A Year in Reading

My daughter just whacked me in my head with a flashlight while she was shining it into my ear. I asked her what she saw and she said, "Whiskers." Ok, so I better trim those. Then she was gone, off in her wobbly run, a wild circle of light racing on the ceiling behind her.

In this post, I remember the books that have cracked their spines in my hands this year and offered up their various wares. I often think that I don't read enough, that I should try harder, stay up later, not watch that movie. But I suppose I've managed quite a bit, a great deal perhaps, reading squeezed in minutes here, a lunch hour there. There's never a moment in my life now where a book is not within reach. Strange to consider that since I stayed away for so long. Many of these books were read earlier in the year when I wasn't so novel-steeped and time-shorn. A surprising number of them started and abandoned. This happens quite a bit and I've denoted those in the list with an asterisk. Double asterisks means that I didn't get far at all, less than 10 pages usually. My patience wanes as responsibilities increase - or perhaps it's merely the fact that now I possess a recognition of the limits to my time here. Children do that to a person. The titles in italics are ones that I'm still working through and the ones rendered boldly were read multiple times cover to cover.

Anon, then, to the list, in no particular order:

William Gass

• On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry


• Fiction and the Figures of Life

John Gardner

• On Moral Fiction


• On Becoming a Novelist


• The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers

Harold Bloom

• A Map of Misreading


• Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine


• Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?


• Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages


• The Book of J


• The Western Canon


• Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human


• How to Read and Why


• Ruin the Sacred Truths : Poetry & Belief from the Bible to the Present


• Omens of the Millenium


• Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds

Leslie Garrett

• Beasts, The

Frederick Seidel

• Frederick Seidel: Poems 1959-2009*

Jhumpa Lahiri

• Interpreter of Maladies*

Sam Pink

• I Am Going to Clone Myself Then Kill the Clone and Eat It

Roberto Bolano

• 2666

Vladimir Nabakov

• Lolita


• Pale Fire


• Bend Sinister

William Kennedy

• Ironweed*

Sylvia Plath

• Sylvia Plath: The Collected Poems

Jeffrey Lent

• A Peculiar Grace**


• Lost Nation


• In the Fall*

Charles Fort

• The Complete Books of Charles Fort

Henry Bettenson

• Documents of the Christian Church*

Joseph Young

• Easter Rabbit

Junot Diaz

• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao**

Philip Roth

• The Human Stain*

David Mitchell

• Cloud Atlas*

China Mieville

• The City & The City

Ernest Hemingway

• The Old Man and the Sea


• For Whom the Bell Tolls

Richard Powers

• The Echo Maker: A Novel*


• The Gold Bug Variations

Henry Green

• Loving; Living; Party Going*

James Wood

• The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief

Blake Butler

• EVER**


• Scorch Atlas

Thomas Mann

• The Magic Mountain

Flannery O'Connor

• Flannery O'Connor : Collected Works

Larry Brown

• Fay*


• Dirty Work


• A Miracle of Catfish*


• The Rabbit Factory*


• Father and Son


• Conversations with Larry Brown

Jonathan Littel

• The Kindly Ones**

Frank Stanford

• The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You*

Michael Kimball

• Dear Everybody

Leo Tolstoy

• War and Peace

William Faulkner

• The Reivers


• The Unvanquished

Charles Dickens

• A Tale of Two Cities


• Bleak House

George Eliot

• Middlemarch

William Shakespeare

• William Shakespeare: The Complete Works

Graham Greene

• A Burnt-Out Case

Matt Bell

• How the Broken Lead the Blind

Geraldine Brooks

• People of the Book*

Samuel R. Delany

• Atlantis: Three Tales*


• About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews

Joshua Ferris

• Then We Came to the End*

Barry Hannah

• Bats Out of Hell*

Thomas Pynchon

• Gravity's Rainbow*

John Steinbeck

• The Winter of Our Discontent


• East of Eden


• The Red Pony


• The Grapes of Wrath

Theodore Weesner

• Winning the City*


• Children's Hearts: Stories

Jeanette Winterson

• Written on the Body

Tim Winton

• Dirt Music*

Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Crime and Punishment

Herman Melville

• Moby-Dick

John Williams

• Augustus: A Novel


• Stoner


• Butcher's Crossing

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

• Of Love and Other Demons


• Strange Pilgrims*

Benjamin Percy

• Refresh, Refresh


• The Language of Elk

Wilhelm Reich

• Listen, Little Man!

Peter Matthiessen

• Shadow Country

William Gay

• Twilight*

Donigan Merritt

• The Common Bond

Herbert Marcuse and Douglas Kellner

• One-dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

Lorrie Moore

• Birds of America: Stories*

Tao Lin

• Eeeee Eee Eeee**

Michel Foucault

• The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language*

Leon Lederman

• The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?*

James Salter

• Burning the Days: Recollection*


• Last Night


• Dusk


• A Sport and a Pastime

Robert Zingg Singh and Joseph Amrito Lal

• Wolf-Children and Feral Man

Cormac McCarthy

• The Orchard Keeper*


• Outer Dark


• Child of God


• All the Pretty Horses


• Cities of the Plain


• The Crossing


• No Country for Old Men


• Blood Meridian


• The Road

Rick Bass

• The Watch*

There's likely a few more that I forgot to record in Goodreads. The to-do pile is now three stacks against the wall towering up past my hips now. Too much to read. Not enough time. I find myself primarily reading now for the fuel, for my own writing. I can't help but feel I've lost something.

But gained as well. The yellow oval of that flashlight flitting past on the ceiling is a harbinger of sharp elbows and knees and sticky fingers. My daughter throws such a light out as she moves. In some distant (distant, I tell you!) future, she'll wreak havoc on some poor, love-sodden soul. But this time she holds for me in her other hand a book. "Read, Daddy," she says, jabbing the corner into my thigh. "Read!"

Indeed, let us read.

Did you have a favorite book from the 09 reading season? What was it?

Pushcart Nomination

I received an email this morning from The Emprise Review that they were nominating my story, The Dead Center of the Sun for a Pushcart Prize.

I won't win, but the nod is still cool. Thanks to Roxane Gay and everyone else at the Emprise Review for the smile this morning.

On other fronts, I spent five hours last night working on one paragraph and it still isn't right. Brutal. Currently working on a major restructure of the first third of the book. Chapter 12 has essentially become Chapter 1 and that necessitates much rewriting. But it's better this way, I think. Moves right into blood and running and fast breath. There was a later theme that can now be introduced stylistically and within content from the get-go and thus be threaded throughout the entire narrative is less obvious ways. I didn't realize that when I decided to make the change, but that's when you know that a direction is the right one -- all those various elements begin to better align and harmonize. Tough though, to look at all the re-writing that needs to be done. Alas. Crack my knuckles, huff out a weary breath, and plunge on.

We woke to a thin wet snow this morning, falling out of the sky like white butterflies.

That to which we cling and that which we toss away.

Nearly nine months now I've labored on this one thing. Culling and injecting. Re-arranging. Layering on and thinning out. At months seven and eight, I felt I was nearly done, but I was wrong. That was fatigue harnessing thought and tongue. The next month rolled around and it became clear to me the task wasn't complete, that I could be better, that I should be better, that I must be better than I had been to this point.

The photo is what has been extracted and what remains. That is of the papers I kept. Some shredding was earlier engaged. More red-inked slaughter forthcoming. That to which we cling is necessarily a stack smaller than that which is tossed away. Can value be obtained in some other manner that doesn't heap forth measures of disdain? Such systems prevail in other matters of life, not only writing, but it is writing with which I'm concerned. I wonder if it's possible to have a publishing world wherein disdain and exclusion do not figure prominently? Likely not.

I suppose that once past the initial getting-it-done phase, the stage in which I'm situated is the next hump that most would-be writers stumble upon. Revision is grueling, a rack upon which the mind is stretched. The tendency of the eye to falter over sentences so often scanned is immense. One knows that word is wrong, that the rhythm in that sentence globs instead of hums but one would rather sip Rum and allow the words to fuzz or to perhaps trumpet up those in company, raise the volume of the peers to such a keen that the fractious note may subside into minor disharmony. No one will notice that gaff, surely. Come on. So one moves on to the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next chapter and yet that nag still tugs, pulls one back to the page and the nib descends with its red havoc and scratches that word out, then the sentence succumbs, for without the word the sentence fails and then the collapse continues to the paragraph and even the chapter in certain cases, so it's then I think most writers fail in their revision. They put that word back in and go on, unable to shoulder the yoke of all the work that demands to be done. It's so damn hard to start it over, but when you do, the right word, the one that you should have thought of in the first place, percolates up through the swampy mess and there arrives a sort of bliss at reading that sentence rendered just so, with full-throated vigor and slick plumage and streaking speed. But then the next sentence...

And on it goes. And goes. And goes.

Go read this excellent story by Matt Bell at the latest issue of Conjunctions. I can't link directly to it, but scroll down about mid-way through the page. It's called His Last Great Gift. The editors there were kind enough to put it up on the web. Because they did, I read it, and subscribed to the journal then and there. Really, a wonderful story. Check it out. I haven't enjoyed reading something that much in several months.

You hear that click? That's the wooden gear on this rack notching the strands one tooth tighter.

Who Influences You?

Wait till you sense the storm in the air. It'll arrive as a thickening, like the tension in the room between you and your spouse as bills hiss from their envelopes. It's best engaged in the deep night, when the outside has been blacked by the storm's tardy-gait approach, when the world is more rounded and obscure than rendered angular and jut. Walk up to a window then, before the howl and the water starts. Place your palm against a window's cold glass. Fur your breath white around your fingers. Do what all humans must, that is make their shape against that black. This is how you'll best sense it, anyway. Wait for a rising gust to batter against the pane. You'll feel the window beat just like the naked thump of your lover's heart under your palm. There'll be that same soft flutter of surprise that another life, full of blood and verve, has bucked up to meet yours. We all take that flutter and from it fashion our wants and expectations. Not only in life, but also in literature. We pick up a book and every now and then our window rattles.

This is influence. It is primal.

Some authors will not read other fiction when they write their own out of a fear of being influenced. They wish no muffle to their own voice and fail to recognize the shade and hue of others already infused in their tongue. I maintain that no writer writing now can escape influence if that writer reads at all. And what writer doesn't read? We all write from within a crowd. We are all that girl behind the glass in the photo. Who is talking to her as her face melts into that sad? Much of a writer's job is to manage the shape and force of the breath on the other side of the glass, to huff out the white shape of their palm against the infinite gale of other voices.

I've discovered a new voice with which to temper mine: Jeffrey Lent.

I'm curious who your influences are. Are you the sort of writer that shies away from other fiction when you write? Or do you delve further in, consuming fuel? Who are your influences?

Wet your finger

Wet your finger and hold it to the air. A shift in the wind, yes? Often subtle, sometimes a gale, there is a ramping shift in how we read short, literary fiction. Notice I said short fiction. The fat-thighed novel still trucks its wares on paper and will for some time to come, I think, until devices to read them by are ubiquitous, cheap, and accessible as a cell phone or the industries that produce books stop buying literary manuscripts altogether. I've been thinking that whenever I read short fiction--stories, flash, micro, hint...whatever descriptor ones wants to slap onto its bumper--I find that I abhor and hold dear sentences read on paper and sentences read on screen in practically the same ratio. This lead me to consider the issue of quality in regards to short fiction irregardless of the publishing medium.

My conclusion is that there is little difference in the overall quality of the writing on the Internet versus the traditional print world. My sampling and opinion is based on my own reading, culled from a list of select journals, both online and in print. I don't read everything. Can't. I read more short work online than I do in print because the online work is almost always free and accessible at work--an important thing. While I think that the commercial aspect of short fiction writing (ha!) is an indicator of quality, I don't think it's the best or even one that should be employed with regularity. We careen headlong into walls of bias here. I am biased. I'd rather be published in Tin House or The New Yorker than anywhere else I've published. I think most writers would rather be published in the print version of The Missouri Review as opposed to the online component, even though one editor tells us that the online component has far more readers than the print version. What is this bias about? It's about respect and perceived worth. One reason there is a bias between print and online publication is that there resides within many writers an inherent haughtiness, a class system, and a great need to be cherished, admired, and admonished. These manifestations of Ego should not be dispensed with but tempered. Art fails without Ego, but growth wanes with Ego unharnessed and amok. Short fiction, perhaps more so than any other literary form save woebegone poetry, needs growth, change, and acceptance of new mediums. Short fiction should not trumpet any forbearance of the Internet since the populace at large has thus far demonstrated that they in no way need short fiction.

Short fiction--let's call it flash--provides a burst, a boot heel in the pants. With it one moves swiftly toward an evocative moment, the payoff. Perhaps it's the porn of literature then. Flash is all about the money shot. That's ok. Money shots abound on the Internet, or so I've heard. Flash is easy to read there. Work will cordon off the opening of a novel on the desk, but not the launching of a browser to an online lit journal. I appreciate being able to do this. To ease the consumption of startling words at soul-sucking work is a boon not to be ignored. The Internet perpetuates literature in a world that cares little and less about words, their meanings, context-tendriling, import and worth. Attention tendered to the power and presence of words is always a good thing, no matter the medium or pay. It's a fire sale in the literary fiction department, is it not? And short literary fiction suffers the most.

So, I've decided to write about works as I encounter them online, to hawk and promote those that seem to me pert and energetic, worth the effort of reading on a screen. It's harder to share good works found in print. I can't link to objects. Reviews, I suppose is what I'm talking about, some of which I've already done for books and what not, but my want is not canted toward the negative, thus I will only discuss works from which something good glitters. The road of spitting upon and finger wagging is easily tread. Let us clop our boots into the treacherous positive. This is my big change and the reason for the honking sign above. Not the glowing, 5 star this and 5 star that type of ass-kissing commentary (I maintain that we won't find great on the Internet), but an honest appreciation of good words no matter the author or where they were published. The currency of respect is not backed by anything other than individual taste and even though Tin House's pockets jiggle with many baubles, the stories published there are filtered by a individual taste just as much as they are at Pank or any other journal on the Internet. If you have suggestions for short fiction for me to read and comment on, email them to me or comment on the blog. I have no MFA. I'm not officially educated. Barely made it out of high school. But I will tell you what I like, why I like it, and why I think you should read it too. This is all any critic does, and we're all critics, whether we wear the high-brow collar or not. Anon then, here's the first:

Steven McDermott's Sliver in the latest issue of Pank, hooked me with the word goosing in this sentence: Not too late to let the frontal lobes have their victory over that limbic stem goosing her. It's rather rare to see attention to language and ingenuity in the employment of a word, both in short fiction published online and in print. Too often language is pared down as if vigorous words are too preachy or too blingy or too show-offy. I'm not a believer in transparent prose. Allow me to muster up some broadness in my chest and ask you to name me a great writer of transparent prose. Literature is not the penning of memos or the cataloging of groceries to purchase. Language that prompts a sentence to leap, a word that hearkens attention to itself, is what makes writing live. Goosing makes that sentence leap. The next two sentences clued me in to thinking that this piece might reach beyond a simple emotional description of an event: She had no illusions that whatever wholeness she might feel here on the beach would be anything but temporary. Still, she couldn’t make herself stop. I want to know what happens now. I'm all about rushing into doom on legs wobbly with desire. You should be too.

I'll not do any sort of analysis on this other than what I've done already, but know that the story details a sexual scene, degradation through an innovative item listing, woeful self-disdain, and a final image of shadows, that deeper secret body within ourselves welling forth and acting out desire and disdain upon the sands. It is that final image that persists for me, what I keep thinking about after I've read and moved on from the story. I read this several days ago and still think of that one shadow riding another over the hot sand.

So go read. Steven Mcdermott has a collection of stories that can be purchased here. It is this story that prompted me to refocus as best as I possibly can on the positive. Let us not lament too terribly what has been lost, but instead move forward as we're able into the new and render credit where credit is due.

Tremble

Love would come into the room like a torch and sear. The bathroom light must remain on, that pale soft yellow pushing the door ajar, spilling across the floor where her bare foot would step. He watched that bodiless light, caught breathless in his waiting. Dust floated through it like thoughts. The room needed to be right. Enough light to see a tendon clench or a throat shudder but not so much that bumps on the elbow intruded into view. His devotion not a fog, her supple obedience not a fad. So much love and all of it too terrible to bear.

He had arranged things the way she liked, the clock turned away from the bed, photographs face down, covers turned back to reveal the bare and sudden whiteness of the sheets. Nothing but him to witness her presence, her milky unveiling, the truth of her body in the pale light. This is where she'll lay. He ran his palm across the cool fabric. This is where her bundled hair will darkly tumble from the towel, wet. This is the rag she'll use to clean him out of her. She'll raise it to her nose and make that face, carry it away held in two fingers.

He smoothed the sheets where his fingers had passed. The mattress would accept them later, hollow under their knees and elbows, cradle their skulls and buttocks. Sheets would rasp. Her belly would buck and rash in that pink, strange way. She'd fold up her knees on the bed and he'd grab them, want her to stay. Her hands flung back on the pillows, the indent of her absent ring drawing his attention.

—What time is it, she'd ask. Then: —No, don't tell me. It'd be too terrible to bear.

So he wouldn't. Instead he'd bring her wrist to his ear, drown in her pulse, grow hard again and move her hand there.

—Tell me there's hope, he'd say.

—Don't ask me that. A turning away, her throat bare.

—There must be a way.

She'd roll over, draw the sheets up to her chin. —I can't. You don't understand.

No matter how the room had been prepared, he'd see it then, her shoulder tense under his reaching fingers, a pursing of her lips as she tightened her shoes before leaving. Always a commitment to that, never anything else. A meeting, traffic, something important with work. Her fingers would flutter dismissively in the air, blow him a kiss across the room. The door would close and he'd watch the bar of light underneath it tremble.

William Hazlitt on Metaphor

What's new again is actually old. Here's William Hazlitt from his essay On Familiar Style writing about metaphor use in prose as if it's a scourge. Look at the picture before you read and you'll see that frown of his worm further across his face. Also note that in this wonderful snippet of text he's not entirely free of the thing he rails against.

...Such persons are in fact besotted with words, and their brains are turned with the glittering but empty and sterile phantoms of things. Personifications, capital letters, seas of sunbeams, visions of glory, shining inscriptions the figures of a transparency, Britannia with her shield, or Hope leaning on an anchor, make up their stock-in-trade. They may be considered hieroglyphical writers. Images stand out in their minds isolated and important merely in themselves, without any ground-work of feeling—there is no context in their imaginations. Words affect them in the same way, by the mere sound, that is, by their possible not by their actual application to the subject in hand. They are fascinated by first appearances, and have no sense of consequences. Nothing more is meant by them than meets the ear: they understand or feel nothing more than meet their eye. The web and texture of the universe, and of the heart of man, is a mystery to them: they have no faculty that strikes a chord in unison with it. They cannot get beyond the daubings of fancy, the varnish of sentiment. Objects are not linked to feelings, words to things, but images revolve in splendid mockery, words represent themselves in their strange rhapsodies. The categories of such a mind are pride and ignorance—pride in outside show, to which they sacrifice everything, and ignorance of the true worth and hidden structure both of words and things. With a sovereign contempt for what is familiar and natural, they are the slaves of vulgar affectation—of a routine of high-flown phrases. Scorning to imitate realities, they are unable to invent anything, to strike out one original idea. They are not copyists of nature, it is true; but they are the poorest of all plagiarists, the plagiarists of words. All is far-fetched, dear bought, artificial, oriental in subject and allusion; all is mechanical, conventional, vapid, formal, pedantic in style and execution. They startle and confound the understanding of the reader by the remoteness and obscurity to their illustrations; they sooth the ear by the monotony of the same everlasting round of circuitous metaphors. They are the mock-school in poetry and prose. They flounder about between fustian in expression and bathos in sentiment. They tantalize the fancy, but never reach the head nor touch the heart.

Alas, does a clinical exactness in prose really convey information better? I tend to think, although without as much vitriol, that exactness of such a nature constricts the breathing of a text, that low soft bellow of its life as it unfolds. Or rather it constricts a text that attempts to reach beyond itself, a text that desires conjugation with canonical theme. I sense a rise in this clinical precision again, especially amongst some of the Internet writers. It could be that it never really waned. I'm curious what drives such things. Perhaps it's the loss of a person's ability to conceptualize outside themselves. When one loses the ability to discern forces larger than the mushy edge of their own skin one inherently lacks an ability to compare.

To find the similar in the dissimilar is the movement of thought outside the thinker.

As I read Mr. Hazlitt's text and stared at his picture, I came to wonder how he'd behave at a seven year old's birthday party. This is important! Lumpish, foul, itinerant grumps never play. They leverage up a clean, weighty exposition and marvel at the dun it seeks to exact on the rote-schooled minds of its readers. Such folks raise their ponderous thighs and fart at play. Here is where the high seriousness of literary art holds its nose and swings wildly at the bright pinata.