What's Crazy and What Makes Sense?

 I need to get back to my fiction. I need to get onto the other stories, but the novel "Love Stinks" needs work. My typist disappeared from the scene and with her a bunch of my text. But I am still reading and thinking.

KH finds "Road Tripping" too bizarre, and he is not so fond of "Love Stinks," either. The first is not told in a realistic fashion - albeit, I think realism is a bit more than journalism.

When I was younger, I gave up writing when I could not figure out how to adapt William Faulkner to Indiana. That there was anything to write about Indiana, I learned only after reading Joyce Carol Oates' When We Were the Mulvaneys and Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books. Reading Gray and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, taught me there were other ways of writing fiction than Hemingway or Faulkner or Fitzgerald, or even Kurt Vonnegut.

Which is why I read and want to point out writers who are exploring what they can do with words - unlike me, who just gave up - with the hope they will inspire others.

Bardskull by Martin Shaw review – a mystical voyage:

It may be easier to say what Bardskull is not. It’s not a memoir. It’s not poetry. It’s not a compendium of myths and ancient wisdom. It is, rather, all of these things, plus some faux-naive drawings, loosely structured around an autofictional account of several journeys that oral storyteller Martin Shaw seems to have undertaken on Dartmoor over the course of 101 days, a kind of wilderness journey. Or in Shaw-speak: “I walked out one summer morning and barely ceased till St George’s Day of the next year … These are words from the rough, from the stomp. Things hurtled through me, old things. I am not the same.”

There is certainly a tremendous urgency to the account. “I know we are moving fast here,” writes Shaw. “But this mad jumble is where I live. I abide in a place where a Greek hero will resemble my mother at the same moment magical sows from Welsh myth glower through the rain.” We get occasional glimpses of real, live other people – “Tony of Scorriton says you can’t trust cider without some cow shit in it, scudding around at the bottom of the glass” – but essentially this is a deep descent into Shaw’s inner self, into the murk of memory and ideas and reflections, mixed and blended into a kind of thick mystical soup.

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey review – who is this mysterious artist?:

Celebrated for her novels, her art installations and her musical collaborations with David Bowie, Tom Waits and Tony Visconti, the artist known as X was, until her death in 1996, one of the more enigmatic cultural figures of the 20th century. She always refused to confirm her place or date of birth, and after she took the pseudonym “X” in 1982, it was never clear which if any of her previous identities – Dorothy Eagle, Clyde Hill, Caroline Walker, Bee Converse – corresponded to her actual name. This is a biography drawing on X’s archives and a range of interviews with the people closest to her, joining the dots about her background and exploring her difficult relationship with contemporary America. And it is, like X herself, entirely a work of fiction.

Catherine Lacey, the author of this haunting, genre-bending novel, has form investigating characters with mysterious identities. Her previous book, Pew, was a gothic fable set in America’s Bible belt, narrated by an unnamed protagonist whose race, gender and age are never established. Pew, so nicknamed because they are discovered sleeping in a church, mirrors the anxieties and fractures of the world they turn up in – a world that becomes progressively weirder as we read the novel.

Though it is structured in a similar way and drawn to the same themes, Biography of X is a stranger, more ambitious and more accomplished book. The conceit is that the book’s actual author is CM Lucca, X’s widow. Annoyed by the publication of an inaccurate biography of her late wife, Lucca has resolved to set the record straight. Complete with extensive bibliography, photographs, footnotes, images of X’s books and art, and even front matter that attributes the copyright to CM Lucca, 2005, Biography of X is presented to the reader as a simulacrum of a nonfiction work. This is an enchantingly strange proposition and, like Pew, it only gets stranger.

 If we think we cannot make something out of the Midwest, what to make of I felt a deep desire to escape’: Natasha Carthew on Cornish beauty and brutality, which did make me see touchpoints with life in Indiana.

Now to get through to my own crazy thing.

sch 4/2