Exile on Ninth Street

Posted by Todd at 07:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It's been about a month now since Kurt Vonnegut died. At the time of his death, I had just started reading Anna Karenina, but decided my next read, once I'd finished Tolstoy should be Vonnegut.

It had been long time since I'd read anything by Vonnegut, at least six years, but I had long enjoyed him, though it took me some time to get him (not that I'm a scholar or anything now). The first book of his that I read was Galapagos, his novel about the descent of man.

I picked it up because I thought it was science fiction -- and it is; though not the kind I normally read in 1987, the year I after I graduated high school. I didn't know quite what to make of it (it's set 1 million years in the future, on the island of Galapagos, and humans have evolved to the point of being seal-like creatures). I kept reading it -- though I didn't really catch on to the satire -- because I found it so bizarre.

Though it was such a strange book, or maybe because it was such a strange book, I decided I wanted to read something else by Vonnegut, and I found Cat's Cradle. My first copy of Cat's Cradle was a thin orange paperback, and I thought it was strange to see such short chapters, some just a few paragraphs or so in length. But, I didn't quite get it. There was something about Bokonon, and the children's game cat's cradle and some strange chemical called ice-nine. At the time it really didn't make sense.

But this past week I reread it, not knowing what to expect: Maybe it wouldn't make sense again. And yet it did. I caught onto it--the plot, the satire, the humor.

As I've been reading through this project of mine, I've become more alert to my sense of humor, to actually laughing when I read something funny; it's an experience as a reader that's somewhat new to me.

Part of that comes from personality. Only recently have I realized how serious-minded I am. Not that I lack a sense of humor, but I tend to think too much, and think with a capital T. And that capital T thinking has influenced my reading.

For much of my reading life, I've read with my brain in such a serious mode that sometimes I lost the joy of reading. Part of that mode came from the influence of someone I respected at one time: That person was surprised to hear I liked "fluff" such as Rita Mae Brown, whose serious novels had made me laugh out loud. Part of it came from grad school and the never ending search for meaning through scholarship and theory. Part of it came from my own sense of needing to find personal meaning through reading.

But recently, this journey of reading 100 novels has led me to understand that no matter how great a piece of literature a novel is supposed to be, I can read it and laugh at the funny parts (even in Tolstoy, a Mr. Serious if there ever was one), I can sympathize and empathize with the characters, I can think with a capital T, and I can appreciate the world each novel brings.

And laugh and smirk I did when rereading Cat's Cradle. Vonnegut's sense of absurdity was not only appropriate for the early 1960s, but fits so well now. Absurd religions. Too much trust in science. Overdone patriots. The end of the world.

So it goes. (That's from another Vonnegut novel, you know.)

My lesson learned, perhaps, from Cat's Cradle is that of one of the characters, Frank Hoenikker, "'There was a time when I took people's silly answers seriously. I'm past that now.'"

Or maybe it's the lesson of his brother Newt, "'There's love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.'"

Or maybe there is no lesson in literature.

So it goes.

Posted by Todd at 07:04 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

...and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. --Proverbs 31:6

When I first read Anna Karenina 15 years ago, I hadn't noticed an interesting detail (perhaps because I was trying to gather up all the plot strands and was missing some details) -- late in the novel Anna becomes a junkie, using small doses of morphine to stifle the emotional pain of a declining romance with Vronsky, as she perceives it.

And though she felt sure that a coldness was beginning, there was nothing she could do, she could not in any way alter her relations to him. Just as before, only love and by charm could she keep him. And so, just as before, only occupation in the day, by morphine at night, could she stifle the fearful thought of what would be if he ceased to love her.

What an extraordinary psychologist Tolstoy is: What do humans do to stifle pain? they turn to drugs. Today we get depressed, even a little, and it won't go away, and we get a prescription to fix it. The chemical compounds are perhaps a bit more controlled than a reaction to morphine, but still we seek solace when trouble comes. The thing Anna has greatly feared -- a waning romance with Vronsky -- has come upon her, even if that fear isn't grounded in facts, even if it is wholly irrational (but isn't that where fear comes from, the irrational?). She has no rest, her mind is unquiet. She has to remain occupied during the day, and on morphine during the night.

I find myself at my most sympathetic with Anna at this point in the novel. What a vast, irrational thing human suffering is: Does it matter how we get to the point of anguish? Anyone who experiences grief in some way -- and what is Anna experiencing but grief? -- must be able to find some sympathy when others grieve, even if we don't or can't accept the rightness or wrongness of the actions that took that person to the point in which grief exposes itself, a storm in the mind, as William Styron calls it in his beautfiful book-length essay about his struggle with depression Darkness Visible.

But back to drugs and drug use to stifle pain: It's an ancient solution to the one thing that's truly universal to human experience. "Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more," says Proverbs. And I have to say, "cheers!" to that.

Posted by Todd at 06:16 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Saturday, April 7, 2007 it snowed in Central Texas. And maybe a quirk in the weather patterns here was enough to send me to church, devout agnostic that I am, although it wasn't snowing when I stopped at my friend's shop in Salado, Texas; it was just sleeting, and I was 99 percent certain I could get a nice, free hot cup of coffee there, and maybe the sleet would let up, and I'd be on my way.

Or maybe I went to church because my friend invited me to the regular Saturday service at the chapel behind his shop, and that sounded good because afterward would be a potluck dinner in which the main dish was roast lamb, and I hadn't eaten that day, so I'd suffer through a church service for a free meal.

Or maybe it's because I was grateful another friend had loaned me money earlier that day, and a little prayer of thanks was in order to a god I don't really believe in, but what the hell, I'm desperate -- I have little money, no job other than freelancing, and less hope -- and whatever comes of it might help.

Plus, it was sleeting. In April. In Texas. And once I had begun my second cup of coffee, it was snowing. It was snowing, and beginning to stick. In April. In Texas. So, anything could happen. Maybe even a god I don't really believe in would answer prayers, or at least listen. Plus, there was roast lamb in my friend's oven.

Since late March, I've been reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and I've come to the part, about halfway through the novel, in which Levin, an unbeliever, has to make confession in order to marry his beloved Kitty. Levin is my least favorite character in the novel, perhaps because he reminds me of myself in more ways than I'd like to admit (one of his least charming characteristics is his inability to see ambiguity, the shades of gray in human character and action that novels tend to elevate into art; it's a trait I battle with and don't like in myself, especially when dealing with uncertainty). "Levin c'est moi," Flaubert might say.

In light of my recent experience in church, I found myself reflecting on this passage:

Levin found himself . . .  in the vaguest position in regard to religion. Believe he could not, and at the same time he had no firm conviction that it was all wrong. And consequently, not being able to believe in the significance of what he was doing nor regard it with indifference as an empty formality, during the whole period of preparing for the sacrament he was conscious of a feeling of discomfort and shame at doing what he did not himself understand, and what, as an inner voice told him, was therefore false and wrong.

The day I attended the service was Holy Saturday, the day before Easter Sunday, a day of hope because Christ is about to defeat death -- the tomb will be empty and Christ risen on Easter Sunday. It wasn't the first time I had gone to services at the little Episcopal chapel behind my friend's shop; for various reasons I had gone to services in the past (as a journalist covering religion, and interested in immersion journalism, as a potential seeker who ended up at the time confirming his own agnosticism), but each time I dreaded parts of the service, particularly Eucharist (in the Episcopal church anyone is welcome to particpate in communion); because I'm not a believer, I feel strange, as out of place as Levin must have felt, taking something believers take so seriously (Episcopalians believe in consubstantiation -- Christ is present in the bread and wine, but the bread and wine don't become the body and blood as in transubstantiation, which Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches believe), but I take the bread and the wine, because I tend to feel even more out of place sitting in the pew, singled out as being out of place.

This particular snowy Saturday, it wasn't the Eucharist that created such discomfort, but the point in the service in which everyone renews their baptismal vows. I was raised Baptist, and baptised at 17. There were no baptismal vows, you just went under and somehow were a new person.

So, I faced something that was somewhat unfamiliar, but unfamiliarity with the vows weren't creating the discomfort. It was phrases such as "I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth," and "I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord," and "I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting" that were making me feel like Levin, as if by saying these things I was being dishonest with myself and others; I was being "false and wrong."

And yet, there was one thing that struck me in the renewal: the repetition of "I will, with God's help." Maybe that's why I was at church. Because I have no strong conviction that it is all wrong. The devout agnostic wanted God's help, because like Job, everything had fallen to shit. I was a character in my own novel, seeking some kind of redemption or atonement, wanting a blessing, rather than experiencing a curse.

As I continue to read Anna Karenina, it's clear Tolstoy to some extent modeled Levin after Job. And most of us at some time must feel like Job, a man subjected to a terrible and shocking bet between God and Satan. No matter what, through loss of everything meaningful in his life, Job never curses God. I haven't been so faithful. I haven't had any faith at all. And perhaps that is justice enough in this god's eyes to continue his wager, and perhaps intentionally lose on occasion.

An unbeliever, Levin slowly succumbs to faith. I still doubt. Levin is one of the few literary characters I've dealt with since embarking on my 100-novels reading project that finds religion forming his character, shaping him, as religion, or the lack of, has shaped me. It's rare to see characters in contemporary fiction show how religion, or the lack of, has shaped them, and yet, at least for Americans, religion is still a viable force that does shape our characters. I wonder why it doesn't seem to shape many fictional characters' lives in any meaningful way.

As for me, I still say I know that I don't know. Unlike Job, I can't say I'm happy with this so-called God, almighty that he (or she) is; faith is still elusive. And I'm not really sure why.

Comments are still turned off, but you may e-mail comments to tglasscock at yahoo dot com.

Posted by Todd at 06:21 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I've again been dipping into the 19th Century -- as part of my 100 novels project -- last month  Huckleberry Finn, and this month Anna Karenina. While I'm not up to offering, at the moment, any great, piercing critical insights, I find myself enjoying the formality of the language, of the rhetoric, even in Twain, who presents a genuine American voice. Besides the intimidating length of some 19th Century novels -- my copy of Anna Karenina is 912 pages -- I think modern readers may be intimidated by the formality of the prose. I know I was when I first picked up Twain in elementary school.

As writers and readers, at least in English, we've been influenced by the Hemingway-esque, terse sentences, the zippy, piss-urgent language of The Associated Press, of journalism, and the rhetorical notion of "open" punctuation--fewer commas, and even fewer semicolons (because of the tendency toward shorter sentences?).

But perhaps the 19th Century novelists learned their prosody and punctuation from that era's teachers of rhetoric, of the written word meant to be spoken, of different "beats" or pauses for different punctuation. I get a sense, especially from Twain, that his prose begs to be read aloud,  read carefully, whether read aloud or silently, not zipped through as if it's the latest from the AP. It's hard to say whether this is true for the Tolstoy since it's a translation.

Other oddities of the Constance Garnett translation: I keep encountering many one-sentence paragraphs, and those paragraph breaks sometimes don't seem consistent with the flow of the action of a scene. (Is Russian like this? Or rather, Tolstoy's Russian?)

Posted by Todd at 08:45 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Here is an article I wrote for Blog Critics after my first reading of James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime. (I've recently reread the novel as part of my 100 novels reading project.)

A Feast of Love

Posted by Todd at 07:13 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I first understood the power of sentences reading Hemingway. His descriptions read as if they were filmed, not written.

Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees.

A sentence like this puts you in the place it describes, an Italian villa during Wordl War I. It was sentences like these that I so wanted to create when I first started writing seriously, not only their visual quality, but also their rhythm. The distinct Hemingway sound. It took me a long time to break away from imitation (though it still creeps in from time to time, especially strings of clauses linked with "and").

When I read, I love encountering great sentences. "Sentences are extraordinary things," writes Tom Grimes in a review of Stephen Amidon's novel The New City. "They're often the taken-for-granted miracles of storytelling, as transparent to readers as the fact that the sun rises and sets every day is to humans. But great sentences, like sunlight, allow us to see what otherwise would remain hidden."

Grimes' review led me to read The New City. I wanted to read great sentences, obsessed as I was with making them. When I first read the novel seven years ago, I read great sentences, as the opening paragraph.

At first the damage didn't look that bad. There was a jagged crack running through the front door's glass, but that could have happened in a hundred innocent ways.  And the lobby's disorder -- sand spilled from an upright ashtray and a scattering of drug awareness pamphlets -- looked like the usual by-products of teen rowdiness.  As Austin Swope stepped onto the metal staircase that helixed up into the converted silo, he began to think that maybe the security people had exaggerated when they spoke of a riot.

A great paragraph of description, visually strong, it sweeps you into the narrative as well as Hemingway. Plus there is that use of the verbal "helixed". What a surprising word, "helixed".  A perfect word to describe a spiral staircase, a word that eventually evokes the chaos that evolves the novel's plot. (Amidon might get tsk-ed, though, by Renni Browne and Dave King, authors of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, who consider "as" constructions unsophicated, hackneyed.)

Set in in the 1970s in Newton, Maryland, a planned community, a quasi-utopian dream of city planner Barnaby Vine, The New City follows several characters, chief among them the ambitious Austin Swope, as the city, and the idea behind the city -- to harmoniously bring all classes and races together -- comes to clash with the one antagonist common to utopian literature, human nature. In other words, Newton fails its Freudian reality test, largely because of Swope's ambition, his blindness toward his son Teddy's adolescent petty jealousies, as well as a Romeo-Juliet-plot of young lovers (black boy, white girl) torn asunder. 

On the second reading, I was still moved by Amidon's sentences, although they falter sometimes as Grimes notes: About two-thirds of the way through the novel, the narrative slows because the sentences "fluidity and caustic accuracy degenerate into imperatives. 'He had to get out of here. He had to go talk with his dad . . . He had to act fast.'"

Maybe "falter" isn't the right word. In the passage Grimes has quoted (spoiler warning), Swope's son Teddy has just caused the death by drowning of Susan Truax, love interest of Joel Wooten (Joel is Teddy's best friend, and Teddy sees Susan as a rival). Teddy has just taken an argument too far; a push meant to simply dunk Susan as payback for an insult goes horribly wrong. What Grime's quotes is Teddy's voice.  A panicked, urgent voice from a character that no longer has time to be fluid or caustically insightful. And Amidon picks the narrative pace up in the final third of the novel.

The sentences stand out, and illuminate the novel's world, an imagined world that reads like reportage. Amidon has worked as a journalist. Details matter. And The New City is filled with details.

Posted by Todd at 07:18 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)