Amber Sparks

Entries categorized as ‘great books’

A Dream of the Red Chamber, Denying the Death of the Novel, and Our Dwindling Attention Spans

July 28, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Red, White, Brown by Rothko

Over at The Millions, Dylan Suher lays out a lovely tribute to Xueqin’s A Dream of the Red Chamber–one of the four greatest Chinese epics works. I have to admit that though Chris and I have read parts of all of them, and though we have three of the four works sitting on our bookshelves, we have yet to read them in full. When I say epic work, you probably think of War and Peace, right? Well, these are volumes long and sometimes each volume is War and Peace-sized.  And like Suher admits, Red Chamber is very different than our Western novels. The Chinese classic writers seem to be just as absorbed by ritual and minutae as they were by plot. Sometimes more so. It’s a radically different way of writing, with value placed on stillness rather than motion, and as an impatient, MTV Generation Westerner I find myself often intimidated by it.

But I love what Suher says here about the so-called death of the novel, and why Red Chamber might teach us something very valuable in our fast-moving society:

Myriad and ever-emerging like cockroaches, those essays that would pronounce a final sentence on the novel rely on a gross misperception of how culture works. The logic behind most of these arguments is that readers are only willing to read works that reflect their direct experience; thus, a faster paced world demands shorter stories, or an image-obsessed world eschews text altogether. “Death of the novel” essayists would condemn the art form to the dustbin of history like the telegraph, the typewriter or some other piece of outdated machinery.  Theirs is a brutally determinist view of the world; they seem to believe that culture can only reflect–and never influence–the societies and people that produce it.

However, that’s never been my experience. I have continually been shaped by books. To Kill A Mockingbird taught me what courage is. Beowulf taught me about death. Swann’s Way taught me how to let go of love. And I hope that Dream of the Red Chamber will teach me to pay attention. For as much as life is made out of Joycean epiphanies, it seems that a great deal more of it is composed of lunches and dinners, awful parties, boring family get-togethers, and countless, idly-watched episodes of Law and Order. There seems to be a great deal of value in learning how to find the beauty that lies in this “wasted” time. Not to say that we can’t also have quick beach reads. But we don’t only read to consume; we also read in order to learn and maybe even in order to change and to grow.

Read the rest here.

Categories: great books

Congratulations to Laura van den Berg and Dzanc!

July 12, 2010 · Comments Off

…has been shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor award! Huge major awesome news for both the wonderfully talented van den Berg and the wonderful publisher, Dzanc.

Categories: favorites · great books

As I Lay Dying, Reinterpreted

June 18, 2010 · 2 Comments

Artwork by Tony Lee Jr.

This is really cool. Artist Tony Lee Jr. has reinterpreted Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying as a series of found objects. You have to check it out here.

(Link from NotCot, of course.)

Categories: art · great books

Yay for Small Press Victory: A Pulitzer Prize

April 13, 2010 · Comments Off

Paul Harding’s first book, Tinkers, published by the Bellevue Literary Press, has won a Pulitzer. It’s the first small press novel to do so since A Confederacy of Dunces in 1981.

I have to admit I haven’t read the book, but I will now. Congrats to Harding and to the Bellevue Literary Press. Very exciting news for small presses everywhere.

Categories: cool stuff · great books

Alice, 1933

March 1, 2010 · Comments Off

Why have I never heard of this? A 1933 version of Alice in Wonderland? One that includes Through the Looking Glass? Designed by William Cameron Menzies? Endorsed by Alice Liddell herself?
I mean, check this out:

The transformation of the howling baby (played by the dwarf actor Billy Barty) into a squealing, squirming flesh-and-blood pig could be an outtake from Tod Browning’s 1932 “Freaks.” And the croquet party hosted by the Red Queen (Edna May Oliver) turns into an Ubuesque scramble of authority run amok, in which the terrorized participants (“Off with their heads!”) flail around in violent desperation using actual flamingoes as mallets. (The end credits bring no comforting reassurances from the ASPCA.)

Although the project originated with McLeod (an unobtrusive studio functionary best remembered for his Marx Brothers vehicles, “Monkey Business” and “Horse Feathers”), the dominant creative force appears to have been the brilliant, unclassifiable art director, William Cameron Menzies.

Want.

Categories: art · film · great books

Snow, Myth, Wire and String

February 10, 2010 · Comments Off

The nice thing about being trapped in my apartment for the last three days has been the productivity it’s forced upon me. I’ve been working on my myths stories, reading and researching like crazy, reading through my monsters, myths of the world, and ritual books, plowing through myth motifs online, and also reading (finally!) Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String. And though I realize I’m the only person in the world who hadn’t read this book already, I’m about to hold forth on it anyway. It is my blog.

As most of you have probably discovered for yourselves, the magic of Marcus’s book is in the slow but steady construction of a new/old world–it is/isn’t us, we are/aren’t the “members” in Marcus’s text. Right away the book was familiar, as it will be to anyone who’s studied anthropology, myth, religion, ritual, or history. It’s a guidebook to a civilization, with motifs and terms and testimonies. At first, it was just a bit of a slog because of course it reads nonsensically; but very shortly–after just one or two motif descriptions–the wording was so perfect, the constructs so precise and careful that I absolutely started to believe this world. I didn’t quite know what I was believing, but I believed in it just the same. It was kind of like being a very small child; you understand little of the world around you, but you never doubt its existence. And like a child, when I read Marcus’s book I began to catch small truths, then large truths,  emotions that I recognized, that rang true underneath the names given to banal objects.

If you’ve studied much history at all you know that religion eventually becomes myth, and myth becomes folktale or legend. This is true for all societies and civilizations, everywhere. So it the smaller pieces of Wire and String read like folktale, the larger pieces like myth. The religion, the world, we know to be a primitive one–or do we? How easy to see the realness, the need for worship, of a Thompson or a bird or a Perkins or–especially–a Father.  As I read further, I was drawn in deeper to this world like a looking glass placed against ours, topsy-turvy and frightening but also somehow ours, somehow real, somehow the only real. The inverted glass in the inverted glass.

The writing is brilliant, and often funny. “The Food Costumes of Montana,” for example, was one of my favorite funnier chapters. But just as you’re sucked into the craft and phrasing, the wordplay and games, you come across a definition like this one:

WESTERN WORSHIP BOXES      The smallest structures, designed to fit precisely one body. They are rough-walled and dank, wooden and finely trimmed–the only areas of devotion.

No mistaking the despair or futility there. The recognition of death and the only final place to be complete and completely loved.To worship at one’s self, forever. Ouch.

The family relationships are also recognizable and poignant, particularly the relationship between father and son. The father in Wire and String is a changing, vast concept: leader, patriarch, disciplinarian, playmate, disappointment, cruel fiend, taskmaster, beloved.  I found, though, the most aching sadness in the relationships between brothers, echoed over and over again throughout the pieces, often opposed, absent and present, partly present (one leg left over from the dead brother) or present but a premonition of absence keenly felt.

Reading The Age of Wire and String was a transformative experience, and was so immensely helpful to my current project that I can’t possibly overstate the fact. Reading it was like dozing off while reading The Golden Bough,  to find an equally strange yet entirely recognizable ritual taking place in the grove, in the space between dreaming and waking. The book really pushed, really encapsulated for me the exact spot where religion, myth, folktale–the stories of our past, of humanity–mix and merge and tell some fundamental truth about all men that has never faded, never dampened, never died. We have and always will make the stories and the structures, give our words and actions and loved ones meanings beyond their meanings because we must, because to stand armed with nothing and face just the blank end, the box, would be unbearable. So we build instead. And this book understands that better than maybe any other I’ve read.

Categories: great books · myth

Two Literary Giants are Dead

January 28, 2010 · Comments Off

RIP Howard Zinn and J.D. Salinger. They lived long lives, but they will still be greatly missed and mourned. Two writers who had a huge influence on me in very different ways.

What a depressing couple of days.

By the way, the New Yorker has made all Salinger’s  stories published there available here. I’ll probably spend some time there tonight, reading and rereading.

Categories: great books · history · smart people

Great Nation Piece on Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

January 18, 2010 · Comments Off

I want to be this woman when I am old. She looks dotty and Russian and wonderful.

Yes, I know this piece is from December. But I only just discovered it, so leave me alone.

P.S., I just finished There Once Was a Woman… a few days ago and highly, highly, highly recommend to the two of you that haven’t read it yet. My affair with Russian writers continues unabated, and this article is a nice temporary focus for my obsession.

Categories: great books · smart people

Easy Grace: Writing and Class in the 30s and Today

December 10, 2009 · 2 Comments

I’m fascinated by class and how it defines, shapes, and categorizes/segregates artists and their art. I think more than anything, class in general fascinates me because most Americans living in its upper and middle places would like to believe it no longer exists; or that if it does exist, it no longer defines or limits us.

Writing about proletarian authors in his must-read tome on Socialism and Communism in the 1930s, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties, Murray Kempton discusses the ways in which their writing is often hard-won, their style blunt and graceless by necessity, their youth left behind in the struggle to leave the poverty they were born into–and the fact that they will never entirely belong to the upper echelons of literary society. He writes of James T. Farrell:

There were ways in which he was the best-educated young writer of his time. He had read philosophers well outside the realm of discourse of conventional critics; he was a deep, though perhaps narrow, student of history; he had great resources in the European tradition. He was a perceptive enough critic to argue for William Faulker in the early thirties, when Faulkner was at the peak of his creation and his nadir of reputation. He was certainly better educated than Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who in many areas were not educated at all.

Yet he was, and always would be, received as a barbarian in the genteel world of the literary supplements…because poverty had blunted his fingertips and left his work heavy with passion and deficient of charm.

And later, Kempton goes on:

Farrell’s world, like [Theodore] Dreiser’s was one whose inhabitants understood the price the artist pays. They looked at the New York literary world and thought it commercial, supercilious, log-rolling, and absolutely alien. The plebian writer had to talk about the world in which he grew up; he had to write about a drab and barren existence; he did not after all feel qualified to write about any other kind. He could not write romance, because there was so little romance in his life; he could not write with easy grace because there was so little grace in his life.

I hear the term “easy grace,” and I think instantly of Fitzgerald, whose writing exudes nothing so much as easy grace, indeed whose early life was nothing but a kind of easy grace. (Squandered opportunity and talent is another story, and one by the way almost unheard of in the rank of the working-class artist. Not by easy grace, but by blood and sweat does the working-class writer attain a measure of success in the arts, and once obtained, it’s not casually thrown away.)

I think Kempton was right about his generation. And I wonder if the same can be said of mine. With the growing divide–chasm, really–between the rich and poor in this America today, is the writer from a less-than-middle-class background still at such a pronounced disadvantage? Does their style still belong to another world entirely? Part of me says, no, of course not, because it’s much easier now to go to college, to study any field, to have access to great literature no matter how much or how little money you have.

But another part of me says, yes, yes, the divide is still there. Only now it’s more pronounced, because I believe few people who grow up poor but have the opportunity to go to college would even go into the arts at all. In the thirties, art could be seen as weapon, and the working class writer could wield it in the service of unionism, or Communism, or Socialism, or equality. But today, art as blunt instrument, art as pure purpose, is looked upon with distaste–and I don’t necessarily disagree that it should be looked upon in exactly that way. After all, art with blunt purpose seems to lose its art entirely, and becomes merely another tool. But regardless, with art seen today as largely a hobby, or a job that will never pay, I can’t imagine that many people given the opportunity to climb out of poverty with a higher education would choose to “waste” the chance by majoring in art, creative writing, music, etc.

And if a working-class student never even gets the chance to acquire a style–blunt or graceful–then isn’t the gap even greater than it was in the thirties?

Categories: Writing · great books · history · politics

Holiday Gifts and Stuff Part II

December 7, 2009 · Comments Off

I always give books and more books for the holidays. This year, though, I’m limiting myself to my favorite indie press books, since I want to 1)support indie writers and presses and b)introduce friends and relatives to books they might not see on the front table at Barnes and Noble or in the “best of” lists circulating widely at this time of year.

So far, I’ve picked up extra copies of Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas, Amelia Gray’s AM/PM, Shane Jones’ Light Boxes, and Brian Evenson’s Fugue State. I highly recommend all four as fantastic gifts for the book lover(s) in your life. (I hope there are many.)

Speaking/writing of Brian Evenson, his holiday picks appear today on the Emerging Writers Network’s Holiday Shopping Guide, which is really worth checking out. Everyday until Christmas the site is featuring a writer showcasing their recommendations for holiday gifts, with writers like Laura van den Berg, Peter Markus, Scott Garson, and Molly Gaudry chiming in.  I’ve already added several more books to my long, LOOOONG wish list from their excellent picks.

Enough chatter. Go shopping!

Categories: favorites · great books · rabid consumerism