The Creative Act

Rebecca Solnit. A paradise Built in Hell.

This is a compelling book about the ways communities react to natural disasters. Solnit got the idea for the book while interviewing survivors of the  hurricane that hit Halifax in 2005. Many got a particular look in their eyes in discussing the events. Their was a fondness in the memories of what transpired in the wake of the disaster. Solnit decided to study this fondness, because she herself had experienced the 1989 San Francisco Earthquake and her memories were similar.

Personally I remember the Ice Storm of 98, and the blackout of 2003. I look back on them as having been exciting times, and good ones as well (bbqs, cards with grandparents, quie and stillness) . This book compares the accounts of people in such situations with media reports and finds the media to be serving us very poorly. It also studies the effects of government on the situations and tends to find them negative. This is a book that reminds us of the power of spirit and community, even if it lays dormant most of the time. (An ad-hoc soup kitchen in in the wake of the 1904 S.F. Quake had a sign proclaiming “Eat, Drink, And be Merry because tomorrow they might make us move to Oakland,” and with that we know the meaning of perseverance.

While the argument may at times become a little too straight forward and simple, a little too anti-government for my tastes, it is compelling in its admiration of the human soul. It counters tales of mass raping and pilaging with stories of people giving away food, shelter and services, like the plumbers of San Fran that offered their service free around the clock for two weeks trying to fix the city’s broken piping system. It leaves you wondering how generous you would be in such a moment, and knowing how good you would like to be.

This book would make an excellent christmas gift for many readers, especially because you can read it before wrapping.

Adalbert Stifter. Rock Crystal. NYRB

This is a 76 page book that reflects upon events familiar to just about everyone. Two children set out on Christmas eve from their grandparents to their home. The path is over a small mountain, one they have traversed many times. The boy is young, the girl younger (perhaps 4 or 5).

A very short while after they leave it starts to snow.

Local communities form several valleys set up search parties when they realize what has happened. The children hideout in a cave for the night and see something akin to the northern lights, which they associate with the Christ child they had expected to arrive that night in their village. This is a tear jerking story for those who have been lost or lost someone.  It is about a community coming together, being defined by a moment that will go down in their village history an change the way they see the mountains around them.

I highly suggest you read this book, assuming you have encountered either, estrangement from a community or loss in your life. You want regret it.

J.M. Coetzee. The Master of Petersburg.

J. M. Coetzee has won all the prizes and, in a style Thomas Bernhard would approve of, rarely bothers to pick them up himself. The man is known to never smile, to attend parties without uttering a word all night. Despite this seemingly cliché persona, he writes damn good books. He is one of the few living authors in my personal library, I now have four of his books, placing him in an even smaller category.

The Master of Petersburg was recently brought to my attention by a customer at the store. We were discussing Dostoevsky because he was buying a Coetzee book and I told him I find the Coetzee feels a lot like Old Dusty and Kafka. The customer, knowing more than I, laughed because those two are well-known as his influences. More to the point, Coetzee had written a book featuring Dostoevsky as the main character.

The book takes place in the late 1860s, fame but not fortune have already come to the protagonist. His stepson has died mysteriously and so Dusty has to go get his papers and see to the final details of his son’s life. The narrative itself is quite interesting, involving Nacheav a young revolutionary out to use Dostoevsky, an old one. There is love, hate and plenty of inside jokes for Dostoevsky lovers.

The book is really about the cost of writing. The torture a “real” writer must go through in order to put his/her soul on the page. The fact that they must use their every action and those of their family and friends in order to have a product. Coetzee’s Dostoevsky sees himself as selling his soul to pay his gambling debts. Importantly it is not just his soul but also the dead boy’s soul, and the poor people he encounters and everyone else’s souls that are to be sold. I suspect Dostoevsky thought along these lines more then once as he returned home from some event or other and tried to figure out how to make it into a novel or how to use so-and-so’s character in a book. This would feel dirty. I have felt this in my attempts to write poetry, inevitably other people’s stories are told, against their will. The personal internal conflict caused by this would grow with fame and fortune, at least I suspect that to be true.

I wonder if Coetzee feels this way too. Is the book really about a man living in South Africa? Is it really an explanation for his refusal to pick up those awards or to even smile? This book is a lot of fun, moves well and is a great read for those unfamiliar with Coetzee. For those familiar with both authos, mthis is a masterpiece not to be missed.

Raymond Carver. What we talk about when we talk about love.

Raymond Carver is an author I have long heard about an never read. He comes up in discussions and in book reviews regularly but never in a way that made me rush out to read him. Then I read a review of the Library Of America volume of his work and became interested enough to finally pick up a book by him. I choose his shortest book because somehow I was skeptical of him and very uncertain I would enjoy his work.

This little book of short stories takes less then a day to finish but at least a week to sink in. These are hard-nosed stories about a twisted kind of love. Some people are inclined to read very deeply into these stories and offer hopeful readings of them, “he is showing us what he doesn’t have, what he is missing by not writing about it”,  ”reading between the lines we can understand that he knows what he is missing” etc. No matter how compelling such essays may be they fall flat in the face of the work itself, like when the loved ones of a person on life support are told the person is but to the loved ones in the room it is clear that life is still present.

Carver is man that may never have really been in a healthy loving relationship in his life. These stories suggest that his father, mother, uncles, aunts, girlfriends etc. had poor relationships with Carver. The variegated types of relationships that we expect to find love within are all explored and the result is a vision of love that focuses on all the wrong aspects of love. Carver sees jealousy, possession, humiliation and pain in all these relationships.

There are beautiful moments in the stories, like the young couple dancing in a driveway during a garage sale, but they are ruined, always ruined. Like the one with he dancing, where drunkenness rears it head leaving a feeling of discomfort and uncertainty. We keep reading though because the writing is very sound, it affects the reader and holds a mood throughout, but not the mood you might expect from a book about love.

While I understand that some people view love as hooky, as impossible and if happy then not a topic worthy of serious authors, but I am convinced that this work should be called something else. Not “hate” because that is not Carvers point, but rather; “the ways love can fail” or “the twists love can take” or “in relationships humans require love and these  examples  demonstrate that necessity” or ”only those oblivious about love dare to talk about it and they don’t know anything.” Or some such title. I was not looking for a sappy romance when I picked the book up, but I at least expected to read about a type of love I could call familiar, or at least love. But this work is nothing like that.

It may be a book that offers a lot of insight for those who have read some of Carver’s other works, but as an introduction to him, I suspect it is all wrong. This book does not make me want to read more by him because I see him as failing to understand true love. If he at least had a single story in here that suggested he knew how tortured and tormented the forms of love in the other stories were (though of course he knows this or wouldn’t have written them with such a tone) that would help. But to have the negative without an example of the positive is to have the ying but not yang; and that is a serious failure.

I am not sure which type of reader I would recommend this book to other then someone that loves his other work. I am sure there is a type, he is popular after many years and sells, but I am curious to see who I find myself handing this book over to despite the masterly writing.

Next Up: J.M. Coetzee. The Master of Petersburg.

Alberto Moravia. Boredom. NYRB.

Alberto Moravia’s book first came out with the english title “The Empty Canvas.” The story follows a painter that is no longer interested in art nor able to paint. His big problem is that he is rich and bored (read whiny). By boredom he means that he is unable to attach anything outside of him to himself therefore he is bored as nothing has a meaning. He feels disconnected from the artifacts of the material world and so stays in his mind at all times, which is the vantage point from which the reader watches the tale unfold.

Enter Cecelia, the would-be model come sex toy. Dino (the painter) essentially inherits this young fox from a sly old painter whose studio was in the same building. Dino comes to think that in her he has something he can connect with and possess. His attempts to accomplish this are failures as the girl proves to be an especially difficult nut to crack, uninterested in money and life to such a complete extent it becomes obvious to the reader that it is she, and not Dino, that is truly bored and detached from the world.

For the first 80 pages I could not help but think this must be a poor translation and I pondered putting the book down. The only reason I held on was that the New York Review of Books has never let me down with one of their printings. Suddenly on page 189 (a little more than halfway) a chapter ends “I was still at the stage of jealousy when a surviving sense of dignity prevents one from spying upon the person one is jealous of. Nevertheless, as I went away I knew I had merely postponed the moment when I would start watching her. Next time, I thought, I should no longer be able to stand firm against circumstances which encouraged me, which indeed almost obliged me, to spy upon her.” And suddenly the novel takes off at a terrific speed until, dazzled and surprised you put the book down and think, Huh?

I will not attempt to explain the metaphysical character of this book because an awful lot is going here besides the narrative and I fear that doing so would give far too much away. The pleasure of this read for me is in the pondering of its metaphysical aspects.  This is a book you’ll have to read twice and think a lot about, perhaps you could read some Nietzsche on boredom in order to truly grasp it. If that is too much work, then I suggest reading the final 200 pages because as a thrilling tale of obsession wherein you hate both the spy and his “victim” this book is pure gold.

Michael Dirda. Book by Book.

Having finished off the powerful and mind-tiring The Idiot by Fyodor Dostevsky I was looking around the shop for a little bit lighter of a read. I stumbled upon a work by the Washington Post book reviewer Michael Dirda who has overs 30 years experience in writing about literature. Recognizing him as a great literary mind the Post  allowed him to choose which books to write about, and did not restrict him to writing only about current books. This has resulted in 30 years of his mind wandering through endless pages of classical  literature, and some newer works, with the intention of writing about them, deciphering what value/lessons they offer to the reader. In this book he shares some of the knowledge knowledge he has acquired from the books and ideas he has developed about the role of books in the quotidian.

Let’s get one thing straight, the man is a bibliophile.  He assiduously kept notes of quotes he found inspiring in some way. In this book we see a man that has devoted his life to the written word explaining why he has chosen to do so and why most people would benefit from a similar decision. He does not rely on cozy and simple aphorism about getting to know mankind, rather he makes a claim and then backs it up with 10 or more quotes from well-known (and some less well-known) authors from a variety of eras and backgrounds. In short, you should find a copy of the book, even if only for the amazing list of books that every good guest room should have and why.

Dirda tells us, “it is impossible to read serious novels, poetry, essays, and biographies without also growing convinced that they gradually enlarge our minds, refine our spirits, make us more sensitive and understanding. In this way, the humanities encourage the development of our own humanity. They are the instruments of self-exploration.” which is something readers already know, but says it with much appreciated clarity. Personally I better understand our common history and the ways in which people are inherently unpredictable by reading books. If everything always played out as it should, and everyone followed every rule where would the fun be? At the same time I keyed in on the word “refine” because I think that part of the advantage of reading is the appreciation of style and class that it can help develop. Our days are vulgar now, when was the last time someone opened a door for you, offered you a seat in the metro, quoted a poem they had read recently, or offered to help you with a stroller? Personally I find that reading about times when people sill had manners of this sort inspires me to to behave differently. I often wonder if not doing these things is freedom from being the man-in-the-flannel-suit or just old fashioned laziness.

Another quote that struck me is about the ways we contradict ourselves. This one certainly describes a familiar experience, “Great fiction eschews the reductionist and obviously didactic, instead reveling in complication, painting out options, at most revealing the consequences of one course of action over another. Contradiction, not consistency, second thoughts, rather than dogmatic certitude, lie at the heart of humane understanding, and all those who try to simplify experience usually only succeed in narrowing it.” Life and the people in it are complicated. Great books are often full of characters that contradict themselves which complicates them, but also makes them real.

Early writing noted the complexity of life, take for instance The Bible, a book all classic writers (post-bible of course) knew very well. A few complicated questions arising from its pages dealt with by the likes of Dostoevsky include: how can we say God is perfect and everything he creates must be perfect (the idea behind, “God wills it to be so”) and yet strive to change the way the world works or blame and question God for abuses and oppression? Speaking of oppression, how can the poor and oppressed be the ones that get into heaven when at the same time most people are morally outraged regarding the status of the poor and oppressed in the world? Something about this does not seem to add up. Contradiction is inherent in our life, especially in moral questions.  As Walt Whitman said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.” Alas, when a writer depicts a muddled life full of uncertainty they tend to impress me as real (even if only the narrator displays the uncertainty because his characters are too narcissistic to question themselves). But I digress.

I once read that the most common trait of the pasts of university graduates (yes even higher then parental education levels and incomes) is the presence of a serious dictionary in the house the graduate grew up in. Dirda has strong feelings about parents getting their kids to read and good advice for parents already convinced (lots of readers have asked him how to instill the love of reading in their children). His reply describes my childhood in a nutshell. Paraphrased: Have books in the house, read them, make them a normal part of life, let children read whatever they want and take them to the library. Be sure to say “hang on I am almost done my chapter” far more often than “hang on it is almost a commercial break.” Follow these rules and everything will be fine, and remember let them read whatever they want, no matter how juvenile, because they are in reality juvenile and immature readers. There will be lots of time for classics, for now a habit needs to be formed not a taste.

This little book by Dirda is a reminder of how many books are out there and what they have to offer. If you are ever searching for a new style to follow or theme to delve into, this book will have an answer or two for you. If you just want an easy read that has enough pithy quotes to make you stop and think, this is a good book for you. Personally I think it is a nice addition to my library.

Up next an old favorite: Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Dostoevsky. The Idiot.  Everyman’s Library Edition.

I have long been a fan of the huge-russian-novelists-of-huge-russian-novels. What could be better than sinking your teeth into the equivalent of a massive stack of pancakes smothered in butter and real Quebec maple syrup? The Russians never disappoint, we have been reading them for a long time and will continue to. Russia was blessed with a surprising long tradition of writers that fed off each other, starting with Pushkin and working its way though the years (Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Lermontov, Bulgakov and  Solzhenitsyn) overlapping each other and pushing each other. While the competition was fierce and they threw many barbs at each other, they also inspired each other and fed off each other.

A few days ago I  finished reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. It has long been a favorite of mine. Every time I put my feet up and make the tea and start making my way through the 600+ pages I feel frustration at how hard it is to keep track of everyone in the book. Despair enters my mind as he makes his characters flip-flop in their ideas, attempt to murder each other, or at least ruin each others’ lives. The sad ending brought on by the fact that Old Dusty always loses control of his characters as he writes. (For those unfamiliar the story follows Prince Myshkin, a christlike figure, who has just returned from a long convalescence needed by him as he was an “idiot” or invalid. He returns to society and gets confounded by constant rumors and treachery. All ends badly for the young Prince). Despite the difficulty I know I will be rewarded for my time.

There are two main allegories in the novel. Firstly, the book is a riff on what Dostoevsky thinks would happen to Christ if he appeared in 19th Century Russia. As the tale unfolds the reader gets the feeling even the narrator is disgusted by his society which could ruin such a special man. Secondly, it is about the societal changes happening in Russia at the time and Dostoevsky’s feeling that these changes would prove disastrous for society.

The Idiot is a complicated novel. The narrator is not entirely certain as to what is happening and the reader really only knows as much as the characters are willing to say. The characters however, are not trustworthy narrators as they have their own goals, dreams, and fallabilitties. They are all trying to understand what is happening in their society of intrigues which leaves the reader guessing. The fun is in trying to get to know the characters, understand their hopes, virtues, and vices, if not synthesizing Doestoevsky’s metaphore’s into a political worldview.

I love reading Old Dusty, his novels are like comfort food, and yet a sense of malaise settles in upon me when I read him. When I finish one of his works I never know what to read next. A friend I recently introduced to D read The Idiot has found the same phenomenon in his reading, the only thing that appeals is another Dusty novel, Brothers K perhaps? If you have any ideas, or follow a pattern in your post-mega-important-novel-reading let me know about it by leaving a comment to this post. For my part I always follow him up with a softball book. So I read Micheal Dirda’s Book by Book which will be the subject of my next post.

I apologize for the lack of effort I have been putting into the site. I have been very busy, fumbling my way into the ownership of a small bookshop. During this process I have seen many things I thought I ought to write about, and even woke up several times with the urge to write. I did not do it though. I have been tired, my final thoughts at night have not been about how blessed my life is, nor about my wife (now with child as if I didn’t have enough to feel bad about overlooking) but, rather, about lowly and base financial concerns. My first thoughts in the morning are about the store and how to make it more profitable. I wonder how great writers, that we all know were under great financial strain, managed to write anything. As the days have flew past I think they might have become more and more accustomed to their state of affairs and been able to focus on art, I least think I am getting there.

I am still not in a place to write the fiction that I love. I am only in a place to write about it. Therefore I will start writing very regularly about the status of my reading, my habits in reading and some thoughts about what I am reading. I will offer up some juicy quotes that I feel may inspire others to read or write. I hope no one will be offended by my using this space in this way. As always, everyone is invited to post whatever they like, though due to the alck of posts I feel comfortable monopolizing the space.

Let me start by saying I ahve always been a reader. I love reading, even the back of a cereal box if there is nothing else (do you realize how many cereal ingredients are jsut another word for sugar?). I love to read an actual book, not a screen, it is all I can do to sit in front of this screen long enough to write these posts. Some people feel differently, but for me nothing will ever rival the feeling of curling up, legs under me, tea in hand, notebook at my side for quotes or thoughts, with a book in my hand.  Reading slows things down for me, makes them clear and calm, especially when I read poetry. The other hours of my day are chaotic and full of worries. At night I do not seek distraction from life, but beauty, love, thoughts on par with my intellect, and of course, good stories. Books are where I find these things, learn about the past, try to learn to understand other people and places, foreign ideas. I love to talk about what I read and am reading with others, in person so that thoughts can bounce fast and furious and understading can grow. The process of synthesizing what is happening in a book ( to a character, in a characters’ mind, to an idea or theme that is underlying the book)  is a difficult one that I relish.

So for the next while I will be posting pieces about my reading. I just finished Fyodor Dostoesvky’s The Idiot and will be posting about that next. The following post will be my thoughts on Michael Dirda’s Book By Book. I am also reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (partway through volume three), and a biography of Old Dusty by Joseph Frank.

Any comments on this project are always welcomed, and if you want to share thoughts about what you are reading feel free to do so, you might even help me decide what to read next.