tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-65666935805108158702024-03-13T14:15:23.562+00:00steady diet of booksgabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.comBlogger25125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-17346965486416295922009-03-18T20:47:00.007+00:002009-03-18T22:20:02.887+00:00Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums (a return)<div align="justify"><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgORU-U4UjjGrMLEjcmCse6bpunL5nJke4SirzpVKO5yOYDLFCYkBPOSTZ3XTTnYSN8cyjkK5yUeJnj1Ih7GaIDU1etIrt3ha-3mdob83JL4sRPsiIzUYvFjJx4VzwVUyubY5-wWnCKIaQ/s1600-h/dharma+bums.jpg"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5314649649830894338" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 268px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 400px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgORU-U4UjjGrMLEjcmCse6bpunL5nJke4SirzpVKO5yOYDLFCYkBPOSTZ3XTTnYSN8cyjkK5yUeJnj1Ih7GaIDU1etIrt3ha-3mdob83JL4sRPsiIzUYvFjJx4VzwVUyubY5-wWnCKIaQ/s400/dharma+bums.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br /></span><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I haven't been here for a while, as writing about music proved a lot easier and I guess more immediately and communally satisfying. However, now that I've further developed my Hardcore for Nerds output into </span><a href="http://hardcorefornerds.tumblr.com/"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Tumblr</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">, it seems a good time to come back to this my original blog - which was meant to be my internet <i>niche</i>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">[Of course, I've still been reading, though I have to say it's too often much easier to flip open a laptop and check my blog list than it is to sit down with a paper, non-interactive, Web 0.0 book - though I know that the latter still ultimately provides the greater pleasure. Currently I'm reading Don </span><a href="http://steadydietofbooks.blogspot.com/2007/11/don-delillo-underworld.html"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">DeLillo</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'s first novel, <i>Americana</i> (1971), and wondering why it's so uncannily similar to <i>Mad Men</i>; while dipping in and out of the Big Book of Zen, aka <i>Classics of Buddhism and Zen: The Collected Translations of Thomas Cleary</i>, (Vol. 4); and I'm stalled out on Henry James's <i>Portrait of a Lady</i> (really really good book for a mental transatlanticist such as myself, but 19th century novels aren't cut out to compete with 21st century distractions) and Alex Ross's thick <i>The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century</i> (I need to proxy my way into Spotify so I can actually listen to what he's talking about). Plus I'm still reading and essay-writing about a variety of historical and political academic topics.]</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Today's posting on Tumblr focused on a short-lived, early 1990s hardcore punk band from California called </span><a href="http://hardcorefornerds.tumblr.com/tagged/han_shan"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Han Shan</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">, whose sole output, an eight-song woodblock-printed 7", was incidentally the </span><a href="http://hardcorefornerds.blogspot.com/2007/08/han-shan-st-7.html"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">very first post</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> on the Hardcore for Nerds blog. As a commenter on that post said:</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"...This band also got me into the poetry of Han Shan, who I recommend. English translations by Gary Snyder and Burton Watson are pretty good. The fact that a punk band fused their aesthetic with ancient Chinese poetry changed my perception of the possibilities of hardcore."</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">That translation by Gary Snyder (as 'Japhy Ryder') is part of a key scene of <i>The Dharma Bums</i>, where Kerouac first visits his informal mentor in Berkely:</span></p><br /><blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">A peacefuller scene I never saw than when, in that rather nippy late red afternoon, I simply opened his little door and looked in and saw him at the end of the little shack, sitting cross-legged on a Paisley pillow on a straw mat, with his spectacles on, making him look old and scholarly and wise, with book on lap and the little tin teapot and porcelain cup steaming at his side. He looked up very peacefully, saw who it was, said, ‘Ray, come in,’ and bent his eyes again to the script.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘What you doing?’</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Translating Han Shan’s great poem called “Cold Mountain” written a thousand years ago some of it scribbled on the sides of cliffs hundreds of miles away from any other living beings.’</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Wow.’</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'When you come into this house though you've got to take your shoes off, see those straw mats, you can ruin 'em with shoes.' So I took my softsoled blue cloth shoes off and laid them dutifully by the door and he threw me a pillow and I sat crosslegged along the little wooden board wall and he offered me a cup of hot tea. 'Did you ever read the Book of Tea?' said he.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'No, what's that?'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'It's a scholarly treatise on how to make tea utilizing all the knowledge of two thousand years about tea-brewing. Some of the descriptions of the effect of the first sip of tea, and the second, and the third, are really wild and ecstatic.'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'Those guys got high on nothing, hey?'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'Sip your tea and you'll see; this is good green tea.' It was good and I immediately felt calm and warm. 'Want me to tell you about Han Shan?'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'Yeah.'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'Han Shan you see was a Chinese Scholar who got sick of the big city and took off to hide in the mountains.'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'Say, that sounds like you.'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'In those days you could really do that. He stayed in caves not far from a Buddhist monastery in the T'ang Hsing district of T'ien Tai and his only human friend was the funny Zen Lunatic Shih-te who had a job sweeping out the monastery with a straw broom. Shih-te was a poet too but he never wrote much down. Every now and then Han Shan would come down from Cold Mountain in his bark clothing and come into the warm kitchen and wait for food, but none of the monks would ever feed him because he didn't want to join the order and answer the meditation bell three times a day. You see why in some of his utterances, like - listen and I'll look here and read from the Chinese,' and I bent over his shoulder and watched him read from big wild crowtracks of Chinese signs: 'Climbing up Cold Mountain path, Cold Mountain path goes on and on, long gorge choked with scree and boulders, wide creek and mist-blurred grass, moss is slippery though there's been no rain, pine sings but there's no wind, who can leap the world's ties and sit with me among white clouds?'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'Wow.'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'Course that's my own translation into English, you see there are five signs for each line and I have to put it in Western prepositions and articles and such.'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'Why don't you just translate it as it is, five signs, five words? What's those first five signs?'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'Sign for climbing, sign for up, sign for cold, sign for mountain, sign for path'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'Well then, translate it "Climbing up Cold Mountain path"'.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'Yeah, but what do you do with the sign for long, sign for gorge, sign for choke, sign for avalanche, sign for boulders?'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'Where's that?'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'That's the third line, would have to read "Long gorge choke avalanche boulders"'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'Well that's even better!'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'Well yeah, I thought of that, but I have to have this pass the approval of Chinese scholars here at the university and have it clear in English'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'Boy what a great thing this is,' I said looking around at the little shack, 'and you sitting here so very quietly at this very quiet hour studying all alone with you glasses...'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'Ray what you got to do is climb a mountain with me soon. How would you like to climb Matterhorn?'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'Great! Where's that?'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'Up in the High Sierras. We can go there with Henry Morley in his car and bring our packs and take off from the lake. I could carry all the food and stuff we need in my rucksack and you could borrow Alvin's small knapsack and carry extra socks and shoes and stuff.'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'What's these signs mean/'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'These signs mean that Han Shan came down from the mountain after many years roaming around up there, to see his folks in town, says, 'Till recently I stayed at Cold Mountain, et cetera, yesterday I called on friends and family, more than half had gone to Yellow Springs," that means death, the Yellow Springs, "now morning I face my lone shadow, I can't study with both eyes full of tears."</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'That's like you too, Japhy, studying with eyes full of tears.'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'My eyes aren't full of tears.'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'Aren't they going to be after a long time?'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'They certainly will, Ray ... and look here, "In the mountains it's cold, it's always been cold not just this year," see, he's real high, maybe twelve thousand or thirteen thousand feet or more, way up there, and says, "Jagged scarps always snowed in, woods in the dark ravines spitting mist, grass is till sprouting in the end of June, leaves begin to fall in early August, and here I am high as a junkey-"'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'As a junkey!'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'That's my own translation, he actually says here am I as high as the sensualist in the city below, but I made it modern and high translation.'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'Great. I wondered why Han Shan was Japhy’s hero.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Because,’ said he, ‘he was a poet, a mountain man, a Buddhist dedicated to the principle of meditation on the essence of things, a vegetarian too by the way though I haven’t got on that kick from figuring maybe in this modern world to be a vegetarian is to split hairs a little since all sentient beings eat what they can. And he was a man of solitude who could take off by himself and live purely and true to himself.’</span></p></blockquote><br /></div>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-86806744762846603792008-09-11T13:08:00.009+01:002008-09-11T22:22:43.181+01:00Jon Savage - Teenage<div align="justify"><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbQs5fdXTpe-aoPlSrIJBRkHY3oTo8ToW06-7rGcXXvhgPT6pMfmMhY0MNuwTNvl3SN1xVsF8rkNOY8M0E2EqndoByBY_pA_M5weeSdEVTHj6hMFDXg2WKWKyYQwTWkqj5rkrjBTHPO8g/s1600-h/teenage+front.jpg"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5244734798844243090" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbQs5fdXTpe-aoPlSrIJBRkHY3oTo8ToW06-7rGcXXvhgPT6pMfmMhY0MNuwTNvl3SN1xVsF8rkNOY8M0E2EqndoByBY_pA_M5weeSdEVTHj6hMFDXg2WKWKyYQwTWkqj5rkrjBTHPO8g/s400/teenage+front.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The English journalist and writer Jon Savage is best known for his book </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Englands-Dreaming-Revised-Anarchy-Pistols/dp/0312288220"><i><span style="font-family:times new roman;">England's Dreaming</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond</span></i><span style="font-family:times new roman;">, both an history of the bands of late-70s punk rock and the social history of the punk movement of the time. <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Teenage-Creation-Culture-Jon-Savage/dp/B000W90B6C">Teenage</a>: The Creation of Youth Culture</i> is a broader social history, dealing with the concept of adolescence prior to the emergence of the 'teenager' as a specific, commercial demographic in the 1950s. As such, <i>Teenage</i> focuses on a variety of movements, conflicts and problems which involved the youth of Europe and America from the last quarter of the nineteenth century up until the end of the Second World War.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The book's introduction traces its development from an early investigation into "the history of youth subcultures" of the post-war era to a realisation that "punk's historical collage... marked the moment when the linear forward motion of the sixties was replaced by a loop. Suddenly, all pop culture time was accessible, on the same plane, available at once." This realisation broadened into a wider interest in the development of youth and adolescence, not only in America but in western Europe; and the history of "the quest, pursued over two different continents and over half a century, to conceptualize, define, and control adolescence."</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I haven't yet read <i>England's Dreaming</i>, so I can't comment on the strengths of that book: whether it is, as I have seen it reviewed </span><a href="http://www.punk77.co.uk/Books/englandsdreamingjohnsavage.htm"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">elsewhere</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">, a good documentary history of the bands of the era but "on slightly more dodgy ground" with regards to social and political context. Certainly <i>Teenage</i> is far more associated with the latter, but I think that is what gives it such strength as a work of popular history. It takes the <i>idea</i> of youth in a cultural and social context, and expands on it through documenting a wide variety of groups and movements. Moreover, it is vigorous in its pursuit of what really was revolutionary about the various youth subcultures - in reference to the discussion of adolescence at the end of the introduction, Savage states:</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"There is a dialectic within the book, therefore, between the extraordinary and the ordinary. However, if I have to make the choice, it is to find the extraordinary within the ordinary."</span></p></blockquote><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><i>Teenage</i> does this by taking key groups from across the time period and geographical locations, and siting each in the broader social movements of its time. So there are decadents in late nineteenth-century Paris, and boy scouts in Edwardian Britain, juvenile delinquents and gangsters in American industrial cities, right up to the movements for and against Fascism in Nazi Germany. Some subcultures were a reaction to social progress, some were consequences of it, while others were impositions of the adult world on the youth it derived its power from.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">To take an obvious example, the Hitler Youth in Germany grew from being one of many youth associations to the predominant, and eventually only, official one, deriving from the political and social ideology of Nazism; whereas around it dwindled a vibrant alternative culture stemming from the <i>Wandervogel</i> of the nineteenth century to a tiny minority of dissident groups. As the <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/apr/14/society">Guardian review</a> of the books states, "Yet even the Nazis were unable to mould teenagers exactly as they wanted. Perhaps the strongest, most revelatory part of the book is a detailed account of how delinquent gangs and youthful tastes for forbidden British and American fashions and music survived throughout the Nazi era despite ever more violent state attempts to repress them."</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">While the most well known of these is the White Rose resistant movement of the late period of Nazi Germany and the war, it was preceded by and - by virtue of the isolation of totalitarian society - separated from earlier movements of looser rebellion by the German 'Swing Kids'. They form - along with the French <i>Zazous</i> - but one chapter of Savage's book, yet I'll discuss them below as both an example of the aim and arc of youth history in the rest of <em>Teenage</em>, and as a subculture of particular interest to my </span><a href="http://hardcorefornerds.blogspot.com/search/label/Swing%20Kids"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">other area of writing</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">.</span></p><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpGKnuoHXR8QqnywFWfayBUDaQ4uCXTMLRr40oYF50HOebOoV95EkoGgGfAvMjxbKttllycXf479iHr7ZESOoF_jFoTQ8cLlEjcwVPQ1Cwu6vePut6jFiRSiDjkx8doTItPFiXVSCoC9U/s1600-h/teenage+zazou.jpg"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5244734806742895202" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpGKnuoHXR8QqnywFWfayBUDaQ4uCXTMLRr40oYF50HOebOoV95EkoGgGfAvMjxbKttllycXf479iHr7ZESOoF_jFoTQ8cLlEjcwVPQ1Cwu6vePut6jFiRSiDjkx8doTItPFiXVSCoC9U/s400/teenage+zazou.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Swing or 'hot' jazz spread from America into Britain and Europe during the 1930s, the latter form having already been established in Britain and France during the 1920s. In the 1930s, however, jazz came into conflict with the totalitarian and moral ideology of the Nazi state; the regime's attitude towards the genre of music is documented in Michael H. Kater's <i>Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany</i> from which Savage takes a quote from a Hitler Youth leader:</span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"The Nigger has a very pronounced feeling for rhythm, and his 'art' is perhaps indigenous but nonetheless offensive to our sentiments. Surely such stuff belongs among the Hottentots and not in a German dance hall. The Jew, on the other hand, has cooked these aberrations up on purpose"</span></blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">With jazz as both a creation of an inferior Negro race <i>and</i> a Jewish conspiracy, censorship and repression soon followed. Savage describes how the divisions of Joseph Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry control and repressed the playing of jazz: the Reichsrundfunkkammer restricted radio play to ideologically controlled German jazz (having to recognise at least jazz's popularity as a form of light entertainment); while the Reichsmusikkammer policed the playing of jazz in public places and some musical venues. The " gaps in the totalitarian state" were exploited for as long as possible, allowing for small groups of jazz fans to form clubs for adolescents apart from the demands of the Hitler Youth, while following a mode of physical and cultural expression - swing - which stood in defiance of Nazi ideology. The largest of these groups was the Hamburg Swing Youth, formed in 1937.</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In the 1940s, and in wartime Germany and occupied Europe in general, the Swing Youth was both under increased totalitarian pressure and availing of the confusion of war in both physical and social terms: they "instinctively responded to the freedom that they heard in their forbidden records", even if such</span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"passions were dangerous in wartime Europe, as the Nazis sought complete compliance from their subjects and their own people. At the same time, youth was destablized by the demands of total war: the chaos of mobilization, the disruption of family life, and the deranged psychology of war itsefl conspired to double the figures for juvenile delinquency in Nazi Germany during 1940 and 1941. At the time when confidence in the regime was at its height, there were over 17,000 recorded youth crimes, of which two-thirds were committed by members of the Hitler Youth." </span><p></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">While most of this youth rebellion was inner-city, working class gangs, the Swing Kids represent for history an extreme (and middle-class) manifestation of non-conformity. This dialectic of exceptionalism in Savage's book sits uneasily here with the class dynamics of Nazi Germany, as the significant Swing Kids had the effective protection of wealthy parents and the economic freedom to collect the consumer goods of the Swing lifestyle - clothes, records - which contrasts with the baser freedoms that working-class youths were able to hold on to. Yet the Swing Youth still represented a true cultural defiance; and many of its leaders, particularly from the Hamburg club, suffered true retribution at the hands of the state police.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This retribution was not, and needed not to be, as severe as that handed out to later and more explicit dissidents, but was still indicative of what we see today as the prime mechanisms of fascist repression. As Savage explains:</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"The Gestapo's campaign [against Hamburg Swing clubs which had moved undergound] was extremely effective against a group of young people unprepared for such brutality. They used stool pigeons, pressurising vulnerable swings to inform on their friends. The Hitler Youth informed on swing pupils in local schools and acted with directors to expel the rebels. However, the subculture persisted to the extent that, in the summer of 1941, an appeal for help was made to the head of the Central Security Agency, Reinhardt Heydrich. In January 1942, the net was drawn even tighter with a new decree that banned dancing in semiprivate locations like sports clubs.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">That same month, Himmler intervened. He was determined that there would be no "mere half-measures" against this contagion: "All the ringleaders, and I mean ringleaders both male and female, and all teachers with enemy views who are encouraging the swing youth, are to be assigned to a concentration camp..."</span></p></blockquote><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Outside Germany, in France the situation was more isolated from the direct actions of the Nazi state, but complicated by the political reshapings of the occupied and divided French state. In the south of the country, in the Southern Zone, power was vested in the Vichy regime. Under the leadership of the World War I her Marshal Petain, Fascism was created anew as a French ideology: <i>Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité</i> was replaced by <i>Travaille, Famille, Patrie</i>. Vigorous morality and a subservience of youth to the "spirit of sacrifice" and the community defined this new Vichy culture. Though this represented existing strains of French conservatism, it was also opposed by the country's intellectuals and liberals, themselves under Nazi control:</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"To Simone de Beauvoir, observing from Paris, the marshal's phrases about the family, God, and the "reign of virtue" was the "same violent prejudice and stupidity that had darkened my childhood - only now it extended over the whole country, an official and repressive blanket." In comparison to the Vichy's return to a nonexistent religious agrarian past, conditions in the Occupied Zone were both more modern and more serious. Although Vichy was the capital of the new France, Paris was the seat of power and under the direct rule of the Nazis."</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In this culture of repression, resistance was both extremely dangerous and morally required. Sartre remarked, "Everything we did was equivocal; we never quite knew whether we were doing right or wrong; a subtle poison corrupted even our best actions." The rebellion of jazz was an implicit one, an affected attitude found "in the mannered sarcasm first rehearsed by Baudelaire" and a provocative dandyism, which Camus described in <i>L'homme révolté</i> as</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"The dandy can only play a part by setting himself up in opposition. He can only be sure of his own existence by finding it in the expression of others' faces. Other people are his mirror."</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">With the increasing repression and censorship of the regime, in winter 1941 the <i>Zazous</i> emerged from the "petits Swings" and "Ultra Swings" of American influence. They were dandys set apart from the <i>collabos</i> (collaborators) by their dress, a blend of American, British and continental fashions. The jazz slang <i>Zazou</i> originated, in one version, from Cab Calloway "whose watch chains and checked jackets were highly influential on the style" and who "recorded 'Zah Zuh Zah' in 1933, and embellished it with the chant "zazouzazou - hey!", while scat singers "developed this clanging surrealism" further (Savage draws most of his documentation from <em>Les Zazous</em>, by Jean-Claude Loiseau.)</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The <i>Zazous</i> continued as an underground movement, subverting the Fascist culture of France and its Fascist youth magazine <i>Le Jeunesse</i>, until by summer and autumn 1942 the state opposition - combined with the violent actions of <i>collabo</i> youth groups - essentially eradicated the "principally middle- or upper-middle-class" movement. In the final period of flux, some of the most interesting cultural statements of the group manifested themselves - from the adoption by a deliberately outcast few of the Jewish yellow star "to show their sympathy for the Jews... exactly like the official one, except for one detail: at the centre, there was a word of five letters: Swing" (or <i>Zazou</i>) to the emergence of a subgroup of '<i>zazou triste</i>' ('sad <i>zazou</i>'), "wearing somber clothes and steel-rimmed glasses". (Sound familiar?)</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><blockquote>"The <i>Zazous</i> appeared on the French stage and then disappeared, as if in a puff of smoke. Although they cultivated a blank facade, they left the authorities in no doubt about their total contempt for "The National Revolution." They also reveled in their bad press to the point of delerious abjection. Turning adolescent obnoxiousness into street theater, they offered a symbolic resistance to the occupation's "ambient, abstract horror" that also mirrored its ultimate vacancy. However, they learned that in Nazi states everything was politicized, and that defiance was punishable by violence, imprisonment and death."</blockquote></span></p><br /></div>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-81952270955373408332008-06-16T15:32:00.007+01:002008-12-09T21:00:15.645+00:00Bloomsday<div align="justify"><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7kQN9jDAtQss7aO8K2nrdda1oMgzYHZlgKCUCjGxfbvzypuTlRgwCqKc0TcYr5dYx_Y5sZfQrp3-gry2SpvBtalo6K-EmZU6-8SeIjjSSooN6bVPL4-38ByC9ZZrrtd3MbIlmw3d7e6A/s1600-h/ulysses+redux2.jpg"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5212487298614555666" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7kQN9jDAtQss7aO8K2nrdda1oMgzYHZlgKCUCjGxfbvzypuTlRgwCqKc0TcYr5dYx_Y5sZfQrp3-gry2SpvBtalo6K-EmZU6-8SeIjjSSooN6bVPL4-38ByC9ZZrrtd3MbIlmw3d7e6A/s400/ulysses+redux2.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">104 years ago on this day, a fictional event took place in the book of James Joyce, <i>Ulysses</i>. The central character, hero and icon of that book was called Leopold Bloom. So, some Irish people like to commemorate the 16th of June each year as 'Bloomsday', by dressing up in Edwardian clothes, eating kidneys, and reading extracts from <i>Ulysses</i>.</span></p><br /><p><a href="http://steadydietofbooks.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><i>Ulysses</i> on Steady Diet of Books</span></a></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">__________________________________________________</span></p><br /><blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"...and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldn’t answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didn’t know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and then the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auction in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousand of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deep-down torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire ad the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I though well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><i>Trieste-Zürich-Paris</i>, 1914-1921</span></p></blockquote><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">__________________________________________________</span></p><br /><blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">from <i>Ulysses</i>: A Short History, by Richard Ellmann</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"<i>Ulysses</i> may be seen to conduct its affirmation by discovery of kinship among disparate things, whether these are mind and body, casual and important, contemporary and Homeric, or Bloom and Stephen. The universe is, if nothing else, irrevocably interpenetrating, Joyce takes an almost mystical pleasure in convergence – of times, persons, qualities. These receive authorization in <i>Ulysses</i> from no abstract statement, but from language, which is part of the argument as well as means of expressing it. By displaying the utmost linguistic variety, in levels of speech, in styles of writing, <i>Ulysses</i> testifies that, beneath all forms of conscious striving, of individual life or social organization, human beings are at work with syllables to submit language as living and delighting proof of their gregariousness."</span></p></blockquote><br /></div>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-63582658186911635372008-01-06T18:14:00.001+00:002009-02-25T21:15:27.606+00:00Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNj3HBlURy90PLMYU-v-bNYa2KbL5Agjxkn58cGsQwDN-1p56_-_gCC1ykToAEkDHHU8qN_MmcGHytSY1uxcNDqbeKMhmJyAL7JFQAIHXMwswcmVUxKRT3nIKwj9eRHO6djnULIeQ98hY/s1600-h/thirdpoliceman.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5152724058259761938" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNj3HBlURy90PLMYU-v-bNYa2KbL5Agjxkn58cGsQwDN-1p56_-_gCC1ykToAEkDHHU8qN_MmcGHytSY1uxcNDqbeKMhmJyAL7JFQAIHXMwswcmVUxKRT3nIKwj9eRHO6djnULIeQ98hY/s320/thirdpoliceman.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div><br /><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Flann O'Brien's <i>The Third Policeman</i> is - at least currently - likely the most recognized of the Irish humorist's novels. It holds a more glamorous reputation than that of the </span><a href="http://steadydietofbooks.blogspot.com/2007/08/flann-obrien-dalkey-archive.html"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">previously reviewed</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> <i>Dalkey Archive</i> and is less achingly literary and somewhat more sensible than his acclaimed debut, <i>At Swim-Two-Birds</i>. What part of that reputation comes from its association with the TV show <i>Lost</i>, as I said before, is probably that "both works are probably equally as difficult to follow".</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><i>The Third Policeman</i> is a dark fantasy, a comic tale that delves into murder, death and metaphysics, but never outright farce. The book is set in the provincial Irish countryside, as opposed to the urban and suburban (respectively) Dublin settings of <i>At Swim-Two-Birds</i> and <i>The Dalkey Archive</i>. Hence the focus of the story is on the isolated, cocooned inhabitants of a very strange police station, to which the narrator and main protagonist turns to for assistance at the novel's start.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">These policeman (of which there are three) harbour some strange habits, obsessions and, as is ultimately revealed, arcane knowledge. The first, the Sergeant Pluck, is essentially the base for Sergeant Fottrell of <i>The Dalkey Archive</i>, with his obsession with bicycles and their atomic dangers. The second, young Policeman MacCruiskeen, has as a hobby the production of an infinitely regressing series of wooden chests, each fitting inside the one before. The third, Policeman Fox, is the most mysterious, leading a nocturnal and otherwise invisible existence, and not appearing until the very end of the novel. Other characters include John Divney, the narrator's partner- and rival-in-crime of the opening chapters, Mathers, the dead or not-quite-dead miser, Joe, the narrator's soul; a group of one-legged men, said to be allegorical to the IRA; and, in another overlap with <i>The Dalkey Archive</i>, the mad scientist De Selby - who appears in a series of lengthy footnotes which themselves make up a kind of book-within-a-book.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><i>The Dalkey Archive</i> begins autobiographically, in the second paragraph - the first actually begins "Not everybody knows how I killed old Philip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with a spade" - briefly charting the way in which the situation that the narrator finds himself in emerged: the death of his parents; his living in a strange kind of bondage with Divney, the caretaker of the family farm and, later, public house; and their plan to steal the old miser, Mather's, money. Following the apparent murder of Mathers, and some lengthy periods of distrust, the narrator is sent to the old miser's house to retrieve the stashed metal box containing the object of the theft. However, in the tradition of fantastical stories everywhere, as well as in classic science fiction tales of weirdness, 'something happened':</span></p><br /><blockquote><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"I cannot hope to describe what it was but it had frightened me very much long before I had understood it even slightly. It was some change which came upon me or upon the room, indescribably subtle, yet momentous, ineffable. It was as if the daylight had changed with unnatural suddenness, as if the temperature of the evening had altered greatly in an instant or as if the air had become twice as rare or twice as dense as it had been in the winking of an eye; perhaps all of these and other things happened together for all my senses were bewildered all at once and could give me no explanation. The fingers of my right hand, thrust into the opening in the floor, had closed mechanically, found nothing at all and came up again empty. The box was gone!"</span></p></blockquote><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">From that point on, <i>The Third Policeman</i> descends into surreality and bizarre discoveries. The Harper Perennial blurb describes the novel as "distinguished by endless comic invention and its delicate balancing of logic and fantasy", delivered, it must be said, in the author's inimitable but quintessentially (and therefore, imitating) Irish style. Part of the book's appeal lies - and this is not exactly an original observation, but a memory of something I read elsewhere as well - in its combination of the parochial (the rural setting and the microscopic dramas of the police house) and the universal (the metaphysical and existential discoveries, trappings and just plain absurdities of the plot). While <i>The Dalkey Archive</i> was played as a detective farce, investigating the peculiar yet personal experiments of the inscrutable De Selby, <i>The Third Policeman</i> contains a much more entirely warped and twisted world:</span></p><br /><blockquote><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"As I came round the bend of the road an extraordinary spectacle was presented to me. About a hundred yards away on the left-hand side was a house about which astonished me. It looked as if it were painted like an advertisement on a board on the roadside and indeed very poorly painted. It looked completely false and unconvincing. It did not seem to have any depth or breadth and looked like it would not deceive a child. That was not in itself sufficient to surprise me because I had seen pictures and notices by the roadside before. What bewildered me was the sure knowledge deeply-rooted in my mind, that there were people inside it. I had no doubt at all that it was the barracks of the policeman. I had never seen anything with my eyes ever in my life before anything so unnatural and appalling and my gaze faltered about the thing uncomprehendingly as if at least one of the customary dimensions was missing, leaving no meaning in the remainder…</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I kept on walking, but walked more slowly. As I approached, the house seemed to change its appearance. At first, it did nothing to reconcile itself with the shape of an ordinary house but it became uncertain in outline like a thing glimpsed under ruffled water. Then it became clear again and I saw that it began to have some back to it, some small space for rooms behind the frontage. I gathered this from the fact that I seemed to see the front and the back of the ‘building’ simultaneously from my position approaching what should have been the side. As there was no side that I could see I thought the house must be triangular with its apex pointing towards me but when I was only fifteen yards away I saw a small window apparently facing me and I knew from that that there must be <i>some</i> side to it. then I found myself almost in the shadow of the structure, dry-throated and timorous from wonder and anxiety. It seemed ordinary enough at close quarters except that it was very white and still. It was momentous and frightening: the whole morning and the whole world seemed to have no purpose at all save to frame it and give it some magnitude and position so that I could find it with my simple senses and pretend to myself that I understood it. A constabulary crest above the door told me it was a police station. I had never seen a police station like it."</span></p></blockquote><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In this bizarre universe, the narrator's journey takes on an air of inexplicability and unknowableness that marks it out as less of a comic fantasy than a science fiction novel. The wit is ever-present of course, but nonetheless often heavily overlaid with a profoundly odd sense of fear and trepidation. <i>The Third Policeman</i> is thus a novel of combination, "a murder thriller, a hilarious comic satire about an archetypal village police force, a surrealistic vision of eternity, the story of a tender, brief, unrequited love affair between a man and his bicycle and a chilling fable about unending guilt".</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Like <i>Lost</i>, the piece of modern culture that this novel is so tantalisingly connected to, <i>The Third Policeman</i> is a cryptic tale, but it is not one entirely without resolution or exposition. From the first extract above, and from some adjectives I could easily have used in describing the book, a good deal of the plot's secret may be guessed. Regardless of the actual nature of the plot or the narrator's journey, however, <i>The Third Policeman</i> remains a work of surreal comedy and bizarre wit. A useful appendix to my edition details some of the book's history, and proves that some of the book's truth is stranger than its fiction:</span></p><br /><blockquote><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'A Curious Tale'</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">A publisher’s note at the end of <i>The Third Policeman</i> displays a letter, written in 1940 by O’Brien to the American author William Saroyan, in which he explains some of its eccentricities.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">By the time they reach this letter, readers will already have marvelled at the book’s many themes: man’s search for God, for eternal youth, for unimaginable power and treasures, and his relationship with nature, with the soul, with the myriad mysteries of the universe and, crucially, with the bicycle.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">A beguiling and curious combination of many books and styles – part <i>Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland</i>, part <i>Gulliver’s Travels</i>, part <i>Seventh Voyage of Sinbad</i> - <i>The Third Policeman</i> drifts from bizarre fantasy to sheer nonsense and back again, propelled by frequent drafts of dry wit. It is, in the immortal words of one of the policeman, ‘nearly an insoluble pancake’.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Almost as strange as the novel’s plot is its history. It was written after the publication of O’Brien’s first novel, <i>At Swim-Two-Birds</i>, but was rejected by his publishers who wrote: ‘We realize the author’s ability but think that he should become less fantastic and in this novel he is more so.’ He had been thinking about adapting it for the stage, probably influenced by Saroyan’s success as a playwright, but abandoned the idea after this blow.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Nevertheless, he did try his luck abroad, sending the manuscript to literary agents in America through a contact of Saroyan’s, with the perhaps more apposite title of <i>Hell Goes Round and Round</i>. However, further enquiries revealed that they had mislaid it. Perhaps enraged, or inspired, by this carelessness, he abandoned all attempts to place it with anyone and began telling friends that <i>he</i> had mislaid the manuscript, even inventing different fates for it. These ranged from the simple mistake of leaving it on a tramcar or showing it to someone at the Dolphin Hotel and then leaving without it, to the inspired notion that he had taken it on a trip to Donegal by car only for the pages to have somehow been blown out of the boot. To an actor friend who knew a film director and who felt it might be adapted into a script he offered the rather undramatic yarn of having left it on a train. Only his friend Donal McDonagh knew the truth and, after O’Brien had asked him to look at the novel again to see what was wrong with it, McDonagh replied ‘nothing’. Despite this assurance, it lay unread for twenty-six years.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Yet various chunks of <i>The Third Policeman</i> did appear in O’Brien’s final novel, <i>The Dalkey Archive</i>. Largely concerned with bicycles and policeman, some of the material has been lifted, word for word, from the original source. And a short story published under the pseudonym Myles na Gopaleen, called ‘Two in One’, also borrowed from the unpublished novel. But when O’Brien’s friend and biographer Anthony Cronin suggested that the story should be published under the byline Flann O’Brien, the latter replied ominously, ‘I don’t know that fellow any more.’</span></p></blockquote><p align="justify"><br /></p></div>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-38226407432589120492007-12-25T19:36:00.001+00:002009-02-25T21:18:38.918+00:00Terry Pratchett - Hogfather extract (Pt. II)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC6_JWrQjBsHmnuWICZ9xbQkrek-JACi7JxqcBgVbTzdDn1hqOCbZdcG9MqCHzOI1ny11E02zUJCJ3MI3tcZoJb-bY3SBIu88OCVG2GYr7ZObfyONxv9ekt1oZLstdTILSskZe74hA3wM/s1600-h/hogf.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC6_JWrQjBsHmnuWICZ9xbQkrek-JACi7JxqcBgVbTzdDn1hqOCbZdcG9MqCHzOI1ny11E02zUJCJ3MI3tcZoJb-bY3SBIu88OCVG2GYr7ZObfyONxv9ekt1oZLstdTILSskZe74hA3wM/s400/hogf.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5147997847102415346" /></a><br /><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style><br /><blockquote><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"In the glittering, clattering, chattering atmosphere a head waiter was having a difficult time. There were a lot of people in, and the staff should have been fully stretched, putting bicarbonate of soda into the white wine to make very expensive bubbles and cutting the vegetables very small in order to make them cost more.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Instead they were standing in a dejected group in the kitchen.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Where did it all go?’ screamed the manager. ‘Someone’s been through the cellar, too!’</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘William said he felt a cold wind,’ said the waiter. He’d been backed up against a hot plate, and now <i>knew</i> why it was called a hot plate in a way he hadn’t fully comprehended before.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘I’ll give him a cold wind! Haven’t we got <i>anything</i>?’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘There’s odds and ends…’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘You don’t mean odds and ends, you mean <i>des curieux et des bouts</i>,’ corrected the manager. </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Yeah, right, yeah. And, er, and, er…’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘There’s nothing else?’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Er… old boots.’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Old-?’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Boots. Lots of ’em,’ said the waiter. He felt he was beginning to singe. </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘How come we’ve got… vintage footwear?’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Dunno. They just turned up. The oven’s full of old boots. So’s the pantry.’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘There’s a hundred people booked in! All the shops’ll be shut! Where’s Chef?’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘William’s trying to get him to come out of the privy, sir. He’s locked himself in and is having one of his Moments.’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘<i>Something</i>’s cooking. What’s it that I can smell?’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Me, sir.’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Old boots…’ muttered the manager. ‘Old boots… old boots … leather, are they? Not clogs or rubber or anything?’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Looks like… just boots. And lots of mud, sir.’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The manager took off his jacket. ‘All right. Got some cream, have we? Onions? Garlic? Butter? Some old beef bones? A bit of pastry?’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Er, yes…’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The manager rubbed his hands together. ‘<i>Right</i>,’ he said, taking an apron off a hook. ‘You there, get some water boiling! Lots of water! And find a really large hammer! And <i>you</i>, chop some onions! The rest of you, start sorting out the boots. I want the tongues out and the soles off. We’ll do them… let’s see… <i>Mousse de la Boue dans une Panier de la Pâte de Chaussures</i>…’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Where’re we going to get that from, sir?’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Mud mousse in a basket of shoe pastry. Get the idea? It’s not our fault if even Quirmians don’t understand restaurant Quirmian. It’s not like lying, after all.’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Well, it’s a <i>bit</i> like-” the waiter began. He’d been cursed with honesty at an early stage. </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Then there’s <i>Brodequin rôti Façon Ombres</i>…’ The manager sighed at the head waiter’s panicky expression. ‘Soldier’s boot done in the Shades fashion,’ he translated. </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Er… Shades fashion?’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘In mud. But if we can cook the tongues separately we can put on <i>Languette braisée</i>, too.’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘There’s some ladies’ shoes, sir,’ said an under-chef. </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Right. Add to the menu… Let’s see now… <i>Sole d’une Bonne Femme</i>… and… yes… <i>Servis dans un Coulis de Terre en l’Eau</i>. That’s mud, to you.’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘What about the laces, sir?’ said another under-chef. </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Good thinking. Dig out that recipe for Spaghetti Carbonara.’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Sir?’ said the head waiter. </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘I started off as a chef,’ said the manager, picking up a knife. ‘How do you think I was able to afford this place? I know how it’s done. Get the look and the sauce right and you’re three-quarters there.’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘But it’s all going to be old boots!’ said the waiter. </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Prime aged beef,’ the manager corrected him. ‘It’ll tenderize in no time.’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Anyway… anyway… we haven’t any soup-’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Mud. And lots of onions.’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘There’s the puddings-’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Mud. Let’s see if we can get it to caramelize, you never know.’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘I can’t even find the coffee… Still, they probably won’t last until the coffee…’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Mud. <i>Café de Terre</i>,’ said the manager firmly. ‘Genuine ground coffee.’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Oh, they’ll spot that, sir!’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘They haven’t up till now,’ said the manager darkly. </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘We’ll never get away with it, sir. Never.’</span></p><p align="justify"><br /><br /> </p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">…</span></p><p align="justify"><br /><br /> </p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">'I’m not going to,’ said the head waiter firmly. </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Look, I’ll buy you a better pair after Hogswatch-’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘There’s two more Shoe Pastry, one for <i>Purée de Terre</i> and three more <i>Tarte à la Boue</i>,’ said a waiter, hurrying in. </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Mud pies!’ moaned the waiter. ‘I can’t believe we’re selling mud pies. And now you want <i>my</i> boots!’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘With cream and sugar, mind you. A real taste of Ankh-Morpork. And we can get at least four helpings off those boots. Fair’s fair. We’re all in our socks-’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Table seven says the steaks were lovely but a bit tough,’ said a waiter, rushing past. </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Right. Use a larger hammer next time and boil them for a bit longer.’ The manager turned back to the suffering head waiter. ‘Look, Bill,’ he said, taking him by the shoulder. ‘This isn’t food. No one expects it to be food. If people wanted food they’d stay at home, isn’t that so? They come here for the ambience. For the experience. This isn’t cookery, Bill. This is <i>cuisine</i>. See? And they’re coming back for more.’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Yeah, but <i>old boots</i>…’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Dwarfs eat rats,’ said the manager. ‘And trolls eat rocks. There’s folks in Howandaland that eat insects and folks on the Counterweight Continent eat soup made out of bird spit. At least the boots have been on a cow.’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘And mud?’ said the head waiter, gloomily. </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Isn’t there an old proverb that says a man must eat a bushel of dirt before he dies?’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Yes, but not all at once.’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Bill?’ said the manager, kindly, picking up a spatula. </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Yes, boss?’ </span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Get those damn boots off right now, will you?’ "</span></p></blockquote><p align="justify"><br /> </p>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-70226239307764710592007-12-24T18:32:00.001+00:002009-02-25T21:17:12.024+00:00Terry Pratchett - Hogfather extract (Pt. 1)<div align="justify"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6scNqTHyCfoNoT1nm1fxN4W0pGQWcoI-tVRr6d82QEjoj3TQFYYDlDEEWbaJw5zf-Vt3ABXFl9af9meeID3qAhr0kmSAnSseGp_pj-GtoHKxI8LytvB60jhsQ25mVjK_hHCS01mVh_WE/s1600-h/hogf.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5147609942836109714" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6scNqTHyCfoNoT1nm1fxN4W0pGQWcoI-tVRr6d82QEjoj3TQFYYDlDEEWbaJw5zf-Vt3ABXFl9af9meeID3qAhr0kmSAnSseGp_pj-GtoHKxI8LytvB60jhsQ25mVjK_hHCS01mVh_WE/s400/hogf.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Sky One, 8.00-10 PM, 24-25th December</span></p><br /><blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"The beggars stopped singing, except for Arnold Sideways, who tended to live in his own small world.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘- nobody knows how good we can live, on boots three times a day…’</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Then the change in the air penetrated even his consciousness.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Snow thumped off the trees as a contrary wind brushed them. There was a whirl of flakes and it was just possible, since the beggars did not always have their mental compasses pointing due Real, that they heard a brief snatch of conversation.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘It just ain’t that simple, master, that’s all I’m saying-’</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">IT IS BETTER TO GIVE THAN TO RECEIVE, ALBERT.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘No, master, it’s just a lot more expensive. You can’t just go around-’</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Things rained on the snow.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The beggars looked at them. Arnold Sideways carefully picked up a sugar pig and bit its nose off. Foul Ole Ron peered suspiciously into a cracker that had bounced off his hat, and then shook it against his ear.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The Duck Man opened a bag of sweets.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Ah, humbugs?’ he said.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Coffin Henry unlooped a string of sausages from around his neck.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Buggrit?’ said Foul Ole Ron.</span></p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘It’s a cracker,’ said the dog, scratching its ear. ‘You pull it.’ </span><p></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Ron waved the cracker aimlessly by one end.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Oh, give it here,’ said the dog, and gripped the other end in its teeth.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘My word,’ said the Duck Man, fishing in a snowdrift. ‘Here’s a whole roast pig! <i>And</i> a big dish of roast potatoes, miraculously uncracked! And… look… isn’t this caviar in the jar? Asparagus! Potted shrimp! My goodness! What were we going to have for Hogswatch dinner, Arnold?’</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Old boots,’ said Arnold. He opened a fallen box of cigars and licked them.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Just old boots?’</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Oh, no. Stuffed with mud, and with roast mud. ‘s good mud, too. I bin saving it up.’</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Now we can have a merry feast of goose!’</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘All right. Can we stuff it with old boots?’</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">There was a pop from the direction of the cracker. They heard Foul Ole Ron’s thinking brain dog growl.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘No, no, no, you put the <i>hat</i> on your <i>head</i> and you <i>read</i> the hum’rous <i>mottar</i>.'</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Millenium hand and shrimp?’ said Ron, passing the scrap of paper to the Duck Man. The Duck Man was regarded as the intellectual of the group.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">He peered at the motto.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Ah, yes, let’s see now… It says “Help Help Help Ive Fallen in the Crakker Machine I Cant Keep Runin on this Roller Please Get me Ou-”.’ He turned the paper over a few times. ‘That appears to be it, except for the stains.’</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Always the same ole mottars,’ said the dog. ‘Someone slap Ron on the back, will you? If he laughs any more he’ll- oh, he has. Oh, well, nothing new about that.’</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The beggars spent a few more minutes picking up hams, jars and bottles that had settled on the snow. They packed them around Arnold on his trolley and set off down the street.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘How come we got all this?’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘ ’s Hogswatch, right?’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Yeah, but who hung up a stocking?’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘I don’t think we’ve got any, have we?’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘I hung up an old boot.’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Does that count?’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Dunno. Ron ate it.’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">…</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">High over the city Albert turned to Death, who seemed to be trying to avoid his gaze.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘You didn’t get <i>that</i> stuff out of the sack! Not cigars and peaches in brandy and grub with fancy foreign names!’</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">YES, IT CAME OUT OF THE SACK.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Albert gave him a suspicious look. </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘But you put in the sack in the first place, didn’t you?’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">NO. </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘You did, didn’t you?’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">NO. </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘You put all those things in the sack.’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘You got them from somewhere and put them in the sack.’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">NO. </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘You <i>did</i> put them in the sack, didn’t you?’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">NO.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘You put them in the sack.’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">YES. </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘I <i>knew</i> you put them in the sack. Where did you get them?’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">THEY WERE JUST LYING AROUND</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Whole roast pig does not, in my experience, just lie around.’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">NO ONE SEEMED TO BE USING THEM, ALBERT.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Couple of chimneys ago we were over that big posh restaurant…’</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">REALLY? I DON’T REMEMBER.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘And it seemed like you were down there a bit longer than usual, if you don’t mind me saying so.’</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">REALLY.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘How exactly were they just inverted comma lying around inverted comma?’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">JUST… LYING AROUND. YOU KNOW. RECUMBENT.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘In a kitchen?’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">THERE WAS A CERTAIN CULINARINESS ABOUT THE PLACE, I RECALL. </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Alber pointed a trembling finger. </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘You nicked someone’s Hogswatch dinner, master!’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">IT’S GOING TO BE EATEN, said Death defensively. ANYWAY, YOU THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD IDEA WHEN I SHOWED THAT KING THE DOOR. </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Yeah, well, that was a bit different,’ said Albert, lowering his voice. ‘But, I mean, the hogfather doesn’t drop down the chimney and pinch people’s grub!’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">THE BEGGARS WILL ENJOY IT, ALBERT. </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Well, yes, but-’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">IT WASN’T STEALING. IT WAS JUST… REDISTRIBUTION. IT WILL BE A GOOD DEED IN A NAUGHTY WORLD. </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘No, it won’t!’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">THEN IT WILL BE A NAUGHTY DEED IN A NAUGHTY WORLD AND WILL PASS COMPLETELY UNNOTICED. </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Yeah, but you might at least have thought about the</span> <span style="font-family:times new roman;">people whose grub you pinched.’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">THEY HAVE BEEN PROVIDED FOR, OF COURSE. I AM NOT <i>COMPLETELY</i> HEARTLESS. IN A METAPHORICAL SENSE. AND NOW – ONWARDS AND UPWARDS. </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘We’re heading down, master.’ </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">ONWARDS, AND DOWNWARDS, THEN. "</span></p></blockquote></div>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-86758576860745384512007-12-09T17:12:00.000+00:002008-12-09T21:00:16.861+00:00Alan W. Watts - The Way of Zen<div align="justify"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaY4ymEq76NmGt51m6Z4sQBPXedXMLmy5lsBLMmFSlGHSiptzYciViEbGApMrZ1LLUXREk2u9SNIKmkducGWESBl4vJb0GKUy6ZTVoHz3Yky-QFEzvbzD-3N6vnLzqaOKQVBCLNsJyNkM/s1600-h/wayofzen.jpg"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5142410995583884562" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaY4ymEq76NmGt51m6Z4sQBPXedXMLmy5lsBLMmFSlGHSiptzYciViEbGApMrZ1LLUXREk2u9SNIKmkducGWESBl4vJb0GKUy6ZTVoHz3Yky-QFEzvbzD-3N6vnLzqaOKQVBCLNsJyNkM/s400/wayofzen.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><br /><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Zen Buddhism</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"has directness, verve and humour, and a sense of both beauty and nonsense at once exasperating and delightful. But above all it has a way of being able to turn one’s mind inside out, and dissolving what seemed to be the most oppressive human problems into questions like ‘Why is a mouse when it spins’."</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">(Preface, p. 10)</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This wonderful old book is another of my finds in the Secret Book and Record Store here in Dublin (for a mention of a few others, </span><a href="http://steadydietofbooks.blogspot.com/2007/11/phaedrus-vs-omar-khayym-zen-and-art-of.html"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">see here</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">). Well, when I say old I mean 1957. That's not exactly from-back-before-the-automobile antiquity, but it's a nice aged Penguin paperpack - Pelican, actually, since it's non-fiction.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Now, this blog is mostly about fiction, specifically novels; however, the last post was about a combination of a recent film and an illustrated Zen poem, so I do like to mix it up a bit. This particular post is not only linked to the theme of that piece, but also to a general thread which has been running through the blog as a whole, right through the write-ups of Kerouac and Pirsig; there is a whole vein of American sub-culture, or counter-culture, which takes from Zen as its inspiration and influence.(For more Zen, see </span><a href="http://hardcorefornerds.blogspot.com/2007/11/van-pelt-sultans-of-sentiment.html"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">this post</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> on <strong>Hardcore for Nerds</strong>)</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This is, most of all, a very useful text. What <i>The Way of Zen</i> does as a book is, chiefly, provide a "'account of an esoteric doctrine', as the blurb describes. A quote from the New Statesman calls it</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"Certainly the most explicit and orderly of it [Zen] that has yet appeared in English."</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">At the top of the blurb, in italics, is the prophetic (or rather anti-prophetic) quote</span></p><blockqoute><p><i><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Those who know do not speak;</span></p></i><i><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Those who speak do not know</span></i></p><blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span></blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Watts makes a great deal out of the non-verbal, not-literary nature of Zen: it is not something - at least not <i>in itself</i> something - to be learned out of a book. The traditional Zen way of indicating this is, roughly, to say that the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself - as illustrated in this </span><a href="http://www.cbl.ie/Exhibitions/Temporary-Exhibitions.aspx"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Yoshitoshi</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> print:</span></p><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgGos3G0EPeXzPjEqtSIHZIUnc75vNZuYH98xjcfbBGG3raK3fZxJ3zOQ2T1E6zOBG__vPshp1565AQAFvV8Bfiv6WJiXfA2kDbp1WFXmlquwCG-5REWJzMbTKvI6gcriUpImLmWqHlUo/s1600-h/yoshitoshi-moon-hotei.jpg"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5142415208946801954" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgGos3G0EPeXzPjEqtSIHZIUnc75vNZuYH98xjcfbBGG3raK3fZxJ3zOQ2T1E6zOBG__vPshp1565AQAFvV8Bfiv6WJiXfA2kDbp1WFXmlquwCG-5REWJzMbTKvI6gcriUpImLmWqHlUo/s400/yoshitoshi-moon-hotei.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><p><i><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"The night clouds dissolve</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Hotei pointing at the moon</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">holds no opinion"</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">('Moon of Enlightenment', from Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's</span></i><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> One Hundred Views of the Moon<i>, via <a href="http://monkeybuddha.blogspot.com/2007/09/tsukioka-yoshitoshi.html">monkeybuddha.blogspot.com</a>)</i></span></p></blockquote><br /><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Watts does a good job of finding the balance between accuracy and authenticity, on the one hand, and on the other, presenting Zen in an attractive, accessible manner. The style of the book is somewhat academic, and slightly dated by this stage, but it's still an easy read. It is split into two sections, 'Background and History', and 'Principles and Practices'. The first traces the evolution of Zen thought through the history and culture of Buddhist and pre-Buddhist thought. The second deals with both the central philosophical ideas of Zen and the traditional images we have of its practices - particularly <i>za-zen</i>, or sitting meditation, and <em>koans, </em>or metaphysical riddles, which separate the two major schools of Zen itself. There is a rich discussion on these issues in the book, and some of the more incidental sections on Zen in the Arts (the tea ceremony, formal gardens) are fascinating. It's a very sympathetic text, but also quite scholarly; it travels an interesting path between objectivity and subjectivity, some of which is explained in the extract below.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><i>The Way of Zen</i> is more than a worthwhile, comprehensive introduction to Zen Buddhism: it is to a degree a cultural text of itself, a book 'of its time'. Watts, the author, is mentioned by pseudonym in at least one Kerouac novel. The 1950s was a boom period for Buddhism in the US, particularly in California and San Francisco city. What exactly Watts made of Kerouac's idiosyncratic take on Buddhism would be interesting to find out, because whatever about hedonism, Zen is all about idiosyncracy - at least when it's not about strict discipline, that is, but I digress - and thus is more than just a spiritual tradition, but an artistic and cultural medium. As Watt mentions below, there is a 'parallelism' between advanced Western science and the Eastern metaphysical tradition; a subject later much covered by Fritjof Capra's best-selling <em>The Tao of Physics</em>. </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">While, as the blurb says, "it is unfortunately still easier to say what Zen Buddhism is not that what it is", there is a lot to be said for what Zen can be linked to outside of itself. So this book is best thought not of as a spiritual guide, but as a work of discovery for those who want to know about the culture, philosophy and life of Zen. I may return to this book and discuss some of the substantive aspects of it, but for now I'll leave you with an extract. This is exactly the first couple of pages from the author's preface:</span></p><br /><br /><blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"During the past twenty years there has been an extraordinary growth of interest in Zen Buddhism. Since the Second World War this interest has increased so much that it seems to be becoming a considerable force in the intellectual and artistic world of the West. It is connected, no doubt, with the prevalent enthusiasm for Japanese culture which is one of the constructive results of the late war, but which may amount to no more than a passing fashion. The deeper reason for this interest is that the viewpoint of Zen lies so close to the ‘growing edge’ of Western thought.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The more alarming and destructive aspects of Western civilization should not blind us to the fact that at this very time it is also in one of its most creative periods. Ideas and insights of the greatest fascination are appearing in some of the newer fields of Western science – in psychology and psychotherapy, in logic and the philosophy of science, in semantics and communications theory. Some of these developments might be due to suggestive influences from Asian philosophy, but on the whole I am inclined to feel that there is more of a parallelism than a direct influence. We are, however, becoming aware of the parallelism, and it promises an exchange of views which should be extremely stimulating.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Western thought has changed so rapidly in this century that we are in a state of considerable confusion. Not only are there serious difficulties of communication between the intellectual and the general public, but the course of our thinking and of our very history has seriously undermined the common-sense assumptions which lie at the roots of our social conventions and institutions. Familiar concepts of space, time, and motion, of nature and natural law, of history and social change, and of human personality itself have dissolved, and we find ourselves adrift without landmarks in a universe which more and more resembles the Buddhist principle of the ‘Great Void’. The various wisdoms of the West, religious, philosophical, and scientific, do not offer much guidance to the art of living in such a universe, and we find the prospects of making our way in so trackless an ocean of relativity rather frightening. For we are used to absolutes, to firm principles and laws to which we can cling for spiritual and psychological security.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This is why, I think, there is so much interest in a culturally productive way of life which, for some fifteen hundred years, has felt thoroughly at home in ‘the Void’, and which not only feels no terror for it but rather a positive delight. To use its own words, the situation of Zen has always been - </span></p><blockquote><p><i><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Above, not a tile to cover the head;</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Below, not an inch of ground for the foot.</span></i></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Such language should not actually be so unfamiliar to us, were we truly prepared to accept the meaning of ‘the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head’.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I am not in favour of importing Zen from the Far East, because it has become deeply involved with cultural institutions which are quite foreign to us. But there is no doubt that there are things which we can learn, or unlearn, from it and apply in or own way. It has the special merit of a mode of expressing itself which is as intelligible – or perhaps as baffling – to the intellectual as to the illiterate, offering possibilities of communication which we have not explored. It has directness, verve and humour, and a sense of both beauty and nonsense at once exasperating and delightful. But above all it has a way of being able to turn one’s mind inside out, and dissolving what seemed to be the most oppressive human problems into questions like ‘Why is a mouse when it spins’. At its heart there is a strong but completely unsentimental compassion for human beings suffering and perishing from their very attempts to save themselves."</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">(Preface, p. 9-10)</span></p></blockquote></div>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-40476948337400510632007-12-01T15:32:00.000+00:002008-12-09T21:00:19.257+00:00Into the Wild/10 Bulls<div align="justify"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ0Pt8hw72x1s0E8WKl9I4iRoE9Ai20aZsh1MHPO0R0myqTxzpLLwIopXKLA3eQ907SpmTABSWBoHCHogHTxo5Dl6fsof6uky9MLiTzg-koyq9aoLWQk1Iq-zV_iam2p-zTVSEgWQ4SRU/s1600-r/IntoTheWildMoviePoster.jpg"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5139063777246256306" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPMbQQzBq9ewN_ridXi9uT-tqKZuSGLoilAYw0cJVk8lgEgKH-HT3WcZ9pIYdG46UFU9n0RoBmEyEDb3MeZJB2uw4ZNdxdM2kLT_z1Nb_14wnVaajnMn4CDVMRXjfZqry1PgZJYltV2vE/s400/IntoTheWildMoviePoster.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style><br /></span><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Last weekend I went to see this film, Sean Penn's <i>Into the Wild</i>, and I think it might be a masterpiece. Or at least, there are reasons for saying that it's really, <i>really</i> good. You can read a very good review of it by some random Aussie blogger here at </span><a href="http://typingisnotactivism.wordpress.com/2007/10/20/film-review-into-the-wild/"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">typingisnotactivism.wordpress.com</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">, and from which I've pulled a couple of particulary good quotes.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The basic plot is (based on a true story) that Christian McCandless, straight-A college student, abandons his middle-class lifestyle in the early 1990s to journey across America - "rather than the road so obvious, he embarks on a road rarely so sincerely travelled – donating his entire college fund to OxFam, destroying all his i.d., and disappearing into the still wild frontiers that live in the midst of, and beyond, American civilization." It seems like the film could be rather preachy or sentimental, but thankfully it doesn't take itself too seriously. There are plenty of gentle laughs in the story of the reinvention of Emile Hirsch as 'Alexander Supertramp' - it's not a comedy though, despite the appearance of Vince Vaughn in a small but key role - as well as a lot of real pathos and despair in his eventual journey to the Alaskan wilderness.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><i>Into the Wild</i> is a long feature - I reckon about two and half hours - but I never really felt boredom encroaching. The film is a study of character ambiguity much more than it is a simple story of self-discovery; the people McCandless meets, befriends and proselytizes to, and the places he travels as the determined, eager Supertramp sketch a multitude of American society and culture. Not to mention landscape, of which the towering Alaskan peaks are only the most dramatic. Accompanying this lush visual and literary experience is the soundtrack by Eddie Vedder. I'm on a big </span><a href="http://www.emusic.com/artist/Lungfish-MP3-Download/11609130.html"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Lungfish</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> (and </span><a href="http://www.emusic.com/artist/The-Pupils-MP3-Download/11611354.html"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Pupils</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">, the same band minus the rhythm section) kick at the moment, and while it might be a bit of a stretch to connect their various bands, there is something of the same spacious, weighty alternative-grunge, or folk atmosphere about it. There's definitely something very liberating and American about big/loud guitars, and not just (necessarily) in the Springsteen sense.</span></p><br /><blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"The soundtrack... plays no small part in helping this film work its seemingly easygoing magic. Hard Sun has to be the song of the year but more importantly the musical feel is organic, subtle, and happy to be taken or left. There is no sonic cheapening of the moment with obvious emotional or responsive cues. The story is so beautifully told that Vedder only has to add to what is already a great accomplishment, rather than accomplish what hasn’t been done. Similarly the cinematography is subtly stunning but never overbearing. While the camera captures and conveys zen-like moments of motion and stillness, its ultimate achievement is delivering an almost objective truth that allows the viewer to respond in their own personal way."</span></p></blockquote><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Why I am writing about this on <strong>Steady Diet of Books</strong> is for a variety of reasons. Like I say, this is a literary film. Not just in its scope, but in part quite specifically so; McCandless is an avid reader of Russian literature (Tolstoy, Gogol) as well as American authors such as, unsurpisingly Jack London. What is a bit of a surprise is the lack of mention of Kerouac; more of surprise to me, of course, as anyone who has been following this blog might have noticed, I'm a big fan. <i>Into the Wild</i> sounded on at least the one level like a great Kerouackian adventure, and that was how I would have and did sell the film.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">McCandless's hyperliterary tendencies are really quite central to the psychological and philosophical lines of the story; as the achingly real modern-day idealist who uses the timeless, to him, emotions of the nineteenth century authors to redefine his world. As his sister, whose character acts as the outside, objective narrative of the film, remarks, he had a quote for every occasion. His ability to intone chunks of literature with intense fervour is something I envy somewhat, my own memory not extending to verbatim absorption of even the greatest works - those around me may instead be quite thankful of that. And while if I was to trek out of organised society, it would be based at least in part on </span><a href="http://steadydietofbooks.blogspot.com/2007/08/jack-kerouac-dharma-bums.html"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The Dharma Bums</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> and </span><a href="http://steadydietofbooks.blogspot.com/2007/09/jack-kerouac-desolation-angels.html"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Desolation Angels</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">, the completely different references of this film only reaffirm the variety and expanse of Western or near-Western literature.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In any case, McCandless's journey completed lacked the on-again-off-again hedonism of Kerouac's, and its sincerity was social and physical as well as spiritual. Which brings me, rather lengthily, to the second reason why I'm posting about this film. For better or worse, environmentalism is about the only ideology to which I really subscribe anymore. Part of it is about being politically and socially conscious, but part of it is that truly transfiguring artistic view of the world which I first found in Kerouac. </span><a href="http://steadydietofbooks.blogspot.com/2007/11/robert-m-pirsig-zen-and-art-of.html"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Pirsig</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">, too, rekindled in his physical and philosophical American journeys that appreciation for worldly nature which is, probably, latent in our childhood sense of wonder. In music, as well; I got a little sidetracked already into the earthy, folksy and Taoistic guitar sounds of Lungfish - but on my other blog I've already posted some more lyrically evident </span><a href="http://hardcorefornerds.blogspot.com/2007/10/blog-action-day-2007.html"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">pieces on environmentalism</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Finally, the last thing I'll say about <i>Into the Wild</i> is to briefly mention the character's anti-materialist stance. By some reviewers this has been portrayed as selfish and arrogant; while by others as noble, pure ideal. The truth is that it's somewhere in between; hence the film being a study in ambiguity. Actually, it's like an update of <em>Rebel Without a Cause </em>to the modern versions of idealism and rebellion.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In political science today, and I guess this is kind of sociological as well, the attitude referred to is that of 'postmaterialism'. A nod to the constructed complexities of postmodernism, the postmaterialist generation care less about material social issues (jobs, welfare, health) than they do about less tangible subjects such as the environment or quality of life. (The implication being, of course, that they are provided already with substantial if not excessive material benefits, and regard issues concerning their distribution as inconsequential). Against this kind of idea, environmentalism is meant to look hypocritical, and we lose that authentic Kerouackian artistic stance which, at least implicitly, <i>Into the Wild</i> portrays.</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">II</p><br /></span><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">While doing some reading for an essay, I came across this passage in a book called <i>‘Beauty, Health and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985’</i>, by Samuel P. Hays. In my opinion at least it forms a really eloquent, if academic, defence of 'postmaterialism':</span></p><br /><blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“All this seems rather complex and contrived; public interest in environmental affairs is far simpler. It stems from a desire to improve personal, family and community life. The desires are neither ephemeral or erratic; they are evident in many nations, first in the advanced industrial and consumer societies and then in more recent years in those of middle and even earlier stages of development. They express human wants and needs as surely as demands for better housing, more satisfying leisure and recreation… We customarily associate these with human ‘progress’, which normally is accepted as a fundamental concern unnecessary to explain away in other terms. An interest in the environmental quality of life is to be understood simply as an integral part of the drive inherent in persistent human aspirations and achievement.”</span></p></blockquote><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">III</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><i>10 Bulls</i>, a 12th-century illustrated Zen (Chan) Buddhist poem, symbolizing the different stages on the journey to enlightenment. From the <i>Zen Flesh, Zen Bones</i> anthology, with modern woodcuts by Tomikichiro Tokuriki:</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">1. The Search for the Bull</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">2. Discovering the Footprints</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">3. Perceiving the Bull</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">4. Catching the Bull</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">5. Taming the Bull</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">6. Riding the Bull Home</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">7. The Bull Transcended</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">8. Both Bull and Self Transcended</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">9. Reaching the Source</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">10. In the World</span></p><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJllpWX4sUubQAFIxKoJRNJiOE_wWHWg3EwIDYIyyNjwFdAWf6yeut_E8QAy3eQ5cwr2Swb8iBEAQxtXqbk1IHZF5Uo6YPd-2_YZ1PAUs6EfHmz5Ccsta5IeqAh6J1HCPoSgrtSuE-1aU/s1600-r/10bulls1.jpg"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5139029507702201362" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJrjQ6JK3BisDRJ66z9v_4xqiiw6k6kk4fz8kTxmSO6omiJcm2yR7vjfLUZTAn1Yi0_MkwQPyK73ghJdEKVLGOq9mxvJl_RsxPrXFXWW7-TgIBhbo3w1juuuQFbXJnrXDJoioA7tChXqo/s400/10bulls1.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"In the pastures of this world, I endlessly push aside the tall grasses in search of the bull.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Following unnamed rivers, lost upon the interpenetrating paths of distant mountains,</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">My strength failing and my vitality exhausted, I cannot find the bull.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I only hear the locusts chirring through the forest at night.</span></p><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfAYs4spiBSffwIystt4PSUUXeEpPSiPO_RsRZovR7yO5T3NJ5QU0onBlpSnSS-iURACSm50AASFbRO7xy3fNjWo2olpwvTSw_H3KC-AzDMBuiMOAPBgxwpyDESDNss-XF0yvs_OWLakQ/s1600-r/10bulls2.jpg"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5139029511997168674" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjdD-6XubawsgZ7Qwdg5_eMP0CtQZRcqn1aw_tBfnvprl6NABxXGLHvnNFQW-1-3RJ0BV23Fl0O2cs4IqO_hQivN2zk2AK1mB30HjfDMXNv3om0Ch0FuDMoMkY7NvPsgUbPbxQcUa9qk4/s400/10bulls2.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Along the riverbank under the trees, I discover footprints!</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Even under the fragrant grass I see his prints.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Deep in remote mountains they are found.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">These traces no more can be hidden than one’s nose, looking heavenward.</span></p><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6YX-jdGgiRrXSIoBePqIJZQEosMibFD6ay88q9bgFzb59-GsY9jpvKayZvQ7zqnLTbS25FrCCY27eFYkh-PMnJNYH_6A8DUkSUSNRkgbXSbHMLGynrCr6qwWzHEJgvWyJGvsHpNzCQxY/s1600-r/10bulls3.jpg"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5139029511997168690" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfkTIvMTTgFil0T-M3qVde4x-XSKK0PTWwSIrx1XP-bL_WOdZZXLzHYkXulcw6GVTFy_h5V1aXVz7HDwdKlqcEotvqHzMfeUqFs7ZWk1IN_5kO9HupDnjDgy4bHfF1dss3U3ZzVXmoGPg/s400/10bulls3.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I hear the song of the nightingale.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The sun is warm, the wind is mild, willows are green along the shore,</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Here no bull can hide!</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">What artist can draw that massive head, those majestic horns?</span></p><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJYroUnlrTECkeF-KAx63hUwDVrMqnQWM078j31kt2U7Dj38IRaL6nRQ20uLhrmgWzOUNdmJ4EQc_JPGqQV9Q7rflkS4AQ_47QpLdpXdLQhh9gi3H8RtBvjc1nIbWI98tWmfFpa-yGeYI/s1600-r/10bulls4.jpg"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5139029511997168706" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVmBtshYRfUaRFTSvWkuQgBBOHet-E7WZx_9351E4edI2-U_WBr_IECNqgXlTBrv0pe1XVyvvQaR_M4tMdwZnsWfq_mtLePFO2YHqeKnunwnY0NfX-GKQL1gll6odVeCAzILxsvhDsISo/s400/10bulls4.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I seize him with a terrific struggle.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">His great will and power are inexhaustible.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">He charges to the high platueau far above the cloud-mists,</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Or in an impenetrable ravine he stands.</span></p><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinM-GoX5ikHnaXzN_63YL3cpkY32ZX771mnr3Gz4SmWiiORWjC2VP0czDUlx8WJRSGvr3uVr9L5gt9ZcCNjmSRge2koU_vjdna_3TuDZzLJiMhJHfwXYmeCUjkIg1ibetMDWzoKOGnFhQ/s1600-r/10bulls5.jpg"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5139029516292136018" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5RYuVnRJyBg7wtBconvhZtd1yiIBA9wsKsm2OmlCVOI84WVdCaiLGWXWYmekL0hJ2_e3yFgCWyXTYYxhYG9U9ggsxO7i6KIJCbOvaGTyf3B122XNdSd4sqDZ2pFTZqznJrkGmCC1NEuc/s400/10bulls5.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The whip and rope are necessary,</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Else he might stray off down some dusty road.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Being well trained, he becomes naturally gentle.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Then, unfettered, he obeys his master.</span></p><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5GxXarCmItLp50yFbtqctYUFCtcqWMJMLlU8q5vOcZgCsT_Lo7CVJEUNveY-r-kLBMX_XNj9P1xKVySdQ7RD27g8r5cQQT55ziV-3f2Yvju72LXXq-2KFlaLO3P6L9iZ9TUeOjpSu4qA/s1600-r/10bulls6.jpg"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5139031036710558818" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-KsLIlGIx99hMmTHmpLQi6hjezg_nfzJ5CVPwi_D01nC2v9-feIiLiBxooNy6Fw_hI33DoSxexoOLoh4gPJVmIjWfMcgZceB8xeGpjkwNX2lYcA8y6Bbd2AuHy1Q6CFd9ldgEvt9m8w4/s400/10bulls6.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Mounting the bull, slowly I return homeward.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The voice of my flute intones through the evening.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Measuring with hand-beats the pulsating harmony, I direct the endless rhythm.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Whoever hears this melody will join me.</span></p><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilKcNp9behgxWnJHiFCMNayLgB53djSLHR__NqIADyBCAS6ulNpWd3xJk9-WMtObxbRn_K-4I_9Ul0P9sGodvG27oQOYshXQWbnTFOLdJ1gOR7UOTZCd-sDRHq38ueeKl2uiBWaMISsZA/s1600-r/10bulls7.jpg"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5139031036710558834" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_KNBGfUnDOGhLrHaHO4L2bYUS_N4uNdYh1W9NAF-wQOJ9_sYd3WMSbOoL-_n2lsEvMITOH0yeYMmLTGLyuOSULSAJZCLDhIcAjz3-AZgA4tLjgkVOYvtMoER3KQzxmFrWTw-fN4FuQtc/s400/10bulls7.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Astride the bull, I reach home.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I am serene. The bull too can rest.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The dawn has come. In blissful repose,</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Within my thatched dwelling I have abandoned the whip and rope.</span></p><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk0c__QyE4Z4EBTnV-LOFuKhbi4FuL3V-DVqgguuaKH1UZ6ilbtoDPcE4NCFXLx-Lu11syFb4HH2Hh0AGtLJhUrpU6E911iuTsnSUUhgmG5uZQgxhlPMNMKRJ533quFpVVj9Ud84dDeSM/s1600-r/10bulls8.jpg"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5139031041005526146" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicMfovnIs6N7DDL_z1l6nLL3vNUBBAb-3KALkFM0wM6jtObVx89RY4R0tE_XQlEpGf2uV8sBEUqbEM-KWrCHiESmBxjHPHUyEF4aOWsuGChFqahLPxUCaISQHG4EnPqe12f9aMg2LR32Q/s400/10bulls8.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Whip, rope, person and bull – all merge in No-thing,</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This heaven is so vast no message can stain it.</span></p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">How may a snowflake exists in a raging fire?</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Here are the footprints of the patriarchs.</span></p><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrRhiWHcWla1DC0j8dsxsAp5e1eHxyOey4isjZvvHdqHzI9WeqdMkRTSBGitOa-Be7CNRmmUmr9m5TM_kFWvH3wcsZO2dx0r8fvFNEPgSDotV9XsVlnW_8txTIEL9K50Nt5wm_LxIm9Uo/s1600-r/10bulls9.jpg"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5139031041005526162" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8juNj64AR9IOnuLRgJrIOP-VC-PCgUTSYkeBNVAjtU-4jT4Tr8LjRJb-IoU4GoRNhrr1XZiF45D9I51mKyw7kCjwozFD1z_KutXaQ0aHzNmHdrVMo_NxX47yi5EMDxuqBGcUFtUGXEKk/s400/10bulls9.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Too many steps have been taken returning to the root and the source.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Better to have been blind and deaf from the beginning! </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Dwelling in one’s true abode, unconcerned with that without -</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The river flows tranquilly on and the flowers are red.</span></p><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-M4412KSp98XP1luh3225Xgw1BvSbeB-ta2_HAjeTm82pHSIrqj0V7-rlsdShccBT2JhnEWfZZfCVy2hQnStbUq6hEGOamRlSDInr527Vl7SJ_fFBEYeGZd8qm6DtzNpRPJE9mi41JmM/s1600-r/10bulls10.jpg"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5139031045300493474" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhibuoMnsn__bellCWz9wCRBxEpJtMYS98t5So5SlC8tl4qiFLfHhNu0Nk-5Os8M71lptdw_GHIDrbXiiTLl36F2aJePSUinfgMpTxx122z_mNX-MhTGScTDAfcFCKRQZmQVjSFlYC3mHI/s400/10bulls10.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Barefooted and naked of breast, I mingle with the people of the world.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">My clothes are ragged and dust-laden and I am ever blissful.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I use no magic to extend my life;</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Now, before me, the trees become alive."</span></p><strong></strong></div>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-47157133357986062222007-11-22T17:49:00.001+00:002008-12-09T21:00:19.495+00:00Don DeLillo - Underworld<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidcUtjbR4ptCPSm1uOzohhIG0snu2P1QKvPfSOh8lzicutTcfpVYbgKaBJQJORetJeegd7nwB9EyW2ndImYglcewhUE868S0hDyFFvDammjaoF01-_P8tklnfdqz4BoZETJj4pO8Vrx_o/s1600-r/underworldresized.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5139024873432488962" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDMSR5BCiP_pI6gggylSfAyR35Bt01GtqolQOAKA53Alhlg0gI65-Dhs7vdB5nMoWbILtFEFJFRPSfPz7aBmfvt7DrEg6MqYGqd_NqJe1H11BPUZs7-YEsjCRGzDQAHqg2r83piRnDmQM/s400/underworldresized.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div align="justify"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_coFoAhVunLs/R0XAu6ss8bI/AAAAAAAAANs/8AAjUsWBH2A/s1600-h/underworld2.jpg"></a><br /><br /><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Another really mammoth novel, and again this time from America. <i>Underworld</i> deserves comparison to <i>Ulysses</i>, a fact I mentioned </span><a href="http://steadydietofbooks.blogspot.com/2007/10/james-joyce-ulysses-ii.html"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">here</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">. If not for any real Joycean stylings, then for a similar ambition that DeLillo brings to literature.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">As you might expect, critics love this book, because they can make so many lyrical, profoundly aphoristic statements about its goals and intents. It’s the kind of book where the blurb quotes come in paragraphs rather than sentences. The most understated of them merely remarks that “Don DeLillo’s latest novel really is one of the finest of the century”. They tend to play the man not the ball, in near-fawning recognition of DeLillo’s status as a major literary writer – “In <i>Underworld</i> we have a mature and hugely accomplished novelist firing on all cylinders, at the sophisticated height of his multifarious powers”.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Yet as for the novel itself, its significance is in something other than its dimensions of length and weight; it is the experience and the affect of the work to the reader. Hence <i>Underworld</i> “demands our full attention. The reward is its great depth, shimmering prose and the feeling that when we put it down that we’re a little wiser than we were”. “Reading the book is a charged and thrilling aesthetic experience and one remembers gratefully that this is what the novel can do, and indeed does, better than any other art form – it gets the human condition”.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Most pointed of all, is the description of the New York Times – perhaps since the city is the subject of the book - “This bravura master of cerebral pyrotechnics also knows how to seize and rattle our emotions… In this remarkable novel, [DeLillo] has taken the effluvia of modern society, all the detritus of our daily and political lives, and turned it into a dazzling, phosphorescent work of art”.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The final blurb I wish to include is one of the two on the front cover, and simply calls <i>Underworld</i></span></p><br /><blockquote><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“…an aria and a wolf whistle of our half-century</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">It contains multitudes.”</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">(Michael Ondaatje)</span></p></blockquote></div><br /><div align="justify"><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">From one acclaimed author to another; Don DeLillo is <i>the</i> major writer of that ‘half-century’. That is a completely gratuitous statement – at the moment, the papers are full of obituaries for Norman Mailer, who I really <i>should</i> read – but I’ll fight my corner for DeLillo's importance as a really important stylistic American writer.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I say stylistic because, although DeLillo writes beautifully plotted books and tackles some pretty weighty subjects (the two that come to mind are <i>Libra</i>, which I’m just about to mention, about Oswald’s assassination of JFK, and <i>Falling Man</i>, about the Twin Towers disaster) it is the style of his writing which really gets me. The depth and fineness of his characterisation is also an important feature; but this, too, is mostly stylistic. As evidence, here is an extract from the first couple of pages of the very first chapter of <i>Libra</i>:<br /><br /></span><br /><blockquote><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">" ‘In The Bronx’</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track. He liked to stand at the front of the first car, hands flat against the glass. The train smashed through the dark. People stood on local platforms staring nowhere, a look they’d been practicing for years. He kind of wondered, speeding past, who they really were. His body fluttered in the fastest stretches. They went so fast sometimes he thought they were on the edge of no-control. The noise was pitched to a level of pain he absorbed as a personal test. Another crazy-ass curve. There was so much iron in the sound of those curves he could almost taste it, like a toy you put in your mouth when you are little.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Workmen carried lanterns along adjacent tracks. He kept a watch for sewer rats. A tenth of a second was all it took to see a thing complete. Then the express stations, the creaky brakes, people bunched like refugees. They came wagging through the doors, banged against the rubber edges, inched their way in, were quickly pinned, looking out past the nearest heads into that practiced oblivion.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">It had nothing to do with him. He was riding just to ride.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">One forty-ninth, the Puerto Ricans. One twenty-fifth, the Negroes. At Forty-second Street, after a curve that held a scream right out to the edge, came the heaviest push of all, briefcases, shopping bags, school bags, blind people, pickpockets, drunks. It did not seem odd to him that they subway held more compelling things than the famous city above. There was nothing important out there, in the broad afternoon, that he could not find in purer form in these tunnels beneath the streets."</span></p></blockquote><br /><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">So what the DeLillo style is all about is getting a feel for a place, a scene, a moment in time. It’s psychological, psychogeographical even; a description of New York through real people who are also historical characters (as befits DeLillo's penchant for fictionalising celebrity, the opening preface has a three-way conversation between Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra and J. Edgar Hoover at a baseball game). In fact, <em>Underworld </em>doesn't have much of a plot; just fifty years of numerous interweaving narratives and enduring symbols of culture and atttitudes; one half baseball, one half atom bomb.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Altogether, <em>Underworld</em> is a succession of episodes, scenes which begin and end without any real dramatic action, only portraiture and compelling, sympathetic description. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This extract is one of those scenes, of a subway graffiti artist Munoz/Moonman who actually reappears much later in the novel. In total the scene runs to just over eight pages, juxtaposed with the viewing of a lost Eisenstein film, ‘Unterwelt’, uptown in the Radio City Music Hall:</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“The statue in the marbled niche had the thighs and claves of a man, a man’s bundled muscles in the forearms, but the figure in fact was biblical Eve, tight-breasted, with an apple in her hands and the sloping shoulders of a fullback.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">And why not. The evening had the slightly scattered air of some cross-referenced event…”</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The subplot is that the socialite artist, Klara Sax, is involved in trying to get the backstreet graffitist to do a gallery show. Ironically, elsewhere in the narrative (and about twenty years later) she is in charge of a project to paint, not subway trains, but hundreds of decommissioned, steel-finished war bombers – linking back to the 1950’s atomic era, and so on. Even within the piece here, there is a lot of repetition – a subtle touch of Joycean stream of consciousness and internal dialogue – which is quite noticeable if you read carefully. (Here, the ellipses are mine)</span></p><br /><blockquote><a name="moonman"></a><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"The train was one of his, Moonman’s, he had a dozen pieces running through the system, top-to-bottom burners, and it just so happens he was aboard tonight, under the water mains and waste pipes, under the gas and steam and electric, between the storm sewers and telephone lines, and he moved from car to car with each stop and checked out the people who stepped inside, wearing their retractable subway faces, and the doors went ding dong before slamming shut.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Ismael Munoz, dark and somber, watching people come aboard. Sparsely stubbled Ismael reading lips and faces, hoping he might catch a bravo comment. Hey this guy is lighting up the line. This was his newest piece so here he was going uptown on the Washington Heights local, every car tagged with his own neon zoom, with highlights and overlapping letters and 3-D effect, the whole wildstyle thing of making your name and street number a kind of alphabet city where the colors lock and bleed and the letters connect and it’s all live jive, it jumps and shouts – even the drips are intentional, painted supersharp to express how the letters sweat, how they live and breathe and eat and sleep, they dance and play the sax.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This is not a window-down piece. This was a whole-train burner with windows painted over and each letter and number bigger than a man.</span></p><p><i><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Moonman 157</span></i></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Ismael was sixteen, not too old and not too young and he was determined to kill the shit of every subway artist in town.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Nobody could take him down.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">…</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Once a man stood on the platform and took a picture of one of Moonman’s top-to-bottoms, a foreigner by the look of him, and Ismael sidled to the open door so he could be in the picture too, unknown to the man. The man was photographing the piece and the writer both, completely unknown to himself, from someplace in Sweden he looked.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">…</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">At Columbus Circle he changed to the Broadway train because he had business at the end of the line. He got on a train that was bombed inside and out by Skaty 8, a thirteen-year-old writer who frantically tagged police cars, hearses, garbage trucks, who took his Krylon satin colors into the tunnels and tagged up the walls and catwalks, he hit platforms, steps, turnstiles and benches, he’d tag your little sister if she was walking by. Not a style king, no way, but a legend among writers for the energy he put forth, getting his tag seen by major millions and then two weeks ago, and a genuine regret went through Ismael as he recalled being told, he slumped and sagged all over again and felt the deepest kind of soldierly sadness – Skaty 8 hit by a train while he’s walking on the tracks under downtown Brooklyn.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">People moved along the car, they skated to a seat, they looked at display ads above the heads across the aisle, all without eye motion that you could detect with the most delicate device.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Ismael used to walk the tracks when he felt sorry for himself. Those were foregone times. He’d pop an emergency hatch in the sidewalk and climb down into a tunnel and just, like, go for a walk, be alone down there, keeping the third rail in sight and listening for the train and getting to know the people who lived in the cable rooms and up on the catwalks, and that’s where he saw a spray-painted scrawl, maybe five years ago, down under Eighth Avenue.<i>Bird Lives</i>. It made him wonder about graffiti, about who took the trouble and risk to walk down this tunnel and throw a piece across the wall, and how many years have gone by since then, and who is Bird, and why does he live?</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">And the guy who reached around saying excuse me please.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">He rode up the edge of Manhattan headed for the Bronx. There was no art in bombing platforms and walls. You have to tag the trains. The trains come roaring down the rat alleys all alike and then you hit a train and it is yours, seen everywhere in the system, and you get inside people’s heads and vandalize their eyeballs.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">…</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The crew shook the cans and the ball went click.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">He stood on the door edge of one train and leaned across to the train parked adjacent and tagged it from the windows up.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">And he went down the slate stairway that crumbled to the pressure of his weight, his hand on the rusty pipe that was the banister, and he felt the mood of a tunnel on a given day. It might be a coke mood one day, Ismael did not do drugs, or a mood of speed that’s travelling through the tunnel, someone made a buy and shared it, or a mood of mental illness, which was often the case. And always a brown rat mood because they were there in pack rat numbers, an endless source of stories, the size of the rats, the attitude of unfearing, how they ate the bodies of those who died in the tunnels, how they were eaten in turn by the rat man who lived in level six under Grand Central, he killed and cooked and ate a rat a week - track rabbits, they were called.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In other words to muralize a whole train you need a full night and part of the next night and no shuffling bullshit talk.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">And a mood of who you are in your head day by day, which he did not share with anyone at street level, and going to sleep in a cousin’s bed at night or in the supply cellar of some bodega where they knew Ismael Munoz and gave him a place that was adequate and hearing the doors go ding dong and seeing the man from Stockholm, Sweden who took pictures of his piece.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">…</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">They had dozens of cans out and ready, all by prearrangement, and he called a color and they shook the can and the ball went click.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">”Where’s my Perrier?” he said.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">But you have to stand on a platform and see it coming or you can’t know the feeling a writer gets, how the number 5 train comes roaring down the rat alleys and slams out of the tunnel, going whop-pop onto the high tracks, and suddenly there it is, Moonman riding the sky in the heart of the Bronx, over the whole burnt and rusted country, and this is the art of the backstreets talking, all the way from Bird, and you can’t <i>not</i> see us anymore, you can’t <i>not</i> know who we are, we got total notoriety now, Momzo Tops and Rimester and me, we’re getting fame, we ain’t ashame, and the train go rattling over the garbagy streets and past the dead-eye windows of all those empty tenements that have people living there even if you don’t see them, but you have to see our tags and cartoon figures and bright and rhyming poems, this is the art that can’t stand still, it climbs across your eyeballs night and day, the flickery jumping art of the slums and dumpsters, flashing those colors in your face – like I’m your movie, motherfucker."</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">(<i>Part 4, Cocksucker Blues – Summer 1974, Ch. 3</i>)</span></p></blockquote></div>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-33752444740950753222007-11-10T23:04:00.000+00:002008-12-09T21:00:20.824+00:00Phaedrus vs. Omar Khayyám (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, revisited)<div align="justify"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJKz4c713OXRqTx5PaSu7JTkJNYB48CHR6XnJP4Md6G-dDX8kzDGlxIQ1oePolaLAdVaXyCEofAsEPEenl-fjXCfgHuFL58ldQjfJX2QovAS5SvF6KEi8m4LHB0IXkc20aV4omICQ09oU/s1600-h/0553277472.01.jpg"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5131352161326756194" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJKz4c713OXRqTx5PaSu7JTkJNYB48CHR6XnJP4Md6G-dDX8kzDGlxIQ1oePolaLAdVaXyCEofAsEPEenl-fjXCfgHuFL58ldQjfJX2QovAS5SvF6KEi8m4LHB0IXkc20aV4omICQ09oU/s400/0553277472.01.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br /><br /><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style></span><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><i>(Now with Pt.III)</i></span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I’m a great believer in intertextuality… I love making comparisons; or rather, connections. As the quote goes, “Only connect”.</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><i>Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance</i> although physically not that large a book, nevertheless contains so much that it was difficult to treat it anyway comprehensively in the one post. A second problem was that it’s a hard book to quote from: although it’s immensely readable and definitely at times quite lyrical, it doesn’t lend itself to outstanding extracts, which are after all only literary soundbites. That is not a comment on the quality of the writing, which is superb, but more on the method of the book, which is to layer thought upon thought (both intellectually and emotionally) until a beautiful structure of ideas is built up.</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">That is why I feel the need to add a little more around the bare bones of the original post. I’ve already put up some pictures of a certain other motorcycle road trip on my other (music) blog: </span><a href="http://hardcorefornerds.blogspot.com/2007/11/bouncing-souls-vs-zen-and-art-of.html"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Bouncing Souls vs. Zen And the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">. Here, obviously, I’m going to look at books: specifically, books that are mentioned in ZMM.</span></p></div><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><div align="justify"><br /></div></span><p align="justify"><br /><br /></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I</span></p><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5131352616593289618" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpYqROMLM7ntL02vWJkawSPs399oLHE5-sem8wS0R8uqdOxY3UffiFG1HYZYZfinjklWjmBMBPJCRIzq-e3rkqnUh9QylS0n-lI9I8aR0ju6R1qhOEI6mwiunt-oVsIVsNCloi7ySpzIs/s400/walden.jpg" border="0" /><br /><br /></span><blockquote><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"Books. I don’t know any other cyclist who takes books with him. They take up a lot of space, but I have three of them here anyway, with some loose sheets of paper in them for writing. These are:</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">a. The shop manual for this cycle.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">b. A general troubleshooting guide containing all the technical information I can never keep in my head. This is <i>Chilton’s Motorcycle Troubshooting Guide</i> written by Ocee Rich and sold by Sears, Roebuck.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">c. A copy of Thoreau’s <i>Walden</i> which Chris has never heard and which can be read a hundred times without exhaustion. I try always to pick a book far over his head and read it as a basis for questions and answers, rather than without interruption. I read a sentence or two, wait for him to come up with his usual barrage of questions, answer them, then read another sentence or two. Classics read well this way. Sometimes we have spent a whole evening reading and talking and discovered we have only covered two or three pages. It’s a form of reading done a century ago… when Chautauquas were popular. Unless you’ve tried it you can’t imagine how pleasant it is to do it this way."</span></p></blockquote><br /><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">II</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span></p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5131352169916690802" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7v7YGmw9FOX5gqAilcfrp25nFjmDUiO2xcS9EldlBDVgGPlcJFao0RPNwUdgp-0as-0WYieSgjf2OaE0Dt3tjW-OkDlGTYd36-ZSn5opfuGqA_Ck4lJwkQm-fUJ7_Va8pCOuBFw6Mgs0/s400/khayyam1.jpg" border="0" /><br /><br /></span><blockquote><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"The sunlight just touches the top of the bluff high above the draw we’re in. A wisp of fog has appeared above the creek. That means it’ll warm up.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I get out of the sleeping bag, put shoes on, pack everything I can without waking Chris, and then go over to the picnic table and give him a shake to wake him up.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">He doesn’t respond. I look around and see that there are no jobs left to do but wake him up, and hesitate, but feeling manic and jumpy from the brisk morning air holler, “WAKE!” and he sits up suddenly, eyes wide open.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I do my best to follow this with the opening Quatrain of <i>The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam</i>. It looks like some desert cliff in Persia above us. But Chris doesn’t know what the hell I’m talking about. He looks up at the top of the bluff and then just sits there squinting at me. You have to be in a certain mood to accept bad recitations of poetry. Particularly that one.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Soon we’re on the road again, which twists and turns. We stem down into an enormous canyon with high white bluffs on either side. The wind freezes. The road comes into some sunlight which seems to warm me right through the jacket and sweater, but soon we ride into the shade of the canyon wall again where again the wind freezes. This dry desert air doesn’t hold heat. My lips, with the wind blowing into them, feel dry and cracked.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Farther on we cross a dam and leave the canyon into some high semidesert country. This is Oregon now. The road winds through a landscape that reminds me of northern Rajasthan, in India, where it’s not quite desert, much piñon, junipers and grass, but not agricultural either, except where a draw or valley provides a little extra water.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Those crazy <i>Rubáiyat</i> Quatrain keep rumbling through my head.</span></p><blockquote><i><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">…something, something along some Strip of Herbage strown,</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">That just divides the desert from the sown,</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Where name of Slave and Sultan scarce is known,</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">And pity Sultan Mahmud on his Throne…</span></p></i></blockquote><p align="justify"><br /></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">That conjures up a glimpse of the ruins of an ancient Mogul palace near the desert where out of the corner of his eye he saw a wild rosebush…</span></p><p align="justify"><i><span style="font-family:times new roman;">…And this first summer Month that brings the Rose</span></i></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">… How did that go? I don’t know. I don’t even <i>like</i> the poem. I’ve noticed since this trip has started and particularly since Bozeman that these fragments seem less and less a part of <i>his</i> memory and more and more a part of mine. I’m not sure what that means… I think… I just don’t know.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I think there’s a name for this kind of semidesert, but I can’t think of what it is. No one can be seen anywhere on the road but us.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Chris hollers that he has diarrhea again. We ride until I see a stream below and pull of the road and stop. His face is full of embarrassment again but I tell him we’re in no hurry and get out a change of underwear and roll of toilet paper and bar of soap and tell him to wash his hands thoroughly and carefully after he’s done.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I sit on an Omar Khayyám rock contemplating the semidesert and feel not bad.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><i>…And this first Summer month that brings the Rose</i>… oh… now it comes back…</span></p><blockquote><i><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Each Morn a thousand Roses bring, you say,</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday?</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">And this first Summer month that brings the Rose,</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Shall take Jamshyd and Kaikobad away.</span></p></i></blockquote><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">… And so on and so forth….</span></p><p align="justify"><br /></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Let’s get off Omar and onto the Chautauqua. Omar’s solution is just to sit around and guzzle the wine and fell so bad that time is passing and the Chautauqua looks good to me by comparison. Particularly today’s Chautauqua, which is about gumption…"</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span></p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5131564796567646626" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU79ANdeoezUUPLtCZHYPpCAR7GNbcJp44AaTxWC2Yf79gxlJRqd7D7FUP17JStV_IbpvRTl_2hHoAV9qOqnnjMN34L0hUhSBo1cXCwAmhusNCLLkHzW_HO7p2rM9fK9vK58wqrdED7VE/s320/khayyam2.jpg" border="0" /><br /></span><blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br /></span><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">III</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><em>Walden</em> I bought about a year ago, and it is really rather good. In fact, it’s kind of similar to ZMM, in that it combines the practical story of Thoreau’s seclusion in the wood cabin of Walden Pond and his intellectual and political thoughts about American civilisation (Thoreau is famed as a committed 19th-century proponent of civil disobedience). So <i>Walden</i> is in effect another counterculture novel.</span></p><p align="justify"><br /></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><i>The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám</i> I just picked up today. <i>Blend</i> mentioned below that he picked up his copy of ZMM for a dollar on the street. Unfortunately, we don’t have much of that going on in Dublin. We do have a little place called ‘The Secret Book and Record Store’, at the end of a corridor off a busy street - incidentally a few doors down from Tower Records, which we do still have here – where I found the copy of the <i>Rubaiyat</i> you see above, for €5.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Particularly at these current exchange rates, that’s a lot more than one dollar, but it’s very good value nonetheless. I found some other good stuff – Paul Auster’s <i>City of Glass</i> in graphic novel form drawn by Karasik and Mazzucchelli and with an introduction by Art Spiegelman (€7.95), Kurt Vonnegut’s <i>A Man Without a Country: A Memoir of Life in George W. Bush’s America</i> (€7.95) and Bernard-Henri Levy’s <i>War, Evil and the End of History</i> (€4.95; some French philosopher dude combining his war journalism with his <i>refléxions</i> on politics and the ’68 student rising – it had a cool black cover and the price was right, wasn’t it?). When I was paying for all this I saw a </span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/“http://steadydietofbooks.blogspot.com/2007/08/knut-hamsun-hunger.html”"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Hamsun</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> at the top of the several piles of second-hand books yet to be priced; asked how much it was; the cashier went to the back of the store to consult with the owner, typed away at his computer for a while; repeated the process; and then told me €40! Apparently it was a first edition. I’m not even sure if it was any good (one of his later works), so obviously I left it.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">So that’s my story of cheap/second-hand book-buying in Dublin. The whole twenty-quid extravaganza was partly in celebration of the fact that this blog has been going for about three months this weekend. It’s time to take stock, so any suggestions, requests or ideas for improvement are more than welcome – just leave a comment!</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In any case, I’ve got a great book coming up – Don DeLillo’s <i>Underworld</i>, which is currently vying with <i>City of Glass</i> as one of the coolest books about New York there is to read. Stick around…</span></p>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-16425986262605373922007-11-03T18:22:00.000+00:002008-12-09T21:00:22.070+00:00Robert M. Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance<div align="justify"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9lXA9yqLcq7CPLEFconde2O7KTLv12dujr0KfqBh9MT8CPPeESs0Qb2xwDBFyvlTo2ky9nHdywIFbUIXqCOTnwiLRnH_cFxUt60vVk8CfifbcjLskAsRDTuc1RZR6AapZRs-Qdalxago/s1600-h/ZAMM.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5128682155602363682" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9lXA9yqLcq7CPLEFconde2O7KTLv12dujr0KfqBh9MT8CPPeESs0Qb2xwDBFyvlTo2ky9nHdywIFbUIXqCOTnwiLRnH_cFxUt60vVk8CfifbcjLskAsRDTuc1RZR6AapZRs-Qdalxago/s400/ZAMM.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Now that <i>Ulysses</i> is out of the way, it’s time to start on another mammoth book. <i>Zen and the Art of the Motorcycle Maintenance</i> is a pretty well known 70’s counterculture novel, and by the author’s own admission, doesn’t have all that much to do with either Zen or motorcycles. What it does have to do with is, on the one hand, a personal quest for peace and serenity, and on the other, a metaphysical journey into the human understanding of art and technology. The subtitle is significant – decided on after much discussion between author and publisher, as “An Inquiry into Values”. What these values are, is fundamental to understanding Pirsig’s work; basic, metaphysical and firmly absent of conventional moralising. And it is the ‘inquiry’ which defines the peculiarly incisive character of the book.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><i>ZMM</i> takes the narrative form of a father-son motorcycle road trip, combined with a ‘Chautauqua’, which is the author’s term for philosophical and intellectual discussion. In this way – and this is what makes the book so thick – he weaves together a literary tale with an incisive philosophical one. The theme of motorcycle maintenance is a link between the two – as is the Zen attitude to life – and serves as a metaphor for a lot of his philosophical and metaphysical ideas. In addition to all this, the road trip turns – and without me giving anything away – into a major psychological drama.</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Briefly, the philosophical element of <i>ZMM</i> is a reappraisal of western ‘subject-object’ metaphysics, which recognises a fundamental division between the self and the world around it, towards the author’s own ‘metaphysics of quality’. Quality is described as the interface between the subject and the object, the former concepts of which are seen as misguiding and redundant. A lot of this is taken from Zen and other Eastern philosophic traditions, with their rejection of dualities and the emphasis on the immersion into the effervescence of being. The motorcycle maintenance comes in here as a kind of Taoistic attention to the act of work – the melding of the machine and the mechanic, to crudely and rather falsely describe it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This philosophic system only emerges gradually throughout the book, and on the way the author brings in different strands of his intellectual experiences, which are wide and very varied. There is a stress on being analytical – the action of which is brilliantly described as that of a surgeon wielding a knife, the analogy being the cutting and transferring of ideas rather than tissue – as he develops his system of relating to reality.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The counterculture element to the book is brought up quite frequently, as a reason for creating a new theory of metaphysics. Pirsig is dissatisfied with the industrialised, materialist society which he seeks to escape from on his journey. At the same time, this is past the high water mark of the 60's (I think that's a line from Hunter S. Thompson, actually) and he is critical of the idealism of the hippy movement. Here, too, the fundamentally questioning spirit of Zen emerges, alongside the deep humanism of the author. Although politics are only discussed tangentially, he has a deep concern for the people and the land he is travelling through. The appreciation of natural beauty, too, has a sense of ecology or environmentalism about it. Most basically, however, it is the everyday practicalities of his motorcycle trip through which Pirsig grounds the philosophical questing of the novel.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">As <i>ZMM</i> continues, and the intellectual discussion becomes more and more sophisticated, the personal elements of the narrative take on a more disturbing tone. In many ways, the book is no longer the book you started reading. The text shifts between real events of the narrative, abstract discussions and an increasingly pressurising </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">reminiscing of the author’s past. The novel takes on a almost Gothic quality towards the end, full of dark drama and fractured personalities, while the metaphysical-intellectual thought reaches its stratospheric conclusions. Not only are the philosophical elements truly intriguing and credible, but <i>ZMM</i> is a masterly dramatic literary novel.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Here's the start of the very first chapter...</span></p><br /><br /><blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning. The wind, even at sixty miles an hour, is warm and humid. When it’s this hot and muggy at eight-thirty, I’m wondering what it’s going to be like in the afternoon.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In the wind are pungent odors from the marshes by the road. We are in an area of the Central Plains filled with thousands of duck hunting sloughs, heading northwest from Minneapolis towards the Dakotas. This highway is an old concrete two-laner that hasn’t had much traffic since a four-laner went in parallel to it several years ago. When we pass a marsh the air suddenly becomes cooler. Then, when we are past, it suddenly warms up again.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I’m happy to be riding back into this country. It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that. Tensions disappear along old roads like this. We bump along the beat-up concrete between the cattails and stretches of meadow and then more cattails and marsh grass. Here and there is a stretch of open water and if you look closely you can see wild ducks at the edge of the cattails. And turtles… There’s a red-winged blackbird.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I whack Chris’s knee and point to it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“What!” he hollers.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">”Blackbird!”</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">He says something I don’t hear. “What?” I holler back.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">He grabs the back of my helmet and hollers up, “I’ve seen <i>lots</i> of those, Dad!”</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“Oh!” I holler back. Then I nod. At age eleven you don’t get very impressed with red-winged blackbirds.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">You have to get older for that. For me this is all mixed up with memories that he doesn’t have. Cold mornings long ago when the marsh grass had turned brown and cattails were waving in the northwest wind. The pungent smell then was from muck stirred up by hip boots while we were getting into position for the sun to come up and the duck season to open. Or winters when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and I could walk across the ice and snow between the dead cattails and see nothing but grey skies and dead things and cold. The blackbirds were gone then. But now in July they’re back and everything is at its alivest and every foot of these sloughs is humming and cricking and buzzing and chirping a whole community of millions of living things living out their lives in a kind of benign continuum.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">You see that vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car-window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re <i>in</i> the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it’s right there, so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness."</span></p></blockquote></div>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-12230709522585915012007-10-28T17:46:00.000+00:002008-12-09T21:00:22.442+00:00James Joyce, Ulysses (II)<div align="justify"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaWsAn8axKG3izvYUXUYk4U_1Jaw36-01clz_aJyqzoKBWKYGjqCxTwN5UF-85A4ia5TCTQP8vRbeKWpR5YBDjaUY_1lsu11-Vw9b1srLVb2Nxm_UCLo6SgQaWrLY4WBSS5I4rH6QrzOA/s1600-h/ulysses+redux.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5126447527067927778" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaWsAn8axKG3izvYUXUYk4U_1Jaw36-01clz_aJyqzoKBWKYGjqCxTwN5UF-85A4ia5TCTQP8vRbeKWpR5YBDjaUY_1lsu11-Vw9b1srLVb2Nxm_UCLo6SgQaWrLY4WBSS5I4rH6QrzOA/s400/ulysses+redux.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style><br /><blockquote><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing-gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- Introibo ad altare Dei.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful jesuit.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awakening mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat, and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak…”</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">(<i>Ch. 1 - Telemachus</i>)</span></p></blockquote><p>__________________________________________________</p></div><div align="justify"><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">And so begins one of the most unfairly denigrated books of the twentieth century. Denigrated unfairly, in fact, for both obscenity and inaccessibility. Scholars of the future may well term this the ‘Joycean paradox’ – how a book was banned for its explicitness in the first half of the twentieth century, and how in the second half it was derided as meaningless nonsense. Hopefully, in the twenty-first century we should be able to come up with some kind of cohesive response.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">To be kind to the unreconstructed bigots and the revisionists, who may or may not be all the same people, there is plenty that is difficult about this book. And furthermore, I’m not the kind of person to advocate any kind of Great Books - books that are not only must-reads, but must-likes. I just enjoy reading great books, and admit that it may be entirely possible to dislike <em>Ulysses</em> while retaining a full intellectual faculty.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">So, to any remaining philistines who are reading this, I shall now endeavour to show you why <em>Ulysses</em> is a book well worth reading. (Rest assured, as well, that I often write with my tongue so far in my cheek that it pokes out the other side)</span></p><p><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;">__________________________________________________</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span></p><br /><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">II</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><em>Ulysses</em> is not really just a book, it’s a whole cultural experience. It is, after all, an epic description of a day in the life of Ireland’s capital city in the early years of the twentieth centuries, and with all the political, social and cultural baggage that comes with, transformed into an immense work of art. It’s not the greatest story ever told, but it is a good attempt at capturing everything about character and situation into the one book.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Even just as a book, it still works very well. I’ve never read Homer, so most of the whole Greek analogies are over my head, but <em>Ulysses</em> does have a certain structure to it. Originally, there were title chapters in the manuscript, corresponding to episodes of the Homeric poem – <em>Sirens</em>, <em>Nausikaa</em>, <em>Telemachus</em> etc – but at least in my Penguin edition, these aren’t included in the body of the text. I think that it is good to at least be aware of the extra level of meaning, but it is not really necessary to the appreciation of <em>Ulysses</em> as a modern novel. Sure, if you’re an English scholar, then maybe you should know…</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The chapters do help structure the book, however, because what Joyce is all about here is switching between styles of writing – generally becoming increasingly impenetrable. The extract above reads pretty much as an ordinary novel, although there is hinted at that extra freedom of description, that lyrical touch which makes even comparatively normal Joyce (selections of <em>Dubliners</em> and <em>Portrait of the Artist</em>) so enjoyable to read. In the other extracts I have produced (here and here) the effect is ratcheted up to a much heavier degree. A lot of the writing in Ulysses is pretty detached from meaning and any kind of real communication with the reader.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">There. I said it – euphemistically, of course – that <em>Ulysses</em> is a load of nonsense at times, and that no right-thinking individual who isn’t an idiot savant or a crazed poet should really worry about understanding Joyce’s alleged masterpiece.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">That’s true – if only for, as Terry Pratchett would say, a given value of ‘truth’ – but I hardly think it should stop you from enjoying the book. Common sense would seem to give you two options with regarding to reading the unreadable: either you keep hold of the idea that there is a meaning in there, to be decoded with sufficient attention and knowledge; or you just ride on over the passage, absorbing the language and the sounds, and the seemingly incidental ideas. Of course, the real answer has to be a synthesis of the two: just keep on going, and see what you pick up – you might be surprised!</span></p><p><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;">________________________________________</span></p><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5126447531362895090" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPF03UqusL0p4yoM0hisCGtWTO6Ih9u_RZKeCwYWo_FlofD4YGFgNhFwr_4fhagIWcYyjOFcj4ifDAWl-YUqIfXKvTPXjGrQtqIFQs0gxme8i2H-K0_xaH7Ys0VVP8RuLrP2FvLHrfQj4/s400/marilyn2Xart858.jpg" border="0" /><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">(Yes, that is Marilyn Monroe, and that is apparently <em>Ulysses</em> that she is reading. She said she liked the sounds of the book, but more importantly she read it the way one is meant to - not all at once, but randomly, from chapter to chapter)</span> </span></p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">____________________________________________ <p><br /></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">III</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">As I say, <em>Ulysses</em> is a lot more than just a book. It’s a whole idea about approaching literature, about giving words meaning and power they might not have had already. It is an attempt to apply literature to as many facets of life as possible, to describe the whole sum of human experience, thought and communication and not just the rarified strand which makes up ordinary narrative.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In this sense, <em>Ulysses</em> is all about the legacy. For me, that legacy is chiefly the beat literature of Kerouac. Of course, Kerouac had plenty of other influences, and thankfully so, because otherwise he wouldn’t be half as interesting a writer. I wasn’t even consciously aware of the connection for a while, other than a few abstract references, and despite the fact that I began reading them within a few years of each other. </span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">t was, though, when I broke with a pretty much continuous stretch of reading Kerouac’s novels and even some of his poetry, and picked up <em>Ulysses</em> again, that I realised that, in fact, I had been reading Joyce all along. Filtered through the Beat consciousness, the craziness of American popular culture and the haze of literary and psychochemical experimentation, it was all pretty much the same thing; the wholesale deconstruction and explosion of language. It’s all about, as well, the expression of thought and feeling in that wonderfully direct, expansive and lyrically beautiful fashion, although Kerouac comes across as a much more likeable and personable writer than Joyce.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><em>Ulysses</em> is built up so much as a classic of literature that it’s easy to forget sometimes what it’s meant to be; a document of communication, distorted for effect. It’s a statement, too, which is why it’s big and heavy. It’s a masterpiece, a virtuoso performance, which makes it so grand – but at heart, it’s simple really.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">There must be hundreds of other difficult-to-read modernist authors who have come after Joyce, all of them owing a debt to the master and producing their own progressive, exciting pieces which join in the high miasma of modern literature. I haven’t had the chance to read many of them, but I’m sure they exist. Of course, it’s all post-modern now; Joyce is consigned to history, and the ideas have changed – but there will always be great books that attempt to describe life like <em>Ulysses</em> did.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Probably the best living American author, Don De Lillo, did something of the kind with his massive <em>Underworld</em>. It’s a globe-spanning, era-jumping description of New York in the second half of the twentieth century, just as <em>Ulysses</em> was a single-day, perambulatory account of Edwardian Dublin one warm summer’s day – both of them a view of life across classes, personalities, ideologies and histories. De Lillo’s prose is hardly to be called Joycean – in fact it’s qualitatively very different – but he does have some of the same kind of ambition that Joyce did.</span></p><p></p><br /><p>____________________________________________</p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Today, <em>Ulysses</em> perseveres. Better still, it pervades. The cultural experience which is a novel of some 700-odd pages and lot of made-up words, is clung to tightly by a certain few in my native city – not to mention its global, and significantly, American, following.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">It pops up in the strangest of situations: once, in the course of an amicable conversation with a police sergeant – in fact, the exact equivalent and real-life successor of Flann O’Brien’s Sergeant Fottrell – the values of marine bathing were discussed, and he quoted with great mirth Joyce’s “snotgreen scrotumtightening sea”.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In Dublin, Bloomsday is a significant annual celebration, with the centennial in 2004 drawing huge crowds of Joyceans, and other cultural tourists. Amongst other events, there was a massive open-air breakfast of lambs’ kidneys, numerous Gorgonzola lunches, as well as public readings from the book – invariably including a reading by Ireland’s first openly homosexual senator – and throngs of enthusiasts dressed in Edwardian clothing.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">There may be a streak of fandom in the celebration of <em>Ulysses</em> which makes me uncomfortable. But it’s probably because I don’t want to see the greatest novel ever written being regarded with any more suspicion than it already is. <em>Ulysses</em> is, I suppose, just another book: but it is one which very much pushes at the boundaries of that concept.</span></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p></div><br /></span></span>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-24973201183153357892007-10-27T15:31:00.002+01:002010-06-16T13:55:02.776+01:00Flann O'Brien - On the (Vico) Road<div align="justify"><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-mkzvim-ZQ2ZcjUP9tYHMq2FY-2V0AiN8RDA9Tfc1vt14CMYyrRAiQcfucpMskyZUXG17u8vEHay-D2w4H7rDOIlGAvdiuExApDv6wR5j8kHdcq9X-6x3Svx5RJvfiVuIOYouCCS8vSA/s1600-h/DSCF2204.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5126379396001711250" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-mkzvim-ZQ2ZcjUP9tYHMq2FY-2V0AiN8RDA9Tfc1vt14CMYyrRAiQcfucpMskyZUXG17u8vEHay-D2w4H7rDOIlGAvdiuExApDv6wR5j8kHdcq9X-6x3Svx5RJvfiVuIOYouCCS8vSA/s400/DSCF2204.JPG" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><p>I was fascinated upon first reading <a href="http://steadydietofbooks.blogspot.com/2007/08/flann-obrien-dalkey-archive.html"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The Dalkey Archive</a>, many years ago, as the very first page began with a wonderful lyrical description of a local landmark; I'd already gathered from the title that it might have something to do with the area, but I didn't expect it to jump straight into something so familiar. Of course, the rest of the book is pretty fantastical, but there are constant local and historical references amongst all the intrigue and farce.</p></span><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">For this blog I decided a few months ago, at the end of the summer, to take my camera and retrace the route of the first page and its description of the lovely Vico Road. Not surprisingly, the book travels a lot faster in print than it does on foot, but the essential sequence of things is still valid. Let us take a journey... like the Joyceans who traipse around Sandycove and its Martello tower, Flann O'Brien's character follows a slightly more humble and less erudite path around the sleepy (and prohibitively expensive) environs of Deilginis...</span></p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><div align="justify"><br /></div></span><br /><div align="justify"><br /><br /></div><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5126074633712321522" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg42ejfll5mixPn80_sa7UerB8E-FxsPpN1OsCCqhjnZO4K7QLlGw3bi7V9-XkCqiemviNZYVIfEjO1xE_Fvlk9yqveHdwUUiJQOlCDjPYpby4jn8O1nLBYh9CWfzhLITk_SY7n-g_zEis/s400/DSCF2195.JPG" border="0" /> <img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5126074350244479970" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEdzQ8poqEqFha6ZLhfK-MEKq6C3Rdmx9kl8R7F9F6QiFaRc1uLpf3jO4dj-xpHxi_A56KsmmrF9Du4fBxSPgCAT5GM3IUak_L-4bYqJKd4fJX5OJ8KPAJ-e4JxjF0wWm0TvDO1jKJvow/s400/DSCF2198.JPG" border="0" /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5126075058914083842" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyNLuDnGCVY8Ex_HoAIFWdOlUOsKknnqVG-C5LSG_3IMvisKgYvBKrQOpECkCjMOLSwG3DuIrNzBDxdcG3E2l5KZEnYXtWPahTZg46DgIji4aA2iid5wFxn7rQyZTykkIQy9M9709Pwgk/s400/DSCF2215.JPG" border="0" /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5126075947972314162" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-TjSnlO4-BpYaqaITRlqPrUUmUyK4SiKWRx-3_7hdKm74vatSyKCfhZuqjW8Ih_2WH3XmaN_WXXu6RDiM4YJfFZHZb9TbC2_VOJChElljcf8SWbk8DdcR4b-nW-g6QzVe9KOSaf1BoHY/s400/DSCF2222.JPG" border="0" /> <img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5126378116101456978" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHMLmvUY6CvsReDQe-qvy3Ojhfeh6rPTJ5jAa9Q3R5XidOKiznRycwFHOB0iWz6hj6NdATGi8KZwDGRrdVQnox_BD9eSRTaG-9jjnc2_qUwR1bjytS-V8CIA2Wqz7hYzWSsT08iy_L890/s400/DSCF2237.JPG" border="0" /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5126076257209959490" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG44huvPj7zSs9neoSJZpLiP1Q7kbo5asQPuTPBRMIef96eoFDbaw7iT9mUNI8a6PR0yHea2odm0_xQFtab8J-UvBIhDJ2haxd614-Ky9vMxADwONbivHoAmdEdpTOa8AVNZns-UmGV-Q/s400/DSCF2235.JPG" border="0" /> <img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5126378128986358914" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAXnoqzU8d9tv0zlUGxM_-l_nifryALBR-_-cDd-LWcSryI4Ji0GY32RQ7zAKTsMt6VOQX3rojxTiJXLJXsx7dpFGYw9LhZ5dg6VdZpS7wY9XK_wN1hpUA3jgUCQBK9phWfmswneA-b5w/s400/DSCF2228.JPG" border="0" /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5126378120396424290" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEim2bA6zbbhbFj5RGhgiqK9chgrh8fjqd7aNaBcHzU0xoaNhfQ7dYJ1F5YRu3yOkDW0wI5MWIGIPv4EN8jIOZ-FDf6qCzxjyZcuuDhfq72LUhyltJzBE2Ay7FrDUH7ITEgMTg278aIho7Y/s400/DSCF2240.JPG" border="0" /><br /></span><br /><blockquote><br /><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"1.</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Dalkey is a little town maybe twelve miles south of Dublin, on the shore. It is an unlikely town, huddled, quiet, pretending to be asleep. Its streets are narrow, not quite self-evident as streets and with meetings which seem accidental. Small shops look closed but are open. Dalkey looks like an humble settlement which must, a traveller feels, be next door to some place of the first importance and distinction. And it is – vestibule of a heavenly conspection.</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Behold it. Ascend a shaded, dull, lane-like way, per iter, as it were, tenebricosum, and see it burst upon as if a curtain had been miraculously whisked away. Yes, the Vico Road.</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The road itself curves gently upward and over a low wall to the left by the footpath enchantment is spread – rocky grassland falling fast away to reach a toy-like railway far below, with beyond it the immeasurable immanent sea, quietly moving slowly in the immense expanse of Killiney Bay. High in the sky which joins it at a seam far from precise, a caravan of light cloud labours silently to the east.</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">And to the right? Monstrous arrogance: a mighty shoulder of granite climbing ever away, its overcoat of furze and bracken embedded with stern ranks of pine, spruce, fir and horse-chestnut, with further on fine clusters of slim, meticulous eucalyptus – the whole a dazzle of mildly moving leaves, a farrago of light, colour, haze and copious air, a wonder that is quite vert, verdant, vertical, verticillate, vertiginous, in the shade of branches even verspentine. Heavens, has something escaped from the lexicon of Sergeant Fottrell?</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">But why this name Vico Road? Is there to be recalled in this magnificence a certain philosoper’s pattern of man’s lot on earth – thesis, antithesis, chaos? Hardly. And is that to be compared with the Bay of Naples? That is not to be thought of, for in Naples there must be heat and hardness belabouring dessicated Italians – no soft Irish skies, no little breezes that feel almost coloured.</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">At a great distance ahead and up, one could see a remote little obelisk surmounting some steps where one can sit and contemplate this scene: the sea, the peninsula of Howth across the bay and distantly, to the right, the dim outline of the Wicklow mountains, blue or grey. Was the monument erected to honour the Creator of all this splendour? No. Perhaps in remembrance of a fine Irish person He once made – Johannes Scotus Erigena, perhaps, or possibly Parnell? No, indeed: Queen Victoria..."</span></p><p></p></blockquote><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span></div></span>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-15182799326124354522007-10-12T21:13:00.000+01:002008-12-09T21:00:24.360+00:00James Joyce - Ulysses (I)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiceJgXkrGuNMQnT5hJ1d2NAtVscojiZF9WWYdECx7RVwKyK1ysLLKicPqkcm41choaARUarVsAlQvuzlPtZmEWp26es2USF-PezD2u_D_pRU4_B04tZWERnz1DrLUESup6hxcJGkCga5o/s1600-h/ulysses+redux+desat.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5120548850584694450" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiceJgXkrGuNMQnT5hJ1d2NAtVscojiZF9WWYdECx7RVwKyK1ysLLKicPqkcm41choaARUarVsAlQvuzlPtZmEWp26es2USF-PezD2u_D_pRU4_B04tZWERnz1DrLUESup6hxcJGkCga5o/s400/ulysses+redux+desat.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><blockquote><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing Imperthnthnthnthnthn.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Horrid! And gold flushed more.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">A husky fifenote blew.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Blew. Blue bloom is in the</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Gold pinnacled hair.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">A jumping rose on satiny breasts of satin, rose of Castille.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Trilling, trilling. Idoleres.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Peep! Who’s in the … peepofgold?</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Tink cried to bronze in pity.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Decoy. Soft word. But look! The bright stars fade. O rose! Notes chirruping answer. Castille. The morn is breaking.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Jingle jingle jaunted jingling.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Coin rang. Clock clacked.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Avowal. <i>Sonnez</i>. I could. Rebound of garter. Not leave thee. Smack. <i>La cloche!</i> Thigh smack. Avowel. Warm. Sweetheart, goodbye!</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Jingle. Bloo.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Boomed crashing chords. When love absorbs. War! War! The tympanum.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">A sail! A veil awave upon the waves.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Lost. Throstle fluted. All is lost now.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Horn. Hawhorn.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">When first he saw. Alas!</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Full tup. Full throb.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Warbling. Ah, lure! Alluring.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Martha! Come!</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Clapclop. Clipclap. Clappyclap.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Goodgod henev erheard inall.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Deaf bald Pat brought pad knife took up.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">A moonlight nightcall: far:far.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I feel so sad. P.S. So lonely blooming.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Listen!"</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;">(<em>Ch. 8 - Sirens</em>)</span></p></blockquote>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-64138653790937732332007-09-25T21:34:00.001+01:002008-12-09T21:00:24.489+00:00Brendan Behan - After the Wake<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4QttHnsEE6Kxz3BPyA52svnMnwAZnFJHaZ2eRiDwqEVykFgii5odThBbVtMwY_AB9isSid1ZRUG3XCU87vEc4pfeh11Yidptvf3ckgf2UE9GrySEhGG7634_ePzba1a6AxiPJ0dpX2dQ/s1600-h/behanredux.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5114252900975160930" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4QttHnsEE6Kxz3BPyA52svnMnwAZnFJHaZ2eRiDwqEVykFgii5odThBbVtMwY_AB9isSid1ZRUG3XCU87vEc4pfeh11Yidptvf3ckgf2UE9GrySEhGG7634_ePzba1a6AxiPJ0dpX2dQ/s400/behanredux.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span></div><br /><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Brendan Behan was a mid-20th century Irish writer, and another great example of drink-sodden Irish literature. Even better, he reminds me of </span><a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Bukowski</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">, the great drink-sodden exponent of Beat literature. Behan is best known as the author of <i>Borstal Boy</i>, an autobiographical account of his imprisonment at a young age in a English jail, and which was later adapted for the stage. <i>After the Wake</i> is a collection of Behan short stories, as well as journalistic pieces, and includes part of the <i>Borstal Boy</i> story.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Recently, the Dublin port company have been running a series of posters promoting the use of the port as a tourist link to Britain, somewhat bizarrely through reference to the numerous literary emigrés who took the 'mailboat' out of the country, often never to return. James Joyce is one, and Behan - a well-known nationalist author - another. I say bizarrely, because the prime motivation for this emigration (hardly the jaunty travelling that the company wishs to advertise) was, I would think, the conservative and narrow-minded culture, not to mention economic and political stagnation, of Ireland itself. I mean, these supposed national literary heroes were one-way ticket people, and more exiles than emigrés. And the self-proclaimed 'Borstal Boy' is an unlikely candidate for a reputable, not to say distinguished, cultural ambassador.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I had not in fact personally read Behan until very recently, when I picked this book up at the local library, and to say the least I was impressed. Think perhaps of the realism and dark humour of Bukowksi, against or rather with a more generous, gentler and less sociopathically destructive nature, and set within an older, impoverished yet verbally acute culture. Even just on literary merit alone, and leaving aside the politics, humanity and vibrancy of his characters, these short stories represent some very skilled writing.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This extract is from a story called 'The Execution', an understated, lightly scored (in the sense of the author playing on the emotions) and surprisingly tender tale of paramilitary murder and warped social relations. Pints, pistols and gombeens are not a world away from Bukowski's seedy underbelly of California. Well, in fact they are... but only becuase it's a small world. Read on; some knowledge of Irish history useful!</span></p><div align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span></div><br /><blockquote><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"We went in, Ellis between Kit and myself. The poor devil wouldn’t have run if we’d let him. He was telling me how it wasn’t his fault giving the dump away. He had never been picked up before and the cells had got in on him. Smiling contentedly to himself he was, and saying that maybe the boys wouldn’t think too badly of him when he took his tar and feathering like a man. Real wistfully he said to me, ‘I’d sooner get an awful beating than a tar and feathering because that’d be a terrible disgrace, my old man being a ’16 man an’ all.’ God help him. My father was a Dublin Fusilier in 1916, but that’s the way.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I squeezed his arm in a friendly way. I’d never liked him much before but I felt sorry for him and sorrier for his people. He had been fond of boasting about the Fenian tradition of his family. Still, we couldn’t let people give away dumps on us or there’d soon be no respect for the Army.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">We entered the snug.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I’d my hand through the pocket of my mac and on my skit. It was a Police Positive .38 in a slip-holster, a nice small skit.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Gerry Dolan, I knew, had either a Lüger, Parabellum, Walther or a Browning. They were the only automatics in the company dump, except for a few Colt autos and a 9mm Peter that was too big to lug around. And Gerry dearly loved automatics, especially ones with queer names. I never saw the day he’d be satisfied with a Smith or Webley.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">You can sometimes judge a fellow by his taste in skits.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Now Kit, I could swear, would be carrying a Colt auto. He liked a Smith but held that it was bulky for work like this. Although he didn’t love automatics as a rule, gra for the Colt. Mainly, I think, because when he went around checking dumps with the Batt. Q/M he could pinch a few rounds of Thompson stuff to bang off in it. A wild lad Kit, but dependable. A bit of a boozer. He used drink with Mickey Horgan and Connie.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">For all that I’d nearly had them dismissed for using Army stuff on an unofficial job, I thought the three of them the best suited of the five of us in tonight’s work. Connie and Mickey would be carrying short Webleys.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I ordered four drinks – four pints, a mineral for Dolan and a glass of whiskey for Ellis. They give a condemned man a glass of rum and a cigarette in France. I wished Ellis had asked for a bottle of stout. Connie, Kit and Mickey were drinking abstractedly. The frothy rings on their glasses were equi-distant.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I wasn’t used to drink and was sorry I’d hadn’t ordered an ale, a pint seemed even more unmanageable tonight.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Ellis knocked back his whiskey and asked what we were having. I didn’t want to stop there all night and said we’d better be going. I was surprised when Gerry Dolan said it was his round. He ordered three pints, ale for me, and two whiskeys. His face reddened when I looked at him.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">When we got in the car again Ellis’s spirits seemed even further improved, the liquor I supposed. He offered me a cigarette and struck a match; his face was very young looking.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">About three miles further was the spot. It would be my job to tell them to get out of the car. Ellis would see the loneliness of it. There wasn’t a house in sight of it. It didn’t seem so easy a thing now.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">It was a frosty night and my legs were getting a bit cramped. I hoped Ellis wouldn’t start crying or anything. I’d sooner he put a fight. It would be easier to let him have it.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Let him have it,’ ‘plugging him,’ ‘knocking him off’. It’s small wonder people are shy of describing the deed properly. We were going to kill him..."</span></p></blockquote>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-3376654082347857852007-09-13T21:19:00.000+01:002008-12-09T21:00:24.627+00:00Jack Kerouac - Desolation Angels (Yet Another Extract)<div align="justify"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgesmAPKismFdFRnI9OiH9pLwVadupVSFDmoFMWkLJ8Oe5MfnwNSHVnubCTqmHqAuKi4ni80bI31DQq-5mr6i_0FRKIiErM2wEWOpw6XxFENAPFXXrIkDCICXFdxrPZI-HqOGs7-bABAfo/s1600-h/Publication1.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5109788359601385506" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgesmAPKismFdFRnI9OiH9pLwVadupVSFDmoFMWkLJ8Oe5MfnwNSHVnubCTqmHqAuKi4ni80bI31DQq-5mr6i_0FRKIiErM2wEWOpw6XxFENAPFXXrIkDCICXFdxrPZI-HqOGs7-bABAfo/s400/Publication1.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><p>Like <i>On the Road</i>, <i>Desolation Angels</i> is primarily a novel of many journeys, with Kerouac as ever trying to live out (and describe) the American Dream as idiosyncratically and as anti-materialistically as possible. That, aside from the philosophical musings and emotional agonising, is the pure simplicity of the book. Kerouac was an author who combined deep introspection of his own psychological state with close observation of the world around him. Together, this produces in his writing neat, lyrical stories which would merely be called ‘real-life’ if, in fact, they were not so sublimely realistic and uniquely beautiful. Here, in ‘Passing through New York’, Kerouac nearly loses his complete pack while riding the bus – the story passing from sudden disaster to existential angst, on into biography, then religious mysticism and back to calm, Zen-like relief again:</p></span><br /><div align="justify"><br /></div><blockquote><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“I got down to the bus station with my rucksack and foolishly (high on Jack Daniels) began talking to some sailors who then got a guy with a car to drive out to the back streets of Washington in search of an afterhours bottle. A Negro connection was dickering with us when up walked a Negro cop who wanted to search us all, but was outnumbered. I simply walked away with my rucksack on my back, to the station, got on the bus and fell asleep with the pack by the driver’s well. When I woke up in Roanoke Rapids at dawn it was gone. Somebody had taken it off at Richmond. I let my head fall on the seat in that harsh glare nowhere worse in the world than in America with a stupid guilty hangover. A whole new novel (<i>Angels of Desolation</i>), a whole book of poetry, and the finishing chapters of another novel (about Tristessa), together with all the paintings not to mention the only gear I had in the world (sleepingbag, poncho, sweater of holy favour, perfect simple equipments the result of years’ thinking, gone, all gone. I started to cry. And I looked up and saw the bleak pines by the bleak mills of Roanoke Rapids with one final despair, like the despair of a man who has nothing left to do but leave the earth forever. Soldiers waited for the bus smoking. Fat old North Carolinians watched hands aback clasped. Sunday morning, I empty of my little tricks to make life livable. An empty orphan sitting nowhere, sick and crying. Like dying I saw all the years flash by, all the efforts my father had made to make life something to be interested about but only ending in death, blank death in the glare of automobiles day, automobile cemeteries, whole parking lots of cemeteries everywhere. I saw the glum faces of my mother, of Irwin, of Julien, of Ruth, all trying to make it go on believing without hope. Gay college students in the back of the bus making me even sicker to think of their purple plans all in time to end blind in an automobile cemetery insurance office for nothing. Where’s yonder old mule buried in those piny barrens or did the buzzard just eat? Caca, all the world caca. I remembered the enormous despair of when I was 24 sitting in my mother’s house all day while she worked in the shoe factory, in fact sitting at my father’s death chair, staring like a bust of Goethe at nothing. Getting up once in a while to plunk a sonatas on the piano, sonatas of my own spontaneous invention, then falling on the bed crying. Looking out the window at the glare of automobiles on Crossbay Boulevard. Bending my head over my first novel, to sick to go on. Wondering about Goldsmith and Johnson how they burped sorrow by their firesides in a life that was too long. That’s what my father told me the night before he died, “Life is too long.”</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">So wondering if God is a personal God who’s actually personally concerned about what happens to us, every one. Putting us up to burdens? To Time? To the crying horror of birth and the impossible lostness of the promise of death? And why? Because we’re fallen angels who said in Heaven “Heaven is great, <i>it better be</i> anyway” and off we fell? But do you even remember doing such a thing?</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">All I remember is that before I was born there was bliss. I actually remember the dark swarming bliss of 1917 altho I was born in 1922! New Years’ Eves came and went and I was just blisshood. But when I was dragged out my mother’s womb, blue, a blue baby, they yelled at me to wake up, and slapped me, and ever since then I’ve been chastised and lost for good and all. Nobody slapped me in bliss! Is God everything? If God is everything then it’s God who slapped me. For personal reasons? Do I have to carry this body around and call it mine own?</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Yet in Raleigh a tall blue-eyed Southerner told me my bag was being shipped to my destination station in Winter Park. “God bless you,” I said, and he did a calm double take.”</span></p></blockquote></div>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-17413714634970636632007-09-10T20:07:00.000+01:002008-12-09T21:00:27.208+00:00Jack Kerouac - Desolation Angels (A Photographic Interlude)<p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I've recently returned from a short hiking holiday in the Welsh mountains of Snowdonia, a holiday on which I brought <em>Desolation Angels</em> along with me to read. Call me an idealist, but part of me was looking for some kind of beat Kerouackian journey of experience in the wilderness - not that we were that far from people most of the time - and indeed, part of the time it was like this. These photographs (presented in chronological order) were taken on a beautiful cloudless day, on a 15k ridge walk to the peaks of Glyder Fach and Glyder Fawr (some way to the northwest of Mt. Snowdon, Yr Wddfa). I used a Fuji FinePix S7000 digital SLR, and converted the pictures afterwards (mostly with a red filter... as all b/w photographers know, it is great for bringing up atmospheric skyscapes).</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><em>Desolation Angels </em>isn't much of a mountain book - in spite of its beginning with Kerouac in situ on a mountaintop like the crazy ascetic monk he always wanted to be - and I think <em>The Dharma Bums</em>, with its vivid account of Ray, Japhy and Morley's hike up the Matterhorn, better fits that description. Nevertheless, the solitude and inescapable vastness of the mountain landscape is a key emotional and philosophical theme of the novel. Mt. Desolation, and the rest of the Cascades for that matter, are probably incomparably vaster and emptier than the rocky enclave of Snowdonia, but I'm going to go ahead and draw the comparison anyway.</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I'm no poet, and I'm not really all that much of a writer - definitely more of a reader! - so here's my own artistic response to Kerouac's "Desolation Blues" in Twelve Choruses: "Desolation Black & Whites" in Twelve Portraits.</span></p><br /><br /><p align="justify"></p><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5108660854032332738" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmUWF3EPgKy6h6g1zWhSeSA-8qNBx-88vRQZKNw-3noZHu7XvQXUnLI-JftfpdC2oQAHVrvmse9XL3q7Ix0y5EH_Z_-1IjvOlLpECuk-EMWMgCu4cKIZ7MxqZqsGl9o2vk3eiVSS22Zek/s400/DSCF2245redux.jpg" border="0" /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5108661481097557970" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwPuZgSYPsMgHRmnXVkEaK1IhOihdYMa0qwKpiDZDLPmYFjIMmvGtcAq84cWLHWLPFBWrj1EdvY2cy6NiQ9BP9dN-Z7DGCAbyoCumMlnS20_Alv6qTq4Un3Nyp_gHcxSmm2u7f_qnbSqA/s400/DSCF2254lumredux.jpg" border="0" /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5108662009378535410" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdVtgDaPOsDtfECoWENXg2a9cwUb1hChRuPpCY6cLXUxhayIi7lOJG7CqlIY8CmA8re6630REkbemVo87FhcLevGaL8CdJfou53gs7qHT8yDFNbijaGl9mj9uIrsIQQKTCzSz7yo6F_nA/s400/DSCF2259redux.jpg" border="0" /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5108662249896704002" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS61hP1bnMj7MWgGsVYnOgyHXhcfn7S0vPzpfEofM6Ww7ZmXPB-6Fc9hCye-sovUXOF22p8lmsA1zcFvrBuoBFe5CAVTA85nxYsNCc2MKteMToXDvZiIFjxNGB-FFMipccGFI74HKnUpQ/s400/DSCF2260redux.jpg" border="0" /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5108662606378989586" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipOEAK5SjeunAwKiuw6O2ZpyyhVqcxiGUrpuukLyR7YadQuAg_kTmuV5uOg7jfreQQMOBvTKdChA0nA9XsZbNsOigVU-uChTf-LHJHU193n6BTZ6Jvfuri-t4vlUJs7G7hVRV83WYRZKE/s400/DSCF2269redux.jpg" border="0" /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5108662984336111650" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSWjz4Anty8y6rCzTR-zT9a2Zcsw4aLEUxx4XCylfVD1qln7VEJFY1NjBTLeBgh25D70AmvsUQH3-TBCTfOyRuLx1BzjbCrR6jcX51ekWS6L6QGzAzSSozns1sojtQRovLIjKMGuVuQRo/s400/DSCF2271redux.jpg" border="0" /><br /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5108663242034149426" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkjZ7CrVfjz5z5AgpuZL8kCSKW9uQ-otQ_qjL8TGnAi2_erEGPnpylEU-Q4MmxnxJ9qswpmz94gy47qI55xsV8mWlNarJD2ChuRE3UONng8N7ujvE-FFit6D7u0So82z1pe-UNy9meqFU/s400/DSCF2274redux.jpg" border="0" /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5108663615696304194" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZxDdquO6dlxoV1e93r3xjGrJj9jq5O5WDk0b39Cfjju6N0JNa-1F0mu6wbM7lTj0w6QZGA98uiuZxLYCGkwLKR0_PvkeW3fy86yJCiqdVRwRTwth__d9HLB-On7NpdQxN-nZ28kW5UpI/s400/DSCF2275greenredux.jpg" border="0" /> <img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5108665960748447890" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvpPw6kxqc66woiIsb2FohZADemuP5oKI5VyUoI2wiBkOSPd4yn1zVe_Tih5XQ7uYPqo-9hSflkzP_pMt6zbpLKjus64Ke1AuGvK494v48EfKtleCrs_1qw4J_OOG8O7s0ATNaAi9i41M/s400/DSCF2282redux.jpg" border="0" /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5108664298596104290" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhI_y0m1BoWpLD7yqfPPZTJ1cStY7Iya7XkaI4JQvvtPtxZU4Os6ONx6qcdm258UiL1UkL8ikyBNAjdV3PvHPoQACiN5NVCbDChWQ4whcA1cZdKl3eXWEu-pP1X_nK8Q4unXxQHw27Ukkk/s400/DSCF2287lumredux.jpg" border="0" /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5108664500459567218" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiErHr0zJZIAZmQjMmFd5DlXOT28MpKy4I96IimP4tyGWhemnT-7v2EnjIaDnrT6r_CYqAprR9q9la1pek0A61BFu_o0k6hHhaPM1J_xX210vfX3bJz2_PtRmyItDkw9XjxcQa1mXZryBc/s400/DSCF2289lumedux.jpg" border="0" /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5108664994380806274" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4vQ58CyOwG0Z4hrvNbezLlf9e2LBRlMq9WtOZzq0ek8OR_fUkV3MvcFQynwasKt4YPQBU_mjEI3l2Va6K1X7cxK1Kgavx1tF5iuKddU8lShxCtCQpxxiuRo3R5gLxPZC2hZoEEwR17Jg/s400/DSCF2307redux.jpg" border="0" /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmUWF3EPgKy6h6g1zWhSeSA-8qNBx-88vRQZKNw-3noZHu7XvQXUnLI-JftfpdC2oQAHVrvmse9XL3q7Ix0y5EH_Z_-1IjvOlLpECuk-EMWMgCu4cKIZ7MxqZqsGl9o2vk3eiVSS22Zek/s1600-h/DSCF2245redux.jpg"></a>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-52774452717691539092007-09-09T20:56:00.000+01:002008-12-09T21:00:27.340+00:00Jack Kerouac - Desolation Angels<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdxKw6S25tRVUPPGM6n5iKO-WJYx26efj_tfZLdXeRpHbfVOycC42fYFKmviPGHem3D8GUSHjyiqvGQDm5qaxU1sH3kFXDgR3dPKMK6TuWWZBQZjt0MaHN3WPz1kLr32_BpP5jnoD9sRc/s1600-h/desolation+angels+redux.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5108300643715151794" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdxKw6S25tRVUPPGM6n5iKO-WJYx26efj_tfZLdXeRpHbfVOycC42fYFKmviPGHem3D8GUSHjyiqvGQDm5qaxU1sH3kFXDgR3dPKMK6TuWWZBQZjt0MaHN3WPz1kLr32_BpP5jnoD9sRc/s400/desolation+angels+redux.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><em>Desolation Angels </em>is one of Kerouac’s later books, first published in 1965, nearly a decade after <em>On the Road</em>. Clearly, it is somewhat more advanced in both style and content, and can seem a little daunting in comparison. More dense than breathless, it is nevertheless a wonderful expansion of the great and profound Beat odyssey which begins with <em>On the Road</em>. I first found it in the college library in hardback, and avidly read the 186 chapters within a couple of weeks, at whatever opportunity presented itself.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><em>Desolation Angels</em> is more fragmented than the other Kerouac novels, in fact made up of two books, ‘Desolation Angels’ and ‘Passing Through’, Book One containing one hundred and two chapters, and Book Two eight-four, all of fairly short length. The chapters are further arranged by setting or theme: ‘Desolation in Solitude’, ‘Desolation in the World’; ‘Passing Through Mexico’, ‘Passing Through New York’, ‘Passing Through Tangiers, France and London’ and ‘Passing Through America Again’.</span></p><p align="justify"><br /></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The Kerouac canon, or more specifically the ‘Duluoz Legend’ (the series of autobiographical novels, each written and published at the time with Jack Duluoz, i.e. Kerouac, under different aliases) overlaps significantly at this period. <em>Desolation Angels</em> begins almost exactly as <em>The Dharma Bums</em> ends, with Kerouac as a fire lookout in the High Cascades. Not only was the experience of Mt. Desolation made into the centrepiece of this novel (purportedly transcribed directly from his journals written at the time), but it is recorded in poetry in ‘Desolation Blues’, and in prose in ‘Alone on a Mountaintop’, part of <em>Lonesome Traveler</em> – which, to further complicate matters, also recounts the experiences of ‘Passing Through Tangiers, France and England’ as ‘Big Trip to Europe’. Finally, the tail-end of <em>Desolation Angels</em> hints at the even darker writing of <em>Big Sur</em>, Kerouac’s deeply disturbing tale of the D.T.s and paranoia in an isolated coastal cabin on the wild California coast, as a refuge from his unwelcome and intrusive new celebrity:</span></p><p align="justify"><br /></p><blockquote><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘But enough about California for now – I later had adventures down there that were really horrible and only as horrible as you get when you get older and your last moment impels you to test all, to go mad, just to see what the Void’ll do – ”</span></p></blockquote><p align="justify"><br /></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">As I say, <em>Desolation Angels</em> is a fragmented work, perhaps a return to the epic grandeur of the Great American Novel Kerouac always wanted to write, and away from the relative brevity and unrelenting movement of <em>On The Road</em>. <em>Desolation Angels</em> possesses in many ways a broader scope – travelling outside of the American continent, for a start – but also a broader, more reflective vision. Having absorbed and refined the exuberant style of <em>On The Road</em>, as well as progressing through the Buddhist mysticism of <em>The Dharma Bums</em>, the Kerouac of <em>Desolation</em> digs that little bit deeper into the Beat lifestyle.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">At the same time, <em>Desolation Angels</em> has its extremes of wild exuberance as well as solemn introspection; it still works quite excellently as a Beat novel, as a superbly creative celebration of life’s loves and sorrows. It starts with Kerouac having attained the spiritual and literal peak of the previous novel, and yet grappling with the implications of prolonged (although desired) solitude. Here, Kerouac descends the trail on his return from his 63-day stint as fire lookout:</span></p><p align="justify"><br /></p><blockquote><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“The best way to come down a mountain is like running, swing your arms free and fall as you come, your feet will hold you up for the rest – but O I had no feet because no shoes, I was “barefooted” (as the saying goes) and far from stomping down on big trail-singin steps as I bash along tra la tra la I could hardly even mincingly place them the soles were so thin and the rocks so sudden some of them with a sharp bruise – A John Bunyan morning, it was all I could do to keep my mind on other things – I tried to sing, think, daydream, do as I did by the desolation stove – but Karma your trail is laid out for you – Could have no more escaped that morning of bruised torn feet and burning-ache thighs (and eventual searing blisters like needles) and the gasping sweats, the attack of insects, than I can escape and than you can escape being eternally around to go through the emptiness of form (including the emptiness of form of your complaining personality) – I had to do it, not rest, my only concern was keeping the boat or even losing the boat, O what sleep on that trail that night would have been, full moon, but full moon was shining down on the valley too – and there you could hear music over the waters, and smell cigarette smoke, and listen to the radio – Here, all was, thirsty little creeks of September no widern my hand, giving out water with water, where I splashed and drank and muddled to go on – Lord – How sweet is life? As sweet</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">as cold</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">water in a dell</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">on a dusty tired trail –</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- on a rusty tired trail – bestrewn with the kickings of the mules last June when they were forced at stickpoint to jump over a badly hacked pathway around a fallen snag that was too big to climb, and Lord I had to bring up the mare among the frightened mules and Andy was cursing “I cant do this all by myself goddamnit, bring up that mare!” and like in an old dream of other lifetimes when I handled the horses I came up, leading her, and Andy grabbed the reins and heaved at her neck, poor soul, while Marty stabbed her in the ass with a stick, deep – to lead the frightened mule – and stabbed the mule – and rain and snow – now all the mark of that fury is dry in September dust as I sit there and puff – a lot of little edible weeds all around – A man could do it, hide in these hills, boil weeds, bring a little fat with him, boil weeds over small Indian fires and live forever – “Happy with a stone underhead let heaven and earth go about their changes!” sang old Chinese Poet Hanshan – No maps, packs, firefinders, batteries, airplanes, warnings on radios, just mosquitoes humming in harmony, and the trickle of the streamlet – But no, Lord has made this movie in his mind and I’m a part of it (the part of it known as me) and it’s for me to understand this world and so go among it preaching the Diamond Steadfastness that says: “You’re here and you’re not here, both, for the same reason,” – “it’s Eternal Power munging along” – So I up I get and lunge along with pack, thumbed, and wince on ankled pains and turn and turn the trail faster and faster under my growing trot and pretty soon I’m running, bent, like a Chinese woman with a pack of faggots on her neck, jingle jingle drumming and pumping stiff knees thru rock underbrush and around corners, sometimes I crash off the trail and bellow back on’t, somehow, never lose, the way was made to be followed – Down the hill I’ll meet thin young boy starting out on his climb, I’m fat with butchers, and it’s Springtime in the Void – Sometimes I fall, on haunches, slipt, the pack is my back bumper, I burnst right along bumbling for fair, what words to describe hoopely tootely pumling down a parpity trail, prapooty – Swish, sweat – Every time I hit my bruised football toe I cry “Almost!” but it never gets it straight so’s lame me – The toe, bruised in Columbia College scrimmages under lights in Harlem dusks, some big bum from Sandusky trod on it with his spikes and big boned calf all down – Toe never recovered – bottom and top both busted and sore, when a rock prods in there my whole ankle will turn to protect it – yet, turning an ankle is a Pavlovian fait accompli, Airapetianz couldnt show me any better how not to believe I’ve strained a needed ankle, or even sprained – it’s a dance, dance from rock to rock, hurt to hurt, wince down the mountain, the poetry’s all there – And the world that awaits me!”</span></p></blockquote><p align="justify"> </p><p align="justify"><br /> </p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">To my mind, Kerouac is by far one of the most enjoyable writers to read in prose. I noted in my review of <em>The Dharma Bums</em> that I hadn’t talked much about Kerouac’s actual writing style, so I’ll try and rectify that here. ‘Beat’, ‘poetry of pure prose’, ‘spontaneous prose’, there are plenty of phrases to describe it – but, in the end, you can only experience it for yourself.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The extract above is as good as any, really, for appreciating the pure Kerouac style. Both palpably exciting and intellectually clever, his writing is to me often absolutely captivating. Moreover, it is (paradoxically, given the last remark) wonderfully free – in the sense that as a writer Kerouac plays loose and fast with language. Spontaneity, wordsmithery, humour, aural and visual allusions, all play a part in creating that superbly original style. Kerouac for me is someone who has deconstructed language – breaking down the conventions and constrictions of standard prose into a sublime string of words, phrases, meanings and transcendent emotions.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">As an Irishman, I am that little bit proud to draw a link between Kerouac and the past master of expansive, streaming prose – James Joyce. A clearly acknowledged influence on Kerouac, what Joyce did in 1922 with <em>Ulysses</em> was to deconstruct both the novel and the language with which a novel was written. Obviously, Kerouac rarely reaches the extremes of that infamous book – although parts of <em>Desolation Angels</em> definitely come close – and as a Joycean, he was a partial, if devoted, follower. In his early journals (windblown worlds, p. 48) he remarks:</span></p><p align="justify"><br /></p><blockquote><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“…I do believe in the kind of writing that gives effortless pleasure to the reader. In the end, I am my own greatest reader. Also, I believe in <em>sane</em> writing, as opposed to the psychotic sloppiness of Joyce. Joyce is a man who only gave up trying to communicate to human beings. I myself do that when I’m drunk-weary and full of misery, therefore I know it’s not so honest as it’s spiteful to blurt out in associations without a true human effort to evoke and give significant intelligence to one’s sayings. It’s a kind of scornful idiocy.”</span></p></blockquote><p align="justify"><br /></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I’m pretty sure he was taking about <em>Finnegan’s Wake</em>, however! With some qualifications, the Joyce-Kerouac comparison is really crucial, in my opinion at least, to appreciating Kerouac’s writing. The trail extract above, while fairly straightforward, contains many Joycean elements, particularly in the association of words and sounds – creating a tone similar to that in the following extract. The blending of rhythms, orthography and jokey humour is evocative of language in its cultural association – here in a earthy, folksy American style rather than, as with Joyce, the cosmopolitan Dubliner speech. The style is used for both meaning and effect, for art and for emotion – but most of all, to show the capabilities and potential of language, its biblical, time-honoured significances, and the way it should intimately affect the reader. So here’s how Joyce did it (in the ‘Oxen of Sun’ chapter of <em>Ulysses</em>, as Bloom converses with a nun in the maternity hospital – I think)</span></p><p align="justify"><br /></p><blockquote><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“As her eyes then ongot his weeds swart therefore sorrow she feared. Glad after she was that ere adread was. Her asked if O’Hare Doctor tidings sent from far coast and she with grameful sigh him answered that O’Hare Doctor in heaven was. Sad was the man that word to hear that him so heavied in bowels ruthful. All she there told him, ruing death for friend so young, algate sore unwilling God’s rightwiseness to withsay. She said that he had a fair sweet death through God His goodness with masspriest to be shriven, holy housel and sick men’s oil to his limbs. The man then right earnest asked the nun of which death the dead man was died and the nun answered him and said that he was died in Mona island through bellycrab three year agone come Childermas and she prayed to God the Allruthful to have his dear soul in his undeathliness. He heard her sad words, in held hat sad staring. So stood they there both awhile in wanhope, sorrowing one with other.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Therefore, everyman, look to that last end that is thy death and the dust that gripeth on every man that is born of woman for as he came naked forth from his mother’s womb so naked shall he wend him at the last for go as he came.”</span></p></blockquote><p align="justify"> </p><p align="justify"><br /> </p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">There is both a style and a meaning to this novel. <em>Desolation Angels</em> is - for all its superficial, carefree wanderlust experiences - a deeply philosophical, mystical and even religious work of literature. As Kerouac wanders from Seattle to San Francisco, Mexico, New York and Europe, he ponders the existential suffering of his life. The super-vibrant characters of <em>On The Road</em> and onward criss-cross this whole novel as well; Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and innumerable other literary heroes. Those people, who were previously Beats, Zen Lunatics or just sorrowful friends are all now, in Kerouac’s eyes, ‘angels in desolation’. In all, <em>Desolation Angels</em> reads like a massive beatific vision of a country and culture which Kerouac alternates between being jaded or eagerly anticipatory of. The novel alternates between both beauty and sadness.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><em>Desolation Angels</em> is an intensely psychological novel – an explanation, as Nelson Algren remarks, of ‘what the place of religion may have been in the Beat mystique’. Kerouac’s spontaneous prose spoke of literary freedom – freedom of style, and of content. As he says himself, returning again to Joyce, (windblown world, p. 242):</span></p><p align="justify"><br /></p><blockquote><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"Come a day there will when… authors of exact imagination will be free, as Joyce felt free, to wind out their moody shroud about the riddle of the tale being told."</span></p></blockquote><p align="justify"><br /></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><em>Desolation Angels</em> is also, lastly, a symbolic novel – an idealist novel, centred on the feeling of desolation, not depression but a feeling of ‘lostness’ in the world – based around an intense personal sadness and vibrant, mystical experience of suffering and joy. As he writes in the final chapter:</span></p><p align="justify"><br /></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><blockquote><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"How we continue in this endless Gloom I’ll never know – Love, Suffer and Work is the motto of my family (Lebris de Keroack) but seems I suffer more than the rest – Old Honeyboy Bill’s in Heaven for sure anyway – Only thing is Where’s Jack Going?” </span></p><p align="justify"></p></blockquote><p align="justify"><br /><br /></p><blockquote><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span></p></blockquote>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-5175833030260622252007-08-25T21:15:00.001+01:002008-12-09T21:00:27.375+00:00Flann O'Brien - The Dalkey Archive<div align="justify"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit7IrE6azBMMy5HT_d8F_8rLLTkh1NiEsYqcnLV718t2tEVCMbGBoa83cXaPbM0gcUtg1YE_VHcFpb1vQKRKWIAppzc99p6Ddv27V-cX8suzHzYxSZEOocbS2ffyuJQzxNINIxWA04Z-s/s1600-h/dalkey+archive+redux.jpg"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5102735843568285538" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit7IrE6azBMMy5HT_d8F_8rLLTkh1NiEsYqcnLV718t2tEVCMbGBoa83cXaPbM0gcUtg1YE_VHcFpb1vQKRKWIAppzc99p6Ddv27V-cX8suzHzYxSZEOocbS2ffyuJQzxNINIxWA04Z-s/s400/dalkey+archive+redux.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style></span><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Hopefully I can keep this post a good deal shorter than the Knut Hamsun review – the trouble is, classic novels seem to have a symbiotic relationship with long, semi-academic introductions. However, Flann O’Brien’s <i>The Dalkey Archive</i> isn’t a classic book, although you could say it’s written by a classic author. Flann O’Brien is probably my favourite Irish author, being as he was essentially a comedic Joyce. Not that James Joyce didn’t have his moments of levity, but he never exactly threatened to engulf the reader in hilarity, which is often what Flann O’Brien’s novels do.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Flann O’Brien (real name Brian O’Nolan; forced to adopt a literary pseudonym due to his occupation as an Irish civil servant, he also wrote voluminously in newspapers under the even more ridiculous alias of Myles na Gopaleen) wrote in the middle of the last century, <i>The Dalkey Archive</i> being published in 1964 shortly before his death two years later. O’Brien was a gifted, creative and very funny novelist, albeit also an often drink-sodden one (see my previous contribution to literary theory <a href="http://steadydietofbooks.blogspot.com/2007/08/charles-bukowski-hot-water-music.html">here</a>). Part travelling in the shadow of Joyce, part mired in his own bitterness and cynicism, his body of work nevertheless still stands out as some of the freshest and most original parts of Irish literature.</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">So what is <i>The Dalkey Archive</i>? To my mind, it is the most accessible of Flann O’Brien’s works. The posthumously published <i>The Third Policeman</i> (which recently had its cult status re-ignited by a connection to the plot of <i>Lost</i>; I’m not a follower of that show, but I’d hazard a guess that that both works are probably equally as difficult to follow) while perhaps even funnier in its surreal fantasy, lacks the ordinary charm of <i>The Dalkey Archive</i>. And in comparison with his heavily Joyce-influenced 1939 debut, <i>At Swim Two-Birds</i>, <i>The Dalkey Archive</i> is eminently more readable.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In a way, <i>The Dalkey Archive</i> is a detective novel, or at least a pastiche thereof. At the same time, it is a gloriously daft, surreal comic fantasy, not to mention an ingenious satire on Irish drama. Perhaps also it is a portrait of the old-fashioned world then to be found in Dalkey, a suburban village on the outskirts of Dublin city. Trams, priests and of course pubs abound. Variety and familiarity characterise this novel – variety, because of the comedy and surreal happenings of the novel, and familiarity because of the quintessentially Irish characters and cultural setting.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">It might help to mention here that three main characters in the book are, in order of appearance: De Selby, a mad scientist living in peaceful solitude by the sea in Dalkey; Sergeant Fottrell, the senior policeman in the village with deep metaphysical suspicion regarding bicycles (see below); and Joyce himself, not dead but living an anonymous existence in the rather unexciting tourist resort of Skerries, some way north of Dublin. These excellent comic sketches revolve around the comparatively straightforward protagonist; ‘Mick’, an abstemious, earnest young civil servant and heavily ironic alter ego of the author, whose devious interference in disparate and rather implausible events only adds an extra gloss to the intricate humour of the novel.</span></p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><p>In short, <i>The Dalkey Archive</i> is a cheerfully daft yet breathlessly readable novel of madcap happenings in an archaic, though not entirely dated culture. The extract below, I hope, should give an indication of the genius of this book: it seems, even to me, to be difficult in this dialogue to distinguish the typical Hibernian idiom from the daft (and arguably even more typically Hibernian) surrealism. Believe me, Irish people do, or at least once did, actually talk like this… particularly when they had ‘a drop taken’, as they say!</p></span><p></p><br /><br /><blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The sergeant beckoned the waitress, ordered a barley wine for himself and a small bottle of ‘that’ for his friend. Then he leaned forward confidentially.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- Did you ever discover or hear tell of mollycules? he asked.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- I did of course.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- Would it surprise or collapse you to know that the Mollycule Theory is at work in the parish of Dalkey?</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- Well… yes and no.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- It is doing terrible destruction, he continued, the half of the people is suffering from it, it is worse than the smallpox.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- Could it not be taken in hand by the Dispensary Doctor or the National Teachers, or do you think it is a matter for the head of the family?</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- The lock, stock and barrel of it all, he replied almost fiercely, is the County Council.</span></p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><p>- It seems like a complicated thing all right.</p></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The sergeant drank delicately, deep in thought.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- Michael Gilhaney, a man I know, he said finally, is an example of a man that is nearly banjaxed from the operation of the Mollycule Theory. Would it astonish you ominously to hear that he is in danger of being a bicycle?</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Mick shook his head in polite incomprehension.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- He is nearly sixty years of age by plain computation, the sergeant said, and if he is itself, he has spent no less than thirty-five years riding his bicycle over the rocky roadsteads and up and down the pertimious hills and into the deep ditches when the road goes astray in the strain of the winter. He is always going to a particular destination or other on his bicycle at every hour of the day or coming back from there at every other hour. If it wasn’t that his bicycle was stolen every Monday he would be sure to be more than halfway now.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- Halfway to where?</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- Halfway to being a bloody bicycle himself.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Had Sergeant Fottrell for once betrayed himself in drunken rambling? His fancies were usually amusing but not so good when they were meaningless. When Mick said something of the kind the sergeant stared at him impatiently.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- Did you ever study the Mollycule Theory when you were a lad? he asked. Mick said no, not in any detail.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- That is a very serious defalcation and an abstruse exacerbation, he said severely, but I’ll tell you the size of it. Everything is composed of small molecules of itself and they are flying around in concentric circles and arcs and segments and innumerable various other routes too numerous to mention collectively, never standing still or resting but spinning away and darting hither and thither and back again, all the time on the go. Do you follow me intelligently? Mollycules?</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- I think I do.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- They are as lively as twenty punky leprechauns doing a jig on the top of a flat tombstone. Now take a sheep. What is a sheep only millions of little bits of sheepness whirling around doing intricate convulsions inside the baste. What else is it but that?</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- That would be bound to make the sheep dizzy, Mick observed, especially if the whirling was going on inside the head as well.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The sergeant gave him a look which no doubt he would describe as one of non-possum and noli-me-tangere.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- That’s a most foolhardy remark, he said sharply, because the nerve-strings and the sheep’s head itself are whirling into the same bargain and you can cancel out one whirl against the other and there you are – like simplifying a division sum when you have fives above and below the bar.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- To say the truth I did not think of that.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- Mollycules is a very intricate theorem and can be worked out with algebra but you would want to take it by degrees with rulers and cosines and familiar other instruments and then at the wind-up not believe what you had proved at all. If that happened you would have to go back to over it till you got a place where you could believe your own facts and figures as exactly delineated from Hall and Knight’s Algebra and then go on again from that particular place till you had the whole pancake properly believed and not have bits of it half-believed or a doubt in your head hearting you like when you lose the stud of your shirt in the middle of your bed.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- Very true, Mick decided to say.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- If you hit a rock hard enough and often enough with an iron hammer, some mollycules of the rock will go into the hammer and contrariwise likewise.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- That is well known, he agreed.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- The gross and net result of it is that people who spend most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of the parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycles as a result of the interchanging of the mollycules of each of them, and you would be surprised at the number of people in country parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Mick made a little gasp of astonishment that made a sound like the air coming from a bad puncture.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- Good Lord, I suppose you’re right.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">- And you would be unutterably flibbergasted if you knew the number of stout bicycles that partake serenely of the humanity.</span></p></blockquote></div>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-14521537726835703872007-08-21T20:21:00.001+01:002008-12-09T21:00:27.599+00:00Knut Hamsun - Hunger<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRU-ZDfGqY-cldLiwwTBchlzJceJcjmVjuu8ORVolmV5EA5S-euDbFyHTQxSjcZHZVpAkOEBZE9UN6CLj5v03fOF3JI9ZARQrSx39948yTsa0IUUg8Xu_Hts0W2M1wz2pER9gGMHxOOOo/s1600-h/hunger+redux.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5101239253624059714" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRU-ZDfGqY-cldLiwwTBchlzJceJcjmVjuu8ORVolmV5EA5S-euDbFyHTQxSjcZHZVpAkOEBZE9UN6CLj5v03fOF3JI9ZARQrSx39948yTsa0IUUg8Xu_Hts0W2M1wz2pER9gGMHxOOOo/s400/hunger+redux.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Knut</span> Hamsun's <em>Hunger </em>is, quite seriously, <em>Fight Club</em> coming straight from the 1890s. Some argue that it was the inspiration, effectively, for the books that were in themselves the inspiration for <em>Fight Club</em> and all that other bleak post-modern jazz. This, then, is the bleakest of them all.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“One of the most disturbing novels in existence” says Time Out, and they’re not far off. <em>Hunger</em>, or <em><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Sult</span></em> in Norwegian, was written in 1890 by Hamsun, a Norwegian novelist who went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. His many other novels attracted much critical praise, although none were stylistically as direct and uncompromising as Hunger.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“<em>Hunger</em> is the crux of Hamsun’s claims to mastery. This is the classic novel of humiliation, even beyond Dostoevsky” says the Observer. Hunger is the deeply painful, despairing account of a young writer, existing on the edge of starvation, which blends physical intensity with a psychological paranoia. Its central – and effectively only – character is deeply unsympathetic, and indeed mentally unstable. Throughout, the demoralising, debilitating effects of hunger are written with uncomfortable vividness. What little hope the sparse plot may occasionally offer is dashed with tremendous unfeeling, so that the novel exists only in the monotony of despair. Such is its power, its profundity of effect, its sheer absence of positive relief, that the novel should not be described as merely disturbing, but also as peculiarly vicious.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br /></span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Such is <em>Hunger's</em> </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">status as a cult classic that it has recently been republished in an updated format, borrowing for its cover design the traditional imagery of the modern thrillers which it so overbearingly resembles. This 2006 <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Canongate</span> edition features, in addition to the definitive <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Lyngstad</span> translation (previous attempts erred heavily in the translation of Hamsun’s style), an excellent introduction by Paul <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Auster</span>. Those of you familiar with Paul <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Auster</span> will know that that makes it a work of art in itself, but in addition to an excellent lyrical portrait of the book, his introduction delves quite astutely into the literary and philosophical qualities of the novel. From the neutral, characterless facts which make up the structure and plot of the book, ‘the bare bones’, it follows primarily for <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Auster</span> that <em>Hunger</em>: “….is a work devoid of plot, action and – but for the narrator – character. By nineteenth century standards, it is a work in which nothing happens. The radical subjectivity of the narrator effectively eliminates the basic concerns of the traditional novel.”</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><em>Hunger</em> has become for many one of the first modernist books, using its radical differences to portray its central character in an astoundingly novel manner. Or as the Irish Times says, it is “…A work of pioneering modernism… black, funny, evocative, exasperating. A magical and terrible insight into the human soul.”</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br /></span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The elements which define <em>Hunger</em> as a uniquely modern work are many and diverse, but not completely obscure. It is a novel partly of nihilism, of existentialism and, in many ways, of sheer emptiness. The tale of starvation, as <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Auster</span> notes, has no “redeeming social value”; although “it puts us in the jaws of misery, it offers no analysis of that misery, contains no call to political action”. It is debatable whether the novel brushes with pseudo- or <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">proto</span>-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Nietzschean</span> ideas, especially as Hamsun “who turned fascist in his old age during the Second World War” turns out to be a pretty despicable guy. Yet <em>Hunger</em> is so wildly cynical, so tragically comic and so utterly cutting that it would be hard to square it with any kind of fascist or semi-fascist ideology. Its central character is both maniacally deluded and pathetically weak, subsisting in a life of total physical and spiritual poverty, so that he could hardly be seen as some kind of super-man.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Perhaps, as a novel of survival and unflinching realism, <em>Hunger</em> may well be an artfully exaggerated masterpiece of modern auto-biography. However, as <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Auster</span> remarks, making an interesting comparison to Joyce’s own masterpiece:</span></p><blockquote><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“<em>Hunger</em>; or the portrait of the artist as a young man. But it is an apprenticeship that has little in common with the early struggles of other writer. Hamsun’s hero is no Stephen <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">Dedalus</span>, and there is hardly a word in <em>Hunger</em> about aesthetic theory. The world of art has been translated into the world of the body – and the original text has been abandoned. Hunger is not a metaphor; it is the very crux of the problem itself.”</span></p></blockquote><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The modernism of this novel derives equally from its style as it does from its content. <em>Hunger</em> is a relentlessly subjective book, inhabiting all the follies and duplicities of its protagonist’s conscious and unconscious thoughts. Existential, and nihilistic, it abandons many of the fixed notions of traditional literature – again, as <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Auster</span> says:</span></p><blockquote><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“Historical time is obliterated in favour of inner duration. With only an arbitrary beginning and an arbitrary ending, the novel faithfully records the vagaries of the narrator’s mind, following each thought from its mysterious inception all through all its meanderings, until it dissipates and the next thought begins. What happens is allowed to happen.”</span></p></blockquote><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Finally, it is the radical nature of this novel which ultimately assures it its power and status; a potent combination of abstraction and realism derived from nothing less than the rejection of all tradition and assumption, until there is no existence or meaning left; and for Hamsun or his character “there is nothing to keep him going – and yet he keeps on going. He walks straight into the twentieth century.”</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br /></span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Auster</span>’s introduction in the modern edition, from which I have rather too liberally quoted here, was in fact originally written in 1970. My own first introduction to the book was actually from the 1999 Rebel Inc. anthology <em>Rebel Yell: A Century of Underground Classics</em>. It contained a series of introductions and short excerpts from a selection of cult classics, amongst which was Hamsun’s <em>Hunger</em>. The introduction there, by Donald <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">MacLean</span>, was equally superb, an enthusiastic paean to a book which, if it “were published today… would seem like the work of an exciting new voice, a voice by turns <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">startingly</span> direct and seductively lyrical”. Like <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">Auster</span>, he explores the subjectivity, immediacy and literary nihilism of the novel, and digresses into the controversial issue of Hamsun’s own personality, but at base he seeks only to enthuse on the intensity of <em>Hunger</em>.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Here below is an extract, roughly the second half of the excerpt printed in <em>Rebel Yell</em>. Little more needs to be said, except to note that <em>Hunger</em> is as relevant today as it was over a century ago, and the whole novel still proves as powerful, and as disturbing, as any of the other thrillers that abounds in modern literature. Enjoy!</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></span></p><blockquote><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"I had fallen asleep where I lay and was awakened by the policeman. There I was, mercilessly called back to life and my misery. My first feeling was a stupid amazement at finding myself out in the open, but this was soon replaced by a bitter despondency; I was on the verge of crying with grief at still being alive. It had rained while I slept, my clothes were soaking wet, and I felt a raw chill in my limbs. The darkness had become even thicker, I could barely make out the officer’s features in front of me.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Stand up now, will you!’ he said.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I got up immediately; if he had ordered me to lie down again, I would also have obeyed. I was very depressed and quite weak, and besides I started almost instantly to feel the pangs of hunger again.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘Wait a minute, you dummy!’ the officer called after me. ‘You’re walking off without your hat. There, now go on!’</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">‘It seemed to me too there was something I had forgotten,’ I stammered absent-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">mindedly</span>. ‘Thanks. Good night.’</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">And I shambled off.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">If only one had a piece of bread! One of those delicious little loaves of rye bread that you could munch on as you walked the streets. And I kept picturing to myself just the sort of rye bread it would have been good to have. I was bitterly hungry, wished myself dead and gone, grew sentimental and cried. There would never be an end to my misery! Then I stopped suddenly in the street, stamped my feet on the cobblestones and swore aloud. What was it he had called me? Dummy? I’d show that policeman what it meant to call me a dummy! With that I turned around and rushed back. I felt flaming hot with anger. Some way down the street I stumbled and fell, but I took no notice, jumped up again and ran on. On reaching <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">Jærnbanetorvet</span> Square, however, I was so tired that I <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">didn</span>’t feel up to going all the way to the pier; besides, my anger had cooled off during the run. Finally I stopped to catch my breath. Who cared a hoot what such a policeman had said? - Sure, but I <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">wasn</span>’t going to swallow everything! – True enough! I interrupted myself, but he <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">didn</span>’t know any better. I found this excuse to be satisfactory; I repeated to myself that he <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">didn</span>’t know any better. And so I turned around once more.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">God, the sort of ideas you get! I thought angrily: running around like a madman on sopping-wet streets in the dark of night! My hunger pains were excruciating and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">didn</span>’t leave me for a moment. I swallowed my saliva again and again to take the edge off, and it seemed to help. I <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">hadn</span>’t had enough to eat for many, many weeks before this thing came up, and my strength had diminished considerably lately. When I had been lucky enough to get my hands on a five-krone bill by some manoeuvre or other, the money generally <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">didn</span>’t last me long enough for my health to be fully restored before a new hunger spell descended upon me. My back and shoulders had borne the brunt of it; I could stop that gnawing pain in my chest for a moment by coughing hard or by walking extremely bent over, but there was nothing I could do for my back and shoulders. Anyway, why <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">didn</span>’t my prospects simply brighten up? <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">Didn</span>’t I have the same right to life as anyone else, like <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">Pascha</span> the second-hand <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">bookdealer</span>, or <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">Hennechen</span> the steamship agent? <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31">Didn</span>’t I have the shoulders of a giant and two stout arms for work, and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_32">hadn</span>’t I even applied for a job as a woodcutter on <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33">Møller</span> Street to earn my daily bread? Was I lazy? <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_34">Hadn</span>’t I applied for work and listened to lectures and written reviews and plugged away like crazy day and night? And <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_35">hadn</span>’t I lived like a miser, eaten bread and milk when I had plenty, bread when I had little, and gone hungry when I had nothing? Did I live in a hotel, did I have a suite on the ground floor? I lived in a godforsaken loft, a tinsmith’s shop abandoned by everybody and his brother last winter because it snowed in there. So I <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_36">couldn</span>’t make head nor tail of the whole situation.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I was thinking about all this as I walked along, and there <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_37">wasn</span>’t as much as a spark of malice, envy or bitterness in my thoughts..."</span></p></blockquote><p align="justify"><br /></p>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-1392781883267117652007-08-16T20:42:00.001+01:002008-12-09T21:00:29.909+00:00Keith Hemmerling - Law School Suicide (**Guest Post!**)<div align="justify"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE_BzsYW0RaoViphBI3o7P6nMNCOe7eIQGKEY9_6A4aEr79ETctng1UPnOYAFHlFHtFGBkM8CgHjETaFg7i3nDYTdPyiGSGlDeuCAT763_uSKSLZyvuHxBNRR3SPScjqQnwhbOVkxsVE4/s1600-h/lss+redux.jpg"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5099389823526532850" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE_BzsYW0RaoViphBI3o7P6nMNCOe7eIQGKEY9_6A4aEr79ETctng1UPnOYAFHlFHtFGBkM8CgHjETaFg7i3nDYTdPyiGSGlDeuCAT763_uSKSLZyvuHxBNRR3SPScjqQnwhbOVkxsVE4/s400/lss+redux.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style><br /></span><blockquote><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“You’re not gonna know who you’re watching up here, a madman or just a guy trying to make a whole lotta hell out of a bad situation…a whole lotta heaven. My name is Caulfield Dean and I make up movies in my mind…”</span></p></blockquote><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Caulfield Dean, CD A</span></p><br /><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This is a kind of departure from the usual posts here. Law School Suicide is a four CD set released by a singer-songwriter named Keith Hemmerling through some sort of entity called the Damien Stone Theatrical Company. Keith Hemmerling plays Caulfield Dean, Caulfield Dean is the main character in this story, Caulfield Dean wrote the story, Caulfield Dean is Damien Stone’s real name and so is Keith Hemmerling. All, some or none of this is true. Confusing, eh?</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This is not a book.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This is not a play, although it is called one.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This is not an album, although it is a CD set.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">It is not music but it contains music.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">It is like nothing you have ever heard before.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The mystery of who Keith Hemmerling is and why he did what he has done is one of the eternal questions I think that will never be fully explained. All we know is the information that he has provided about himself, what we can deduce from his songs and writings and the fragments of art we still have. He came from nowhere and then returned, leaving us with scraps of videos, references to his literature on the subject of mental health and ten known albums released between 2000 and 2003. What we know is that Keith Hemmerling seems to be a recovered heroin addict with manic depressive bi-polar disorder, who spent much of his life in and out of whore-houses and working in sex-shows.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The story begins as a thinly veiled autobiography, detailing the relationship between Caulfield Dean, a singer-songwriter in law-school in Virginia, and his friend and classmate Alee. From the beginning Dean launches into an epic soliloquy that races from suicide to mental telepathy, briefly stopping off at jealousy, sports and James Dean. This is not only a blistering performance from Hemmerling that instantly creates a vivid and real character in the listeners mind, but also upsets our sense of reality. Dean’s first line sets himself up as an unreliable narrator. But we are told two things; firstly, all you must decide if he is telling the truth about this story and secondly, he made up the entire story in the Bar examination of 1979. As the story progresses layers of contradiction and confusion amount and as the storyline spirals out of control, reaching such levels of absurdity that we will be forced to question the very nature of the piece and its narrator.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The medium that this work uses is so unique that Hemmerling is free to experiment in a way that would be unfeasible using the mediums of literature, drama or music alone. Law School Suicide lurches uncontrollably through places, times and ultimately through reality and fantasy, becoming increasingly erratic as the listener realizes the extent of Dean/Hemmerling’s mental illness. Large amounts of time focus on instrumental passages with Hemmerling messing around on the guitar with no structure in mind, twenty minute long stream-of-consciousness speeches sprawl into unknown territories, pieces of tape cut out mid-stream due to “bad” editing and at one stage Hemmerling breaks down mid sentence and screams at his sound engineer.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">But there is more to Law School Suicide than just its strangeness. It is a complex look at metal illness; it also has one of the funniest speeches ever written in the form of a music publisher’s rant (“the lyrics used to be important when they were printed on the album – but no one can read anymore…stick to the audience, you know they are one-syllable-people”); but most striking of all, it gives the character of Alee a level of realism and density that is extremely rare even in many character based works of literature, even while this entire exposition takes place in one phone message.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">A unique masterpiece that still defies explanation or understanding, Law School Suicide cements Keith Hemmerling as the most unusual and innovative artists of all time. At the moment information about where Keith is, he has not released any more music to my knowledge since 2004’s The War in Zevon. One may never truly understand Hemmerling but somehow that’s part of the attraction.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Caulfield Dean, Damien Stone, the art of Erica Escobar, Forty-Deuce; the sex shows of old Time Square, the butterfly tattoo, the Minnesota pipeline, drugs, therapy, whore-Madonna complexes and the law-school student who suicided last year. The music of Keith Hemmerling inhabits its own universe, one that is as beautiful as it is inexplicable.</span></p><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">(<em>Review written by 'mr x, indeed'</em>)</span></p><br /><br /><a href="http://www.divshare.com/download/1595954-7f1"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">CD A</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br /></span><a href="http://www.divshare.com/download/1596557-740"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">CD B</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br /></span><a href="http://www.divshare.com/download/1608802-b1c"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">CD C</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br /></span><a href="http://www.divshare.com/download/1608947-8c6"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">CD D (with cover art)</span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span></div>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-83200769566343353272007-08-14T14:22:00.000+01:002008-12-09T21:00:29.933+00:00Charles Bukowski - Hot Water Music<div align="justify"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0tg3ZPKzZv24rR9sXtR2PzFoE4JX-umbdCWaFmB49aF5ow6mQlsq3Cmah_3NVMPKGEXKPQ1h8rbixbL2nNUJqwcozlihDLR1BPDd2hUOY9KD-WGdBUN1Ii119t-eCg3LVqWfwYQ3iuio/s1600-h/hotwatermusic+redux.jpg"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5098546402166293634" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0tg3ZPKzZv24rR9sXtR2PzFoE4JX-umbdCWaFmB49aF5ow6mQlsq3Cmah_3NVMPKGEXKPQ1h8rbixbL2nNUJqwcozlihDLR1BPDd2hUOY9KD-WGdBUN1Ii119t-eCg3LVqWfwYQ3iuio/s400/hotwatermusic+redux.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br /><blockquote><p>The sun shone through the window. It was just before noon. Hot water gurgled through the pipes of the building.</p><p>Hank Chinaski got up, went to the bathroom, and vomited.</p><p>He came back into the living room, and cracked open a warm beer.</p><p>He drank it, then decided to update his blog.</p><p>"Shit,” thought Hank, “that didn’t sound right.”</p></blockquote><br /><br /><p>If you’ve ever had a hangover, you’ll like this book.</p><br /><br /><p>Charles (or Chuck) Bukowski was a German-American writer, somewhat in the style of the Beat generation authors of the 1950s. He lived in Los Angeles for most of his life, and apparently enjoyed it some of the time. Best known perhaps for his novels such as <i>Post Office</i>, <i>Factotum</i> and <i>Ham on Rye</i>, he also wrote widely in poetry and short prose. This collection, <em>Hot Water Music</em>, first published in 1983, is one of his later works. He died in 1994, at the ripe old age of 74, which is pretty impressive, considering.</p><p>Bukowski's life and literature (in good old Beat style, seemingly inseparable) revolved around drinking, writing, fucking, arguing, more drinking and sleeping everyday until noon. Simultaneously, he was one of the most, honest, sympathetic characters in modern iterature (often through his lyrically named alter ego, Hank Chinaski) as well as a callous blackguard and general dirty old man.</p><br /><br /><p>The secret to Bukowski’s work, as with almost all good literature, lies with what might be called the creative impulses, or literary stimulants. Chief among all such is the substance of alcohol, as a brief survey of 20th century writing easily illustrates. Irish literature, which birthed the modern novel through James Joyce’s <em>Ulysses</em>, is especially notable in this respect. It has subsisted on its own steady diet of stout/porter and whiskey (barley malt, not rye) for several generations and counting. A significant proportion of <em>Ulysses</em> occurs within the walls of public houses, while Flann O’Brien made copious use of the Guinness advertising slogan “a pint of plain is your only man” in his debut Joycean-homage novel of 1939, <em>At Swim Two-Birds</em> and, in later life, attempted to get a contract to get paid to write a potted history of the whiskey distillery industry.</p><p>American literature is hardly much different. F. Scott Fitzgerald was never much more than a creator of martinis in book form. Kerouac, a sometime fervent Joycean, nevertheless had the purity of his message somewhat distorted and reshaped by the differing stimulants of Benzedrine and marijuana. And Bukowski, of course, was the ultimate barfly. Yet Bukowski took the progress of English language literature another step further, with the focus not so much on the effect of inebriation as on the impulse of being chronically hungover.</p><p>And that, pretty much, is the secret to Chuck Bukowski. Of course, it’s all a little bit facetious - or, as the man would have said himself, “Balls!”</p><br /><br /><p>As for the stories themselves, Bukowski has an astounding variety. Most of them do follow a kind of consistent Beat/lowlife mien, but he constantly switches between styles of narration (first person, alter-ego, or Joe Bloggs everyman), situations and even mood (okay, mostly he riffs on cynicism… but occasionally he forays into the elegiac). Bukowski is also consistently, and bitingly, hilarious, and you’re unlikely to get bored or jaded reading his stories.</p><p>Earlier Bukowski work featured a bit more surrealism, and often adapted his mien to the zaniness of classic science fiction (e.g., ‘The Gut-Wringing Machine’, or ‘Dr. Nazi’). His 1973 collection, <em>South of No Nort</em>h, provides a good example of this earlier style.</p><p>In addition, the vast majority of Bukowski’s work involves, in some way or other, the scatological, the pornographic or the downright obscene. This collection alone contains not one, but two separate stories of mutilated penises (‘Not Quite Bernadette’, and ‘Praying Mantis’). The two extracts below, as it happens, don’t contain anything of particular crudity (well, except for the doberman… but read on). It’s not that I’m prudish, it pretty much just worked out that way when I was choosing them.</p><p>Finally, I am hesitant (perhaps gladly) to indulge in much literary criticism here, chiefly because of an internal Bukowski shouting “Balls!” at anything too arch. These books are meant to be enjoyed intuitively, not critically. But, there are two dynamics which I feel are a good way of looking Bukowski’s humour, particularly amongst the arcs of his desultory short stories: first, making the mundane farcical, and second, making the farcical mundane. These short stories tend invariably to follow one or other of these dynamics. These two extracts make a good illustration:</p><br /><br />1st,<br /></span></div><blockquote><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><p>Valoff did have a fairly interesting face – compared to most poets. But compared to most poets almost everybody has.</p><p>Victor Valoff began:</p><br /><p>"East of the Suez of my heart</p><p>begins a buzzing buzzing buzzing</p><p>sombre still,still sombre</p><p>and suddenly Summer comes home</p><p>straight on through like a</p><p>Quarterback sneak on the one yard line of my heart!"</p><br /><p>Victor screamed the last line and as he did so somebody behind me said, “Beautiful!” It was a local feminist poet who had grown tired of blacks and now fucked a doberman in her bedroom. She had braided red hair, dull eyes, and played a mandolin while she read her work. Most of her work involved something about a dead baby’s footprint in the sand. She was married to a doctor who was never around (at least he had the good sense not to attend poetry readings). He gave her a large allowance to support her poetry and to feed the doberman.</p><p>Valoff continued:</p><br /><p>“Docks and ducks and derivative day</p><p>Ferment behind my forehead</p><p>in a most unforgiving way</p><p>o, in a most unforgiving way</p><p>I sway through the light and darkness…”</p><br /><p>“I’ve got to agree with him there,” I told Vicki.</p><p>“Please be quiet,” she answered.</p><br /><p>“With one thousand pistols and one thousand hopes</p><p>I step onto the porch of my mind</p><p>to murder one thousand Popes!”</p><br /><p>I found my half pint, uncapped it and took a good hit.</p><p>“Listen,” said Vicki, “you always get drunk at these readings. Can’t you contain yourself?”</p><br /><p>“I get drunk at my own readings,” I said. “I can’t stand my stuff either.”</p><br /><p>“<i>Gummed mercy,</i>” Valoff went on, “<i>that’s what we are, gummed mercy, gummed gummed gummed mercy…</i>”</p><br /><p>“He’s going to say something about a raven,” I said.</p><br /><p>“<i>Gummed mercy,</i>” continued Valoff, “<i>and the raven forevermore…</i>”</p><br /><p>I laughed. Valoff recognized the laugh. He looked down at me. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “in the audience tonight we have the poet Henry Chinaski.”</p><p>Little hisses were heard. They knew me. “Sexist pig!” “Drunk!” “Motherfucker!”</p><p>I took another drink. “Please continue, Victor,” I said. He did.</p></span><p></p></blockquote><div align="justify"><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">(from ‘Scum Grief’)<br /></span></div><div align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />and, 2nd </span></div><div align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></div></span><blockquote><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Joe Mayer was a freelance writer. He had a hangover and the telephone awakened him at 9 a.m. He got up and answered it. “Hello?” <p>“Hi, Joe. How’s it going?”</p><p>“Oh, beautiful.”</p><p>“Beautiful, eh?”</p><p>“Yes?”</p><p>“Vicki and I just moved into our new house. We don’t have a phone yet.But I can give you the address. You got a pen there?”</p><p>“Just a minute.”</p><p>Joe took down the address.</p><p>“I didn’t like that last story of yours I saw in Hot Angel.”</p><p>“O.K.” said Joe.</p><p>“I don’t mean I didn’t like it, I mean I don’t like it compared to most of your stuff. By the way, do you know where Buddy Edwards is? Griff Martin who used to edit Hot Tales is looking for him. I thought you might know.”</p><p>“I don’t know where he is.”</p><p>“I think he might be in Mexico.”</p><p>“He might be.”</p><p>“Well, listen, we’ll be around to set you soon.”</p><p>“Sure.” Joe hung up. He put a couple of eggs in a pan of water, set some coffee water on and took an Alka Seltzer. Then he went back to bed.<br />The phone rang again. He got up and answered it.</p><p>“Joe?”</p><p>“Yes?”</p><p>“This is Eddie Greer.”</p><p>“Oh yes.”</p><p>“We want you to read for a benefit…”</p><p>“What is it?”</p><p>“For the I.R.A.”</p><p>“Listen, Eddie, I don’t go for politics or religion or whatever. I really don’t know what’s going on over there. I don’t have a tv, read the papers… any of that. I don’t know who’s right or wrong or who’s wrong, if there is such a thing.”</p><p>“England’s wrong, man.”</p><p>“I can’t read for the I.R.A., Eddie.”</p><p>“All right, then…”</p><p>The eggs were done. He sat down, peeled them, put on some toast and mixed the Sanka in with the hot water. He got down the eggs and toast and had two coffees. Then he went back to bed.</p><p>He was just about asleep when the phone rang again. He got up<br />and answered it.</p><p>“Mr. Mayer?”</p><p>“Yes?”</p><p>“I’m Mike Haven, I’m a friend of Stuart Irving’s. We once appeared in Stone Mule together when Stole Mule was edited in Salt Lake City.”</p><p>“Yes?”</p><p>“I’m down from Montana for a week. I’m staying at the Hotel Sheraton here in town. I’d like to come see you and talk to you”</p><p>“Today’s a bad day, Mike.”</p><p>“Well, maybe I can come over later in the week?”</p><p>“Yes, why don’t you call me later on?”</p><p>“You know, Joe, I write just like you do, both in poetry and prose. I want to bring some of my stuff over and read it to you. You’ll be surprised. My stuff is really powerful.”</p><p>“Oh yes?”</p><p>“You’ll see.”</p><br /></span><p></p></blockquote><div align="justify"><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">(from ‘A Working Day’) </span></div>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-39295305053678319502007-08-12T18:14:00.000+01:002008-12-09T21:00:30.102+00:00Chuck Palahniuk - Fight Club<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjByI5yuYyaJJhG3IySxLSq3Q3YY5QD_-XABDUNWiHgj_IJKBOYuAsrIm2mQkIosXNVfUxkWJT0lj1RJl-hsWENJXN_gUF1sa89KphTz3OdsB2bUKj_Yl97DSxFKFdS_lcVoKKwARwa_zg/s1600-h/fight+club+redux.jpg"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5097910038336881746" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjByI5yuYyaJJhG3IySxLSq3Q3YY5QD_-XABDUNWiHgj_IJKBOYuAsrIm2mQkIosXNVfUxkWJT0lj1RJl-hsWENJXN_gUF1sa89KphTz3OdsB2bUKj_Yl97DSxFKFdS_lcVoKKwARwa_zg/s400/fight+club+redux.jpg" border="0" /></span></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This is a superb novel, arguably one of the last classics of the 20th century. Published in 1996, and only Chuck Palahniuk’s second novel, it was later made into an equally excellent film with Edward Norton and Brad Pitt. For most people who know Fight Club, it’s through seeing the film. I was perhaps fortunate in reading the book first (although when it had already been made famous by the film), yet as I say, both are equally good in my opinion. The adaptation is done faithfully, while at the same time adding an extra edge to the work; the main noticeable disparity is the different endings. All I’ll say is, the book’s ending does not involve the Pixies!<p> <br /></span></p><p align="justify"></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"></span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"></span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Whether in print or in cinema, or whether considered internally or externally, <i>Fight Club</i> is primarily a cultural phenomenon. Its story centres on the invention, by a dispossessed and disillusioned office worker, of an underground ‘fight club’ – i.e., bareknuckle, no-holds barred fighting in the dark basements of unscrupulous bar owners. Within the book, this phenomenon provides young, white-collar drones with a disturbingly effective form of release from their lives, and validation of their existence. Beyond this, as the novel progresses, ‘fight club’ accelerates and expands into increasingly violent, nihilistic and subversive expressions of discontent.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Outside of the text, the theme of <i>Fight Club</i> clearly found a resonance amongst readers around the world, particularly those (like myself) who read it in their teenage years. <i>Fight Club</i> really is a quintessentially modern book, a kind of <i>fin de siècle</i> portrait of the hollowness of our post-industrial world and decadent capitalist society. (Or a portrait of something very, very bad, anyway!).</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">To leave it for a moment to the professionals - amongst the quotes on the back of my Vintage-published edition, the novel is variously described as: “an outrageously apocalyptic comedy of horrors” by none less than Bret Easton Ellis of American Psycho fame; or as a “haunting and strikingly original American urban nightmare”, by the Glasgow Herald. In fact, it is the Big Issue which puts it best, as:</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"></span></p> <br /><br /><blockquote><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><p align="justify">“A terrifying roller-coaster read which rapidly goes out of control. Palahniuk’s debut novel reads like Franz Kafka updated to modern-day New York via Paul Auster. What begins as a vicious evening of bare-handed fighting suddenly becomes a terrifying, apocalyptic movement… wonderfully unpleasant”</p><p align="justify"></p><p align="justify"></p></span></blockquote><br /><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Basically, this is novel is <i>dark</i>, both morally and psychologically. It merely <i>begins</i> with the subversion of authority and society, and then soon progresses to the subversion of humanity itself. As the story goes, when a publisher disparaged his previous effort, <i>Invisible Monsters</i>¸ as too disturbing, Palahniuk got mad and replied something along the lines of “You ain’t seen nothing yet”. Hence, and as a result of a wholly deliberate effort to produce a superlatively disturbing book, the world was given this wonderful work of violent, sado-masochistic anarchy. Yet at the same time, <i>Fight Club</i> isn’t a shock book and as a philosophical, if deeply cynical work of literature, is quite sublime in places.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Palahniuk has a distinctive writing style, built almost exclusively around narration and dialogue, terse and detached with a cutting sense of humour. Interspersed in the minimalism of his text is an abundance of factoids, delivered here by Tyler, the suave, confident anti-hero of the novel. <i>Fight Club</i> may become one of the first popular classics of post-modern literature; blending perhaps as it does the hyper-realistic, detached dialogue pioneered by Don DeLillo with a hyper-literate, culture- and media-steeped wash of the information age.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Here’s a extract which is typical of Palahniuk’s style in general. This scene, the ‘invention’ of fight club, should be very familiar to fans of the film:</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"></span></p><br /><br /><blockquote><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"...When we invented fight club, Tyler and I, neither of us had ever been in a fight before. If you’ve never been in a fight, you wonder. About getting hurt, about what you’re capable of doing against another man. I was the first guy Tyler ever felt safe enough to ask, and we were both drunk in a bar where no one would care so Tyler said, “I want you to do me a favor. I want you to hit me as hard as you can.”</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I didn’t want to, but Tyler explained it all, about not wanting to die without any scars, about being tired of watching only professionals fight, and wanting to know more about himself.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">About self-destruction.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything down to make something better out of ourselves. I looked around and said, okay. Okay, I say, but outside in the parking lot. So we went outside, and I asked if Tyler wanted it in the face or in the stomach.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Tyler said, “Surprise me.”</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I said I had never hit anybody.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Tyler said, “So go crazy, man.”</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I said, close your eyes.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Tyler said, “No.”</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Like every guy on his first night in fight club, I breathed in and swung my fist in a roundhouse at Tyler’s jaw like in every cowboy movie we’d ever seen, and me, my fist connected with the side of Tyler’s neck.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Shit, I said, that didn’t count. I want to try again.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Tyler said, “Yeah it counted,” and hit me, straight on, <i>pow</i>, just like a cartoon boxing glove on a spring on Saturday morning cartoons, right there in the middle of my chest and I fell back against a car. We both stood there, Tyler rubbing the side of his neck and me holding a hand on my chest, both of us knowing we’d gotten somewhere we’d never been and like the cat and mouse in cartoons, we were still alive and wanted to see how far we could take this thing and still be alive.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Tyler said, “Cool.”</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I said, hit me again.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Tyler said, “No, you hit me.”</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">So I hit him, a girl’s wide roundhouse to right under his ear, and Tyler shoved me back and stomped the heel of his shoe in my stomach. What happened next and after that didn’t happen in words, but the bar closed and people came out and shouted around us in the parking lot.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Instead of Tyler, I felt finally I could get my hands on everything in the world that didn’t work, my cleaning that came back with the collar buttons broken, the bank that says I’m hundred of dollars overdrawn. My job where my boss got on my computer and fiddled with my DOS execute commands. And Marla Singer, who stole the support groups from me.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Nothing was solved when the fight was over, but nothing mattered..."</span></p><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">(Ch. 6)<br /></span></p></blockquote><br /><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This next extract is similar, but is taken from a bit later on in the book, where the events have progressed somewhat. This I think gives a better feel for the inner spirit of the book, the sense of meaning (and no-meaning) which ties together the plot. Psychologically, Palahniuk’s character seems designed to be both familiar and unsettling. Part of the black comedy of <i>Fight Club</i> is what I might call its simultaneous portrayal of humanity and inhumanity. Here, the narrator is perched on the edge between the mundanity of his office lifestyle and the transcendence of his nihilistic violence:</span></p><br /><blockquote><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"My boss sends me home because of all the dried blood on my pants, and I am overjoyed.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The hole punched through my cheek doesn’t ever heal. I’m going to work, and my punched-out eye sockets are two swollen-up black bagels around the little piss holes I have left to see through. Until today, it really pissed me off that I’d become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed. Still, I’m doing the little FAX thing, I write little HAIKU things and FAX them around to everyone. When I pass people in the hall at work, I get totally ZEN right in everyone’s hostile little FACE</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Worker bees can leave</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Even drones can fly away</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The queen is their slave</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">You give up all your worldly possessions and your car and go live in a rented house in the toxic waste part of town where late at night, you can hear Marla and Tyler in his room, calling each other human butt wipe.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Take it, human butt wipe.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Do it, human butt wipe.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Choke it down. Keep it down, baby.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Just by contrast, this makes me the calm little center of the world.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Me, with my punched out eyes and dried blood in big black crusty stains on my pants, I’m saying HELLO to everybody at work. HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. That is nothing. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it’s so cool to be ENLIGHTENED. Like me.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Sigh.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Look. Outside the window. A bird.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">My boss asked if the blood was my blood.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The bird flies downwind. I’m writing a little haiku in my head.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Without just one nest</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">A bird can call the world home</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Life is your career</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I’m counting on my fingers: five, seven, five.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The blood, is it mine?</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Yeah, I say. Some of it.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This is the wrong answer."</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">(Ch. 8)</span></p></blockquote><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><i>Fight Club</i> is many things; a cult novel effectively and powerfully transformed into a cult film, a dark yet comic tract of psychological horror, a philosophical rebuke to the modern world, and a post-modern psychological thriller. Most effortlessly of all, though, it is one thing: pure, 100% proof, distilled cynicism.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Hence Tyler Durden’s acrid reply to the supposed “Zen spirit” of the above passage, delivered perhaps not in a <i>haiku</i>, but in a passable <i>koan</i>:</span></p><br /><blockquote><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“Sticking feathers up your butt,” Tyler says, “does not make you a chicken.”</span></p></blockquote><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br /><br /></span></p>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-6515580725380950012007-08-10T21:57:00.001+01:002009-03-18T19:48:37.658+00:00Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-HfoyhoCjbVxuzTh6sbdY6xrfOd1w9ZtL_l3fZRgpKDW827Jg9UzSJ2nwCOXYboOLULB6Yr8V3r_yGxMciqx3bj24iIy5LmALZswguxSs6ZFjQGado1QlDjXkLlXPdpZRlA77NgEipas/s1600-h/dharmabums+redux.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5097180095760024642" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-HfoyhoCjbVxuzTh6sbdY6xrfOd1w9ZtL_l3fZRgpKDW827Jg9UzSJ2nwCOXYboOLULB6Yr8V3r_yGxMciqx3bj24iIy5LmALZswguxSs6ZFjQGado1QlDjXkLlXPdpZRlA77NgEipas/s400/dharmabums+redux.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div align="justify"><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Jack Kerouac is one of the best, if not the best, author that I’ve ever found. Especially since he was an author with a wide and varied body of work. Jaroslav Hasek (see below) wrote one very good book – which in fact he never actually completed, finishing only four out of a planned six volumes of <em>The Good Soldier Schweik</em>. Whereas Kerouac, effectively, spanned an entire generation of subculture with his work. It’s fair to say Kerouac is synonymous with the ‘Beat generation’, although so much so as to obscure the variety and contrasts of his books; from the hopeful ‘Great American Novel’ of <em>The Town and the City</em>, to the intensity of his classic <em>On the Road</em> as well as his later output, such as <em>Big Sur</em>, in which ‘the mirror of the Beat way of life is hammered at and it shatters’.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Which is why, in a way, I am choosing for this post his 1959 book, <em>The Dharma Bums</em> - even beyond the fact that it is, probably, my favourite Kerouac novel. I won’t pretend that I didn’t get into Kerouac through, and directly from, <em>On the Road</em>. Neither will I even suggest that that book is less than deserving of its immense acclaim. Rather, I hope to present <em>The Dharma Bums</em> as a gentler, perhaps subtler introduction to the beauty and sublime genius of Kerouac, uncrowned King of the Beats.</span></p><br /><br /><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">First of all, <em>The Dharma Bums</em> is, and isn’t, a book about Buddhism. Mostly, it is; although its religion is of an oblique nature, and the book has its fair share of the secular hedonism of <em>On the Road</em>. Basically, the novel follows Kerouac’s autobiographical alter ego, Ray Smith, journeying around the west coast of America with various Beat hipsters and ‘Buddhist cats’. There’s a loose dichotomy of urban, Frisco loucheness and wild, outdoorsy solitude. It starts with Smith on the railroad, hopping freights, and ends with him alone on ‘Mt. Desolation’, a Washington peak where the idealistic nature-lover gets a job as a fire lookout. In between, there’s poetry, drink, girls, and various socially uncountenanced nonsensical high jinks – roughly in that order.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><em>The Dharma Bums</em> is a classic Kerouac story of vibrancy and exuberant lifestyles – ‘A descriptive excitement unmatched since the days of Thomas Wolfe’, according to the New York Times – but also a beautifully tender exposition of idealism, compassion and small philosophical virtues. At the centre of The Dharma Bums spiritual and literary heart is the character of Japhy Ryder (in real life, Gary Snyder, a noted ecologist, socialist and poet). Japhy, throughout a bosom pal to the older Kerouac, is a devotee of Zen Buddhism and plays the foil for Kerouac’s efforts to find peace and understanding in the titular Dharma (dharma loosely translates as ‘truth’ or ‘law’, and is fundamental to the terminology of Buddhism and spiritual enlightenment). His efforts are not entirely successful, as is explained in this Penguin blurb:</span></p></div><blockquote><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"Following the explosive energy of <em>On the Road</em> comes <em>The Dharma Bums</em>, in which Keroauc charts the spiritual quest of a group of friends in search of Dharma, or Truth. Ray Smith and his friend Japhy, along with Morley the yodeller, head off into the high Sierras to seek the lesson of solitude and experience the Zen way of life. But in wildly Bohemian San Francisco, with its poetry jam sessions, marathon drinking bouts and experiments in ‘yabyum’, they find the ascetic route distinctly hard to follow"</span></p></blockquote><div align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span></div><br /><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Part of the beauty of <em>The Dharma Bums</em> is its contradictions and simple, honest humanities. Penguin recently released a deluxe classic edition with a scholarly introductory essay by Ann Douglas (and extra nice artwork to boot) which discusses the philosophical, moral and psychological issues of the book – of which there are complex and many. Nevertheless, they fail to obscure either the innocent idealism and zany happenings, or lyrical and prosaic sensibilities (of which I am conscious of having said far too little here) of this wonderful novel.</span></p><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Indeed, the literary quality of this, and all of Keroauc’s work (his ‘poetry of pure prose’) is what ultimately assures it a devoted readership. As a mere taste, here is one description of many of the marvellous ‘Japhy Ryder’, the archetypical Dharma Bum:</span></p><br /><blockquote><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style><p align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"…About a mile from there, way down Milvia and then upslope toward the big campus of the University of California, behind another big old house on a quiet street (Hillegass), Japhy lived in his own shack which was infinitely smaller than ours, about twelve by twelve, with nothing in it but typically Japhy appurtenances that showed his belief in the simple monastic life – no chairs at all, not even one sentimental rocking chair, but just straw mats. In the corner was his famous rucksack with cleaned-up pots and pans all fitting into one another in a compact unit and all tied and put away inside a knotted-up blue bandana. Then his Japanese wooden pata shoes, which he never used, and a pair of black inside-pata socks to pad around softly in over his pretty straw mats, just room for your four toes on one side and your big toe on the other. He had a slew of orange crates all filled with beautiful scholarly books, some of them in Oriental languages, all the great sutras, comments on sutras, the complete works of D.T. Suzuki and a fine quadruple-volume edition of Japanese haikus. He also had an immense collection of valuable general poetry. In fact if a thief should have broken in there the only things of real value were the books …</span></p><p><span style="font-family:times new roman;">...orange crates made his table, on which, one late sunny afternoon as I arrived,was steaming a peaceful cup of tea at his side as he bent his serious head to the Chinese signs of the poet Han Shan. Coughlin had given me the address and I came there, seeing first Japhy’s bicycle on the lawn in front of the big house out front (where his landlady lived) then the few odd boulders and rocks and funny little trees he’d brought back from mountain jaunts to set out in his own ‘Japanese tea garden’ or ‘tea-house garden’, as there was a convenient pine tree soughing over his little domicile.</p><p>A peacefuller scene I never saw than when, in that rather nippy late red afternoon, I simply opened his little door and looked in and saw him at the end of the little shack, sitting cross-legged on a Paisley pillow on a straw mat, with his spectacles on, making him look old and scholarly and wise, with book on lap and the little tin teapot and porcelain cup steaming at his side. He looked up very peacefully, saw who it was, said, ‘Ray, come in,’ and bent his eyes again to the script.</p><p>‘What you doing?’<br /><br />‘Translating Han Shan’s great poem called “Cold Mountain” written a thousand years ago some of it scribbled on the sides of cliffs hundreds of miles away from any other living beings.’</p><p>‘Wow.’ … "</span></p></blockquote><div align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">(Ch. 3) </span></div>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6566693580510815870.post-62696985896502243512007-08-09T09:02:00.000+01:002008-12-09T21:00:30.907+00:00Jaroslav Hasek - The Good Soldier Schweik<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXpCwBju96z1RlfgGbjQL5q4n35DkTKQHPz2K4WQFOuvC3xqaxOyZRzX4sxGLVN_xHI6X40vGdJLFjhralTgQ4CcV4y6yh4sHcqq6Jzlwe8YdYuoAmIuQGnCFL0aAdm42U3RbguVYFcxY/s1600-h/schweik+redux.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5096626414346028034" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXpCwBju96z1RlfgGbjQL5q4n35DkTKQHPz2K4WQFOuvC3xqaxOyZRzX4sxGLVN_xHI6X40vGdJLFjhralTgQ4CcV4y6yh4sHcqq6Jzlwe8YdYuoAmIuQGnCFL0aAdm42U3RbguVYFcxY/s400/schweik+redux.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div align="justify"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><p>Ok, to begin: <em>The Good Soldier Schweik</em> is, insofar as the term means anything, my ‘favourite’ book. Certainly it’s one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read, and re-read several times. This well-thumbed paperback has pride of place on my bookshelf and, above all, continues to offer a vivid comic portrayal of central Europe early in the last century.</p><br /><p>Published in 1930, it is a long, winding tale about a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War One. Schweik is the hero of the tale, a dim-witted fool, idiot savant, or as the author describes him, “a modest unrecognized hero”. The book is a series of farcical and satirical escapades within the Austrian military, against the largely unspoken backdrop of the war’s senseless violence.</p><br /><p>What I like about this book in particular is the style of humour. That <em>The Good Soldier Schweik</em> has its own distinct character is the quality which to my mind assures it classic status, albeit perhaps in a cult sense. On the one hand, its style is sufficiently original to allow the book to stand on its own. On the other, it is gently evocative of a peculiarly European culture and, moreover, sense of humour - especially the combination of satire and farce. Anyone who reads Schweik, I think, will soon appreciate the cheerfully daft yet politically acerbic mind of its central character, and the comic, surreal 20th century world in which he lives.</p><br /><p>Here’s a short extract to give the flavour of <em>The Good Soldier Schweik</em>’s humour. Naturally, I’ll start at the beginning…</p><br /><br /><br /><blockquote><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style><br />"Schweik, the Good Solider, Intervenes in the Great War:<br /><br /><p>‘So they’ve killed Ferdinand,’ said the charwoman to Mr Schweik who, having left the army many years before, when a military medical board had declared him to be chronically feeble-minded, earned a livelihood by the sale of dogs – repulsive mongrel monstrosities for whom he forged pedigrees. Apart from this occupation, he was afflicted with rheumatism, and was just rubbing his knees with embrocation.</p><p>‘Which Ferdinand, Mrs Müller?’ asked Schweik, continuing to massage his knees. ‘I know two Ferdinands. One of them does jobs for Prusa the chemist, and one day he drank a bottle of hair oil by mistake; and then there’s Ferdinand Kokoska who goes round collecting manure. They wouldn’t be any great loss, either of ‘em.’</p><p>‘No, it’s the Archduke Ferdinand, the one from Konopiste, you know Mr Schweik, the fat, pious one.’</p><p>‘Good Lord!’ exclaimed Schweik, ‘that’s a fine thing. And where did this happen?’...”</p></blockquote><br /><br /><p>And the rest, as they say, was history. World War One began, obviously, and Hašek’s bumbling hero was immortalised in this classic novel. It’s difficult to accurately portray the humour of this book, since it works on a long story arc and many, many hilarious, rambling escapades. Best, then, to leave it to the rather good blurb on the back of my copy, which gets it nearly right…</p><br /><br /><blockquote><style type="text/css"> p { text-indent: 2em; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0; } </style><br /><p>“Because humour, real humour, knows no national boundaries, this satire on army life, about the military career of a fat little dog fancier from Prague, is one of those rare books which, while belonging to literature, abounds in the qualities which can be appreciated by the widest possible range of readers. Schweik’s adventures – as a malingerer, in the detention barracks, as a drunken chaplain’s orderly, as batman to an over-amorous lieutenant, making off with the colonel’s dog, and getting important messages all mixed up – have won him the lasting enthusiasm of readers everywhere.”<br /></p></blockquote><br /></span></div>gabbagabbaheyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07764368059568550318noreply@blogger.com4