Building Stacks

Or, How I Accumulated so many Shitty Books.

It's generally known among my close associates that I loathe my stacks. Part of this is because I make many decisions by feeling. That means that when I decide I want to read something, it's best that I read it then. I am not unlike the fickle public consciousness in that way. There is a zeitgeist for everything. So when I have to turn to my stacks for a book to read, most of which I acquired between six months to three years ago on impulse, I'm not particularly happy about it.

Bargain Books: Being both cheap and a hardcover fanatic is a problem. I adore hardcover books, so when I'm in Barnes and Noble, and I see a book by an author I've been meaning to get to (or sometimes not) in hardcover for something like six dollars? I get more excited than I have any right to. Mercifully, the last time I went to Barnes and Noble I managed to avoid buying Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke and Don Delillo's Falling Man. Barely.

Out of the 17 novels/collections in my stacks, a whopping 7 of them are bargain books.

Assigned Reading: You get assigned a fair amount of reading as a writing student, and rightfully so. Sometimes it gets near impossible to keep up, or only part of a book is assigned to you. Sometimes your professor changes the syllabus mid-quarter (Thanks, Stephen Geller. I'm totally going to read this $50+ volume of English Renaissance Drama that doesn't include Shakespeare). But we were talking about prose.

Assigned reading accounts for 3 more of the books. That accounts for 10.

Remnants of Reading Past: I'm a big believer in documentation, organization, and the like. So when I decided to start reading more in March 2008, I decided I would do it with a clean slate. Effectively, I considered any book I'd read before then as "unread". Like resetting your play count on itunes. Many of my old books were put aside without any problem: Every mass market edition I own can be explained. If it can be helped, they won't be entering my shelf. However, I owned a few suitable (some even nice) editions from previous false-starts. So books like Agee's A Death In The Family, Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, and Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, among others, were folded into the mix.

Old Books account for another 3. That makes 13.

Unwelcoming Receptions: I'm very touchee when I start a book. An author can be difficult once I've gotten through the door, but If I'm met with a cold glass of water to the face on the welcome mat, I won't be walking in. It inevitably comes to be that some books I buy on impulse fail to engage me long enough to commit. This doesn't mean their bad. Actually, they tend to be classics or at least well-regarded.

Another 3 books are accounted for here. That's 16.

The Last One: If this deserves it's own section or not, I'm not sure, but it's uniquely classifiable, so I thought I'd just do it. It's an old book, an unwelcoming reception, and a book I had once intended on using for the basis (in an "inspired by" kind of way) of something I wanted to write. This book would be Margaret Yourcener's Memoirs of Hadrian.

So that, dear friends, is how you build a stack of books you have no interest in reading.

Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

Winesburg, Ohio

by Sherwood Anderson

(10: 6/50)

"The son shook his head. 'I suppose I can't make you understand, but oh, I wish I could,'"

The entry below will openly analyse Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and address specifically its possible themes, symbols and intent. No plot-related spoilers will be divulged.

There is something fascinating, unnerving, and somehow emotionless in reading themes and ideas that you yourself have expressed in writing. In Winesburg, Anderson tackles a half dozen subjects I've written about in the past such as judgement paranoia in "Queer" to the importance of experience in Drink. Yet somehow, because these subjects are so personal to me, it lacks the resonance you'd expect the work of fellow mind to have. I do believe it's all in the pitch.

Winesburg, Ohio, characterized as a short-story cycle is almost novel-like in its treatment of theme. Winesburg speaks specifically to how the importance of leaving home and experiencing the world is necessary to growth. The citizen's that populate Winesburg lack the ability to communicate with one another. Just as many of them have never left the surrounding area, so too are they bound to themselves. Expressing anything to another human being is Herculean effort rarely, if ever, achieved in the cycle. The result is an undeniable connection between experience and understanding.

The overarching narrative, if you deem it to be described as such, of ubiquitous "protagonist" George Willard serves to illustrate these ideas. Through Mother, Loneliness, Drink, Sophistication and the rest of the cycle, it becomes clear that Anderson is insisting on leaving home's importance to the road to adulthood.

Anderson doesn't, however, attack his subject. There is an almost refreshing sense of non-judgement throughout. Their stories are regarded as stories to illustrate a greater point. Of course, many stand on their own (though a few require the entire cycle) to present specific ideas but I believe they generally serve a larger whole.

Winesburg, Ohio isn't quite an American masterpiece. It glimmers in parts, recedes in others. Despite literary critic Malcolm Crowley's efforts, Anderson, like many significant writers, will eventually, within a century or two, be sandblasted from literary history; known only to Ivy League period specialists, and assuredly out of print entirely. Already, despite being of direct literary importance in both the establishment of Hemingway and Faulkner, Anderson's writing is already reduced to four or five in-print novels/collections. I've expressed on numerous occasions in the past how pitiable I find this reality.

Anderson may not be the strongest voice of his generation, but stories such as The Untold Lie are of beautiful quality. Anderson is so completely unlike his characters in that way. Winesburg, Ohio, if it is nothing else, is an impressive examination of the psyche of mid-America in the early 20th century. Anderson communicates on their behalf, and he does it lovingly. Though perhaps not well enough to convince a small-town, bad tempered misanthrope.

Up Next: Jonathan Tropper's How To Talk To a Widower

Auteur in Residence

Okay. So perhaps "auteur" is too strong a word, but this is beside the point. Warner Brothers just announced that Batman director Christopher Nolan will be mentoring the development of the company's new Superman franchise. That's good news for Warner Brothers. If only every movie could make a billion dollars (and being half-way decent wouldn't be too bad either!).

I thought this news was exciting. Mostly because it put this notion into my head: Every major studio should have an auteur in residence. It would be a symbiotic relationship in which high-profile directors are assured backing for their projects in exchange for supervisory consultation of the studio's various projects. Sort of like a well-funded American Zoetrope.

Who benefits: The auteur. Projects no longer have to be assured commercial giants. The notion of film as art is supported by the studio under the stipulation that budget costs don't rise like a second production of Cleopatra. We smack Jean-Luc Godard upside his head and make him swallow his oft quoted pity. Assured vision and art-film for the masses.

The studio. This is where is gets tricky. In order for this to work, the director in question needs to be someone both innovative and with a commercial mind. Someone who can thin out bad ideas while simultaneously keeping the studio in the green. Someone who knows the difference between Transformers and Dragon Ball, and who could have improved either of them with their input. The goal here is to eliminate box-office drags before they hit the ground.

Someone who has the mind to suggest the proper people get into the director's chair rather than the same schmucks who have made friends over the years.

Loss on auteur project is less than the loss on box office failures

The Audience. Not only does American cinema get a blast from the art world, but hopefully the bar standard on popcorn flicks get raised in the process. There will always be Matthew McConaughey movies: They take $30 million to make and generate around 50. But maybe all hope isn't lost.

So that's my idea for near cinematic utopia. Plus, think of how much of a big deal it would be when a studio had to change directors. It would be like waiting for white smoke!

Muss up your cage then, bird.

You want to write about the toxic ignorance of small town America, the elliptical nature of human failing, the seductiveness of that which will kill us but you don't. You sit on eggs promising they'll hatch and smash them before they do. Eggwhites and blood cover your walls.

All you succeed in doing is messing up the cage.

Aren't these things good enough for you? Important enough to you? You pretentious little shit. You'll spout off like some self-important boho schmuck, but won't create. You won't do it. Why?

You're a fucking charlatan peddling property you don't own. You're a sadistic sap soaking apathy so swiftly you can't swing this shit. It'd be a miracle if you finish this.

Apathy is your alcohol and you're a lousy alcoholic. You're so wrapped up in yourself you can't spare the effort. This is the well you have found that none may drink from; the Prometheus that hoards is chained to no rock.

Do you love the sight of your shit-stained walls so much?

Muss up your cage then, bird. Live in the filth of your own ideas. You're no majestic creature poised for great flight; just a callous crow starving in your self-imposed winter. Feed on the carcasses you've hid away; they'll get you by but get you no wear.

Muss up your cage then, bird. You are no great hunter; just a crow among millions.

Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides

The Virgin Suicides

by Jeffrey Eugenides

(10: 5/50)

"And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: 'Obviously, Doctor,' she said, 'you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.'"

The entry below will openly analyze Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides and address specifically its possible themes, symbols and intent. No plot-related spoilers will be divulged.

If ever I felt the term effortless applied to anyone or anything, I would have to assign it to Eugenides' prose. They are of a striking beauty and seamlessness beyond the superficial tricks of literature. They are not a fireworks show of alliteration, or a painted vista metaphor, they are simply the craft at near perfection. They are sentences of unfaltering word choice, and yet seemingly pulled from the ether, skimmed as effortlessly as refuse from a pool.

Told in collective first-person by an unnamed, innumerable group of former neighbor boys, the novel presents the fate of the Lisbon sisters as it would be experienced by someone who had lived on their block. It's a position of close physical proximity but ultimately vast emotional distance. We, like our narrator(s), do not know our subject. We can only observe them through the dubious lens of our unknown narrator(s), and the accounts their life-long fixation has amounted to.

The Virgin Suicides is an examination of the hand-in-hand companionship of distance and decay. The former heralds the latter. More damaging than physical imprisonment or distance is self-imposed mental and emotional distance; the willingness to recede into oneself. It is a corrosive, self-dissolving attitude that leads to non-existence.

The virginal motif of the novel, I believe, refers primarily to life unlived, and life without human contact. That Mary Lisbon is the final sister to pass away suggests perhaps an even more complicated symbolic narrative than I can even begin to comprehend. References to Christendom certainly proliferate the novel, but as to a greater implication, I'm at a loss for ideas save for what Eugenides' narrator presents at the end of the novel.

Speaking of which: It bothers me immensely that this otherwise exquisitely written and fascinating novel ends quite on the note that it does. Fiction is of course a forum for personal statement, but Eugenides shift to a seat of judgement at the close of the novel, literally in its final two pages, is upsetting to say the least. It elicited a knee-jerk reaction that threatened to change my opinion of the novel. He presents two notions, one completely in keeping with his perceived intent, and another that, although maybe a commonly held belief, can be too bitter a pill to swallow. That it should be presented by our unknown narrator(s), they themselves not above questioning, makes it all the worse.

Still. It's a beautiful, enigmatic novel, well worth reading and perhaps best read before Middlesex. If this was Eugenides' focus on language, and Middlesex his focus on plot, I cannot wait to see them combined with his focus on character. Really. Whenever you're done, sir. We're waiting.

Up Next: Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

Sorry, but I died.

You are aware, I think I can safely assume, that I am a great fan of Shirley Jackson. However, I'm afraid between the late Mrs. Jackson and the good people at Penguin, I'm in a bit of a bind. You understand, Jackson published six novels in her lifetime. Two of them are still in print, both of which I've read. Now. If we set aside what's out of print, that does leave one little stone left unturned without dipping into her non-fiction or short stories: Come Along With Me.

It's the novel Jackson was writing at the time of her death, and is currently collected along with some short stories and lectures in a volume published by Penguin of the same name. The problem is that I don't know where I stand on unfinished novels.

Certainly, their academic value is unquestionable. They serve as the best example of where a literary career might have gone if it continued, or as it faces down death. I don't know if I --as a fan, reader, and writer-- would want to dive into those waters. Of course, the state of the work is perhaps the greatest consideration.

With Jackson's Come Along With Me, it was something freshly started, a mere 30 pages of it exist (still a substantial amount considering the general length of her other work). However, In my crate of unread books, Henry James' The Ivory Tower awaits (weighing in at 348 pages), currently off-limits until I've read something James actually did finish. Which is worse? The one that takes only a lazy afternoon hour, or the one with the promise of a complete novel without the ability to deliver? Does it even matter? An incomplete novel is still an incomplete novel, after all. Though... Better to be kissed than left alone at climax.

Perhaps that's how it is then. As frustrating, or heartbreaking it may be, perhaps it's better an unfinished work be an infant than almost grown. If pages were pringles, and a novel were satisfaction, better to eat one and dream of the rest than indulge in almost enough. Both leave you disappointed, but at least you're spared the promises of closure.

I suppose then that the unfinished novel is worth one's time, assuming your passion for the writer is strong enough. It hardly seems worth it to read say Capote's Answered Prayers if you weren't struck by the rest of his ouvre. Something of that sort isn't going to change any opinions, although there is a certain allure to the unfinished novel. That it's somehow greater because it is incomplete. But I suppose that is just a bit of human nature. We can't help entertaining the idea that we just missed out on something. Who doesn't have an anecdote?

A formula. E=Enthusiasm on a scale of 1-1000. X=Page count of unfinished work. If E-X= Positive Value, Read. Or what you will.

Really. All of this could be avoided if you geniuses would have the good decency to stop dying.

A Case for Due Apprecaition.

Perhaps the problem is that I don't read enough female authors; my shelf only includes Ingalls, Jackson, Korelitz, Oates, Smith, and Tan. Still I don't expect any injection of La Guin, Rand, or Woolf, would remedy the problem.

It appears to me that within our modern culture there is an undeniable romanticism, mysticism, and eroticism given to the female form in literature and pop-culture that is not duly given to the male form, or generally masculinity as a whole.

Jeffrey Eugenides is an author who has an apparent great interest in the role of gender in our lives. This quote comes from The Virgin Suicides:

"We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to facinate them."

Now. Regardless of whether this is Eugenides himself speaking, or his narrator, I would like to point something out: This is nothing more than a well-articulated version of a comedian's "Men are Dopes, and Women do everything" bit, which is increasingly featured (to great applause) in the comedic acts of both genders. For shame.

First of all, whom does this self-deprecation benefit? If we belittle masculinity, and elevate femininity what possible positive role results? None. You're left with unreasonably high expectations on one gender not totally unlike how American Men were regarded in the 1950s. Aren't we still coping with notion of men having difficulty expressing emotion some three generations down the line?

I am not saying that the female form and mystique shouldn't be glorified. Far from it. I think it's healthy, I think it's emboldening, I think it's appropriate as there is an undeniable mystique to the gender but I feel you cannot express a healthy appreciation for one without doing so for the other. Like it or not, there is an equal romanticism, mysticism, and erotism to the male form.

Perhaps I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill, but as I mentally index the novels I've read, or become familiar with, it seem the novels that glorify femininity far outweigh the other. Is this because the opposite would be a "backwards step of feminism"? Really, who better than a female writer can accurately express such notions, and yet-- isn't there a risk there? Maybe.

Yet we see authors like Miller or Roth who use the word "cunt" half as often as they do "the". Where is the cutting objectification from the other side of the fence? Wouldn't is be equally as riveting? Isn't someone writing this?

Can we just stop pussy-footing around and acknowledge both genders as strong, sexual entities? That can exist as both a mystique and as an ideal? Can we stop with the infuriating self-deprecation?

There is an artistic beauty to both genders that can and should be expressed. You can fill volumes about either without it having to cause damage to the other. I simply don't understand why the male form and identity is undersexualized and underappreciated in literature and in our culture.