KVARESTO8
Walking Projects
Fairfax Cross County Trail, 41 miles: completed 2 July 2010.
(more…)Meta
More Me
-
- Pinboard bookmarks
- All-purpose profile
-
Category Archives: Prose Fiction
Time for a reread
Russell Hoban, ventriloquist extraordinaire/author of Riddley Walker, has passed.
(Link via Bookslut.)
Showing up
Dwight Garner’s provocative challenge in last week’s Times magazine to novelists who publish infrequently,
If you and your peers wish to regain a prominent place in the culture, one novel a decade isn’t going to cut it.
is more than a little short-sighted. Did James Joyce forfeit his influence on literature, his place as a modernist, for publishing only two books in the 23 years after A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? (Granted, all three works were serialized first, à la Charles Dickens.) Do we think less of Ralph Ellison for never publishing his follow-up to Invisible Man?
And yet, Garner makes a good point. He finds exemplars in Dickens, John Updike, Woody Allen:
Good times, bad times, you keep making art. Many of your productions will hit; some will miss; some will miss by a lot.
I’m pulling for you, Aimee
Oddly, I find myself more invested in the outcome of this year’s Tournament of Books than usual. Maybe not so oddly, because I’ve read the two semifinal winners (but the field is still four—go figure) and I’d like to read the Jennifer Egan as well.
I don’t remember any pirates
Via Leta, Rudbeckia Hirta summarizes Atlas Shrugged. If I’d had this precis to read back when I was in high school, I could have spent that week reading sexy science fiction instead.
People alternate between speechifying at each other with Tea Party rhetoric and then having sex because everyone would stop reading if it was just the Tea Party stuff.
Potustoronnost?
Via Bookslut, a story from the Onion with steak to go with the sizzle of the headline (and byline, in this case): “Hey, Man, I Totally Get It; I’d Watch A 2-Hour ‘Biggest Loser’ Special, Too,” by A Collection of Nabokov’s Short Stories. Guess who just added something to his book shopping list.
Some lists: 8
Via Bookslut, Simone de Beavoir, Pearl Buck, Nelson Algren (A Walk on the Wild Side), and Françoise Sagan were on the Times fiction best-seller list the week I was born. Not too shabby. The nonfiction list is not too bad, either: John Kennedy, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Nancy Mitford, H. L. Mencken (posthumously), C. S. Forester (crossing over from the fiction list with The Age of Fighting Sail), and Winston Churchill.
Poetic license
In the first chapter of the The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender, a quite fine novel, this passage stopped me:
My father usually agreed with [my mother's] requests, because stamped in his two-footed stance and jaw was the word Provider, and he loved her the way a bird-watcher’s heart leaps when he hears the call of the roseate spoonbill, a fluffy pink wader, calling its lilting coo-coo from the mangroves. Check, says the bird-watcher. Sure, said my father, tapping a handful of mail against her back. (p. 5)
Now Ajaia ajaja is indeed a spectacular bird to see, and she’s got the habitat right, but waders as a rule don’t have much of a voice. But (thought I), since I hadn’t heard the birds I saw in Florida some years ago, maybe the spoonbill does have a pleasant coo. Not so, says Roger Peterson (eastern North America field guide, 5/e): “VOICE: About nesting colony, a low grunting croak.” David Sibley adds, “Also a fairly rapid, dry, rasping, rrek-ek-ek-ek-ek-ek, much lower, faster than ibises.” The one available audio sample from the Macaulay Library confirms.
Beckett decoded
For most of the arcane vocabulary in Murphy, the authority would appear to be C.J. Ackerley, Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy, unfortunately out of print.
(l) High praise is due to White for the pertinacity with which he struggles to lose a piece.
There are some good reproductions of the chess game with Mr. Endon in section 11. My own photographic contribution, realized with my dusty set, is the representation of the ending position, incorporating this annotation: “(m) At this point Mr. Endon, without so much as “j’adoube”, turned his King and Queen’s Rook upside down, in which position they remained for the rest of the game.” Not something easily rendered with standard notation, English or algebraic.
There’s a lot of Shakespeare lurking in the book, and in particular As You Like It (one of the characters is named Celia), but I would be utterly remiss if I did not check off the following riff in section 8:
“It is the second childhood,” he said. “Hard on the heels of the pantaloons.”
Notice that Murphy “misremembers” the quote, as do many of us, as “childhood” for “childishness.”
You can’t handle the truth
Via Bits, Paul Lamere notes that, if it chose to do so, Amazon.com could derive and publish metrics of how people actually read, page by page, their Kindle-powered e-books, leveraging the data collected by Whispersync. He suggests some useful categories:
Most Abandoned – the books and/or authors that are most frequently left unfinished. What book is the most abandoned book of all time? (My money is on A Brief History of Time)
and similarly:
Dishonest rater – books that most frequently rated highly by readers who never actually finished reading the book…
Most attempts – which books are restarted most frequently? (It took me 4 attempts to get through Cryptonomicon, but when I did I really enjoyed it).
I dunno: is the world ready to learn that hardly anybody actually reads John Galt’s enormous monologue, the one towards the end of Atlas Shrugged?
Howth Castle [and] Environs
Is the world ready for a corrected edition of Finnegans Wake?
(Via Bookslut.)
Some lists: 7
Hunh. I don’t dislike John Cusack movies, but I am good at crosswords.
(Via kottke.org.)
Untamable
The image from Henry Darger used in the cover design of the NYRB’s reissue of a novel from 1929 by Richard Hughes, is apparently all too appropriate, if we trust reviewer Andrew Sean Greer.
To say A High Wind in Jamaica is a novel about children who are abducted by pirates is to make it seem like a children’s book. But that’s completely wrong; its theme is actually how heartless children are.
* * *
…the children have such a deformed sense of right and wrong that it’s soon the pirates who are frightened of them.
A puzzle inside a puzzle
In Rabbit Redux, Harry Angstrom has gone into his father’s trade, operating a Linotype machine. There’s a couple of passages in the book where John Updike reproduces the lines of hot type that Harry sets for a local tabloid, including his mistakes. So we come, in Part II, to this passage, typed while Harry is particularly agitated:
Police authorities revealed Saturday that they are holding for questioning two black minors and Wendell Phillips, 19, of 42B Plum Street, in connection with the brutal assault of an unidentified sywsfyz kmlhs the brutal assault of an unidentified elderly white woman late Thursday night.
The letter substitutions make sense when you look at Ottmar Mergenthaler’s keyboard: Harry’s left hand has slipped one column to the right.
Except for one thing: sywsfyz should be sywsfyq. The key to the right of y is q, not z. My text is the Everyman Angstrom tetralogy. Where did the mistake creep in?
A mystery: 4
How is it that, of the ten volumes of Gilbert Sorrentino on my shelf, there are seven different publishers represented?
- Dalkey Archive
- Penguin
- North Point Press
- Random House
- Coffee House Press
- Fromm
- Grove Press
The funny thing is, everything else that I’ve read of Sorrentino, I’ve been trying to recapture the magic in the first novel of his that I read, Mulligan Stew. And nothing else has come close.
Best wishes from a harmless maniac
wood s lot reminds us that it is James Joyce’s birthday. To which I can only add, from my small trove of bookmarks, this scrapbook of images annotative of Ulysses. Start with the map.
