Saul Bellow - The Adventures of Augie March

Allow me to tell you about the book I have just now, within the last five minutes, finished reading:  The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow.

I’m very happy to have randomly decided to pick it up at the bookstore one day, on a whim based on a memory that one of my favorite professors had it in his syllabus in another class.  It’s amazing.  It’s rare that you encounter books that contain such fully-realized human beings and seem to encompass all there is to life in relatively so few pages.  It’s such a grand thing, with rich and textured language - though not overwrought and false.  This book is alive, and it disturbs me that I’ve heard so little about it in the various literary circles I have haunted in the time that I’ve been alive.

There will be a period of careful deliberation as to whether this book will replace another on my top ten list.  It’s an inspirational work of art, but also humbling for me, as I cannot help but tremble in its shadow.

Read it.

My Honorable New Title at Xenith

Because Hannah, the former anthologist and lovely woman that conceived the Xenith anthology, no longer has the time or resources to put toward the project, I am happily accepting her position.

I am also introducing a new plan and design for said anthology.  For details, go here.

If you are unfamiliar with the anthology or, heaven forbid, Xenith, please visit these links, explore, and discover.

This should go well with all of the other ambitious and time consuming projects I am taking on.

Instead of aiming for publication this year, however, I have proposed rescheduling it for next June.  That should leave plenty of time for all the things I’d like to see come together.  In the end I expect it to be a very nice volume of wonderful work by wonderful writers.

An Expected Need to Gush and Other Tales

The titular mention of gushing stems from the book, or one of the two books, that I am currently reading.  I have read the first book of The Iliad for Xenith’s book of the month, and it was more engaging than I thought it would be, but what continuously amazes me is The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow, which I am almost halfway through.  I’ll be sure to write a fanboy review when I finish it, but I couldn’t really contain myself.  Depending on how the rest of it goes, this may end up a favorite and might just have to bump another book off of the Top Ten Recommended Books page.  I consider it hasty to go around singing praise for a book before I actually finish reading it, but it’s hard not to in this case.  What’s interesting, though, is that I couldn’t really pinpoint an exact reason as to why it has its fingers deep in my chest.  It has so many things going for it and, though a prime example of expert craft, seems effortlessly put together - a facet of certain artworks that I’ve always admired, this organic temperament.

However, despite the rapture that comes from reading a great novel, I feel rather guilty and somewhat despondent over the fact that I vowed to at least attempt writing a novel over these summer months and still remain at 750 words, many of which will soon be deleted after two weeks of thinking about the dialogue that has taken place.  You see, I have this tendency to integrate the idiosyncracies of those that surround me in my life into my literary works but fail to give them any real depth or desire, thus creating these undeniably pastel cartoons meant to resemble people.  It’s frustrating, this extreme weakness.  It makes me want to avoid dialogue altogether, or at least any focused interaction between characters meant to be a slice of realism.

Of course the chapbooks are still quite theoretical.  I’m starting to wonder at this point if I will ever actually get around to doing them.  I’d like to, but with this sudden contempt for the vast majority of my previous work, including most of the poems that are in The Analyst’s Wish, I’m feeling less adamant about it.  Still, it’d be a wise thing to do, I think.

Anne Carson - Decreation

Like Autobiography of Red, the only other work I have read by Carson, Decreation was read devoured in just a few days; and, like Autobiography of Red, Carson’s most recent collection left me burning:  upon finishing, I wanted nothing more than to turn back to the first page and start over.  I restrained myself, however, due to reading etiquette (which has only been broken once in the last few years with Nabokov’s Pale FIre, however I generally discount it considering this happened before I really formalized the rule of never reading the same author twice in a row, even if it is the same book).

My first wish whilst reading this collection, conceived just after completing the relatively straight-forward poems introducing the book, was that I was more intelligent, analytical, and in general a better reader.  While the bulk of Autobiography of Red is fairly accessible, Decreation is rather intimidating.  I finished it about a week ago and still feel that I only understand a fraction of it; and when I feel the need to read it again, I sincerely believe that it should be done more aggressively, armed with a small notebook and a pen.  Those that approach reading lightly should cower before it, or simply throw it away in disgust; it is not for the half-interested.

But it is a beautiful thing.  Erudition aside, there are so many striking lines, passages, images, and sentences, surely enough to satiate your thirst, but more likely enough to saturate (but not drown).  A professor of classics by day, Carson of course draws on several Greek (and other) myths and stories, giving each a very modern pulse.  One of the most intriguing works in the collection that is, what I would guess, the central work:  Decreation:  An Opera in Three Parts.  Rather than explain it or describe it, I’ll simply post one of its many arias.

Aria of Brittle Failure Theory
[sung by Hephaistos lying on his bed amid debris of the trap, chorus tapdancing slowly around]

Chorus:
Brittle failure occurs
of course
when stress on a material exceeds its
tensile force

(so scientists say).

Brittle failure theory
should predict
when some quietly oozing volcano
will erupt

in a deadly pyroclastic way.

But with you Hephaistos it’s hard to know.
You’re strangely slow.

H:
My theory is
I could split my heart on the anvil
and put her inside
and weld it together again
then there she’d stay
till the end of time,
there she’d stay
in no one’s heart
but mine.
And I know
our love would grow
freer and brighter
with every stroke of the hammer.

Chorus:
Brittle failure theory may
in the end fail
to explain how true love can
ever avail

against forgery.

But with you Hephaistos it’s hard to know.
You get that strange glow.

H:
My theory is
I don’t care anymore about justice, injustice,
how they end,
how they start.
I just want to be clear
to be more and more clear
until finally
all you see
is the line
left by the cutting tool
in the heart,
not even
the heart.

For those of you adventurous enough, beauty-starved and thirsty for something that requires a great deal of thought, I couldn’t recommend this enough.  It is another work by a great author that has so quickly elbowed her way into my list of favorites and shall remain there for a long time.

Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore

Just because it took me well over a month to read it doesn’t mean it wasn’t engaging: it just means I am a rather pathetic reader.

About (if not exactly) two weeks have passed since reading the last pages of Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami, and I’m still trying to pull my thoughts together.  This is not to say that I was left stunned and speechless, only slightly confused (I hate to use such a word, but could not find a better one).  I guess what puzzles me is that I found so much joy in reading a book lacking almost any beauty, which is something I have always held in high regard.  No sentences, passages, or images left me particularly amazed or even moved (and this could simply be a translation issue, and if this is the case and Murakami’s writing is breathtaking in the original, I pity those of us who cannot read Japanese), but my desire to know what happened next kept me reading.  On these grounds, the judgmental, snobbish part of me wants to dismiss the novel as something less than what I would normally read.  There are patterns within the book, and metaphors and deeper meanings, things meant to be taken away, however nothing particularly stimulating, at least for me.

The characters are largely memorable, almost on a Dickensian scale.  This comparison suddenly forces me to think about how this book functions much like one by Dickens, however there is a marked difference.  Kafka on the Shore has memorable, tangible characters, however their interaction is so removed from reality that it makes them all unbelievable.  That is one of my major issues with the novel, and it’s nice to be able to finally articulate it.

Overall I would classify this as an interesting and entertaining read, perhaps the epitome of the summer novel, for some, but a little weak in terms of craft.  Over the years I have come to expect, if not demand, a great deal from the books I read.  I read to grow, and although some may take something away from Murakami’s novel, much like some may take something away from Chuck Palahniuk’s work, the more advanced reader will most likely find nothing but a good source of entertainment.  Call me elitist, if you like; I’ll take it as a compliment.

That Sweeping Ambition

I was doing some minor research today, looking up a healthy portion of information on the Loft’s website, when I decided that I would attempt to write a novel this summer.

My original plan was to attend the open house tonight and possibly register for a summer class.  However, given that I have absolutely no money to spend on such things, I decided against it (these financially responsible decisions are extremely rare).  I tooled around on the Loft site a little bit more, visiting their various external links and resources before stumbling upon a sort of agent finder, which caught my attention.  What struck me about the agents was, of course, the fact that they almost always deal solely with book-length manuscripts, which is something I do not have.

The first option is to continue writing short stories until I have a number of decent ones with which to fill a book, however, because I am losing faith in almost all of my old writing, I don’t wish to do that as it would require starting over completely and having about fifteen stories to write.  The second option is to write a novel.

Although I have come close, I have never written a novel before.  I wrote a novella about three years ago, but it was disturbingly awful:  thirty-one thousand words, each one a small serving of shit.  So I started over, adding more to it and revising it until I was halfway through it at fifty thousand words, then decided I didn’t like it.  That idea is still maturing and will not be written at this time.  I have a relatively new idea that I’d like to write, and I believe I am excited enough to do so in the next three months.

Wish me luck.

The Monoto-News

I made a few very subtle changes to the site today (and possibly yesterday, I don’t remember). Instead of posting a sample poem, which doesn’t exactly make all that much sense, I have provided a page with links to any pieces freely available online. Because I am so embarrassingly green, there are only two pieces. One was published in Miranda Magazine last September, and the other was recently placed in Xenith’s long-awaited Issue 43. I think they are both good representations of my general writing style, at least when it comes to poetry. Even though I’ve always said that prose is my primary strength and direction, I never seem to publish it. That’s not to say I don’t try, though. Admittedly, it has been a while since I’ve submitted any fiction (or poetry, for that matter) to a magazine. The last attempt, I believe, was sending “Song of Syntax” to Glimmertrain for their Very Short Fiction contest. Hmm… I just checked on that one in another window. They didn’t like it.  Pity.

Hopefully I will get into the habit of submitting on a regular basis. What generally happens is I will, over the period of about a week, spam publishers. Then I’ll wait anxiously for the first few rejections, get discouraged, and forget about it. Strangely enough I keep getting rejections even now, more than six months since my last binge.

In other news, things on the chapbook front aren’t moving very fast. The Analyst’s Wish is probably the farthest along, as all the poems have been selected and placed in order, however it hasn’t progressed much beyond that point. As for the fiction ones, I’m a little concerned. I went back and read a lot of my older fiction, including a piece that I was going to include in this project, and I was sorely disappointed. I feel like there are things I could do now that are so far beyond what I was doing then, which is, I guess, a good sign, but it sort of depletes my available options. Still, this sort of clarifies the reasoning behind consistent rejections.

Perhaps tonight would be a good opportunity to research a few literary magazines, just so I can get my ass in gear. Unfortunately, most of them are shutting down for the summer.

I will probably keep making minor changes to the site as time goes by. One day I hope to completely redesign it, but it will suit my needs for the moment, if you could call them needs.

An Update on Current Projects

After two weeks of obsession, I have completed my longish poem, which ended up at 245 lines and is currently titled “Hymn”.  At the moment–and my feelings have been known to fluctuate greatly–I am actually rather proud of it.  There are parts of it that I think could be better, and I will perhaps revise it in the future, but right now I’m quite satisfied with it, overall.  I think it will go in the back of the small collection of poems I am planning to put out in chapbook form, which is simply every poem that I’ve written that I don’t consider atrocious.  Said chapbook is operating under the name The Analyst’s Wish and will hopefully be available soon.  If you would like to read this poem, and I encourage you to do so, it is temporarily available here.

Speaking of the chapbooks, I have decided to go with a more… personal approach.  Michael has convinced me to use nicer paper and then sew the bindings together, rather than simply print on copier paper, fold, and staple.  I like the suggestion, and will be going with it.  The only down side is that I will probably end up charging money for them, as they will be more expensive to make and take more of my time.  But that might be more exciting–selling my art to others.

One more thing I am going to start working on is a new short story.  I don’t want to divulge too many details–or any–so we’ll just say that the good folks at Xenith already have a hunch as to what it will be about, but, at this moment, nobody knows how I am going to tell the story except me.  I was thinking about it this morning and formulated some interesting ideas, and I hope that they will translate well onto paper.  Perhaps I should begin outlining this right now.

That is really all there is to say at this time.  As soon as the booklets come into being I will start frequenting local open mics.  I will be announcing my whereabouts on this site before I am actually there, so if you live in the area, feel free to come out and clap for me.  I would appreciate it.

What the Thunder Said

Today’s excerpt is from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which is very quickly becoming one of my favorite literary sculptures.

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves	395
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
DA	400
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed	405
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
DA	410
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours	415
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded	420
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?	425
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins	430
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih

Read the whole poem here.

 

I have sort of become obsessed with this.  I find it truly inspiring that such a message can be communicated.  “Shantih”, according to Eliot’s footnote, loosely translates to “The Peace which passeth understanding.”  The poem has built up this general aura of hopelessness and then it is all released in these final lines of acceptance.  It’s quite haunting.

The three words spoken by the thunder (Datta, Dayadhvam, and Damyata) are also very interesting.  They translate, again loosely, into “give, sympathize, control.”  I’m not exactly sure what to make of this at this time, but it’s undeniably intriguing.

On April 11th I suddenly got in in my head that I would sit down and read The Waste Land, and I did that very night.  I read it again, aloud to Michael and his sister, the following night while we were camping.  I read it again today while I was on lunch.  It’s resonating with me very strongly, and I’m happy about this, as years ago I couldn’t even wade through it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I suddenly produced a rather lengthy and slightly abstract poem.  (In fact, I have already written seventy lines of it.)

A Brief Sketch of the Immediate Future

I have created this site in an effort to whore myself out to the reading public.  I have mentioned elsewhere that I have been festering too long and should start marketing myself and my writing in various ways, and this site will do exactly that to the three people that will happen upon it.

 My primary focus at this time is creating chapbooks of my poems and a few stories.  Once these are completed and printed, I will start distributing them in various places.  I will also ask Michael to make idiosyncratic business cards for me to hand out to people I encounter.  The next step is to start attending open mics more frequently and pretty much stop haunting the slam scene, at least for a while.

 Please be patient in the development of this website.  I am still learning the interface and am in general a very lazy person, but please check back often.