=walking eyeball sketchbook=

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=2013 Books Read=

Ghosts
John Banville

What a great writer John Banville is--if only one can get oneself to read him. 

I tried half-a-dozen times to read this book before I took to it. I knew it would be good. I knew I would like it. But I kept starting it and putting it down. I read a half dozen other books instead.

What was the problem?

Reading Banville, I found, was like sailing. If you could only catch the wind right, he carried you along without you having to do another thing. The sailing was smooth and effortless. The beauty and power of his language swept you out to sea. You sat there amazed. The horizons were limitless. The journey exhilarating.

But if you couldn't catch that wind, you foundered. Everything was difficult. You were stuck close to the dock, exasperated, your skiff turning circles like a dragonfly with a broken wing, sloshed by the incoming tide.

Well, at least that's how I imagine it is with sailing. I've never been on a sailboat. In any event, it's the best description I can come up with for how I found reading Banville.

He's been compared to Joyce and Yeats, but I found him more comparable to Beckett. The bleakness. The world-weary misanthropy. The broken-down characters for whom life is just to high a hill to scale. The same humor. Yes, Banville, like Beckett, is a funny writer. If you have that sort of sense of humor. I do.

He's like Beckett, but with more plot. Though the plot in Ghosts is minimal. A group of pleasure-seekers on a small boat find themselves stranded on an island. If you're high-brow, you think Shakespeare's "The Tempest." If you're like me, you're reminded of "Gilligan's Island." They are of all different character types, the strandees. You've got the pretty young thing, the cynical photographer, the elderly duffer, a pair of buffoonish buddies, a sinister lothario. They seek temporary shelter in a big ramshackle house inhabited by a decrepit servant, an ex-convict, and a once-renowned art historian.

To say much more wouldn't be to ruin the plot, what there is of one, as to be somewhat irrelevant and off the point.

What is the point? 

It's Banville's facility with language, his ability to weave a haunting meditation on human life that is by turns extravagantly beautiful, spare and violent.  

Banville is not for everyone. No more than sailing or sushi or walking on eggshells is. But he's worth giving it the effort. Even if it means picking up his book six or seven times before you get the feel for it. If the wind catches you right, you're in for quite a ride.

In Defense of Cheap Sketchbooks

Well, here I am, back to using what is quite possibly the cheapest possible "sketchbook" in the world--the school writing tablets you get at discount stores for a dollar (sometimes 50 cents) a piece. The lousiest type of paper outside of newsprint and whatever they use to wrap dead cod at the fish store. 

Recently, I treated myself to a couple of really nice Moleskin watercolor books. But I just can't get myself to use them with the same anything-goes spirit that I use these throwaway tablets. 

It's not that I don't feel that I deserve to use fine materials, that I'm somehow unworthy, or that I'm afraid to "ruin" them with anything less than perfection. Okay, there is that, but it's not only that. 

It's not that I grew up in a single-parent household where money was tight and we were taught to keep anything we did have in as pristine and unused a condition as possible for as long as possible (--just try doing that with a piece of paper!) Well, this is true, too, but it's not the all of it, either. 

Maybe I don't respect myself enough as an artist, or take myself or my work seriously. But I do, maybe even too much so. 

So what is the problem? What is the antagonism between me and fine materials? 

Maybe, I've begun to wonder, if the problem isn't a complicated combination of all of the above and the equation somehow resolves itself in this way: that when I use fine archival papers I feel that I need to be certain that I have fine, archival stuff to put on it. And I don't. Or I might. But I can never know until after the work is done. 

Sometimes, of course, I know beforehand: like when I'm pasting library receipts or recipes into my sketchbook. Or pressing lipstick prints onto the pages. Or making quick sketches of stuff I ate. Or jotting down lists of things I did on this or that particular day, or phone numbers I need to remember, or advertising slogans that caught my attention.  Quotes from authors I've read, sketches of authors I'm reading, pictures cut out of magazines...none of this is "archival quality" work and I don't feel right putting it on archival quality paper. Doing so, I feel like I have to talk myself into the idea that I'm doing something important, archivally important. Something meant to last, to stand the test of time. And I'm not. Nor do I have to be.

Using crappy paper, I'm making a sort of Declaration of Creative Independence. I'm saying: "I'm not doing anything important with a capital 'I'. I'm not doing anything for the gallery, the museum, for Posterity. I'm taking myself seriously; I'm taking my "now" seriously, and nothing more. I'm enforcing my freedom to do what interests me in the moment because whatever I'm doing this moment is guaranteed not to last much longer on the recycled garbage I'm creating upon.  I'm thinking now of the Chinese poet who sat at the back of a drifting boat writing verses. As each one was finished, he put a match to it and set the paper to burn on the river.  

I've come to understand that this is the best way I can enforce honesty and integrity into my work and my life. The best way I can make my life and my work one--and make of their union an end in itself which, as I've come to see it,  would constitute at least one good reason for living.

=centipede Issue #2=

=2013 Books Read=

The Three Button Trick and Other Stories
by Nicola Barker

Hi Nicola

How are you? Doing well, I hope. I just finished reading your book The Three Button Trick and Other Stories and it put me in mind to drop you a line. I finished it, cover to cover, in two days. I know the collection isn't long, but I'm not a fast-reader either! So, to read that quickly, I have to be fairly engaged. Well, as it turned out, I also had a lot of time to read yesterday. The hubby and his mates popped down to Atlantic City to see a vintage car show and auction. I don't know why I'm talking in English slang as I'm not English. Probably an after-effect of reading your stories! Anyway, I was alone most of the day so I had plenty of time on my hands.

Well, the weather was fairly awful, nothing like what the forecasters had promised: it was grey and cold as the bottom of a frying pan stashed in an unheated hall pantry. The long pleasant walk in the sun I was so looking forward to taking--that was out. I spent most of the morning in the warm kitchen baking a coconut custard pie for the hubby (his request). It was my first attempt at the coconut custard. Shall I give you the recipe? Let me know. For now, though, here's the key: use coconut milk. You'd think that was a no-brainer but most recipes I've seen tell you to use plain milk.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, between doing a little writing and vacuuming and attending to some intimate matters of  personal hygiene the details of which I'll spare you, I had plenty of time to finish The Three Button Trick and Other Stories. Let me say straight off (well, I'm not quite saying it "straight off,"am I?) that I enjoyed it. Also, I understand how hard it must be to have to defend work that you did twenty years ago. Good grief! I wouldn't line a cat bin with stuff I wrote two decades ago! Thank god, I often console myself with thinking, but I suppose it's something of a silver lining that no one ever thought enough of my writing back then to publish it. For that matter, no one thinks much of it now either, so I guess I'll have that much less to regret twenty years from now. I'm getting off the point again. What I'm trying to say is that no doubt you've grown a lot as a person and a writer in the last couple of decades.

Which is not to say that these stories aren't good. They are. You know, most of them, anyway. No one can hit a home run every time up at the plate, not even one of those muscle-bound guys on steroids. For the most part, the tales here are smart and quirky and slick, pretty much what you might expect from a smart young woman writing for a slick magazine targeted for a readership of other smart young women. I really don't see them as even approaching the work of Martin Amis or Julian Barnes as the copy on the back of your book boldly and immodestly claims. (I know you have nothing to do with that). Maybe you're more recent work justifies such comparisons. I know you've come close to a Man Booker Prize a couple of times by now. Personally I couldn't say. I'm not so sure I'm going to take the time to find out either because you write such super-long novels nowadays and I just find that kind of investment impossible to justify (unless your Tolstoy or something). Well, we'll see. Right now I'm not inclined to giving Darkmans a try, but who knows? I change my mind--what's left of it anyway--a lot.

Back to The Three Button Trick and Other Stories, though. A lot of the stories seems to turn on a clever gimmick of some sort, like the title story, and "Back to Front," where the guy is born with all his insides on the wrong side of his body and "Inside Information" about the unfit, unwed mother with the talking fetus.  G-String would fall into this category. I know it's supposed to be funny, but I kind of thought it was just silly. Others are real gross-outs, like "Symbiosis: Class Cestoda"--a story about a woman with a unique eating disorder involving (yuck!) tapeworms! I'll never forget it, though, especially when I'm eyeballing that extra piece of coconut custard pie. Do you really think it would work, The Tapeworm Diet? Some of these stories wouldn't be out of place in a horror anthology, especially the more literary sort of horror anthology. Hey, you're not related to Clive Barker by any chance, are you?

I think your "Wesley" stories were clearly the best in this collection. They were shocking, too. I'm thinking especially about the one with the finger-eating owl. Sometimes I think your propensity to shock can "cheapen" the literary merits of your story, but I don't think that's the case in the Wesley stories, where the violence seems so much more integrated than it sometimes does. 

Actually, on second-thought, (I told you I changed my mind a lot) I'm thinking again of the title story and I'm going to say that this might, in fact, have been the best story in the book. Aside from the shock, it brings together a lot of what is best in your stories...or what I think is the best of your stories. It's also rather heartwarming, even though it is mainly a story about jealousy and infidelity and selfish people behaving rather badly, it's ultimately a tender-hearted love story. How can that be people might wonder? Well it's hard to explain...and that is what makes it such a good story.

Well, I guess that's about all I have to say about The Three Button Trick and Other Stories and I'm also guessing you're thinking it's more than quite enough! Thanks for keeping me company yesterday. I wish I could offer you a slice of coconut custard pie. It came out super-creamy, super-deeeelish!!! Do let me know if you'd like the recipe.

Take care,
m.

=2013 Books Read=

Reality Hunger
David Shields

1.  By chance, I picked up this book about a year ago at the library, read the dust jacket hysteria, and was sufficiently annoyed to put it right back on the shelf where I found it: another self-important screed treating matters I'd thought about ten, fifteen years ago as "explosive" and "revelatory." No thanks.

Of course, I was jealous and embittered. Unlike Shields, I have no academic platform from which to pitch these "inflammatory" "revolutionary" ideas. I quit graduate school to take up living with someone out of some mistaken notion of "living in the real world"--a mistake, not necessarily because the "real world" doesn't exist, but because I never had any suitable place in it. 

I haven't the credentials and connections that academia would have granted me had I stayed on and finished my MFA at Syracuse, not to mention if I'd retreated from reality altogether and earned my Ph.D. 

Oh well, I took the road more traveled by and here I am. It's not David Shield's fault. It's not even my fault. I'm not the person I used to be. If I were, I'd talk some sense into her. Or box her ears. Or both.

Anyway...

2. Flash forward to a month ago: I read a blog-post (Levi Asher, LiteraryKicks) referencing the book in a review of Shields new book, How Literature Saved My Life, and thought, "Well, maybe I should go back and read Reality Hunger, after all...so long as I can get it free at the library, that is." There's no rush. I've still got another Anita Brookner novel to finish. 

Last Sunday morning, still in bed as the clock inched past nine, opportunity knocked. At the time, I was sitting back on my heels between my husband's spread legs. Hands laced behind his head, smiling contentedly against the headboard, he sighed and said, "How about we go to the library today after breakfast? Would you like that?" 

Never one to miss an opportunity to go to the very magnificent central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, I delicately licked the corners of my mouth, smiled prettily, and said "You bet!" 

Then I snuggled up in his burly arms for a great big hairy-chested snuggle until he roused himself and said, "So what do you think about rustling me up some breakfast, wench? Scrapple, I think, this morning."

One breakfast later...

3. As it happened, Reality Hunger was available, sitting on the bottom shelf, just waiting for me to borrow it. There were two copies, in fact. I was pleasantly surprised. So often I don't find what I'm looking for at the library, only to find something else even more interesting. On this particular day I signed out: A.S. Byatt's The Biographer's Tale, Dean Young's The Art of Recklessness, and The Three Button Trick and Other Stories by Nicola Barker. And, of course, the one book, aside from The Art of Recklessness, that I actually came to borrow: the aforementioned, but so far unreviewed, Reality Hunger.

4. It was true what I said at the start of this pseudo-review. That I'd actually come to many of the same conclusions that David Shields has about literature over a decade ago. Maybe even more than a decade ago. Certainly I'd had these ideas in nascent form ever since I was in graduate school and conscious of myself as a writer. The need for a "new"kind of cross-genre literature that features immediacy, ultra-flexbility, speed, leaps (derived in part from Robert Bly's evangelical celebration of "leaping poetry"), collage effects (derived in part from Burroughs and Gysin and the entire history of art in the 20th century)--all these elements seemed to me then, and even more do they seem to me now, essential strategies for replicating how the mind, at least my mind, and apparently David Shields' mind, actually perceives reality. How could the traditional novel in particular, and traditional literature in general, capture that? In fact, once the internet came into play, how could traditional publishing accommodate it either? 

Answer: it couldn't, it can't.

5. Here's the criticism of Reality Hunger and of people, like me, who like the book, who find it inspiring: in the end, it champions the short attention span. At least that's the charge to which it lays itself open.

Shields wants information and revelations and climax without the connective narrative tissue. He writes that he's always been inspired to write a book filled with epiphanies--he'd build a literary House of Epiphanies, in each room a surprise, a shock, a treasure. He'd get rid of the long boring hallways in between. So would I. He finds the traditional novel a tedious and unnecessary machinery for conveying us to where we really want to go. Why not just go to the destination? Or, at least, just describe the destination? I get what he wants because I want it, too. He doesn't want to wade through a 600-page novel to garner half-a-dozen insights. He wants a precis of a novel, a report detailing the highlights. He wants a short story instead. Better yet, a short-short. An aphorism.

But that doesn't mean that everyone else wants what he wants and I think that's where he antagonizes people. A lot of people don't mind taking the long way around. They don't mind being taken to "another world," something Shields baldly states he finds of almost no interest.

Shields doesn't see literature as "entertainment" but as an almost religious/spiritual endeavor. Many people see it as exactly that. They want to be entertained.

Maybe the most self-damning thing Shields asserts is that reality television actually provides a better format for embodying the truths about our lives than the stale inventions of narrative fiction. This seems to me the weakest link in his argument. Because, although I agree that we need an art that more effectively reflects real life, if art is synonymous with real life, as it supposedly is in the realm of reality television, what do I need art for at all? I have my own screwed up life to entertain me. I don't need to see someone else's screwed up life on television, or to read about it in books either, for that matter. 

The fact is that no matter how "real" a depiction might claim to be...it's still a fiction. And this is something that Shields pretty much admits throughout Reality Hunger. Even the "honest" memoirist, doing his or her best to recall their memories as faithfully as possible, must necessarily fictionalize.

So...where does that leave us????

It leaves us hungering for reality and with no way to provide ourselves with a 100% daily requirement for it. We can only approximate and I suppose, in the end, what Shields is really arguing for is more reality in our art, less filler, as little filler as possible.

Okay, maybe there is something even worse that Shields cops to in Reality Hunger, worse even than his slanted admiration for reality television. He believes reality is subjective, and radically so; most people do not. He doesn't shy away from the charge of solipsism. In fact, he all but embraces the notion. He seems to believe that the only difference between a solipsist and a non-solipsist is that the non-solipsists haven't admitted to their solipsism yet. (Perhaps they're too solipsistic to do so). Who can blame them? Being a solipsist is considered to be almost as bad as being a child molester.  

6. Finally, here's the praise: Reality Hunger is an inspiring, thought-and-argument-provoking book. And the arguments and thoughts it inspires are both of the kind worth having. Shields champions a form of writing that he calls the "lyric essay." What is that, exactly? It's hard to say. He defines it, sort of. What he really seems to be after is not so much a "form" of writing, but a way of writing, in which the author seeks the unique form most appropriate to the subject at hand. He harkens us back to the original meaning of the term "essay" which is to assay a subject, "to make an attempt." Shields thus seeks to avoid the very problem he finds with the novel (and other traditional genres), which is the boring predictability and the inherent limitation of a finished product dictated by pouring even fresh content into readymade forms. 

It's easier for him to give examples of what he likes than to define it. He cites, among others, work by authors such as Fernando Pessoa, Samuel Beckett, Ann Carson, and Ben Marcus as the sort of thing he'd like to read (and write) more of. 

The book itself is comprised of fragments, including many call-to-arm quotations and pithy paraphrases from authors as diverse as Nietzsche, Montaigne, Beckett, Didion, Nabokov, Dillard, Emerson--well, even a sampling isn't enough to give you a proper idea. Many citations are from authors less well-known and more contemporary, authors that Shield's considers to be writing on the front lines of the "new nonfiction."  

7. I don't mind saying that Reality Hunger is one of the most worthwhile books I've read on writing in quite some time, even if I did formulate most of these thoughts on my own ten, fifteen, even twenty years ago. The book reminded me that I was on the right track in one sense, even if I were on the wrong road altogether.