Writing space

February 22, 2007 By in Life, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Inspired by BlogLily, I took a picture of where I write. Unlike some, I haven’t cleaned up, so you’re seeing my desk au natural. Just to the left of my PowerBook is a stack of six books waiting to be written about and a few recent copies of The New Yorker, which further add to the chaos.

workspace2

While at Kate’s, I also noticed her typewriter post and sent her this e-mail (edited slightly):

I’m a bit younger than you and so do not remember a time without computers, and while I love the convenience of computers I also like the thrack-thrack-thrack typewriter noises and the key sensation. Some computer keyboards offered a similar tactile experience: the old-school IBM Model M and Apple Extended Keyboard II.

Both these have been replaced by soft-key keyboards, although independent companies have resurrected the older style. On the Windows side a Kentucky company sells the Customizer, and on the Mac side a Canadian company sells the Matias Tactile Pro. Like you, I also use a PowerBook, and I bought one of the (original) Tactile Pros and love it. The keyboard is ludicrously expensive, to be sure, and the noise annoys others if they have to share the same space, but it comes as close as you can get to the typewriter.

You can see the white Tactile Pro at the bottom of my desk.

EDIT: Things have changed since this was posted—see the new setup here.

About Alice

February 20, 2007 By in Books, Life

Calvin Trillin discussed his new book About Alice on January 31, although the book is almost identical to a magazine article published in The New Yorker last March. I read both and didn’t immediately detect any of the differences in the book. It is probably the most moving piece of short nonfiction I’ve read, and dealt honestly and cleanly with a subject that could easily have descended in sentimentality, and would have in lesser hands but never did in his. The large crowd came because of that, and when I say large I mean it: I arrived just before Trillin started speaking and had to wedge myself between some bookcases toward the back of the reading area at the University Book Store.

Instead of jumping right into About Alice, Trillin first read some other pieces where she played a starring role; before he discussed Alice as she passed he discussed Alice as she lived, but the questions focused on his new book. I started. In About Alice, Trillin says that he met Alice when she was engaged—well, apparently just a few weeks from being married—so I asked if he’d still knew the guy or if he knew whether the guy’s reaction to About Alice. His answer—all one word of it—made the crowd crack up: “No.” But the crowd was already in a good mood, and I wonder how many standup comedians have so appreciative a group.

Some of their goodwill must have come from the way Trillin mixed genuine feeling with humor, since the latter is so often bound up with cynicism or cruel irony. Hearing something different is startling, and from About Alice and other books one can hear and feel how Trillin feels about Alice. I could even hear it in his discussion, and this is a greater accomplishment than it seems because Trillin talks almost in a monotone and relies primarily on words for his delivery.

A few people asked questions that seemed like they were out of advice columns lite; one woman asked about whether Trillin found closure and the like, as though his writing is just a version of therapy, while another asked how Trillin “transubstantiates” everyday experience into writing. In other words, he was asking how to be funny. Trillin was patient with them, as I guess authors have to be, though he did seem to poke a little bit and gently at some questions—after all, he makes humor out of life. It was very much worth hearing him—even if it meant being stuck between bookcases.

The Sea

February 15, 2007 By in Books

It is not clear what we should take from The Sea, John Banville’s brooding novel about an old man looking over his life, its early parts, and his early awakening. He apparently did not use well whatever knowledge he gained through his early loves, at least based on his sometimes harsh assessment of his daughter’s life. I say harsh because his voice and tone are tinged with disappointment, but his views are not expressed harshly because he understands his daughter and why she made the choices she did, but because he recognizes his own failures in her.

Parts sing, but they cannot carry the whole, as even when they do sing they also lose the melody:

She is in my memory her own avatar. Which is the more real, the woman reclining on the grassy bank of my recollections, or the strew of dust and dried marrow that is all the earth retains of her? No doubt for others elsewhere she persists, a moving figure in the waxworks of memory, but their version will be different from mine, and from each other’s. Thus in the minds of the many does the one ramify and disperse. It does not last, it cannot, it is not immortality. We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations. I remember Anna, our daughter Claire will remember Anna and remember me, then Claire will be gone and there will be those who remember her but not us, and that will be our final dissolution. True, there will be something of us that will remain, a fading photograph, a lock of hair, a few fingerprints, […] yet none of this will be us, what we are and were, but only the dust of the dead.

Morbid, but accurate, even if two things ring false: the “grassy bank of my recollection” is a ridiculous metaphor because there is nothing about recollections that imply a grassy bank or anything like it, and also the word “ramify”, which, though I know what it means, stuck out as a word used more because it sounds literary in an intimidating and exclusive fashion than because it is appropriate. Here it distracts from the narrative—demonstrating why it is so seldom used.

Oh, and aside from the writing, it would also be nice if The Sea were at least a little bit funny. It’s hard to be ceaselessly grim about someone who, despite being bent by regret—and possibly criminal alliteration—lived reasonably well. Do we have a right to demand heroic events and achievements? Obviously not, but it’s hard to see tragedy through Banville’s novel, though that seems his target.

I wonder if the current big deal European literature obsession with the past is actually a large trend or just most obvious in Booker winners. I’m tempted to make facile generalizations on the basis of a small subset of prize-winning works that most of the U.K. probably hasn’t read and probably hasn’t even heard of, but I’ll avoid that in favor of raising the question and then not exploring the answers to it.

At least one novel I have read, however, takes what The Sea aims for and hits the mark. Contrast it with Ian McEwan’s Atonement, a much better book dealing with similar themes but told from the perspectives of people living their lives, and the former shrivels away. Atonement deserves its big prize, as its metaphors do not strain and its language does not ascend to heights before falling off them because it’s too heavily encumbered.

Martin Amis in Seattle

February 7, 2007 By in Books, What Was Said

Martin Amis spoke at Town Hall in Seattle on January 26 about his new book, House of Meetings. The talk itself was much smoother than the novel, as the book’s structure confused rather than enlightened. Where and when was the action taking place? How did it link together with each event? If House of Meetings becomes a classic—an unlikely but possible scenario—someone will no doubt rearrange it chronologically in an attempt to see more of it.

Despite the book’s faults, Amis was an excellent reader: a strong voice that didn’t overwhelm and a cadence that seemed appropriate to the work and questions. He had an odd habit of sometimes skipping words or sentences, and I’m not sure why he did, unless it was to amuse himself or slightly confuse the audience. Several times he also replaced words in ways that substantially changed meaning—for example, he once used “black” in place of “slave,” when the latter referred to a character in the Gulag.

Two people asked ridiculous questions: one whether Amis would ever write about the United States, the other about Amis’ “creative process.” The first has the sense to be embarrassed when Amis answered that he had lived in the U.S., set part of at least two novels in it and all of at least two more.

The best line came when he described life: “You’re starring in a very crude, irresponsible, and, above all, low budget, horror film.”
It’s very funny but also serious and apt, like many of his novels. At this point and at several others I had the sense of deep waters churning, but that I could not perceive their depths. Another perceptive comment was on the modern novel, when he suggested that when a writer finds a difficulty, the writer name the difficulty itself. Seems like an unfortunate trick if you leave the dilemma in the text.

After the reading when Amis signed my books, he mentioned that he has a 20-year-old son named Jacob; I should have asked if his son was going to take over the family pub—a reference to Money, in which Martin Amis the character comments on whether he inherited the writing business—but wasn’t quick enough on my feet. Whether he would’ve laughed or wanted to garrote me I don’t know.

I did arrive having read only half the novel, and as I continued I felt somehow let down. There are sentences and even paragraphs of beauty amid the wasteland. What is this slight novel trying to say? Perhaps that the world itself is fragmentary, and all the moreso when the state turns against its people and intentionally tries to rip all social connections apart. Amis is appropriate hard on the Russia of Stalin’s era while simultaneously realizing that today’s Russia under Putin is merely following the rhythm that even Stalin did not start.Clearly Amis also saw much of Dostoevsky, and some of the humor in House of Meeting he sees going back to that author—whose only virtue, according to Amis, is that he’s a genius, and not precisely as a writer. It was a point I would have liked to follow up, but couldn’t, and in Amis’ novel I can see those perfect few sentences that are imperfectly developed into a larger idea that would help round out the characters: “‘Closure’: ech, if I so much as whisper it or mouth it I feel myself transformed into a white-coated, fat-necked peanut in a mall-style consulting room. Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition.” (Italics in original.) It’s an appropriate rebuke to the unfortunate confessional aspects of Western culture, which embraces the possibility of something that isn’t always there.Given all this, the lavish praise in blurbs for House of Meetings somewhat puzzles me: the characters, save for the protagonist, are absent, and they seem victims of history. All of my comments may be violating one of John Updike’s rules about book reviewing: do not criticize the author for what he has not attempted to do. Is difficulty in reading a requirement for literary praise? It rings hollow. There is House of Meetings, the text itself, which I finished and for which I feel nothing, like a woman who I know, intellectually, that I should find attractive and yet don’t. Money was disgusting and amazing; House of Meetings leaves the faint taste of a life twisted by the state and, sadly, a reader twisted by the author. I wish it were otherwise.

Life

January 31, 2007 By in Books, Life, What Was Said

“This is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Good-night.”

—Robertson Davies, The Cunning Man

Martin Amis

January 20, 2007 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , ,

The New York Times loves Martin Amis’ new novel, House of Meetings, which rather heartens me because I agree with Kakutani’s low assessment of his last few novels. But his best stuff—and here I’m thinking of Money, mentioned in my comments about The Player—cements his reputation, and even his worst is at least serious. Next Friday he’ll be in Seattle. In the meantime, enjoy this Q&A. Sample:

The phrase “horrorism”, which you invented to describe 9/11, is unintentionally hilarious. Have you got any more? JONATHAN BROOKS, by email

Yes, I have. Here’s a good one (though I can hardly claim it as my own): the phrase is “fuck off”.

And:

How do you think you might have ended up spending your working life if your father hadn’t been a famous writer? JOHN GORDON, Eastleigh

Well, John, that would depend on what my father had chosen to do instead. If he had been a postman, then I would have been a postman. If he had been a travel agent, then I would have been a travel agent. Do you get the idea?

There are serious answers too, though all of them have at least something comic about them, which, as Robertson Davies does, should be distinguished from funny or silly.

Random reading

December 31, 2006 By in Books, Life

The reading lately has been eclectic: a family member gave me The Rejection Collection, an excellent and hilarious book of frequently contrarian cartoons. I picked up Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising from the library, where it was swiftly returned when I finished it; the style is straight from a poorly written technical manual on human emotion and idiocy in war, but a post on some of the interesting aspects of it 20 years after its first publication will be forthcoming. I can only hope that admitting reading it won’t kill my credibility.

Then there were two melancholy and elegiac Big Fiction works from Britain: The Sea and Atonement, neither of which need much introduction given their fame, prizes and praise.

Finally, I also checked out George Trow’s Within the Context of No Context after reading about it in The New Yorker. The essay itself certainly doesn’t have any context: aside from decrying the depravations of pop culture and lamenting some form of old order, I’m not sure what it was about. If the world doesn’t make sense anymore—a point I’m not about to take sides on—that’s no reason to imitate one’s view of the world in writing.

Oh, and television is bad—very, very bad. That much was evident. What’s good? That wasn’t so evident, but I guess we need context to find it. Perhaps context is good. It might be. It’s hard to tell from this essay. Getting it from the library was also a wise choice.

I’m going on a trip shortly and will probably start Robert Fagles’ translation of The Odyssey after. Reading it is supposed to be an odyssey in and of itself. I hope it’s a worthwhile one.

The Quiet American

December 31, 2006 By in Books

This should be required reading for anyone involved in Iraq—its lessons about the problems of idealism and nation-building continue to go unheeded, as does its larger message about what most people really value. Here’s a clue: it isn’t abstract ideals, but rather the self, perhaps the family, and maybe the tribe. Everything else is at best of secondary importance, except as it relates to and affects those concentric circles.

But let’s back up some: Fowler, a cynical journalist—is there any other kind?—covers the disintegrating country of Vietnam with one hand on the bottle and another on a native girl, whose hands are occupied with the obvious, his wallet, and his opium pipe. Contrasted with him is Pyle, an American convinced he’s found the solution to intractable political and historical problems through the worship of an idea. Implementing the idea and hence solution is the hard part, but with enough fortitude and adherence to the greater good while allowing gritty compromises, Pyle believes he can arrive at the solution. History gives us the answer as to whether Pyle’s beliefs are accurate.

Despite their apparent positions, Fowler’s cynicism prevents him from being co-opted and morally compromised, while Pyle’s idealism and his desire to do good by choosing the right side ultimately makes him complicit in a crime far worse than anything Fowler could have imagined. And yet, like many writers, I fall into the same trap as Pyle in the first sentence of this entry by prescribing solutions based on books of ideas that may or may not have any relevance to the situation I’m trying to apply them to. For me to hold The Quiet Ameican up as an example of what we should be doing isn’t so different from Pyle’s zealous adherence to the fictional York Harding.

The plot itself has its own turns, and combines aspects of hopeless love stories, political thrillers, and buddy novels. Although not explicitly about spy novels, The Quiet American also has all the elements Jerome Weeks identified in his post I Spy: The story of betrayal, of brutalization, and of sacrifice. In a later post he adds the persistence of history. The Quiet American doesn’t explicitly have much of the latter, however much it hangs in the subtext, but I’m sure its about successors about the direct American experience do, and I’m sure whatever literature emerges from Iraq will too.

I’m not the only one who noticed the importance of The Quiet American. Roger Cohen uses it for his lead in “Some Lessons for U.S. in Vietnam and Iraq Parallels”, a Dec. 2, 2006 article only available to subscribers. Frank Rich mentioned it in his September 24, 2006 column. The book is remembered—but evidently not by current decision makers. Too bad. The Quiet American is “about” Vietnam, but it might as well be about Iraq, or any number of other well-meaning failed efforts.