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March 01
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Mark
is currently reading:
The Prestige (Paperback)
by Christopher Priest
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Mark
gave
to:
The Mezzanine (Paperback)
by Nicholson Baker
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read in February, 2008
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February 24
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Mark
gave
to:
Myra Breckinridge (Hardcover)
by Gore Vidal
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read in February, 2008
Mark said:
"Essentially Vidal having fun with Freud, film theory, the counterculture and Marshall McLuhan (among other media and post-modern theories), by making half-cocked radical pronouncements in the absurd and borderline delusional voice of a sex-changed mo...more
Essentially Vidal having fun with Freud, film theory, the counterculture and Marshall McLuhan (among other media and post-modern theories), by making half-cocked radical pronouncements in the absurd and borderline delusional voice of a sex-changed movie critic turned gender warrior. This way he gets to say whatever he wants without having to convince people to take it seriously. It's fun, although most of it's actually pretty tame by contemporary academic standards. (Though the half-hardcore, half-clinical sex scenes still reasonably "shocking.")...less
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February 10
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Mark
gave
to:
The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (Hardcover)
by Susan Faludi
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my rating:
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read in October, 2007
Mark said:
"This is an article about the presidential primaries, the politics of narrative, and the pretty dick-swinging tone of American sociopolitics, with a large assist from Faludi:
http://thelmagazine.com/6/3/fe...
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Mark
gave
to:
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (Paperback)
by Michael Chabon
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read in February, 2008
Mark said:
"So, I loved this book, and kind of wanted it to be my life, the way certain people I could name but won't feel about The Sun Also Rises. I was about fifty pages in, tops, before I found myself casting the movie in my head. (I deliberately avoided loo...more
So, I loved this book, and kind of wanted it to be my life, the way certain people I could name but won't feel about The Sun Also Rises. I was about fifty pages in, tops, before I found myself casting the movie in my head. (I deliberately avoided looking at the cast list until after I finished reading the book; thank god I did, I would have liked the book, I estimate, about 46% less had I know while reading it that Mena Suvari plays Phlox. Appalling.) Or, to be honest, imagining myself as the lead character in the movie of the book. Or, to be even more honest, imagining myself as the lead character in the real-life version of the book. I haven't done this since, I don't think, and funnily enough, Fortress of Solitude. (Not coicidentally, another book that takes place appealingly in a culturally signified past; I think it helps, if you're going to try to place yourself in a story, it helps to be able to place the story in a time and place that already seems and looks like part of history, as opposed to the uncertainly defined present.) Yeah, I know there are a hell of a lot of other things literature can do, but this was the first of the things that literature can do that literature did to me, and I'm glad to be reminded of how it feels.
And you know what? Chabon knows exactly what he's doing. It's so obviously semi-autobiographical, embellished and romanticized (crime! great food! copius sex! adventures!), but essentially a not-quite-as-young-as-he-once-was man's marvel at his youth, and sadness at its passing. (I'm fairly certain I could have figured this out even if I had read an essay to that effect once.) Chabon makes it clear, I think, exactly how aware he is of all this, with passages about "the will to bigness," and the narrator's closing admission about his tendency to exaggerate.
So The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is a book about how art can make life bigger and better than it is.
I should also mention that one of the reasons it pulls this off is because there's a memorable image, quotable bit of dialogue, fresh observation, or hilariously perfect and original turn of phrase on pretty much every page of the thing....less
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February 04
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Mark
gave
to:
Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust (Paperback)
by Nathanael West
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read in January, 2008
Mark said:
"Bicoastal Depression-era kiss-off: Lonelyhearts is about New York, journalism, the paralyzing cynicism of the overeducated; Locust is about L.A., entertainment, the wasteful mobilization of the naive. West writes in short chapters, with plain diction...more
Bicoastal Depression-era kiss-off: Lonelyhearts is about New York, journalism, the paralyzing cynicism of the overeducated; Locust is about L.A., entertainment, the wasteful mobilization of the naive. West writes in short chapters, with plain diction and little extraneous tissue in his prose, and a steady stream of strange and abrupt images or oberservations. The person I've read who writes most like him is Richard Brautigan -- in both cases you picture a lonely man, hunched over a keyboard. Though temperamentally they couldn't be more opposed: Brautigan is bipolar, gentle, romantic; West is pitiless, caustic, very Catholic. (Wait, turns out he was Jewish. Really? His hang-ups seem somehow otherwise. Also, the almost complete absence of Jewish characters in satires of the newspaper and movie business is an odd omission for a writer of the time, Jewish or otherwise, to make -- even if the books are more concerned with the audiences of the respective media than the producers. Anyway.) Anyway, I'm curious to read more, and to see the movies he screenwrote, partly because I'm skeptical about his versatility. A seminal satiric perspective, I'm told (though the idea of a time before Hollywood-as-two-dimensional-dreamland satires seems impossible, doesn't it?), but it leaves a bitter taste: So, Nat, now that you've cast a bilious eye in all directions... what's left?...less
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January 28
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Mark
gave
to:
Under the Volcano: A Novel (P.S.)
by Malcolm Lowry
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my rating:
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read in January, 2008
Mark said:
"I probably didn't read this book attentively enough — it requires a great deal of tab-keeping given the fabric of interwoven backstory allusions and symbolic imagery motifs — so rather than look at Lowery's shifts in perspective and chronology; h...more
I probably didn't read this book attentively enough — it requires a great deal of tab-keeping given the fabric of interwoven backstory allusions and symbolic imagery motifs — so rather than look at Lowery's shifts in perspective and chronology; his modernist incorporation of films and newspaper fragments and tattered signs and other texts; (hindsight-aided) embodiment of prewar politics in his characters and Mexican politics in his milieu; etc., I'm just going to focus on his sentences. Those romantic, paragraph-long exhalations of rapturous description, ejaculations of unvarnished emotional need, tortured internal logic — doubling back on itself as his characters dredge up yet more lavalike memories from their roiling insides — witty and desperate and impossible; clauses piling up on themselves so that there's no way to return to the solid ground where they began, only to spiral upwards and trail off with a sigh...
Under the Volcano could only have been written by a drunk, but no drunk could have written Under the Volcano....less
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January 04
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Mark
gave
to:
Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories (Hardcover)
by Steven Millhauser
bookshelves:
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read in January, 2008
Mark said:
"Review TK at some point, I'm sure you'll live with the waiting.
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January 01
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Mark
gave
to:
Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright (Paperback)
by Steven Millhauser
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my rating:
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read in December, 2007
Mark said:
"I originally read this book in my sophomore year of high school, and remember little about it except that I liked it. Reading it again, it turns out that Edwin Mullhouse is actually one of my favorite books; if I didn't know any better, I'd also vent...more
I originally read this book in my sophomore year of high school, and remember little about it except that I liked it. Reading it again, it turns out that Edwin Mullhouse is actually one of my favorite books; if I didn't know any better, I'd also venture that it's been a fairly significant influence on my own sporadic attempts at fiction. Huh.
There's a lot going on here: a parody of the impulse to biography (since the narrator is a sixth-grader and the subject is his next-door neighbor and playmate, the parody is mostly implicit, so that Millhauser can go in for some straight-played analysis and leave it to the reader to remember who's doing the talking), a pretty sophisticated first-person narrator of uncertain reliability, and so on. Mostly, though, it's a precisely described, regally dictated catalog of childhood memory (that is, personal) and postwar Americana (that is, universal); the idea, which is a dominant and explict theme in Millhauser's recent short fiction, is that language (or, more generally, any kind of art or other vehicle), if utilized to its fullest potential, can grant us access to the totality of experience. We would be able to remember everything, if only we could find the right words for all of it....less
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