how to read on a budget

Sad but true: with nearly 5 million Americans drawing unemployment aid, it's becoming increasingly likely that you, dear reader, may have less discretionary income to spend on books than you might have a few years ago.

However, that doesn't mean you should have to go without poetry. Many forward-thinking small presses out there have decided to begin producing downloadable chapbooks, as a way of experimentally engaging with the Web's impressive duplication and distribution capacities. And since the production costs of these chapbooks are essentially passed along to whoever decides to print them out (ideally you and me), many of these small presses have made their downloadable chapbooks available for free.

A good place to start?: try Faux Press' index of nearly fifty free chapbooks. If you follow avant-garde poetry, the list of figures who have work there is pretty impressive: Bruce Andrews, Brenda Iijima, K. Silem Mohammad, Chris Stroffolino... but the one I began with was Christina Strong's Utopian Politics, which presents a kind of frenzied transmission that alternately evokes travel, digital communication, and post-millenial state control / resistance.

[Cross-posted to the Vivarium blog.]

Labels: book_commentary

Wednesday, February 25, 2009
7:41 AM
0 comments

the year in reading: 2008

One of my New Year's traditions (at least since 2004) is to take a little time to crunch the numbers on the books I read the previous year, as well as to announce a few highlights. (Past years' results: 2007; 2006; 2005; 2004.)

As for this year, I read a total of 51 books, which is about average for me, although down a bit from last year's 58. Here's the breakdown:

Fiction: 16, the same as last year. The highlight here, far and away, was Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, a book I'd put off reading for some time, but which emerged as easily the best book I read this year. Other highlights in the field of fiction are a few books I'd read before (Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist, Carole Maso's The Art Lover, and Patrik Ourednik's Europeana) and at least one that I should probably have read long ago (J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey). Miranda July's book of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, deserves a mention here as well.

Books on film / film criticism: 7, down four from last year. Highlight: Carol Clover's canonical text on gender in the contemporary horror film, Men, Women, and Chain Saws. (You can browse my notes here, if you're so inclined.) I also re-read Chris Radley's great Cronenberg on Cronenberg volume.

Graphic novels / comics anthologies / books of cartoons: 22. Up fifteen from last year, which means that the "season of comics" I wrote about here and here actually turned into something more like a year of comics. I make no apologies about this: this avenue of my reading provided me with no shortage of highlights, including the four volumes of Joss Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men, the first volume of Warren Ellis' Planetary, Neil Gaiman's Marvel 1602, and the Daredevil Omnibus Companion (a volume which, for my money, is preferable to the actual Daredevil Omnibus). Less escapist stuff included Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Marjane Satrapi's Complete Persepolis: neither one is the masterpiece that some people have claimed, but both do very good work in expanding the field. Valuable re-reads included the Robert Crumb / Harvey Pekar collaboration Bob & Harv's Comics, Paul Pope's 100%, and Dan Clowes' Ghost World.

Assorted nonfiction and polemics: 4. Among them, three constitute highlights of the year: Oranges, an early work by John McPhee in which he examines the citrus industry; The Ecology of Games, a MacArthur-funded anthology of writing about video games, adolescence, and literacy (see more notes on this book here); and Getting Things Done, the infamous productivity guide parodied here.

Surprisingly, I read no books of poetry or literary criticism this year. I spent extended time with Gertrude Stein's How To Write and John Ashbery's Hotel Lautreamont but did not complete either.

The following authors wrote books I read for the first time in 2008, and also wrote books that I read prior to 2008: Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Joss Whedon, Frank Miller, Alan Martin, Warren Ellis, Michael Ondaatje, Lynda Barry, J.D. Salinger, and John McPhee.

What did you read this year that you enjoyed?

Labels: book_commentary, comics

Sunday, January 04, 2009
3:29 PM
1 comments

the year in books (so far)

Just a quick heads-up for any of you interested in what I've been reading lately: the 2008 books-log page, which had been languishing for the last few months, is now up-to-date. I'm mostly not writing capsule reviews this year—just too much other stuff going on —but if you just want a raw list of the 47 books I've read so far this year, well, it's there for you. (My LibraryThing page has also been brought up to date, for those of you who prefer that system.)

Anyone have any recommendations for worthwhile books I should try to tackle before the year is out?

Labels: book_commentary, meta

Wednesday, November 19, 2008
8:47 PM
6 comments

the new novel, part II

So I've been kicking around a variety of books for that "New Novel" course I'll be teaching this fall, and some things are beginning to fall into place.

I'm definitely going with Patrik Ourednik's Europeana (2005) as my "experimental-form" novel; it not only pushes the boundaries of what could be considered a novel (in a way that will be fruitful for discussion), but it also gives a big recap of global 20th-century events and thus sets up some useful themes for us to work with, here in the early days of the 21st.

I'd like to follow this up with either Lynda Barry's Cruddy (2000) or Alicia Erian's Towelhead (2006), as sort of a way to look at how those 20th-century forces impact powerless people, specifically using the figure of the adolescent girl to get at this. Of the two, I marginally prefer Cruddy, in part because its status as an "illustrated novel" fulfills my interest in having a "hybrid" book on the list: it opens up a juncture where we can talk about the critical rise of the graphic novel over the last ten years or so. Plus Towelhead has a lot more sexuality in it, and there's only a certain amount of that kind of stuff that I feel comfortable dragging into the classroom.

I also wanted a classically-structured novel, but one which deals thematically with some of the "big issues" that the class increasingly looks to be built around: I'm currently reading Ann Patchett's Bel Canto (2001), which tells a story about terrorists raiding a high-class dinner party in South America as a possible candidate there. Patchett sees human interaction as being capable of generating real beauty, and the book is clearly focused on locating these moments even in the midst of violent crisis. Used too liberally, this could descend into Pollyanna-ism, and the book is definitely running that risk, but it might be a nice antidote to follow the bleakness of Cruddy. [Still a little tempted to wedge in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition (2005) instead, although this would break my 50/50 gender breakdown.]

[I'd also consider dropping the "traditional" novel entirely in favor of another hybrid, if I could find another good one by a female writer... the obvious choice here is Carole Maso's utterly fascinating novel The Art Lover, which I'd love to re-read, but it seems a stretch to call something originally published in 1990 a "new" novel.]

And finally, I wanted something "outside" the realm of the literary novel, preferably a graphic novel or piece of genre work: I'm leaning here towards Colson Whitehead's great science-fiction-ish novel about elevator repair, The Intuitionist (2000), although I'm also still considering including a graphic novel in this slot, specifically Paul Pope's science-fiction-ish 100%. [One advantage of 100% is that it's a quicker read, and I'm concerned about having enough time to teach the writing elements of the course if I'm also dealing with four long-ish novels.]

Almost decision-making time! Anyone who wants to try to sway me, speak up!

Labels: book_commentary, teaching

Friday, August 15, 2008
9:34 AM
3 comments

the new novel

So those of you who read my Facebook news-feed know that I've accepted an offer to teach two writing courses at Boston University this fall, loosely themed around the topic of "The New Novel."

This is a topic I can have some fun with, obviously, and I quickly decided that a good course on the New Novel should endeavor to include the following things:

• A more-or-less classically-structured novel, but which deals with topics that are distinctly "21st-century" in orientation. [Something like William Gibson's Pattern Recognition or Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis or Falling Man are the types of books that fit comfortably in this slot.]
  

• Something that deals with similiar topics, but is more experimental or progressive in terms of its form. [Patrik Ourednik's Europeana might work well here, and I'm tempted to include something like Ben Marcus' Notable American Women or Leslie Scalapino's "trilogy" The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion, but these are probably both slightly too ambitious for college freshmen.]
  

• A hybrid text, something that is "novelistic" in orientation but clearly reacting to the pressures of "visual culture" / multimedia. [Steve Tomasula's VAS: An Opera In Flatland would be a blast to teach, but something like Lynda Barry's "illustrated novel" Cruddy or Zach Plague's brand-new boring boring boring boring boring boring boring could work equally well.]
  

• Something "outside" the realm of the literary novel, preferably a graphic novel. [In a pinch I could use a piece of genre fiction, most likely SF or horror.]

I also am [typically] concerned with balance of representation, so I'd like to see at least one novel by a non-Caucasian writer and at least one novel by a non-North American writer, and I'd like the list to be fifty/fifty in terms of gender distribution.

The problem, sadly, is that I'm trying to limit myself to only four books (ultimately the course is a writing course and not a Lit survey), and trying to fit the four "types" that I want with the gender and ethnicity constraints that I set up is proving something of a diabolical logic puzzle. I'm pretty close to "locking in" on Gibson and Tomasula, white men both (sigh), which means that ideally I'll find a graphic novel and an experimental 21st-century novel, both written by women, at least one of whom is non-Caucasian.

Persepolis is holding a lot of appeal in the graphic-novel category, but its autobiographical status might eliminate it from the running, and as far as I can tell, most crticially-acclaimed graphic novels by women tend to be memoirish. (See also: Alison Bechdel's Fun Home.) Has anyone out there read Jessica Abel's La Perdida?

If I swap out the graphic novel for a genre novel, Octavia Butler is a potentially fruitful person to work with, although her only 21st-century novel is Fledgling, not generally considered her strongest work.

In terms of the experimental novel, I think Miranda Mellis' The Revisionist might hold some appeal, and its SF trappings might tie it well to the Gibson and Tomasula, but I haven't read it (a copy is winging its way to me as we speak).

You readers are good at this kind of thing. Recommendations?

Related: Roundtable on gender imbalance in SF / fantasy / speculative fiction publishing

Labels: book_commentary, teaching

Wednesday, August 13, 2008
5:11 AM
4 comments

100 book challenge: part six: miscellany

Down to the final fifteen of the 100 Book Challenge!

• As long as we're coming out of the graphic design shelf, we might as well move into Beautiful Evidence, by design critic Edward Tufte
  [I panned this book a bit when I first read it, believing it to re-hash some of the material from Tufte's earlier books. However, that also makes it the easiest one to select if I'm going to take just one. It is probably the most well-designed one of the batch.]
  

• Re-Search #11: Pranks!
  [Back in the good old days of the mid-nineties, Re-Search was the ultimate arbiter of what was cool and underground, and I'm grateful to them to introducing me to a lot of different countercultural thinkers. Of the Re-Search volumes I have, this is the one that meant the most to me, but Angry Women, Modern Primitives, and the Industrial Culture Handbook are all just about equally worth bringing.]
  

• Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge
  [Along the same lines as the Re-Search books, this was a book that taught the young Jeremy about what was cool. (The book's main answer to that question: geeks and psychedelic shit.) Some of the tech romance has lost its luster in the, er, fifteen or so years since this book came out, but I'm more than willing to hold onto it as perhaps the single volume that best explains how I ended up the way I did.]
  

• Along these same "formative" lines, I'm not sure I can part with any of what I consider to be the three key Advanced Dungeons and Dragons texts: the Dungeon Master's Guide, the Player's Handbook, and Monster Manual.
  [I haven't played Dungeons and Dragons in probably five years now, but these three books basically describe how to generate and stock an entire fictional world, and determines coherent rules for how players can interact with that world: the amount of entertainment that can be extracted from their triangulation is truly limitless. A book that strips away the fantasy trappings in an attempt to provide an even broader basis for world-building is the GURPS Basic Set, which I'm also tempted to bring but which I don't think would make a list that caps at 100.]
  

• Continuing with games, I'd bring the Redstone Editions Surrealist Games book-in-a-box...
  

• ...and the Oulipo Compendium, which defines a mind-boggling number of literary constraints to play around with...
  

• ...and Jeff Noon's Cobralingus, which takes the idea of literary constraints and fascinatingly updates it by mashing it up with the kind of gate/filter/patch mechanism familiar from real-time sound synthesis programs like AudioMulch.
  

• And ultimately, for when I was through with the wacky wordplay and wanted to get back to writing normal English-language sentences, I'd bring a copy of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style.

I'd cram in a few more great works of fiction...

• Cathedral, by Raymond Carver
  

• Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
  

• my version of Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
  [My edition has great illustrations by Rockwell Kent, circa 1930.]
  

• ...and one excellent work of humor: Our Dumb Century: 100 Years of Headlines from America's Finest News Source
  

• ...and maybe one exemplary picture book for children: The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, by Chris Van Allsburg

And that'd be 100 (OK, closer to 115, given the various cheats and bundles I stuck in there.) Could I live with this 100? Maybe, although there's a lot of good writing in the piles left that remain. I find myself already wanting to make a list of a second hundred... the "honorable mentions," perhaps...

Labels: book_commentary, lists, projects

Monday, July 07, 2008
5:31 PM
0 comments

100 book challenge part five: comics, art books, graphic design

Thirty books left to go in the 100 Book Challenge!

Last time I left off on the cusp of "comics," so let's proceed into that realm. I'm fortunate that a lot of the comics I want to bring are actually in comics form, in long-boxes under my bed, and are thus exempt from the purge. But in terms of "trade paperbacks," let's see.

• Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
  [Totally essential; besides being a gripping thriller, this is also a decade-by-decade history of the archetype of the "costumed hero" in the twentieth century, with an appreciation of the form of the "horror comic" thrown in to boot. It's also one of the best examinations of what it means to be an aging superhero; in this regard it is joined by Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, which I'd bring if I hadn't lost my copy somewhere.]
  

• From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
  [If I can bring another Moore, I'd pick this paranormal retelling of the Jack the Ripper story.]
  

• Read Yourself Raw, edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly
  [A giant, oversized version volume collecting selections of the first three issues of "the comics magazine for damned intellectuals." My introduction to Spiegelman, Charles Burns, Mark Beyer, Gary Panter, and Windsor McCay. Speaking of whom....]
  

• Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, by Windsor McCay
  [Surreal, fantastic dream comics, circa 1904 (predating Surrealism by a comfortable margin).]
  

• Rabid Eye: The Dream Art of Rick Veitch, by Rick Veitch
  [More dream comics, these circa 1996. But no less fantastic.]
  

• Cheating: I have most of the run of G. B. Trudeau's Doonesbury in a series of volumes: The Portable Doonesbury, The People's Doonesbury, The Doonesbury Chronicles, etc. Any of the individual volumes might not be that valuable, but together they make a form of the Great American Novel.
  

• Another cheat: volumes 4, 5, and 6 of the book-sized comics anthology Kramer's Ergot
  [Probably the most important comics anthology since those 80s RAW volumes. I'm not sure I could part with a volume.]
  

• And another cheat: volumes 1-4 of Joss Whedon / John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men
  [I've been reading a lot of comics this year, and I'm prepared to say that, although this isn't high art, it's probably the best stuff that mainstream comics is putting out these days.]
  

• American Splendor Presents: Bob and Harv's Comics, by Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar
  [Crumb and Pekar are both essential comics creators, and getting both of them, at the top of their respective games, makes this volume a must-keep.]
  

• Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, by Chris Ware
  [Ware's world-view is bleak enough to nearly constitute a form of comedy, but there's no doubt that he's an absolute master of comics form and vocabulary.]
  

• Monkey Vs. Robot, by James Kochalka
  [A little bit of brilliant minimalist stuff... his American Elf collection is also great, but I have that in individual-issue form.]
  

• The Frank Book, by Jim Woodring
  [Jim Woodring drew my LiveJournal user icon, a character named Frank who roams about in a creepy, psychologically-rich cartoon universe. This stuff is a good example of the kind of things that can really only be done in comics (they've been turned into animated films, but their eerie, airless logic works best on the page).]

The Frank Book is a big coffee-table style book, so let's transition and throw a few more of those into here:

• Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective
  [Published by the Guggenheim, this 632-page tome contains somewhere around 500 color reproductions of Rauschenberg's work, and another couple hundred in black-and-white. This is also probably the most expensive book I have ever bought for myself (and it would be even more expensive to replace, apparently.) Worth it, though: Rauschenberg, to me, is one of the key artists of the 20th century, bringing together (in a single figure) strands of Abstract Expressionist, Pop, and Fluxus.]
  

• Paul Klee
  [Another Guggenheim edition. Klee is another of my favorite visual artists, and although this volume isn't as comprehensive as the Rauschenberg one, it's well worth hanging on to.]
  

• I'll bundle two graphic design books here as a final cheat: Sonic: Visuals for Music and 1 + 2 Color Designs, Vol. 2. Neither one is a masterpiece, which is part of how I can justify bundling them, but I do flip through them fairly frequently when needing ideas for graphic design projects, and books of this sort are expensive, and thus a pain to replace.]

Fifteen books left to go, and what's left in the collection? Mostly just miscellany. Stay tuned!

Labels: book_commentary, lists, projects

Sunday, July 06, 2008
5:24 PM
4 comments

100 book challenge: part four: essays and cultural criticism

Moving on with the 100 Book Challenge, we come to the "essays" area. I don't have a huge selection here, but these would be my picks:

• I Remember, by Joe Brainard
  [Perhaps the simplest organizing principle for a memoir ever: a sequence of sentences, each of which begin with the words "I remember." Yet somehow it works.]
  

• The Size of Thoughts, by Nicholson Baker
  [This book is full of great pieces, including Baker's hilarious review of the Dictionary of American Slang and his lament on the disappearance of the card catalog.]
  

• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace
  [Not quite as good as the exemplary Consider the Lobster, but I don't have a copy of Lobster—I read the library's copy—and this one is also great.]
  

• I'd also probably bring the giant anthology Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Philip Lopate, which has key selections by people like George Orwell, Joan Didion, M.F.K. Fisher, etc., and thus eliminates the need for a lot of individual volumes.

Essays slide nicely into the critical writing section of my library, so let's head there....

• Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin
  [This book is full of interesting ideas and key essays, but it also has deep sentimental value for me.]
  

• America, by Jean Baudrillard
  [I find the central argument here to be incomprehensible, but in a provocative, distinctly "Baudrillardian" fashion. Like a piece of heady SF in its way. See also his The Gulf War Did Not Happen, which I could part with but which holds similar pleasures.]
  

• Discipline and Punish, by Michel Foucault
  [Probably the key Foucault to hang onto.]
  

• Mythologies, by Roland Barthes
  [And this the key Barthes.]
  

• The Postmodern Condition, by Jean-Francois Lyotard
  [...and this the key Lyotard.]
  

• Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, by Donna Haraway
  [Contains the great Cyborg Manifesto and a number of excellent critiques of the ideological biases inherent to the sciences.]
  

• A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History, by Manuel Delanda
  [Between this and Patrik Ourednik's Europeana, one doesn't need any other history books.]
  

• Temporary Autonomous Zone, by Hakim Bey
  [Does this belong in fringe ideas or cultural criticism? It's a little of both, but totally freakin' brilliant. Life-altering.]

Moving on into some more straightforward literary and media criticism...

• Literary Theory, by Terry Eagleton
  [An overview of the main literary theory movements of the last hundred years, written in a style that's clear enough that a bright undergraduate could grasp every word of it.]
  

• Postmodernist Fiction, by Brian McHale
  [A good argument about what postmodernist fiction is, what it does, and why it's doing it. I'd also include Marjorie Perloff's Radical Artifice here, a similar argument about experimental poetics, but I don't own a copy.]
  

• Half-Real, by Jesper Juul
  [The best piece of video-game criticism I've read to date.]
  

• Rules of Play, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman
  [Not exactly a piece of video-game criticism, more a design handbook, but a key text for "game studies" anyway.]
  

• Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud
  [Yet, oddly, I might pass on McLuhan's Understanding Media, which has not dated especialy well and in some ways is a model for everything cultural criticsm does poorly.]

That's seventeen—and since I'm trying to stick to round numbers for this project I'll include three pieces of fiction I overlooked this first time around: the bizarre Sixty Stories, by Donald Barthelme, the classic Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, and a piece of fun, dense SF, Accelerando by Charles Stross (which I reviewed here.) That brings us to twenty for today, and the running total for the project overall to seventy. I'll move on from the McCloud into the "comics" shelf next.

Labels: book_commentary, lists, projects

Friday, July 04, 2008
11:07 AM
2 comments

100 book challenge: part three: religion, new age, fringe science, and science

Still in the process of [at least theoretically] culling my book collection down to 100 key books. Moving on down the shelf takes us through Drama—my drama selection is pretty patchy and under-appreciated; I'm not sure that any of the scattering of volumes I have would be worth including in the final 100. If I had a good volume of Shakespeare's plays I'd take that, but I don't. Moving on.

The next couple of shelves are religion, "new age"-type stuff, and fringe science. Here are my picks from that area:

• The Grove Press "Pocket Canons" Books of the Bible box set.
  [I should be honest and acknowledge that I'll almost certainly never read the entire Bible, but reading these twelve books every few years is feasible and desirable.]
  

• Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, by Gershom Scholem
  [This book took me forever to get through, but was incredibly rewarding. There are so many strange ideas in the history of Judaism, and this book is a fascinating overview.]
  

• A History of God, by Karen Armstrong
  [Contains just about everything you'll ever need to know about the three major monotheistic religions.]
  

• The I Ching, or Book of Changes (Wilhelm / Baynes translation)
  [Carl Jung claimed that this book was alive. Philip K. Dick claimed that this book could not predict the future, but could rather provide an accurate diagnosis of the present, from which probable futures could be extracted. Anything I could add would be extraneous.]
  

• The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, edited by Lawrence Sutin
  [If anything, Dick's non-fiction is even more interesting and loopy than his fiction. This book contains a lot of Dick's thoughts on spirituality, synchronicity, and reality: great stuff. I'd also find it hard to part with In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis, the book that editor Lawrence Sutin valiantly attempted to carve out of Dick's 8,000 page journal documenting his mystical experience.]
  

• Cosmic Trigger Volume One: Final Secret of the Illuminati, by Robert Anton Wilson
  [For better or for worse, Cosmic Trigger changed my life, and although I'm a little more distanced from Wilson these days, this volume is still a real gold mine of high weirdness.]

Let's move on down into the science books...

• Metamagical Themas, by Douglas R. Hofstadter
  [Godel, Escher, Bach is more renowned, but this book, which collects Hofstadter's Scientific American columns from 1981-1983, has just as many fascinating ideas, and in more digestible form. Language, self-referentiality, fonts, game theory, geometric art... this thing is like a laundry list of geek interests. Plus it is the book that taught me the game Nomic.]
  

• Emergence, by Steven Johnson
  [A good, readable introduction to the science of complexity and self-organization.]
  

• Chaos, by James Gleick
  [Great pictures of fractals, and still (to my mind) the best introductory book on this particular branch of science. I also own Mandelbrot's The Fractal Geometry of Nature, which is wonderful to look at, but a bit over my head.]
  

• Li: Dynamic Form in Nature
  [A tiny little book—basically an impulse-buy kind of thing—documenting "surface patterns" in nature—crystal designs, cat markings, vascular structures in leaves, etc. Those are the kinds of patterns I'm attracted to, so this book is pretty important to me. Since it's small, I'll throw in its sister volume, Sacred Geometry, a similar-sized volume on the harmonic mathematics of ritual spaces.]

This brings me right up to the halfway point: 50 books, 50 to go.

Labels: book_commentary, lists, personal

Wednesday, July 02, 2008
10:05 AM
0 comments

100 book challenge: part two: poetry

Still toying with the idea of trying to figure out which books I would keep, if I were to limit myself to 100. Last week I figured out 25 works of fiction I'd want to keep; here are some selections from the Poetry shelf.

• Veil: New and Selected Poems by Rae Armantrout
  [Armantrout's poems are enigmatic, delicate, and careful—she may be my favorite living poet.]
  

• My Life, by Lyn Hejinian
  [This is perhaps the most interesting and important poetic project of the last, say, 25 years.]
  

• Deer Head Nation, by K. Silem Mohammad
  [Back in 2007, I wrote that this book, part of the "Flarf" / "Google-sculpting" genre, was "one of the best new books of poetry to emerge in the last ten years." I stand by that.]
  

• This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, by Juliana Spahr
  [Another important book, this pair of poems has a better grip on the key questions of the contemporary moment than almost any other book in my entire collection. Longer write-up here.]
  

• The Tunnel: Selected Poems, by Russel Edson
  [Edson's demented little stories, like psycho-sexually rewired fairy tales, are a longtime favorite of mine. This is another book where just opening to any page and beginning to read is pretty certain to be rewarding. Random opening line, to test this theory: "A piece of a man had broken off in the road."]
  

• How to Write, by Gertrude Stein
  [Not sure what to say about this book, except that it's not really about how to write. The classic Stein text is probably Tender Buttons, which I wrote up here and here, but don't actually own. Anyway, this one, also great, will do in a pinch.]
  

• Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania, edited by Jerome Rothenberg
  [Classic 1968 ethnopoetic anthology. Reads like a weird alternative Bible.]
  

• Postmodern American Poetry, edited by Paul Hoover
  [A good Who's Who of interesting poets working today.]
  

• The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion: A Trilogy, by Leslie Scalapino
  [I've always loved Scalapino (I in fact made her Wikipedia page), and this book is a good example of why. Hard to describe, but I'd say it's like what you'd get if you ran a kind of important modern novel about globalism through some kind of syntax re-ambiguator?]
  

• A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, by Tom Phillips
  [If you're not familiar with this bizarre text, run a Google Image Search on "humument" right now. Use this link, if you want.]
  

• Human Wishes, by Robert Hass
  [This list is heavy on the experimental stuff, so here's what is, to me, a five-star book of more traditional lyrical poems about everyday life.
  

• A Book of Luminous Things, by Czeslaw Milosz
  [Another one for the traditionalists. Love poems, haiku, lyrical meditation—standard stuff, but well-selected here, and I think one needs some more emotional and less academic stuff to round out the picks.]
  

• Darkness Moves, by Henri Michaux
  [This French poet isn't that well-known, but his poems are blend of Surrealism, drug writing, and cerebral fantasy that I find absolutely hits me in my pleasure center every time. Sample line: "Infinite are the passages from fog to flesh in Meidosem country."]
  

• Howl, by Allen Ginsburg
  [One of the greatest books of poems of the 20th century. Nothing more to add.]
  

• The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
  [I also would like to bring along really good volumes collecting William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara, Ezra Pound, or John Ashbery, but aside from the Stevens I don't own any of these books, so I don't need to worry about which get the nod and which don't.]

That's fifteen—added to the twenty-five fiction titles brings us to forty. Sixty more to go.

Labels: book_commentary, poetry_commentary

Monday, June 30, 2008
1:13 PM
3 comments

100 book challenge: part one: fiction

Here are the first 25 picks, all from the Fiction shelves.

• The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker
  [One of my favorite authors, and this is my favorite novel by him.]
  

• Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges
  [This book has enough provocative, imaginative ideas in it to last one a lifetime simply by itself.]
  

• The Age of Wire and String, by Ben Marcus
  [Still a book I grab on a regular basis to read random passages out loud to people.]
  

• Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
  [Like Labyrinths, this is a book that opens up onto a nearly infinite "possibility space."]
  

• If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, by Italo Calvino [The other really essential Calvino novel.]
  

• Story of the Eye, by Georges Bataille
  [A 1928 pornographic novel so mindbending it borders on the Surrealist.]
  

• Crash, by J.G. Ballard
  [If we're bringing along experimental pornography, we should definitely include this.]
  

• Naked Lunch, by William Burroughs
  [And this.]
  

• I'm going to cheat here, and count Burroughs' "Cut-Up Trilogy" (Nova Express, Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded) as one volume
  

• Another cheat: William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive).
  

• I actually don't need to cheat on this one, because I have the single volume that collects The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, by Douglas Adams, but it's really the first only the first volume that matters deeply to me. I can, however, see myself enjoying re-reading the others at some point.
  

• The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien.
  [I've still never made it all the way through all three of these, but it's good to bring an unfinished book along with some of the faves, and good to have a book you could feasibly read out loud for a year.]
  

• The Annotated Alice, by Lewis Carroll [annotations by Martin Gardner]
  [Another good out-loud book, plus it's essential to have at least one book on hand that could entertain children. Having Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass together in one volume make this an absolutely indispensible choice. Not to mention the annotations, which are fascinating.]
  

• Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
  [I'm not entirely sure that I'll ever re-read this, but there are some great bits in it that often pop up in my mind, and I'd like to be able to refer to those bits at some point.]
  

• The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon [I'll include Gravity's Rainbow later, if there's room]
  

• Underworld, by Don DeLillo
  [Maybe my favorite "realistic" novel of the last 100 years.]
  

• White Noise, by Don DeLillo
  [Fights with Underworld for the title.]
  

• Time's Arrow, by Martin Amis
  [My favorite Amis novel, and the most successful and beautiful extended meditation on the flow of time that I've ever read.]
  

• Blindness, by Jose Saramogo
  [Like Time's Arrow, this is a book that's effectively a fantasy, but nevertheless profoundly captures both the horror and the beauty of real-life humanity.]
  

• Europeana, by Patrik Ourednik
  [An experimental novel that's also a concise history of the 20th century.]
  

• Lolita, by Vladmir Nabokov
  [Or maybe Pale Fire? Whew, tough choice.]
  

• Valis, by Philip K. Dick
  [Far and away the best of his novels.]
  

• My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist by Mark Leyner
  [An indescribable mish-mash of cyberpunk, experimental poetry, and humor writing.]
  

• Schrodinger's Cat, by Robert Anton Wilson
  [More coherent and more intellectually provocative than the cluttered Illuminatus Trilogy.]
  

• Magic For Beginners, by Kelly Link
  [A weird but often delightful collection of fantastical short stories.]

Next up: poetry.

Labels: book_commentary, lists

Saturday, June 28, 2008
11:50 AM
2 comments

(some writing about) writing about film

So after I saw Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (Film Club XXVII), I went and got a book of her writing out of the library (Essential Deren: Collected Writing on Film). It's pretty interesting, and it sheds some light on exactly what it is that she's attempting to do in her films.

I tend to read with a package of book darts nearby, and eventually (because I'm a huge geek) I take the passages of a text that I marked with the darts and transcribe them into the computer so that I can easily access, search, or share them later.

It occurred to me that people reading this blog might be interested in the notes on the Deren book, so I whipped them up into a webpage, viewable here. I'm still reading the book, so the notes aren't quite complete, but there's more than enough there for interested parties to sink their teeth into. (The page will dynamically update with new notes once I return to reading the book, which might not be for a few weeks: I'm travelling.)

Just in case Deren isn't your thing, here are a few other exports of notes on film books I've read in the recent past:

Virginia Wright Wexman's A History of Film

Carol Clover's Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film

Stan Brakhage's Brakhage Scrapbook: Collected Writings 1964-1980

Martha Nochimson's The Passion of David Lynch

Eric Lichtenfeld's Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie

Jonathan Rosenbaum's Movies as Politics

Hopefully you can find something in there to enjoy. Oh, btw, these exports aren't hand-coded; they're all made possible by Dabble DB, a great (but not free) service used to generate online databases: that's the same service I use to maintain the 20 Most Recent Films and Favorite Films pages.

Last but not least is a reminder that the Production Design Blog-A-Thon begins Monday...

Labels: book_commentary, indexing, media commentary

Saturday, May 17, 2008
10:09 AM
0 comments

the season of comics

Of the last five books I've read (see sidebar), all five of them are graphic novels. That's the first time that that's happened in the five years I've been keeping a reading log.

I think there are a few factors that might contribute to this, besides the fact that graphic novels are generally pretty quick reads. It's winter, and an especially gray and dismal-looking winter, and the lure of something brightly-colored is appealing. Also, my grading load has increased this semester, and it's hard to want to read more lines of black text on white paper when I'm done with a few hours of reading student drafts. But probably most prominent is that Film Club has begun patronizing comic book / video store / geek haven Brainstorm, and it's one of those local microbusinesses that you just can't help but want to support.

Labels: book_commentary, comics, personal

Sunday, March 02, 2008
10:23 AM
0 comments

the year in reading: 2007

I know we're a little bit far on into 2008 for a year-end recap from 2007, but I try to crunch the numbers on the reading log every year, and I don't want to skip 2007 just because I was so busy for the first few weeks of the New Year.

So. Total number of books I read last year: 58! That's up a comfortable 16 from last year, and only two shy of my high-water mark (60 books in 2004).

Novels / novellas: 16 (up seven from last year). Highlights: Honestly? Probably fantasy stuff like the Harry Potter series, which I read all in a row, and Philip Pullman's Amber Spyglass. Of the science fiction I read this year, Charles Stross' Accelerando was the standout, beating out SF-esque books with greater literary aspirations like Cormac McCarthy's The Road or William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. Both of those were fine books, but Accelerando was ultimately more impressive.

Books on film / film criticism: 11 (+11). Highlight: Martha Nochimson's offbeat feminist read on Lynch, The Passion of David Lynch

Graphic novels / comics anthologies / books of cartoons: 7 (+2). Highlights: Roz Chast's Theories of Everything, and Matthew Diffee's great anthology of rejected New Yorker cartoons

Collections of poetry: 5 (-1). Highlights: K. Silem Mohammad's flarf masterpiece, Deer Head Nation; derek beaulieu's fun book of visual poetry, fractal economies

Essays / memoirs: 5 (+2) Highlight: the first three volumes of the Grand Piano collective autobiography project, written by an all-star team of Language poets. I claim them as a highlight, although by the time I got to the third volume they were depressing me deeply: hearing people reflect back upon about the formation of their intellectual / creative community really fostered an indelible awareness of certain absences in my own life

Books of literary criticism: 3 (same as last year). Highlights: the N+1 pamphlet on the "practical avant-garde;" Samuel Delany's Starboard Wine

Books on video games or game studies: 4 (+4; counting Henry Jenkins' Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers, which is only marginally about video games). Highlight: I was deeply engaged by all four of these books, but the one of them that was most important for my own thinking on games and narrative was Jesper Juul's lucid and insightful Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, the best book I read all year

Assorted nonfiction and polemics: 7 Highlight: Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand!: Women and Men in Conversation

Authors I read in 2007 who have written at least one book I read prior to 2007: 8 (Philip K. Dick, Paul Pope, Rick Veitch, Ursula K. LeGuin, Philip Pullman, Edward Tufte, William Gibson, Samuel Delany. Aside from Edward Tufte and maybe Rick Veitch, every one of them writes primarily in the field of science fiction or fantasy. Interesting.)

Trends: big leaps in reading about film and video games, two categories not even really on the radar in years past. Novels and poetry remained an important part of my reading, although I didn't read a single short story collection this year. Hmm.

What did you read last year that you enjoyed?

Labels: book_commentary

Sunday, January 20, 2008
2:26 PM
5 comments

some recent capsule reviews

With classes being over (they ended, for me, on Thursday), I've been able to take some time to catch up on this year's reading log. That said, here are some new capsule reviews for stuff I read this fall...

Alma, or The Dead Women by Alice Notley
This book is many things simultaneously: a collection of experimental poems utilizing different female personae; a cry of abject despair regarding US foreign policy; a set of incantations, curses, and other witchery; a call for the creation of a new species, defecting from the old. The fact that none of these things are particularly popular make it all the more impressive that this book ever made it to press. Enjoyable in small doses, sobering at its full length (at 344 pages it dwarfs most other volumes of contemporary poetry on my shelf).

Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie by Eric Lichtenfeld
A good overview of the action film as a genre, although I wish the book's theoretical basis was a bit more rigorous. It is best at positioning the films historically (it includes even minor details about their promotion and reception) and is weaker when it does ideological or formal analysis. The promise of an argument about "violence and spectacle" is only nominally fulfilled. Scavengings here.

You Just Don't Understand!: Women and Men In Conversation by Deborah Tannen
A careful analysis of the way gender differences manifest in conversation that scrupulously avoids taking a side in the "nature / nurture" debate. The book has no shortage of hard sociological data at its root, but most of the chapters are "humanized" with the inclusion of a lot of (sometimes repetitive) anecdotal data. This makes it slow reading at times, but the insights here remain sound: making this the rare example of a book that will genuinely help almost any adult who might take it to heart. Scavengings here.

Beautiful Evidence, by Edward Tufte
A masterpiece of beautiful design, but content-wise this book feels a bit like a "Tufte's Greatest Hits" collection. The Powerpoint-hatin' and the appreciation of Minard's "Napoleon marches on Moscow" graphic, for instance, will seem familiar to readers of Tufte's other books. (That's not to say that there isn't a pleasant sort of comfort to encountering them again here.) Of the chapters that felt really fresh, the one on "sparklines" is key: it's the one that best showcases Tufte's endless willingness to fruitfully rethink the ways that we visualize data. Scavengings here.

Movies As Politics, by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Book-length volume of Rosenbaum's film criticism, collected from around the 1994-1996 era. I admire Rosenbaum as a critic, but I'm not entirely sure these short pieces, taken together, quite add up to a book. Arguments recur, yes, but in a way that betrays their piecemeal origins rather than working cumulatively. Scavengings here.

Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons 1978-2006, by Roz Chast
Roz Chast's cartooning work in recent years has been so content to mine the vein of child/parent relationships that it's easy to forget the pleasures of her early work, which is much more interested in the intersection between the odd and the quotidian. This is a great collection, although the first third (for my money) is vastly better than the final third.

Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures The Life of The Mind, by Gerald Graff
A book-length argument for some relatively commonsense principles: students learn better when they understand a context for what they're learning; instructors have a duty to try to bridge the gap between academic language and the vernacular; student papers are better when they have a sense that they're arguing *against* someone rather than into a vacuum. Valid points, certainly: but as someone mostly convinced of these points on my way in, I found the rhetorical exertion on display here to be essentially skimmable. Scavengings here.

As usual, the full list of everything I've read this year lives here, and LibraryThing powers a RSS feed of my reviews here.

Cross-posted to Raccoon Books.

Labels: book_commentary

Monday, December 10, 2007
3:42 PM
0 comments

accelerando, by charles stross

Back in August, I wrote that Charles Stross' Accelerando might be the best science fiction novel of the last ten years. After a few months to think about it, I stand by that, and I wanted to try to follow up on the claim a bit here.

First off, it touches on just about every hot geek topic from the last decade or two: bandwidth politics, data havens, distributed computing, AI pets, entertainment law, viral marketing, the reputation economy, fringe-science ideas from people like Moravec and Tipler... the list goes on. One of Strosser's great talents is that he can not only cram all these ideas into a single book, but also find the ways in which they can be rewardingly combined, the ways they might shoot sparks if struck together: as a result, the future of Accelerando seems like an actual future, the generated result of ideas that have been lived with for a while, and fruitfully combined, recombined, mashed-up, road-tested, exploited, etcetera. It's a future that's imagined richly enough to be pretty disorienting for the reader—the more familiar you are with those zeitgeisty topics listed above the easier a time you'll have.

It'll also help if you've got a passing familiarity with the basic tropes of SF—stuff like interplanetary colonization, "first contact," "the singularity," virtual worlds, consciousness-as-digital-simulacra, etc. Cause most of that stuff's here, too. Still erring on the side of maximalist density, Stross chooses to shoehorn not one but all of these different tropes into his book, again with an eye for the ways they might cross-pollinate interestingly. In other words, this is a book intended to disorient people who find normal SF novels to be not provocative or defamiliarizing enough (no small feat, considering that SF is a genre that has a certain degree of disorientation and frustration built into it as a fundamental requirement). It's also a generational epic and a comic romp—it's brisk and flat-out entertaining. Highly recommended.

Cross-posted to Raccoon Books.

Labels: book_commentary

Monday, November 19, 2007
11:41 AM
0 comments

some recent book reviews

I've updated this year's reading log with some new reviews, posted below for your reading convenience:

Easy Travel to Other Planets, by Ted Mooney
There's a lot to like about the way this novel chronicles the interpersonal drama among a group of intellectuals and artists. The conversations are stylish, fragmentary, and mediated; the prose is compressed, with a cinematic sense of editing; a quasifuturistic theme (interspecies communication) provides ample opportunity for strange riffs; an atmosphere of geopolitical tension permeates obscurely at all times, threatening, at any moment, to condense into apocalypse—at its best, it recalls the energy and thrust of early DeLillo. At its worst, it reads like high-end erotica posing as lit: Mooney's attention to the sexuality of his [female] protagonist lurches towards the prurient at times (in the first thirty pages of the novel, she participates in three sex scenes, including one with a dolphin).

Drawing From Life: The Journal as Art by Jennifer New
Book dedicated to showcasing intricate art journals, mostly hand-drawn. The journals themselves are so self-evidently fascinating that it's hard to say why presenting them in this fashion doesn't quite work. The choice to reduce intricate journal-pages down to postcard size, rendering them mostly unreadable, certainly doesn't help; I think there's also a problem with the sheer number of journals represented here, which helps to give a sense of scope and variety but eliminates the ability to really immerse yourself in any particular journal. The framing essays profiling each journal-maker are worth a read, but ultimately they're not nearly as interesting as the journals themselves: it's just one more degree of remove between the reader and the subjectivity that's alive in the journal-pages. There's so much "frame" here that the art itself is choked out.

Only Words, by Catharine MacKinnon
MacKinnon is an anti-pornography feminist, which can cause people on both ends of the political spectrum to reject her ideas without taking the time to engage with them first. This is a shame, because MacKinnon's argument here is one of the most interesting anti-pornography arguments I've read, avoiding the easy use of anecdotal pathos, in favor of a legal argument, suggesting that pornography's status as "protected expression" is a classification error, and that it belongs more properly in the category of speech acts that are treated legally as actions rather than ideas (hate speech; sexual harrassment). Elegant and deft.

The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman
Final volume in the His Dark Materials trilogy, a children's fantasy trilogy built around the (Gnostic) notion of a War Against God. The fact that such a thing ever achieved a moderate success on the shelves of American booksellers strikes me as so profoundly improbable that Pullman earns points just for pulling it off; that goes double when you also consider that this book also features two heroically pair-bonded male angels and features a young girl's sexual awakening as a major plot point. But to focus on the anti-Narnian qualities on display here is to overlook the sheer strength of Pullman's prose and storytelling craft. In this volume, these strengths are most evident in Pullman's sequences of genuine terror (the passage into the Land of the Dead) and heart-rending tragedy (the parting of lovers). Heavy stuff, but Pullman is right to not flinch from confronting children with emotionally weighty material: it dignifies them as fully human.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
Post-apocalyptic minimalism from master prosesmith Cormac McCarthy. This book could fruitfully be partnered with Jose Saramago's Blindness: both stare unflinchingly into extremes of human ugliness in an attempt to unsentimentally illuminate the fragility and sheer miracle nature of human love. In Blindness the love is between a man and a woman; here it is between a father and son, a framework that allows the book also to also rewardingly explore some of the thornier questions of parental ethics—when is it appropriate to lie to a child, for instance? What forms of protection are valid and appropriate? The book disappointingly pulls a few punches in its final pages, but prior to that it was one of the most rewarding novels I've read this year. Recommended.

Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, by Jesper Juul
If I were to pick a book that this one most reminded me of, it would be Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: you could practically entitle this Understanding Video Games and be none the worse for wear. Like McCloud, Juul comes to his chosen branch of the media tree with a fresh eye, determined to coherently examine its component elements in order to build a new conception of the way they work their effects. For Juul, the key elements are narrative and rule-based play, and the unique experience of video games grows out of cooperation (as well as tensions and slippages) between these forces. Fascinating reading, clear and lucid, an essential work for anyone interested in the academic study of video games or cross-platform narrative. Highly recommended.

(Those of you who are interested in that last one might want to take note that all my "scavengings" from the book (85 in total) can be found here.)

Cross-posted to Raccoon Books.

Labels: book_commentary

Tuesday, October 23, 2007
1:24 PM
0 comments

away notice

Leaving tomorrow for a few days in the Great Northeast; if any readers of this blog happen to be in the greater Boston area and have a free lunch hour tomorrow or Friday, let me know and we'll hang. Otherwise I'm going to the Coop to blow some money.

Because of my trip, film club for the week is canceled, and I probably won't really be upping the blog posting pace, but I will leave you with one observation and one question:

The observation: Charles Stross' Accelerando is possibly the best science fiction novel of the last, oh, let's say ten years or so. I am stone-faced serious when I say this, although to get some idea of why, you might want to read some of what I was saying about science fiction last year around this time

And the question: does anyone know of a good way to defamiliarize prepositions? E-mail me at "projects," at imaginary year (all one word) dot com.

Labels: book_commentary, personal

Wednesday, August 22, 2007
4:03 PM
0 comments

some recent capsule reviews

Here are some reviews of stuff I read back in April. I didn't get a chance to review them then, because back then I was posting reviews of stuff I read in March. Oh well.

The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography: Volume 1 by Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, and Ted Pearson
Ten Language poets take turns writing reflections on their origins. This volume (the first in a proposed ten) covers 1975-1980 and is loosely organized around a theme of "love." The unusual collective authorship scheme here is overtly designed to evoke multiplicity and ultimately create a "community of memory," although a less kind read might be to point out that it also serves to build the Language Poetry "brand," perhaps as part of a bid for long-term canonization. After all, the very point of writing autobiography (on one level) is to self-aggrandize, and although the Language thinkers, with their grounding in theory and radical politics, are more likely than most to critique this implulse, they don't manage here to transcend this aspect of the genre. All the same, the group assembled here is basically an all-star list of important poets writing today, and it's fascinating reading for anyone interested in putting their poetic work in context.

The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz
Strange, episodic story cycle of life in a gloomy Eastern European city (Drogobych), which is overstuffed with decaying marvels, cryptic artifacts, and just plain trash. (Same goes for the protagonist's home, which seems both cramped and weirdly infinite.) The book is populated by colorful / quirky / mad characters, most centrally the protagonist's father, who obsesses first over raising exotic birds and then later, over developing a quasi-Gnostic theory about tailor's dummies as a form of imprisoned matter. Uniquely European high weirdness, likely to be enjoyed by fans of Calvino's Invisible Cities or Kafka's parables.

Among the Names by Maxine Chernoff
For this book, Chernoff gathered various texts pertaining to the concept of "giving" or "gifts," ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Gifts," to Marcel Mauss' The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, to DivorceSource.com's "The Question of the Ring." Thus gathered, she culls interesting phrases from them and jettisons the rest, effectively taking the discourse and exploding it into a book-sized cloud. This doesn't reduce it to nonsense, however—the theme of the gift persists—but by shattering the originals she decontextualizes the fragments, transforming them into curious artifacts, rewarding of close examination. The result of arranging these artifacts is not to make an argument about giving, exactly, but to do something more valuable: to try to illustrate (albeit obliquely) the entire sphere of human thinking that surrounds the concept. Fascinating, occasionally moving. Recommended.

Cross-posted to Raccoon Books.

Labels: book_commentary

Thursday, August 16, 2007
12:00 PM
0 comments

j. k. rowling, pirates of the carribean, and world-building

One fact that has not escaped mention in the cloud of discourse surrounding the Harry Potter phenomenon is this one: there are certain metrics that traditionally characterize "good writing," and viewed through some of these metrics, J. K. Rowling does not appear to be a very good writer at all.

A few examples: she abuses space-filling adverbs, she circulates through the entire array of distracting synonyms for "said" (including the especially unfortunate "ejaculated"), she relies enormously on wordy expository dialogue (often at the climax of a book), her sense of prose rhythm is clunky, her metaphors are rarely vivid, she intermittently dips into cliche, her combat sequences read like a transcript of a Dungeons and Dragons melee round... etc etc etc. I could continue to populate this list, but really, any fan of the books (and I count myself among their number) could tell you that these things detract from the enjoyment of the books only marginally, if at all. And the unprecendted size of her global legion of fans suggest that there is a whole other unspoken set of "good writing" metrics that Rowling is in fact the undisputed contemporary master of.

So what might that be?

A clue is provided by Chris Stangl, of the great Exploding Kinetoscope film-blog, who has not written on Harry Potter as such (at least not that I've seen) but who understands something about that sprawling subculture we call fandom (just as a for-instance, note his in-depth appreciation / critique of the comic-book-only Season Eight of Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

Anyway, in his 2006 year-end list, Stangl writes about, of all things, Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest, and in doing so he says:

"The story is built out of the elements that satisfy and inspire fan-fiction writers. Careful, obsessive attention to the arcs and quirks of every periphery character, piling on the backstory and complicated relationships, until the puffy summer blockbuster assumes Wagnerian proportion. Every character combination would be a potentially interesting pairing for slashfic. Holes in character histories and the timeline are left open for imagining more adventures. New fantasy elements and characters are introduced with such color and variety, they expand the Pirate-verse in every direction. Any Pirates fan gets a three hour cruise on the funniest, sexiest, most breathless, dreamiest galleon on the water. The rest of you may be lost at sea."

Interesting, I thought: and it reminded me of the "mixed or average reviews" that the new Pirates movie, At World's End, had been receiving. Complaints of the movie being over-plotted, talky, tedious, and cluttered made me wonder if these critics weren't just judging it, like some have judged Rowling, by the wrong metric. So let's pop over to see what one of fandom's primary academic champions, Henry Jenkins, has to say:

Unsurprisingly, he calls it "one of the best summer movies that I have seen in a long long time."

More:

"The film ... throws a lot of stuff at us and expects us to catch it. ... [T]he parts add up to a satisfying whole if we connect all of the pieces. For someone really engaged in watching this film, the result is epistemaphilia, a mad rush of information being brought together and being clicked into the right mental category."

And still more:

"The modes by which we consume [franchise] films have shifted. Most films don't warrant a first look, let alone a second viewing, but for those films that do satisfy and engage us, a much higher percentage of the audience is engaged in what might once have seemed like cult viewing practices. Once we find a franchise which floats our boats, we will settle in for an extended relationships and we want to explore all of the hidden nooks and crannies. We want to know everything we can possibly know about this world and contemporary franchise films are designed to accommodate our interests."

And still more:

"Plots cross each other: a choice which seems to bring resolution to one plotline opens up new complications for another; a decision which makes sense from one perspective seems enigmatic from another; and the reader must be alert to all of these different levels of development, must think about what the scene means for each character and each plot if they are going to get full pleasure from the story."

And so all those negative reviews?:

"[I]f [people] suddenly realize that the film is much more complex and layered than they anticipated, they may start to flounder and ultimately drown, which seems to be what happened to a high percentage of the film critics. They went into the film expecting a certain kind of experience; they hadn't successfully learned how to take pleasure from its world-building; they don't want to dig into the film more deeply after the fact, comparing notes online with other viewers, because their trade demands constant movement to the next film and a focus on their own private, individualized thoughts."

Hmm. Nice. I haven't seen any of the Pirates of the Carribean movies, but I think that all the praise that Stangl and Jenkins are loading onto the franchise applies perfectly to the Potter books. People don't care about Rowling's work on the level of prose style, because the books offer a different pleasure from the pleasure of simply reading stylistic prose. Rowling has created a world that people engage with and enjoy. The vast networked ensemble of characters attended to within that world provides a staggering number of points for further engagement. The fact that, ultimately, the amount of information she can supply about these characters is finite is not a disappointment but rather explodes the universe into a practically infinite number of jumping-off points for further imagination, participation, and still deeper engagement. This is what Rowling is good at. To judge from the success of her books it may be the thing that primarily matters. Teachers of storytelling, take note.

(Film club this week was Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989), a film that engages in world-building narrative in its own fashion. But more on that later.)

Labels: book_commentary, fandom, media commentary, narrative, writing

Saturday, August 11, 2007
12:59 PM
0 comments

the inevitable harry potter posts: III

Finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Harrows a while ago, but only now found the time to write it up. Essentially spoiler-free, but in the comments area, anything goes:

Here, in the series' final book, is where Rowling strives most evidently for long-term grandiosity, from the Pullman-esque epigraphs, to the honest-to-God old-school Fantasy Quest, to the (disappointing) abandonment of "school" as the primary framing device. She also takes this as an opportunity to effectively trash the franchise, attempting with unrestrained relish to definitively retire most of the major characters (in one fashion or another). Some of the sacrifices thusly endured would feel (more?) capricious if it weren't for Rowling's selection of Life Under Enemy Occupation as the replacement frame. As anyone glancingly familiar with the history of WW-II-era Europe can tell you, enemy occupation makes for harrowing circumstances, and it is these circumstances that the book, at its best, convincingly evokes: no place is safe, everyone is constantly at risk, ignoble death can strike seemingly at random. This is a dark place for the series to go, but it sets the stage for satisfying closure.

Over and over again during my read of the series, I thought about the act of world-building, and how it is distinct from or related to the more traditional acts of narrative construction. Expect a discussion on this point soon, using the Potter books (and possibly the Pirates of the Carribean series) as the prime exhibits.

Cross-posted to Raccoon Books.

Labels: book_commentary

Tuesday, August 07, 2007
4:53 PM
0 comments

the inevitable harry potter posts: II

Three more Harry Potter reviews. I'm in the middle of reading the last one, which is appropriately harrowing; expect a non-spoilery review here soon.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
The transitional book in the series. Rowling still feels indebted to the "boy wizard-detective solves mystery" structure of the earlier three books, but she's also clearly grown more interested in character development and the long-term narrative elements of the story world. This creates an interesting tension: between the desire, on the one hand, to write another self-contained book (like the first three) and the desire, on the other, to write a book that functions as an installment in an ongoing serial. The tension isn't fruitfully resolved: this book is the slowest to get rolling (it takes nearly 200 pages just to get to Hogwarts) and Rowling's heart doesn't seem to be entirely in the mystery: it's the one of the first four which has the least satisfying Big Reveal, which requires an entire chapter's worth of flavorless talk to fully clarify.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
The first book in the series where Rowling assumes that the readers have read the previous books. Freed of the necessity to ponderously re-establish the backstory-- the flaw that weighed down Goblet of Fire --Rowling is freed up to hit the ground running: the turbulence begins to hit with the first chapter. As with the earlier books in the series, the book is centered around a mystery here, although unlike the earlier books, it doesn't truly belong the the genre of The Mystery as such--there is no real way to puzzle out the solution, for instance. But the series doesn't really need to rely on mystery structure any longer anyway: by this point the long-form plot has amassed enough potential energy that it can soar simply by exploiting the conflicts already set up in its first four installments. Which isn't to say that there aren't new ones as well, notably in the form of Dolores Umbridge, whose petty abuses of power, disdain for the autonomy of young people, and Kafkaesque punishment schemes make her all-too-familiar: possibly my favorite villain in the series. Recommended.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Feels a bit like a book-length positioning of pieces for the big finale of Book Seven. Not that there's anything wrong with that: Rowling, at this point, has developed a very rich world, populated by literally dozens of characters who we care about, each with their own interesting plot arc. (This may form the basis of an entire later post.) Watching this network click forward in the standard increment (one year) is fascinating unto itself; the Voldemort backstory that forms the real backbone of this book is an added bonus.

Cross-posted to Raccoon Books.

Labels: book_commentary

Thursday, July 26, 2007
9:52 AM
0 comments

the inevitable harry potter posts: I

So I've been putting off reading the Harry Potter books for what feels like forever, despite the fact that this means that I'm at a real social disadvantage when hanging with my fanfic-writing pals. With the approach of the seventh final book, however, I realized that I'd have only a short amount of time to ever try to read them without knowing The Ending, so I decided to make ripping through the six existing novels my big July Reading Project.

As all of civilization knows, the final book went on sale last night at midnight, so it looks like I missed my deadline: I've finished the first four books and am about halfway through the fifth. Hopefully I'll get fully caught up before stumbling upon any spoilers, although I'm wondering if this is even possible without having to go on Full Media Blackout.

Anyway. What follows are reviews of the first three, free of all but the most mild spoilers:

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
A good read. Chugs along surprisingly swiftly, drawn by the well-plotted and essentially rewarding mystery story that forms the book's core. The main characters (Harry, Hermione, Ron) are charming, albeit a bit sketchily-drawn in this early volume (and some of the bit characters, primarily the Dursleys, are cast with a heavier hand than is perhaps necessary, even for childrens' literature). The book's real stroke of genius, however, is the utilization of the familiar triumphs and trials of Going To School as a way to ground us in the quirky tweeness of Rowling's universe. Perhaps a minor quibble after this praise is the matter of the prose, some of which is occasionally clunky or slack (I don't know what enchanted letters shooting out of a fireplace flue are like, but to say they "like bullets" is no help). I'd probably let this pass if I hadn't just read Phillip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass, a piece of children's fantasy literature that uses prose so finely-wrought and precise that nearly anyone looks clunky and slack by comparison.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
The second book in the series brings back some of the same pleasures of the first-- the likeable characters, the fast-paced narrative, the "boy detective" elements (clues, red herrings, a finely-crafted Big Reveal) --and also introduces a subtle new one, specifically, a sense of repetition and variation that emerges from Rowling's decision to plot the books around a school year. Many of the milestones from the first book (summer trouble at the Dursley's, a Diagon Alley outfitting trip, the Sorting Ceremony, the Quidditch season, Christmas break, etc) recur here, which adds to our comfort and familiarity, but changing perspective and changed circumstances keep the book from feeling repetitive. The interplay between these poles is essentially the interplay that lends pleasure to any sort of tradition, and it does similar work here, making this book a read that satisfies more deeply than the first-- even if the Dursley's still feel heavy-handed, and even if the climax still has a touch of the deus ex machina about it (tell me again why a sword comes out of the Sorting Hat?).

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
The best of the first three. At this point in the series, Rowling's confidence appears to surge dramatically, resulting in the book being more inventive than its predecessors, most notably through Rowling's decision to introduce creatures that are brand-new to the series universe (Dementors, boggarts) instead of simply choosing to revamp of already-existing fantasy creatures (as she does with the pixies, goblins, dragons, centaurs, etc. of the earlier books). In addition, the mystery is more complex and satisfying (although the Big Reveal accordingly requires deployment of huge chunks of dialogue in the center of what's ostensibly a moment characterized by murderous desire). Finally, the book has a thrilling post-Reveal final act -- something absent from the earlier two books -- and a satisfying profusion of loose ends, which begin to give some sense to the shape of the larger seven-book arc. Recommended.

More to come in a while; cross-posted to Raccoon Books.

Labels: book_commentary

Saturday, July 21, 2007
10:13 AM
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back

Back from two days of mind-expanding drone festival action, two days of on-the-road hijinxs with Harvey P., and five days in Houston, Texas with K. and a rotating cast of guest stars.

Needless to say, I emerged from the far end of it having been pummeled by enough good times to have rendered me nearly insensate. Some highlights, ordered in rough chronology, include: attempting to summarize all of Seasons Two and Three of Lost to Harvey, who indulged this act on my part with a preternatural patience; exploring an abandoned motel in downstate Illinois; listening to the generative music produced by pan-African automated whirligigs designed by polymath George Lewis (currently on display at Houston's Contemporary Art Museum in conjunction with this exhibit); getting caught in torrential rain with old-school compatriots Jon and Sharon; enjoying salmon grill-out with the whole Court of Charleston group; laughing nearly to the point of internal rupture at a story K. told about attempting, when quite young, to make a steak tatare.

Then there was the fest. Saw some fantastic music, felt proud of my own performance as part of The Number None quartet formation, took a handful of decent photos—these are the good things. The bad thing is: we lost money on it, which has resulted in some lingering post-fest complications best left unrecounted here.

Aside from fest music, I've also consumed some other media in the last week, including the Transformers movie and the first two Harry Potter novels, which I'd not read before. Both were surprising: I didn't expect the Transformers movie to be as funny as it is, and I didn't expect the Harry Potter books to be essentially mysteries, complete with clues, red herrings, and big reveals. So many people talk about Harry Potter as a big fantasy epic, but I found them—at least these first two—to be much closer to the tradition of "boy detective"-type novels, set in a fantasy milieu. In any case, they are quite charming, and the Transformers movie was worth my $9.50, even though it adds yet another branch to the messy thicket of Transformers continuity.

Has anybody out there read The Boy Detective Fails?

Labels: book_commentary, media commentary, personal

Monday, July 09, 2007
12:16 PM
0 comments

fractal economies, by derek beaulieu

A quick litmus test for whether or not you should read derek beaulieu's fractal economies would be to look at the image below:

"sinus headache"

This is one poem from the book.

If you can accept this as a poem, you might enjoy this book.

If you can see it as an exciting poem, one that expands the field of what a poem can be and expands the toolkit of ways poetry can represent, then you might love this book. I did.

"sinus headache," above, is taken from "surface," a long sequence of Letraset experiments that comprises most of the first half of the book. The second half is made up of two other sequences, "depression" and "blister," in which beaulieu investigates other visual means of poetry-making: photocopier and scanner experiments, relief experiments (rubbings), found poems, diagrams, etc. These other sequences are slightly less interesting than "surface," although this might be a matter of personal taste—part of what I enjoyed about the dry transfer experiments, for instance, is their compositional intricacy, a quality that doesn't naturally inhere in, say, a photocopier experiment. Ultimately, I'd argue for the importance of these other sequences as well, for they contribute to the book's larger effect: broadening the field of possible techniques for contemporary visual poetry. (There are, by my count, four poems in the book that don't even use letterforms.)

As an extra bonus for the truly hard-core: the book closes with a theoretical essay by beaulieu, "an afterward after words: notes towards a concrete poetic." I'm still digesting the ideas in this essay, and may write more on it later.

Labels: book_commentary, poetics, poetry_commentary, visual_poetry, xerography

Thursday, June 28, 2007
10:52 AM
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book reviews: march 2007

A temporary break in the workload allowed me to get a chance to breathe yesterday, so I spent it making this collage and hanging out at LibraryThing reviewing books I read back in March. (April reviews coming soon, if all goes well, although I'm getting a new batch of papers today.)

Anyway, here they are:

Crypto Zoo, by Rick Veitch

Hearing other people describe their dreams is supposed to be famously boring, but Rick Veitch has developed quite the knack for it: his autobiographical dream-comics are enormously compelling. Even "inspirational" -- each time I read one of these Veitch volumes I'm driven to re-start my own intermittent practice of dream-journaling. Any book that can motivate me to write first thing upon awakening, instead of rolling over and going back to sleep, must be powerful indeed.

Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative

Nearly fifty essays compiled by the creators of the online journal Narrativity. The book promises, in its back cover copy, to represent writers "from Tijuana to Montreal," and sure enough they're there: the overall thrust of the book, however, is Bay Area through and through, and readers' enjoyment of the book will likely vary proportionately to how much mileage they can get out of that particular scumbling-up of aesthetics and theory and personal experience and politics that the San Franciscan literary scene has been reliably producing for a generation now. I tend to enjoy that stuff, but this collection is a mixed bag, in part because of the length restriction: averaging only about five pages apiece (a remnant of their Web origins), many of the pieces are able to squeak out a provocative line of inquiry, but very few develop fruitfully beyond that. This leaves the book feeling like a kind of intellectual snack food: often tasty, but not particularly nourishing.

The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood, by Martha Nochimson

Critical appreciation of Lynch's work, up to and including Lost Highway. Iconoclastic to the point where it almost qualifies as "zany," Nochimson's read on Lynch is that he is not only feminist but also radically empathetic: she claims his films are designed "to bring the greatest consolation to the greatest number of people." Along the way we get lots of stuff about surging energy, living vs. constructed form, and forces beyond rational control. Odd, but never boring—in fact, its weirdness makes it often totally engaging. Recommended.

Baby by Carla Harryman

Carla Harryman has described her work as being a series of "studies in sentences, paragraphs, and the relationship of narrative to non-narrative," studies which allow her "to consider the social meaning of form without having to forsake [her] impulse to make things up." If that's the kind of stuff you like, check this one out: it produces a set of quasi-characters (most prominently a baby and a tiger) and suspends them in a void which has narrative elements but manifests as something quite different from a story. Intriguingly strange.

The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula LeGuin

Eerie SF novel about a world whose continuity is repeatedly revised by a man's dreaming mind, an ability which, predictably, begins to be exploited the very second another person gains a sense of it. Fascinating premise, but the book's real strength is in the way it locates the emotional heart of the story, becoming (at its best) a moving meditation on memory and loss, on power and the renunciation of power. Recommended.

Cross posted to Raccoon Books.

Labels: book_commentary, comics

Friday, May 04, 2007
10:49 AM
1 comments

the other hollywood

Legs McNeil's The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry is a book with outsized ambitions: even after doing away with gay porn entirely, claiming, probably rightly, that it's "another book unto itself," there's still at least three major strands operating here: a biography-oriented approach, dealing with major players within the world of porn; a true-crime-ish approach focused on mob involvement, industry murders, high-profile busts, etc; and, finally, an overview of major developments within the industry as an industry (the famous rise of video, for instance).

Although these three strands often overlap, they're distinct enough that the book often struggles to manage the welter of material. (To get a grasp of the magnitude of the topic, remember that the life story of just one figure in this world, porn merchant Reuben Sturman, constitutes an entire third of Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness.) Consequently, the book manages the unenviable trick of both being nearly 600 pages long and feeling like it's barely scratching the surface.

I've never been much of a big reader of true crime, and so that facet of the book is the least interesting to me (although the life story of FBI agent Pat Livingston, and his identity confusion with his undercover alias Pat Salamone is weirdly gripping: another "book unto itself" lies there). In reality, it's the third strand—what seems to me to be the "true" history of the industry—that I was the most interested in, and at times the aversion to this material struck me as frustrating: why two chapters on a porn oddity like John Wayne Bobbit and not even a mention of industry-wide efforts to come into compliance with Section 2257? Why does the discussion of the star system that dominates porn today seem to end with Ginger Lynn? And for that matter, where's the Internet? (The book closes its history in 1998, with the discovery (and swift containment) of HIV in the post-testing industry, but it was published in 2005, so certainly Internet porn could have at least warranted a brief epilogue?)

Quibbling in this way is easy and perhaps a bit cheap: sure, this book isn't definitive, but I'm pretty certain that at this stage of the game it's next to impossible to write the definitive history in a single volume. And so if this ends up being a history—rather than the history—does it matter? What matters more is that the book is consistently fascinating (although the short-sighted lack of an index does make the task of keeping track of the hundreds of recurring figures who crop up somewhat more of a chore than it, strictly speaking, needed to be). So, ultimately, recommended, albeit with reservations.

This review will eventually be cross-posted to Raccoon Books.

Labels: book_commentary

Friday, April 06, 2007
5:04 PM
0 comments

unit operations II

Just finished reading the second chapter of Ian Bogost's Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, and found it shockingly similar to the first. The pile-up of important names continues: this chapter tackles Plato and Aristotle, linguist Ferdinand Saussure, deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, computer scientist John von Neumann, digital media theorists Lev Manovich and N. Katherine Hayles. And, like the previous chapter, this one ends up with a kind of strange left turn, this time analyzing the Department of Homeland Security's Homeland Security Advisory System, which "underscores the tension between unit operations and system operations."

I'm still really enjoying this book, although I'm still struggling to make sense of its thesis in even the most general sense.

Labels: book_commentary, game_commentary

Sunday, March 25, 2007
11:33 PM
0 comments

unit operations

I just finished reading the first chapter of Ian Bogost's Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, and I'm really enjoying it.

Bogost's approach hinges on the concept of the "unit operation," a "mode of meaning-making that [privileges] discrete, disconnected actions over deterministic, progressive systems," and the first twenty pages of the book pretty much constitute an attempt to clarify this distinction.

I'll confess that he isn't a hundred percent successful. At the end of my first pass through the chapter, I feel like I might have a tentative grip on what distinguishes a "unit operation"-based analysis from "systems operation"-based analysis, but I strongly doubt that I'd be able to do something like summarize the difference between the two. I can't entirely blame Bogost for this: "units" and "systems" are both high-level abstractions; we're not exactly talking about apples and oranges here.

Determined to make it clear, Bogost starts pulling in conceptual machinery from a variety of different disciplines: half the fun of the book so far is watching the interesting thinkers pile up on top of one another. By page twenty we've moved through quite the array: Heidegger, Spinoza, Leibniz, Alain Badiou, "object-oriented" philosopher Graham Harman, "autopoetic systems theorists" Francisco Valera and Humberto Maturana, sociologist Niklas Luhmann, mathematician Georg Cantor, digital media theorists Janet Murray and Espen Aarseth, and poet T. S. Eliot—all this en route to, of all things, a unit-operations-oriented analysis of Spielberg's film The Terminal (2004), in which Bogost concludes that the film is about "specific modes of uncorroborated waiting."

So, in conclusion, I'm not really sure yet exactly what Bogost is even talking about, and yet I've jammed the first chapter full of about a pound of bronze (in the form of Levenger Page Points). Being disoriented by brilliance is a good thing.

Labels: book_commentary, game_commentary

Friday, March 23, 2007
10:53 AM
0 comments

reefer madness: sex, drugs, and cheap labor in the american black market, by eric schlosser

Three decent essays posing as a coherent book.

There's a broad unifying theme—the premise of examining "what happens in the black market." But the approach that Schlosser takes towards this content—what we could consider his methodology—varies widely from piece to piece, rendering the examination oddly diffuse, short on unifying vision.

Compounding the problem is the fact that each piece comprising the book seems drawn from a different genre: the "drugs" chapter is essentially a persuasive piece, a call for marijuana-law reform, and the goal of examining "what happens" in the drug market is mostly subordinated to the making of that argument. (This isn't to say that growers, dealers and buyers don't make their appearances—but Schlosser's more interested in focusing on the few penalized growers that will help him to make his case rather than trying to draw a larger, richer picture of the market as a whole.) By contrast, the "Sex" chapter is built around the model of the biographical profile, looking at the figure of pornography magnate Reuben Sturman (1924-1997). Sturman was a colorful guy, and Schlosser makes his tale engaging reading, but I'm not convinced that Sturman embodies the vicissitudes of the porn industry so perfectly that one can pass off Sturman's life story as an exploration of the market.

None of this is intended to knock the pieces themselves, which are clear, well-paced, and nicely detailed, essentially bedrock models of good journalism. But as a book it doesn't live up to the promise of its organizing principle.

This review will eventually be cross-posted to Raccoon Books.

Labels: book_commentary

Thursday, March 22, 2007
1:51 PM
0 comments

some recent book reviews

So here's the last bunch of book reviews I wrote. If you'd prefer, you can get a more steady stream of book reviews by subscribing to my LibraryThing RSS feed or by just occasionally visiting this page at Raccoon Books.

Batman: Year 100 by Paul Pope
Paul Pope is one of the best comics creators at the moment, not only because he's a great visual artist and a sharp writer but also because he has a wild, unsummarizable theory about the way that comics work as an iconic language. His theory, wild though it may be, intersects nicely with the way that superheroes are currently being treated in our culture: less as characters (who would need to grow and change as their narrative unfolded) and more as unchanging archetypes, collections of iconified traits. Once a set of traits is indestructibly established (as with Batman) you can improvise off of it pretty freely, just like you'd do with a jazz standard. Pope understands all of this, and it's part of what makes his superhero riffs so great.

In this book, Pope plants Batman in the 2030s, which permits him to riff mightily, telling his tale with verve and style, but ultimately the stock elements of the State-controlled dystopian setting erode some of the freshness on display. It's still a blast to read, but ultimately it doesn't hit as hard as the best Batman stories out there, or as Pope's own unfinished masterpiece, THB.

Godland Volume 1: Hello, Cosmic! by Joe Casey and Tom Scioli
In this graphic novel, Casey and Scioli blow the dust off the vast cosmic machinery of 1960's-era Kirby-Lee collaborations, and reboot it for the contemporary present (by deploying it in a world that contains junkies, S/M, punk rock girls, and irony). It makes an ambitious attempt to be both parody and homage and a satisfying SF/adventure story in its own right—and if it occasionally falls short of getting this balance exactly right, it at least gets points for trying. Fun.

Groundhog Day, by Ryan Gilbey
Part of the BFI Modern Classics series, slim critical volumes, each on a single film. The critical elements in this one are dialed back a bit—it's more of a summary-plus-appreciation. A quick read, likeable, on an enjoyable film.

Deer Head Nation, by K. Silem Mohammad
A paranoid mind, restless in its search for pattern, can take just about anything that can be named with a noun and make an organzing narrative out of it. In this book of poems (which utterly transcends the "novelty" origins of the "flarf" genre), K. Silem Mohammad chooses deer as the thread that joins up the rest: at the beginning of the book, a deer head is merely "spooky," but by the end of the book, after being presented with a "suite" in which dozens, possibly hundreds of disembodied Internet voices have made their ellipitical proclamations on the search term "deer," the animal and its oft-displayed head both seem deeply braided into the book's other concerns (war, terror, America, human abjection). Paranoid? Sure. But these are paranoid times. Highly recommended; one of the best new books of poetry to emerge in the last ten years.

Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers by Henry Jenkins
Odds-and-sods collection from Jenkins, reprinting a smattering of essays, interviews and Congressional testimony [!] from the last dozen years. The divide between the more rigorous critical writing, and the more generalist Technology Review pieces renders this collection slightly uneven, but Jenkins is one of the preeminent thinkers on fandom and participatory culture, so even at its most fluffy, this book is always an interesting read.

The Mother's Mouth, by Dash Shaw
I seem to remember reading an online profile (or something) where Dash Shaw described his work in indie comics as exploring the effects of "putting one thing next to another." I've been unable to relocate the exact quote, but The Mother's Mouth is testament to this as an aesthetic. At its most straightforward it tells the (fragmentary, partial) story of an emerging romance between Virginia (a sunken-eyed, heavy-set librarian) and Dick (a gaunt musician). But this story is intercut with other kinds of visual material--from cutaways of geological formations to dance instructions to the drawings of children in therapy --which expand the context and deepen the narrative in intriguing and evocative ways. Recommended.

Labels: book_commentary, comics

Wednesday, March 21, 2007
9:58 AM
0 comments

some fresh book reviews

Book-review page for 2007 is up now, kicking off with these three reviews:

A Short Guide to Writing about Film by Timothy Corrigan
Slim, steeply-priced volume which deals tidily with the subject promised by the title. Clearly intended for a classroom environment, although general readers wanting more methods for thinking about film might be able to extract something from it as well. (My students are using this book this semester; we'll see how it goes.)

Within the Context of No Context by George W.S. Trow
Encompassing a 1980 New Yorker article and a 1997 companion piece, Trow's book is an exercise in stylish despair. At its most basic level it functions as a critique of a media-based society, but this book is neither manifesto nor jeremiad--it's something altogether more sly. For every point made by an incisive aphorism there's another made only obliquely, by way of, say, a witty anecdote, or an evocative coinage. As a result the critique here is essentially slippery: it seems to explain everything, but by way of not actually explaining anything. Tricky. (Also oddly riddled with typos: you'd think Atlantic Monthly Press would be able to scrape up a few proofreaders.)

The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick
PKD at his loopy best: starts out as a spirituality-based thriller (what if Christ were secretly reborn in a dystopian future?), but by the book's midpoint the entire universe has become queasy and unhinged as the novel's theological forces grapple and debate. Messier than Valis and with more "wtf?" moments, but a worthy follow-up nevertheless.

A few more coming soon(ish), and as always, anyone wanting a more real-time-ish feed of my reviews can find such a thing on this LibraryThing feed page.

Labels: book_commentary

Thursday, January 25, 2007
12:44 PM
0 comments

year in reading 2006

Happy New Year, everyone. And time for me to crunch the numbers on the reading log:

Total number of books I read last year: 42 (up 7 from 2005)

Novels / novellas: 9 (up four, counting David Markson's This Is Not A Novel and story cycles like David Mitchell's Ghostwritten or Bilge Karasu's Garden of the Departed Cats)

Collections of poetry: 6 (same as last year, counting Geraldine Kim's "poem-novel" Povel)

Collections of short stories: 6 (+5)

Graphic novels / comics anthologies: 5 (-4)

Books on science / technology: 2 (same as last year)

Books of literary criticism: 3 (+2)

Essays / memoir: 3 (+3)

Books on art / architecture / music: 2 (same as last year)

Assorted nonfiction: 7

Authors I read in 2005 who have written at least one book I read prior to 2005: 12 (Manuel DeLanda, Mike Davis, Steven Johnson, David Foster Wallace, Johanna Drucker, Steve McCaffery, Grant Morrison, Rick Moody, Joshua Clover, David Markson, Kathy Acker, Robert Coover)

Trends: whatever I was working through last year seems to have resolved / been repressed: last year I tackled eight heavy books on religion and mysticism, and this year I didn't read a single one. In exchange, this year marked a big return to fiction, with both novels and short story collections up.

Highlights?: Three books especially helped to define the scope of the writing project I'm currently working on: two collections of poems (Geraldine Kim's Povel and Juliana Spahr's This Connection Of Everyone With Lungs) and one experimental novel (Patrik Ourednik's Europeana). A lot of the other fiction I read was less immediately applicable to my own writing, but was impressive on its own merits: traditional novels like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and stranger fiction like Mark von Schlegell's Venusia, Kelly Link's Magic For Beginners, David Foster Wallace's Oblivion, Kathy Acker's Great Expectations, and Robert Coover's Universal Baseball Association. I also read two great essay collections: John McPhee's Uncommon Carriers and David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster (the latter indubitably being the single best book I read all year).

Labels: book_commentary

Monday, January 01, 2007
11:36 AM
0 comments

some fresh book reviews

Here's some of the books I've finished in the last two months or so, along with some capsule reviews:

Justice League America: World War Three, by Grant Morrison & co.
Grant Morrison closes his run on JLA with a bang, taking us from Atlantis to Heaven to cosmic space in a dogged determination to out-do every previous comic-book end-of-the-world storyline. The result is hyper-kinetic and deliriously crammed: a psychedelic mandala made out of superheroes. There's no room for (much) character development here, but amid the fireworks there are still moments where the story manages to feel surprisingly moving and personal. A blast.

Kalpa Imperial, by Angelica Gorodischer
Fabulist allegories investigating the relationship between power, humanity, and storytelling, using Empire as the central metaphor. Often fascinating, although the book has a tendency to skew towards abstraction: this has the feature of making the stories feel more universal (a plus) but also saps them of concrete details that would make them more memorable.

Oblivion, by David Foster Wallace
Strong collection from Wallace, with the opening and closing stories ("Mister Squishy" and "The Suffering Channel") being the high-water marks. These two stories are perhaps the strongest pieces of fiction I have ever read about life in corporate America, revealing yet another vast field of human experience that Wallace has seemingly obtained mastery over. Impressive.

The Garden of the Departed Cats, by Bilge Karasu
Strange narrative about a traveller who grows embroiled into a conspiracy / human chess game, interspersed periodically with fables, metafictions and allegories. Sounds promising: the combo of "fantastic tales plus framing narrative" recalls Calvino, and the tales themselves are akin to Kafka's parables. But in the end, the book misfires more often than it connects, rendering these comparisons tragically superficial.

Time Maps, by Eviatar Zerubavel
Brief, readable book about the ideology of historical narratives and timekeeping systems (i.e., the calendar). I'm no stranger to the ideological dimension of the quotidian, so the revelations on hand here didn't feel especially startling, but having so many examples so accessibly presented kept the book enjoyable.

All of these reviews are mirrored over at my LibraryThing page, for those of you who are into that sort of thing. Plus they're also on the Raccoon Books page for the year-in-progress.

Since the year's almost over, some year-in-review posts will appear soon (my anuual one for albums of the year and for books of the year). But I'm still on the road, moving ever further north and not logging a lot of time on the computer, so those posts may not appear until early 2007. Stay tuned.

Labels: book_commentary

Friday, December 29, 2006
11:54 AM
0 comments

recent reading

Some new capsule book reviews of things I've read in the last couple of months:

Y: The Last Man Vol. 1: Unmanned by Brian K. Vaughn & co.
Q: In a near-future where only one man survives, will there still be stereotypical man-hating feminists? A: Oh my yes. Promising premise (first pitched by Mary Shelly in 1826) degrades quickly into garden-variety gynophobia.

Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg
Short stories. The title story is a killer, one of the best I've read in recent years.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Autistic boy attempts to solve neighborhood crime. A promising premise, one which the book dutifully carries out, and then memorably transcends. Recommended.

Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America's Educationally Underprepared by Mike Rose
When a book defines itself as "moving" in its own subtitle, approach with caution... and, indeed, this memoir-ish book is not without its soft-focus moments. It does manage, however, to amply convey that peculiar love that a teacher feels for even (especially?) his or her worst students. But its episodic nature and unwillingness to follow through on its argument(s) grows wearying by the end.

Venusia by Mark von Schlegell
Delirious piece of writing growing out of that verdant patch where the tributaries of science fiction, psychedelia, and abstract critical theory all drain into one another. Equal parts William Burroughs and Edgar Rice Burroughs, this book features sentient plants, unstable psychic landscapes, drug-induced reptile hallucinations, and pulp-grade sex: what's not to like?

Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee
Take a topic which is inherently fascinating (the inner workings of America's transportation industry), and then hand it over to "writer's writer" John McPhee, with his unerring eye for illuminating detail, and his unerring ear for unusual turns of phrase, and the result is absolute delight. Steering a barge, braking a locomotive, getting a package through UPS: McPhee handles them all with great elan, rendering them accessible to the mind of the reader without sacrificing an iota of their boggling complexity. Highly recommended.

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
Polymath whiz David Foster Wallace on John McCain, pornography, grammar, 9/11, sports memoirs, conservative talk radio, and, yes, lobster. And yet from the welter of topics a coherent theme emerges: how to communicate in a world so thick with irony and spin that genuine, sincere communication is automatically considered suspect. An important book, highly recommended.

The Question of Bruno by Aleksandar Hemon
Short stories by Bosnian-turned-Chicagoan Aleksandar Hemon. Hemon, like Nabokov, is an ESL writer who puts most native speakers and writers of English to shame: the language-acquistion process seems to generate linguistic strangeness (or at least a total liberation from cliche). Hit or miss overall, but certain sentences here are as good as they come.

I've also begun to maintain a LibraryThing page, for those of you who would rather go there than dig around in the Raccoon Books directory... expect old reviews from 2005 and 2004 to be appearing over there sometime soon(ish). And if you have a LibraryThing profile, dear reader, don't hesitate to post a link to it (or your username) in the comments box, so that I can add you to my watchlist.

Labels: book_commentary

Monday, November 13, 2006
4:43 PM
0 comments

books for the game industry

Although I'm not a member of the videogame industry, I very much enjoyed looking at Ernest Adams' list of Fifty Books Everyone In the Game Industry Should Read. There are a few that are game-design-oriented in ways that I can't find relevance in, but only a few: Adams keeps much of the list oriented around theoretical and inspirational texts.

The following are books that I own / have read:

• Rules of Play, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman
  

• A Theory of Fun for Game Design, by Raph Koster
  

• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward Tufte
  

• Visual Explanations, by Edward Tufte
  

• Envisioning Information, by Edward Tufte (he has a new one out, too)
  

• Everything Bad Is Good for You, by Steven Johnson
  

• Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud
  

• Homo Ludens, by Johan Huizinga
  

• The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
  

• Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, by various authors (*cough*gygax*cough*)
  

• Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
  

• Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, by Marshall McLuhan
  

• The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell
  

• Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, by Janet H. Murray

and the following are the books on Adams' list that I'd like to read, along with intriguing clippings of his descriptions:

• Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames, by Steven Poole
  "Steven Poole is an intelligent and thoughtful writer who understands not only how games work but what they mean, culturally, psychologically, and technically."
  

• Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, by Jesper Juul
  "[E]xamines the complex relationship between rules, which create gameplay, and fiction, which creates fantasy worlds."
  

• Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, by Ian Bogost
  "[Provides] a method of analysis that marries literary theory to information theory."
  

• Joystick Nation, by J.C. Herz
  "[A] good introduction to the sociology of videogames, placing them in context as a cultural phenomenon."
  

• What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, by James Paul Gee
  "He presents, and argues for, 36 principles of learning that he believes can be found in the design of good games"
  

• The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, by Frederick P. Brooks
  "Some of the most famous software engineering truisms were first identified by this book, such as 'adding programmers to a late software project will make it even later.'"
  

• A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander et al
  "Christopher Alexander and his team identify dozens of patterns of behavior—not all so dramatic—and show how to enable that behavior through architecture." I've been meaning to read this book for at least five years now.
  

• Man, Play, and Games, by Roger Caillois
  "[I]ntroduces a classification for games based on four key qualities found in many of them: competition, chance, simulation ... and what he calls vertigo"
  

• The Ambiguity of Play, by Brian Sutton-Smith
  "Sutton-Smith updates Huizinga and moves the discussion into the modern world."
  

Labels: book_commentary, game_commentary, lists

Friday, October 13, 2006
12:30 PM
0 comments

reading the corrections

So I've finally gotten around to reading Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, a novel which is now five years old. I ended up avoiding the book at the time of its publication, as a result of the now-infamous "Oprah controversy," which made it difficult for me (depite basing my understanding of the controversy completely on second-hand retellings) to think of the book as anything other than a node in a complicated argument about literary elitism, corporate populism, and garden-variety sexism. Eventually I grew less interested in this argument and more interested in the more basic question of whether the book is any good.

Short answer: it is. The world of The Corrections is more keenly and deeply envisioned than any that of any other novel I have read in recent memory. Franzen's great triumph here is to have produced a set of believable characters and built their personalities, histories, and current contexts in extremely fine-grained detail. Furthermore, Franzen routes this information to the reader through channels that feel consistently fresh, proving that there are still artful ways to present exposition in an essentially traditional narrative.

And make no mistake: this novel is, at its core, a traditional dysfunctional-family drama, a book with aspirations that are essentially modest, despite the tendency among some critics to talk about The Corrections as a "big" social-novel-type book.

In fairness, Franzen himself speaks perfectly clearly about the book's true scope: in this Bookpage profile, Franzen says that an earlier draft of the novel "was much more about the stock market, insider trading and prisons. I finally found that the big social picture stuff wasn't working so well, whereas the little crises these characters were involved in interested me a lot." I think Franzen's right to trust his instincts here: in my own reading of the finished novel, I found that the stuff that works best was the attention to the nuances of interpersonal crisis, whereas what works least well, at least for my money, was the stuff that seemed most obviously intended as Important, Relevant Commentary. (I'm thinking specifically of the psychophamaceutical drug Aslan, which enters the book almost exactly at the halfway point and functions, in my opinion, as a glaringly "devicey" plot device in a book that otherwise sticks to more realistic terrain.)

Franzen makes related points in this interview: "[T]he problem with the social novel is that we don't need it anymore. Before TV, people would actually read a book to learn about a subject, and TV does it so much better. The serial dramas like ER and the news do it so well. So, if you have something important to say why would you write a novel? If you are trying to advocate two sides [books] aren't a good way of doing it. But, TV is really good at it."

These claims, which show Franzen moving from personal feelings about his own novel to broader claims about the Novel in general, work a little less happily, in fact, there's almost no sentence here that doesn't make my mind ache. Is the point of the social novel really to "advocate two sides?" Is TV news really that good at helping people "learn about a subject?" Are the people who have "something important to say" really all working as ER scriptwriters? (It's fuzzy thinking like this that helps to justify something like Ben Marcus' hatchet job on Franzen-the-critic that ran last fall in Harper's.) For all its flaws, though, I feel the quote does adequately sketch out the scope of Frazen's ambition.

Which still leaves me feeling puzzled by pieces like this one at N+1 (actually a profile on David Foster Wallace's recent work). In it, critic Chad Harbach makes the claim that The Corrections serves as a worthy follow-up to Wallace's Infinite Jest, a claim which strikes me as frankly bizarre: although the two novels share a degree of thematic overlap, they have radically different ambitions (not to mention broad differences in their respective formal concerns).

So: is The Corrections worth reading? Yes: but you'll need to dig through some misleading hype to discover the excellent (but modest) novel which lies beneath.

This review will eventually be cross-posted to Raccoon Books.

Labels: book_commentary

Monday, October 09, 2006
9:19 AM
0 comments

recent reading

Writeups of a few books I've finished recently:

The Totality for Kids by Joshua Clover
Arch little poems and hypercondensed travelogues ambiguously regarding the waning of Europe, modernism, and theory and the concomitant rise of America, pop, and capital. Occasionally exuberant, but only in a way that suggests deep and abiding sorrow.

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell
It's kind of amazing that a story cycle containing so many different hot-button global elements (art thieves! disembodied souls! apocalyptic cults! artificial intelligences!) can end up feeling so oddly understated. The end result is something like one of Warren Ellis' Global Frequency trades, only four times the length and lacking most of the kinetic energy. Interesting enough to be worth finishing, but I would have preferred the faster, denser book that the subject matter suggests.

Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary Theory by Franco Moretti
I'm interested in diagrams and info visualization at least as much as I'm interested in literary history, so when Moretti argues that the former can be used as a tool to learn more about the latter, I don't find it particularly controversial. But the examples he uses to prove the utility of his method are startling in their clarity and force. Recommended.

This Is Not A Novel by David Markson
Novelist attempts to write an anti-novel, seeing what survives when you reduce narrative to a cascade of facts (literary anecdotes and gossip, mostly). The experiment yields its most interesting results over the first 40 pages or so, so the remaining 150 serve primarily as feeble inquiries into the effects of perserverance and duration, effects explored more intriguingly elsewhere.

...

I've also read the first three volumes of the Seven Soliders of Victory trade paperbacks, which represent the newest comics work by Grant Morrison: I have some things to say about this series but will probably wait until I've read the fourth and final volume.

I'm also still working on writing up some thoughts on David Foster Wallace's new[est] book of essays, Consider the Lobster. The book is complicated, and my thoughts on it are thorny, but I can probably say that it has been the best book I've read so far in 2006.

Labels: book_commentary

Saturday, September 23, 2006
3:36 PM
4 comments

recent reading II

Sorry things have been so quiet over here in blogland lately. I've been writing a lot elsewhere, mostly in the form of steady progess on the Novel of Adequacy (currently titled Meanwhile, although that might change). I just wrapped up Chapter Nine, and the chart has been complicating pleasingly. I'm working on a few other visualizations of the book's network; expect them to appear here if I ever finish them.

In other news, still broke, which means I've been continuing to churn through summer reading. Who wants capsule reviews?

Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World by Jack Goldsmith & Tim Wu
This book lucidly debunks the notion that the Internet inherently possesses territorial independence or extra-legality, mostly by clearly laying out various ways that governments can (and do) enact enforceable restrictions upon Internet content and behavior. Recommended.

Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness by Chris Kraus
A curious book, collecting essays which straddle the line between art review and memoir of alienation (book club question: is Kraus' BDSM practice a cure or a symptom?). The institutional critique is sharp, the observations on LA are witty / bleak, and the overall grimness is leavened by Kraus' obvious yearning for meaningful human interconnection (and art that can express it). Bracing, enticing.

Demonology by Rick Moody
A frustratingly uneven collection, containing one story which I'd consider to be a modern classic ('Demonology') and one story so torturously overwritten as to be unreadable ('Pan's Fair Throng'). Sometimes I found myself suppressing the feeling that these stories exist primarily as an excuse to showboat, that they're really more about Moody as a stylist than they are about the people they are ostensibly about. In this way the book ends up reminding me of the Coen Brothers movies: inventive, flashy, often entertaining, but with little sense of human urgency.

Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, by Steven Johnson
Breezy book making what essentially amounts to a three-point argument: that video games engage mental skills such as problem-solving and pattern recognition, that a lot of contemporary TV indulges in fairly complex narrative strategies, and that online discourse rewards writing skills and in-depth thinking. I'm pretty sympathetic to these arguments, so the book's conclusions felt a bit foregone to me, although certain examples felt freshly cogent (the diagrams of character networks in a show like 24, for instance).

On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt
This slim volume attempts to develop a theory which will position bullshit in the framework of moral philosophy, and along the way answers questions like: how does bullshit differ from the lie? A blast to read, although I disagree with almost every major conclusion Frankfurt makes (with the anti-postmodernism argument that closes the book being particularly unwelcome).

I might write up a more thorough critique of the Frankfurt at some point, we'll have to see. And, despite the fact that I finished the Moody book only under some (self-imposed) duress, my interest in literary fiction does seem to have re-awakened after the slumber of the last few years. Consequently, I'm looking for recommendations: use the comments link down there if you want to plug anything.

Labels: book_commentary, novel_of_adequacy, writing

Sunday, July 02, 2006
9:15 PM
0 comments

recent reading

I find myself, this summer, with less disposable income than I have had at any time in the past ten years: my paychecks are covering rent and bills but just about everything else (including, say, groceries) either needs to be put on credit or done without.

This has kept me suspended in a foul mood that's hard to shake but it has also resensitized me to just what a friend the university library can be. Needless to say, I've been reading a lot. Here are some books I completed last month, with some brief notes:

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis
MacArthur fellow Mike Davis hunkers down and attempts to produce a readable synthesis of the enormous body of current literature on global urban poverty in this book, which ends up averaging about four footnotes per page. The general adherence to hard fact makes it difficult for Davis' usual theoretical insight to shine through, but the urgency of the subject matter more than compensates. Required reading.

Europeana, by Patrik Ourednik
Twentieth-century events, intriguingly reordered and recontextualized into something that more closely resembles experimental fiction than a history book. No characters as such: Ourednik instead works mostly with collective masses such as 'scientists' or 'soldiers' (although a few representative individuals shimmer through occasionally). Fascists and communists factor in as the big baddies, with capitalists and neoliberals getting more of a free pass than I'd be inclined to give. But then again I'm not Czech.

Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Davis
Slim, readable critique of the prison-industrial complex. Points out ample racism and sexism, although, oddly, the titular question of "obsolescence" is mostly left unaddressed. Useful as an introduction to the prison abolition movement, although newcomers to the topic may want more convincing that punishment and/or reformation would function better in a post-prison world.

I've completed four other books this month; expect some notes on those soon. And the list of all the ones I've read this year lives here, as always.

Labels: book_commentary

Friday, June 23, 2006
7:06 PM
0 comments

recent reading

Couldn't sleep, so I got up and wrote capsule reviews of Kathy Acker's Great Expectations and Johanna Drucker's The Visible Word : Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923, two books I finished a while ago. Read 'em on the books page or over there on the sidebar.

Labels: book_commentary

Monday, May 08, 2006
7:29 AM
0 comments

geraldine kim | povel

I'm pretty sure the claim that Geraldine Kim's book Povel represents a new form that successfully merges confessional verse poetry and the novel should be taken as tongue-in-cheek, appearing, as it does, in an introduction that claims to be written by Lyn Hejinian and claims to have originally been published in An Exaltation of Forms CXXXVIII, only to turn around to tell us, in a footnote at the very end, that "Lyn Hejinian never wrote this and An Exaltation of Forms CXXXVIII is not an existing text."

This fake introduction, with its sense of pomo gamesmanship and its willingness to cleverly tweak elements of "the book as form" (the author photo, bio, and epigraph are all played for gag effect, too) initially seems to place the book in a tradition staked out by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and later parlayed into a literary career by Dave Eggers, particularly in McSweeney's and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. But perhaps Povel's claim to hybridity is not all red herring, as the book does ring akin to Lyn Hejinian's My Life, at least in the way that it makes a sort of biographical narrative by aggregating a set of tenuously-related details.

The main difference is that Kim renounces just about all claim to "poetic"-sounding language. A Hejinian line might say something like "The waves rolled over our stomachs, like spring rain over an orchard slope," a sentence that might contain the somewhat ungainly noun "stomachs" but which also is built around a "nature-y" simile that should sit pretty comfortably with readers of traditional lyric poetry. Contrast this against Kim's "Sarcastic Starbucks Guy runs like a frantic penguin to get tea for the lady in front of me." Still based on a nature-themed simile, but the difference feels pretty stark, even if what exactly distinguishes it is hard to articulate. Is it just the presence of the corporation name? Is it the fact that this image feels, to me, familiar, whereas the "orchard rain" image feels, frankly, exotic?

Whatever the reason, Hejinian's book feels like a poem, whereas Kim's book feels not exactly like a poem or like a novel but a bit like reading straight through the archives of a breezy, funny blog. "It would suck to be a unicorn" (p. 40). "A woman walks in front of me as we climb the stairs and I notice that her ass resembles a pair of tympanis" (p. 86). The whole book is like this, ten thousand bits of random observation, accumulating in various ways, some of which take on some of the features of narrative (the book does have, for instance, characters, some of whom have back-stories, although how much "character development" is happening here is questionable).

The fact that the book piles on these observations and leaves them in free suspension qualifies it as an "Everything Device," although one that's fragmented and trivia-focused in comparison, to, say, Juliana Spahr's This Connection of Everyone With Lungs. One could almost think of Kim as the anti-Spahr: where Spahr's book keeps focusing consciousness outward, broadening it, attempting to see each detail as part of the Big Big Picture, Kim's book seems more focused inward, the sheer massive weight of detail-to-be-collected cramming out any sense of wider connectedness as it overtaxes the very consciousness responsible for collecting it: "Trying to constantly remind myself to write it down before my short-term memory takes it away." I'm not saying that Spahr's book is better—in fact, if you asked me which one works as a better representation of everyday consciousness, I'd say that while we all might wish we had minds like Juliana Spahr's—concentrated on making sense of world atrocity and issues of personal agency—I, for one, feel the shock of recognition much more when confronted with the mind of Geraldine Kim, fixated on TV shows, celebrity trivia, momentary impulses, vaguely narcissitic anxieties, and things said to me by an ex, years ago. This may or may not be lamentable.

This review will eventually be cross-posted to Raccoon Books

Labels: book_commentary

Thursday, April 06, 2006
12:47 PM
0 comments

juliana spahr | this connection of everyone with lungs

OK, so for a while now I've been wanting to talk about Juliana Spahr's new book, This Connection of Everyone With Lungs, as an example of what I've been calling an "Everything Device," a structure, framework, or system which positions disparate information into a meaningful relationship.

We can get a sense that the book is going to do this from its title alone, a phrase drawn from the opening poem: "Poem Written After September 11, 2001." This poem's central task is to articulate the model of radical interconnectedness upon which the rest of the book depends. Over its eight pages it performs this task through what essentially amounts to a slow zoom-out, from the microscopic level ("cells, the movement of cells and the division of cells") all the way out to global scope ("the space of the cities and the space of the regions and the space of the nations and the space of the continents and islands"). To call oneself a "global citizen" is slightly pollyanna-ish, but this poem still functions as a lovely vision: the way it is made elegiac by its positioning as a "post-9/11" poem feels slightly predictable, but that makes the elegy no less real. One of the more "important" poems in recent memory (let's set aside, for now, the question of whether poetry should aspire to importance).

More interesting and important still is the book's remainder, a single long poem (broken into discrete chunks), entitled "Poem Written From November 30, 2002, to March 27, 2003." (The first bit of it lives over at Shampoo, you can go check it out if you're so inclined.) I think this poem is more interesting because it's doing the thornier work of dealing with the consequences of the first poem: if "everyone with lungs" is connected in a "lovely [and] doomed" global matrix, then what does this mean? If we can successfully expand our consciousness to the point where it encompasses the whole earth as a system, then what does it mean when part of that system (including but not limited to "our part") is attempting to kill another part of that system (including but not limited to "their part")? Is it possible to love humanity all-encompassingly when some of the humans that we're connected to behave so, well, shittily? Is a person killed in the Burij refugee camps important? What about someone killed in the Monoko-Zohi civil war? What about Justin Timberlake? How important is the weather? If you can make your own bed a place of "connected loving" and "pleasure" and "agency," what relevance does this have to the rest of the world, if any? How can you consider these questions seriously in a world at war without going insane or succumbing to crippling grief?

I don't think that the book answers these questions, but I think they're the right ones to be asking, and any book that represents a sustained attempt to address them (lyrically no less!) gets my recommendation.

PS: When I first wrote about Spahr's project I said that the high lyrical voice and the sometimes "newsy" details made it seem like "Walt Whitman doing NPR's Morning Edition," and it still seems possible to say that Spahr's project is to represent the newspaper in the form of a poem. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, and it has its own storied tradition: the avant-garde has been attempting to beat the newspaper as a model for radically discontinuous juxtaposition at least since Mallarme.

This review will eventually be cross-posted to Raccoon Books

Labels: book_commentary

Monday, April 03, 2006
11:45 AM
0 comments

the year in reading

Once again: a new year, time to crunch the numbers on the reading log. General trend?: reading fewer books but enjoying the ones I read more. There are a good half-dozen books on this year's list that I spent a long, intimate time with, filling dozens of index cards with crabbed handwriting and generally hastening my decline into obsessive-compulsive insanity.

Anyway, the numbers:

Total number of books I read last year: 35 (down 23 [!] from 2004)

Novels / novellas: 5 (down four)

Collections of poetry: 6 (down sixteen [!])

Collections of short stories: 1 (+1)

Books on science / technology: 2 (same as last year)

Books on religion: 8 (+8)

Graphic novels / comics anthologies: 9 (+4)

Books of literary or cultural criticism: 1 (-5)

Books on art / architecture / music: 2 (-1)

Essays / memoir: 0 (-4)

History: 0 (-2)

Authors I read in 2005 who have written at least one book I read prior to 2005: 10 (Karen Armstrong, Christine Hume, Rae Armantrout, Craig Thompson, David Toop, Alan Moore, Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, Charles Bernstein, and Ryan McGinness)

Books I read in 2005 that I read at least once prior to 2005: 3 ( Valis, by Philip K. Dick, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons)

High points: looking at the numbers above reveals a real increase in my interest in books on religion, and these are indeed the books that I spent the most time with and made my most careful notations on. (This interest traces definitively back to a single distinct experience which some of you have heard me talk about.) Unsurprisingly, then, many of my favorite books that I read this year come from that field. I enjoyed Elaine Pagels' Gnostic Gospels and Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, both rightfully considered definitive texts on their respective topics, but I probably got more out of Stephen Katz's deeply fascinating Mysticism and Language anthology and Philip K. Dick's provocative, loopy In Pursuit of Valis : Selections from the Exegesis.

Outside of the world of religion? The essays in Johanna Drucker's great collection Figuring the Word : Essays on Books, Writing and Visual Poetics changed the path of the writing I produced this year more than anything else I read, and the "image/text" Vas: An Opera in Flatland, produced collaboratively by Steve Tomasula and Stephen Farrell, convinced me that there maybe is still life in the novel after all. Finally, reading the first two manga that comprise Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira saga revealed to me just how deeply the story is compromised by the abridged, compressed version found in the movie.

What did you read this year that you enjoyed?

Labels: book_commentary

Monday, January 02, 2006
12:36 PM
0 comments

The Filth is Grant Morrison's most recent piece of long-form comics narrative, a thirteen-issue series published by Vertigo and recently collected into a trade paperback. The Filth is a pretty trippy compound of provocative ideas and strange imagery, but it doesn’t really work as a story, and over the past two months I’ve been reading and re-reading the collection trying to figure out where exactly the flaw might be found. (The post that follows will contain minor spoilers (and postmodern theory), so beware.)

In the book-length study Postmodern Fiction, author Brian McHale discusses the concept of "ontological oscillation": the way that postmodern narratives tend to set up two or more incompatible worlds and lets the text "flicker" between the different realities without necessarily establishing one as more-or-less "real" than another within the space of the story (although some may bear a greater degree of resemblance to our own "real" world than others). This model maps neatly onto The Filth: within the first three issues we're introduced to three distinct ontic worlds. The first of these is the world which seems (initially at least) to be fairly congruent with our own: the contemporary urban Britain where everyman Greg Feely works at his office job and buys pornography essentially functions as a stand-in for our own world's contemporary urban Britain. There are some minor inconsistencies—for instance, early on in the series we're introduced to a race of nanotech organisms evolved by a Nobel-Prize-winning scientist—but daily life in this first world seems like it would be more-or-less familiar.

The second world is the one into which Feely is abducted, the world referred to as "the Crack," which houses the headquarters of a secret hygiene organization called the Hand. "Are we on another planet?" Feely asks, bewildered by the funhouse architecture of Hand HQ and the blighted landscape outside. "Am I in the future? Or in virtual reality?" The answer isn't exactly any of the above, but it's clear that the Crack is a kind of para-space where the normal rules of reality don't apply: monkeys speak, giant submarines are powered by cathedral-batteries, time and space operate in unusual fashion. And then we have a third world, the least real, introduced at the beginning of Issue Three: "the Paperverse," a comic-book universe that emulates the look-and-feel of old Marvel and DC comics, featuring cities like "Omnitropolis" and super-powered characters like "Alpha-Sapiens" and "Machine Girl."

Morrison spends a lot of time exploring the permeability of the boundary between these three worlds: Hand agents covertly (and not entirely benignly) manipulate events in the real world; Feely is disoriented and troubled by the high weirdness of the Crack, mostly wanting to return to caring for his sick cat in his normal life; the Superman-like Secret Orginal cripples himself by leaving behind the action-packed but comparatively innocent world of the Paperverse and punching into the perverse, morally-ambiguous universe of the Crack. And for the most part, all of this works effectively as a means of bringing dramatic tension into The Filth (although the events occuring at Paperverse / Crack boundary never really amount to more than a tantalizing digression).

But one of the difficulties with writing a postmodern narrative containing universes that lack a firm ontological basis is that events occurring in those universes begin to lose some of their weight and consequence. Ontological instablity is a condition with its own degree of tragedy, and Morrison has proven himself able to exploit this in the past (see Deus Ex Machina, the volume which collects some of his run on Animal Man, or the unsettling conclusion of his more recent three-issue series Seaguy) but in The Filth the pathos-generating events tend to be more traditional, and when they occur in a space like the Crack they have a tendency to feel featherweight: the death of Hand agent Cameron Jones from time-accelerated lymphatic cancer just doesn't seem to matter that much because the universe where it happens has already been established as a place where nearly anything goes.

Pathos in The Filth functions more effectively in the "real world," at least for a while, but by mid-series the science-fictional elements of that world have begun to ramp up, which violates the terms of that universe: we’re introduced to elements like a floating nation-ship, the Libertania, in Issue Seven and a man who can manifest clouds of "visible thought" above his head in Issue Ten. With no recognizable reality left for the weirdness to orient around, the story begins to feel completely ungrounded, and events which seem intended to carry emotional weight begin to fall flat: it's difficult to feel like the death of a sick cat is "real" when it happens in a universe where events like the destruction of a nation of over 100,000 people and the mutilation and assassination of the President of the United States seem to have no notable consequences.

There’s a lot to like in The Filth, but I’d stop short of claiming (as the Comics Journal claims) that "The Filth is the best thing Morrison has ever written." It strives for a certain degree of dramatic gravity at the same time as it systematically kicks out its own dramatic supports.

Labels: book_commentary, comics

Sunday, February 06, 2005
5:29 PM
0 comments

Crunching the numbers on last year's reading reveals the following trends:

Total number of books I read last year: 59 (down three from 2003)

Novels / novellas: 9 (down seven)

Collections of poetry: 22 (+7)

Collections of short stories: 0 (-8!)

Books on science / technology: 2 (-1)

Books on religion: 0 (-3)

Graphic novels / comics anthologies: 5 (+2)

Books of literary or cultural criticism: 6 (+4)

Books on art / architecture: 3 (+3)

Essays / memoir: 4 (+4)

History: 2 (+2)

Authors I read in 2004 who have written at least one book I read prior to 2004: 14 (Colson Whitehead, Robert Hass, Lyn Hejinian, Marjorie Perloff, Marguerite Duras, Don DeLillo, Henri Michaux, John Ashbery, Terence McKenna, Stanislaw Lem, Virginia Woolf, William Burroughs, Donna Haraway, Grant Morrison)

Books I read in 2004 that I read at least once prior to 2004: 3 ( Radical Artifice : Writing Poetry in the Age of Media by Marjorie Perloff, The Lover by Marguerite Duras, White Noise by Don DeLillo)

High points: Manuel DeLanda's One Thousand Years of Non-Linear History and Guy Davenport's The Geography of the Imagination, two nonfiction works of untrammeled brilliance; Eros and Magic In the Renaissance, Ioan Couliano's idiosyncratic study on esoterica; Virginia Woolf's The Waves, the newest addition to my all-time favorite novels list; Christine Hume's startlingly good poetry debut Musca Domestica; William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Soft Machine; Rae Armantrout's Made To Seem and Precedence; the coffee-table-book compilation of Jim Woodring's hypnotic, transcendent Frank comics; Colson Whitehead's unclassifiable The Colossus of New York.

Labels: book_commentary

Tuesday, January 11, 2005
2:06 PM
0 comments

Even when collected, Celan's prose makes for a slim volume—the book contains some speeches, a pair of brief forewords, a letter, a set of epigrammatic fable-ettes, a cryptic short story, and two or three other oddments. That's it. It's enough prose to fill one evening's worth of reading, and given Celan's long committment to minimalism and silence, we should probably feel lucky that we even get that much.

Brevity notwithstanding, the contents here serve as a welcome addendum to Celan's poetry. His entire body of work can be read as an attempt to reconcile two beliefs: a belief in the ability of writing to embody the voice of absolute otherness—original, strange, perhaps ultimately indecipherable—and an equally deeply-held belief in the virtues of communication, of conversation and encounter. This lifelong attempt at reconciliation yields a set of tensions which serve as the animating force behind his poems: the modest stack of writing in this volume, taken collectively, provides additional insight into Celan's attempt to chart these worthy human tensegrities in their full complexity. Recommended.

more books

Labels: book_commentary

Sunday, November 14, 2004
10:05 PM
0 comments

I've spent a lot of this summer staking out The Cantos. The poem has proven to be relatively impermeable to forward assault, so I'm doing the kind of thing I don't normally do, namely, attempting to make the poem more intelligible by reading a bunch of contextual material, the writing about/around the poem.

This is more fun with Pound than it sometimes is with other poets, because The Cantos is a poem so Cinemascoped that it sometimes seems like almost everything ever written could be counted as part of "the context." The Odyssey? Check. Ovid's Metamorphoses? Check. The correspondence of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson? Check. The Confucian Analects? Check.

I've been struggling through Pound's own (unorthodox?) translation of some of the Confucian writings, trying to see what he saw in them. The Analects in particular have been very difficult for me to appreciate: their repeated articulation of the actions and traits of the "superior man" makes them read, at times, like selections from the world's oldest self-help book.

Additionally, I struggle with the Confucian emphasis on tradition ("performing the rites") and the corresponding disdain for "twistiness" or deviance... this world-view is so congruent with contemporary U.S. conservativism that I have great difficulty feeling comfortable with it as a philosophy.

All the same, there's something in the Confucian works that I'm interested in, most notably the way the works approach pattern and change: the Analects can be seen, in part, as a way to ensure the continued iteration of certain patterns through time. How does one maintain a way of life or a body of knowledge through a universe in a state of eternal flux? This is a question that seems to have interested Confucius, and it's almost certainly a question that interested Pound, whose work can be understood as a kind of digest version of the history of literary knowledge, a kind of seed-book that might preserve information through a civilization's apocalyptic collapse (a collapse that Pound may have seen as imminent).

Pattern is also key to another text in this volume, The Great Learning, which is interested less in replicating patterns through time and more with replicating a specific pattern through scale: from the micro- to the macro-. If a man [sic] can establish self-discipline, or manifest the pattern of "orderliness" within himself, says Confucius, this pattern has the potential to radiate out, remanifesting in larger and larger spheres, all the way up to good (orderly) governance of the State.

"Things have roots and branches; affairs have scopes and beginnings. To know what precedes and what follows, is nearly as good as having a head and feet."

Labels: book_commentary, poetry_commentary

Friday, August 27, 2004
3:45 PM
0 comments

I've been reading a ton this summer, but aside from The Medusa Frequency I haven't actually finished a single book. Instead I've been reading around in a set of loosely-related texts, including Grant Morrison comics (Seaguy and The Filth), as well as his Pop Magic! essay; Robert Graves' Greek Myths omnibus; Rudy Rucker's Seek!: Selected Nonfiction; Octavio Paz's treatise on love, sex, and eroticism, The Double Flame; The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings; Guy Davenport's The Geography of the Imagination; and Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

Mining the system of relations between these texts has been fascinating: in my head their system of correspondences and echoes are beginning to form an intricate hypertextual ideogram.

Where can I get a replica of Thomas Jefferson's revolving five-book easel?

Labels: book_commentary

Wednesday, July 07, 2004
7:54 AM
0 comments

twisty little passages II

Early in Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages : An Approach to Interactive Fiction, Montfort makes a convincing case for using the term "interactive fiction" to describe the sort of electronic literature that he's writing about. I like the designator, partially because, as Montfort points out, it enjoys widespread usage, but also because it can be precisely located in a hierarchy of related descriptors. Specifically, it is a little bit more inclusive than the term "text adventure" (not all pieces of interactive fiction need to be "adventures") and a little bit less inclusive than my term command-line literature (not all pieces of command-line literature need to be "fictional").

(An aside: for those of you who aren't really sure what interactive fiction is, this page might give you a basic handle on the form.)

So. Within the first ten pages of Twisty Little Passages, Montfort remarks on the need for "a book-sized resource on interactive fiction's history and implications—one that considers how the form came into being and how it developed through the decades, with basic theoretical discussions of the nature of the form and at least an introductory critical discussion of important works," and it is apparent that the rest of the book intends to fill that need. To quibble with the book's subtitle, one could argue that the different strands in that list do not really constitute a single "approach," but rather several different approaches: there's really enough there to fill a couple of different books. By attempting to tackle each of them in a single concise volume, a certain scantiness ensues (I had no trouble completing the book in a day), but Montfort deserves credit for ambitiously staking out the territory: other scholars of electronic literature will undoubtedly see this book as a valuable starting point to branch off from.

The most successful chapters, to me, are the ones that consider "how the form came into being and how it developed through the decades." The history of Zork and Adventure's development is especially interesting reading, as is the overview of the contemporary IF scene, which has apparently thrived as a non-commercial subculture in the years following the decline of Infocom and other commercial IF publishers. Montfort's critical overview of the major IF works (of the both the commercial and post-commercial era) is pretty condensed—only the most important works get more than a page or two—but valuable nevertheless: I'm hard-pressed to say that I'd trade it for a deeper read into a smaller handful of works. That can come later.

The weaker chapters are the ones that attempt a theory of the form. The first chapter does some decent work establishing a useful terminology with which to discuss IF works: distinguishing between replies and reports, for instance, or distinguishing between which commands are digetic and which are extradigetic. This material, however, is dispensed with in under ten pages, and is forced to share space in this first chapter with the standard "what is interactive fiction?" boilerplate.

The second chapter, probably the book's weakest, unconvincingly attempts to situate the text adventure within the literary tradition of the riddle. Some of the parallels that Montfort attempts to draw have numerous exceptions: for instance, although it is true that riddles are "presented for solution," it is less true that all interactive fiction can (or should) be thought of as doing the same: for instance, notice that many of the IF works available through Adam Cadre's IF page are said to contain "almost no gamelike elements." ("If stuck, just keep exploring," Cadre writes of his latest work, and, in the release notes, he writes "even if you get to an ending, you may have only seen a small fraction of what's possible," neither of which seem like statements that usefully apply to any riddle I know of.)

I take less issue (at least initially) with Montfort's statement that interactive fiction creates a systematic world, but again, the parallel flags for me: is it accurate to say that a riddle also creates this sort of world? Perhaps technically, but the experience of solving a riddle feels to me substantially different from the far more immersive and ludic experience of exploring the world of a work of interactive fiction.

I think Montfort is more on the mark when he touches on the idea of IF as a "literary machine" or what Espen Aarseth would call "ergodic literature." The literary tradition there dates back at least as far as that of the riddle: the I Ching is commonly cited (including by Montfort) as a "literary machine" that dates back to antiquity.

Quibbles aside, I'd highly recommend this book to anyone studying electronic writing, and I even think that most of it is accessible enough to be of interest to people who remember the old Infocom games fondly and might have an interest in seeing what's new in the field.

Labels: book_commentary, electronic_literature, interactive_fiction

Tuesday, January 13, 2004
5:03 PM
0 comments

One of the books I got for Christmas that I'm most excited about is Rules of Play : Game Design Fundamentals, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman.

I think you can learn a lot about a book from its index, and this book is no exception:

Tetris
and cultural context, 86
endpoint, 259
experiential play, 86
formal rules, 86-87
information in, 210
metacommunication, 452
pleasure, 330, 341
protective frame, 95
rules, 143-144, 145-146
as simulation, 425

I read a huge chunk of the book almost as soon as I got it, but progress is currently on hold until I finish making my syllabi for the new semester. However, the blogosphere is already buzzing about the book, see this entry over at Confectious or, for a slightly more critical take, this entry at Antimodal. My own notes may appear in this space at some point but right now the priority is to do a write-up on Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages.

Labels: book_commentary

Saturday, January 10, 2004
2:43 PM
0 comments

When I finished reading Louis Jenkins' The Water's Easy Reach, I officially completed the fifty-second book I've read this year, which means that, on average, I've read at least a book a week. The full list lives here.

I've never before managed to maintain a reading log for more than a couple of months at a time (a spotty attempt from 2001 lives here and a second one here). Now that I've got one that covers a whole year, I'm thinking about analyzing it for trends... all part of the bigger project of trying to figure out exactly what it is that I like. In December or January I'll do some crunching on the data-set of the year's list and I'll post the results here.

What my number-crunching won't reveal is whether fifty-two is above or below my normal yearly average. It's probably above—not only because a fair number of books on this list are fairly slight poetry chapbooks, but also because the very knowledge that I was maintaining a list made me oddly conscious of the half-finished books lying around my apartment at any given moment. Knowing that I could add a book to "the list" if I completed it sometimes gave me the extra incentive to finish that book rather than starting a new one.

That's not to say that I finished everything I started reading this year. The following are some books that I read beyond the first page, but didn't complete. I have ordered this list according to snarkiness:

Shamanism : Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Marcus Eliade
Amount completed: approximately 20 pages
Reason for quitting: this book is probably the text on shamanism, but it's not really very friendly to a general audience. There's 600-plus pages of hard-core data here: more than I need. (I may yet read Daniel Pinchbeck's Breaking Open the Head, though.)

The Druid Source Book edited by John Matthews
Amount completed: one article
Reason for quitting: Pretty much same as above. Druidism is interesting, and the book is probably great for some people, but I'm too much of a neophyte to be particularly gripped by debates about which particular trees Irish druids venerated.

John Cage : Writer edited by Richard Kostelanetz
Amount completed: probably 90 percent
Reason for quitting: I read everything that was interesting, which was most of the book. I skipped some of the drier journalistic reviews and some of the more technical articles. I would also have skipped the mesotics if there were any... I love Cage but have never found his mesotic writings to be even a little bit interesting.

Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis
Amount completed: maybe sixty pages
Reason for quitting: Every once in a while, I start to believe the Bret Easton Ellis hype. Maybe he is a great satirist, I think, and I'm just missing something... then I read something he wrote and am disabused of that notion for another several years. This book has one joke: celebrities, models, and trendsetters are shallow. This is the kind of satire that could only seem "cutting" to people who work for Conde Nast.

Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse
Amount completed: forty pages; skimmed the rest with mounting horror
Reason for quitting: This is an absolutely dreadful book, inexplicably admired by lots of people with otherwise good taste. Following the pattern of self-help literature, this book makes up a new jargon through which to interpret (read: over-simplify) the world. Like many other pseudo-philosophies, this one seems momentarily like it might just explain everything, only to utterly detonate upon the slightest contact with the real world that we have to live in.

Labels: book_commentary

Wednesday, November 19, 2003
4:55 PM
0 comments

I'm still reading Cryptonomicon, and on lots of levels I'm still enjoying it: it's full of lots of fun geeky bits, and just sentence for sentence it's snappily written and acutely observed. I've read over two-thirds of the book now, and I intend to finish.

But one thing keeps bothering me, and that's the ideological difference between Stephenson (or Stephenson's characters) and myself. This isn't a new problem for me: even when I read Snow Crash, I thought to myself "this book has some problematic subtexts." But in Cryptonomicon they're not really subtexts anymore, they are the text, and attempting to ignore or gloss past those passages of the book gives me a sort of low-level migraine.

So I might as well just grapple with them directly. Premises put forth in the book that I'd take issue with include:

• that the work of female cultural critics is primarily motivated by issues they're having with their boyfriends
  

• that "post-modern, politically correct atheists" are essentially socially retarded because they have lost their "instruction manuals"
  

• that the Nelson Algren notion of "hard work = success" is the most valid way to think about the American class system
  

• that racism is primarily a matter of intent (that you cannot be unintentionally racist)
  

• that couples who talk about their feelings with one another have boring sex
  

• that women control the world through a conspiracy designed to control and monitor male ejaculation
  

Admittedly the book presents that last premise in a pretty tongue-in-cheek fashion, but at best it is the kind of joke that a lame stand-up-comic would make, and at worst it is the kind of statement that helps to justify the paranoia of the really hard-core anti-feminist types. (Stephenson should know this: he is, almost above all else, a writer who has a keen sense of the way ideologies and beliefs can travel virally from mind to mind.)

If he could hear me raise these objections, Stephenson would probably accuse me of being one of those emasculated, feelings-oriented, sensitive males that are so easily offended. But it is wrong to take offense when someone basically insults you or the people you care about over and over again?

Labels: book_commentary, rants

Tuesday, November 18, 2003
9:39 AM
0 comments

I recently cracked out The Party Train, an anthology of prose poetry I haven't really looked at since graduate school, and the introduction quotes Gertrude Stein as saying that Tender Buttons represents "my first conscious struggle with the problem of correlating sight, sound, and sense, and eliminating rhythm."

Weird. The book strikes me as an attempt to de-correlate sound from sense, but maybe that possibility isn't entirely ruled out by that quote. But this business of eliminating rhythm strikes me as totally strange, because one of the things that impressed me about the book is its musicality: it seems veritably obsessed with the rhythm of language.

"To bury a slender chicken, to raise an old feather, to surround a garland and to bake a pole splinter, to suggest a repose and settle simply, to surrender one another, to succeed saving simpler, to satify a singularity and not to be blinder, to sugar nothing darker and to read redder, to have the color better, to sort out dinner, to remain together, to surprise no sinner, to curve nothing sweeter, to continue thinner, to increase in resting recreation to design string not dimmer."

I mean, it's not iambic pentameter, but that sentence certainly doesn't strike me as one from which the rhythm has been eliminated-- or are GS and I just using the word differently somehow?

Labels: book_commentary, poetry_commentary

Sunday, November 02, 2003
3:27 PM
0 comments

So I promised a Gertrude Stein post to offset all the Tarantino material.

I just recently got done reading Tender Buttons, Stein's classic 1914 work. It's pretty wild stuff for any time, but especially for 1914. Part of the fun of reading this book has been trying to figure out what, exactly, the surrounding context for this intriguing piece of work might be. I know very little about Stein's biography, and this poem bears almost no resemblance to any other piece of pre-World War I poetry I've ever read. Critics often claim that Stein writes in a "Cubist" style-- whether Stein herself made this comparison I do not know --and with the Cubists emerging in France around 1907 this could be a potential lead, although I can't instinctively see the paralells between Cubism and the writing here.

Her project-- which seems to be largely centered around driving a wedge between language and content --would seem to place her within the tradition of the language poets, although she's about seventy years early to that party. I could also place her in the "prose poetry" tradition, but that really seems to take off around 1960 -- she'd be one of the first people to ever write such a thing (in English at least).

But this throws me right back into the question of context. What on earth could have been going on in her head to get her to just invent stuff like this out of whole cloth?

Labels: book_commentary, poetry_commentary

Tuesday, October 28, 2003
5:45 PM
0 comments

cosmopolis

Cosmopolis, the new Don DeLillo book, is something of a disappointment. The book's primary set-pieces—an anti-globalism protest, a hip-hop performer's funeral, a rave, and a Spencer Tunick-esque mass gathering of nudes—all feel slightly stale: there is nothing here as inventive as White Noise's Airborne Toxic Event or Most Photographed Barn In America; nothing here as accomplished as Underworld's "super-omniscient" Giants-Dodgers game.

That said, there are some interesting thematic threads woven throughout the book. Like DeLillo's last novel, The Body Artist, Cosmopolis permits the appearance of elements which are overtly fantastic. In this novel, the super-natural is embodied by two pieces of image-capturing technology (a surveillance system and a camera-watch), which are so sophisticated that they begin to display events that have not yet occurred.

These devices are the most dramatic symbol of one of the book's central thematic concerns: the predictive capabilities of technology. The protagonist, Eric Packer, is an asset manager who has made millions by accurately predicting the inherently unpredictable fluctuations of currencies, with the assistance of sophisticated information-gathering technologies. The book seems to suggest that as these technologies improve, they grow ever-closer to penetrating the veil of the future.

Thinking about this reminded me of something that ex-hacker Steve Steinberg mentioned over in the Boing Boing sideblog, which warrants quoting at length here:

"[T]o be a hacker in the late 1980s was to know something profound about the nature and degree of connectedness before everyone else ... today, an equally singular and premonitory view is coming into focus at a few of the edgier hedge funds on wall street.

[...] we have all heard that companies from Wal-Mart to Cheescake Factory rely on sophisticated data mining to run their business. Every customer is analyzed 43 different ways until They know what you will buy before even you do. Even ignoring the enormous gap between rhetoric and reality, these algorithms are at best myopic. Like the idealized model used in undergraduate physics -- no gravity, no friction -- these companies imagine their business in isolation.

But money flows through a network with thousands of significant nodes-- to partners, from customers, away from competitors. The airline industry has come the closest to this kind of holistic analysis, thanks to their penchant for collusion.

But right now the only people who really want to see how all the pieces fit together -- to datamine entire industries, economies -- are on wall street. Coincidently, the web has already made many businesses so transparent that an outsider can know almost as much as management.

Surely, with enough determination.. a lot of bandwidth, some fast computers... somebody will build the first detailed map.. a topography of money flows.. to see what's next."

Labels: book_commentary, capitalism, information, technology

Tuesday, September 09, 2003
11:09 AM
0 comments

It's a good time to be interested in avant-garde magazines from the past. Over at Ubuweb we can find all ten issues of Aspen, the multimedia "magazine in a box" that was published from 1965-1971. This archive includes the full text of all the articles, scans of all the objects, Quicktime versions of the films, and MP3s of the phonograph recordings.

Incredible. Contains materials from Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Philip Glass, Robert Smithson, La Monte Young, Terry Riley, John Cage, and dozens of others. At Ebay you'd be paying hundreds of bucks for even a single issue of this mag.

Meanwhile, over at the Eclipse Project, you can download (as PDFs) issues of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the influential poetry journal edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein. Thirteen issues available, published from 1978-1981.

Labels: book_commentary

Thursday, August 28, 2003
10:23 AM
0 comments

I'm currently reading Mutations, a sprawling, white-hot anthology on the contemporary city.

One of the prominent contributors to this book is Rem Koolhaas (and his students involved in the Harvard Design School's Project on the City) and the book, at least on initial glance, seems to be a towering sheaf of disorganized data, similar to Koolhaas' deliriously unassailable S, M, L, XL. There's definitely something appealing about trying to approach an enormously complex topic (be it the metropolis or the creative work and theoretical contexts of an individual) by essentially collating a vast supply of raw documentary material and allowing the reader to sift and select from it as they wish, in accord with their own purposes. (In some ways we can imagine that this is what a non-electronic hypermedia would look like.)

There is no good reason why this strategy need be the exclusive province of hip architecture / urbanism books. Indeed, I've been thinking a lot about what this strategy might mean for fiction, how it fits in to my ideas about information prose, what effects the use of such a strategy might have on narrative. Lots of notes have ensued.

(Note: close inspection will reveal that Mutations does, indeed, have a structure, albeit one flexible enough to accomodate bewildering variety: ten pages of statistics are followed by roughly two hundred pages of essays, which are followed by a series of photographic dossiers, which are followed by several massive hybrid-form projects from various groups and individuals, which are followed by an index of "urban rumors"...)

Linked before but relevant here: the Praystation Harddrive CD-R.

Labels: book_commentary, information, narrative

Monday, August 25, 2003
3:32 PM
0 comments

This week, I eagerly devoured the poems in Clark Coolidge's book Space, from 1970. I don't know much about Coolidge aside from this book, but I'm looking forward to learning more.

When I began reading the book, I thought that perhaps one of Coolidge's driving fascination was a love of things—the poems in the early sections of the book are built are characterized by a wild proliferation of nouns:

mica flask moves layout hasty
bunkum geode olive loin candle
mines repeating sky hot dregs, in cast
lank oiler blocks, hats sink
wig pyrite & hasty troll by the rim

(from "The Tab")

At times the juxtapositions of things and their descriptors almost cohere into Surrealist images:

armies of harps & bleeding film, so?
(from "Echo & Mildew")

envelope larva bulk machine, parts of a hill
(from "Dripstone Assembly")

but other times the nouns come so quickly that they confound the image-making part of the brain:

mauve sod gaps ring sinter close to bells slice opals lens rust to spice
(from "The Eight Rains")

The experience of reading these long chains of words is an experience not of sense-making but rather of a quick cascade of mental associations. The ability to make "sense" of the poems is eroded even further by the book's later sections, where the focus shifts from concrete nouns to abstract nouns, pronouns, and articles. Units of syntactical "meaning" grow ever shorter:

Bers phone the the.
Give showed mail ing.
The on won so.
Ly fetch wonders note.
It's a gim, a de.

(from "These")

In the book's final section, the poems rarely maintain "sense" for even the duration of a single word:

tion
inertia
ity

be having
eight

priate
via
iny

flatting

im
dense

in ness

(from an untitled poem)

A number of the poems from Space can be read here, although the sense of progression that I outlined above, which provides a genuine sense of mounting exhiliration, is likely to be lost when reading just a few sample poems. Fortunately, you can download the entire book as a PDF from this site, or see the whole book in scanned form here, courtesy of the I-can't-believe-I-never-noticed-this-before Eclipse Project, a collection of "digital facsimiles of the most significant out-of-print small-press books and journals from the past quarter-century, as well as major new works of experimental writing."

Further reading: Coolidge interview, on improvisational music, naming and other themes that seem to come up on occasion around here.

Labels: book_commentary, poetry_commentary

Monday, August 18, 2003
5:13 PM
0 comments

I'm currently reading William Gibson's Idoru. The setting is absolutely a perfect fit with Gibson's set of themes—anyone interested in technology, media, and language is eventually going to be attracted to the zeitgeist of contemporary Japan.

I'm also struck, once again, by Gibson's use of noir tropes. When I was reading Neuromancer and the other Sprawl books, I simply thought that Gibson was borrowing a convenient and time-proven plot structure, but while reading this book, with its attention on information-trawling (the whole "nodal point" thing), it occured to me that the act of making sense of disparate pieces of information is key to both Gibson's SF and the detective stories of someone like Chandler.

It's also key to the writings of Lovecraft, as well, but that's a theory for another day.

(Possibly related?: Frederick Jameson's writings on Chandler's LA.)

Labels: book_commentary

Friday, May 30, 2003
9:49 AM
0 comments

The ever-vigilant Judith sends me a list of novels which prominently feature children, including:

The Everlasting Story of Nory by Nicholson Baker
The Last Samurai by Helen Dewitt
Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
The Saskiad by Brian Hall
The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis

And she also usefully points out that the worlds of juvenile and young adult literature of course feature representations of children by the barrel-load. Which begs the question: what is the best juvenile / young adult literature out there?

I'm fond of A Wrinkle In Time, myself, and I enjoyed The Golden Compass, the first book in Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy—although, being fantasy/SF, these books don't exactly have the stamp of "realism" that I'm looking for. Francesca Lia Block is closer.

Related: I had the opportunity on my recent roadtrip to flip through the Dave-Eggers-edited The Best Non-Required Reading 2002, a collection marketed (interestingly) to people between the ages of 15 and 25. The final piece in the collection is a selection from high schooler Zoe Trope's controversial Please Don't Kill the Freshman, published by Future Tense Books (and soon to be reprinted by Harper Collins). What struck me about the bits of it that I read is not so much its originality, but rather the fact that it rang incredibly similar to the writing of a few students that I've had in my fiction classes, also young, precocious women. These writers tend to be startlingly incisive about particular topics (largely gender and sexual politics) and they also tend to share a similar style (terse, clipped prose and a tendency towards stream-of-consciousness and abandonment of standard grammatical convention), and I'm beginning to see it as a kind of decentered movement instead of just a few isolated cases. Who or what are the common influences on these women? (I sense Bukowski in the mix somewhere.) This interview is not particularly illuminating.

Labels: book_commentary

Friday, May 16, 2003
11:54 AM
0 comments

I've been quite busy lately with summertime fun.

A partial listing of some of the stuff I've been doing includes:

Playing the 1920s-era 10-button accordion that I received in the mail from Lorraine, and the concertina that I received from my sister. Expect next year's Number None album to be all about bellows duets.

Researching independent publishers. (Soft Skull Press and Akashic Books both look particularly interesting.)

Going to Summer Solstice, the MCA's annual hipster sleepover, with friend-from-out-of-town Maggie G. We entertained ourselves by playing a gender-neutral version of Michael Barrish's people-watching game Woman of My Dreams, which added an extra entertaining dimension to the night.

Reading books, currently Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin. The best things I've read over the past few months are probably Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (thanks here to Judith for the recommendation) and Ben Marcus' Notable American Women. I've also been trying to make more room on my bookshelf by getting rid of some books, but that's a subject for a whole different post.

Riding my bike. I tried to find an old grain elevator in Pilsen, but it must have been demolished years ago.

Watching a single bee of some variety slowly and meticulously build a nest from tiny tiny pieces of particulate.

Sitting in front of my poor laboring windowbox air conditioner.

Labels: book_commentary, personal

Monday, June 24, 2002
12:44 PM
0 comments

I am currently reading Portnoy's Complaint, as part of my project of reading writing about sex, but I think I'm very, very close to stopping. The book was loathsomely entertaining for the first fifty pages or so, and I've read a hundred more pages since then, and there's been very little variety, which means mainly that the elements that once seemed entertaining have now grown simply tedious, and the loathsome elements have continued to accumulate. The book goes on for another 150 pages or so, and I don't get any sense that it's going to do anything different or remarkable in this long final stretch. Moral? Rants are wonderful, but they should be short.

Other books destined to soon be sold or given away include Mortimer Adler's How To Read A Book, which was given to me by a representative of the Great Books Foundation. It is currently sitting by the stove, three feet from the back door. It has not yet made it any deeper into my home, and I do not anticipate that it will.

Labels: book_commentary

Friday, June 14, 2002
3:08 PM
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I'm currently reading Sven Lindqvist's History of Bombing.

The subject matter is obviously relevant, but it is the book's form that fascinates me the most. The book is organized into 399 fragments, organized roughly chronologically, but within that chronology, several different narrative threads exist: you are not intended to read the book in a straight-through linear fashion, but rather to jump from fragment to fragment, depending on which narrative chain you are following. (The book opens with twenty-two starting points, which you can choose from freely.)

The book functions like a more structured version of Cortazar's Hopscotch. Or, more generally, it works as another good example of "ergodic literature," where "nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text," a category which also applies to a great deal of electronic writing. It not entirely unlikely that part of the reason I respond so favorably to the idea of separate narratives within a chronological superstructure is because it is similar to my own project, Imaginary Year.

Lindqvist describes his book as "a labyrinth with twenty-two entrances and no exit."

Labels: book_commentary, electronic_literature, writing

Monday, March 25, 2002
12:40 PM
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I've been thinking a lot lately about literary realism, and whether it's a good thing or not.

Many of my favorite twentieth-century writers (Italo Calvino, Donald Barthelme, Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, etc.) consciously and deliberately violated the tenets of literary realism in their fiction. You could argue that the textual experiments of Burroughs or Barthelme (or, more recently, those of Ben Marcus) constitute a kind of higher order of "realism"—we live in a world densely webbed with discourse networks, and the work of those authors reflects that reality in a way that you could technically call mimetic. The experience of reading these stories matches our experience elsewhere, yes, but the characters—if there even are characters—resemble us only indirectly.

I think that there is a value to the act of telling stories about experiences that resemble our own. We can see this by looking at the last thrity years of American literary fiction, which is characterized by an explosion of women's writing, minority writing, and gay writing. The people who ran the women's presses and women's bookstores that sprang up in the 1970s understood that realistic storytelling was not only pleasurable but also political: the terrain of representation was contested terrain, on which battles could be fought and won. The early gay and minority presses had this same sense of awareness and enjoyed similar success.

I like reading fiction that evokes the fragmentation and density of our contemporary world, but I think fiction can do more than just that: it can tell a story about that world, and how people—people we recognize as being like us—negotiate it. This is something that I try to do in my own work. For my money, the only writer out there who is really doing this with regularity is Don DeLillo. This probably explains why I like DeLillo so much.

(Backstory: I've been thinking about this stuff because a while ago, The Magnificent Melting Object recommended Nathalie Sarraute. I checked out her book Tropisms / The Age of Suspicion. It's a weird hybrid—half of the book is a collection of strange microfictions, the other half is a set of four pieces of literary criticism— but the literary criticism half deals a lot with the question of realism (particularly psychological realism) in twentieth-century fiction.)

(Wishlist: I need to find people in Chicago who I can sit down and talk about books with.)

Labels: book_commentary, narrative, writing

Thursday, February 21, 2002
9:38 PM
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tales of nevèrÿon

I spent some time this weekend reading Tales of Nevèrÿon, one of the books in Samuel Delany's Nevèrÿon series.

Delaney populates this book with by fantasy-character archetypes (the hulking slave, the child empress, the old woman of the village), but then proceeds to focus more on the invisible flows that surround them (power, language, capital). A handful of allusions to critical theory are sprinkled in for flavor. So far, it's brilliant: like leaving Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and some Foucault book out on your radiator all night only to wake up in the morning and find that they've melted together into a single text.

For a while, it seemed like Wesleyan University Press was keeping this and the other books in print, although it doesn't appear on their most recent list.

Further reading: poking around online reveals some science-fiction novels and stories that incorporate linguistics. (And any time I think of Delany I am reminded that I should read more Bellona Times.)

Labels: book_commentary, science_fiction

Monday, February 04, 2002
12:49 PM
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cookbook testimonials

Snark writes:

there are a number of dead simple recipies in Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, the single best vegetarian cookbook on the market.

Laura writes:

a book suggestion:
The Vegetarian 5-Ingredient Gourmet. The food is all over the place and simple as hell--using canned beans, etc. Also, a little fancy--with the right idea, that fanciness is about clarity of flavor and not about the rarest musrooms you can find.

Labels: book_commentary, recipes

Saturday, January 19, 2002
4:04 PM
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minimalist cooking

In response to my request for cookbooks with easy recipes (below) Judith recommends The Minimalist Cooks Dinner.

I'm a big fan of both minimalist art and minimalist music, so: minimalist dinner? Why not?

I'll keep you posted.

Labels: book_commentary, recipes

Tuesday, January 15, 2002
6:49 PM
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vampires and creoles

I am currently reading Interview With the Vampire, which I will be teaching in a few weeks for my Horror course.

The most interesting thing about the first fifty pages or so is the way that race flickers in the background. The early action in the book's narrative all occurs around plantations near New Orleans, a city which receives special attention as a site of racial and ethnic mixing:

"There was no city in America like New Orleans. It was filled not only with the French and Spanish of all classes who had formed in part its peculiar aristocracy, but later with immigrants of all kinds, the Irish and Germans in particular. Then there were not only the black slaves, yet unhomogenized and fantastical in their different tribal garb and manners, but the great growing class of the free people of color, those marvellous people of our mixed blood and that of the islands, who produced a magnificent and unique caste of craftsmen, artists, poets, and renowned feminine beauty. And then there were the Indians, who covered the levee on summer days selling herbs and crafted wares. And drifting through all, through this medley of languages and colors, were the people of the port, the sailors of ships, who came in great waves ... Then add to these, within years after my transformation, the Americans, who built the city up river from the old French Quarter with magnificent Grecian houses which gleamed in the moonlight like temples."

This is not the first time in the past few weeks where I've been reading American horror fiction and race has come up as a substantial theme. It is worth noting that Rice's second novel is not horror fiction but rather historical fiction about the free people of color: obviously something she had some significant interest in.

Here is a website covering the "history and genealogy of the Free People of Color in 19th century New Orleans."

Labels: book_commentary, horror, race

Monday, January 07, 2002
10:11 PM
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