1. Carteret,NJ
First guests. She, an inner-city public school teacher, he, an extra in movies.
They took the train in from Jersey and a man in the seat in front of them got arrested. Also, there was a bomb scare on the train. They enjoyed all of this and thought it was adventurous and exciting, like being on the Orient Express.
He smiled happily all the three days of their trip. She was wonderfully eloquent and made their bed meticulously each morning.
2. North Hollywood,CA
He owns a company that makes designer chocolates in round little tins. Business had been done with a client near New Orleans, so he took two days vacation.
He's precise and dedicated to details in the way many gay men are. It looks like he has a lot on his mind as there is a certain amount of tension radiating from him. His hair is grey and well-kept.I find him hard to read. I'm thinking our B&B isn't up to his fastidious standards, but when he checks out, he assures us he will come back, as did the New Jersey couple. Not bad for 2 rookies who knew Jack about running a B&B 3 days ago.
3. Cambridge, MA
They are young, self-sufficient and the condom (neatly discarded in the waste basket, thank you, young man) indicates a joyful first night's stay. He's a physics Phd student at MIT, and he has that wonderful poise of the very bright, answering all questions calmly and thoughtfully, as if he'd never been asked them before. He's slightly cross-eyed which accentuates his aura of erudition. She is giggly and happy, and has the exuberance and fast-talking joy which is usually found in girls much younger than she.
Monday, August 22, 2011
Thursday, April 21, 2011
The Day of the Locust
What is one to do in the Windy City, on a rainy and miserably cold April day, when only last week spring - that flirtatious and treacherous harlot- let us have a peek under her titillating dress, standing a-la Marilyn Monroe on the subway vent, and letting golden rays of warmth wash over our chilled and winter-pale bodies, pushing the bubbling mercury way above the 70 degree mark, only to have her tug the garment back down with a brusque, businesslike movement, with her pretty head thrown back, eyes closed in a childish and petulant you-can’t-touch-this frown, and let the sleet and snow return on our despondent and defeated faces?
Well, one thing you can do is pick up a copy of Mr. Nathanael West’s classic tale of life in Hollywood in warm and sunny California, The Day of the Locust.
This good read was penned in 1939 and deals with a group of people living on the fringes of the American movie industry during the great depression.
But before we launch into this exquisitely told story of oddballs, soulless starlets and a whole cast of unsavory and shallow characters, I’d like to spend a paragraph or two cackling on about my weakness for good titles and the methodology behind my reading madness.
I love a good title. I am a sucker for them. And although I prefer the definite article-intriguing adjective-cool noun 1-2-3 punch, as in: The Human Stain, The Sheltering Sky, The Good Earth, The Daunting Douchenozzle and other classic calling cards for English literature, I was much drawn to the portentous and biblical-image evoking phrase; The Day of the Locust. I knew the book existed and had caught a glimpse of its reputation, but had I never heard of it before stumbling upon it on the dusty shelves of one of the second-hand bookstores I frequent, I would have purchased it for the title alone.
Needless to say that this strategy for selecting books isn’t guaranteed to send shockwaves of delight through your Clitterati Literati each and every time.
My selection process for candidates to be held in front of my Roman nose for several hours is fairly straightforward. I want to emphasize that I speak of Real Books here, as in real dead-tree residue and good old-fashioned ink.
Kunkle, Krinkle, Kindull, or whatever the name of that electronic abomination may be; to the pit with Thee, Demon!
I suppose the sheer volume of books on offer makes us all fastidious to some degree.
Were one shipwrecked and left alone on the proverbial island, even the discovery of a Dan Brown novel may bring about a euphoric reading experience, as it will be the only printed text to be read in the next 40 years before one succumbs to the combination of boredom, scurvy and the effects of excessive self-pleasuring (note: Swindle abusers caught in this predicament will find out after 3 days that having 10,000 stored stories doesn’t amount to Jack squat when your batteries have run out).
But if one has even a little choice in literati, Brown’s stories will immediately be recognized for the rancid stool water that they obviously are.
To guide me through the canyons filled with all those thousands upon thousands of books in our treasured English language alone, I found a trusted guide in a quite unlikely place; I use the Time Magazine list of best English novels published after 1923.
I scan the listing, take a quick look at the subject, and unless the book deals with a matter I really don’t care for, like sports or anything post-modern, I put it on my list and look for it the next time I skulk my way through the narrow aisles of Chicago’s used-bookstores.
I almost always buy my books second hand, not just because of the monetary incentive, but because I love everything about old books; their smell, the different fonts on the covers, the way the cloth covers feel against my palms, the lovely ochre color at the edges of the pages, contrasting with the pristine white in the center.
Hah ! Kindle, my tuchus! I stand erect on the barricades of tradition, the spirit of Gutenberg to my left and that fractious Frenchman General Pétain on my right, and in unison we bellow as we stare down the gathering swarm of electronic pixel vampires who besiege our literary Verdun: ” Ils ne passeront pas !”
But enough of this falderal, and on with the review.
Locust tells the story of Tod Hackett, a set-designer/painter who’s been lured to Hollywood, but who winds up being disillusioned by the people he meets in Tinseltown. Now, the trope of the shallow, desperate, empty-headed, starstruck Hollywood wannabes is indeed a familiar one, but West’s unflinching eye and first-rate dissection of human character, presented in terse, clear prose, exposes a dystopia not only devoid of true human worth and achievement, but one rife with viciousness and cruelty rising from the boredom and emptiness the émigrés to California experience after they find that the dream of a lifetime doesn’t deliver.
Tod’s acquaintances exist at the periphery of the illusion of Hollywood, and none of them go anywhere.
The storyline seems somewhat fragmented as we see Tod interact with some very well-described characters, but there isn’t much dramatic plot development, save the climactic final scene.
The structure of the story, or lack of it, reminded me a bit of Steinbeck’s style in Cannery Row.
A writer can only get away with this loose a story when the reader is fascinated by the characters and wishes to see what will happen to them even though none of them are particularly sympathetic and none of them will get what they want.
And, Jesus be praised, there are actually a few very funny moments in this otherwise brutally honest and sobering novel. For instance: an Inuit family, brought to Hollywood to be extras in a movie, confuses a funeral for a movie-set, with hilarious results.
The title of this book works very well, and it looms over the entire story from beginning to end.
Some deranged critic opined that the locusts are a reference to the rising fascism in Europe at the time.
As the saying goes; one has to be very well read to be this wrong.
The locusts are the seekers of a false dream, whose bitterness morphs into an insatiable appetite for ever more spectacular and violent diversions. In the case of the adorers of Hollywood royalty, this manifests itself into motion picture escapism, but the greatness of The Day of the Locust is that it constitutes a searing indictment of not only Hollywood, but of our entire entertainment culture and the trivial and meaningless icons we erect for ourselves, with all the detrimental effects this has on our humanity.
I have lived in California for a decade, including a two year stint in Southern California, and it is amazing how this 70-year-old story still accurately describes the lunacy, the vapid trend-seeking and cultural vacuity of modern-day Los Angeles.
Sarah Vowell, who is very funny, once observed that California is the worst place to be sad in. And she’s right. One has no excuse to be miserable in all that sun-drenched, natural beauty and there isn’t a season with clouds and rain in which a person can properly feel sad.
Perhaps for such as I, who almost got lost themselves in the Californian wasteland, this novel is more poignant than it will be for readers who haven’t lived in Southern California, but my hunch is that you will enjoy Nathanael’s superb creation.
The Frittati council awards this stunning piece of fiction with no less than 8 Wafting Winona’s and 1 Adorable Aniston to boot.
You will be distressed to know that I’ve set myself to the writing of a short story, and I have chosen as my subjects the classic Shakespearean themes of murder, cocaine and teenage prostitution. Developments will come your way as the plot thickens.
In the meantime, a la semaine prochaine, mes amis Literati, and if you have been wondering (as you bloody well should) what exactly is rotten in the state of Denmark;
well, it is the cheese.
Well, one thing you can do is pick up a copy of Mr. Nathanael West’s classic tale of life in Hollywood in warm and sunny California, The Day of the Locust.
This good read was penned in 1939 and deals with a group of people living on the fringes of the American movie industry during the great depression.
But before we launch into this exquisitely told story of oddballs, soulless starlets and a whole cast of unsavory and shallow characters, I’d like to spend a paragraph or two cackling on about my weakness for good titles and the methodology behind my reading madness.
I love a good title. I am a sucker for them. And although I prefer the definite article-intriguing adjective-cool noun 1-2-3 punch, as in: The Human Stain, The Sheltering Sky, The Good Earth, The Daunting Douchenozzle and other classic calling cards for English literature, I was much drawn to the portentous and biblical-image evoking phrase; The Day of the Locust. I knew the book existed and had caught a glimpse of its reputation, but had I never heard of it before stumbling upon it on the dusty shelves of one of the second-hand bookstores I frequent, I would have purchased it for the title alone.
Needless to say that this strategy for selecting books isn’t guaranteed to send shockwaves of delight through your Clitterati Literati each and every time.
My selection process for candidates to be held in front of my Roman nose for several hours is fairly straightforward. I want to emphasize that I speak of Real Books here, as in real dead-tree residue and good old-fashioned ink.
Kunkle, Krinkle, Kindull, or whatever the name of that electronic abomination may be; to the pit with Thee, Demon!
I suppose the sheer volume of books on offer makes us all fastidious to some degree.
Were one shipwrecked and left alone on the proverbial island, even the discovery of a Dan Brown novel may bring about a euphoric reading experience, as it will be the only printed text to be read in the next 40 years before one succumbs to the combination of boredom, scurvy and the effects of excessive self-pleasuring (note: Swindle abusers caught in this predicament will find out after 3 days that having 10,000 stored stories doesn’t amount to Jack squat when your batteries have run out).
But if one has even a little choice in literati, Brown’s stories will immediately be recognized for the rancid stool water that they obviously are.
To guide me through the canyons filled with all those thousands upon thousands of books in our treasured English language alone, I found a trusted guide in a quite unlikely place; I use the Time Magazine list of best English novels published after 1923.
I scan the listing, take a quick look at the subject, and unless the book deals with a matter I really don’t care for, like sports or anything post-modern, I put it on my list and look for it the next time I skulk my way through the narrow aisles of Chicago’s used-bookstores.
I almost always buy my books second hand, not just because of the monetary incentive, but because I love everything about old books; their smell, the different fonts on the covers, the way the cloth covers feel against my palms, the lovely ochre color at the edges of the pages, contrasting with the pristine white in the center.
Hah ! Kindle, my tuchus! I stand erect on the barricades of tradition, the spirit of Gutenberg to my left and that fractious Frenchman General Pétain on my right, and in unison we bellow as we stare down the gathering swarm of electronic pixel vampires who besiege our literary Verdun: ” Ils ne passeront pas !”
But enough of this falderal, and on with the review.
Locust tells the story of Tod Hackett, a set-designer/painter who’s been lured to Hollywood, but who winds up being disillusioned by the people he meets in Tinseltown. Now, the trope of the shallow, desperate, empty-headed, starstruck Hollywood wannabes is indeed a familiar one, but West’s unflinching eye and first-rate dissection of human character, presented in terse, clear prose, exposes a dystopia not only devoid of true human worth and achievement, but one rife with viciousness and cruelty rising from the boredom and emptiness the émigrés to California experience after they find that the dream of a lifetime doesn’t deliver.
Tod’s acquaintances exist at the periphery of the illusion of Hollywood, and none of them go anywhere.
The storyline seems somewhat fragmented as we see Tod interact with some very well-described characters, but there isn’t much dramatic plot development, save the climactic final scene.
The structure of the story, or lack of it, reminded me a bit of Steinbeck’s style in Cannery Row.
A writer can only get away with this loose a story when the reader is fascinated by the characters and wishes to see what will happen to them even though none of them are particularly sympathetic and none of them will get what they want.
And, Jesus be praised, there are actually a few very funny moments in this otherwise brutally honest and sobering novel. For instance: an Inuit family, brought to Hollywood to be extras in a movie, confuses a funeral for a movie-set, with hilarious results.
The title of this book works very well, and it looms over the entire story from beginning to end.
Some deranged critic opined that the locusts are a reference to the rising fascism in Europe at the time.
As the saying goes; one has to be very well read to be this wrong.
The locusts are the seekers of a false dream, whose bitterness morphs into an insatiable appetite for ever more spectacular and violent diversions. In the case of the adorers of Hollywood royalty, this manifests itself into motion picture escapism, but the greatness of The Day of the Locust is that it constitutes a searing indictment of not only Hollywood, but of our entire entertainment culture and the trivial and meaningless icons we erect for ourselves, with all the detrimental effects this has on our humanity.
I have lived in California for a decade, including a two year stint in Southern California, and it is amazing how this 70-year-old story still accurately describes the lunacy, the vapid trend-seeking and cultural vacuity of modern-day Los Angeles.
Sarah Vowell, who is very funny, once observed that California is the worst place to be sad in. And she’s right. One has no excuse to be miserable in all that sun-drenched, natural beauty and there isn’t a season with clouds and rain in which a person can properly feel sad.
Perhaps for such as I, who almost got lost themselves in the Californian wasteland, this novel is more poignant than it will be for readers who haven’t lived in Southern California, but my hunch is that you will enjoy Nathanael’s superb creation.
The Frittati council awards this stunning piece of fiction with no less than 8 Wafting Winona’s and 1 Adorable Aniston to boot.
You will be distressed to know that I’ve set myself to the writing of a short story, and I have chosen as my subjects the classic Shakespearean themes of murder, cocaine and teenage prostitution. Developments will come your way as the plot thickens.
In the meantime, a la semaine prochaine, mes amis Literati, and if you have been wondering (as you bloody well should) what exactly is rotten in the state of Denmark;
well, it is the cheese.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Heart of Darkness and Ignatius Rising
Ah, there you all are, my pale-faced, bibliophile compadres.
Welcome back to the Literati thread, and by Jove, do I have a treat for your tired, red-rimmed eyes that take so much abuse from your habit of reading well into the wee hours of the morning by the light of that single flickering candle, as you are huddled up in your starched, linen nightshirt and matching cap with tassel, safe in the bosom of your fine Edwardian bedstead.
We will be serving not one but two heaping, steaming helpings of Frittati for your perusing pleasure this week.
The first is a review of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the second is a biography called Ignatius Rising: the life of John Kennedy Toole, by Rene Pol Nevils and Deborah George Hardy.
Conrad’s 1902 novella covers less than 100 pages with ink, and I should have been able to consume this famous story in a reading session or two, yet I found myself having difficulty immersing myself in this dark and lugubrious tale. For one, Conrad’s vision of humanity is bleak, to put it mildly, and being already familiar with the story (courtesy of Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now, which is based on Heart of Darkness) I knew that the chance of succumbing to bouts of uncontrollable laughter, or stumbling upon any manifestation of beauty or hilarity were slim. Conrad has been much praised for his prose, but I found his style rather inaccessible. This book, being over a century old, contains a great many nouns which have long ago sunken to the bottom of that vast sea of desuetude which is the final resting place of so many once vibrant and productive English words. And this doesn’t improve the reading experience. Also, there is relatively little dialog in the story which leaves us marooned with Marlow the somber narrator and his dismal take on our hominid lineage.
There is no doubt that Conrad is a technically gifted writer; his description of the Thames and the towns on its banks, at the beginning of the story, is quite impressive, as is his vivid recounting of that other great river, The Congo, and its riparian, ominous jungle .
Most of you will be familiar with the plot, but I shall offer a summary nonetheless.
Restless sailor of the seven seas Marlow tells of his harrowing journey, piloting a rickety steamboat up the Congo River during the time of the brutal colonization of the Congo by the Belgians who were extracting the coveted ivory from its interior, while leaving a mountain of native corpses in their wake. Marlow is trying to reach a trading agent by the name of Mr. Kurtz whose station is the farthest reaching part of the greedy arm of the empire, and who enjoys an almost mythical status with his fellow traders who dwell in stations down river. The references to the heart of darkness, where Kurtz resides and into which Marlow is inching his way through the perilous jungle, are many. No news from Mr. Kurtz has reached the other trading stations on the river for over a year, and Marlow’s quest to find this man takes on the character of a peregrination. It is telling that Conrad often uses the word pilgrims for the traders who accompany Marlow on his leaky tub of a steamboat.
When he finally meets Kurtz, Marlow finds an insane, emaciated megalomaniac who’s made himself a God to the natives, and who has transformed the village and surrounding area into a charnel house.
While reading the novella, images of Coppola’s much vaunted movie kept coming to mind and erected another barrier between me and the story; yet another good reason to eschew motion pictures based on literature, or at least postpone their viewing until the book has been properly consumed.
Much has been written about Heart of Darkness, and the trek through the jungle, accompanied by the increasing callousness and savagery of the colonists, lends itself easily to morose musings on the hypocrisies of the ‘civilized’ European invaders and the more ethereal search for what truly slumbers in the hearts of men who wear incongruous starched shirts in the steaming jungle and who count elephant tusks while their colleagues are dying right next to them of tropical diseases.
I found the time that we actually get to spend with Kurtz disappointingly brief. His character is built up to almost legendary proportions, and Marlow keeps obsessing about the man, so that his brief appearance, disturbing and grotesque as it is, is something of a let-down, much like finally seeing the mechanical shark in the movie Jaws.
Conrad doesn’t think much of humanity which may automatically qualify him as a great thinker and author in some circles, but before the protean and ever febrile judges of the Irritati court, Heart of Darkness is awarded with a timid 6 Winonas. But, as we are in a generous mood today, we shall also heap upon Józef Teodor Konrad an honorary Aniston, which most people equate with roughly half a Winona. So there, Joseph.
Our second book today deals with John Kennedy Toole, author of A Confederacy of Dunces, whom I shall refer to in the remainder of this writing as Ken. Now, I don’t care for biographies, and would therefore never thrust one rudely and without warning into your trusting and tranquil countenance, but I will make an exception for Ignatius Rising because I am fascinated with Ken Toole and I, like many millions the world over, count A Confederacy of Dunces among my favorite books.
On March 26, 1969, when yours truly was still waddling around Holland on uncertain legs and had just mastered the art of not shitting oneself , a thirty-one-year old, well-dressed man from New Orleans, parked his white Chevrolet Chevelle in a rural area of Biloxi, Mississippi, covered the exhaust pipe with the end of a green garden hose, ran the other end of the hose through a cracked rear window, sat behind the wheel, turned the ignition, and started to breathe in the lethal fumes.
Only due to the perseverance and the antics of a mad, sad, highly eccentric and narcissistic woman -Mrs. Thelma Ducoing Toole- did it come to pass that the brainchild of her son Ken ever found its way out of obscurity and into the hearts of the world’s grateful readers, snapping up the first ever posthumously awarded Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981.
If you haven’t read A Confederacy of Dunces yet, you really, really should. It is an astonishingly funny book featuring one of the most unpleasant and memorable characters in all of fiction, Ignatius Jacques Reilly. Not possessing a single redeeming quality, this obese, self-obsessed flatulent snob and slob will nevertheless have you in stiches and, as so eloquently phrased by Walker Percy, who was so instrumental in giving Dunces to the world, “there is an underlying sadness in the book, and you never really know where it is coming from”. Dunces is considered by many literati the best book ever written about New Orleans and its denizens.
Ignatius Rising, published by Louisiana State University Press, 2001, and donning probably the worst and ugliest cover in the history of the printing press, tells the story of a precocious only child and his immensely overbearing mother. We learn of his academic achievements, his time in the service, his escalating alcohol consumption, the pressures of academic life, his unhealthy relationship with his mother, and finally his descent into depression and paranoia resulting in his untimely death.
It is well worth the read, but I shall not attempt to summarize a biography, because that would be silly.
What I would like to dwell on before I let you all return to your various louche activities, is the rejection by Simon and Schuster (and many other publishers) of this fine work.
We have all heard the stories of great works of fiction that were initially rejected by some dilettante editor or other, but in Ignatius Rising we are shown the actual correspondence between a sensitive and ambitious author, who’s deeply wounded by the rejections of his novel (which he knows to be good), and the quite sympathetic editor Robert Gottlieb, who also recognizes the quality of the work, but who ultimately sticks to his initial objection to the book, namely that “it isn’t really about anything”.
It is sad beyond words that a gifted editor (Gottlieb had Joseph Heller under his tutelage and encouraged him to complete Cath-22) could not come to an unusually good and original book without preconceived notions about what a story ought to be like.
It is very well possible that had he read the book properly, Ken would be with us today and writing his heart out, while sitting on his veranda in New Orleans, sipping a Mint Julep or a Sazerac.
Oh well, as that other author,who also insisted on writing stories that “weren’t about anything” said: So it goes.
Ignatius Rising gets 7 willowy Winonas.
Until next week, and if you must, please use a tissue afterwards.
Welcome back to the Literati thread, and by Jove, do I have a treat for your tired, red-rimmed eyes that take so much abuse from your habit of reading well into the wee hours of the morning by the light of that single flickering candle, as you are huddled up in your starched, linen nightshirt and matching cap with tassel, safe in the bosom of your fine Edwardian bedstead.
We will be serving not one but two heaping, steaming helpings of Frittati for your perusing pleasure this week.
The first is a review of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the second is a biography called Ignatius Rising: the life of John Kennedy Toole, by Rene Pol Nevils and Deborah George Hardy.
Conrad’s 1902 novella covers less than 100 pages with ink, and I should have been able to consume this famous story in a reading session or two, yet I found myself having difficulty immersing myself in this dark and lugubrious tale. For one, Conrad’s vision of humanity is bleak, to put it mildly, and being already familiar with the story (courtesy of Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now, which is based on Heart of Darkness) I knew that the chance of succumbing to bouts of uncontrollable laughter, or stumbling upon any manifestation of beauty or hilarity were slim. Conrad has been much praised for his prose, but I found his style rather inaccessible. This book, being over a century old, contains a great many nouns which have long ago sunken to the bottom of that vast sea of desuetude which is the final resting place of so many once vibrant and productive English words. And this doesn’t improve the reading experience. Also, there is relatively little dialog in the story which leaves us marooned with Marlow the somber narrator and his dismal take on our hominid lineage.
There is no doubt that Conrad is a technically gifted writer; his description of the Thames and the towns on its banks, at the beginning of the story, is quite impressive, as is his vivid recounting of that other great river, The Congo, and its riparian, ominous jungle .
Most of you will be familiar with the plot, but I shall offer a summary nonetheless.
Restless sailor of the seven seas Marlow tells of his harrowing journey, piloting a rickety steamboat up the Congo River during the time of the brutal colonization of the Congo by the Belgians who were extracting the coveted ivory from its interior, while leaving a mountain of native corpses in their wake. Marlow is trying to reach a trading agent by the name of Mr. Kurtz whose station is the farthest reaching part of the greedy arm of the empire, and who enjoys an almost mythical status with his fellow traders who dwell in stations down river. The references to the heart of darkness, where Kurtz resides and into which Marlow is inching his way through the perilous jungle, are many. No news from Mr. Kurtz has reached the other trading stations on the river for over a year, and Marlow’s quest to find this man takes on the character of a peregrination. It is telling that Conrad often uses the word pilgrims for the traders who accompany Marlow on his leaky tub of a steamboat.
When he finally meets Kurtz, Marlow finds an insane, emaciated megalomaniac who’s made himself a God to the natives, and who has transformed the village and surrounding area into a charnel house.
While reading the novella, images of Coppola’s much vaunted movie kept coming to mind and erected another barrier between me and the story; yet another good reason to eschew motion pictures based on literature, or at least postpone their viewing until the book has been properly consumed.
Much has been written about Heart of Darkness, and the trek through the jungle, accompanied by the increasing callousness and savagery of the colonists, lends itself easily to morose musings on the hypocrisies of the ‘civilized’ European invaders and the more ethereal search for what truly slumbers in the hearts of men who wear incongruous starched shirts in the steaming jungle and who count elephant tusks while their colleagues are dying right next to them of tropical diseases.
I found the time that we actually get to spend with Kurtz disappointingly brief. His character is built up to almost legendary proportions, and Marlow keeps obsessing about the man, so that his brief appearance, disturbing and grotesque as it is, is something of a let-down, much like finally seeing the mechanical shark in the movie Jaws.
Conrad doesn’t think much of humanity which may automatically qualify him as a great thinker and author in some circles, but before the protean and ever febrile judges of the Irritati court, Heart of Darkness is awarded with a timid 6 Winonas. But, as we are in a generous mood today, we shall also heap upon Józef Teodor Konrad an honorary Aniston, which most people equate with roughly half a Winona. So there, Joseph.
Our second book today deals with John Kennedy Toole, author of A Confederacy of Dunces, whom I shall refer to in the remainder of this writing as Ken. Now, I don’t care for biographies, and would therefore never thrust one rudely and without warning into your trusting and tranquil countenance, but I will make an exception for Ignatius Rising because I am fascinated with Ken Toole and I, like many millions the world over, count A Confederacy of Dunces among my favorite books.
On March 26, 1969, when yours truly was still waddling around Holland on uncertain legs and had just mastered the art of not shitting oneself , a thirty-one-year old, well-dressed man from New Orleans, parked his white Chevrolet Chevelle in a rural area of Biloxi, Mississippi, covered the exhaust pipe with the end of a green garden hose, ran the other end of the hose through a cracked rear window, sat behind the wheel, turned the ignition, and started to breathe in the lethal fumes.
Only due to the perseverance and the antics of a mad, sad, highly eccentric and narcissistic woman -Mrs. Thelma Ducoing Toole- did it come to pass that the brainchild of her son Ken ever found its way out of obscurity and into the hearts of the world’s grateful readers, snapping up the first ever posthumously awarded Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981.
If you haven’t read A Confederacy of Dunces yet, you really, really should. It is an astonishingly funny book featuring one of the most unpleasant and memorable characters in all of fiction, Ignatius Jacques Reilly. Not possessing a single redeeming quality, this obese, self-obsessed flatulent snob and slob will nevertheless have you in stiches and, as so eloquently phrased by Walker Percy, who was so instrumental in giving Dunces to the world, “there is an underlying sadness in the book, and you never really know where it is coming from”. Dunces is considered by many literati the best book ever written about New Orleans and its denizens.
Ignatius Rising, published by Louisiana State University Press, 2001, and donning probably the worst and ugliest cover in the history of the printing press, tells the story of a precocious only child and his immensely overbearing mother. We learn of his academic achievements, his time in the service, his escalating alcohol consumption, the pressures of academic life, his unhealthy relationship with his mother, and finally his descent into depression and paranoia resulting in his untimely death.
It is well worth the read, but I shall not attempt to summarize a biography, because that would be silly.
What I would like to dwell on before I let you all return to your various louche activities, is the rejection by Simon and Schuster (and many other publishers) of this fine work.
We have all heard the stories of great works of fiction that were initially rejected by some dilettante editor or other, but in Ignatius Rising we are shown the actual correspondence between a sensitive and ambitious author, who’s deeply wounded by the rejections of his novel (which he knows to be good), and the quite sympathetic editor Robert Gottlieb, who also recognizes the quality of the work, but who ultimately sticks to his initial objection to the book, namely that “it isn’t really about anything”.
It is sad beyond words that a gifted editor (Gottlieb had Joseph Heller under his tutelage and encouraged him to complete Cath-22) could not come to an unusually good and original book without preconceived notions about what a story ought to be like.
It is very well possible that had he read the book properly, Ken would be with us today and writing his heart out, while sitting on his veranda in New Orleans, sipping a Mint Julep or a Sazerac.
Oh well, as that other author,who also insisted on writing stories that “weren’t about anything” said: So it goes.
Ignatius Rising gets 7 willowy Winonas.
Until next week, and if you must, please use a tissue afterwards.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Their eyes were watching God
Greetings, fellow Frittatis. And welcome to the third episode of the Literati thread.
Last week’s subject of my literary focus was Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 Their eyes were watching God.
I chose this book because it is short (180 pages). I knew I was going to have little time to devote to reading on account of my foolish new venture into yet another commercial endeavor.This fevered chasing after gold and silver is brought about by my sincere desire to ward off the horrors of penury and to shower Lovely Lola in all the satin and silk her mellifluous self deserves.
Their eyes were watching God follows Janie, a light-skinned black woman living in Florida in the 1930s.
The central theme of the novel is the desire for love and happiness against the back-drop of quite adversarial circumstances (i.e. being a woman and being black in the American South in the Thirties.)
Plot (with spoilers)
Janie’s an orphan who’s raised by her grandmother who insists on marrying her off as soon as Janie’s hormones show the very first signs of stirring. She marries a peasant of a man who thinks of her as chattel, only fit for cooking and cleaning. She soon leaves this simple beast and goes off with a well-dressed, debonair looking fellow with whom she spends the next 20 years and the next 100 pages.
Although this man is an improvement over beau number one, this ambitious and (relatively) wealthy man sees Janie as a trophy, and unhappily Janie advances into middle age, until…..
Tea Cake makes his appearance; a sunny, honest and much younger man, who makes Janie experience love and life, even though he is an unsophisticated laborer who loves to gamble and carries with him a switch-blade in case his fellow dice-throwers decide to recoup their losses with the aid of a straight razor.
Evaluation
In the first review on this thread, I mentioned that I read the book (The Second Coming, by Walker Percy) incorrectly, because I took too long to read it, which diminishes the overall reading experience by messing up the pacing of the plot.
Perhaps there are different ways to read a novel incorrectly and perhaps that is why I can’t be enthusiastic about Their eyes were watching God.
Or maybe the experience is better if the reader is black or female, but I simply did not like this book.
Short as it was, halfway through the story I deliberated whether I should push through to the end or just abandon the book and pick up next week’s subject.
Most of the book is in dialogue, as in “Us colored folks is too envious of one ‘nother. Dat how come us don’t git no further than us do”, which makes the story quite lively, but Mrs. Hurston’s prose, while narrating the story, is far from excellent and sometimes just plain clunky.
Another problem with the book is that it feels as if the characters (mainly Janie and Tea Cake) are being marched through the story in order for the author to get her point across.
Although I sympathize with Janie, I never had the feeling I got to know her. For better writers, such as Mr. Bowles who wrote the subject of my previous entry The Sheltering Sky, this isn’t a problem, as they can draw a reader in by the sheer force of their descriptive powers and their cunning prose.
It sounds unkind, especially since the subject of this story is such an important one, but I just don’t think Mrs. Hurston is a good writer, and this story could have been much better.
If anyone has read the book and is in violent disagreement with my review, I would like to hear from you, because it always bugs me when a work of art is much praised and people rave about the wonders to be found in the work, while I am left with my snout in the dirt hunting for, but not finding, the coveted literary truffle.
Until then, Their eyes were watching God receives a meager 4 Winonas on the Irritati scale.
Until next week, and if you have been, please stop at once.
Last week’s subject of my literary focus was Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 Their eyes were watching God.
I chose this book because it is short (180 pages). I knew I was going to have little time to devote to reading on account of my foolish new venture into yet another commercial endeavor.This fevered chasing after gold and silver is brought about by my sincere desire to ward off the horrors of penury and to shower Lovely Lola in all the satin and silk her mellifluous self deserves.
Their eyes were watching God follows Janie, a light-skinned black woman living in Florida in the 1930s.
The central theme of the novel is the desire for love and happiness against the back-drop of quite adversarial circumstances (i.e. being a woman and being black in the American South in the Thirties.)
Plot (with spoilers)
Janie’s an orphan who’s raised by her grandmother who insists on marrying her off as soon as Janie’s hormones show the very first signs of stirring. She marries a peasant of a man who thinks of her as chattel, only fit for cooking and cleaning. She soon leaves this simple beast and goes off with a well-dressed, debonair looking fellow with whom she spends the next 20 years and the next 100 pages.
Although this man is an improvement over beau number one, this ambitious and (relatively) wealthy man sees Janie as a trophy, and unhappily Janie advances into middle age, until…..
Tea Cake makes his appearance; a sunny, honest and much younger man, who makes Janie experience love and life, even though he is an unsophisticated laborer who loves to gamble and carries with him a switch-blade in case his fellow dice-throwers decide to recoup their losses with the aid of a straight razor.
Evaluation
In the first review on this thread, I mentioned that I read the book (The Second Coming, by Walker Percy) incorrectly, because I took too long to read it, which diminishes the overall reading experience by messing up the pacing of the plot.
Perhaps there are different ways to read a novel incorrectly and perhaps that is why I can’t be enthusiastic about Their eyes were watching God.
Or maybe the experience is better if the reader is black or female, but I simply did not like this book.
Short as it was, halfway through the story I deliberated whether I should push through to the end or just abandon the book and pick up next week’s subject.
Most of the book is in dialogue, as in “Us colored folks is too envious of one ‘nother. Dat how come us don’t git no further than us do”, which makes the story quite lively, but Mrs. Hurston’s prose, while narrating the story, is far from excellent and sometimes just plain clunky.
Another problem with the book is that it feels as if the characters (mainly Janie and Tea Cake) are being marched through the story in order for the author to get her point across.
Although I sympathize with Janie, I never had the feeling I got to know her. For better writers, such as Mr. Bowles who wrote the subject of my previous entry The Sheltering Sky, this isn’t a problem, as they can draw a reader in by the sheer force of their descriptive powers and their cunning prose.
It sounds unkind, especially since the subject of this story is such an important one, but I just don’t think Mrs. Hurston is a good writer, and this story could have been much better.
If anyone has read the book and is in violent disagreement with my review, I would like to hear from you, because it always bugs me when a work of art is much praised and people rave about the wonders to be found in the work, while I am left with my snout in the dirt hunting for, but not finding, the coveted literary truffle.
Until then, Their eyes were watching God receives a meager 4 Winonas on the Irritati scale.
Until next week, and if you have been, please stop at once.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
The Sheltering Sky
I know that many of you have been eagerly counting the minutes until the launch of the second installment of the Literati Irritati Frittati reviews.
Well, dear bookworms, it is now time to reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the Sheltering Sky, and repose.
Yes, this second review is about that monumental and monstrous achievement by Mr. Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, first published in the year of our Lord 1949.
I finished reading the book some 4 hours ago, and even though the preparation and consumption of a copious meal now separates me from the closing, chilling paragraph, I am still a bit shaken by the experience of reading this novel. It is that good and that disturbing.
If you haven’t read it yet, I urge you to abandon this post this very second, close your laptop and stow it behind that stack of well-worn Victorian erotica you keep in your bedroom closet, rush to your local purveyor of Literati, purchase a copy of the book and return to your hovel with great haste to immerse yourself in the absolutely terrifying tale of three Americans and their descent into the hell of the Sahara.
I find it impossible to review this story without a plethora of spoilers, so please go read the book and then return shaken, bleary-eyed and perhaps an inch wiser to this thread.
I can tell you in advance that this brilliant work of art is the dubious recipient of 9 out of a possible 10 Winonas on the internationally accepted Literati Frittati scale.
First, I have to say that unlike the previous entry I read this book right. Its 318 pages were devoured in 5 days, which, for me, is somewhat of an achievement, since I not only have to suffer the indignity of working for a living, my AADDHDTV also kicked in like a motherfucker.
Yet, this story is so engrossing that even those like me with a perpetual wondering mind can’t help but return their horrified eyes to the printed page.
The story follows Port,Kit and Tunner, three affluent Americans, on a helter skelter journey through French North Africa, some years after World War Deux.
You realize after the first few pages that nothing good awaits these people, and yet you can’t help but cringe for these characters when they make one very bad decision after the other.
This is no small achievement from the author as none of these people are very sympathetic. But the enormously menacing and alien world through which they travel makes the reader huddle close to these characters and hope that they come to their senses and turn on their heels and head back towards the comfort and sanity of civilization.
Instead, the trio delves ever deeper into a hostile and desolate world.
We never get to learn much about the background of the three young Americans, other than some hints at the sources of their discontent, yet we feel intensely for their plight.
Bowles is an extraordinarily effective writer, and his ability to evoke dread and gloom with just a few sentences is remarkable.
The Sheltering Sky is one of those few books that isn’t a page too long, which is what I consider the mark of a great writer.
His description of Morocco, its barren, unforgiving landscape and its inhabitants is excellent.
Like all great literature, The Sheltering Sky tells a story which illuminates something about the human condition which less alert souls would normally not see.
It is a story about privileged people stumbling into the harsh reality of the African desert, but it is also a story about the terror of cosmic loneliness.
Read this book. It will change you.
Night night.
Well, dear bookworms, it is now time to reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the Sheltering Sky, and repose.
Yes, this second review is about that monumental and monstrous achievement by Mr. Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, first published in the year of our Lord 1949.
I finished reading the book some 4 hours ago, and even though the preparation and consumption of a copious meal now separates me from the closing, chilling paragraph, I am still a bit shaken by the experience of reading this novel. It is that good and that disturbing.
If you haven’t read it yet, I urge you to abandon this post this very second, close your laptop and stow it behind that stack of well-worn Victorian erotica you keep in your bedroom closet, rush to your local purveyor of Literati, purchase a copy of the book and return to your hovel with great haste to immerse yourself in the absolutely terrifying tale of three Americans and their descent into the hell of the Sahara.
I find it impossible to review this story without a plethora of spoilers, so please go read the book and then return shaken, bleary-eyed and perhaps an inch wiser to this thread.
I can tell you in advance that this brilliant work of art is the dubious recipient of 9 out of a possible 10 Winonas on the internationally accepted Literati Frittati scale.
First, I have to say that unlike the previous entry I read this book right. Its 318 pages were devoured in 5 days, which, for me, is somewhat of an achievement, since I not only have to suffer the indignity of working for a living, my AADDHDTV also kicked in like a motherfucker.
Yet, this story is so engrossing that even those like me with a perpetual wondering mind can’t help but return their horrified eyes to the printed page.
The story follows Port,Kit and Tunner, three affluent Americans, on a helter skelter journey through French North Africa, some years after World War Deux.
You realize after the first few pages that nothing good awaits these people, and yet you can’t help but cringe for these characters when they make one very bad decision after the other.
This is no small achievement from the author as none of these people are very sympathetic. But the enormously menacing and alien world through which they travel makes the reader huddle close to these characters and hope that they come to their senses and turn on their heels and head back towards the comfort and sanity of civilization.
Instead, the trio delves ever deeper into a hostile and desolate world.
We never get to learn much about the background of the three young Americans, other than some hints at the sources of their discontent, yet we feel intensely for their plight.
Bowles is an extraordinarily effective writer, and his ability to evoke dread and gloom with just a few sentences is remarkable.
The Sheltering Sky is one of those few books that isn’t a page too long, which is what I consider the mark of a great writer.
His description of Morocco, its barren, unforgiving landscape and its inhabitants is excellent.
Like all great literature, The Sheltering Sky tells a story which illuminates something about the human condition which less alert souls would normally not see.
It is a story about privileged people stumbling into the harsh reality of the African desert, but it is also a story about the terror of cosmic loneliness.
Read this book. It will change you.
Night night.
Monday, March 21, 2011
The Second Coming
Yesterday, I finished The Second coming by Mr. Walker Percy, first published in 1980.
Before I launch into my critique, I have to admit that I didn’t read the book right.
By that I mean that I took far too long to read it, almost three weeks.
Being a very slow reader, I found that novels are much better when you finish them within a week.
I tend to accuse authors of being too wordy and making their stories unnecessarily long, when it is partly my own fault, because leaving a story unread for a few days creates the illusion of a slowed-down pace of plot development.
So, at the risk of not being entirely fair to Mr. Percy, I will proceed. Besides, I don’t think he’d care very much one way or the other on account of him being quite dead.
The Second coming follows two characters: Allison and Will. Allie is a girl who has escaped from a mental institution and Will is a middle-aged, retired millionaire who spends his days golfing and thinking about the suicide of his father. Will suffers from mysterious spells which cause him to fall down and black out.
The narrative alternates between the two characters until they meet somewhere in the second half of the story.
I found Allie’s character by far the more interesting, as we first meet her sitting on a bench in a South Carolina town ( the whole story unfolds there, not counting a few flashbacks that take place elsewhere) without any memory of herself or anything else. As it turns out, Allie has received electroshock treatments which cause temporary amnesia. Allie is like the first person on earth and she needs to learn pretty much everything anew, including the difference between denotation and the sometimes contradictory connotations in human communication. Her own cryptic, alliterative speech pattern is the only bit of humor that I could discern in this story.
I got to like Allie and was rooting for her to succeed in her attempts to function in the world.
Will is Walker Percy. This becomes very clear when I saw the picture of the author on the back of the dust jacket and when I read his bio on Wiki. Percy’s father committed suicide by shotgun blast to the head, as did his grandfather. Having also lost his mother at a young age, it isn’t surprising that death and suicide become a major theme in his work, but I found the many instances where Will wonders about his father’s suicide and (SPOILER ALERT: the discovery that during a hunting incident in his youth, his father had tried to kill Will) too repetitive. Although the end of the story is satisfactory, there isn’t enough plot development to keep one interested in Will’s plight.
I am starting to notice that some writers are too interested in their own persona which they inject in a story.
There is no doubt, though, that Percy is a good writer, with a good eye for the Carolina landscape, true-to-life dialogue and more than a little insight in the world and people surrounding his characters.
The religious theme in the story didn’t work that well and the characters beside the two protagonists are sketched quickly and never really come to life. For example, we never get to learn much about his wife and daughter, other than that the former was fat and is now dead and the latter is a sour-faced, discontented Jesus Freak.
The title may hint at Will’s existential angst and fascination with Christianity, but the real meaning of it is revealed at the end of the book when (SPOILER ALERT) we learn that sexual ecstasy is seen as the first coming (yes, literally) and that the longing for death is seen as the second.
Overall I enjoyed The Second Coming. I liked it much better than the previous two books I read (All the King’s men, by Pen Warren and The human Stain by Philip Roth [boy, that one was disappointing]) but I thought the book I read prior to these two, The good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck was much better.
On the Literati Frittati scale, Mr. Percy receives 6.5 out of a possible 10 Winonas.
PS. I have been told that his novel The Moviegoer is quite good, so I will read that one later this year.
Before I launch into my critique, I have to admit that I didn’t read the book right.
By that I mean that I took far too long to read it, almost three weeks.
Being a very slow reader, I found that novels are much better when you finish them within a week.
I tend to accuse authors of being too wordy and making their stories unnecessarily long, when it is partly my own fault, because leaving a story unread for a few days creates the illusion of a slowed-down pace of plot development.
So, at the risk of not being entirely fair to Mr. Percy, I will proceed. Besides, I don’t think he’d care very much one way or the other on account of him being quite dead.
The Second coming follows two characters: Allison and Will. Allie is a girl who has escaped from a mental institution and Will is a middle-aged, retired millionaire who spends his days golfing and thinking about the suicide of his father. Will suffers from mysterious spells which cause him to fall down and black out.
The narrative alternates between the two characters until they meet somewhere in the second half of the story.
I found Allie’s character by far the more interesting, as we first meet her sitting on a bench in a South Carolina town ( the whole story unfolds there, not counting a few flashbacks that take place elsewhere) without any memory of herself or anything else. As it turns out, Allie has received electroshock treatments which cause temporary amnesia. Allie is like the first person on earth and she needs to learn pretty much everything anew, including the difference between denotation and the sometimes contradictory connotations in human communication. Her own cryptic, alliterative speech pattern is the only bit of humor that I could discern in this story.
I got to like Allie and was rooting for her to succeed in her attempts to function in the world.
Will is Walker Percy. This becomes very clear when I saw the picture of the author on the back of the dust jacket and when I read his bio on Wiki. Percy’s father committed suicide by shotgun blast to the head, as did his grandfather. Having also lost his mother at a young age, it isn’t surprising that death and suicide become a major theme in his work, but I found the many instances where Will wonders about his father’s suicide and (SPOILER ALERT: the discovery that during a hunting incident in his youth, his father had tried to kill Will) too repetitive. Although the end of the story is satisfactory, there isn’t enough plot development to keep one interested in Will’s plight.
I am starting to notice that some writers are too interested in their own persona which they inject in a story.
There is no doubt, though, that Percy is a good writer, with a good eye for the Carolina landscape, true-to-life dialogue and more than a little insight in the world and people surrounding his characters.
The religious theme in the story didn’t work that well and the characters beside the two protagonists are sketched quickly and never really come to life. For example, we never get to learn much about his wife and daughter, other than that the former was fat and is now dead and the latter is a sour-faced, discontented Jesus Freak.
The title may hint at Will’s existential angst and fascination with Christianity, but the real meaning of it is revealed at the end of the book when (SPOILER ALERT) we learn that sexual ecstasy is seen as the first coming (yes, literally) and that the longing for death is seen as the second.
Overall I enjoyed The Second Coming. I liked it much better than the previous two books I read (All the King’s men, by Pen Warren and The human Stain by Philip Roth [boy, that one was disappointing]) but I thought the book I read prior to these two, The good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck was much better.
On the Literati Frittati scale, Mr. Percy receives 6.5 out of a possible 10 Winonas.
PS. I have been told that his novel The Moviegoer is quite good, so I will read that one later this year.
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