Friday, January 25, 2008
Idea
This book is great (both books, The Recognitions and the Andre Dubus III book). Why don't we set a date to meet and everyone has to be at page 200 by then? That way we can discuss the book in sections and not try to do it all at once, at some point in time that will never come?
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Coming Along
Finally bought The Recognitions today. Did you guys know it is like 1000 pages? As soon as I finish this book of Andre Dubus short stories I think I'll be ready to tackle it.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Shattered Thoughts (Shadoobee)
1. So far really taken by what has to be the first negative "review" (if you will) of Paris I've ever read, this deflation of Updike-style/Lieblingesque urbanitas that must have annoyed the hell out of people upon publication. I think it's Chapter II. Who hated Paris back then, really? I don't think I've ever read something so negative about it. You had these incredible dispatches via Liebling both pre-WWII and post- to an extent, before he took the A-Train to Boxiana (that's Harlem, lover; and like Eighth Ave and 57th street), the man singing praises upon praises of the place. As far as NYC literature is concerned you also had Edith Wharton comparing European wealth to the nouveau york city riches, and the latter definitely got the bad end of that licking stick. Granted I *am* being an idiot now that I realize it, that WG isn't attacking Paris but the American version of Paris, or better just the Tourist Version of Paris as this idealized seat of ne plus ultra sophistication. But then I really wonder to what extent that itself is a strawman, stuck in Wyatt's head, not necessarily reflective of Paris or even American Paris so much as Wyatt's inability to interact with the world without the mediation of art--he needs books, paintings, theories, all this stuff that's meant to approximate the world Borges-map-style because those moments of clarity, those moments of recognition, you only get seven of them in your life, seven chances to see the world as it is.
It reminds me a lot of Pi that Aronofsky film, when he looks at the sun. Can't look at the sun everyday now can you.
2. How savage--how savage--is WG toward Otto? It's a send-up of the wannabe, the 50s Harvard dabbler, the hopeless romantic, the naive countryboy in the city full of slick but ultimately vapid socialites. Can you blame me for taking some of it personally? It's difficult not to see 50s NYC as pretty much exactly the way it is now, and see outsiders like ourselves (Internet69, you're off the hook--and, if I might say so, off the chain) as cast simply by the fact of our outsiderness as Otto characters--whores on whom balls have been unfairly attached. Or maybe really I just remember my "Otto phase" we'll call it, not in it anymore thank god, maybe in some phase that's infinitely worse--but either way it aggravates the hell out of me that a bunch of fucking Beatrice Inn-type do-nothing idiots can turn Otto into such a lark, so facilely. (Still loving the part when he stops over to see Wyatt's wife, and picks up Wyatt's book, and starts saying sentences to Wyatt's wife that Wyatt himself has said to Wyatt's wife--and so completely undermining Wyatt's wife's affair. It's Wyatt's cruel prank--that he's essentially "counterfeited" himself in the personage of Otto.)
3. Which brings me to the whole idea of "writing novels" in this book, how the characters openly talk about what they're working on, how they explain how they engage in human relationships exclusively for the purpose of recounting them fictionally. How everything is very openly based not just on real life but on *their* individual lives. There are two incredible impulses here--the one to be 100% passive observer, which is impossible; the other to be, paradoxically, the "main character" of one's own life. And you can see these two impulses crippling these characters, caught inextricably in a web of both blase and melodrama. Every action in real life is put to the question: "How would this go over in a novel? How would this read?" I'm hoping someone can talk more coherently about the novel in the post-WWII era specifically as it's presented in other novels.
4. From there it makes sense why there are no quotation marks--quotations imply ownership, that *one person* said *this one exact thing*. Whereas in WG's world no one owns any words--they are public domain the second they depart the lips, they become mere undifferentiated fodder for our fictions. (We live only to write how we live.)
5. 500 pages by January 31?
It reminds me a lot of Pi that Aronofsky film, when he looks at the sun. Can't look at the sun everyday now can you.
2. How savage--how savage--is WG toward Otto? It's a send-up of the wannabe, the 50s Harvard dabbler, the hopeless romantic, the naive countryboy in the city full of slick but ultimately vapid socialites. Can you blame me for taking some of it personally? It's difficult not to see 50s NYC as pretty much exactly the way it is now, and see outsiders like ourselves (Internet69, you're off the hook--and, if I might say so, off the chain) as cast simply by the fact of our outsiderness as Otto characters--whores on whom balls have been unfairly attached. Or maybe really I just remember my "Otto phase" we'll call it, not in it anymore thank god, maybe in some phase that's infinitely worse--but either way it aggravates the hell out of me that a bunch of fucking Beatrice Inn-type do-nothing idiots can turn Otto into such a lark, so facilely. (Still loving the part when he stops over to see Wyatt's wife, and picks up Wyatt's book, and starts saying sentences to Wyatt's wife that Wyatt himself has said to Wyatt's wife--and so completely undermining Wyatt's wife's affair. It's Wyatt's cruel prank--that he's essentially "counterfeited" himself in the personage of Otto.)
3. Which brings me to the whole idea of "writing novels" in this book, how the characters openly talk about what they're working on, how they explain how they engage in human relationships exclusively for the purpose of recounting them fictionally. How everything is very openly based not just on real life but on *their* individual lives. There are two incredible impulses here--the one to be 100% passive observer, which is impossible; the other to be, paradoxically, the "main character" of one's own life. And you can see these two impulses crippling these characters, caught inextricably in a web of both blase and melodrama. Every action in real life is put to the question: "How would this go over in a novel? How would this read?" I'm hoping someone can talk more coherently about the novel in the post-WWII era specifically as it's presented in other novels.
4. From there it makes sense why there are no quotation marks--quotations imply ownership, that *one person* said *this one exact thing*. Whereas in WG's world no one owns any words--they are public domain the second they depart the lips, they become mere undifferentiated fodder for our fictions. (We live only to write how we live.)
5. 500 pages by January 31?
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Progress Report
Just finished reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. Good read. I will probably purchase the book club book pretty soon. Glad that other people are enjoying it, that is encouraging.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
The Journey Begins
On First Looking Into Gaddis's The Recognitions
Not into exactly. I am still looking at the actual book. I bought my copy, paperback, a Penguin Classic if there ever was one, brand-new at the Barnes & Noble on Court Street. It was the only WTG45 selection available. It was on a shelf like all the other books, such that all of the page edges on the top and bottom and reverse-of-spine were kept away from sunlight and the page-yellowing physical damage associated with sunlight. When I was young I had a bunch of paperbacks on my desk at my parents' house, completely ruined because they were near the window and the sun pissed them yellow, so I tend to be sensitive to these sorts of discolorations, if not actively seeking them out.
Anyway I want somebody to explain to me how the keystone of American postmodern literature can sit on a shelf, its edges nowhere near sunlight, for so long that enough sunlight has crept into the atomic-sized cracks between shelf and book to permanently yellow the tops, side, and bottom of its pages. If I needed any more motivation to read this book, now I have it.
Sure we don't want to read Faulkner?
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