Self-Fashioned Suicide Reading Course

tell you what...

2010-02-07T11:34:00.000-08:00

Clearly, I am in a mood of negligence. This project is dying out. And that's okay! Let me tell you why, the final excuse:

I am still reading, but freely and happily non-academically (or at least, I don't feel I need to formulate an analysis for each book.) I am not in the same mood of desperate boredom as I was when I created this blog. Overall, I feel a lot better, and freer to chart my own course through whatever I choose to explore, rather than stay anchored in a self-imposed project. This is certainly the time in my life to read, and store up, and explore everything I can... I enjoy it very much, but the weightiness of writing self-consciously about it all has gotten to me. There's too much to write about, too much I'm overturning and getting into -- it's best to leave it inside my head for now, or better yet, to find some impossible cocktail party somewhere where I can impose it on others. I already managed to talk about Walter Pater at a dinner party (an experience that left me giddy, because the guy I found to talk to was a Harvard professor -- friend of my parents' -- and had never heard of Pater. He knew Oscar Wilde, though, indicated by a knowing roll of the eyes).

This will be the last post for a long time, so I may as well give an update. Since I last posted, I have read:

Denton Welch: The Making of a Writer -- Michael De-La-Noy (in preparation to reading his Journals... he was a fascinating man, very neurotic and helpless, but keenly attuned to everything around him. A woefully underrated writer.)

The Uncommon Reader -- Alan Bennett (an absolute pleasure, which I read in about an hour... it's an immaculately-worded English novella about The Queen Herself discovering the joys of reading, and how it unravels her position of power)

1984 -- George Orwell (this was my third time reading this. It's the best novel ever written. That title changes hands a lot, but this has continued to be my personal favorite... not for pure-enjoyment value, just because of it's perfect structure and widespread credibility -- everyone knows what Big Brother means, and there are so many fans of this novel. Punk rock bands, political science buffs, conspiracy-theorists, plus plenty of high-school kids.)

Gigi -- Colette (Sonny, if you're reading this, this was something I read when I was supposed to be working. As I said in the note, you really shouldn't pay me for those hours. I was also reading Henry Miller, in those small delicate-papered French editions we have. An anecdote about the book: when Colette was being carted around a hotel lobby in her wheel-chair, she spotted Audrey Hepburn moving through the crowd. She pointed to her and proclaimed, "That's her! That's my Gigi!" So you can imagine what kind of a delightful, silly, intruiging girl Gigi is. If Holly Golightly was a Parisian youth, and not yet escaped from home.)

Jonathan Livingston Seagull -- Richard Bach (it will change your life. I need to read it over a few more times before I can explain it... it's the best allegory for the pursuit of life that I've ever found or formulated. The truth that sets you free: there are no limits.)

I am still in the middle of Plexus, and have also taken up This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald (I have such a fondness for the man, I figured I should actually read more of his books. I've been saving The Great Gatsby for when it appears on my list... and for now, I'm sticking to the order.)

I will not be posting any more about my reading adventures for now, possibly ultimately into the future. I have classes that require involvement and reading now (in World Literature, we're set up to read Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, The Plague, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Doctor Zhivago.) Although, if Simon's Rock turns down my application (I will recieve their verdict by March 15th), I will be right back to where I started.

HAPPY SUPERBOWL DAY!
BON VOYAGE!
R.I.P. AND FOREVER LIVE J.D. SALINGER!
TIDINGS OF COMFORT AND JOY TO ALL
...AND THE HIPPOS WERE BOILED IN THEIR TANKS
O ALL THE SAD YOUNG MEN
OF MICE AND MEN, ON GOOD AND EVIL, FLAPPERS AND PHILSOPHERS
O SKINNY LEGIONS! RUN OUTSIDE! THE ETERNAL WAR IS HERE!
WISH ME LUCK AS YOU WAVE ME GOODBYE! CHEERIO, HERE I GO, ON MY WAY!

To get my last bit in, here's a final recommendation: Go read House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.
Thank you.

[Interlude]: The Renaissance

2010-01-24T14:59:00.000-08:00

In my application to Simon's Rock, I gave the web address to this blog... and now that all the paperwork is actually being processed and my writing under scrutiny, I've been hesitant to write much of anything on here. Also, I've veered quite a ways from my reading course lately. Quickly, a litany of excuses: I had my finals, I was getting my college application together, I had to have my application interview, and all of this has made me kind-of scattered. I hang onto little things and big projects become much more daunting. Now, I am engaged on a perpetual see-saw of disposition (this makes the euphoria incredible and liberating, and the misery like that 4th circle of hell where the sullen are drowned under icy sludge). But, of course, still finding time to read. Today and yesterday, it's been The Renaissance by Walter Pater.

Walter Pater was Oscar Wilde's mentor at Oxford College, and some would say the generator of the Aestheticism awareness that came about at the end of the 19th century. I suppose it was an artistic movement... more of a stylistic movement. The doctrine (taken up by dandies and their admirers) was basically this: Art for art's sake, it is the only thing in life that makes sense. Beauty is the quality to hold above all others. Live in reckless pursuit of the beautiful. Conduct yourself with grace, charm, and exquisite performance -- make your life your art. All art is quite useless.

So Walter Pater wrote this series of essays on The Renaissance (14th-17th centuries, respectively) based around its historical significance, with particular focus on its prime figures and products. Naturally, there's going to be quite a bit of Aesthetic theory thrown in to bring us around to his perspective. It is much more than the dry historical account that the gold-gilded cover and title would have you assume -- written in a joyfully descriptive style, with acutely-phrased analysis and infectious intellectual verve. The only reason I sought out this book was because of Oscar Wilde -- it was the most formative and personally important book in his life. When he was imprisoned, and finally allowed to have books sent to him, this was the first that he requested. This skews certain passages to make them a bit heartbreaking -- rhapsodies about the flourishing spirit, or the pursuit of beauty above all else (which is in a sense what got Wilde imprisoned in the first place, reckless beauty-mongering)... even just the passage from an old French story about a girl who escapes from her bedroom tower and runs across the dewy lawn on white feet (there are more descriptions, but I'll spare you non-aesthetes) to wander the night streets and find the one she loves. I don't think I would've been able to take the horrible irony of reading this book in a rank, ramshackled prison cell.

One of the essays is on the poetry of Michelangelo, much of which was fueled by lovesickness for a woman named Vittoria Colonna. Here is one of his sonnets not about Vittoria:

"On the Painting of the Sistine Chapel"
by Michelangelo (translated by J.A. Symonds)

I've grown a goitre by dwelling in this den --
as cats from stagnant streams in Lombardy,
or in what other land they hap to be --
which drives the belly close beneath the chin:

my beard turns up to heaven; my nape falls in,
fixed on my spine: my breast-bone visibly
grows like a harp: a rich embroidery
bedews my face from brush-drops thick and thin.

My loins into my paunch like levers grind:
my buttock like a crupper bears my weight;
my feet unguided wander to and fro;

in front my skin grows loose and long; behind,
by bending it becomes more taut and strait;
crosswise I strain me like a Syrian bow:
whence false and quaint, I know,
must be the fruit of squinting brain and eye;
for ill can aim the gun that bends awry.
Come then, Giovanni, try
to succour my dead pictures and my fame;
since foul I fare and painting is my shame.

I finished Henry Miller's Sexus, by the way -- volume one of The Rosy Crucifixtion trilogy (which is my actual topic at hand, being jostled quite frequently to the side by all these side-project interlude books). I'll make my encompassing conclusions about it once I finish the rest (Plexus and Nexus)... in short, I loved it. I'm almost not ashamed of it, too.

BOOK 8: Sexus

2010-01-18T08:42:00.000-08:00

"'Rebecca,' I said, proceeding slowly and deliberately, 'if I really knew what I was capable of I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you. I feel sometimes as though I am going to burst. I really don't give a damn about the misery of the world. I take it for granted. What I want is to open up. I want to know what's inside me. I want everybody to open up. I'm like an imbecile with a can-opener in his hand, wondering where to begin -- to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I'm sure of it. I know it because I feel so marvelous myself most of the time. And when I feel that way everybody seems marvelous... everybody and everything... even pebbles and pieces of cardboard... a match stick lying in the gutter... anything... a goat's beard, if you like. That's what I want to write about -- but I don't know how... I don't know where to begin.'"

-- Henry Miller

Sidetrack.

2010-01-17T12:21:00.000-08:00

There are two books that I am in the middle of at the moment, along with Sexus. I had said I wouldn't do this, dual-reading or juggling books, but somehow it's not at all surprising. I have sustained interest in all of them so far, so I figure it's still in the spirit of the thing.

1. The Journal of Albion Moonlight by Kenneth Patchen

This is my third time (at least) reading this. I ordered a glossy new copy that arrived on the doorstep just days ago, because my battered used one finally cracked down the spine and spit out its front pages. I found it last summer, during a vacation in Cape Cod last summer -- this eccentric little New Directions paperback wedged into the slap-dash-brick-laden-style bookshelves. I knew nothing about Kenneth Patchen except that he was a soft-spoken angry genius who knew Allen Ginsberg somehow, and made gloppy surreal watercolors with poetic messages. I didn't know what his writing was like -- but the name Albion Moonlight was so enticingly old-English and strange. So, I bought it and read it -- mystified, delighted, and astonished that a book like this could exist and not be celebrated at all.

It is the only book I have ever started to read again immediately after finishing it the first time. I carried it with me in my backpack for months when I got back to school. I completely understand it, accept it, and adore it, but still find it impossible to describe. The back cover calls it an "allegorical journey", but I don't really believe that. It incorporates everything in literature -- written truly like a journal, with plenty of poetics, sinister imagery, sympathetic addresses to the reader, tirades, and meandering (and situations so IMAGINATIVE they'll ravage your senses). It is impossible to describe! but it's incredible. I could live in this book. It has also been billed as "surrealist", and I guess I would buy that. Kenneth Patchen tended to avoid labels of any kind (he was a little bit of a radical, very individualist and pacifist), though he was kin to much of the writing from the Beat and the Surrealist movements. I wonder if quoting something from it would help what I'm trying to say.... well, this isn't much of a representation, but it's a nice quote anyway:

"What a lonely thing it is, to write -- and to spend the whole night writing (which is the plan in me) is a form of torture. My eyes will have burnt skin on them tomorrow; my hand will shake; my stomach will refuse to empty. Dogs with broken legs are shot; men with broken souls write through the night."

And then, to juxtapose, there are the passages like this:

"GOD! LET ME THROW MY LOVE OUT OVER THE WORLD LIKE A NET TO CATCH EVERYBODY IN IT FOR MY PURITY IS BUILDING FIRES THAT WILL NEVER GO DEAD UNDER THE WATER WHERE EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL LIES AND I WILL TEAR AND KILL LIKE A BEAST KNOCK ALL THEIR SOLDIERS DOWN BECAUSE I GIVE NO QUARTER I BURST INTO FLAMES I SHED MY CLOTHES I OPEN MY HEAD AND LET THE PUS OUT I BLEED I EAT MY OWN FLESH AND DRINK MY OWN BLOOD LET ME TAKE ALL THE TROUBLE ON MY BACK I AM STRONG WATCH I TALK WITH GOD I WRAP YOUR WOUNDS WITH THE CLOTHES OF MY LOVE I WILL NOT BE TURNED ASIDE I WILL ENTER THE TEMPLE AT LAST AND ALL THE LIGHT AND SINGING AND DESIRE AND PEACE WILL REST ON MY TONGUE I WILL DANCE ALL THE GRAVES OPEN AND SCATTER LIVING MEN OVER THE FIELDS I WILL TRIM THE GRASS THAT MUSIC GROWS IN I WILL FEED THE CREATURE THAT HAS NEVER LAUGHED IN ANY OF THEIR HOUSES I WILL BUILD A ROAD THAT THE SUN CAN WALK ALONG I WILL HEAL THE CHILD WHICH THE DEVOURING NIGHT-HORROR HAS FED ON I WILL SMASH THE BLOOD-SOAKED IMAGE WHICH STOPS THE LAMB'S HEART I CREEP AND BURN AND TAKE THE LICE OUT OF SLEEP'S WOMB BECAUSE IT IS TIME TO OPEN THE DOOR LOOK I SAY THE RAIN IS BEGINNING TO FALL THE BIRDS FOLD THEIR WINGS IT IS WINTER IT IS ESSENTIAL THAT WE CRADLE THE POOR BLACK WORLD IN OUR HANDS I LICK MY CHOPS SEEING YOU LIE THERE SO WHITE AND HELPLESS YOU CANNOT THROW ME OUT WITH THE LEFT-OVERS OF YOUR CANNIBAL DINNER I WILL MAKE YOU WATCH ME AS I OPEN MY MOUTH AND SWALLOW MYSELF I WILL NOT LET YOU ESCAPE THE STENCH AS I CRAWL ROTTING IN YOUR STREETS I WILL FLY INTO YOUR BELLY AND WALLOW IN YOUR DIRT I WILL NOT TURN ASIDE WHEN YOU SING ME TO SLEEP WITH THE LULLABY OF THE LEPROUS WHORES I WILL PERSUADE THE TENDER MADNESS TO TAKE YOU I WAIT HERE IN THE DARKNESS WITH A REVOLVER MADE OF TIGER FUR HELD TIGHTLY BETWEEN MY TEETH.

You are looking into the smoking eyes of an idiot...

I wipe my body clean with the bright milk of stars.

I remove my heart and plant it in the ground.

Crosses... the mask is on fire!

I confide in you because roots put their implacable lips through the flesh of our cities. You will never stand among the trees which grow in this sky. You will not hear when the white angel screams in these branches. I have on my shoulders the lashing tracks of a monster. I am alone in the forests of death."

It's not pretentious, really. I'm trying to imagine if this is a certain-person's type of thing, or whether this book is just woefully unknown because of some marketing fluke. The Journal of Albion Moonlight is wholly honest, and mind-exploring/excavating. I'm glad I found it in its obscurity, anyway... on a somewhat related note, Henry Miller is just as enthusiastic about it as I am (the only difference is that he gets to blurb his opinion on the back cover).

2. William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible by Barry Miles

William S. Burroughs... starting from a (predictably, since he's a writer) lonely childhood, where he developed a love for hard-boiled crime novels and became inwardly tortured by the knowledge of his sexual identity... to a period of stagnancy, heavy addiction, nullification in oblivion... and then he is urged to write by Ginsberg and Kerouac (two young Columbia college-kids at the time, who thought Burroughs was just a wonderful enigmatic teacher), and begins to have the time of his life.

Well, that's all a very bland, simple way of putting it. He was neurotic and difficult for all his life, though writing did seem to release something. He wanted to be RID of his writing, because it became like constant need (two phrases from him: "the algebra of need" and "word virus"). His yearning for new forms led him to heavy experimentation -- seeing where the boundaries were in the reality of his medium. His images and characters and scenes were written out to their full-blown potential, with nothing held back. If it became ludicrous, he went right along with it, played it up and made an incredible black-tempered farce of it. Writing was his greatest, possibly only, liberation. In Naked Lunch ("the frozen moment when everyone realizes exactly what is on the end of every fork"), he developed his format of "scenes" composing into a novel. They all exist in the same kind of non-dimension, a plane of dementia... but there is obviously no need for a linear storyline. Junky and Queer (his first two novels) were autobiographical, but from there he largely created his own world.

I like gathering up the straight facts on people, to know them better. Out of the three Beat figureheads, Burroughs has always been the odd, slightly creepy one I didn't know quite so much about. I think I am beginning to understand his mindset now -- it's grim, but confidently so, and willing to take you on the most refreshingly ridiculous excursions into the surreal world. Burroughs loved guns, loved French writers and read them when he was miserable in prep school, went to Harvard, was married for a while but ended up killing her in a drunken game of William Tell, garnered a small following of bratty fanboys in the '60s, became a recovering misogynist in the '70s when he was friends with Patti Smith, and continues to influence anyone with a counter-cultural bent to them.

BOOK 8: Sexus

2010-01-11T18:46:00.000-08:00

I'm in my attic room, hiding away from a pile of responsibilities. Midnight is closing in. My tasks are as heady as homework and college application, but here I am trying to promote something I can barely describe, or grasp, or reconcile with -- Henry Miller.

I've found one small black-and-white cluster of pixels on Google Images to show who Mona was (she is THE woman of The Rosy Crucifixtion trilogy, one of many but always THE woman -- as Irene Adler was to Sherlock Holmes). It won't let me link it in to show you, but she is incredibly beautiful. Thin ironic eyebrows, mysterious dusky sooted eyes, long delicate neck, features like china, and looking politely out of her mind (if that makes sense).

Here: http://www.hipgallery.com/photopost2/data/500/june_miller.jpg

A lot has happened since I've started to enjoy Henry Miller, last week sometime when I got through the first significant chunk of the book. His reputation cannot be saved, it's true -- but if you're willing to go a little deeper than the titillation and just keep reading into the vast volume of his output, you discover an incredible mechanism of a human mind. It is full of hatred, coldness, desire, compassion, resolution, despair, uncare. In setting to write out everything inside of him, to fill his own life with the work of books, he needs to tell everything. He holds onto love with the very last of his reason... and under the circumstance, this is a noble feat.

I have found some proof that we have our modern-day share of Neal Cassadys in the world... I searched "henry miller" on YouTube, and found this video.

Men like this are why writers exist -- we need to capture them, as they move along by their own willful direction, not knowing how pictureque they are. It is the job of a writer to just be there for everything, to absorb and observe and empathize with every explosion in their eye the fact that they're creating something out of life just by their talk. I have NO idea where this video was taken, or who this guy is... all I know is that it's sunny, smoky and loud, guitars are playing over speakers somewhere, and he's got the most lucid green eyes I've ever seen.

good night, I wish you fantastic journeys.

The Day-Glo Beautiful People: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Experience

2010-01-08T18:04:00.000-08:00

So in comes Tom Wolfe, surging with manic poetic energy to describe in regular journalistic terms the experience of LSD culture in the sixties – Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Neal Cassady swinging a sledgehammer, Hell’s Angels parties on country hilltops at dawn, The Beatles and the many-tentacled monster of teenage girls that rippled after them, wild cross-country careening in a bus painted all the fluorescent colors of hellfire. All these details become ours, artifacts and anecdotes in the whole cosmic movie of The Experience. Tom Wolfe was there for it all – invisible and very minor-character in his own prose, but he was there – and is now trying to set it all down in plain English, full of the facts his job requires, honest-toned and just as wildly mashed together as the crazed perception of a generation of Day-Glo beautiful people under the influence of holiness, sensory brilliance, and good old amphetamines.

Tom Wolfe has a crystalline-fine steel-trap mind for detail and acute observation (crucial to writing a good chunk of journalism, which is what the book is). His sentences careen on and on, building up into litanies of syllablistic fever, multiplying out over the pages in a quasi-coherent mash of his own personal vernacular. Tom Wolfe has quite a thing for words – a penchant, to be academic about it; it’s really quite an absolute passion. He wields an arsenal of medical terms, hip-talk slang, culture-references, catch-phrases and slogans (used like repeated riffs throughout the book), college vocabulary, sound-effects – it all gets thrown in. He may be formidable in his field as a writer, but he is up against an absolutely insane task, trying to bring this indescribable scene about into a book called The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, published in 1968.

What the acid test is is this: : : : well, actually, it comes from… it all started with a moment on… well, there’s a bus, anyway. The magic bus. Ken Kesey elected himself the prophet of acid for America, set out to turn everyone onto this mind-blowing, soul-opening, all-out-there experience. He formed a band of Merry Pranksters, dedicated to The Life, The Experience, The Freak-out Kick of LSD. They were out to change the world with spontaneous and total confidence – because they already knew they could change their own worlds, with this new visionary thing – and also wanted to make a big, bawdy, giggly, heartfelt and happy joke of it. For those who were not in on this (because you’re either on the bus, or off the bus), hate came naturally. It was unthinkably strange to watch as these people racketed all over the country with their noise of mantras and chants and loudspeakers, their strange Oriental flute music, their sheer apparatus overflowing from the bus that was carrying them on a wave of fumes past town after town of soft-faced, quietly-confused middle-class mystified America.

They were out to promote, to "propogate their lust for life", to make it their own movie, pull off a huge performance of joyful combustion to enlighten America out of its complacency once and for all. They all became characters, ordinary American kids turned into the fabulous entities of Mountain Girl, Babbs, Doris Delay, Sensous X, Gretchen Fetchin the Slime Queen, Black Maria, Zonker, and all the rest. They organized massive parties (be-ins, love-ins, impromptu mayhemic bonanzas) to release their love and drugs into the square-but-curious public. At the first of these gatherings, the centerpiece to the whole mess of lights and paint and bodies and dirt was an empty trashcan filled with LSD-laden Kool-Aid, which was passed around in innocent plastic cups. Everyone there had some, and individually lost themselves from there (in Wolfe’s phrase: to become “zonked” out of one’s “gourd”). The acid opens you up, opens and dissolves all fear and knowledge and only the self remains… your perception straddles deliriously the edge of all its angles, all sensation blows straight to your core and sends your mind into an ongoing spasm of rapidfire realization. It’s a view into the absolute unadulterated stuff of the senses.

To those who were in on it, part of the Experience, ON the bus and turned ONto acid… this was the purest reality in the world. It needs no justification or explanation; you just need to try it. Tom Wolfe, being on the scene but still shielded with his professional-observer guise of a reporter (albeit a pretty crafty, virtuosic one), tries his hand at forming conclusions to the whole mess to record it in its essence, and ends up with an Experience of his own. The story of The Merry Pranksters told as narrative is evidence enough of the whole thing (was it a movement? A revolution? A piece of performance or just one big joke?). It was wild, unprecedented, brave, no-holds-barred, revelatory, incomprehensible, culture-forming, path-forging, destructive, absurd, gloriously impetuous, too perfect to describe, and ABSOLUTELY not something to miss for the world.

[Interlude]: Why Sinatra Matters

2010-01-06T19:11:00.000-08:00

Why Frank Sinatra matters... well, he just does. It's obvious. He's an image in American mythology! Crisp and rakish in an overcoat and fedora, moving slow and cool and lonely through the night with a cigarette... It's perfect! It's irresistable! He is the patron saint of New York City!

I love Frank Sinatra, and this little svelte volume goes well with my sentimental view of him I've garnered over the past week (a very unprecedented infatuation). He matters because he brought companionship and understanding to strangers who needed it, through the caring craft of his songs. They're songs about life, love, loss of love, promise of love... all sustained behind the glowing sight of cities. Emotions are built to towering heights from small details (like a smile, a bird, anything moving by). It's an honest, half-dreary worldview, clinging to nothing and always susceptible to confusion; and I love it for that. When the music roars up into a blam-and-blast swing number, it comes charging on with the emotion of rejuvenation.

The songs are dated and easily disheveled by those out to find fault in the lyrics, but the sentiments are perfectly intact. It can be incredibly refreshing to hear music that is not trying to go against anything. They're just beautiful, fun, moony songs to get people feeling together (in all those endless nowhere nightclubs).

The author personally knew Sinatra, and writes with a fine-tuned poetic instinct for details and reminisce. The opening scene is in one of the typical smoky, low-lit, lonely bars that Sinatra typefied so well... the conversation around the table veers into literature, with the question in air being: Fitzgerald or Hemingway? Sinatra goes for Fitzgerald -- he likes The Great Gatsby, and any artist who can do fine work over and over again. Now that I know this, it makes absolute sense. Frank Sinatra would identify with a disillusioned (or illusionless) self-destroying dapper young man of the twenties -- absolutely. Also, I love it that he read. He dropped out of high-school, but that's because he had something to DO. He read, he performed, he drew, he abused and adored women, he cried at his daughter's wedding, he offended and charmed everybody, he had everything and hated to be alone, he understood being alone and sang out against it.

Maybe I'm just a sucker, or a swooner... but I love Frank Sinatra uninhibitedly, in spite of everything. This book was a comfort to find. I read it in under 24 hours.

"I'm for whatever gets you through the night -- be it prayer, tranquilizers, or a bottle of Jack Daniels." -- F. S.

BOOK 8: Sexus (an apology)

2010-01-03T10:57:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, in a cold & cavernous used bookshop I finally found The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I need to read it in a week for a school project (while also managing to write a report on it, without annoying my teacher with run-ons, or other forms of excessive enthusiasm). So this is to say that I have an official, viable excuse for leaving Henry Miller to stew by himself for a while. He is now currently face-down under a chair in my room, hot-red cover cracked down the spine.

I promise I will post my report for The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test here, once it is finished. So far, it is just as ecstatic and kinetic as the essays in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, and I think I want to be Tom Wolfe when I grow up. Actually, I'd just like it to be the '60s again... the closest I can get now is through the documents they left behind.

BOOK 8: Sexus

2010-01-01T21:01:00.000-08:00

First post of 2010! First off, quickly, I'll set down a resolution to get into college next year. I spent a few hours today writing an essay for an application form, explaining how boring and lonely it can get, reading all the time and building your own research projects (this one is my most momentous, but there have been others) for lack of anything stimulating in high-school. I'm also going to put a link to this blog in with my application, as proof of how desperately I'm reaching for new things while trapped here.

I also spent time today reading.

Henry Miller is not a man to hold anything back.

He's perfect in the genre of plotless novels that explore situations in the unashamedly confused tempo of reality. It's the characters the story is concerned with -- so much of the action is based in conversation, or internal-monologue, observation. It's stacked full of soap-boxes. I love books like this -- it feels like the most honest, genuine writing a person can do, and still house it within the confines of a novel, a story.

I can't tell much about the book yet -- I only just stumbled over a fantastic passage (too long to type out here, especially after midnight) today, around page 160. It's a tirade-speech from one of Miller's dinner-companions on one night out, talking about art (brilliantly! ferociously! maybe I should type it out...). This is the first passage from which I can believe that Henry Miller really is a genuis (as I've heard). It's not bad, reading the rest, it's just that he includes everything. There's incredibly coarse, sour-mouthed, misogynist outpourings juxtaposed with insightful and appreciative declarations for modern life. He's mentioned a few times that his favorite poet is Walt Whitman -- a man who was in love with everything in his path. I've never read Henry Miller before this and though I concede he is an excellent writer, he certainly has a reputation for a reason.

In the story so far, the fuel for all his actions comes down to basic lovesickness (I'm still talking about Miller, not a character, because he is writing this as autobiography). With this romantic obsession comes plenty of emotional trysts and tirades of description... this is expected, and appreciated, because Miller is quite a show-off with descriptions, and I like that. I like to see how long sentences can be stretched with the right amount of adjectives, and rainbow-layering of metaphor and striking detail. Miller favors the style of onslaught & hyperbole perfected originally by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, with his ellipses and outrageous inspired rants. It keeps the most mundane of circumstances interesting, and churns sentences along so fast there's pleasure in the momentum to keep up. Maybe this style is a result of the motivation behind The Rosy Crucifixtion trilogy -- to tell everything there is, to get everything out, projectile-vomit-style. Miller does heartily believe in honesty... and automatic writing produces the unadulterated stuff of the senses, honest and uncut.

Henry Miller seems, so far, like a ramped-up version of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was an incredible writer, an acute journalist, and an academic that willingly lost himself into a social scene (to make a vivid historical record of his times? for the sheer fun of it?). Henry Miller focuses his story in a social circle (eccentrics abound), and is obsessed with the romance of it. These New York characters we get down to the last detail in Miller's writing.

Must sleep. Sorry to be brief. Love to all the invisible millions that may be reading this (whoever you are, thanks a billion).

P.S., A Sidenote: I am also reading Man Ray's Montparnasse. Thought you'd like to know.

This is Kiki (Parisienne), modeling in the Surrealist spirit for Man Ray -- a gregarious American photographer who came to Paris to help the Dadaists destroy the world, meet beautiful women to model for him, and talk about art to people who cared. Other migrants to Paris around this time include James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Tristan Tzara (a crazy Romanian, very important to Dadaism), and Peggy Guggenheim.

Mad Tom o' Bedlam

2009-12-28T17:09:00.000-08:00

Give me a platform. Or, I guess, a plane. Any free space... and I will put whatever I want to see to fill it. Blogging is the most exalted form of narcissism we have to work with today, and I'm having as much fun with it as I can.

So, with complete disregard to the topic at hand, here is one of my favorite poems.

It's an anonymous poem from Shakespeare's England (16th century), called "The Ballad o' Bedlam". It can also be called "Poor Mad Tom", "Tom o' Bedlam", "Mad Tom's Song", among others. I can't remember how I found it (I'm sure it was pure chance), but it's really captivating.

Here you go: a dramatic reading in haunting dulcet tones, by some eccentric from YouTube.

The only misrepresentation in this is that he cuts the chorus that should be following each stanza ("While I do sing, any food, any feeding..") It is a ballad, after all, the chanted chorus frames it all off very nicely.

It's an absolute mystery, isn't it? But I love it.

[Interlude]: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (!!!)

2009-12-27T15:24:00.000-08:00

Hello again.

I spent Christmas Eve Eve in a reverie (poetic license skewered by accuracy -- "Christmas Eve reverie" would sound better, but I was busy Christmas Eve) of Tom Wolfe's language. It's language that literally makes you want to get up and dance. The sentences are wild, bouncing, colorful (I'll give you a quote on that later), amazingly imaginative, open-ended and blasting on across the page with pure journalistic fervor (the fervor in trying to see everything and appreciate everything at once).

I know very very little about Tom Wolfe, and I love him already. I've only heard of this (very surprisingly) from school -- I am in a class about the sixties, and from our reading list I have been seeking out The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for some time. So I found this chipped little paperback with an equally crazy title, and I thought I might as well take it with me on vacation. I know I'm adding on way too many books here... and I know I just got a stack of books for Christmas, and I'll still dip into those (I've actually been reading and somewhat grasping Derrida for Beginners! I feel brave just saying so.) One thing about this suicide reading course of mine that I've begun to notice is that it is as much about the byways and sidetracking and general exploration of this Pandora-knotted world I've entered into as it is about adhering to my list. Maybe I only needed the list as a starting point. Bearing that in mind, I still intend to see it out to the end (with much addition along the way). Henry Miller is currently hiding in my desk drawer... after Tom Wolfe, it's on into the madhouse of THE ROSY CRUCIFIXTION.

What you basically need to know about Tom Wolfe (what Wikipedia can tell you, anyway) is that he is a virtuostic journalist from the '60s and '70s, who helped create a movement in his genre called New Journalism. This is a style of journalism that incorporates literary techniques, tells its stories through a series of evocative scenes rather than a cohesive narrative (like blues music!), and presumes no position of authority above its subjects just because it is in the role of a detached observer. I think The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby was Wolfe's first book, a collection of these journalism pieces he contributed to various publications. The title is taken from one of the pieces included, which was Wolfe's first revelatory experiment with New Journalism technique.

I love reading short prose collections -- usually either essays or stories. It's a more casual experience, the increments of story force you to take your time... and each increment has a concentrated intensity of purpose that often harder to grasp in a drawn-out novel.

Here are a few awe-inspiring sentences from the first piece in the book (I don't know what to call them -- stories? pieces? journalism articles? essays? proud products of the New Journalism of America!)

It is called, "Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can't Hear You! Too Noisy) Las Vegas!!!!":

He gave Raymond that patient arch of the eyebrows known as a Red Hook brush-off, which is supposed to convey some such thought as, I am a very tough but cool guy, as you can tell by the way I carry my eyeballs low in the pouches, and if this wasn't such a high-class joint we would take wise-acres like you out back and beat you into jellied madrilene.

Las Vegas takes what in other American towns is but a quixotic inflammation of the senses for some poor salary mule in the brief interval between the flagstone rambler and the automatic elevator downtown and magnifies it, foliates it, embellishes it into an institution.

Such shapes! Boomerang Modern supports, Palette Curvilinear bars, Hot Shoppe Cantilever roofs and a scalloped swimming pool. Such colors! All the new electrochemical pastels of the Florida littoral: tangerine, broiling magenta, livid pink, incarnadine, fuchsia demure, Congo ruby, methyl green, viridine, aquamarine, phenosafranine, incandescent orange, scarlet-fever purple, cyanic blue, tessellated bronze, hospital-fruit-basket orange.

A big brunette with the remnants of a beehive hairdo and decal eyes and an obvious pregnancy is the liveliest of the lot. She is making eyes at everyone who walks in. She also nods gaily toward vacant places along the wall.

Christmas Tally

2009-12-25T13:00:00.000-08:00

1. The Journals of Denton Welch (from dad -- on request.)

2. Slaughterhouse Five --- Kurt Vonnegut (from dad, under his own personal judgement)

3. Stephen Colbert and Philosophy --- edited by A.A. Schiller (from my brother... it's a collection of apparently serious essays)

4. Derrida for Beginners --- Jim Powell (from dad, in case I'm off at college next year... I was horrified to open it, until I saw that it was in comic-book format)

5. Mozipedia: The Encyclopedia of Morrissey and The Smiths --- Simon Goddard (from dad)

6. The Posthuman Dada Guide --- Andrei Codrescu (from mom -- on request. So happy to finally own this. I never wrote anything about it here, but I did mention that I was reading it. Everyone else on earth should, too.)

7. She Walks These Hills --- Sharyn McCrumb (from a friend at school, Rachel)

Grateful, happy and merry... I'm going to be busy with these.

BOOK 7: World of Wonders

2009-12-24T07:36:00.000-08:00

It's Christmas Eve! I finished World of Wonders last night, excitedly (finally back on track as a read-a-holic), and then scribbled a page of notes trying to sum up the book. I thought I'd wait a day to write this, to see it anything new sunk in, but this is going to be pretty much all from what I wrote last night. Like Visions of Cody, it was only by the end of the book that I realized I really enjoyed it. Maybe I need to learn to read every part of a book with the slow significance that I do the ending.

There was a matter of murder leftover from the first two novels in The Deptford Trilogy (which I have not read, but have the general gist of by now). The long and short of it is, Boy Saunton did it to himself -- the suicide was a suicide, and no-one's guilt needs to linger on in life. He drove into the ocean, sucking on the fateful stone (for spite). This was concluded at the end, when Lisel, Magnus and Ramsay were sitting up side-by-side in bed -- engaged in the final wonderful discussion of the book. Magnus was telling the truth the whole time. Ramsay is writing it all down. Liesl smashed her brandy glass against the wall in happiness, when all the telling was over. And Ingestree even got his hand shook warmly by Magnus in the end.

Everyone agreed that the film (remember? the sub-text for all this was a biopic on Robert-Houdin, an old-time magician?) turned out to be quite dull in comparison to Magnus' story.

Some Final Things:

-- the only sign of Canadian culture I gathered from this book was a handful of "eh"s sprinkled thorughout the dialogue. Of course one book isn't going to do justice to an entire country... but maybe Canada really isn't that distinctive. Maybe it's really as blank and cold and boring as people say, and it's the people that thrive in it that make it wonderful.

-- Davies' writing is almost entirely dialogue, or monologue. The vividity of the setting is created from the general aftermath-atmosphere in all the speech. He obviously loves theatre, and sees his stories in the setting of a production.

-- A theme Davies is fond of is devaluing education, and the myths around its importance. Magnus Eisengrim is a marvelous human being, whom everyone agrees is fascinating -- and it often comes up that he is unencumbered by an academic education. It all happened naturally for him. There was a sentence about him that explained, if you want to be a genius, you shouldn't bother with school or it might ruin you. This view may only be a novelty of Davies' own wistfulness, because he is very much an academic. It makes sense that he would want to re-connect with the everyday life of his characters he treasures, and validate his own unpretentiousness.

Now, before undertaking Henry Miller's trilogy The Rosy Crucifixtion (that'll take some bravery to talk about...), I am reading a collection of Tom Wolfe journalism pieces called The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. I'm feeling nearly giddy over how fantastic a writer he is... I'll have to post something about it later, at least sampling you a few of the choicest sentences. Until then, it's Christmas in New England, and too picturesque to do anything like burrow into a book.

Merry/Happy Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Happy Kwanzaa, and Happy Self-Satisfied Atheist Day! I hope you have a wonderful time no matter where or what you are.

BOOK 7: World of Wonders

2009-12-23T09:56:00.000-08:00

I went back and found the quote about Spengler and his wel-whatever for you, just because Davies tells it so much better than that reviewer. Or rather, Liesl tells it:

"You have read Spengler? No: it is not so fashionable as it once was. But Spengler talks a great deal about what he calls the Magian World View, which he says we have lost, but which was part of the Weltanschauung -- you know, the world outlook -- of the Middle Ages. It was a sense of the unfathomable wonder of the invisible world that existed side by side with a hard recognition of the roughness and cruelty and day-to-day demands of the tangible world. It was readiness to see demons where nowadays we see neuroses, and to see the hand of a guardian angel in what we are apt to shrug off ungratefully as a stroke of luck. It was religion, but a religion with a thousand gods, none of them all-powerful and most of them ambiguous in their attitude toward man. It was poetry and wonder which might reveal themselves in the dunghill, and it was an understanding of the dunghill that lurks in poetry and wonder. It was a sense of living in what Spengler called a quivering cavern-light which is always in danger of being swallowed up in the surrounding, impenetrable darkness."

Actually, this makes absolute sense. It seems to be the condensed essence of World of Wonders -- maybe Davies has just been waiting for readers to trip up against this passage, to throw the rest of the dazzling tale into more significant light... Magnus Eisengrim maintains his personal enigma because it is all he has against the "impenetrable darkness" of a world only ready to accept wonder and magic in the small increments of performance. He believes in life's higher recognition (recognition of the indefinite, which by its nature we cannot grasp, and so the recognition is merely an acceptance of ITS own enigma), and so has been wandering without grounding purpose for the span of his life. He can watch, and appreciate, and provoke, and amuse... but he does not assume to peg his own life down with purpose.
Ah-HA.

Spengler = this man -->

You learn things from books! I'm accumulating my fair share of knowledge on radically obtruse-sounding culture-references.... and maybe eventually I'll recognize so many I'll be able to read anything with confidence and ease.

BOOK 7: World of Wonders

2009-12-23T09:28:00.001-08:00

(the most appropriate picture I could find: a little German town in winter)

There's that word again: weltanschauung -- "world-view" in German. Now I understand the quote I used about this book earlier -- I came across the original sentence it was based on today while reading (I then rushed upstairs to find my laptop and write about it, happy to finally have something new to say). So, to the memory of that quote, I owe an apology. The word was not wielded out of sheer pretention, but as a tribute to Davies' writing. It means they actually read the book before reviewing it!

Eisengrim's story continues, now supplemented with the tellings of two other people in the group: Liesl and Ingestree. We discover the circumstances under which he met both of them, and follow along as they are brought to life in a fiery back-and-forth of commentary. Ingestree was a pretnetious young "genius" of an actor with Eisengrim in the London troupe. Liesl was the deformed aristocratic daughter of a rich Swiss eccentric that Eisengrim was hired to repair clockwork for. Liesl & Eisengrim's episode develops into a love-story (she's already warned us, and her listeners, of this)... while Ingestree and Eisengrim have a clash of views on just about everything.

I'm continually realizing that the world of Robertson Davies is immensely vivid, lushly populated, and an absolute pleasure to sink into -- all the more reason why I can't explain my boredom with this book. The style fluctuates between flippantly clever commentary, to romantic storytelling, to hyper-observational description. Magnus Eisengrim is perfect, in possession of every charming component a human can aquire. There is absolutely no reason for this book to be boring. The alarming and unprecedented truth may be that I've been more in-tune with real-life lately. It's Christmas, and people are more keen to get together...that's welcoming. Also, I'm applying to a college (SIMON'S ROCK!), and still trying to tread water above the "C" range in my classes before the semester ends.

It would be needlessly tiresome to apologize yet again for lack of posting, and certainly from spending too much time lingering on this book. As this is the first dry spell of inspiration I've had since starting this project (and I already warned you, my passions work in fits and starts -- and I can already feel a new phase coming around), I think I am allowed a little lenience for the moment.

Two days until Christmas. Second day of Christmas break.

Of course I'll let you know what I get... I think that at least two packages are books. You can tell by the feel -- three ridged edges, one flat, on a rectangular package that makes a thud-ding sound.

Nothing to report...

2009-12-16T13:11:00.001-08:00

I had a detention today, but even being locked in a silent room for an hour did not incite me to pick up World of Wonders again. Last I remember, we have reached Magnus' young adulthood and he is in London, employed as a small-time actor with a troupe of callous and brilliantly-crafted personalities. The film is coming along nicely, but now everyone involved is obviously enthralled by Magnus' telling.

So, clearly I have nothing to offer today. This is just to say I have not died, or quit this blog, or suffered some awful accident. I'm just overwhelmed with problems lately (all of them vague, nettling and hard to pin down). I don't know what to do in high-school... and I'm beginning to really resent them keeping me there.

I know reading can be a comfort, at least a distraction from yourself, but when you have no strength left it's easier to get carried away by the passive little beauties of life. I've been wandering a lot. I'm still pretty miserable.

I won't talk about it here. This is not what I wanted to write.

BOOK 7: World of Wonders

2009-12-05T15:49:00.000-08:00

It's lucky that I found this. I wanted to add a video, something more visually palatable to follow that big block of writing below, but quickly realized YouTube is not exactly Robertson Davies' most enthusiastic promoter.

This is "Liesl's Song" by Rebecca Anderson (who I've never heard of). Liesl is a character in the Deptford Trilogy. In World of Wonders, she is the romantic fascination of both Dunstan and Magnus. She's witty, charming, all of that.

BOOK 7: World of Wonders

2009-12-05T14:48:00.000-08:00

There's my proud little copy! Is it as colorful as I said? I think it's a great stylistic improvement over that pale-hand-slate-gray modern one I posted as a supplement before.
Today is the first snow of the year, so naturally I can't leave the house. It's beautiful in a sinister, silent, unwelcoming way. So from my armchair to yours, here's a great big helping of description. I can't pretend to theorize about this book yet -- I'm caught in the middle with no idea where it's going -- but I can at least describe the experience of reading it.

Things to Know (an overview of sorts):

-- Magnus was abducted by a traveling circus, leaving at home a stringent Bible-wielding father and an insane mother. He had snuck out to see the show when it came to town... and in the "World of Wonders", a tent of performers and freak-show artists, Willard the magician charms him breathless. He then leads little Magnus behind the bathroom stalls and sodomizes him. Magnus goes into complete shock, and is eventually stowed away with the circus' belongings on a train and carried off with them. He makes it clear in his recounting of all this that although most of his childhood sounds miserable, he wasn't entirely unhappy at the time. It was what he knew, and what he grew up with. He was exposed remorselessly to sex-slavery, conning and thievery, heavy drinking, and some fairly insane characters. There's a Fat Woman who is repulsively pious about vice, a hermaphrodite who can tango with himself, a drab young couple who do a knife-throwing act, a Snake Charmer who can't get a boyfriend, etc. He earns some of the roughened jaded-ness of showbiz life, but still always longs for something new of the world. He meets a kind fortune-teller, who lets him in on a little of the world's light. His whole world is unreal -- populated with characters of fantasy, degraded by their circumstances in real life.

-- The fact emerges that the narrator (Dunstan) knew Magnus for the short time in his youth that he spent in Deptford (hometown to both of them). Dunstan was the person who first showed Magnus magic tricks. Obviously they lost track of each other when one went away on a cross-country circus, but it's been hinted that they are going to meet up a few more times over their lives. The two men, at the time of the novel, are in their seventies.

-- Magnus read deeply into the Bible over his life, and still often draws from it. He says that he felt like a Jonah to the other circus-members, and they often treated him as such. His father, when he had lived with him, was on a mission to make his son memorize all of the Psalms (he was up to #79 when he left). The only book he had to read and learn out of over his years as a travelling circus-boy was a sturdy little hotel Bible. So God is an undeniable fact for him.... this sparks wildfires of debate between the intellectual types that are the audience to his story. None of them profess to believe in God at all.

-- Magnus tells his story in the evening hour of the movie-crew's work-day... they all sit by a fire, listening to him. When Magnus announces that he has ended his story for the evening, he circles around to shake everyone's hand (a strangely reverant ritual, done in complete seriousness) and then head off to bed. The rest -- the director, the camera-man, the BBC representative, Dunstan and romantic-interest Liesl -- stay and discuss everything they have just heard. And the dicussions are so incredibly clever and relentlessly entertaining -- you can imagine Davies flinging himself up against his own ideas, and then plunging along in every direction of viewpoint he can imagine. Davies is verbose, frenetic, and occasionally very funny.

-- Magnus Eisengrim is still entirely an enigma. That much is true from the conversation that follows his departure from a room. I have read up until the end of Part One, where Dunstan has ominously said that Magnus has a rare "Merlin's Laugh". "Merlin's Laugh" is an apparently misplaced laugh that is neither amused nor bitter, brought about by the irony of the present based on what will happen in the future. Merlin would laugh at a dandy carefully selecting his pair of shoes, if he knew that that man would be killed before the soles of those shoes had even touched pavement. Magnus laughs like this at the end of his evening of story-telling, with the knowledge of what happened next. It's an effect that both unnerves and enthralls his listeners -- a perfect magician's effect.

I think in the end of this book we may discover that Magnus' telling of his life-story was played out just like any other performance. It's built on lies an exaggeration, but he pulls it off dazzlingly. I've noticed that Davies seems to have a penchant for shock-value -- Willard sodomizes Magnus in the latter half of a single sentence, without pretext. So this twist may be irresistable to him. That way, there'd be no reason to end the book with a lesser Magnus Eisengrim, unloaded of his story, caught without an illusion.

I just realized...

2009-12-03T17:08:00.001-08:00

... before I started this project, I would've said that I hate talking about books. It's strange I've never mentioned it here, but the reason for embarking on this self-fashioned suicide reading course (besides pushing myself to complete something ambitious and enjoying a whole lot of literature along the way) was to get used to writing about books.

I've had a sustained interest in literature for most of my life, but for some reason never any fondness to referring to it in any kind of analytical way. I guess reading is by demand a solitary thing, so to try and synthesize that experience into conversation always seemed demeaning and false to me. Also, I found much of what I read about inexpressible. There's absolutely no way to explain Arthur Rimbaud into words without working yourself up into a tizzy of adjectives.

But now, with the impending thought of college, I know I'll have to be eventually accustomed to talking about books I've read, writing about books I've read, and generally synthesizing everything I've read in a way I used to imagine to be unholy. I guess as long as I can do this in the spirit of enjoyment and genuine personal insight -- not culture-worshipping criticism, or a heartless re-hashing of the book's general characteristics -- it's not so bad. And I've gotten surprisingly used to it surprisingly fast!

Another thing I just realized (through some minimal calculation, that may not be entirely right -- there may have been a few more on-the-side books I didn't mention in this blog, and also some books that I dipped into but did not technically read through-and-through... anyway back to the sentence): I read 10 books in October, and 4 books in November. You know the excuses for November if you've been following this at all. Bearing in mind that December is a communal, social, wonderful sparkly holiday season where it's necessary to exist mostly in real-life... I want to see if I can at least top December's quota. Not that I'm rushing this, or running it through numbers! I just feel guilty for starting off with such a bang and then watching as it subsequently died away.

BOOK 7: World of Wonders

2009-12-03T16:30:00.000-08:00

(NOTE: this is not what my copy looks like, but it's from the same publishing company. There was no online picture of the copy I have on the Web. Mine is slightly weathered, with yellow acid pages sweetened with age. The cover design is full of folds of color.)

So, I was right in expecting this to be a magical, entwining-style story. But it's not as simple to slide into as I'd hoped... the first two chapters I had to read over three times before I felt grounded in what was happening. Already there is a cast of distinctive characters, with their distinctive anecdotal characteristics (they all have very long, interesting names -- each with their own distinctive collections of consonants), congregating around the story waiting to happen: Magnus the magician is going to tell his life-story, in enigmatically small snippets. A lifetime conjuror and illusionist is going to lend something of his own truth to the world. He's being used as an actor and marketing-attraction for a 12-part BBC documentary about Robert-Houdin (an old-time French magician, who operated in an extravaganza of props to delight and charm his audiences) -- the allure for giving his life-story is the perspective and contrast it would lend to the life-story of the other magician.

Magnus is a perfectly self-important and self-contained showman, with a clear natural intelligence but very little official "education." This makes his perceptions and reactions entirely real, unforced into some acknowledged mold (molds that are inbred with schooling.) He is surrounded by intellectuals during thi project, which creates some interesting dynamics. Each could easily turn and mock the other, but currently they're working together with comraderie, trying to get ideas down for both the documentary and the life-story of Magnus. The people involved are the director, the historian-friend (THE NARRATOR, Dunstan Ramsay), the BBC manager, and even the camera-man who one-ups Magnus in a show of vocabulary. Magnus Eisengrim is understandably the most intruiging character of the bunch -- this is setting up wonderfully. In the next chapter, I think he will begin to divulge his story.

The writing is dense, nestled with gems of phrase that make it completely rewarding. So far, this world of wonders is no easy excursion to make -- it's an energetically-sustained carnival of words (sustained by the pure will to communicate). It's relentlessly intelligent stuff... I have the feeling that I'm not going to be able to read this and concentrate just anywhere (classrooms are out, for instance... and also certainly the school-bus.)

Tonight is my first night without homework in a long time. To relax, instead of clearing my brain in a stupor of distractions and YouTube video-binges, I think I'm going to read more into the World of Wonders. I'm still mystified, on the edge, but finally transfixed -- maybe the whole thing is one big cape-swirling trick.

Incidentially, what is a great magician? "A man who can stand stark naked in the midst of a crowd and keep it gaping for an hour while he manipulates a few coins, or cards, or billiard balls."

BOOK 7: World of Wonders

2009-11-30T15:09:00.000-08:00

I did it.

I'm sorry I can't be straight-forwardly-analytical about this reading process. Sometimes the books hinder my ability to communicate (if the books are almost incommunicable themselves.) This last one was quite hard to get through (as I've at least been able to make clear in these entries, if nothing else). I still feel like I haven't given Visions of Cody the trial it deserves, but I don't think I have the strength. It was only near the end of the book that I began to actually enjoy reading it, and began to appreciate the wild & infuriatingly complex person Neal Cassady was. Maybe that's because when Jack was writing the end of his book, he began to get sentimental and kind, taking time out to explain to the reader what was going on.

The book IS about America, as the dedication says, written with unadulterated adoration for everything, but mostly for America's chosen protagonist: CODY/Neal Cassady/Adonis of Denver. Jack Kerouac writes hugely sympathetic, sad, unabashedly confused and worshipping prose that I have begun to notice infiltrate my daily thinking ever since my first exposure to him in 10th grade. I don't know what to say about this book, really, at all, and I'm guilty for it. But at least I did it. I finished it stretched out on the floor on Saturday night, right up to the exhilarating final sentence: "Adios, King."

Now... I'm not sure if I feel justified beginning an entry on my new book, World of Wonders by Robertson Davies, when I haven't read a solitary word of it yet. But nevertheless, here's at least a brief layout of what I know of my subject matter so far (it's pretty scant, but anyway.)

1. Robertson Davies is the crazed-genius-looking man above. He is a popular Canadian novelist who enjoyed dabbling in other intellectual pursuits (such as journalism, criticism, and functioning as a professor.) He died in 1995, and left a canon including four trilogies; the last of which is intruigingly incomplete. World of Wonders is the final book in The Deptford Trilogy.

2. The Deptford Trilogy is constructed from the simple cue-point of a snowball that missed its intended target. From this act, the lives of people are affected, in a kaleidoscopic array of possibilities.

3. World of Wonders is considered by some to be a relative failure in the prodigous efforts of Davies (but weirdly, it is the only Deptford Trilogy book with its own Wikipedia page.) The story is based around the life-story of magician Magnus Eisengrim, who is a character that apparently appeared in several carnations throughout the trilogy.

4. The book stands on its own, despite being part of a trilogy. My dad assures me of this (I snagged my copy from him, from a pile of his old books that were bagged by the door, waiting to be given away).

4. It was published in 1975.

5. According to a review from http://www.cenacle.com.au/, (and if you have an education like mine you can skip all the preliminary big-word culture references): "Quoting Spengler, Davies tells about a Magian world view, a weltanschauung where, 'a sense of unfathomable wonder of the invisible existed side by side with a hard recognition of the roughness and cruelty of day-to-day demands of the tangible world.'"

6. A CLARIFICATION: "weltanschauung" is the German word for "world-view."

I'll write back as soon as I have something personal to say on the book -- that is, once I've actually started it. I wanted something more along the lines of a linear novel to follow my excursions into the quasi-coherent rompus that is Kerouac's elemental medium... and thankfully, this looks like it's going to be exactly what I've been looking for -- a lush, magical story that envelops you without any effort.

BOOK 6: Visions of Cody

2009-11-26T18:25:00.000-08:00

Elegy for Neal Cassady

by Allen Ginsberg (Feburary 10, 1968, 5 - 5:30 AM)

OK Neal
aethereal Spirit
bright as moving air
blue as city dawn
happy as light released by the Day
over the city's new buildings --

Maya's Giant bricks rise rebuilt
in Lower East Side
windows shine in milky smog.
Appearance unnecessary now.

Peter sleeps alone in next room, sad.
Are you reincarnate? Can ya hear me talkin?
If anyone had strength to hear the invisible,
And drive thru Maya Wall
you had it --
What're you now, Spirit?
That were spirit in body --

The body's cremate
by Railroad track
San Miguel Allende Desert,
outside town,
Spirit become spirit,
or robot reduced to Ashes.

Tender Spirit, thank you for touching me with tender hands
When you were young, in a beautiful body,
Such a pure touch it was Hope beyond Maya-meat,
What you are now,
Impersonal, tender --
you showed me your muscle/warmth/over twenty years ago
when I lay trembling at your breast
put your arm around my neck,
-- we stood together in a bare room on 103d St.
Listening to a wooden Radio,
with our eyes closed
Eternal redness of Shabda
lamped in our brains
at Illinois Jacquet's Saxophone Shuddering,
prophetic Honk of Louis Jordan,
Honeydrippers, Open The Door Richard
To Christ's Apocalypse --
The buildings're insubstantial --
That's my New York Vision
outside eastern apartment offices
where telephone rang last night
and stranger's friendly Denver Voice
asked me, had I heard the news from the West?

Some gathering Bust, Eugene Oregon or Hollywood Impends
I had premonition.
"No" I said --"been away all week,"
"you havent heard the news from the West,
Neal Cassady is dead --"
Peter's dove-voic'd Oh! on the other line, listening.

Your picture stares cheerful, tearful, strain'd,
a candle burns,
green stick incense by household gods.
Military Tyranny overtakes Universities, your Prophecy
approaching its kindest sense brings us
Down
to the Great Year's awakening.
Kesey's in Oregon writing novel language
family farm alone.
Hadja no more to do? Was your work all done?
Had ya seen your first son?
Why'dja leave us all here?
Has the battle been won?

I'm a phantom skeleton with teeth, skull
resting on a pillow
calling your spirit
god echo consciousness, murmuring
sadly to myself.

Lament in dawnlight's not needed,
the world is released,
desire fulfilled, your history over,
story told, Karma resolved,
prayers completed
vision manifest, new consciousness fulfilled,
spirit returned in a circle,
world left standing empty, buses roaring through streets --
garbage scattered on pavements galore --
Grandeur solidified, phantom-familiar fate
returned to Auto-dawn,
your destiny fallen on RR track
My body breathes easy,
I lie alone
living
After friendship fades from flesh forms --
heavy happiness hangs in heart,
I could talk to you forever,
The pleasure inexhaustible,
discourse of spirit to spirit,
O Spirit.

Sir spirit, forgive me my sins,
Sir spirit give me your blessing again,
Sir Spirit forgive my phantom body's demands,
Sir Spirit thanks for your kindness past,
Sir Spirit in Heaven, What difference was yr mortal form,
What further this great show of Space?
Speedy passions generations of
Question? agonic Texas Nightrides?
psychadelic bus hejira-jazz,
Green auto poetries, inspired roads?
Sad, Jack in Lowell saw the phantom most --
lonelier than all, except your noble Self.
Sir Spirit, an' I drift alone:
Oh deep sigh.

BOOK 6: Visions of Cody

2009-11-26T15:44:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving (optimistically cordial, to anyone who happens to be reading this). Since I'm too full to move, I thought I'd settle in front of something somewhat productive (instead of watching "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" for the fifth time) and try to finish Visions of Cody -- as hard as it's been to get through one of its sentences lately. Even that was a run-on.

I don't want to just come here to complain, though. Like a lot of writers, Jack Kerouac is obsessed with an IMAGE -- a space in time -- and his ability to immobilize it, preserved in prose. In his wandering and watching, he gathers all the details of life that he can, and gives each its own place in the picture. His books move in spasms of description, all eventually culminating into an image. With Visions of Cody, all restraints are lost. Its descriptions go twisting back through memory and anecdote, speculation and backward-glancing self-knowledge... it's all done in wild first-draft form, and sometimes you have to just crash through the trancelike warp of images to reach his point. One image onslaught that actually eventually hits home (you can feel where you are, rather than feeling alienated by the confusing language) is "Joan Rawshanks in the Fog", a long passage on a movie scene being shot on a foggy night in San Francisco. At the end, there's this paragraph (happy to get to it because it is definitely worth reading. I found footage once of Kerouac reading this to some jazz piano, and it struck me then too):

"At the junction of the state line of Colorado, its arid western one, and the state line of poor Utah I saw in the clouds huge and massed above the fiery golden desert of eveningfall the great image of God with forefinger pointed straight at me through halos and rolls and gold folds that werelike the existence of the gleaming spear in His right hand, and sayeth, Go thou across the ground; go moan for man; go moan, go groan, go groan alone go roll your bones, alone; go thou and be little beneath my sight; go thou, and be minute and as seed in the pod, but the pod the pit, world a Pod, universe a Pit; go thou, go thou, die hence; and of Cody report you well and truly."

The section that comes after the transcribed tape-conversations is called "Imitation of the Tape", and it is nearly unreadable. Here's a sample snippet:

"Never did ask, did ya... ya damn fool, didn't you know you could get all oovered and sore from the scourge and sore of the great Natal Sore, the score is down, the moon doth rise, the frost is in the handkerchief, fufnik, and I'm ovff the of fht to verht eraces mayeslef kedkdj tin the same time that rintintin stole that wonder horse superchief the mighty oneclad pine tree with doublewords ringing in my head nowlike i was goingtoburst..."

Maybe he really was typing instead of writing here (as some obnoxiously curt critic said).. but still, I don't think "rintintin" could've been any kind of typing mistake. So maybe he got confused, and then decided to enjoy himself as long as he was confused. Or it could've honestly been an artistic decision. Writers that make up words certainly gain their share of notoriety for creativity... and I know it's an attractive idea to conquer a book like Finnegan's Wake (that is, find your way intact through the labyrinthian story), but here it feels like Kerouac is simply too frustrated with trying to communicate in a state of exultation over his reality that he's reverted to noises. Or maybe he's challenging the reader. He wants a core following, people willing to stretch their minds a bit. I'm willing to understand, I swear (I thought I was, anyway), but....

My brain feels sludgy. At least I can be in sentiment with people across the country who are all participants of the same gluttonous feast. Maybe no-one's in the mood for talking about this tonight.

[Interlude: Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede]

2009-11-23T08:30:00.000-08:00

Too good to be true: a science-fiction / music lover's fantasy novel based on the simple, delightful idea of Buddy Holly broadcasting live all over the globe from one of the moons of Jupiter. Aliens are controlling him (aliens that have taken the forms of Eisenhower and Khrushchev). The plot gets weirder from there -- it's a wild road-chase between an FBI goon in a black Jaguar, a crazed sinewy woman (Gertrude), a mechanically-enhanced Doberman with an extraterrestrial mission, not to mention a slew of other Authority wranglers; all beetling after a lone light-blue '56 Ariel motorcycle carrying Oliver Vale (emboldened main character, rock 'n' roll disciple). And of course, there are the aliens. The aliens are watching.

Never get high-and-mighty over anything in a medium you love. I'll read anything, if it's really good -- and eclectism is one of the natural results of a true appreciation for any subject. As of today, I think I'm falling in love with this little book. It's on the table next to me now, smiling up with Buddy's warm Texan brown eyes, framed and trademarked in thick black glasses.

Admittedly, I need a quick-fix break from Visions of Cody. I will finish it, I have to, I'll even make sense of it... but I need to allow myself some sanity. I found this book on the school library shelf this morning, and have been carrying it around reading all day (today is an early-release day, before Thanksgiving break, so in every class I've had ample liberty to kill time on my own terms). It's another Perma-bound thing, with yellowing pages. I've found on Amazon that it's now out-of-print... making me really grateful my high-school's book selection is so out-of-date.

So that this is not a total discrepancy from my reading list, here's a sample that mentions my omnipresent subject:

"Gretchen told me that she had been born in 1967 to San Francisco flower children who became embarassingly wealthy marketing lava lamps. Unfortunately, by the time Gretchen had turned fourteen, the bottom had fallen out of the lava-lamp market, and her parents had cut off her allowance. As a result, she had rebelled against their liberal politics and had become a hard-core conservative. She had left home after graduating from high school at the age of seventeen (her parents had "gone back to the earth", which had disgusted her) and had been wandering from city to city ever since, a materialist without material, a money-lover without money. She had garnered enough grants and loans to attend college, but had dropped out of University of Illinois in her sophmore year.

'This fruit of an English professor wanted us to write a twelve-page paper on the Beat poets,' she told me. 'You know, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, that bunch?'

'I've heard of them.'

'They were a bunch of faggots and junkies,' Gretchen said vehmently. 'So I asked the prof, why should I want to write about drugged-out, left-wing, unpatriotic mental popsicles? Besides, what did any of that literary Bob Dylan crap have to do with my double major in Business Administration and Physical Education, I'd like to know?'

'It's a puzzle,' I acknowledged."

More people should know about this book. But, if you don't feel like paying any money or reading for any stretch of time today, just make yourself happy and go listen to "Rave On".

"Tell Me How", "Everyday", "Ready Teddy" or "(You're So Square) Baby I Don't Care" are all just as good, too.

BOOK 6: Visions of Cody

2009-11-22T05:42:00.000-08:00

Great footage, four parts, but certainly worth your while and finger-clicks.
Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady interviewed in City Lights Bookstore, 1965:

BOOK 6: Visions of Cody

2009-11-22T04:02:00.000-08:00

What I've been able to glean of a plot so far, at least the order into which Kerouac's thoughts are organized, is this:

(1) Kerouac wanders, waits for Cody, and ruminates. Lapses into the past. Tells us exactly what the place looks like. Tells us about his American dream.

(2) Kerouac recounts the story of Cody's young life, as told to him by Cody in those long all-hours talks they had, with "intellects disgorged in total recall" (thank you eloquent Allen Ginsberg).

Now, part 3 -- which I am in now -- is called "THE FRISCO TAPE".

It is a transcription of an actual tape recording, made of various conversations between Jack and Cody. It was left running during a party once or twice as well, with even more unchartable dialogue in result. I started out completely unsure of how to read it, because they're so exuberantly caught along in their own free-associative minds (always under some drug, usually wine and Benzedrine) that it makes little sense to the outside listener, or poor reader who thought they were in for some real lines of prose. But I feel like I'm getting the hang of it now, and it's interesting... friendship to them was to tell every story and anecdote of their lives to each other, because each had finally found a sympathetic listener.

Cody Pomeray began the son of a wino/bum/degenerate, who employed his son Cody to scrape money on the streets from passerby, while he waited with his friend in the back-alley. Once they had enough coins, they would embark on a nightly adventure of wine-slinging under a bridge, drinking and declaiming loudly in the darkness while Cody sat by watching. Cody grew up on cross-coast trips (from Denver Westward), left to his own mind and imagination. He later became an optimistic, wild, sensitive 20-something with the Beats; he hardly slept, read Proust and Céline and such, talked all night to whomever on everything. And, or course, there was his legendary prowess with women -- he didn't chase after them, but gathered them up as they came fascinatedly to him.

Neal Cassady was the favorite case-study and inspiration for the Beat-generation gaggle of writers, and this book is his greatest tribute.

I'm still only halfway through.

BOOK 6: Visions of Cody

2009-11-19T19:47:00.000-08:00

Been reading at breakneck speed.
There's a rhythm inherent in this book you'd be left lost without.
This is a good sentence on the book as a whole:

"Jody and I had long talk -- perhaps she'd disapprove of these ideas of mine -- I must write down books too, story-novels, and communicate to people instead of just appeasing my lone soul with a record of it -- but this record is my joy."

BOOK 6: Visions of Cody

2009-11-18T20:11:00.000-08:00

Beliefs and Techniques for Modern Prose
by Jack Kerouac

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

BOOK 6: Visions of Cody

2009-11-18T19:34:00.000-08:00

When you're sitting up in your bedroom at night, homework spread over the floor, the Internet is a warm and lovely place to fall into. Sometimes, this reverie can last for hours. Tonight, I've been looking up dandies and all that is related to them -- namely Sebastian Horsley, who is, as he puts it, "a futile blast of color in a futile, colorless world". He is an accomplished failure, with many stories to tell. Another book I can't read (well, I've read it already, but I always read books a second time through if I really love them) : http://www.amazon.com/Dandy-Underworld-Unauthorized-Autobiography-P-S/dp/0061461253

But I'm here, still diverted from homework but supposed to be talking about Jack Kerouac, a million miles away from here.

Honestly, this book is the most difficult I've encountered yet in my project (which isn't saying much, because I'm only on my first set and it's all been lovely). If you've heard anything about the insane structure of Jack Kerouac's sentences -- it's true. They go on inevitably, literally in the stream-of-consciousness; he might as well have invented the cliche. His reputation for genius is absolutely justified as well... but his muddling, naturally-muddled style keeps this secreted. There are perfect phrases of perfect wisdom hidden between so many layers of babble. Visions of Cody becomes a character study of its author just as much as its real character -- they are both alive and vivid. That is one strange thing I've noticed, reading Kerouac -- it's all so vivid and so obviously well-written, but not so you'd notice it at all. You almost can't tell what's hit you when you realize you're there, in the story.

The book splits away from Cody's stories into reminiscences about the author's own past (vague heroism of childhood, fond and sad memories, "the unspeakable visions of the individual") and very exact descriptions of the circumstance in which he is writing. Kerouac calls himself and Cody and others like him "incurable sitters", describing the insatiable desire to sit and be around people, watching as things naturally happen, and keeping track of your own awareness as it is happening. Jack's roaring enthusiasm for this carries you along with genuine interest, as he details each intricacy of a fire-escape in the glittering rain, while rhapsodizing on the inner dreams of the young woman standing beneath it.

This book is about AMERICA, if anything. Everything is here, everything you've ever dreamed of and I guess Kerouac saw -- the drunkeness, the B-movies, the beautiful girls, the neon lights, the piers, the machinery, the wise hard-faced workers, wine bottles in the fists of bums, the fast cars, the sugar, the grease (the whole thing opens on a diner), the young eccentrics... it's all hugely disjointed, and savagely nonsensical -- like a carnival.

The writing is eccentric, but with a point -- not for eccentricity's sake alone. I used to picture Jack Kerouac as buoyantly happy and hearty (the image of him running down a mountain in The Dharma Bums). Now, reading deeper and deeper into his mind, I'm finding deep strains of melancholy. The details he notes down with such care are all "sad", "tragic", "drear", or something. He's happy when caught up in the move of things, but not left to linger on his own. Maybe it's the loneliness of being a perpetual observer that gets to him. Maybe it's a worldview charged with romantic vision... but he can be a complete realist sometimes.

Whatever it is... agghh.

BOOK 6: Visions of Cody

2009-11-16T16:55:00.000-08:00

FINALLY, I can get behind Jack Kerouac's eyes in this floppy-ended brick of a novel -- reportedly freeform and brilliant. I have my local library copy (plastic-re-enforced covers make me want to take it anywhere) until November 30th... that's 15 days, counting tonight and the day-of to finish it.

The novel is half-narrative and half-transcribed tape-recorder conversations, all centered around the character of Cody -- who is of course Neal Cassady, the token Beat-boy and notorious "Adonis of Denver". Impeccably handsome, brashly intelligent, sensitive and wild, insatiable, in love with The Road, tough, and slightly stupid, he exemplified everything about the America of our dreams (think cowboys on railroad tracks). This book I've gotten myself into is his most intensive character-study -- though many of his writerly friends sought to capture him in one way or another. There is a section in The Fall of America by Allen Ginsberg (which was my second book in this project) created entirely in his honor called "Elegies for Neal Cassady".

So, Kerouac and Cassady were great wanderer-friends... the whole time, one of them was noting down the experience. Cassady published a few scant writings (mostly on the charming [no sarcasm, trust me] topic of stealing cars, which he termed "autoeroticism"), but most of the offering comes from Kerouac.

I'm going to sit up late into the night with this, picking out a path through Kerouac's dejected American dream.

RESOLUTION: For my own gimmicky enjoyment. While I read this book, I will wear nothing but Levi's jeans and Converse sneakers. I will drink lots of coffee. I will eat an apple every day. I will listen to only American music (jazz, rock 'n' roll, Bob Dylan balladry, '70s New York punk). I will make it my habit to wander the circles of my hometown after work and school, making my own study of the surroundings.

Back again.

2009-11-10T19:15:00.000-08:00

Hey, so I've failed NaNoWriMo after week one of intensive, mind-frazzling writing. Here I am, back again.

I actually missed reading for that week quite a lot (you can probably tell by now what nerdy passion goes with this project of mine. It's more than an interest, an inclination, or an escape. It's a SANCTUARY of books). This school year is becoming frighteningly serious, and with all the other things that I have to do (filling some natural life in there somewhere), I didn't have the time. You really need to take a month-long retreat into novel-land to do NaNoWriMo correctly. As wonderful as it sounds and seems, I have been battered away from that particular goal now, by my own sensibility.

So here I am again.

Give me a week to recuperate (and read my little heart out, of side-interest books... they are The Picture of Dorian Gray by the incomparable Oscar Wilde, Oscar's Books by the reverantly devotional Thomas Wright, The Posthuman Dada Guide by the very stylish Andrei Codrescu, and The Renaissance by the emminent Aesthetic prince Walter Pater).

I'll be back, but now I promise I'm here to stay -- until THIS particular goal (crazy escapade, suicide course, lovesick journalling to dead lords of literature) is achieved.

Na No Wri Mo

2009-11-02T17:06:00.000-08:00

I'm afraid I'm rather given to projects... and this can get me ahead of myself sometimes.

Right off, I am not abandoning my self-fashioned suicide reading course, by any means. I still think it's a great thing to do, and I still want to injest every book on my list (along with a great host of others)... but I found out about something only an hour ago that is going to waylay me from this project for the rest of November.

Na No Wri Mo. This stands for National Novel Writing Month. It's a crazy challenge for writers and non-writers, students and kids and adults and anyone who can form sentences (I like to think I have a slight proficiency in this), to write 50,000 words of a novel in one month. There is no revision, and from what I can tell, there's very little direction needed. It'll be hard enough to bang out 50,000 words that are all part of the same story... without a cohesive structure to worry about. I'm doing it, I'm doing it, and it feels good to begin a new wild project.

This will only take a month, and I promise I will come back... defeated by this new literary challenge, or brimful of swaggering pride at having finished a hefty draft of one confused, awful draft of a novel. It's okay if it's an awful novel, though -- when you consider there's no revision allowed in this project. This is not for the delicacy of craft. The purpose is to wrench out a story, and see if I can beat a near-inhuman deadline along with thousands of others.

If anyone wants to join us, you can go here for more info (http://www.nanowrimo.org), but really it's a personal thing. Just start writing.... as hard as it seems. 50,000 words. Story. GO.

I'll see you in a month, with Jack Kerouac still waiting for me -- drunk and disgruntled.

BOOK 6: Visions of Cody

2009-10-30T18:33:00.001-07:00

I have it. It's dedicated, "To America, whatever that is."

The English teacher with Kerouac on her shelves has been consistently out sick, and I haven't been able to get into her room to borrow it... so I have the local library's copy, on an extended rental period of 3 weeks because it is thick. The paperback pages are thin, the spine is thick and orange, and the text is densely-woven onto each page.

I have a feeling this will be quite a journey.

And, what girl isn't at least curious to spend a little time with Neal Cassady, the Adonis of Denver? In the picture below, Cassady is on the left, Kerouac on the right.

In case you didn't know.

I'm being honest about my discrepancies from the task at hand... so I finished Tanglewood Tales tangled in bed when I stayed home from school yesterday.

I went to the library to get Visions of Cody, and also found Looking for Alaska, as well as the deathbed novel of Denton Welch.

I am quickly abandoning Coal: A Human History in favor of more worthy textual temptations. She's too much of a scientist; I can't follow the thoughts with interest.

[A Cacophony of Interludes]

2009-10-27T19:19:00.000-07:00

On-the-side books to read:

A Wonder Book & Tanglewood Tales --- Nathaniel Hawthorne (I'm reading this now... still need to procure a copy of Visions of Cody. The picture below is an illustration from the Hawthorne book -- which is a delightful rehashing of myths and legends, most of which I'm hearing properly for the first time -- of Pandora and her box.)

Coal: A Human History --- Barbara Freese

50 Great Short Stories

Loch Ness Monster --- Tim Dinsdale

Looking for Alaska --- John Greene (on recommendation)

Mozart --- Wolfgang Hildesheimer (I can't wait for this.. had to order it from Amazon, "print on request")

Alarms and Diversions --- James Thurber

The Tangled Wing --- Melvin Konner

Flowers of Evil --- Charles Baudelaire

Johnny Got His Gun --- Dalton Trumbo (never really took it in the first time, though I have a feeling I would really adore it now)

A Far Rockaway of the Heart --- Lawrence Ferlinghetti (the sequel to A Coney Island of the Mind! Another one on recommendation)

Collected Sonnets --- Edna St. Vincent Millay (my mom's)

The Kasidah --- Haji Abdu El-Yezdi

The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess --- Andrei Codrescu

Though, perhaps not all of these are should be considered around the same time. I have some shred of restraint. The rule is sustained: only ONE BOOK AT A TIME. Skimming through collections is perfectly okay, however (there's that handy short stories collection for that.)
WHY is true curiosity always inhibited by reality? Does something want to ensure that we only go so far in our discoveries through life? Why can't I snag a bit of the swine flu, so I can stay home in bed to read myself out of this hole?

Updates!

2009-10-25T18:13:00.000-07:00

I have no indication anyone is out there reading this... so this is as much a notice to myself as anything.

ONE: There's a new edition of Dracula out (another great book I've never read), and it's almost impossible to resist. Burnt-gold jacket, fondly antique packaging, a slick red ribbon marker, bloody endpapers, jagged page edges... a perfect armchair/fireplace/thunderstorm type of book. I read 4 chapters into it on a coffee-stained armchair in a chattery bookstore the other day, and it was still spellbinding. I considered adding it to my list immediately, or at least buying it to moon over, but upon further reflection decided to put it piously out of my mind for now.

Incidentially, here it is: http://www.amazon.com/Dracula-Bram-Stoker/dp/0525951628/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256519892&sr=8-15

It was re-published on the occasion of its SEQUEL, written by the great-grandson of Bram Stoker. It's called Dracula the Un-Dead and it also looks very, very cool.

TWO: I'm making another ammendment to my list. I don't think I'm doing this from lack of discipline, but an involvement in my task. I want to continue to be as absorbed and interested in this as I can... and I'm just not in the mood for '60s-era Buckley essays at all. I started The Jeweler's Eye a day or so ago, and read the introduction and half of the first piece (learning new vocabulary like rapid-fire along the way)... but I can't imagine going on through the whole book with the temptation of so many other books waiting. I love William F. Buckley Jr., he's charming and brightly articulate and infuriating and I still enjoy learning from him when I can, but this little sunburnt paperback will have to wait on my shelves for a future day.

Here's a quote, though, just so the attempt will not seem entirely wasted.. a bit on anarchism, from an essay that addressed in addition conservatism (duh), Ayn Rand's depressing skills as a novelist, and the word "empirical":

"The conservative's distrust of the state, so richly earned by it, raises inevitably the question: How far can one go? This side, the answer is, of anarchism -- that should be obvious enough. But one man's anarchism is another man's statism... There exists a small breed of men whose passionate distrust for the state has developed into a theology of sorts, or at least a demonology, to which they adhere as devotedly as any religious fanatic ever attempted to adhere to the will of the Lord. I do not feel contempt for the endeavor of either type. It is intellectually stimulating to discuss alternatives to municipalized streets, as it is to speculate on whether God's wishes would be best served if we ordered fried or scrambled eggs for breakfast on this particular morning... We can read and take pleasure in the recluse's tortured deliberations on what will benefit his soul. Bernanos' Diary of a Country Priest was not only a masterpiece; it was also a best-seller... Chesterton reminds us that many dogmas are liberating because, however much damage they do when abused, it cannot compare with the damage that might have been done had whole peoples not felt their inhibiting influence."

I think he's got the greatest smile I've ever seen on a human being.

Well, anyway. This leads us to number...

THREE: The book I'm putting in place of Buckley is Visions of Cody by Jack Kerouac. I've yet to obtain a copy of this, but I'm pretty sure I know an English teacher who can help (she first made me read The Dharma Bums last year, so I finally found out why Jack Kerouac is so great). This seems to be an appropriate choice, because Kerouac is about as solidly American as you can get (a college-boy football player who turned to literature and journeyed everywhere, writing under his own style... he was also a Catholic-Buddhist who loved his mother... he died a drunkard, hopelessly confused by the '60s). I know he and Buckley had some kind of a weird relationship, never friends, but Kerouac said that he liked Buckley's style and thought he could make a good president. Of course, this was poorly represented when he appeared on 'Firing Line' as a guest one night, dead drunk and bumbling about self-consciously.

We won't remember that. Jack Kerouac in his books is really a genius.. a soft-spoken genius. I've heard Visions of Cody can be particularly hard to understand, but I'm confident. I'm going to finish another book on the side first (The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis), and then dive in, headlong.

[Interlude]: Hamlet, Prufrock and Language

2009-10-24T08:20:00.000-07:00

(this is Zulfikar Ghose, usually a poet and vivid novelist, also a fan of Hamlet):

I spent yesterday doing some more reading, away from the list this time. Wandering around town, over the course of the day I managed to finish the dense 106-page book (really an extended essay) by Zulfikar Ghose called Hamlet, Prufrock and Language. I read curled on the couch in a bookstore playing '70s-hits radio, on the floor in the catacombs of the library, on an empty bus, and finished it in a college café -- immune to the noise.

I would guess that this is the most enlightened thing you could find to read about Hamlet... it's enthusiastic and thoughtful; and although a critical work, it is emotionally-effecting. It was disquieting, to me... I just get sick of writers who talk on and on about the nature of everything, and then tend toward the conclusion that life is meaningless and language inadequate for expression, so everything must eventually be rejected in favor of silence if we are to face our existance bravely and honestly. SO many writers come around to this idea sooner or later, and being convinced of it again and again leaves me completely confused about my position in life. They're fascinating ideas, but terrifying in implication. After a stormy few days of soliloqies and muddled musing, Hamlet's last words are: "The rest is silence." Ghose employs an arsenal of quotes from other sources to his advantage as well, including many from Samuel Beckett (also profoundly depressing) -- this argument is built up around them.

So, we know Prufrock is silly, and as confused as Hamlet (both were students who emerged from their books to a disillusioned, paler world)... but both have much to offer in the way of language. It's strange to read so much into these characters which are only characters, but it's impossible to resist thinking about. Just as it is that even when you reach a conclusion that language is an inadequate vehicle for pure expression of thought, you still continue to write about it.

BOOK 5: The Day of the Locust

2009-10-23T12:41:00.001-07:00

I was ill-situated to finish this book last night (though I did), comfortably nestled in a plushy armchair by a soft-lit lamp. The climaxing scene is like an avalanche... what is the most rattling is the last image we get of Tod (the main character, narrator, the most consistently sane person in the book) laughing in a police car, wailing along with the siren as the chaos dissipates behind him.

The excuse for the chaos is a film premiere. But, this is all the provocation needed by the people of Los Angeles, to tear their world apart -- it's a way to come alive. The crowd is happily and absolutely in mayhem, moving in waves and surges. Nathanael West handles this rhythm masterfully with his prose. Like Louis-Ferdinand Céline (who we'll get to later, in the depressing French increment of my reading list), he is at the top of his form on the edge of delirium.

I don't think giving a synopsis of the plot would be a fair way to represent it... all the action is fairly meaningless if you try to derive meaning from it individually -- rather, it's all a part of the overall atmosphere of the novel. The characters are essentially caricatures... there's the iron-jawed licentious cowboy, the fiery dwarf, the enigmatic & gorgeous failed-actress, her father the destitute door-to-door vaudevillian, the confused country boy (Homer -- his is the saddest part of all), the child-star brat and his goading mother, the crazy cock-fighting Mexican, and the straight man -- Tod -- who just came to California to paint. Tod could very easily be West's counterpart in the novel, as he seems in the midst of all this to observe, and take the misdirection from other people's lives into his own art.

His one painting that is mentioned throughout the novel is called "The Burning of Los Angeles", fittingly enough. It is never finished... the closest he comes is in his mind, because when he's trying to get out of the thrashing mob in the final scene, he escapes through his thoughts and imagines he's continuing on with the painting, adding some of the crazed faces into his own background of flames and rubble.

I have no conclusions about The Day of the Locust, even after the second time reading it; but it leaves quite an impression.

BOOK 5: The Day of the Locust

2009-10-22T10:38:00.000-07:00

Last post today, I promise.

This is the trailer for the 1975 film adaptation of The Day of the Locust.

burn the cities.... burn the cities...

BOOK 5: The Day of the Locust

2009-10-22T10:10:00.000-07:00

Burn the Cities

by Nathanael West

I.

The Eastern star calls with its hundred knives
Burn the cities
Burn the cities

Burn Jerusalem
It is easy
City of birth a star
A rose in color a daisy in shape
Calls with its hundred knives
Calls three kings
Club diamond heart
Burn Jerusalem and bring
The spade king to the Babe
Nailed to his six-branched tree
Upon the sideboard of a Jew
Marx
Performs the miracle of loaves and fishes

II.

Burn the cities
Burn Paris
City of light
Twice-burned city
Warehouse of the arts
The spread hand is a star with points
The fist a torch
Burn the cities
Burn Paris
City of light
Twice-burned city
Warehouse of the arts

The spread hand is a star
The fist a torch
Workers of the World
Unite
Burn Paris

Paris will burn easily
Paris is fat
Only an Eskimo could eat her
Only a Turk could love her
The Seine is her bidet
She will not hold urine
She squats upon the waters and they are oil
A placid slop
Only the sick can walk on it
Fire alone can make it roar
Not like a burning barn but muted
Muted by a derby hat
So also my sorrow
City of my youth
Is muted by a derby hat

The flames of Paris are sure to be well-shaped
Some will be like springs
Some like practiced tongues
Some like gay flags
Others like dressed hair
Many will dance
Only the smells will be without order

The spread hand is a star with points
The fist a torch
Workers of the World
Unite
Burn Paris

III.

Burn the cities
Burn London
Slow cold city
Do not despair
London will burn
It will burn
In the heat of tired eyes
In the grease of fish and chips
The English worker will burn it
With coal from Wales
With oil from Persia
The Indian will give him fire
There is sun in Egypt
The Negro will give him fire
Africa is the land of fire
London is cold
It will nurse the flame
London is tired
It will welcome the flame
London is lecherous
It will embrace the flame
London will burn

BOOK 5: The Day of the Locust

2009-10-22T09:32:00.000-07:00

I'll be finished with this book soon.

In the thick, brick-like Modern Library copy of Nathanael West's meager but brilliant writings I have, it's about in the middle. What follows are a lot of unpublished writings, drafts and outlines, and letters (including a few entreating ones to F. Scott Fitzgerald, his contemporary, thanking him for mentioning his name in an introduction to The Great Gatsby and angling for more publicity.) The book also included West's 3 other novels: The Dream Life of Balso Snell (which everyone seems to loathe for its juvenile sensationalistic playfulness, but it's my favorite thing in the book), Miss Lonelyhearts (his most famous novel, and most well-constructed) and A Cool Million (which I have not yet been able to get through.. it's dull to accent the emptiness of a quest for money, I think, but after you get the point there's little incentive to go on.)

So I can have a full review of this slim, vicious and glamorously evil Hollywood novel up in the next few days, maybe tomorrow. Today I'll let you know who Nathanael West was/is, because he is criminally obscure in American literature, despite the fact that The Day of the Locust was on the list for "The 100 Best English-Language Novels from 1923-2005" by Time magazine.

Nathan Weinstein was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants living in New York City in 1903. As a student he developed eclectic literary tastes (Oscar Wilde and Dadaism) that went along with a slight disregard for school structure. He was an overwhelmingly average student, and spent most of his time injesting great smorgasboard-type novels (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, etc.) and from the look of things, not doing much else. He dropped out of high school, but got into Tufts by forging his diploma. He was expelled from Tufts, but got into Brown University through similar trickery. He began writing his first novel by that time, working on it during the odd hours of small jobs he was taking.

He then moved out to California, adding the "West" onto his name in commemoration (it was that important to him... I found this in the 'Chronology' section of my Modern Library book - "William Carlos Williams later asks, 'How did you get that name?' West answers, 'Horace Greeley said, 'Go West, young man.' So I did'") He went there to revel in the absurdity of it, and experince the culture. Almost all of his writing draws ironic inspiration from the Hollywood scene of the '30s and '40s. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, he wrote literally about "flappers and philosophers", Apocalypse America, escapism and absurdity. Miss Lonelyhearts was the climax of his style as we can see it, though The Day of the Locust was his final novel.

Nathanael West was killed in a car crash by El Centro, California in 1940. He was coming back from Mexico with his wife to attend the funeral of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and ran a stop-sign that resulted in the crash. He was only 37 years old. His body was taken back to New York to be buried.

Nathanael West would be more completely dead if he hadn't been rediscovered by New Directions in 1957, and his two novels Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust re-published. This thin, shabby black-and-white paperback was the vehicle by which he came to me, when I found it molded to the bottom of a box of donated books. I was working for a fair, and spent the rest of my down-time on shift reading through Miss Lonelyhearts. Once I'm done with The Day of the Locust, I will have re-read 3 of his 4 novels, and more fully understood his relevance as a writer.

BOOK 4: The Autobiography of Malcolm X

2009-10-18T10:14:00.000-07:00

I'm at work in an empty bookshop, and just finished The Autobiography of Malcolm X in a threadbare armchair next to the rattling radiator... he's dead, and I'm still left with a sense of injustice (even after seeing how his cause was played out, and with what efforts he altered American consciousness.) The last sizable chunk of the book is Alex Haley's "Epilogue", which describes the process by which he came to know Malcolm X, how the book was written, and every detail of his death. So, the story of Malcolm X is poignant, full of reincarnation, full of energy and purpose, full of contradictions, and balanced above constant threat. He lived so honed to his cause because he had to be, to overcome the pressures of white injustice. Later there were the added pressures of people wanting him dead, for what he said and did about African-Americans' (I can't say "Negro", it's the 21st century... but that is the word that Malcolm uses) condition in America.

I'm beginning to believe his ideas about integration, as well -- that it will never be a reality. People to not naturally integrate with people different from them. This is stupidity on our part, but part of our nature. Peace will never be a reality, no matter how the desire is there, only because of these sort of obstacles presented in human nature. Sad but true, sad but true -- like the stories of so many people caught on the claws of change, and fighting for it while they can.

So, farewell to Malcolm X, to Detriot Red, to the boy Malcolm Little, to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, to Satan in a prison cell. Farewell from American skies and Harlem night-alleys, hills of dreams and bloodied railroad tracks, rearing from pulpits around the hostile world... you are remembered. Your words are here, and alive in urgency still.

BOOK 4: The Autobiography of Malcolm X

2009-10-17T15:49:00.000-07:00

So much has happened to and around Malcolm X since I last wrote... I had some time to read on a long car-ride today, and have reached the end of 1963, where Malcolm X has become El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, made a few white friends while on his pilgrimage to Mecca and visited various areas around Africa with a royal reception.

But, back at the beginning -- once he became "Minister Malcolm" an oratory fervor began to overtake his life. As anyone who has ever heard Malcolm X speak will attest, he held enormous power over his audience. Chronicaling his early efforts in the Nation of Islam, he describes how he learned to "read" the crowd (that might have not been the exact word... to feel their response, and work with the atmosphere to give his words top potency.) He sustained transcendant belief in the messenger Elijah Mohammad throughout this time, and his life became a battering ram for the cause. With his increasingly profound presence in the Black Muslims (I know it's a term Malcolm himself protests against, but that is the recognized term, so there you go), people began to take interest in an eloquent new leader, and a respectable Muslim. Malcolm X meets his wife Betty, and after a frank and mutually devotional courtship, they are simply married and remain entirely in love for the rest of Malcolm's life (the last chapter before the epilogue is titled "1965", so I assume that is the last year Malcolm X remained alive. Betty, I assume, will live on.)

So he sets Harlem on fire for the Nation... he becomes a powerful figure, fearless in his devotion to the cause. It was really this that made Black Muslims a movement in America. But, as you may know, after a few years Malcolm X falls out of favor with the Nation of Islam -- to put it into light terms. Death-threats started to surface, and he was even ordered officially "silenced" for 90 days by Elijah Mohammad after his comment about JFK's assassination being an act of God (or, Allah) to compensate somewhat the trials of blacks in America (in particular, an incident of 7 murders of nonviolent Muslims.) Malcolm X's faith in Elijah is shattered, too, when he discovers he is a real man with natural vice, but uses his power to twist doctrine to meet his own needs. Confused, misdirected, but still wholly devoted to his faith, Malcolm decides to round out his views of Islam and make the holy pilgrimage to Mecca -- the Hajj -- that every able-bodied Muslim is required to make once in his lifetime.

On the trip, he is shocked with the humanity and sophistication of Europeans' treatment of black people. He also discovers that the whites (or, "blue-eyed blondes") he meets as fellow pilgrims journeying to Mecca offer him the same comraderie and companionableness as pilgrims of any other shade. In his travels, although slopping around in the Arabic, he learns to eat from the same bowl as many others, drink from the same cup as others, pray in the proper prostrated position, pray in the original language, and sleep on the same rug as many other Muslims. As he writes (or, says, as this book was only described by Malcolm X and taken down by Alex Haley):

"I remember one night at Muzdalifa with nothing but the sky overhead I lay awake amid sleeping Muslim brothers and I learned that pilgrims from every land -- every color, and class, and rank; high officials and the beggar alike -- all snored in the same language."

Malcolm X sends a letter home to his wife, on his Hajj experience and the alteration of views it inspired. He instructs her to issue it as a public statement to the press. Then, he goes on to Africa, to speak out about their people's condition in America. He is hosted with fervent joy, and enjoys a humblingly luxurious passage in his travels. Children flock to harangue him with questions about Muhammad Ali -- some thought he was Ali, but others knew that Malcolm X knew him as a friend.

He returns to America bearded and revitalized with purpose.

BOOK 4: The Autobiography of Malcolm X

2009-10-15T17:05:00.000-07:00

I have had almost no time to read in these past few days. I've been trying every chance I've had, but I seem to be choked in a tide of schoolwork. It seems ridiculous that school leaves no time for reading, but that's how it goes.

So, here's all I offer today:

BOOK 4: The Autobiography of Malcolm X

2009-10-13T17:19:00.000-07:00

When I die, I want all my books given to a prison library. I don't think I've ever realized the power of reading and what books can carry to people as well as I do now, having learned of someone who got out of prison and a disasterous life through books. When Malcolm X entered prison, he couldn't even form a sentence correctly... now he's discovering himself and the world, with a miraculously large library at his itching fingertips.

I'm immensely enjoying The Autobiography of Malcolm X, so far... the pages are fluttering by. Malcolm has run through a life of addiction, vice, flagrancy... hustling to peoples' sinister desires while trying to scrape by with as much fall-out style as possible. The chapters I have been through so far run thus:

Nightmare - Mascot - "Homeboy" - Laura - Harlemite - Detriot Red - Hustler - Trapped - Caught - Satan.
(A word of explanation: Laura was a young black girl he took to a lindy-hop [Malcolm could certainly lindy-hop.. he describes it with expertise & a kind of wild adoration].. it was from there that her innocence and resolve for her future shattered, and she ended up another prostitute catering in coldwater flats to strange, lonely men).

The next chapter: Saved.

BOOK 4: The Autobiography of Malcolm X

2009-10-12T14:45:00.000-07:00

I've been re-thinking the structure of this task I've embanked myself in... already there are 3 books I've found that I'm dying to read, and don't want to wait a year or so before I can get to them. The Autobiography of Malcolm X was actually an ammendment made to my list, because I felt I absolutely couldn't wait to read it (it pushed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence down towards the end, and completely knocked The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes off the list, to keep it at an even 35). The two others I've come across are: Hamlet, Prufrock and Language by Zulfikar Ghose, and The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess by Andrei Codrescu (sounds great, doesn't it?).
So.... here's a new code of rules:

1. Only read one book at a time

2. Every book on this list must be read, in order, and faithfully battered out onto the blog.

3. You may read other books on the side of this project, but remember to stick to it, and try to not let more than a few weeks pass between blogging.

4. Restrain yourself -- no promiscuousity in browsing. And only go for other books if they're really irresistable.

Now that that's sorted out, to Malcolm X. The copy in which I'm reading his autobiography is an old school-library copy with a bright-green Perma-bound cover, the title in small black lettering along the spine. The pages are like yellowed moth's wings (it was published in '66), and it looks as if someone's dog got to it, and chewed up the bottom corner of the back cover. From these very humble beginnings, comes the story of his life. I became determined to read this book after we watched the movie "Malcolm X" (starring Denzel Washington) in my class on the '60s. The book was based on events described in the book, and I found Malcolm X such a kinetic, beautiful personality, honed with purpose and dedication, that I wanted to learn more about him.

One thing I've managed to notice in the book so far: each chapter ends with a conclusive statement venerating Malcolm X's religious position. He encompasses all his past experiences (recounted with enrapturing clarity and impeccable narrative tact) with his modern sentiments, by turns ashamed and angry in retrospect to how he acted. At 14, he moved to a city for the first time (Boston), and began to become integrated in slightly slummy, swinging underground.. where blacks learn to look pretty as whites, and whites learn to flirt and dance with blacks. There was still the taboo present that made blacks regarded as dangerous, more uninhibited and primal in force than white, so-called "cultured" people of America. In an effort to fit in, Malcolm took a job as a shoe-shine boy in a dance club (he says he shined for Duke Ellington himself once... the first night he worked there, Benny Goodman came to play yelping clarinet with his swing band), bought a sky-colored zoot suit and feathered hat.. he conked his hair (burned it with lye so it would lie flat like a white man's) and started to take pride in the lighter shade of his skin. His nickname was "Red" for this trait of complexion.

Malcolm X's childhood is more painful, because he recalls the confusion and misunderstanding he had about his unique role in the community. As long as he managed to play the cheerful, subserviant role of a pet Negro, life seemed to reward him and allow him to keep up a role in the predominantly white society. This role was implied upon him in school, where he was one of the only few black children. Although Malcolm got better grades than almost everyone else, his name was "nigger", and no-one ever seemed to imagine he would amount to anything. The first taste of city life opened Malcolm's eyes to his own culture for the first time.. and it was soon after that he became disenchanted with small-town dreams of becoming a carpenter (as his English teacher suggested for him, despite his ambitions toward being a lawyer), or just another menial black scapegoat for latent stupidity in the community, that he left home for Boston.

Malcolm X's childhood before this was broken and strange, recalled in images, and snippets of overheard conversation. His father was an outspoken minister who promoted black pride, saying that all African-Americans should migrate away from America to get back to their own culture. His powerful stance made the family targeted by the Ku Klux Klan and other hate-groups. Their property was assaulted on two occasions; once the windows were smashed-in with rifle butts and once the house was set ablaze. Malcolm's father was found dead one night on the railroad tracks, the back of his skull bashed in, his body almost sliced in half from the path of an oncoming train. The case was deemed a suicide and the family, along with thier cries of injustice and grief, were ushered away. Malcolm's mother (a strong and educated woman herself) was never the same... and she spent the rest of her life struggling to hold onto her children from Welfare and other goverment agencies. She ended up being institutionalized, where she remained while Malcolm and his siblings continued to grow up.

So far, this is a bitter story of a black child's progress from innocence, acceptance and earnesty to succeed in a world that nonetheless hated him... to excitement, peacock-minded foolery and a fierce deviant pride. This progression is an improvement, but Malcolm X is set for many more radical transformations.

Throughout his life, he remained most comfortable in the ghetto, or working-class sections of cities.. Although he's off to a rough, disillusioned start, I think it will be from here that he really begins to flourish with his own ideas, and forge his own way into a hostile world.

BOOK 3: Death is a Lonely Business

2009-10-11T06:19:00.000-07:00

Shrank! A.L. Shrank! It was A.L. Shrank, a skulky devil of an amateur psychologist, who doesn't care for anything in the world. He lives in a shack on the crumbling pier, by the rotting circus spires and cages swirling with surf. He's dripping and disgusting and a MURDERER! Though a cowardly one... he never has to touch his victims, only lead them into their own destruction. One woman (a beautiful opera soprano who sings out fo her window but never leaves her tenement house, weighing 380 pounds, lipped in mayonnaise) he only has to startle into falling over, and then make sure she can't get up. She is smothered on her own fat... prompted to death by her own lonely destruction. Shrank calls these people, his victims, the Lonelies. He finds and follows them, and regards death as a favor to them.

But, as I rippled through the last few pages of this this morning, I found that mercifully Shrank dies as well, fairly willingly. Everything gets tied up neatly, with plenty of resilient life after pages and pages of death and general decay. I fell asleep reading this in an armchair last night, and woke up at 4 this morning with my shoulders crunched and aching... moved to bed, got up again at 7 to finish the book.

And I loved it, very much. Ray has gotten hold of a really great plot, so even he can keep track of it. I'm in love with each one of the characters (it'd take awhile to describe them all).. except Shrank, which shows Bradbury's perfect tactic in playing out the story. It's a tender novel, but also exciting and positively luminous. Ray Bradbury is a magical writer.

So, let this be a comfort to the next reading task I'm about to undertake: The Autobiography of Malcolm X. You can only imagine what a different experience it will be... just look :

still, both are certainly brilliant in their own ways.

BOOK 3: Death is a Lonely Business

2009-10-10T18:37:00.001-07:00

There's something you should know, in this story.

These murders keep happening, and evil forces skulk the mists at low tide... everything's falling apart, but in an operatically ecstatic way. And the one and only glimpse of a shadowy figure (the murderer, the perpetrator of crime, the ultimate antagonist) appears again and again, unidentifyable.

There is a man who stands outside peoples' houses, on doorsteps and in the center of quiet streets, just standing there. Watching.

He's been seen three times now.

and people keep dying.

Perhaps I should establish now that fact that I intend to disregard the reading experience of anyone who is reading this blog -- meaning, I will spoil endings and wrangle the plot as to my own liking. When this sinister, shadowy nightwalker shows himself, I will let you know.

peace, Sweet dreams...

BOOK 3: Death is a Lonely Business

2009-10-10T07:48:00.000-07:00

I first found Ray Bradbury in a used bookshop that was closing down, called The One Hundreth Monkey. We were walking down a side-street in a run-down railway town, and passed this store with boxes of old paperbacks bleaching in the sun on the sidewalk. My dad ushered us inside immediately. I saw a small paperback (the old yellow kind, published in the '60s) with a golden skull on the cover (it was "The Golden Apples of the Sun and Other Stories"), opened it up, and from the first paragraph was entranced.

Ray Bradbury writes unlike any other writer I had yet encountered... ridiculously lavish and completely unrestrained (like Stephen King, or Edgar Allan Poe... one who owes Bradbury, and one whom Bradbury owes, for this style) with descriptions romantically undulating on and on. It may not be meticulously crafted, all of it, but it is wonderful writing, and traps you completely in his world. He's known (at least from the back covers of my little artillery of paperbacks) as the World's Greatest Living Fantasy Writer. I've never been able to stomach anybody else for long - Ray Bradbury is perfect.

He does best with short stories, and even some of his novels turn into a series of interconnected short stories. A magical snapshot, poignantly tragic and brief, and it's perfect. Leave him to write an entire novel, and sometimes he loses himself in the byways of brief scenes... we allow him, though, because it remains still such wonderful storytelling. Description holds constant sway over action, so his worlds are richer and his stories slow, dreamlike. "Death is a Lonely Business" is a mystery novel, and so far relatively un-fantastic (in the genre sense). A cast of lost & lonely characters in Venice, California, living solely on their eccentricities, have stumbled upon a murder (or at least a death), and a young writer has the ardor and the information to help a wildly cynical detective solve the case. Eerie, dripping with fog, a dead world lousy with memories.

This particular paperback I bought in a splurge at another used bookshop -- they had lots of Bradbury, at $1.50 a-piece. I had had it for years, and never gotten past the first page -- the first paragraph, again, dizzied me. But that's what this reading project is for, right? I'm in another world, this one cavernous and dark yet shelled in a magic, golden light...

On Amazon looking up what other descriptions people have made about this lovely book, I found that there is a sequel! It's called "A Graveyard for Lunatics". Still set in California, it follows a tale of murder, with more gorgeously eccentric characters and plenty of poetic interjections to cushion any hard feelings that may come out of a mystery novel.

If you are unlike me and have a free reading schedule, I recommend you check it out. Maybe I can get a bit of vicarious enjoyment, if someone tells about it.

http://www.amazon.com/Graveyard-Lunatics-Another-Tale-Cities/dp/0380812002/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255187809&sr=8-1-spell

BOOK 3: Death is a Lonely Business

2009-10-08T09:08:00.000-07:00

How it starts (and how can you not be enticed):

"Venice, California, in the old days had much to recommend it to people who liked to be sad. It had fog almost every night and along the shore the moaning of the oil well machinery and the slap of dark water in the canals and the hiss of sand against the windows of your house when the wind came up and sang among the open places and along the empty walks.
Those were the days when the Venice pier was falling apart and dying in the sea and you could find there the bones of a vast dinosaur, the rollercoaster, being covered by the shifting tides.
At the end of one long canal you could find old circus wagons that had been rolled and dumped, and in the cages, at midnight, if you looked, things lived; fish and crayfish moving with the tide, and it was all the circuses of time somehow gone to doom and rusting away.
And there was a loud avalanche of big red trolley car that rushed towards the sea every half-hour and at midnight skirted the curve and threw sparks on the high wires and rolled away with a moan which was like the dead turning in their sleep, as if the trolley and the lonely men who swayed steering them knew that in another year they would be gone, the tracks covered with concrete and tar and the high spider-wire collected on rolls and spirited away.
And it was in that time, in one of those lonely years when the fogs never ended and the winds never stopped their laments, that riding the old red trolley, the high bucketing thunder, one night I met up with Death's friend and didn't know it."

BOOK 2: The Fall of America

2009-10-07T19:04:00.000-07:00

Today is the anniversary of a famous Beat event, the first time "Howl" was read aloud: the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, October 7th 1955. This is the only picture I could find from the event, and you can see Kerouac looking peaceful in the midst of it. He didn't actually read that night, but had the job of alternately riling and pacifying the crowd, swinging a tankard of red wine. Tonight was a glorious night.... though I'm spending it entirely unmomentously, in my quiet bedroom with black windows looking on the world outside. But I remember. Everyone on Earth in San Francisco tonight should be at least an ounce happier than everyone on Earth everywhere else, just to be alive in a city of light.

I'm still reading "The Fall of America", of course... warming to the style of the poems more and more. I think it's more a journal than strictly a poetry collection. You can fuss over its classification (as I've been tempted into) endlessly, but in any case I am very glad the thoughts within have been made public. This staunchly fat little booklet, circulated all over the country (mine is a battered, well-thumbed secondhand copy, with softened edges), is proud and dejected all at once... an honest exploration of America. It's a bit of a letdown prophecy.. but still willing to spin out its glory, towering and tottering with forms that fluctuate in a landscape of jagged beams and sparce lines of clouds.

I know it won the National Book Award in the '70s sometime.. so these views are not exclusive to me, I'm sure. Whatever it is -- poetry, journal, monologue babble, tirade, true spontaneous prose -- it works.

Here's a nugget of political thought, from the middle of Houston, TX:

Kissass is the Part of Peace

America will have to Kissass Mother Earth

Whites have to Kissass Blacks, for Peace & Pleasure,

Only Pathway to Peace, Kissass.

BOOK 2: The Fall of America

2009-10-06T17:49:00.000-07:00

Here's a passage I plucked out of "Kansas City to Saint Louis", a poem in the first part of the book, titled Thru the Vortex West Coast to East 1965-1966:

St Louis calling St Louis calling
Twenty years ago,
Thirty years ago,
the Burroughs School
Pink cheeked Kenney with fine blonde hair,
his almond eyes aristocrat
gazed,
Morphy teaching English & Rimbaud
at midnight to the fauns
W.S.B. leather cheeked, sardonic
waiting for change of consciousness,
unnamed in those days --
coffee, vodka, night for needles,
young bodies
beautiful unknown to themselves
running around St Louis
on a Friday evening
getting drunk in awe & honor of the
terrific future these
red dry trees at sunset go thru two decades later
They could've seen
the animal branches, wrinkled to the sky
& known the gnarled prophecy to come,
if they'd opened their eyes outa the whiskey-haze
in Mississippi riverfront bars
and gone into the country with a knapsack to
smell the ground.
Oh grandfather maple and elm!
Antique leafy old oak of Kingdom City in the purple light
come down, year after year,
to the tune
of mellow pianos.
Salute, silent wise ones,
Cranking powers of the ground,
awkward arms of knowledge
reaching blind above the gas station
by the high TV antennae
Stay silent, ugly Teachers,
let me & the Radio yell about Vietnam and mustard gas.

This is the kind of picture that's lovely to have, in the middle of all this babble-poetry. This is something of America, in its spread & splendor. What his mind saw, we see -- effective here. Though Allen still has a thing for name-dropping, and making obscure references to things that matter to him ("W.S.B." is William S. Burroughs, but someone reading Ginsberg innocently would be halted and confused by the very un-poetic abbreviation).
Anyway.
I should probably leave this for tonight, and get started on my real homework... maybe even read some more of the book. I'm in page 48, which is "Autumn Gold".. an experiment in automatic poetry dedicated to Hanover, New Hampshire.
I've got the rest of the books in this section of my reading list in a quiet pile next to my bed. I know I should be focused on the one at hand, but I can't wait to get to Bradbury next... and a golden world of Venice in decay..
Daydreams are wonderful, aren't they? I love stories... segways from reality.

BOOK 2: The Fall of America

2009-10-06T13:40:00.000-07:00

Allen Ginsberg (I promise I won't talk about him for a while once I'm done with this book), being as heartbreakingly in love with Jack Kerouac as he was, decides to try and adopt his writing style. "Spontaneous bop prosody", meaning basically an internal monologue of free-associations and noted observations, twisted out in rhythms of poetry. His experiments with this method led most successfully to "Howl" (and ultimately saved him from his rhymes and old-English sensibilities). "The Fall of America" puts it ultimately to the test, tying all the poems into one whole theme, however vaguely... and some do shine memorably ("A Vow", "Elegy for Neal Cassady", "Memory Gardens").

This fat little book I've undertaken to read might prove one of the most challenging. The lines are usually sparse, but so disjointed and fragmented with names (towns, factories, people in history, his friends, bands, anything that flashes around him goes straight into the poem) that reading them takes longer than a full-sized page of prose. I suppose this is how poetry should be read... but one of the things I've always reveled in about Allen Ginsberg's poetry is that it is so natural and vivid that once you get with the rhythm and flow of it, you can follow the lines like prose. This is most effective in "Kaddish", the longest poem he ever wrote, and a meaty one. So this kind of stilted halting makes me think he was emulating more so than going from his own ideas of how it should sound and be arranged on the page. The whole book is a bit like an experiment... and I guess, being from the '60s, that makes absolute sense.

Reading and writing in the burst of inspiration that the material comes from is what Kerouac, Ginsberg and everyone they influenced are concerned with. But, taken decades out of context, it's more of a challenge to form a background or basis for reading the poem, because it is just so absolutely all-over-the-place. So far, from what I've read, Allen is traveling across America, in a car. The grand Apocalyptic vision he has in mind with the title has not yet been explained (or realized by me)... there's no real evidence of America. We get notation of a few endearing details (a girl leading her horse along the side of the road), but then the whole thing starts up again and loses itself, scuttering along like a self-conscious dancer.

One of the effects successfully achieved in this book is the colossal noise in America... the poetry is often intruded by politician's quotes from the radio, or snippets of song. One poem ends with the full intonation of some chant or other (not Hare Hare Hare Krishna). Maybe this confusion is to the purpose of the picture we're being given, an America reeling and lost in her own byways and back-roads.

BOOK 1: Allen Ginsberg in America

2009-10-04T16:49:00.000-07:00

Allen Ginsberg. Leading off the first group (the one I had in mind as a collection of romantic renegades, in love with America) is this relatively slim biography from the '60s. It's a portrait mostly of his life during that time -- which was extraordinary, and very integrated into public consciousness -- told through a series of evocative snapshots, interspaced by brief lapses into his past as a Columbia student and a sudden star in the San Francisco Renaissance of the Beats.
The book runs like a news report, but a very engaging, sympathetic, hands-on and involved one. Jane Kramer must've been following Allen around everywhere for a period of time, and was allowed access to his personal papers (which I'm sure wouldn't have been too hard to gain, knowing Allen). One of the most enjoyable snippets in the book is the full text of a letter Allen wrote to an old, rather "square" friend from Columbia (who was probably very dismayed and confused when he recieved it) over the better part of a day... it's a rant, but by a mind so perfectly intelligent that when allowed to go off and spin around freely in its own patterns of thought, creates some pretty wonderful prose. It was written largely as a case defending "Howl", and the complexity of its composition, its merit, all of that.
The accounts of Allen's life given in the book are the most personal I have ever read (Allen Ginsberg was the first poet I ever liked, and still the only poet I love -- I am very interested in everything he's done). Incredibly unique, compassionate, energetically friendly and calm in the surrounding churns and waves of '60s change -- he talks like a prophet at parties, college conferences, at the front line of hippie raids, and to absolutely anybody he meets.
The characters you get in this glimpse include:

Peter Orlovsky (Allen's lifetime lover and slightly batty friend)

Julius Orlovsky (Peter's young brother, who doesn't speak a word, but follows the group down the streets of New York as a kind of silent, gentle, brooding lamb)

Maretta (a girl Allen was dating, sullen and introverted, a disciple of Tibetan religion, but hashish is her god)

Carl Solomon (the dedicatée of "Howl", intelligently distant, and deeply depressed as only a Dadaist can justify)

Gary Snyder (briefly, as part of a committee to organize a Human Be-In in San Francisco)

Timothy Leary (part of the same committee)

Andy Warhol (in a Bohemian bar... he never speaks a word, but gets hammered with some wildly perceptive mockery from Gregory Corso. Allen gives him a big hug after, seeing Andy looked sad -- "You have feelings!")

Gregory Corso (as mentioned... utterly mad)

...and still more. Allen knew everybody.

A significant look into the history of Allen Ginsberg and the history of America... because he so integrated himself into American culture, we have almost no choice but to fully embrace and accept Ginsberg for all that he is. The freeing-up of American language and literature in the '50s and the successive revolutions and changes in temperment in the '60s were all carried in some way through this man. And if I can be snared by his ideas even after his death and the ending of the hippie revolution, we are still living in the continuum of that time today.

Introduction / THE LIST...

2009-10-04T16:34:00.000-07:00

1. Allen Ginsberg in America --- Jane Kramer
2. The Fall of America --- Allen Ginsberg
3. Death is a Lonely Business --- Ray Bradbury
4. The Autobiography of Malcolm X
5. The Day of the Locust --- Nathanael West
6. Visions of Cody --- Jack Kerouac
7. World of Wonders --- Roberson Davies

8. The Rosy Crucifixtion (trilogy) --- Henry Miller
11. The Golden Compass --- Philip Pullman
12. The Great Gatsby --- F. Scott Fitzgerald
13. Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer --- Kenneth Patchen
14. Ariel --- Sylvia Plath

15. The Life Before Us --- Romain Gary
16. Malone Dies --- Samuel Beckett
17. Guignol's Band --- Louis-Ferdinand Céline
18. Fable for Another Time --- Louis-Ferdinand Céline
19. The Fall --- Albert Camus
20. Nausea --- Jean-Paul Sartre

21. A Season in Hell --- Arthur Rimbaud
22. Selected Writings of Jean Genet
23. Joy of Man's Desiring --- Jean Giono
24. Antonin Artaud -- Bettina Knapp
25. Artaud Anthology --- Antonin Artaud

26. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland -- Lewis Carroll
27. The Garlic Ballads --- Mo Yan
28. Indian Journals --- Allen Ginsberg
29. The Essential Rumi
3o. Adventures in the Skin Trade --- Dylan Thomas

31. The Flounder --- Günter Grass
32. De Profundis --- Oscar Wilde
33. I Am a Memory Come Alive --- Franz Kafka
34. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance --- Robert M. Pirsig

35. War and Peace --- Leo Tolstoy

Above is the final-drafted form of my staggering reading list. There are 35 books. I have grouped them into segments, loosely based on nationality, more so with feeling and how I thought they would compliment each other.
It's a suicide reading course because it is a fairly large undertaking, and is going to be pretty intensive. But hopefully I will feel invigorated by all this, far from suicidal.
I have set no deadline... but some of these books I've been looking at for months, and some I've been meaning to read for years. So the act in itself is kind-of a deadline.
I am a bored highschool student, set out to devour the world's literature while I still have the enthusiasm to.
It feels very good to get a reading list together. And I thought I could write along the way in this, talking about each book and how it relates to an understanding of its subject, or culture, or just how good it really was.
A few of these are re-reads (only a few). "War and Peace" is obviously my finale. I had read it in the summer before 8th grade, but retained nothing from it besides an enormously bloated feeling of pride and prestige (also a slight annoyance at the drooling descriptive passages the author lavished on Natasha, who was apparently enchanting, though I remember her being completely foolish and overdone).
It's a brave thing to do, especially since I plan to still integrate myself somewhat with daily life and school and such. So we'll say "ambitious" for now. Suicidal? Maybe.

If you haven't guessed already, I got the idea from the movie "Julie & Julia" - undertaking some huge task and blogging your experiences along the way. I love a change and a challenge... and to really dive headlong into some good books.

We'll see how it comes out. Follow me if you like.