also Gilead's triumph. It embodies an attitude toward thinking and speaking, toward being, that has either been lost or has never existed, but which feels as it proceeds like humanity's only hope for survival.

Having read Robinson's collection of essays, The Death of Adam, which I sought out after reading Gilead, I'm convinced she in fact believes that John Ames's sensibility—or something close to it—is our only hope for survival.

That might be another criticism of the book, if one is inclined, as I am, to resist didacticism in fiction.

But by its conclusion the book had made me forget my biases. Gilead is an extraordinary achievement, not least because it succeeds in giving us the story of a genuinely good person, which is notoriously difficult to do in art. More importantly, I felt reading it that with great urgency it was opening up—this will sound very Californian—new ways of being, new possibilities for how I might construct my life, today.

What more can we ask of a novel?

A parting note: I am additionally grateful to Gilead for introducing me to The Essence of Christianity, by Ludwig Feuerbach, an astonishing book. Also, I was struck by Gilead's riveting depiction of the helplessness of decency vis-à-vis sexual charisma.

Friday, November 20, 2009

Publisher's Weekly: Best Books of 2009

Since childhood I've loved lists like these:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20091102/26073-best-books-of-2009.html

Donald Revell, a friend and professor during my time at the University of Utah, has a new book out, The Bitter Withy, which is among the few books of poetry on the list.

(A withy—yes, I had to look it up—is the branch of a willow tree, often used for basketry due its remarkable flexibility.)

Talk Radio, or This Blog

Examine the minds which manage to intrigue us: far from taking the way of the world into consideration, they defend indefensible positions.

— E. M. Cioran, "Some Blind Alleys: A Letter"

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Trust and Governance

American political debate hinges on the definition of self-interest.

A brief story will clarify my point. It will also show, I think, that at their worst American conservatives define self-interest too narrowly and American liberals define it too broadly.

A couple of weeks ago I listened to a debate on KQED, my local public radio station, regarding a proposal for the care of California's state parks. A group of liberals wants to end fees at park entrances for California residents and pay for park care by adding an annual fee to California car registrations.

The debate can be found here:

Jonathan Coupal, president of the conservative Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, argues against the proposal. In effect, he argues that only those who actually enter the parks should pay for their care. Those who don't enter the parks shouldn't be compelled to pay taxes for, as he sees it, something they don't use.

The vice president of government affairs for the California State Parks Foundation, Traci Verardo-Torres, argues that all Californians benefit from the state parks, whether they actually enter them or not; consequently, all Californians should pay for their care through an $18 annual tax. Should they enter the parks, they enter without paying a fee. But it doesn't matter if they don't enter the parks: they'll benefit from this tax by living in a state with well-maintained parks.

These contrasting positions capture the on-going disconnect between conservatives and liberals. The disconnect always occurs at the point where one defines self-interest—and, by implication, how one defines the boundaries of the self.

Your idea of self-interest, for example, reflects how you define yourself. It determines how you answer this question: At what point do I end and others begin?

Your answer to that question is dictated by whom you do and do not trust.

A conservative trusts himself and distrust others. Consequently, his definition of community tends to be much more restricted than a liberal's.

Jonathan Coupal doesn't see himself as benefiting from another Californian's visit to a state park. So he's not willing to pay for it. In his view, the state park, in effect, doesn't exist unless he uses it. He bristles at any suggestion that his money should be spent for him by others; he trusts his own ability to spend his money when and where he sees fit.

Coupal concedes that he's willing to be taxed to pay for state prisons, despite the fact that he doesn't use them. In that regard, a willingness to pay for state prisons but not state parks seems like a contradiction. But one must recall that a conservative's relationship with the rest of humanity is one of distrust. Conservatives rarely complain about taxes as long as they are used to exclude others from the conservative's (narrow) idea of what constitutes a community.

Liberals invert the conservative attitude toward trust: a liberal distrusts himself and trusts others. Consequently, a liberal's definition of community tends to be highly inclusive—often extending, in the political sphere, to all humanity. Liberals rarely complain about taxes that are used to include others—to expand their community. And they resist taxes that will be used to exclude others, like military spending or spending on prisons.

A conservative can't make a liberal understand that a neighbor's happiness is of secondary importance to one's own happiness and that it's immoral to compel the conservative—as he sees it—to subsidize someone else's happiness. Indeed, the conservative believes that in order to maximize happiness throughout the world (which is itself a presumptuous goal, in the conservative's view), everyone should attend with utmost care to one's own happiness and be wary of the happiness of others.

A liberal can't make a conservative understand that the conservative's happiness is indistinguishable from his neighbor's happiness and that it's immoral to attempt to distinguish one from the other. Such a distinction draws a false boundary between the self and others, and the impulse to draw that boundary is responsible for all that's wrong in the world. The liberal believes that in order to maximize happiness everywhere (which is the purpose of one's life), everyone should attend with utmost care to one's neighbor's happiness and not focus on one's own—because, according to the liberal, there is, in fact, no such thing as one's own happiness.

Since we live in an era obsessed with money, this debate over the boundaries of self-interest always ends as a debate over taxes.

The conservative believes that, like his happiness, his money belongs to him. He earned it; he deserves to keep it; he's willing to part with it only when doing so will explicitly help him individually; and he believes that the world will be a better place if everyone has the same attitude toward their own money.

The liberal believes that, like our happiness, our money is not our own. Society creates wealth; society should distribute wealth; individual access to wealth is only possible with the collaboration (hard work) of the larger community. Parting with money helps a liberal only if it helps others; and the world will be a better place if everyone has the same attitude toward money, which is, in their view a social phenomenon.

I depict these two positions at their extremes. But your general orientation toward these two perspectives will determine your political and ethical worldview.

At this particular moment in history, American conservatives are especially distrustful of others—as a consequence, perhaps, of 9/11; also as a consequence of not being in power. As a result, they tend toward an extremely narrow definition of self-interest—narrower than what one will find during less turbulent times.

In the mind of a conservative, the turbulence of our time should be addressed by shrinking one's sphere of trust as much as possible. To do otherwise is to behave recklessly in an unsafe world.

Liberals, on the other hand, believe that the way to address our era's turbulence is by expanding one's definition of self-interest. This requires us to expand our sphere of trust—to incorporate as many people as possible into our lives.

It's my view that at the moment one finds greater moderation—and, therefore, a superior capacity to govern—among American liberals. President Obama is especially balanced in this regard, as manifested by the fact that he's distrusted by extreme factions on both the left and the right.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Solo Faces, by James Salter

All great novelists force us to reevaluate our definitions of sanity. That tradition began with the first modern novel, Don Quixote, and continues unabated. Indeed, the problem of sanity—what is it? who defines it? who is or is not sane?—is quite possibly the defining theme of the novel.

In this regard, the novel has always been subversive.

Of course all art is subversive. But the novel is particularly dangerous because of its ability to disguise its menace in the Biblical conventions of storytelling. Consequently, prior to the development of photography the novel has had no rival in the arts to match its ability to appear benevolent, edifying, and traditional while in fact working to provoke, transform, even revolutionize society.

Certainly novels have met with fierce resistance in the West—Madame Bovary, Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer, Lolita—but that resistance is usually in reaction to sexual content and is fairly reliably a mark of greatness (novelty). So it's rare.

Given, then, the novel's peculiar advantages for sedition, why has it opted to focus on the problem of sanity?

Because the surest way to examine power in any culture is to isolate that culture's boundaries between what's sane and what's insane. Those boundaries don't only distinguish one culture from another; they also clarify who runs the show.

James Salter has written two masterpieces—which is two more than most novelists—and both of them explore sanity. A Sport and a Pastime contemplates erotic love, which we both venerate as life's highest private experience and proscribe as a kind of irresponsible, obsessive madness. Light Years contemplates domestic family life, which we venerate as the central institution of responsible adult life, as the apotheosis of civilized happiness, yet often experience as a slow, inexorable descent into madness—as, in fact, a form of madness, and of cowardice.

Unlike those novels, Solo Faces concerns itself with the Western obsession with individual achievement. Salter has decided to explore that obsession through mountain climbing, perhaps the most mythical (cliché) metaphor for individual achievement imaginable.

For those who love to climb—who live to climb—his careful depiction of that life will be reason enough to read the book. I'd be surprised if there's a better account of climbing culture and its numerous idiosyncrasies.

For the rest of us, Solo Faces, unlike Salter's two great novels, is not especially noteworthy.

According to William Dowie (writing in his critical biography of Salter), Solo Faces began as a screenplay commissioned by Robert Redford. When Redford rejected the screenplay, Salter transformed it into a novel. As a consequence (I suspect), Solo Faces suffers from narrative awkwardness, especially in its earliest scenes. It lacks the organic coherence of Salter's enduring work.

I'll note two other disappointments: Salter's great strength as a novelist is his evocation of the inner life of women. But Solo Faces concerns itself with the overwhelmingly masculine world of mountain climbing, so reading it is a bit like watching a great hitter play defense. Secondly, the keenest pleasure this book offers is the pleasure of suspense. For this particular reader, suspense is a trivial, even annoying quality in a novel.

Nevertheless, one does find, as always, Salter's philosophical elegance—in this case, as it obtains to the heroism (insanity?) of obsessive individual achievement. That elegance is best captured in this exchange, which comes near the end of the book:

     "I decided to see if I could shock her," Rand admitted. "So I told her the truth."
     "Such as?"
     "I told her I'd been climbing for fifteen years. For most of that, ten years anyway, it was the most important thing in my life. The only thing. I sacrificed everything to it. Do you know the one thing I learned from climbing? The single thing?"
     "What?"
     "It is of no importance whatsoever."

The novel's philosophical interest is plain to see when one applies observations like that to individual achievement generally—including, for example, the achievement of writing a novel.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Mad Men, The Wire, and Satire as a Sign of the Times

Mad Men is excellent entertainment. It's third season, which just concluded, was uniformly satisfying. The final episode was especially good.

But I shake my head in disbelief when I hear it—or, more commonly, see it—compared to The Wire.

The Wire (aside from its final season, which was disappointing) is an American masterpiece. In my view it's the greatest show in the history of television.

Its superiority to Mad Men begins with a generic difference: Unlike Mad Men (and unlike Mad Men's artistic and spiritual precursor, The Sopranos), The Wire is epic. Mad Men and The Sopranos, on the other hand, are works of satire.

As an epic, The Wire is rigorously unreassuring. It absolutely refuses to condescend to either its characters or its audience. It never imagines its characters to be stupider than itself. Its ethos is not evaluative but comprehensive and loving (of the world, of existence). There's no hierarchy of truth in The Wire—a truth, for instance, to which we're privy but the characters are not, or a truth to which the world is privy but the show is not. The Wire strives for totality of vision—in this regard it carries on the artistic tradition of the epic. It's morality, to paraphrase an observation that Milan Kundera makes about the novel, is to be amoral. Aside from its final season, it's not didactic or self-congratulatory; instead, it asks questions of the world; its lens is curious and unblinking.

In short, The Wire isn't interested in judgment but in understanding. It says: "So this is the world"; and then it does its absolute damnedest to see clearly, to give freely; and its achievement is formidable, as near as American art has come to Tolstoy.

None of those observations apply to Mad Men.

Unlike The Wire, Mad Men is a work of satire. It's condescending toward its characters and patronizing of its audience. Its characters are stupider than we are and we are meant to take delight in our relative enlightenment. Its artistic vision is hierarchical, with Mad Men's makers above everyone and the show's audience above the characters. Mad Men makes no attempt at total truth but operates by selection, distillation, and suggestion. It's profoundly moral; it's didactic and self-congratulatory. It is—god save us—insightful and sophisticated and clever.

Given their generic difference—what's really a difference of essence—The Wire and Mad Men are not comparable artistic achievements and shouldn't be spoken of as if they are.

The Wire makes the best case in recent popular art for the artistic superiority of the epic over all other artistic forms. It's essential art, great art, because like all epics worthy of the name it is timeless.

The fact that it got made and that its artistic sensibility survived for four complete seasons defy explanation. Like all permanent works of art, it now glows with the light of the miraculous.

It's true that Mad Men—a well-argued, well-made history lesson—is great fun to look at. The sets are thrilling. The women are gorgeous catastrophes, except for Joan Harris, played by Christina Hendricks, who is a human being and is genuinely riveting. The men are stupid, elegant monsters, with the exception of Roger Sterling, played by John Slattery, who—along with Hendricks—offers a glimpse into what the show could be if it stopped concerning itself with teaching us about the world and instead tried to learn from it.

For a while I thought that Mad Men wanted to give us an updated take on The Great Gatsby, which contemplates fundamental American insecurities as profoundly as any work of art in our canon.

It's now clear that Mad Men has no such ambition. Instead, it has joined the parade of self-certain ideologues typical of this moment in American life and who occupy our attention at every turn, telling us who we are, how we think, and how we ought to think.

In this regard Mad Men is great television. Along with The Sopranos, it captures the spirit of our time—a time when the artist has rejected the role of the poet (who knows nothing) for the role of the saint (who knows everything) and has set out on a mission to save us from ourselves.

Monday, November 16, 2009

Day Two

I've tried to hit the ground running.

Most of the notes below I've robbed from the unmarked grave of an earlier blog. That blog was conceived in Costa Rica in 2003, only to be, like much else I've given birth to, stillborn.

My first note—on Light Yearscan be held responsible for my decision to begin The Bewildered Eye. Upon finishing Salter's delicate masterpiece I felt such enthusiasm for it and such bewilderment at its relative obscurity that I decided to speak up, however inconsequentially.

That note, the first I posted after "Inicio," is now buried by the others—a peculiarity of the blog form, which buries its own history. Books seem to me far more intuitive (and intellectually healthy), building upon themselves instead of entombing the process of thought that made them possible and that makes them comprehensible.

I would like to see a blog that one scrolls through horizontally instead of vertically. Does such a thing exist? Is it possible here?

Laments of an amateur.

I suspect I'll be updating this too often in the short term, swept up by nonsensical glee.

The Time of Our Singing, by Richard Powers

The Time of our Singing is a beautiful lesson. The book has tremendous scope. Powers is clearly a genius.

But he's not a novelistic genius. He's the type of genius you get during a Fundamentalist Era. Axes to grind. Proofs. The evidence arrayed.

I happen to agree with him more or less all the time. Perhaps that's why I find the book disappointing.

Well: Why I found the book disappointing. I confess I stopped reading it (reason enough to stop reading this note). The book is too long. It's ambitious and often gorgeously written, but the prose seems to strike, too often, the same key.

In this regard it's like Norman Rush's Mating: relentlessly, the same brilliant voice.

I guess we can't produce a Tolstoy. We are too stylistic, too egotistical. Maybe we don't trust our stories. We require applause. We would rather be marvelous than true.

I suppose there's something to being marvelous, actually—something important.

Another aspect of the book I found disconcerting: It's narrated by the brother of a musical genius, and the narrator is both envious of and awestruck by his brother's talent. Yet the narrator's philosphical range and poetic sensibility—his own artistic talent, in short—led me to think, as I read: As if a mind like this could be envious of anyone.

Momentarily envious, perhaps—but not as a way of being in the world.

Anyway, I don't recommend the book as an exemplary novel but as a wonderfully written exposé of the American soul.

It's a shame exposés are dull, once we get the point.

Liquidation, by Imre Kertész

Always difficult to know what's going on with a translation. But there's an awkwardness to this text that initially I found distracting. Over time it became poignant.

It's a work of genius, regardless—peculiar, wonderfully structured, sincere. It wonders at the big questions: We are a chaos, now, and all live in the shadow of Auschwitz—so what follows from that? And what's the relationship between love and self-destruction? Between love and sadism?

It is unapologetically, if clumsily, postmodern, but it's postmodernism functions in the service of an emotional verisimilitude that I find heroic.

That's a good word for this book. It's a word that its author would flee, rebuke, dismiss as yet another example of our contemporary stupidity.

Regardless, this is a heroic book.

The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen

Franzen has written an unpleasant novel, filled with unpleasant characters to whom nothing bad ever happens. At the book's end there's a death that was given at the outset—a death that has, in effect, already happened. The story’s other ostensibly tragic events are minor and pitiful.

The primary impression one gets from the book is that Franzen takes pleasure in eviscerating his characters. From the outset the stack is arranged against them.

But such arrangements constitute the fundamental difference between literature and propaganda. Most of Franzen's readers—well-educated, well-meaning liberals—will agree with the book's propaganda and so mistake its declamations for artistry.

Of course Franzen is intelligent—painfully, mercilessly intelligent. His prose is swift, democratic, entertaining.

But novelistic insight is not his strength. In its place we get Stating the Obvious.

So The Corrections is a new addition to the Literature of Recognition. An old, venerable tradition: We're invited to read a book in which we'll recognize what we already know about ourselves. Consequently, The Corrections is as modest as its title, despite its many pages and the hopeful fanfare that accompanied its notorious anti-Oprah arrival. It congratulates us on collaborating in its excoriation of human stupidity; our collaboration, if the reader possesses any intelligence whatsoever—and, in a manner typical of our era, wants to be congratulated on his or her intelligence—is reassuring and gratifying. Like other, similar collaborations, it passes from the mind as quickly as a compliment from a stranger whose attention we didn't desire.

The only lasting source of interest in the book is watching its author suddenly quit the game as his characters begin to take control of it. So the book ends abruptly and happily. In place of the venomous tone that characterized all but its final few pages, we suddenly get sympathy and admiration.

Curiously, though, Franzen's abrupt surrender is the most moving aspect of the book. And it is moving. As if all along the novel had been advancing towards its author’s unexpected and deeply painful confession of weakness vis-à-vis his hapless, stupid characters. Satire abruptly turns into love.

Aside from its viciousness, the book suffers from a problem common in modern fiction: there's no one in the book who is nearly as intelligent as its author.

How different they are, in their vapidity, from the protagonists in Tolstoy or Dickens! (Chip is no Pip!) Tolstoy, especially, filled his books with fiercely intelligent characters. Franzen can't. It would ruin his fun.

But Franzen is of his Age, mistaking cynicism for satire. Where Petronius is reckless, patient, generous—delighted!—and grand-spirited and perverse, where he's timeless as opposed to timely, where he's filled with affection for his characters, Franzen is a prosecutor. That’s what we get here: evidence, conviction, punishment. His targets are easy and all too familiar: name brands, fashion drugs, workaholics, a word like “workaholics,” suburban naïveté, political correctness, IPOs.

Yes, Franzen’s characters merit his mockery. It's another question whether or not they merit our time.

Always behind The Corrections, a deeply conservative temperament. Now and then the text plays, but always according to the clever conventions of DeLillo postmodernism. So the book's rare riskiness sticks out awkwardly from the dreary trunk of an otherwise skillful, intelligent, traditional novel.

Franzen wants to be right about us; and he is. Good for him. Dreary for us.

War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges

He's an eyewitness. That's the book's relevance.

I didn't like the end of the book. It's too easy to say that secretly, inherently, we all want to die, or that violence is addictive because we all want the rest of death. Of course we do want to rest, but that's not the sole—or even the primary—source of our violence.

I also don't like the dedication to his children. If it isn't disingenuous, it should be.

The story about the Muslim man who brings milk everyday for the Serbs' infant after the mother can no longer nurse is devastating. It's the book's secret.

A helpful way to approach a critique of this book might be to imagine an ideologue—from the right or the left—reading it. Because it's a confused book. It's broken. Brokenness is its rhetorical stance.

Hedges' likely response to that observation is explicit in the book: Brokenness is the only reasonable stance to such horror, and so much of it.

There is something tiresome, however, about its dismay. Hedges posits an idea of humanity—a liberal humanist's idea, I guess, and in truth I can't think of another worldview worth defending—and then laments our inability to live up to that idea.

But the idea, despite the fact that it's been our salvation, might need to be reevaluated. Could it be that the idea is now facilitating slaughter? Based upon the content of this book, it's an idea so easily refuted by the facts of the world that to read the book is to watch liberalism collapse.

Outside the book, of course, liberalism collapses at an anthem's first note.

I saw that last night, when I watched an NFL football game and saw the Indianapolis Colts unfurl an American flag the size of their football field. In such sights one foresees the end of the world.

In any case, I recommend the book. It's a good introduction to the problem of violence—specifically, to the problem of violence as it's perceived by modern liberalism. So it's a good introduction, too, to modern liberalism generally: to what to admire about it—the poetry, in the first place—and to its vulnerabilities.

They're the same vulnerabilities that Nietzsche addressed, futilely. Wrongly, Nietzsche called them weaknesses.

My god, how we love our tragic lives!

Memorias de mis putas tristes, by Gabriel García Márquez

Lighter, less important than his great novels (if they can be called novels) this book is a delicate celebration of the torment of falling in love.

GM's gifts are two-fold: effortless storytelling—he's the master storyteller of his generation—and a seemingly limitless capacity to take delight in the vagaries of the world. He is abjectly optimistic, positive, life-affirming. Coming from him, "mierda" means "wonder."

A quick, comic read—this is comedy—and a useful reminder that regardless of the world's godlessness (or, worse yet, its godliness) it's filled with reasons to love it.


A follow-up: It's been some time since I recorded this note. As time passes the memory of this book fills me with a peculiar nausea. It might be dishonest. I'll read it in translation and see what I think of it in English.

The Foundation Pit, by Andrei Platonov

Russians write the best novels.

As an aspiring novelist, I felt reading The Foundation Pit that I needed to study it. It's a novel of ideas, yet the ideas are inextricable from the movement of the story. And its movement is effortless. Shifting points of view, locations, discourses—satire, irony, outrage: all without, to this beginner's eye, a formal misstep.

The author has opened a space for himself that allows him to do whatever he'd like. His authorial credibility is boundless. Two-thirds of the way through the book a bear appears as its now-central character. The reader—this reader!—does not blink.

And the book's ideas are astonishing.

Why can't Americans write readable novels of ideas?

This is one of the most poetic and philosophically compelling evocations of despair that I've ever read.

Emphatically recommended. Essential.

Paris Stories, by Mavis Gallant

Gallant reminds me of Chekhov. She's funnier—or it's easier for me to catch her North American comic sensibility—and almost as chilling. These stories are extraordinarily well-crafted. As with Chekhov, the craft is in the service of story, not ideology and not the articulation—the self-aggrandizement—of an ego.

Gallant's art makes clear the difference between literature and propaganda, between fiction and philosophy, between life and death.

In her generous afterword, after her manner, she says that art should illuminate the difference between life and death. One would that that the differences should be obvious, yet reading her stories one realizes that they aren't, and to imagine that they are is laziness.

Her women, especially, are riveting. I've discovered only recently the extent to which women have an inner life. I was aware of it, vaguely hoped for it, but thought that women were primarily social, outward-flowing, and consequently I badly underestimated their private complexity.

Reading Gallant in conjunction with what's transpired in my life recently has transformed the way I see women. I don't know if this transformation will manifest itself in the way I live. I hope it does.

But this isn't about me—or shouldn't be.

Among the gifts Gallant gives her reader, this most of all: her artistic process is impossible to deduce. She says she begins with an image. It's fun to imagine what that image might be with each story; but imagine is all you can do. The stories are seamless. Her touch is too light to leave a trace of anything conclusively original or seminal, of the creative artist, the craftsperson, the technician, the necessity at the story's source.

Having read her I want to copy her. But that's not merely impossible; it is ludicrous.

She's as good as anyone writing short stories right now, perhaps ever. This is a superb collection. Michael Ondaatje edited the book and it includes an introduction he's authored. His introduction seems to implicitly acknowledge that she's the better writer. If it doesn't, it should.

Sleepless Nights, by Elizabeth Hardwick

It took me a long time—months—to finish this little book. It might not necessarily invite intermittent reading, but clearly it's not preoccupied with the striptease of suspense and can be left for days, weeks, for as long as one wants, to be resumed when the mood suits its peculiar but indisputable beauty.

Anyway, it rewards sampling. A couple of passages tonight; more tomorrow night; more again in three weeks.

I always thought, proceeding: How nice to return to this.

In other words, it's not an expedient book. It's generous, leisurely, stylish—I think Hardwick is a topnotch stylist: her line is instantly recognizable, energetic, American, muscular, yet (here we go) feminine. Pre-occupied with minutiae, humane, not exactly gossipy but certainly concerned with social dynamics, long-suffering, efficient, and elegant.

While not a necessary book, it's emblematic of a kind of American writing that we must not lose. I speak of Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, Miller. The autobiographical, the personal, rendered, at its best, acutely, passionately—but without sentimentality; or with sentimentality conveyed with such lean self-assurance that it a acquires a kind of youthful indisputability—in the sense, I guess, that young love or American power is indisputable. The book is just about beyond logical critique due to its sheer gorgeous intensity.

This is a wonderful gift-book for someone who loves English prose. Hardwick stands with William Carlos Williams as one of the 20th century's master prose stylists.

Light Years, by James Salter

I can still remember a time when drinking was an unmitigated delight. Rightly or wrongly, I felt freed by it of my worst qualities (which were all, I imagined, the product of a Mormon upbringing): humorlessness, abject obedience to authority, a fascination with passing judgment, morbid self-control.

Drinking, I became less narrow. I became, for myself, finally, unpredictable. At the age of twenty-nine, I had found a path into the open meadow, or the great teeming city, of life.

Let me put that another way: suddenly, for the first time, I was having fun being an adult.

It was around that time that I read Under the Volcano. I loved the book and I liked to read it aloud.

But I didn't understand it. In addition to its exotic locale, it described an exotic experience: alcohol as an act of suicide. Alcohol as a flight not to life but from it.

If I were to read Under the Volcano today, it wouldn't be the same book. (Re-read books are never the same, which is why there is no such thing as re-reading.) Lowry would now be describing an experience that has become a possibility, perhaps even an inevitability—an experience that, however faintly (or probably not very faintly) I now recognize.

So too does Light Years, by James Salter, a book I've just finished and which has shaken me as few works of art ever have.

Its account of the beauty of marriage, and of its pleasures, and of its terrible and insidious forms of loneliness, would once have been incomprehensible to me. I suppose I would have recognized—but without nostalgia, which makes recognition matter—its account of marriage as a form of refuge. And as a sight of sudden, permanent moments of beauty. But I wouldn't have recognized its account of marriage as catastrophically, terribly lonely, and as always, at some level, doomed.

So I wouldn't have understood the book, as I couldn't understand Under the Volcano.

I'm saying that I would have loved Light Years, as I loved Under the Volcano, but I would have experienced its primary theme, its motivating truth, as exotic, charming, and irrelevant.

I think that Light Years can't be wholly felt unless the reader has been married and a parent for a while—probably for years. That fact (and I believe it's a fact) might explain the book's otherwise inexcusable lack of fame.

(There is no corresponding excuse for the neglect of Salter's A Sport and a Pastime, which is one of very few post-war American masterpieces of erotica—are there any others?—and which, like all of Salter's work, continues to be suspiciously un-read.)

Light Years describes with unsurpassed delicacy the mysteries of domestic suburban married life. It gives a heartwrenching account of parenthood—as heartwrenching (by which I mean true) as any I know. This book could not have been written by a person who didn't love marriage and parenthood and who hadn't known great happiness as a husband and a father.

But also great unhappiness; and it's always in unhappiness, as Tolstoy famously noted, where the story lies.

I don't feel inclined to summarize the plot. Its basic elements are relatively predictable, as all plots are, or eventually become, for anyone who passes his or her life among novels.

Anyway, they don't matter—not in this book; not ever. What matters in literature are formal accomplishment, strangeness, and honesty.

Light Years possesses all three of those qualities in abundance. Reading it, I often had to stop after a few pages, as if to re-assemble myself. The novel seemed to be—it was—smashing me into pieces. It often left me breathless. I confess that as it drew to a close (although I didn't love its final pages) I wept bitterly, helplessly.

Salter has divided Light Years into five parts, each built around what he frames as discreet stages of adult married life. Passing through each stage, one recognizes their truthfulness. More generally, one recognizes that there is great cruelty in truth. That we recognize truth by its cruelty.

The book's celebration of the basic pleasures of life acquires as it a proceeds a kind of indisputable force. No American writer since Hemingway evokes the pleasures of food and drink, the experience of preparing food and eating it, as exquisitely as Salter. In fact, his evocations are better than Hemingway's. (It's no coincidence, I'm sure, that both men spent a great deal of time in France.)

Salter is equally gifted at using setting to construct the emotional content of his art. His eye for the nuance and significance of light is unparalleled in modern American literature, perhaps in all of American literature.

My copy of the book, on loan to me from the Chabot College library, was published by North Point Press and has on its cover a painting by Pierre Bonnard. This choice seems exactly right. Both Salter and Bonnard articulate the truth—the truth as I've experienced it, anyway—of domestic life: They see its colors, its light, its stillness, its sadness and joy, its tendency to dissolve into something which can't be thought about and so can't be contained.

One realizes reading Salter that of course all politics are local because all life is local. We can't feel beyond ourselves. And what causes us to feel? Landscape, weather, nearby bodies, other animals, physical activity, the voices and the words of those we love, human—especially female—beauty, wit, the intelligence and dignity of children. Food and drink. Now and then, too rarely, a work of art. And the sanctuaries of sleep and bedding and the bewilderment of beloved flesh in close proximity to our own. The bewilderment of touch and scent. The boundless province of sex and its indigenous despair.

It is a book about aging and the primary act of resistance we have against aging, which is falling in love.

We see, if we are ready, that beyond those things nothing else matters. The rest is not silence but noise.

I suspect this book will be impossible to read if you don't understand that women are real and have emotional lives that are completely, permanently their own.

Which might make it impossible for most men to read and probably explains why I found reading it so difficult and why it is generally, unjustly unknown.

I think Light Years is one of the great American novels of the 20th century and I'll read it again when I have the strength to face it.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Inicio

So now this: an account, let's say (whimsically), of one man's battle with the gods.

The minor gods, of course, as those are the only ones left.

Notes on literature, culture, politics—on the experience of a self (various, bewildered, imperious) in time.

I've decided to begin a blog—a plodding word for one's literature—because I'm interested in the way that thinking is changing. I'm convinced that it is, and the changes must have something to do with the way we make our thoughts, and share them. So I want to try blog-thinking, in part to see what happens to my writing—or, more to the point, to me—when my thoughts take this form.

Also I'm frustrated by how little writing I actually do.

And by my solitude, far from many minds I miss. I want this to be seen as my attempt to continue conversations that were once essential to me and have now fallen silent.

Let's begin with those ambitions and justifications. They should be taken lightly, as I just made them up, distracted and feeling, this evening, unwell.