Category Archives: reading

Dave Hickey’s prose

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Some writers have mastered the undefinable something that sucks the reader right in, even into subject areas that don’t seem like they’d be enticing. Today’s case in point is Dave Hickey’s “The Song in Country Music” in the seemingly bottomless Marcus/Sollors A New Literary History of America. The piece is mostly about Hank Williams‘s prosody, but along the way you’re exposed to a passel of vividness, a blast of James Agee cross-pollinated with Lester Bangs. Maud Newton quotes one section and Justin Hamm has another, but here’s the one that brought me up short and sent me off to Amazon to order more of Dave Hickey’s writing:

(Hank Williams) was country music’s first auteur. He had grown up in what Nashville musicians called the “trash gypsy” culture of the Alabama woods, with a shell-shocked father and a predatory mother, in a world without electricity, plumbing, or pavement, personally beleaguered by bottomless need, a profound sense of social inadequacy, a predisposition to drink, and a genetic intolerance for alcohol. Georgiana, Alabama existed somewhere below the fuzzy cloud line of Southern culture and outside the cozy realm of country community. It was a place for which the traditional longing and nostalgia of country music was some kind of terrible joke…

and one more bit, further down the same page:

For the kids out of the hills and woods, who had never seen an elevator, Williams’s success remained the stuff of dreams. If you could do just a tenth as well as Williams had, they thought, if you could just move up from destitution to poverty, rich and famous could go to hell. For the Dixie greasers who were Williams’s own kinsmen, the young Icarii on their motorcycles, Williams’s life only proved the Calvinism in their bones. Flem Snopes’s account book must be balanced: Every act of creativity must be followed by an equal and opposite act of wanton destruction.”… (pg. 844)

Frost, ya say?

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I’m making my way slowly through the Marcus and Sollors A New Literary History of America, savoring the articles in chronological order, and visiting territories I had no idea I’d find interesting. This morning it’s Christian Wiman’s “1915: Robert Frost leaves England for America” in which I find this lovingly constructed meditation on the essences of Nacirema culture:

One of the great ironies of American literature is that in a country in which, some new survey always seems to say, 95 percent of the people don’t simply believe in a personal God but can count the whiskers on his chin, so much of our best work should be so consistently fraught with anxious unbelief, galvanizing absence, spiritual terror… a spiritual energy that is both passion and plight, a metaphysical compulsion as fervid as it is unfixed. But this is perhaps not so surprising, since if one American impulse is toward a kind of spiritual vertigo, an equally strong one is the impulse to disguise this feeling with optimistic personae and evangelical enthusiasm. So much of American literature is about buried intensities because so much of American life is a mask. (pg. 537)

Current reading

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I’ve found Daniel Suarez’ Daemon pretty satisfying on several levels, not the least of which are the stoking of my schadenfreudian and conspiracy-detecting proclivities. Suarez (who has been taken seriously by a lot of smart people) seems to get a lot of things about the world as it seems-to-be-going right enough to raise the hairs on the back of the neck every few pages, and here and there he comes through with bits of insight that link domains in novel ways. One case in point mixes digital geekery with mythology and folklore:

The mythmakers… were the ones who invented rhyme and meter –the programming language for human memory in preliterary civilizations. It was a cultural checksum –a mnemonic device. You couldn’t fuck with the code or the rhymes didn’t work; and if the rhymes didn’t work, people noticed. And so the knowledge of a people was passed down intact. It was a shamanic code. If you fucked with the code, then society lost its collective mind. (pg 600)

And so, having finished Daemon, I’ve ordered its just-published sequel Freedom, and confidently expect it to be as gripping and prescient.

Did Gertrude Stein invent the Web?

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I’ve been reading the Marcus and Sollors A New Literary History of America article by article, and this morning came athwart Daniel Albright’s on Gertrude Stein (“1903: Gertrude Stein moves to Paris, and neither is ever the same again”), in which is quoted this bit from Stein’s Three Lives:

…there was a constant recurring and beginning there was a marked direction in the direction of being in the present although naturally I had been accustomed to past present and future, and why, because the composition forming around me was a prolonged present… I created then a prolonged present naturally I knew nothing of a continuous present but it came naturally to me to make one.

Hmmm, I thought, how very like the Web in which we live more than a century later.

Albright ends his article with this food for thought, quoting an unknown-to-me

peculiar piece from Jonathan Swift called A Compleat Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation (1738), full of passages such as this:

Neverout. Miss, what spells b double uzzard?
Miss. Buzzard in your teeth, Mr. Neverout.
Lady Smart. Now you are up, Mr. Neverout, will you do the the favour to do me the kindness to take off the tea-kettle?
Lord Sparkish. I wonder what makes these bells ring.

If Gertrude Stein had never been born, this would seem a freakish and incomprehensible text. It still seems freakish and incomprehensible, but as an anticipation of Stein it is made familiar, assimilated into a canon that she caused to exist.

Hmmm, I thought again, how very like the Web in which we live more than a century later…

Cory on Paige M. Gutenborg

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Cory Doctorow’s half-formed thoughts on one future for bookselling in this morning’s BoingBoing are worth a closer look if you’ve just clicked past the posting without reading it. He mentions the Harvard Bookstore’s Espresso book printer, which I visited and patronized myself a few weeks ago:
Paige M. Gutenborg
…but it’s what he says about its implementation that caught my eye:

At the Harvard Bookstore, they have someone who spends the day mousing around on Google Book Search, looking for weird and cool titles in the public domain to print and shelve around the store, as suggestions for the sort of thing you might have printed for yourself. This is a purely curatorial role, the classic thing that a great retailer does, and it’s one of the most exciting bookstore sections I’ve browsed in years. And even so, there’s lots of room for improvement: Google Books produces the blandest, most boring covers for its PD books, and there’s plenty of room for stores to add value with their own covers, with customer-supplied covers (the gift possibilities are bottomless), and so on. I can even imagine the profs across the street producing annotated versions — say, a treatise on Alice in Wonderland with reproductions of ten different editions’ illustrations and selling them through the store’s printer and shelf-space, restoring the ancient bookseller/book-publisher role.

Cantwell continued

I’m continuing to read Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good: The Folk Revival, and still experiencing, in about equal measure, dissonance of the loathed and the admired: too-frequent overblown PostModernist claptrap, but mixed with really astute observation. Here’s a nice bit of analysis, replete with apposite coinage and illuminating simile:

Culturally, the banjo was an enigma, having been thrust out of a series of social niches through associations that had themselves become indefinable: abandoned by black culture, which reconstructed it from an African progenitor, forsaken by the Gilded Age parlor society in which it had a brief vogue, repudiated by jazz as jazz moved uptown –it was the instrument that history left behind. To take it up, as [Pete] Seeger had, was a gesture at once disarmingly candid and hauntingly emblematic, a fundamentally comic piece of cultural scavengery that like a clown’s broken umbrella solicits ordinary good will in conventional terms as it also legislates some independence of norms and conventions. (pg. 245)

T.S. Spivet

Intrigued by Christopher Lydon’s interview with author Reif Larsen (a 45-minute podcast), I asked the nice folks at Amazon to slip The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet onto a brown truck and hey presto it arrived yesterday. I’ll bet that you’ll do something similar once you’ve visited the book’s Web site, though some might be deterred by the last sentence of Philip Marchand’s review:

Like the Smithsonian, the novel is full of acquired curiosities whose significance and place in a larger order is very hard to figure out.

Yes, well, some of us think life’s a bit like that. And some of us (but not all of us) really relish the figuring. Probably the same people who relish Codex Seraphinianus (explore some images)

Cyberabad

Ian McDonald’s River of Gods has sat on the shelf for a couple of years, awaiting its turn as Book of the Moment. It’s too big for bathtub reading (nearly 600 pages) and too heavy to carry in my Wednesday evening bag (when I often read for an hour after a yoga class in Brunswick), but I’ve been reading the sequel Cyberabad Days lately, and when that’s done I expect I’ll take up River of Gods. Both are set in the India of 2047, so they’re speculative fiction, or maybe sci-fi. The world they inhabit is entirely believable, if one is into believing in future worlds: they are credible extrapolations from the present, alive with slang and bits of technology that just make sense even if they don’t really exist right now. And the Indian setting gives them a fascinating flavo[u]r of their own, easy to imagine that one understands kinda sorta, even if some of the details are a bit hazy –like, just what IS a djinn anyway? Are they imaginary beings, or might they just as well be seen as Real to those whose Imaginations are appropriately constructed? Here’s a bit to whet appetites:

Now there is a new race jostling for space in their city: the aeais [AIs, right?]. If the djinns are the creation of fire and men of clay, these are the creation of word. Fifty million of them swarm Delhi’s boulevards and chowks: routing traffic, trading shares, maintaining power and water, answering inquiries, telling fortunes, managing calendars and diaries, handling routine legal and medical matters, performing in soap operas, sifting the septillion pieces of information streaming through Delhi’s nervous system each second. the city is a great mantra. From routers and maintenance robots with little more than animal intelligence (each animal has intelligence enough: ask the eagle or the tiger) to the great Level 2.9s that are indistinguishable from a human being ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent of the time: they are a young race, an energetic race, fresh to this world and enthusiastic, understanding little of their power… (pg 168)

Berrian addendum

About halfway through Berry’s essay one comes upon this perhaps-puzzling sentence:

The present scientific quest for odourless hog manure should give us sufficient proof that the specialist is no longer with us.

I reckon that this is an allusion to Chic Sale’s Lem Putt, introduced to the world in The Specialist (1929), a classic that should be better known. If it’s new to you, the whole text (including William Kermode’s illustrations) is available, and it won’t take you 10 minutes to read her. The first paragraph may convince you that you should:

YOU’VE heard a lot of pratin’ and prattlin’ about this bein’ the age of specialization. I’m a carpenter by trade. At one time I could of built a house, barn, church, or chicken coop. But I seen the need of a specialist in my line, so I studied her. I got her, she’s mine. Gentlemen, you are face to face with the champion privy builder of Sangamon County.

The book is full of Berryesque advice, grounded in good rural precedent and practice:

No, sir, I sez, put her in a straight line with the house and, if it’s all the same to you have her go past the woodpile. I’ll tell you why.

Take a woman, fer instance — out she goes. On the way she’ll gather five sticks of wood, and the average woman will make four or five trips a day. There’s twenty sticks in the wood box without any trouble. On the other hand, take a timid woman: if she sees any men folks around, she’s too bashful to go direct out so she’ll go to the woodpile, pick up the wood, go back to the house and watch her chance. The average timid woman — especially a new hired girl — I’ve knowed to make as many as ten trips to the woodpile before she goes in, regardless. On a good day you’ll have the wood box filled by noon, and right there is a savin’ of time.

“Now, about the diggin’ of her. You can’t be too careful about that,” I sez; “dig her deep and dig her wide. It’s a mighty sight better to have a little privy over a big hole than a big privy over a little hole. Another thing; when you dig her deep you’ve got ‘er dug; and you ain’t got that disconcertin’ thought stealin’ over you that sooner or later you’ll have to dig again.

“And when it comes to construction,” I sez, “I can give you joists or beams. Joists make a good job. Beams cost a bit more, but they’re worth it. Beams, you might say, will last forever. ‘Course I could give you joists, but take your Aunt Emmy: she ain’t gettin’ a mite lighter. Some day she might be out there when them joists give way and there she’d be — catched. Another thing you’ve go to figger on, Elmer,” I sez, “is that Odd Fellows picnic in the fall. Them boys is goin’ to get in there in four and sixes, singin’ and drinkin’ and the like, and I want to tell you there’s nothin’ breaks up an Odd Fellows picnic quicker than a diggin’ party. Beams, I say, every time, and rest secure.

See? Classic, like I said. And I’ll bet that Wendell Berry knows all about Lem Putt –see the Humanure page.

Today’s hortatory fanfare

Wendell Berry’s writing surely exemplifies the phrase “clarion call”, though I’ve often felt that it’s just not possible to live up to his level of ecological and economic rectitude. Still, there’s often a shiver of Right On! as I read his commentaries on what we’re missing through inattention. Today Tim O’Reilly links to Berry’s essay In Distrust of Movements (2000) and I’ll quote my favorite bits:

…I must declare my dissatisfaction with movements to promote soil conservation or clean water or clean air or wilderness preservation or sustainable agriculture or community health or the welfare of children. Worthy as these and other goals may be, they cannot be achieved alone. I am dissatisfied with such efforts because they are too specialized, they are not comprehensive enough, they are not radical enough, they virtually predict their own failure by implying that we can remedy or control effects while leaving causes in place. Ultimately, I think, they are insincere; they propose that the trouble is caused by other people; they would like to change policy but not behaviour…

We are involved now in a profound failure of imagination. Most of us cannot imagine the wheat beyond the bread, or the farmer beyond the wheat, or the farm beyond the farmer, or the history beyond the farm. Most people cannot imagine the forest and the forest economy that produced their houses and furniture and paper; or the landscapes, the streams and the weather that fill their pitchers and bathtubs and swimming pools with water. Most people appear to assume that when they have paid their money for these things they have entirely met their obligations.