The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

by Laurence Sterne, 1759
448pp / 526 pp
08/18/07 - 09/09/07

After reading a couple of books that weren't quite what comes to mind when people ask "So, what kind of books do you like to read?" I read this book, which I'd been meaning to read for some time.

This is one of those books that seems to often come up in discussions of other books and authors I like; if I encounter a book often enough in such contexts, I'm likely to read it. Plus the description "the post-modern novel before there was anything to be modern about" seems engineered to pique my interest.

You might recognize that quote from the 2005 movie, Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story. And here's the thing: though I realize that the better sort of readers are loathe to discuss a good book in terms of its movie adaptation, while reading this book my thoughts kept turning to the film. Specifically, although the movie purports to fail in adapting the book to the screen (instead focusing on the actors themselves), I kept marveling at how well the filmmakers translated the book to film.

When I first saw the movie, before reading the book, I was disappointed that only the first twenty minutes or so were spent depicting Tristram Shandy's plot. But then, the plot hardly happens in the book, either. Tristram Shandy sets out to tell the story of his own life, starting at conception, but due to a series of digressions and interruptions, he barely manages to tell the story of his birth. He's the most dilatory narrator since Scheherazade, if unintentionally so.

So instead of the story of an English gentleman which a reader might expect, we are instead subjected to his inane opinions, his father's preposterous theories (which remind me of DeSelby from The Third Policeman; a mini Irish Lit course focusing on Sterne, Joyce, and O'Brien would be fun), his Uncle Toby's military obsession, and a number of abortive frame stories. Again, the movie does a remarkable job of similarly frustrating the viewer's expectations.

I was surprised by the extent to which I found this book to be plainly funny. I don't expect the formal tone of an eighteenth century novel to make me laugh out loud, but this book managed to, several times.



This is probably a strong recommendation of this book: a couple of days after starting it, I had to go to a small town where I knew no one, and would most likely be killing a few evening hours hanging around my hotel room. After leaving my house, I realized that I'd left the book behind. Whereas someone who wasn't thoroughly enjoying the book he's reading might have elected to pick up a magazine, or start a new book, or hope that there was something good on TV, I instead opted to pick up a backup copy.

This plan risked disappointment. I'd had to go to three different chain bookstores before finding my first copy, and I didn't have time to shop around before leaving town. I was near the East Cobb Borders, though, which actually had three different editions of the book. (This may become my quick test of the merits of a bookstore, and by extension, the local population: how many copies of Tristram Shandy do they carry?) What's more, one of them was the Dover Thrift Edition, retailing for an even $5. Granted, Dover's sub-par printing materials don't work so well in longer books (it was a little like reading a dried-out phonebook), but I respect Dover's mission of bringing the public domain affordably into the hands of the people, and in some ways the Dover version was superior to the Barnes & Noble Essential Reading version. Having compared a few different editions, I'll say that some English Department denizen somewhere would do well to edit an Annotated Tristram Shandy.

Of course, after finally getting to my hotel room, I realized that I had internet access and the damn thing's freely available online.

Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

by Richard Fariña, 1966
329pp
08/02 - 08/17

I know a girl on myspace whose "About Me" field used to list "Dislikes: the veneration of the Enlightenment, Mark Twain..." Which, though I disagree with the particular objects of her dislike, I very much identify with the sentiment, the notion of disliking the veneration of one thing or another. Surely, we all have a personal cache of things & ideas we find irksomely overrated. As for me, I dislike the veneration of the Sixties, and Beats.

This book might appear to be a contemptible exercise in Sixties-worship. It's by a friend of Bob Dylan, who married Joan Baez's sister, with whom he recorded a couple of folk albums. Its protagonist is one of those romanticized antiheroes who opts out of mainstream society in favor of jazz, hitchhiking, dope, chicks, and Eastern religion. The back cover fluff goes so far as to call this "the classic novel of the 1960s" (this despite the fact that it's set in 1958).

But even though it was Fariña's friendship with Dylan that eventually became book material, he first was college buddies with one Thomas Ruggles Pynchon. And that's the relationship I'd like to see a novel spun out of (Peter Yarrow could be written out altogether). Fariña seems to have been influenced by his friend, and what might otherwise have been a straightforward picaresque Beat novel has various seemingly Pynchonesque flourishes. Fariña's characters in particular--the gangster Giacomo Aquavitus, the drug-peddling giant Buddha--would not be out of place in a Pynchon novel.

To be fair, the Pynchon connection isn't the only way in which Been Down... transcends the clichéd Sixties narrative. Fariña's prose is great: he has an allusive, cryptic and hallucinatory stream-of-consciousness style that reminds me of a blogging friend of mine. Fariña imbues his contemporary hipster slang with almost mystic overtones; superficial notions of "cool" become profound concepts. Which might actually be precisely the kind of shallow Sixties-worship that's forgivable in a high schooler, at best.



How I Came to Read This Book: in the course of reading my last book, Warlock, I came across mention of the fact that, while at Cornell in 1958, Pynchon and Fariña started a "micro-cult" around that book. Pynchon discusses this in his introduction to Been Down..., so my purchase of this book was motivated not only by my interest in a book by Pynchon's Pal, but also in reading Pynchon's intro.
For those of you keeping score at home, the chain of associations flows thusly: NPR segment-->The Raw Shark Texts-->Warlock-->Been Down...-->postage scale-->Mrs. Palsgraf.

Warlock

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The Mezzanine

by Nicholson Baker, 1988
133pp
07/03/07 - 07/14/07

After reading four consecutive 2007 books, I plumbed the depths of history with this 1988 "novel." There's a peculiar kind of psychic reversion that occurs when reading literature from my childhood--specifically, in the infancy of my awareness of the cultural stew in which I found myself immersed (ie, age 8)--that is very much "of its time." This particular book felt like time traveling to a simpler time, even though the notion of 1988 as "a simpler time" is still a novel concept (to me, at least. I am still reluctant to acknowledge that there are people in this world for whom 1988 is a hazy memory at best).

I guess this book is a little notorious (though perhaps not as notorious as the Baker novel Monica gave Bill, which Steven King likened to "meaningless little fingernail paring") as "the many-footnoted novel about a one-story escalator ride." This is an apt nutshell insofar as the book is concerned with minute and discursive observations, with practically no action. Still, though, I take some issue with that summary: we get a pretty full account of the events of the narrator's morning, and anyway, we hear very little about the escalator ride itself.

So it's a book of meditations on some of the more minute, quotidian aspects of modern life. The narrator happens to be in the middle of a Penguin Classics paperback edition of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, a quote from which pretty much forms this books thesis: "Manifestly, no condition of life could be so well adapted for the practice of philosophy as this in which chance finds you today!" Thus the narrator, finding himself in a late-eighties office building, proceeds to philosophize thereupon.

Which makes for surprisingly compelling reading. Baker seems to have genuine reverence for the well-engineered consumer products that fill our lives, and he has an amazing knack for bringing poetry from the modern living condition. The escalators in question, for instance, are "a pair of integral signs swooping upwards between the two floors they served." This is paired with a keen, obsessive eye for detail. E.g., we're treated to the histories of milk cartons and drinking straws, and the minute little changes they've gone through during the narrator's lifetime, and he agonizes over the alternative designs eschewed by their manufacturers. The act of stapling, we are told, is a three phase act. Sociological implications of familiar brands and products are likewise commented on; CVS is "a whole chain dedicated to making available the small, expensive, highly specialized items that readied bodies for human civilization...Things were for sale whose use demanded nudity and privacy."

I, for one, would love to read a whole lot more writing in this vein. We all live in a world populated by exponentially more consumer products than people, but our primary vehicle for observation about these things (as opposed to people) seems to be bad standup. ("Airline peanuts are weird...") God knows this kind of writing is nothing new. Baker uses 133 pages to explore a few minutes of an office worker's inner life; Joyce spent several hundred pages to describe a day in Leopold Bloom's life in far less detail. Such writing has a certain evanescent appeal: though I had to consult Ulysses Annotated to read about "Plumtree's Potted Meat," I am more than familiar with, say, Kiwi shoe polish. Reading about familiar brands and products is more than just an interesting exercise in deriving meaning from the overlooked everyday world, it's comforting.


I considered going to the former Sid & Marty Krofft amusement park site (AKA, "CNN Center") to, as an homage to this book, take a ride on the world's longest freestanding escalator. I didn't get around to doing this, but I did have a few occasions to ride the Peachtree Center MARTA escalator: longest, steepest escalator in the Southeast. (Atlanta Tourism Board! Pls contact me re: proposed "Atlanta: City of Escalators" promotional campaign! This is your final notice.)

The Raw Shark Texts

by Steven Hall, 2007
428pp
06/26/07 - 07/02/07

I remember being keenly interested in this book after hearing it reviewed on some lesser NPR program (On Point, maybe?). I don't recall exactly what the critic said about the book; she may have described conceptual monster fish inhabiting thought-space, she probably mentioned the thirty page flipbook that is the climax. In any event, I got the distinct impression that I, who enjoy Grant Morrison comics and Don Barthelme's collage/stories from the sixties, would like this book. Incidentally, were you pick up the book in a store and read its dust jacket blurbs, you'd likely come away thinking of the 2000 gimmick-film Memento, which is a horribly inaccurate first impression.

The book is gimmicky, though, which can be okay sometimes. Hall likes to play games with typography--sentences are blurred and distorted, images are formed from text as in concrete poetry:

All this to serve a wild premise, something like The Meme Machine by way of Philip K. Dick: the narrator is the victim of an attack by a Ludovician, a "conceptual shark" (pictured above). If we understand the shared ideas and flow of communication among human minds to be the "waters" of human culture--the recurring use of watery images is one of the book's nicer touches--then those fertile rivers and oceans have given rise to new forms of "aquatic" life, from purely conceptual fish, up to the Ludovician, thought-nature's greatest predator, who has eaten most of the narrator's personality and left him an amnesiac blank slate. This and a handful of other great quirky ideas--personalities spanning multiple bodies, "live" texts, "chemical prosthetics" for damaged personalities, and, not least of all, Un-Space--would seem to make for a great, weird romp. Call it sci-fi, if you have to.

Disappointingly, though, this book is a fast-paced thriller. Complete with explosions, a motorcycle chase, thin characters, forced sexual tension, and a nefarious villain. Oh, how I wish I could have just read a book about a dude pursued by a thought shark, with all the head-trips that implies, without having to read about people running away from people, Da Vinci Code-style. The thrilling conclusion can stay, just leave out all other thrilling parts. Not that the book was bad, it's just that I wish I could have taken it more seriously, and I(and I suspect I'm in the majority here, at least in the majority of people who matter) have a really tough time taking an action-driven thriller seriously.


Also, I would have preferred a different title. I liked that particular pun better when it was used in The Watchmen.

The Big Eddy Club

by David Rose, 2007
350pp
Read: 05/29/07 - 06/23/07

Nonfiction! Gasp!

Why the hell do I sometimes choose to read as "pleasure reading" books that are tangentially or directly related to my daily concerns? I know that it makes sense, that I'm going to read about those topics that interest me, and this will be informed by my day-to-day life. But reading this book, I sometimes felt that I was compounding my real-world frustrations by reading about real people coping with some of the very same frustrations. Suffice to say, if you're trying to get a job in public defense in Georgia, and are finding that the state would rather not pay for such jobs, you'd really rather not read a book largely about a Georgia court's unwillingness to provide necessary funds for an indigent defendant facing the death penalty.

The book is "about" the Stocking Stranglings, a series of rape/murders down in Columbus, and the eventual legal struggle of Carlton Gary, the man convicted of those crimes. I had a deuce of a time finding this book, as it was filed under "True Crime." Which is an accurate enough label--"True Criminal Procedure" would be more apt--but located it among one of the bookstore's less reputable shelves.

So this book was out of place. Rose is a Vanity Fair writer experienced in covering criminal matters; his wife happens to be Oxford's Criminology reader. His writing style reminds me of Charlie Kaufman's line in Adaptation: "big, sprawling New Yorker crap." Rose has an incessant need to contextualize. In order to tell us about this murder trial, he must tell us about the American criminal justice system, its peculiarities in the South, and a hundred years of race-relations in Columbus, GA. This approach has its advantages; Gary's experience quickly becomes emblematic of larger issues of race and justice. But Rose's structure is a little unnerving, too. Time in this book moves not like an arrow through space, but like an inexpertly-wielded sewing needle. First we are told of Rose's first trip to Columbus, then of Columbus's earliest history, then of the crimes in the late 70s, then of Reconstruction, then the trial, which leads to an account of Gary's life, and then Rose himself enters the picture, and we follow his own investigations. To be fair, I found this least frustrating when I read larger chunks in a stretch.



You begin this book fully expecting it to end with Gary's exoneration. You, the reader, are aware that Rose is writing in 2006, describing a 1984 trial, and you figure that his account will take you through direct appeal, state & federal habeas claims, and then, in the legal-thriller movie-style dramatic ending that really does happen in criminal law, Gary's conviction would be overturned. You become especially certain of this when reading about the trial, with its shaky junk science and judicially-crippled defense team; surely, you think, in the space of twenty years some higher court will have seen the injustice here. And I bet that's what Rose's editor thought. I imagine they had Rose committed to a book five years ago, and were sure of a dramatic, and possibly highly publicized final outcome in the case by now. Instead, Rose takes you up to 2006, and announces that, as of that writing, Gary was awaiting an evidentiary hearing in the Middle District of Georgia. This is of course mildly disappointing, but the next few pages are gripping, actually. Turning from Gary's case, Rose denounces the Rehnquist Court's disengagement from criminal procedure, and laments Herbert Packer's utoptian "Due Process Model of Criminal Justice." And believe you me, whenever a dude named "Rose" starts talking about Herbert Packer, I am riveted.

Finally, Rose includes an epilogue to gloss over that last appeal, and then inform you that you can follow the ongoing legal wranglings of Carlton Gary, wrongfully convicted black man, on his publisher's website. So, in 2007 it seems we have seen the emergence of a new cop-out of an ending: "To be continued...on teh blogz!!!" (Which happens to be how Harry Potter ends, as well as the Michael Bay Transformers movie.)

No one belongs here more than you.

by Miranda July, 2007
201pp
Read: 06/06- 06/08

Miranda July's 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know blew me away. Its honest exploration of how we relate to our fellow man and our belongings; how we strive to reach out to one another; how we want to poop into the butt of someone special, who in turn will poop back into all own butts, which we then will poop back; it all struck some magic balance between quirky inventiveness and heartfelt sincerity, artifice and insight into the human soul.

I'd really hoped, then, that Miranda July's fiction would perform a similarly virtuosic feat. This seems to be the goal of many young, contemporary writers today, and I'd figured July was up to the task. I'm trying hard not to lose esteem for her. It may simply be that fiction is not her forte. She comes from a performance art background, after all, and while standing before a roomful of strangers and speaking about sex & emotions, etc. nakedly and without artifice takes a lot of courage, and is laudable in that context, it makes for some uninteresting writing. July's prose is too plain, and she is frequently concerned with improbable emotional quandaries, or the details of sexual mechanics. This wide disconnect between plain, simple words and charged, intense subject matter can be moving when mediated by flesh-and-blood human beings like actors, or July in her capacity as a performance artist. But July's straightforward, unadulterated accounts of female orgasms and dysfunctional lesbian trysts only manage to occasionally raise an eyebrow, or amused smirk. My tone is harsh, I know, when really what I mean to say is that the book is entertaining, and a light, easy read. Usually this is high praise; I'd just had higher literary aspirations on behalf of Miranda July.


I should point out that this is in fact a book of "stories." Which, I almost never read short fiction. I sometimes feel bad about this; I am almost never as happy with short stories as I am with novels, and yet I know that novels are hardly objectively "better" than short fiction. I seem to have some deep-rooted prejudice against short-fiction. I approach everything I read with an implicit set of expectations which can only be met by a novel. And thus I wind up reading short fiction only rarely. This vexes me: I know that shorter pieces actually better lend themselves to well-crafted writing, and yet I constantly eschew them in favor of their bulkier brethren. Interestingly, for a while I mostly read novels in the 500 - 800 page range. During that time, my literary expectations likewise reflected what I tended to read: I was interested in fiction of sprawling scope, and often enormous casts. This changed for mostly practical considerations: after I got to law school, I was tired of spending months on the same piece of pleasure reading. Seeking higher turnover, I turned to shorter novels, and now that's what I prefer. I doubt that I'll ever do the same for short stories, though.