Tuesday, 26 August 2014

Tweet, Tweet, Twitterature

Full title: Twitterature. The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less
Authors: Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin
Genre: Fiction, adaptation
Attributes: 208 pages, paperback
Publisher: Penguin (2009)
On the scale of Zero to One: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)
























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Tuesday, 19 August 2014

Surprise: an art, a technique

Full title: Pastoralia
Author: George Saunders
Genre: Fiction, short stories
Attributes: 208 pages, paperback
Publisher: Riverhead Trade; reissue edition (2001)
On the scale of Zero to One: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)


There is a lot to be surprised by in George Saunders’ stories. To start with, his settings are always odd, albeit perfectly plausible. Saunders forces his texts to enter territories where narration appears to have no place: a theme park, a training session for drivers, the crowded meeting room in a Hyatt hotel, a banal apartment, a mock-wedding party, a trip home. But he manages to milk these settings of a lot of narrative juice. And that goes on to do some further surprising through refinement and minute attention to the most trivial of details.
To put it in different words, most of what George Saunders does rests on technique. As he often admitted, his stories are hard-worked, edited to the point of bleeding, reduced and condensed so as to attain the most instructive of coagulations. One can surely learn from him the art of writing and writing and writing. In Pastoralia, these aspects are happily married with the brevity of the dialogues and the professionally sculpted narrative bits, the slender construction of which offers delightful degustations of high-caloric narrative art. Chosen almost at random, a fragment from “Sea Oak”:
“When I get home the babies are asleep and Jade and Min are watching a phone-sex infomercial, three girls in leather jumpsuits eating bananas in slo-mo while across the screen runs a constant disclaimer: ‘Not Necessarily the Girls Who Man the Phones! Not Necessarily the Girls Who Man the Phones!”
Enough is said here to illustrate a social status, to point out a particular kind of cultural environment, and to draw humour from crude, unengaged observation.


Narrative diversions are one of Saunders’ favourite tools. With the ease permitted by the masterful handling of abundant streams of consciousness, he manages to inject humour into the stories by simply following the erratic trajectories of his characters’ thoughts.
Example. In “The Barber’s Unhappiness,” there are a lot of close-ups on the protagonist’s quirky mind-work. In one case, we find him in a room full of strangers. He describes them to us with an appetite of a third-person visitor but with the accuracy of a first-person participant. These people are lists of physical details, dished up in an orderly manner, one after another, as if by means of a conveyor belt. We see them from the outside, and we kind of understand the game. But then there’s a moment (like in almost every story in the book)… A moment when we find that hey, we’re not simply contemplating here; we’re also part of the process of discovery experienced by the very character whose thoughts we are following.
“Next to the white-haired woman was a pretty girl. A very pretty girl. Wow. One of the prettiest girls the barber has ever seen. Boy was she pretty.”
These exclamations are at the same time indications of the protagonist’s surprise, and an oblique intervention of the narrator/author, who insinuates himself in the story via such simple psychographies that add zing and give characters body.
Dynamic narration, erected on a foundation of springy dialogues and descriptions devoid of any emotional involvement, are also to be found in the title story. Here’s an example, one of many:
“Someone pokes their head in.
Young guy, kind of goofy-looking.
‘Bradley?’ Janet says. ‘Holy shit.’
‘Hey, nice greeting, Ma,’ the guy says, and walks in. He’s not supposed to walk in. No one’s supposed to walk in. I can’t remember a time when anyone has ever just walked in.
‘Fucking stinks in here,’ he says.”
And this is how a new character is introduced, without the slightest attempt at announcing his appearance or explaining why he was necessary at all. Unlike the previous example, here the reader finds no narratorial intervention whatsoever. No introduction, no character development, no physical description, no invasion of psychic spaces, no contenxtualisation. Everything we learn about this Bradley we learn through the dialogue into which he jumps from the very first moment. We get to know him as he hangs at the end of his own words.
Saunders is very fond of this narrative method, which gives excellent results by allowing the story to progress as if by itself, while at the same time forcing the reader to play an active role in the games of characterisation and story construction. It’s what holds the collection together – otherwise a series of narratives of unequal inclination, where the author doesn't rise to the surface as a unitary being but rather as a millipedic ego with his numerous feet in a lot of pots. Pots full of honey – it needs to be added: the honey of well-boiled surprise.
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Tuesday, 12 August 2014

“I am home and whole, so to speak”

Full title: Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting
Author: Kevin Powers
Genre: Poetry
Attributes: 96 pages, hardcover
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (2014)
On the scale of Zero to One: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

It’s impossible to find anything said about Kevin Powers that’s not dominated by references to his involvement in the Iraq war. So, quite naturally, one wonders, is it even imaginable to read his poems outside this tight frame? Of course, the title itself, Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting, will appear to be a first difficulty. But let’s pretend this ‘fighting’ is not what everybody has agreed upon; let’s say it is a metaphor. Of no particular war, of no military battle. What now?
The task would still be an immensely difficult one, since the texts in the collection are peppered with images that only make sense in war poetry. There are these perfectly fitting lines from the title poem, for instance:
“war is just us
making little pieces of metal
pass through each other.”
Then there’s “Great Plain,” a poem whose central event is as horrible as any we can find in history books at school or on the news at dinner time: a boy who defies death in order to make a buck by selling unexploded mortars back to the American soldiers.
So yes, against this hard textual evidence, it’s hard to pretend this was not a collection of war poems. But still.
There are things in Powers’ poems which can be read in ways that transgress the logic of the genre. Because yes, there are things worse than wars, things that go deep into our DNA and make us blush at a genetic scale.
Then let’s say it. What these poems are greatly concerned with, is the operations of signs. The alarm is already present in the first poem, “Customs”:
“The world has been replaced
by our ideas about the world.”
Why is such a thing more horrible than war? Because the replacement Powers is talking about is the cause of the very idea of war. Without such a cataclysmic irreverence to the world, there would be little, if any, reasons to take up arms to defend one’s conviction, one’s misunderstandings, one’s allegiance to appearance. Powers seems to understand well this fact, which reviewers overlook almost programmatically. In his poems, Powers takes a peek through the screen of the obvious: the war, the news about the war, the sentiments the war has caused in viewers and soldiers alike. Here’s where the burden lies: in the realization that war is a mere by-product, a consequence (sad, no doubt) of our separation from the world. With this awareness comes the painful realization that we have always missed that which truly deserves our attention:
“if
anything on earth has earned the right to be observed
it is a thing of beauty while in flight.”
(“The Torch and Pitchfork Blues”)
There’s regret in this statement, which reads like a reference to American Beauty. It’s the regret that things have turned out the way they have, and we ended up in this grand mutation of signs, where it is increasingly harder to find signifiers that we can explain.
“We no longer have to name
the sins that we are guilty of.
The evidence for every crime
exists. What one
must always answer for
is not what has been done, but
for the weight of what remains
as residue – every effort
must be made to scrub away
the stain we’ve made on time.”
(“Photographing the Suddenly Dead”)

A lot of what we perceive is the result of how we represent.
Here, Steven Spielberg shooting War Horse: references to this type
of confusion appear often in Kevin Powers' poems.
Source: Dream Works Studios
To arrive at this awareness, one must understand that the tragedy of humankind is our disappearance behind the very signs we have created. This, of course, sends us head-first into terrible problems of morality, where we are asked to finger-point the thing we consider more important: the tragedy of one, or the catastrophe of the world?
“Before there was
brushed nickel there was iron, before
Tommy Dunlap was pushed idly from the bus
into that busy intersection, there was
a plenitude of grief already. Measured
against all that, a single incident recedes
into no biggie.”
(“The Torch and Pitchfork Blues”)

Issues of morality, ontological relevance, and a sense of metaphysical doubt cannot escape the genre known as “war poetry.” But the point is this: there’s a wider space where the poems of Kevin Powers can be placed. There, questions of more fundamental gravity must be asked, as the logic of war recedes into a concern of a second order.
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Tuesday, 5 August 2014

To write like a surgeon

Full title: Speech Begins after Death
Author: Michel Foucault, Philippe Artières
Genre: Non fiction, interview
Attributes: 96 pages, hardcover
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press (2013)
On the scale of Zero to One: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

In 1968, Michel Foucault participated in a series of private interviews with Claude Bonnefoy (also known for having conducted a series of interviews with Eugene Ionesco). There were ten conversations in total, all intended for publication. For some reason, though, the planned publication did not happen. What’s more, the interviews with Bonnefoy passed unnoticed for a very long time, so most of them were gradually lost. The script of the first of these interviews was discovered fairly lately. Although it appears to end abruptly, the script was interesting enough to make it into a volume on its own. This is how Speech Begins After Death came about, with a twenty-page introduction by Philippe Artières, who clarifies a few important things about Foucault’s relationship with interviews, lectures, rallies, and other forms of public speech.
A few topics form the flesh of this thin but dense volume, in which Foucault displayed himself as a relaxed, casual at times, uninhibited interviewee. What really stands out, though, is the theme of writing. This interview, which Artières defines as “Foucault putting himself in danger,” marks an interesting point in the career of the philosopher-speaker: his employment of “autobiographical speech.” Indeed, Foucault talks extensively about his childhood and the medical discourse in which he was raised, as the son of a surgeon. The memory of his upbringing offers him the opportunity to talk about his later development as a writer with the words and logic of a medic:
“The physician listens, but does so to cut through the speech of the other and reach the silent truth of the body. The physician doesn’t speak, he acts, that is, he feels, he intervenes. The surgeon discovers the lesion in the sleeping body, opens the body and sews it back up again, he operates; all this is done in silence, the absolute reduction of words. The only words he utters are those few words of diagnosis and therapy.”
Writing, to Foucault, is like clinical analysis, or like dissection.
Source: Dentistry and Medicine
One doesn't need to know much about Foucault to realize that right here, in this definition of the medical profession, lies the very essence of his career as a writer. He says it upfront: the silence of physicians, doubled by that of writers, generates a unified silence, from which writing rises like a necessity, like an “obligation,” and, at the same time, like a dissection.
“I've transformed the scalpel into a pen. I've gone from the efficacy of healing to the inefficacy of free speech; for the scar on the body I've substituted graffiti on paper; for the ineradicability of the scar I've substituted the perfectly eradicable and expungeable sign of writing. Maybe I should go further. For me the sheet of paper may be the body of the other.”
From beyond his texts, Foucault almost always requires to be quoted through long passages, like the ones above, because there is, behind his words, a desire and a lack: the desire to find out for himself what he might be able to say on a given topic, and the lack of a clear trajectory. Surprising as it may seem, the latter is not a shortcoming of his philosophy, but the actual principle that puts things in motion. Through this interview, as through his oeuvre, Foucault is attempting to satisfy the desire and overcome the lack; and he does so through a convincing theory of writing (convincing because so very personal). To him, as the interview makes apparent, writing is a tool used in the much more complex process of reflection.
“When I begin to write an essay or a book, or anything, I don’t really know where it’s going to lead or where it’ll end up or what I’m going to show. I only discover what I have to show in the actual movement of writing, as if writing specifically meant diagnosing what I had wanted to say at the very moment I began to write.”

Through this exploratory writing Foucault learned, made light, discerned the atmosphere of things. And this is the reason why he didn't consider himself a systemic philosopher, but rather a scalpel-wielding surgeon, a muted-yet-eloquent diagnoser; one who took every task as a new beginning, every word as a new operation.
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Tuesday, 29 July 2014

The loneliness of men

Full title: Good Bones
Author: Margaret Atwood
Genre: Fiction, collection of short-short stories
Attributes: 160 pages, paperback
Publisher: Virago (2010)
On the scale of Zero to One: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)


What’s impressive at times in this collection of short-shorts is the extent to which men are left alone. In “Man at Sea”:
“women are replaced by water, by wind, by the ocean, shifting and treacherous.”
In “Alien Territory” (a story as dazzling as a birth), an alternative is on offer – the alternative to the patriarchal rise to prominence (the accepted version, that is). Here, too, men are alone in an almost odious invention of the species, alone and isolated, alone with nothing but their bare preconceptions:
“Five guys standing outside, pissing into a snowbank, a river, the underbush, pretending not to look down. Or maybe not looking down: gazing upwards, at the stars, which gives us the origins of astronomy.Anything to avoid comparisons, which aren’t so much odious as intimidating.And not only astronomy: quantum physics, engineering, laser technology, all numeration between zero and infinity. Something safely abstract, detached from you; a transfer of the obsession with size to anything at all. Lord, Lord, they measure everything: the height of the Great Pyramids, the rate of fingernail growth, the multiplication of viruses, the sands of the sea, the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. And then it’s only a short step to proving that God is a mathematical equation. Not a person. Not a body, Heaven forbid. Not one like yours. Not an earthbound one, not one with size and therefore pain.When you’re feeling blue, just keep on whistling. Just keep on measuring. Just don’t look down.”
So yes, indeed, these are stories in which, by and large, men get the sour end of the stick, if such thing could be said to exist; if anything else really exists beyond the unforgiving voice that’s telling their stories.
”I’m being unnecessariuly brutal, you say. Too blunt, too graphic.” (“Hardball”)
These are alternatives that have never been taken seriously, what with war and manly loneliness and pride and lack of sympathy, substitute-narrations which here and now are ceasing the day, stealing the show. “Why do men want to kill the bodies of other men?” A question – fundamental like a lot of other questions asked throughout the volume. And by way of a reply, a list of possible reasons (called “traditional reasons”):
“Loot. Territory. Lust of power. Hormones. Adrenalin high. Rage. God. Flag. Honour. Righteous anger. Revenge. Oppression. Slavery. Starvation. Defence of one’s life. Love; or, a desire to protect women and children. From what? From the bodies of other men.”
This is in the same story, “Alien Territory,” a text divided into seven parts, each with its own take on what a man’s body is or might be. A story which takes things so seriously they often seem comical, in their nonfictional plainness (and, of course, plenitude).
“Magazines for women have women’s bodies on the covers. Magazines for men have women’s bodies on the covers. When men appear on the covers of magazines, it’s magazines about money, or about world news.”
Margaret Atwood gives here away stories that read in the glimmer of a second or two. Half narrations, half riddles. Half serious nonfictions, half mad fantasy. Short-shorts, as many generic enthusiasts will call them; or incantations, poems-in-prose; but stories that feel seriously worked out (in the good sense of the word), their muscles sculptural and showing through, the artful hand of their author returned over and over upon their lambent bodies of words. Most importantly, though (as seen right here, one hopes) – with a style that grows contagious, a style that makes one speak with the cadences of the very stories one has just read. Good Bones. Very good Bones. If Bones were your dog, this would sound like an encouragement. Wouldn’t it?
“Today I speak to my bones as I would speak to a dog. […] Good bones, good bones, I coax, wondering how to reward them; if they will sit up for me, beg, roll over, do one more trick, once more.There. We’re at the top. Good bones! Good bones! Keep on going.”
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Tuesday, 22 July 2014

A quotable collection of wonders

Full title: For the Time Being
Author: Annie Dillard
Genre: Non fiction
Attributes: 222 pages, hard cover
Publisher: Vintage Books (2010)
On the scale of Zero to One: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

With Annie Dillard one learns how to wonder. She sees things in a light that must have been the light of their very beginning, the light of metaphors; as when she contemplates the excavation site for the unearthing of Emperor Qin’s terracotta army:
“We can see a half-dug horse, whose lower jaw dips into the ground as if the planet were a feed bag.”
Beautiful. Quotable. Memorable.
A book of travels, that’s what For the Time Being is supposed to be. And it is that. It is that and much more. Travels through poetry and philosophy, at the end of which we realize there’s only one thing we've really seen: the human species. Us, as we appear on earth in the short span between birth and death; us, through the statistics we make, through the mystical ecstasies that elate us, our poetical aberrations, our philosophies, our biological deformities and cultural imperfections. Us, the most fragile and at, the same time, perhaps the most promising creatures on earth.
Almost every time she quotes numbers (from sources rarely mentioned; but who cares, really?), Dillard gives the impression of an accountant keeping the books of the universe. Her numbers are always astonishing. They read like arguments that leave no room for retaliation. They hurt while enlightening; or is it the other way round?
“In our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are four hundred billion suns – give or take 50 percent – or sixty-nine suns for each person alive.”
This “give or take 50 percent” is a stroke of genius. Four hundred billion or two hundred billion (or to put it differently, 200,000,000,000 or 400,000,000,000) are, to the mind of an inhabitant of a one-sun universe, the true test of imagination. A test at which, if I’m not wrong, we fail. Who can imagine such calamities? Who can count to such a length? Who can cope with so much?
Precisely the point.

We will also wonder how slowly but surely sand and debris cover us all.
Source: National Geographic
But the shock of numbers isn't everything the book delivers. One falls in love with the way things are described, as in the case of the horse image quoted above. Of course, there’s more where that description came from. Like, for instance, this one, where we stand in a maternity ward and watch babies receiving their first baths:
“This is where they wash the newborns like dishes. A nurse, one or another, spends most of her eight-hour shift standing here at the sink.
Different nurses bring newborns, one after another, and line them down the counter to the sink’s left. The newborns wear flannel blankets. Knit hats the size of teacups keep sliding up their wet heads. Their faces run the spectrum from lavender through purple and red to ping and beige.”
Then, once she’s made poetry of our coming-about, she moves smoothly, gently, irrevocably to the other part of us: our going-away. Here’s one quote about it, borrowed by Dillard from Juan Rulfo, the Mexican writer. It stands to highlight one technical aspect of the book: the use of crude, unrefined, often uninterpreted quotes. In the novel Pedro Páramo, Rulfo makes a dead woman speak to her dead son thus:
“Just think about pleasant things, because we’re going to be buried for a long time.”
And thus death leaks into the text like rain finding its way into a room through the eaves of a water-proof house. It finds its way into the Chinese terracotta army, into Hasidic literature, into the theological-paleontological writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, into the fragility of those babies washed like dishes, into the natural history of clouds, into stories about sand and dirt. Death infiltrates every aspect of the book the way birth infiltrates it as well. So much so that nothing is truly dead, but everything is fully alive.
The volume is an intricate system, where texts speak to each other, in a networked mesh of images, concepts, colours, and flavours. Reading through these networks brings readers the pleasure of seeing diagrams unfolding. Most importantly, though, it turns everything into a huge quotable thing. It makes fans of the readers. All of them, one hopes.
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Tuesday, 15 July 2014

The boy from the graveyard

Full title: M Is for Magic
Author: Neil Gaiman
Genre: Fiction, fantasy, stories
Attributes: 272 pages, hard cover
Publisher: Harper Collins; reprint edition (2007)
On the scale of Zero to One: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

This is a collection of stories by Neil Gaiman. The main ingredients are, therefore, to be expected. There’s fantasy, there’s imitation fairy-tale, there’s preternatural adventure and otherworldly quests, there are animals that talk and knights travelling to the twentieth century to sort out Arthurian problems. All of this (plus more) being the case, readers might find it close to impossible to isolate one of the texts and call it the favourite. But sometimes a reader’s got to do what a reader’s got to do. For this reader, the one with that extra something is “The Witch’s Headstone.” The longest story in this collection of republished work is also, in fact, an excerpt from the future Graveyard Book, Gaiman’s much-awarded fantasy novel of 2008. Which really makes it less re-published and more – pre-published.
Whatever the case may be, “The Witch’s Headstone” deserves a special place.
The protagonist, to start with him, is an eight-year old boy (calling him a ghost may be too much at this stage) by the name of Bod; short for Nobody – Nobody Owens. He’s, obviously, far from normal (does Coraline sound familiar?). He moves with equal ease in the world of the living as well as in the world of the dead. He lives in a necropolis of sorts, where the dead-and-buried teach him lessons about invisibility, and where he is part of a network of delightful, if quirky, Addamsian (that’s from the Addams Family, of course) characters. He comes to know a dead (but lovable) witch, Liza Hempstock, who, executed centuries ago, lies buried in the unholy ground next to the cemetery. She was put in an unmarked grave. And that’s an injustice Bod sets out to correct by ways he is incapable of handling. He goes to the nearby town to buy a headstone. And since there’s no payment he could possibly make for such an object (remember, he lives in a cemetery, among the long-deceased, who have no currency of their own), he manages to steal from a grave a precious ring, with which he hopes to pay for the headstone. The rest of the story is the narrative of Bod’s going to town and failing in his task. What causes this failure? Simple answer: human nature.

The Graveyard Book was later (2009) rearranged into a novel proper. 
Abanazer Bolger and Tom Hustings, a duo of Oliver Twist-like profiteers who eventually fall victims to their own greed, are given the narrative role of teaching Bod a few things about humankind. They imprison the boy, try to extort him of all possible treasures, threaten him with deeds of the worst criminal sorts. Once their miserable show is finished and Bod escapes, helped by none other than the witch once sentenced to death for her presumed pact with the devil, the balance of morality is readjusted. There’s this strong sense that, in this story at least, the world of the dead (the graveyard with its unsettling wickedness and its twice-told tales of death and ache) is preferable to that of the living. Moral message – check.
Fragment or not, “The Witch’s Headstone” is quite a piece of fictional work. An adventure in itself, one in which the reader grows satisfied by the very fact of their dissatisfaction, it demands a lot of readerly participation. One needs to sort out narrative puzzles, understand relationships between characters, figure out allusions, manage a lot of subtext. A paradoxical tale, one that ticks a lot of Gaimanian boxes, from pace and tempo to mood and personality: funny as well as grave, inspiring as well as heart-breaking. A story many may be inclined to call ‘complete.’ Paradoxically.
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