100 Novels, The Bone People, The End

Finished The Bone People tonight. It's a novel that turns dark very quickly. The last 100 or so pages get narrated by Joe, Simon and Kerewin. For the most part, the novel is in Kerewin's voice. When Joe narrates (or rather when the story turns its focus on him) he's released from prison after a sentence for severely beating Simon almost to death. As repentance he wanders into the wilderness and attempts suicide, only to be saved by a Maori healer. Simon recovers in a hospital then gets sent into foster care, from which he runs away--to where Kerewin's tower is, or was rather. Kerewin runs away too. A doctor discovers that she may or may not have a cancerous tumor in her stomach. Refusing treatment, she wanders off to die. This was a particularly painful chunk of reading, not so much because I cared all that much for Kerewin as a character, but could deeply sympathize with the pain described, as it made me think of my father, and what pain he must've gone through as he lay dying from leukemia. At the same time I wanted to shout angrily at Kerewin because she's essentially trying to commit suicide. (She blames herself for causing Simon to get savagely beaten by Joe.) Giving up in such a cowardly way--again I thought of my father; he was dying, but he fought the evil shit that was eating him alive.

Kerewin's character from the best I could figure out was in her early to late thirties, maybe forties, and her actions seemed way too dramatic of a reaction to the circumstances that led to them. Joe's attempt was perhaps somewhat more believable. Simon's recovery was OK, although the doctor who encourages him to escape foster care until he can be reunited with either Joe, Kerewin or Joe's family was a bit too much; but, Simon seems almost a bit too unnatural as a child, at once weirdly innocent and sensitive and impish and destructive.

Oddly enough Hulme tacks on an epilogue in which all the characters reunite in a sort of made-for-TV movie way; it's the sentimental sort of thing as a reader you want to see happen, and yet, it seems contrived.

Hulme stylistically tries to be too modernist, too Joycean. As I read the novel, with its weird line breaks and quick shifts in point of view, I kept thinking if she hadn't so consciously tried to make the novel experimental, and had used a more conventional straightforward narrative technique, the novel itself would've been stronger. She has an interesting idea with the three main characters and plays on a theme of love and redemption, and oddly enough, despite all of her attempts at modernist experimentation, she provides you with a fairly conventional tale.

I was also a bit disappointed with the way she handled Simon. Throughout the novel she builds up Simon as a mystery figure, with mythological potential, only to end it with Simon being strange (perhaps suffering from untreated post traumatic stress disorder), but a fairly ordinary child. I kept expecting a Gabriel Marquez leap into magical realism.

Anyhow, it's an OK novel, conventional despite its experimental use of language and point of view.

100 Novels, or Here I Go a-Spiraling

The image of a spiral staircase keeps recurring in my reading, in particular as a metaphor for spiritual journey. Last month, I read The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong, which literally uses the image as a metaphor for her spiritual journey.

Currently, of course, I'm reading The Bone People by Keri Hulme, in which the protagonist Kerewin Holmes lives in a tower with a spiral staircase.

Armstrong found her inspiration in T.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday," in which Eliot's speaker climbs a metaphorical spiral staircase, and faces things he doesn't necessarily want to face at each bend of the spiritual road. Neither did Armstrong for that matter.

Eliot makes the image concrete here: "At the first turning of the second stair/ I turned and saw below/ the same shape twisted on the banister/ Under the vapour in the fetid air/ Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears/ The deceitful face of hope and despair."

I wonder if Hulme was inspired by Eliot's poem. Climbing the spiral staircase in Kerewin's tower is a consistent image in The Bone People, and catches Kerewin in moments of hope and despair. It seems to hide a symbolic mystery--besides the staircase, spirals appear elsewhere, even on her cups and glasses, in nature--and that mystery seems to be acted out with the co-antagonists (or what passes for antagonists; though Kerewin battles herself as well) Joe and Simon Gillayley. The child Simon is being played up as a big mystery, and as I'm approaching the climax of the novel, as the action seems to be receding, I keep expecting that mystery to reveal itself.

A Bit on The Bone People, Novel 2

Though I'm about halfway through the second novel of my 100 novel reading attempt, I don't have much to say about The Bone People. It's an OK book, but seems a period piece; it fits to the time it was published. The protagonist, Kerewin Holmes, is sort of a proto-feminist character, a bit of a parody, a woman playing the tough-guy Hemingway role: hard drinking, fishing, fighting, smoking--although no sex yet. In the section I read this morning, she took down a male character (Joe Gillayley, the closest thing to an antagonist) with aikido, in a few swoops, and with much braggadacio later.Was this really what feminists sought in the late '70s early '80s? a parody of an already parodied figure. I can't imagine the character of Kerewin holding up to many feminist standards today. Or am I completely out of the loop since I last took any women's studies classes almost a dozen years ago?

100 Novels

Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel has inspired me to do my own reading of 100 novels. I will keep updating this list, as well as posting thoughts about the books I'm reading here.

The first two books on my list are
1. Atonement by Ian McEwan

and

2. The Bone People by Keri Hulme

Hitchcock May Have Been On To Something

Well, Alfred Hitchcock may have aware of a primitive fear, at least according to this article.

Apocalypse One More Time

Here is a piece by Harold Bloom about what's wrong with America. He ends the piece with a scary quote: "In September, the US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice was quoted as saying at Zion Church in Whistler, Alabama: 'The Lord Jesus Christ is going to come on time if we just wait.'"

I hope everyone will pay more attention to the apocalyptic overtones coming from our backwards-assed right-wing administration in D.C.

The Spiral Staircase

I've been reading Karen Armstrong's The Spiral Staircase, and have found it absorbing. It's the second book by Armstrong that I've read, the first being Buddha, and I so far I find myself feeling a strong connection to Armstrong, of course, not because I was in a religious order: I feel the connection because religion and faith always seem a part of my life--if there are constants in it, religion is high on the list--and yet I feel no connection to God or faith at all. Even as a child, I didn't feel this connection, no sense at all that God was a presence in my life or looked after my well being (if there is a God, and that God has been looking after me, he's been pretty cruddy); and yet I've yearned for an understanding, for a real answer as to whether that God is real or not. (And no Bible quotes from anyone commenting on this blog entry, especially from fundies--you're a big problem in my loss of faith, and not a solution; if there is a God, he ought to smite you.)

God's general cruddy behavior toward me--it's a big issue. As Armstrong progresses in her autobiography, she finds herself helping take care of an austistic child, Jacob, and at one point she suddenly has to face Jacob having an epileptic seizure: "It seemed unfair. Jacob had only recently started to have seizures. Did he not have enough to deal with? I wanted to blame somebody, and God was the obvious target, but somehow I could not get into this. Did I really believe that there was a Being up there somehow responsible for everything that happens on earth, including Jacob's disabilities? No, I did not. Not only did it seem highly unlikely that there was an overseeing deity, supervising earthly events, apportioning trials and rewards according to some inscrutable program of his own, but the idea was also grotesque. If there was a loving providence, it bore no relation to any kind of love that I could conceive."

There's the rub: An "overseeing deity...apportioning trials and rewards according to some inscrutable program of his own...."--that's the bit that gets me. If I've felt any sense of connection to God, it's only through trials, with few rewards (if any), that I seem to experience God, this supposing loving God, who has puzzled me for most of my life. In adolescence, for instance, I yearned to have sex, was aroused as naturally and normally as any teenaged boy, and yet God said it was wrong to fornicate, and in one extreme Jesus suggests self-mutilation for simply thinking about something sinful. And then to discover a love object and get rejected by that person, and fear asking her out, and feel a sense that God is punishing you for even desiring her--the virginal one who follows Him and seems always rewarded by Him--and that combination becomes self-hatred and bewilderment that in some way lasts a lifetime. And this is divine love? How can I love a God, or conceive of such a Being who has created such a torment of trials?

Bewilderment with the secular world is another connection I find reading Armstrong, especially her sense of lack of self confidence. In the sixties, after she left convent life, and while at Oxford University, she saw students all around her who had such confidence in themselves, where she hardly had a sense of self, of who she was or what she could make of herself. (So far, as I read, she has come to the point in which she is trying to destroy that sense of self through annorexia.) To this day, I experience a sense of bewilderment, even as I try to pour myself deeper into the secular world, to understand it, I can't seem to find my place in it. I see and hear and read writers in their 20s and 30s--my contemporaries--and what do they have that I don't? I seem to have an innate ability to write. Armstrong sought to become a scholar; and yet somehow, despite getting her doctorate, is at first rejected--the Oxford dons can't imagine her as a prof within the groves of academe, nor can she imagine herself there. I try so hard at writing and so far I feel rejected. My own alma mater rejected me last year in its creative writing program. I must have some kind of talent, some ability with words. What makes me different from my contemporaries? One thing I see: Religion seems inconsequential in their lives, even if they are believers. Has religion stunted me? Can I see beyond God and find myself and write?

Same Old Story, Same Old Song and Dance?

The New York Press recently published a story by Sam Sacks about the debate over MFA programs in creative writing, an old and perhaps unresovable argument, about the quality of today's literary output and its effects on publishing as well as on writing itself.

At first when I started to read this piece, I thought I was going to hear the same arguments that critic John Aldridge made in Talents and Technicians more than a decade ago. Aldridge took a No-Sale tone slicing and dicing not only MFA programs, but also heralded writers such as Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver and Anne Tyler. Sacks, reviewing the collection The Best New American Voices 2006, takes up a similar tone: "...the stories included are so monotonous that they seem to have been written by a single person of middling talent....the plot and action are always neglible...the things the characters do are always mundane and largely to their psychological conflicts...From time to time a structural innovation appears to offer an interesting novelty, but under the packaging the same old formula is always to be found."

The spin on this piece, though, is that Sacks himself attended an MFA program--at the University of Arizona--unlike Aldridge, who is mainly a critic, although he published a bad novel. Sacks is hardly a cheerleader like Tom Grimes (the director of the MFA program at Texas State University in San Marcos) or Madison Smartt Bell, who in their respective books acknowledge that workshops can teach the craft and technique of writing and not the art of it. Sacks doesn't make a full on assault against MFA programs, but targets some of their weakenesses: lack of intimacy in classes even with small groups, profs whose only credentials may be the publication of one book or even a few stories, the development of rules and doctrine--a basic formulaic approach to the short story.

To me, this formulaic approach is the most troubling aspect. Many critics complain about the homogenous "workshop" style that produces bland fiction with a bland voice. A legitimate criticism that can be deflated by workshop graduates who happen to be great stylists like T.C. Boyle or Denis Johnson. And as a writer, who has been interested in getting an MFA and has even applied but so far been rejected, I've read fiction by MFA teachers and grads--Grimes, for instance, or other Texas State grads like Scott Blackwood (who published an excellent story collection In the Shadow of Our House) or Ray Robertson and have seen a potential for good talent. Their prose is rhythmic and economical and I feel one of my weaknesses as a writer is choppiness. (The sound of language and sentences has been an obsession since reading Hemingway's breathless use of the coordinating conjunction "and".) I feel an MFA might strengthen my actual prose and, indeed, help me with the essences of craft. Anyhow, back to formula. In effect, there's nothing wrong with formula. Some great literary works follow formulas and structures--dramas in five acts, stories with exposition, rising action, climax and denoument. But Sacks elaborates upon the formulaic structure taught in MFA programs, and that formula follows writers out into the real world of writing and publishing and short stories are often published by small academic presses and literary magazines--the small magazines that are often staffed by those holding MFAs. And here is the kicker for me--I submit a short story I've written to such a journal. Is it rejected because I don't have three letters behind my name (I do have an MA in English)? is it read and the MFA editor doesn't recognize the story formula? or is it just that I'm a no-talent hack and should give up fiction altogether? Sacks opens up these questions because the MFA does give you a network of editors and publishers and opportunities; it becomes a signal of credential.

And yet, some really good novels that I've read lately--Wesley Stace's Misfortune for example-- break rules such as the quintessential "Show don't tell" and yet provide fascinating characters and above all great stories. Misfortune is Stace's first novel, and while he may have had some connections to the publishing world through his career as a musician, the novel itself is a surprise--a first novel running at over 500 pages--and a rulebreaker. Is such a book an exception to the MFA world and its affect on publishing? on writing itself? Let's hope not, or talents may be missed simply because they don't fit a particular style.

I'm a Bad Mo-Fo Jedi

how jedi are you? :: by lawrie malen

Paglia At Salon

Camille Paglia is back at Salon.

Apocalypse Now, or The End of Ambiguity

This weekend I glanced through the book Assassin's Gate by George Packer about the Iraq war, and one word stood out as I skimmed pages--apocalyptic, a word that has come to mean not revelation itself, but an end of time itself. At the same time this weekend, while waiting to go to a Christmas party with B, and flipping channels, I caught on the History Channel a show about the Apocalypse, the Revelation of St. John the Divine--the revelation (a hallucination?) of the end of the world as Christians know it, and the supposedly hopeful revelation of Jesus' Second Coming. Having been raised in a somewhat evangelical household as well as community, Revelation sometimes got woven not only into church sermons, but also into everyday conversations (a coach objecting to the word "Beast" blaring across a t-shirt; a TV show on long before that hideous Left Behind series of novels in which people vanish during the Rapture), and has long since been a serious questioning point in my own loss of faith.

In the History Channel program, a Christian scholar points out one of the most troubling aspects of the New Testament's end time narrative: the absolute triumph of absolute good over absolute evil; the scholar saw such a triumph as not necessarily good, or even hopeful. As I listened, and thought, what was this violent hallucination all about--a final solution: Let's rid the Universe of what God (a supposedly supreme being capable of perfect good and perfect love, though often full of wrath and vanity) deems Evil. If you're with us (believers; good) you wallow in Heavenly bliss; if you're against us (nonbelievers;evil) you're eternally scorched in Hell's fiery pits, never to be seen again. A final solution.

Adolf Hitler had a final solution: eradicate the Jews, eradicate all the impure, and let the great Aryan Master Race march in final triumph, in final world domination; and yet Hitler is the embodiment of evil in the 20th century. His was an apocalyptic vision, a vision organized by fascism. The Fuehrer was supreme. You were either with him or against him. Sound familiar? Is this the vision of our current president and his cronies, men such as Donald Rumsfeld mentioned in Assassin's Gate as being one of many "apocalyptic" visionaries of the Iraq war.

In Romania, Condoleeza Rice has been trying to quiet European criticism of the U.S.'s practice in pursuing terrorists. Are you against us? And earlier, in Fort Drum, New York, addressing troops, Dick Cheney said a sudden withdrawal from Iraq would be dangerous. Who's against us, telling us to withdraw? Are we as a nation slowly edging toward these people's apocalyptic vision of some final triumph of good over evil? A theocratically-driven totalinarianism no worse than that of the regimes we're facing down in the Middle East? Bush's thoughts are informed by the same evangelicalism that moves Pat Robertson to call for the assassination of the Venezuelan president, an evangelicalism informed by the triumphal march of good over evil in Revelation, a position in which ambiguities do not exist: The shades of gray most people have to deal with no longer exist in such a worldview. In this worldview you are either with us or against us. Victory or Death.

The Language of War

This morning as I was driving into work, I caught a piece on NPR, an interview with an Arab (Palestinian) journalist who had been covering the war in Iraq, and had written a book about the war. The topic turned to insurgency. With this particular journalist, it was scary to hear that American forces in the early stages of the war were passing houses full of insurgents, who at the time weren't firing upon them. But this journalist also noted the distinctions and factions that made up the insurgents: Some, for instance, were loyalists to Saddam Hussein, others were Islamists wanting neither Saddam nor Americans in Iraq.

Another Arab journalist brought up terminology: When this journalist wrote, he used "resistance fighters", explaining that in Arabic the term had nuances that weren't there in English. "Resistance fighter" is a term that you won't likely hear in the Western press. Our preferred term is "insurgent," which is vague, inoffensive. Dubya and Rummy have gone so far as to say that "insurgent" is hardly a good descripitive term. One term Dubya suggested was "Saddamist." It made me think connotatively--Sodomist, Sodomites. Words, of course, that have connotations of sin, particularly for those of the religious ilk of someone like Dubya.

But, this whole name thing made me also think of a discussion I once read about the terms "rebel" and "revolutionary"; if you lose the revolution, you're a rebel, just as Johnny Reb is still a rebel 140 years after the American Civil War. The question of course in Iraq: Are the insurgents rebels or revolutionaries? What are we? Though this is cliche: History often does get written by the victors. But we aren't victors, are we? We've toppled one government, but have yet to make anything new. And was democracy what the Iraqi people wanted? Are we colonizers? Are we just "policing" as we did in Vietnam? Are the insurgents rebels, revoluntionaries, or resistance fighters? What are they rebelling against? What do they want to change Saddam Hussein's reign into? What are they resisting, besides American/Western occupation? Perhaps that is what the Middle East itself has wanted--to resist the influence of the West, the insurgence of the West on a way of life. Except the money and power oil brings. Feed the Beast, but fight it off.

So much murkiness with this war, with Dubya's crusade to rid the world of all ill, of all evil, by commiting Americans and the West to a worldwide state of perpetual war. "War is peace," said Big Brother in Orwell's 1984. And in that novel language came to mean what the state said it meant. Not unlike where we are now. Are we fighting Saddamists? sodomites? terrorists? rebels? revolutionaries? or insurgents? Perhaps that's the troubling aspect of any war: Why do we fight? Hemingway made it clear in A Farewell to Arms that men went to war for abstractions such as courage and honor. The narrator Frederick Henry realizes what bullshit those terms are, and he leaves the battlefield. Still, we fight. We (humanity) fight over words and words become bullets and planes crashed into towers. All in the language of war.

Read All About Charlie Here

Here is an article on Charles Darwin

Me in A Nutshell

You are a complete literary geek, from knowing the
classics (even the not-so-well-known classics
and tidbits about them) to knowing devices used
in writing, when someone has a question about
literature, they can bring it to you and rest
assured; you know the answers.


How much of a literary geek are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Mother Died Today

"Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure." The opening lines of Albert Camus' The Stranger have been hovering in my head since Friday, the day my own mother died--in a nursing home, as does Meursalt's mother. I don't want to sound too pretentious, too literary when I say lines from literature come to mind when I learned my mom had died. Actually, Friday morning, when my sister called to tell me, she said, "Mom passed." That's how I heard it. That euphemism for finality, implying this death was a temporary thing, not an end, but a movement, a shift from the physcical into the spiritual, an afterlife. These days I'm agnostic--I can't make up my mind about God, much less an afterlife, although all throughout this weekend, even at the end of the funeral as I stood around talking to cousins I knew and to distant relatives I didn't know, I kept imagining Mom and Dad (though divorced almost ten years) floating somewhere in the clouds, together, all the past forgiven, Dad foregoing the soul of his second wife to reunite with his first. Happiness would come to them, though it had stopped here on Earth a decade ago. Or, maybe, several decades ago; I can't be sure.

"Mom passed." Those words are less blunt than Monsieur Meursalt's. "Died" is a journalist's word, and Camus was a journalist; I work in journalism. It's definite, certain--"Mom died," final, no more. Supposedly objective and not surrounded by connotations, at least as the journalist uses it, "died" means what it says, says what it means: there is no possibility of an afterlife, no speculation, no nonsensical bullshit; such things are for clergy and philosophers; journalists are neither, they have no opinions either way. Mothers and fathers cannot reunite and forgive and forget. That's sentimental, and something you cannot prove. But, today, despite my agnosticism, I want to imagine my mother happy and my father happy, that maybe they saw each other in some after-realm, somewhere--maybe on some spiritual facsimile of the train where they met--Mom is able to walk without pain, with no Parkinson's tremor in her arm; and Dad is able to talk without pain, no cancerous white blood cells overloading his body. I can't be sure. Only, for now, it's what I want.

The Man in Black

Last night, while working on writing, I kept the TV on--a bad thing--;but CBS was running a tribute to Johnny Cash. This tribute turned out lackluster, a half-assed attempt to bring together generations of musicians and singers, odd pairings such as Jerry Lee Lewis and Kid Rock singing Cash songs with about as much enthusiasm as a stifled orgasm, all the muscle work without the pleasure. It seemed just an hourlong ad for the new film Walk the Line, of which there were a few clips shown that had already been shown as trailers in theaters or on the Web. Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, the film's stars, made their appearances, plugging the film. Nothing really new or interesting was said about Cash or his career. And sadly several of the performers, including Lewis and Kris Kristoferson, tried to imitate Cash's signature wavering voice and style. I just hope the film doesn't disappoint as much as this ad for it did. Johnny Cash deserves better.

Better Late Than Never

I share a trait with Kevin Smokler, the editor of Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times: I'm never on time for any cultural trend, and I'm lagging way behind on blogging. I've tried it inconsistently for about two years now, but have never had a real focus in any of my blogs. Maybe this one won't be focused either. In general, I want to talk about books and art and movies and other cultural phenomena; at the same time, I'm interested in letting you in on a little bit of my life, as Pam Ribon does at pamie.com. And, I'll try to update this thing more often. Perhaps I'll actually gain some readership--become a famous blogger.

Pitts, Katrina and God's Punishment

Once again Leonard Pitts proves to be one of the best columnists journalism has. As he did after the 9/11 attacks, he picks apart the stupid prejudices people have held regarding news of hurricane Katrina. One of particular interest is the inevitable "God's punishment." Apparently a group called Repent America, Pitt's reports, issued a statement that said the storm was God's way of canceling a gay festival that was to have taken place in New Orleans this week.

Why I'm still amazed at the "God's punishment" theory, I don't know. Anyone who's read the Bible sees the pattern. Piss off God, he kicks ass without taking names. It's a vastly incomprehensible characteristic for a supposedly all-knowing, ever-present, all-loving god to take. Oh, crap! Look at that, the humans I created are way too wicked so I'm going to send a 40-day, 40-night flood and kill everybody--except for Noah, his family and a lot animals. I'm going to destroy my unruly children, instead of trying to show them the way to understanding and compassion.

And, this all-powerful god, if indeed he wanted to cancel a gay shindig, strikes not only the city this "wicked" activity is taking place, but floods several states, displacing or killing thousands of people like the collateral damage (aka civilian murder) of some impersonal military strike. What, for instance, does Mississippi have to do with a celebration of homosexuality in New Orleans, Lousiana? Wouldn't an all-powerful god have the accuracy to pinpoint just New Orleans as he does Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible?

The Buddhist would call such a god "unskilled."

And, wasn't Jesus here, at least to Christian doctrine as I understand it, to wash away our sins so God would no longer have to do such things as sending devastating hurricanes to kill his wicked children?

Well, kudos to Leonard Pitts. If you get a chance, read his column. It's a strong piece.

His Books Are His Monument

Skimming through Mike Cox's biography of Fred Gipson, author of Old Yeller, (a novel I've never read; although of course saw the movie) I happened upon the photo of Gipson's tombstone, which ends Cox's book. The tombstone reads: "His Books Are His Monument."

Simple yet poignant. The whole meaning of a writer's life. It's what I hope people will know me for--books. I've yet to publish one.

quote of the day

"You must write to please yourself; you must be completely honest about the world as you see it."

--From Writing A Novel by John Braine