I really like pulp fiction - Hammett, Robert E. Howard - even the pulpiest heroes - Doc Savage, The Shadow - can be fun.
J.M. Coetzee is one writer who I have read less of (two novels, a couple of short stories) than who I found videos on YouTube:
Daphne du Maurier interested me because I have never understood Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds". She wrote the story on which it is based.
I managed to read two Iain M. Banks's Culture novels while in prison. If you think you like science fiction, that you have read great science fiction, without reading Banks, then you are missing out. Seriously missing out.
Philip Roth at 70: Interview with David Remnick is not what what I heard on The New Yorker Radio Hour. It is more than that. Roth was one of my great discoveries while in prison. Yes, I knew about him when I was a teenager, but did not read him. I wish I had read him instead of Saul Bellow; Roth's world is far mre accessible to me than Bellows'.
sch 1/5–1/6
While in prison, I read an anthology of Russian fantasy and science fiction. I used the interlibrary loan program to get more current Russian writers; one was Victor Pelevin's A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia. What I picked up was the idea of using fantasy where social realism is insufficient to tell us about life. Why I am adding to this already too long post is that The Guardian published a long read on Pelevin: The mysterious novelist who foresaw Putin’s Russia – and then came to symbolise its moral decay.
sch 1/10
In He Got Away With Everything: Reading True Grit After the Reelection of Donald Trump (LitHub) Piers Gelly offers a reading of True Grit which is beyond anything I have read about Charles Portis' novel.
On its face, this decision to write fiction rather than journalism might seem like a turn away from reality—a reality in which, by the time he started writing True Grit, Kennedy and X and King had all been murdered. But in Portis’s writing, and in True Grit especially, I see an Oklahoma of the mind in which these convulsions are powerfully resonant. True Grit is a story about how, in times of upheaval, the mind clings to systems for safety. And in staging this psychological fact, Portis’s novel echoes a contemporary novel not typically mentioned in the same breath: The Crying of Lot 49, which was published three years earlier. What’s implicit in Portis is explicit in Pynchon: both novels, I think, are attempts to represent a mind metabolizing the upheavals and anxieties of the era.
***
Similarly, the quest at the heart of True Grit isn’t just about revenge; it’s also a quest for meaning in a world grown increasingly slippery and strange. As Mattie travels further and further into the Choctaw Nation in search of Tom Chaney, her father’s killer, the reality of True Grit begins to warp. Psychological and moral ambiguity come with the territory: beyond the borders of the United States lies a lawless land of rumor, deception, and plain old oddity. Out here, names drift. Tom Chaney’s name, we learn, might actually be Chelmsford. The villainous Permalee brothers are named Darryl, Carroll, Farrell, and Harold, which has a rather Pynchonian mouthfeel. In this context, Mattie’s theological gloss seems more and more like a desperate insistence—not an attempt to describe order but to create it.
***
The quietly anarchic possibility of this gesture, in the context of the whole, made me feel certain that Portis’s subject matter wasn’t predestination itself, but rather the tendency of the human mind to seek refuge in rigid systems, in doctrines, but to do so imperfectly, incompletely, for the mind contains doubts and contradictions that doctrines simply do not. Mattie’s hopefulness is, for me, a final act of courage—grit, even—and although we can never know that LaBoeuf did, in fact, read those pages, we can hope.
Mr. Gelly may be onto something here that applies to Portis' other novels. This conflict between systems and the contradictions that reality imposes on those systems. That I agree with him on how Trump mangles reality with his lies does not affect my opinion on this reading of True Grit.
sch 1/11
Where to start with: Zora Neale Hurston - it doe not mention any of her plays, but it does place her memoir high on the list. That is where I started with Hurston. Start, you will not mind going on.
How Zora Neale Hurston's posthumous novel was rescued from a fire and published. It may be that her biographers may need to change their views on the last decade or so of her life. This makes it sound like she never quit writing (unlike myself).
Until today, outside of a handful of scholars, the world had not seen Zora Neale Hurston's final novel, The Life of Herod The Great.
Hurston, the accomplished Black writer, folklorist and anthropologist in the Harlem Renaissance era, worked for many years on the pages to The Life of Herod the Great until she died in Fort Pierce, Fla., in 1960 at the age of 69.
In this novel, Hurston looked to redefine the legacy of Herod, who reigned as king of Judaea from 37 BCE to 4 BCE. In a 1953 letter to her editor Hurston wrote, "You have no idea the great amount of research that I have done on this man. No matter who talks about him, friend or foe, Herod is a magnificent character."
And today's reading of the Gospel touched on Herod's slaughter of the innocents. I keep saying this, Hurston is very much worth reading. That she was forgotten for so long is a blot on America's literary conscience.
Gallardo: I wanted to talk about Jan. 7 when the novel debuts, which would have been Hurston's 134th birthday. What should the world remember about Hurston?
Plant: She loved life. And she loved humanity. And everything she did, her anthropological work, her work as a novelist, dramatist, her political activism, everything was about having us see one another as different variations of divine expression … We want to remember her as a humanitarian who was courageous in her effort to have us see ourselves, whole and complete. Undiminished.
sch 1/12
5 Reasons Writing Is Important to the World
Here are five reasons writing a story is possibly the most powerful act for good you will ever accomplish in your life.
And they are good reasons. They buoyed my feelings this morning of excruciating pain and disgust.
I came to Leonard Cohen late in life. Of Federico Garcia Lorca, I read his plays in prison. I offer “In love for life”: The poet who changed Leonard Cohen’s life by Callum MacHattie to point out the strange ways inspiration pollinates creativity.
However, decades before, Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca was forging the path upon which Cohen’s lyrics would follow. Lorca was a member of the ‘Generation of ‘27’, a collection of Spanish poets in the 1920s who spearheaded a movement that showcased romance and tragedy through surrealist imagery. While Cohen’s work has carved him an individual lane in contemporary music, he has often cited Lorca’s work as deeply formative in terms of his influence: “I was fifteen when I began to read Federico Garcia Lorca. His poems perhaps have had the greatest influence on my texts. He summoned up a world where I felt at home. His images were sensual and mysterious: ‘throw a fist full of ants to the sun.’ I wanted to be able to write something like that as well”.
Until today, I never heard of Kate Braverman. That I is due to The Paris Review posting her short story Histories of the Undead. I am thinking hard about my prose for "Chasing Ashes". I like Braverman's style - it has an energy that I think mine lacks.
She remembers now, in the long mornings when Flora and Bob are gone, that she always detested fragments. Or more accurately, the need to order them, to invent a spine, a progression, a curve that resolves.
The Paris Review also posted a link to Kate Braverman Is Dead by Leah Mensch. I like Ms. Mensch's prose, too.
In the photo, she stands in front of a shop window, naturally disinterested. “Beverly Hills,” the sign reads. It’s one of the only shots I’ve ever seen where she looks relaxed, her hands in her pockets. She wears a skirt long over her knees, pulled up to her waist, fastened with a belt. She’s thin, but her cheeks are full. She’s just published her first book of poetry, Milk Run, and her debut was a success: her friends at Momentum Press had underestimated the print demand. Open, all open the places. Never mind that she’s going to walk home through a dark and filthy LA alleyway. Never mind that afterward, she’ll heat speed over an open flame, because the world, for the first time, has made space for her. Los Angeles’s streets overflow with art and literature, and her mind, full of sex and rage and sprawling sentences, is not only tolerated, but, at last, celebrated. “She has,” a critic wrote, “come to a place on the narrow landscape of American poetry where her art and talents cannot be denied.”
For the next forty years, she’ll struggle to fit more than an arm and the backside of her torso into this space. She’ll try everything: Prozac, Lithium, hiding her breasts, pulling her shirt over her head on the Venice boardwalk. Her future efforts will be deemed too desperate, too ambitious, her fiction’s protagonists — double-fisting a syringe and a pen, leaving men behind, gasping for air — too intense and severe. Her rage and her obstinacy, which will drive her work, will trap her, too. “Girl child of the already decomposing streets of Los Angeles,” she’ll later call this 1977 self, with all her bursting naiveté.
From what I read about Braverman, another American writer ignored by America.
So much of her work was born from this: her desire to make a man sit down. Across four decades, she would publish twelve books — poems and short stories, novels and a memoir — all of which are populated with unorthodox women. A revulsion toward conventional womanhood drives the rage in her writing. Womanhood should, she believed, confer outlaw status; it should encompass everything from single motherhood to murder, creation to destruction, the full alphabet of human possibility. Central to her narratives are characters with addictions or criminal records, or who court instability — people who, like herself, have a penchant for danger, a penchant for pain. Sex, pain intermingling with pleasure, were regular subjects. Intimacy and sentimentality were not: “you never understood this man / or why you need him,” she wrote. “Surely another could have tied your wrists / and made your hidden parts open, glistening.” Elsewhere, she wrote about rejecting men’s company altogether: “by choice I sleep alone.”
And people wonder why women got angry at us men:
Like Palm Latitudes, Squandering the Blue failed to satisfy the publishing world. Though some of Braverman’s female contemporaries, like Kathy Acker and Mary Gaitskill, were gaining momentum, the ‘80s were still largely dedicated to literary men. “If I were male,” Braverman said, “[the writing] would be normal. But good girls don’t write about drugs, single motherhood, and rage.” That she had deliberately rejected fluency in the publishing industry’s language, choosing instead to stand on her own power and intellect, was a point of pride. She’d expected some reward for it, but instead — perhaps because of some convergence of her subject matter, her womanhood, and her temperament — Braverman struggled to regain a foothold. And it made her angry. Angry that she’d been left behind by the Ackers and Gaitskills, that she’d been rejected by their publishers. Angrier still that men like Bukowski, who was then publishing about a book a year, were celebrated and revered for their writing about addiction. Bukowski also, around this time, gave an on-camera interview during which he kicked his soon-to-be wife and called her a whore.
I sit here amazed by her story.
sch 1/13
Back in the archive, I posted about Lincoln Michel inveighing against novels slavishly imitating film. He posted a link to an earlier entry in this discussion, Your Novel Should Be More Like Moby-Dick. When I was filling the holes in my literary education during my prison stay, I began noticing the differences between Nineteenth Century novels and those of the Twentieth Century. I put this down to film coming into its own after 1915. Check out the difference between Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and James Jones's From Here to Eternity - in terms of themes, but as to the visuals contained in the stories. Jones's novel was filmed much more easily than ever has been the case of War and Peace. Hemingway and Hammett are much easier adapted to film.
The obsession with plot movement rendered through televisual scenes at the expense of other pleasures seems a very modern and very American attitude. I have to imagine much of it comes from the domination of Hollywood in American culture, which has passed down many “rules” of storytelling to other mediums. While I don’t necessarily agree with those rules for filmmaking anyway, they’re bizarre to apply to novels. Many of the film and TV rules for storytelling have to do with the basic constraints of filmmaking. Primarily, it costs a lot of money. And film is a visual medium where story is conveyed by actors moving and talking. But novels are not bound by production costs, fitting in commercial breaks, or the need to convey story only through actors’ actions and dialogue.
A novel should lean into the pleasures and possibilities of a novel, I say. The novel is an explosive, expansive, and exuberant form. It can encompass anything. Certainly early novels like Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy knew this, as did modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Such writers leaned into the varied possibilities of fiction and were always willing, even eager, to shift form and style.
sch 1/14
