Junot Diaz on what disasters can teach us (the whole essay is amazing):

If, as Roethke writes, “in a dark time, the eye begins to see,” apocalypse is a darkness that gives us light.

But this is not an easy thing to do, this peering into darkness, this ruin-reading. It requires nuance, practice, and no small amount of heart. I cannot, however, endorse it enough. Given the state of our world—in which the very forces that place us in harm’s way often take advantage of the confusion brought by apocalyptic events to extend their power and in the process increase our vulnerability—becoming a ruin-reader might not be so bad a thing. It could in fact save your life.

Wonderful essay today on Pale Fire by Arthur Phillips. I feel exactly, exactly like this about Nabokov’s masterpiece.

I don’t know how he did it. I can play the technician. I can tweeze out the twenty ways his characters inadvertently disclose secrets, or the like. But this is no more impressive than counting his adjectives or identifying his font. Pale Fire is, for me, the one that resists all professional inspection, and, finer still, envy. The novel has burned in me so long that it is now just an object of purest beauty and wonder.

And this, from John Cole at Balloon Juice, on the legality of killing Bin Laden. Yes, I feel exactly like this:

I know I’m being a hypocrite and…I am ok with it in this case. I’ll promise to do a better job sticking to my principles and caring about the law when it comes to someone who hasn’t murdered thousands of people. I swear.

“You have to embrace Bleak House for what it is – a rambling, confusing, verbose, over-populated, vastly improbable story which substitutes caricatures for people and is full of puns. In other words, an 800-page Dickens novel.”

Janet Potter at The Millions on one of my favorite books of all time, and why nobody writes books like this anymore. Because they’re serials, not books, of course. And delicious if read that way.

xTx‘s new (and sold out but available thank goodness on e-readers everywhere) chapbook, He is Talking to the Fat Lady, is one of the last kind. It actually makes me feel a little bit guilty, because I knew xTx was phenomenal and yet I never knew she was THIS good. This is something else. This is epiphany-every-page. This is the sadness of living mixed with the exhilaration of living mixed with the dangerous habit of being alive in a world where most people are not.  This is desire and tearing, hurt and shame and want and need and give and something more. This is something, something else again.

Seriously. I feel I cannot do this book justice with a review. Here are a few sentences instead:

He winds the pretty around his fist, pulling punches so things stay relatively quiet; limiting bruises to only blue, a leopard print rabbiting down her ribcage…

You cannot even try to save me as your size dwarfs the mouth of the well, open and laughing at your loss…

One night after I wash your car, feed your tigers, and engage in a threesome with that ‘smokin’ hot blonde P.A. you’ve had your eye on, you tell her to ‘watch this’ and you proceed to bash my skull in with a hammer…

After I am spent and the colors run clear I will push an empty shopping cart down the street filled with trash that blows past me and I will feel like the last one in the race.

This book  has things to tell you. Each story has things to tell you, from tip to tail, from title to each sentence until there are no more sentences. The sentences tell you a story, and they also tell you that language is mutable, changeable, a friend and an enemy, that images are solid and helpful and people are frightened but brave. These are things you need to hear. These are stories you need to read.

Get it here. You will, I sweartogod, be amazed and grateful.

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.

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.)

Paul Harding’s first book, Tinkers

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.

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.

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.