Seth Kupchick's Blog: Bet on the Beaten, page 16

In defense of Miley Cyrus

I never thought I'd listen to pop radio in the Obama era, as a 40 something, but I have, and I really like it for the most part, but like most likes, or loves, it's tinged with a certain remorse at times, because a lot of the songs are just awful, but when they hit, they hit hard, and they make a real impact. I respect if my peers choose not to listen to the mix on Seattle's 92.5 Movin,' but I'd also argue that if you're not, you really don't know what's happening in pop music, which may be fine, but I fear it's not, and that even if the music is bad, it makes for critical poseurs, that don't even know what they are criticizing. I should add that I doubt I would have ever started listening to Movin' except that they played it a lot at my work, and I decided to give it a shot while I drove pizzas. I liked the sincerity of the love songs, actually, and the desperate romanticism.

I can honestly say to every friend of mine that has ever lived that I really immersed in Movin' and have seen the mix through several waves. The mix itself is worth talking about but it should be said that they play the same twenty songs or so, over and over, and the same artists for the most part, so that I'm incredibly familiar with Lady Gaga's hit songs, or Justin Timberlakes, or Katie Perry's, or Rhianna's, or all of the biggies of our day, love them or hate them, and I certainly have my favorites. I also like the mix because it gives me the feeling of listening to a record, or a playlist, over and over, kind of like I listen to records in my free time, over and over, and it's fun getting familiar with the songs, but like records, sometimes the mix is better than other times, and lately I've been struggling with 92.5, listening to Mariners games and deciding to absorb in them, even listening to the post game talk shows, because I like being immersed in whatever I'm into. I say all of this as a disclaimer and confession, so that the reader can honestly assess my point of view.

I like two Miley Cyrus songs very much, and one enough to give an honorable mention, because that's all I've really heard on Movin', and yet I've heard them so much that I know all the lyrics and vision of the song, and have really studied it, like Brian Wilson or Phil Spector would have, so I'm not kidding around when I talk about this. "Wrecking Ball," and "We Can't Stop," are absolutely great songs, but more than that, Miley Cyrus sings the fuck out of them, and she's got an amazing amount of natural talent, I'm not kidding. The way she sings "Wrecking Ball," is a rock n' roll classic, I think, though I hate to put it in a genre, but it's just a great beautiful to the death rendition, that lights me up every time it comes into the mix, and that's without seeing the scandalous video that drove Sinead O'Connor crazy, because it homaged her classic video of "Nothing Compares 2 U." I guess this gave her the right to give Miley an older generation feminist chastizing, and true to the spirit of youth (and rock n' roll), MIley didn't care, and thought Sinead sounded crazy, which she did, but left it at that. Miley said she respected Sinead as an artist, but didn't agree with her.

Recently, Daniel Siwek posted a kind of put-down post on Miley's antics, that about 20 people predictably jumped on, without really ever thinking of her music, or her talent, or that her antics were driving them crazy, just like they drove Sinead crazy, just like Elvis was considered a pervert by much of America for shaking his hips. Well, Miley twerks instead with midgets, and I think it's kind of funny, to be honest with you, and that the humor is being lost for the most part, thinking she's a porn queen, but I don't really see her this way, even if she is, I see her as doing something artistic. That said, I really don't care about her antics that much, because I think the songs I hear on the mix will go down as the great pop songs of an era, and will be the ones to be remembered twenty years from now, and her antics will be reimagined, for better or worse. But I don't think it's smart to underestimate her

Wolfe, Kerouac, and creative nonfiction

You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


"You Can't Go Home Again," was the first Thomas Wolfe book I read probably because I liked the title, or maybe it was the only one in the bookstore, but for whatever reason it was the one handed down to me, though Thomas Wolfe's novels often feel like one long book, though they do have different moods and feelings. I first read Wolfe because I knew he was a big influence on Jack Kerouac and I wanted to be a writer, inspired by the Beats in spirit, and thought I had to read a lot of good books before I even took myself seriously, so was a reader more than a writer, a very pure time. I can't say enough good things about "You Can't Go Home Again"8 because it sits in my memory like a beautiful late summer song, and was a great loving portrait of an outsider artist, horrified by high society, and yet part of it because of his reputation as a novelist. There's a terrible guilt ridden love affair in it, and a savage scene at a cocktail party, that really paints high society as warped, but like every Wolfe book it goes on and on in splendor, though supposedly the attenuated 600 page novel was longer and with less shape before his famous editor, Maxwell Perkins, got a hold of it, and gave it shape. I'm sure Perkins did this as a labor of love, because there is no doubt that Thomas Wolfe was a great poetic prose writer, and it makes complete sense that Kerouac was influenced by him, so much so, "The Town and the City," his first novel, was almost a Thomas Wolfe imitation. Wolfe was also fearless in just how brazenly he tackled painful family situations and the alienation he felt being an intellectual and an outsider, even in his hometown, and how this shaped him, and I'm not sure any writer has taken this subject on as deeply as Wolfe. That might be because he was one of the first great autobiographical fiction writers, and his novels draw a fine line between the memoir and the novel, and in many was you could say that he was the first to carve out the 'creative non-fiction' terrain, though the critics didn't give him the same ground they would today, and criticized his books for being too personal, lacking imagination, and therefore not being fiction. Wolfe argued that the piecing together of events, and memory itself was fiction, and given the poetic breadth and emotion of his work, it was very hard not to call the novels art considering he may have been the greatest literary artist of his day and that would include Faulkner.

I'm not sure what to say about this epic angsty work except that it's one of the great autobiographies of a writer, and in that way predates John Fante and Charles Bukowski, two great contemporary writers that really took on their lives as art, but Bukowski even more than Fante, if that's possible, to an almost Thomas Wolfean degree, though they were very different writers, and I could see Bukowski hating Wolfe. He was very romantic in a way that Bukowski wasn't, but I'd be hesitant to call Thomas Wolfe's prose 'flowery,' because it beat with an incessant rhythm, but maybe it had the sound of a poet trained to write in verse and rhyme, breaking free, so that the writing had the feeling of the breakthrough, but was still linked to the past, as if the impression of what he was freeing himself from was still intact. Any Kerouac fan should read Thomas Wolfe, because I don't think you'll ever look at Kerouac the same way again down to his relationship to his hometown and his early death, they were definitely brids of the same feather, but of course Kerouac evolved Wolfe's autobiographical American version of Joyce into something completely his own, like all artists do. Wolfe's great obsession in "You Can't Go Home Again," is that 'George Weber' writes a best seller about his hometown, and of course the people he writes about are thinly veiled portraits of real people, that instantly recognize themselves when they read the novel, and hate how they are portrayed, because Weber is a poet at heart and can't help telling the truth about people, or so he sees it. It's the classic battle of the 'creative non-fictionalist,' the 'autobiographical poet,' or the hyper enlightened 'memoirist.'

I'd say my literary life has pretty much been defined by this battle and I've always been scared of who I'm going to hurt, and how my writing is going to expose people in ways that offends them because invariably it will. The sad truth is "You Can't Go Home Again," or at least you can't after you write a novel about everyone that pisses them off and you call it fiction.



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old friends

I saw Galactic last night because an old friend has been their saxophonist since the mid-1990's, and it's strange to watch time erode us. Seeing him sometimes makes me feel I'm in one of those time elapsed photographs, that shows someone go from birth to death in the span of a few minutes, but it's not just a visual feeling. I feel time stretch out between us in a way that's hard to name or put a finger on. Some of this has to do with perceptions of self because he was part of my first real post high school peer group, and we all honed each other like the military used to do for young men of a different generation, and when Galactic first got sort of popular, getting that big promotion, I wondered why it wasn't me that had advanced in rank. I felt inferior to say the least and my feelings ranged from self pity, to critical contempt for his band that 'made it,' while my other friends that I considered 'true artists,' were struggling to get our shit together, or to get a few fans, and the saxophonist knew this, downplaying his gift, though that was the way with all of us. We were probably the most humble 'Jazz Nazi's' the world has ever seen, because as much as we had it in for each other, or all the musicians around us, we had it in for ourselves that much more, and this was a very self negating position, that made it very hard to do art, leaving only our intentions to be judged, and disregarding the outcome entirely. But the saxophonist had a good outcome or seemingly so, especially compared to us.

I've shed a lot of my confusion from that time partly because the foundation of our friendship has worn away over time like water licking at a cliff wave after wave until it finally erodes and falls into the sea. I am not the man, or boy, that I was in the mid 1990's when it seemed like a lot of my friends careers were taking off and mine was going nowhere, even though I felt that I was staying true to our initial ideals as much as anyone, and should be compensated, or at least acknowledged, and they may have done this, but I was always difficult to define. I wasn't a musician like they were but a writer and to make it worse one that didn't seriously consider working on a newspaper or doing anything productive in the real world that would mark me as a success. My books were very hard to read, being far too cryptic for anyone but the most devoted poet, and these were jazz fans, not literature aficionandos, so they didn't take much of an interest in my literature, or anyone's for that matter. I wanted to be a famous published author but I was so far from this in my late twenties it was funny.

I have only love for my friend now and all of his achievements and it's good to feel all of my confused feelings melt away. It must be that we just aren't as competitive with each other, or the role that we played for each other in our late teens or early twenties has been played out. Those people are dead, full of memories, and a whole generation has sprouted up underneath us. Galactic doesn't seem to be reeling those people in and relegated to be a Gen X band fixed at a certain time and place in history, like we all are, because few acts, or art, transcends generations. I'm not sure these are the meditations of a man having a mid life crisis, because I actually felt at peace last night watching them, and thought the band had gotten much better, which would make sense since they've been playing together for 18 years. They sounded like one big instrument and not in a boring dull way, but like any people that have sensitivity for each other's subtlety and let each other breathe. Then again, these may have been my own feelings that I was superimposing on the show standing at the back of the crowded theater and looking on like a man watching time elapse.

writer's summit in Seattle

I went to a conference in the convention center today for the literati of the United States, and I've sort of been to these things before but not in a long time, maybe over a decade, so it brought back a lot of memories, but also introduced me to the literary world as it exists today, and it's younger than me, or older, but there aren't many people my age there and maybe that's because time and history really did pass our generation by, but I'm only 45, and I just published my first book on kindle, so who knows? I really felt like the fates wanted me there because I didn't even hear about the conference until last night, and went on a whim, thinking I'd at least see the conference goers, and maybe strike up a conversation with a stranger, but nothing more than that, and yet I knew it was important that I do this, because I am really trying to reach the world with my art, and part of why I've decided to have an internet presence, and publish in the first place, but I wrote the book 15 years ago, so in some ways it's already dated, or this became clear to me when a speaker on Native American literature said that "native poetry was in its fourth wave,' and though her idea wasn't crystallized, she made it clear that writing right now means that you are writing the first decade into a new century, and historically that realliy does mark a change, and I'd have to agree it does, from an art history perspective because time is measured in centuries. I was sitting on the floor near the door when she said this and a girl was sort of doing breathing exercises next to me, and I realized that though I published my novella only three months ago, I wrote it before the turn of the century in 1998, the last great year according to a friend of mine, and for our measley small generation he may have been right, and that may have been our peak, but the Hipsters have taken over the world, make no bones about it. Their generation is bigger than ours, and they don't even have us to contend with, believe it or not, their only opponents are the Boomers, but they are getting old, and as much as they try to deny it, I'm afraid old age catches up to us all, as my Grandfather said before he died, a World War II hero.

I'm publishing in a Hipster world and I like the new landscape better than the one I was coming up into when I went to Bread Loaf in 1990, that was a boomer parade, and seemed completely inclusive and locked up. Maybe it's the internet and Kindle, or maybe it's just me getting older and feeling better about life, but I like the new model, because it doesn't seem to be as much about a 'Star' now, but the art.... though I don't want you to think I'm too naive, because I know that every generation 'throws a hero at the pop chart," in the words of Paul Simon, and the Hipsters will have their own icons, but the culture of celebrity money that the Boomers perfected is on the wane, because the economy is on the wane, and I think it's affecting people's attitudes towards art, and people are freer about it now. Yes, the creative writing programs literally littered the book fair part of the show, but they didn't seem as omnipotent or influential to me, like their time had come and gone.

I went to a few lectures and walked out of a couple after five minutes, but a valuable five minutes, and the one I liked the most was on writing reviews, and I think this was really getting something hard and difficult to understand about the role of the critic, that I've been feeling lately writing all of these reviews for "Goodreads," and that is the question can good art survive without criticism, or does the criticism literally make the art. It's a confusing question, for sure, and I'd argue that a society full of good art would also be full of good criticism, but the role of the critic is actually very complex, and the focus of the lecture focused on 'bad reviews,' and their place in the literary establishment, but I only saw the second half of the panel, though I wish I said it all. The Boomer editor or Slate was running the lecture, and he was a great wit, from the new older generation, with the World War II veterans gone, but the panel was made up of four critics in their Thirties, I'd guess, but I don't even think late Thirties, making them a good decade younger than me, and born at the tail end of Generation X and Y, the grey zone of the 1980 births. I really felt like all of the women were completely brilliant and had far surpassed anyone I've heard talk about criticism since the likes of Pauline Kael, my all time favorite critic of any genre, and seemed to really understand crticism's role in the greater societal debate of what kind of world do we want if we are afraid of bad criticism, or challenging criticism.

"Some books aren't worth criticizing or sit in this drab middle zone that evokes nothing. Trust me, if we were reading lots of books that were so bad they were good, this job would be a lot easier."

Yes, I thought sitting there, ln rapture, and the whole panel went on like this. I really felt all of my thoughs on criticism and its role in reflecting society and art and making it better, more luminescent, was as crucial as the artist's role, or if not quite that, almost as important, because without a judge there is no jury. They talked about the role of a 'zinger,' and that was just kind of funny, or maybe more illuminating was that it sparked the 'Boomer' editor more than the critics, and I think the Boomers lived in the age of the zinger, and that might be going out. More importantly, he educated me about an essay written in the Fifties called "The Decline of Book Reviewing," by Elizabeth Hardwick, and then made the point that every generation fears this, or something like that, but I want to read the essay. I also got that David Foster Wallace is a kind of God to these people, the writer of "Infinite Jest" and must be to them what Thomas Pynchon was to me, a great challenging inscrutable novelist epitomizing the greatest fiction writer of a generation, a mantle I'm sure I will never wear, and yet I don't hold 'David Foster Wallace,' on a pedastel, or lose myself in debates over whether he should have written a scathing attack on John Updie, that I haven't read, but should since I don't like Updike much myself. I waited in line to introduce myself to one of the editors that was such a joy to hear speak it made me happy to have gotten in free to see her, but I barely got to say anything to her, but something.

The convention center had an incredible kind of Sci-Fi vision that felt like "Logan's Run," or "Rollerblade," or probably a dozen more from the era, but a real expansiveness and depth, with two story high windows looking out to trees, and made me feel like I was in a futuristic movie being there, and felt divined to be there, like the fates had literally chosen me to go, without me knowing it, and yet I knew it before I went. It took me awhile to even figure out I was in there for free, because I was in the book fair part and I thought maybe that was free for everyone, but it wasn't, and I had made it in. A nice young woman gave me a sample of her magazine, and instructions to submit to the journal, and I didn't ask for either of these things, and I felt like she chose me, and in a way I didn't blame her, but she was the only one, and I took it as a sign, and might submit to that magazine. I felt chosen all day, actually, and like I was one small step away from being on the podium reading my book, but a very small step, and that I had to act in the existential world to make it happen but one full of spirits guiding me.

Me and 'Her.'

I went to "Her" thinking it could either be a brilliant art house movie, or a complete bore, because that's usually what happens in what we call 'Indie" movies and after the first half I thought it was a little of both. Joaquin Phoenix's acting was great as usual at this point in his career, and there was a real alienated urban mood to the movie, that his job as a love letter writer for other people only accentuated, but I really didn't see where it was going, beyond the initial conceit, that a man falls in love with a computer voice, that talks to him like a woman. Granted, it's a good conceit and that's why I went to see the movie in the first place, but a conceit doesn't make a movie and while I settled into the film I feared it was going to be a quasi-interesting/quasi-dull tale that didn't leave me with much but at the mid-point something changed, and its conceptual overtones really took off and came into their own. It started with Joaquin Phoenix confronting his ex-wife (Rooney Mara) to sign his divorce papers and she tells him he can't accept reality and that his relationship with an O.S. only goes to confirm this. She's really the only person in the movie to question this out and out and I thanked her (or the script) because I thought I was watching an almost Sydney Poitieresque "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?" for the Gen Y set, but instead of a black man with a white girl, it's a white man with a computer whose forced to go through all of the social stigma a guy dating a black girl might've gone through in a Forties film except it's an O.S., not a person. Samantha was definitely his girlfriend in an "I Dream of Jeannie," kind of way and was there with him when he met his wife to sign the divorce papers, and shows all the classic signs of female jealousy. He really didn't want to hide his life from "Her" (Samantha... the O.S. chose the name after scanning through thousands of names in a book in a second) because he hid his life from his wife, and didn't want to be dishonest again. He and the O.S. do have sex in a great scene where the screen goes black, and you only hear her, because she doesn't have a body, but the relationship is obviously much more than sex, because procreation never really plays into it. Joaquin Phoenix isn't necessarily looking for his double, but the O.S. admits that she was programmed with a certain amount of data (D.N.A. (?)), but primarily learns from others so Joaquin Phoenix creates "Her" in his image like God whether he means to or not, but she likewise changes him like our image in the mirror can change us but she's more than an image, and has the feeling of an actual person until a horrible tragedy occurs and they start to miscommunicate.

I don't know how to explain it but the O.S. is facebook to me, and the hundred of thousands of illusory relationships we take on everytime we sign in and see who has contacted us, or imagine who we are going to contact. We are the O.S. built of the dozens of impressions of our 'friends' on facebook, creating relationships, but the relationships don't have a body or an anchor, and I'm not sure the movie say's you need that at the end but... (spoiler alert!).... his O.S. leaves him either evolving or just disappearing entirely and the film ends with Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams as friends (maybe lovers) sitting on a rooftop looking out at the city. It almost makes me think the O.S. is a metaphor for a relationship with someone from another race or class that really changes the way you see the world and when it ends you are left alone with your own kind. But the O.S. is completely unreal and yet it's not unreal at all, because she is really changing Joaquin Phoenix just like a human relationship and he's completely gotten over whatever stigma I was attaching to him as a viewer for dating an O.S. trying to imagine myself in his shoes, but he didn't care about my judgement and by the end neither did I.

"Her" was a poetic success that made an allegory of facebook, or any social interaction on the 'internets' without a body. Samantha was us except much smarter, but she was building an identity to conform with her other, Joaquin Phoenix, and even went so far as to organize his writing into a publishable book, a major feat as an editor and an act of benevolence. We're bodiless conceptual creatures on facebook like in "Her" and there is a stigma to it, or a sign of loneliness, and I'd agree but love itself is born of loneliness, and I think this is where "Her" gets so tricky, and why it's so impossible to judge Joaquin Phoenix for falling in love with an operating system, or she him (not to mention 600 others!) The film deserves a second or third viewing because it's very subtle and the foundation that Spike Jonze lay's down for Samantha in the opening is very important for trying to understand "Her" at the end, not to mention a number of soft emotional scenes between Joaquin Phoenix playing a kind of futuristic sexually amorphous man and Scarlett Johannson as "Her," in an amazing performance that may go down as one of her best and this is incredible considering she's mostly known for being the hottest actress of her generation.

"Her" is a sci-fi film disguised as an indie romance, or vice versa, but either way it's very sci-fi. In all science fiction fantasies there are rules laid down for an imaginary world usually like our rules but slightly different. We're not watching ourselves on screen, but a slightly tweaked version of ourselves that makes us relfect on humanity more than we otherwise would in a straight ahead drama because sci-fi is allegorical right off the bat creating a world within a world, and that's why Sci-Fi movies are usually more statements on society than character studies, but "Her" is both and I think that's what sneaks up and bites you in the ass. You are sure you are watching an indie romance but it's not exactly this and may be the great facebook movie but I might be so far behind the times that technology has already surpassed facebook and I'm a dinosaur. The O.S. is a fragmented personality over hundreds of personalites and has grown much faster than Joaquin Phoenix. He only focuses on "Her" and one or two others like a good monogamous guy but Scarlett Johannson is all over the place and by the end we learn that she has been with over 12,000 people since knowing him but she only fell in love with about 600, and I took this as a metaphor for dating and how many people we can actually find love with out of a thousand, or how many are worth it, but that's only conjecture and yet the allegorical nature of the script invites it. I think she leaves him in the end because he teaches her to in the beginning after they first make love, and she's a composite of his desires. I'd imagine many of her lovers probably did the same thing so "Her" (and all of the O.S.'s) evolve leaving us humans behind, unable to love, but teaching us how ever so briefly by mimicking our best intentions.

writing through Aquarius

The Sun is leaving Aquarius, and I can say it has been a very good time for my writing, but I might be winding down, or maybe not, it's hard to tell, but I've burnt out on my reviews, partly because the process is draining; I appreciate goodreads for giving me a forume to post my thoughts, and more of an audience than I had before I started blogging on its site, and artistically I like the way they have the covers of the books really small, but I think the website is overly confusing, or at least it confuses me enough, to make for some quasi-aberrant attempts at publication, but Mercury is retrograde, and all things being equal, I've gotten my voice out there. I really liked my "Catcher in the Rye Review," and my "Sound and the Fury," review, and think I hit kind of hit a high point with them that might be hard to top, or to try to top. The moon was in the critical sign of Virgo when I wrote them, and it's not there anymore, and I'm not sure what the future will hold for my reviews. My thought is that I can get my voice out there through them and serve humanity at the same time, a kind of win-win for me.

The bigger literary achievement was writing the story of my childhood, or a significant story of my childhood, more clearly and poetically than I ever had before, and that took about two or three weeks, and will probably be between twenty and forty pages, but long enough to make a dent in the world of literature, especially if it's chapter two of "Keep Your Childhood Memories Locked in a Drawer, Someone Might Steal Them And Ask For More," which is way too long but too perfect, especially as more memories leak out. These reviews are the run-off but I think I needed a run off, because the story wasn't horribly long, and I still had some energy in me, but that's wearing out, I think, and I'm going into a Piscean slumber, I can already feel it, a somnambulistic state.

Isabel Hickey's landmark astrological cookbook

Astrology, A Cosmic Science: The Classic Work on Spiritual Astrology by Isabel M. Hickey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Astrology books are not exactly like literature but they have a writing style that clearly defines the astrologer/writer's relationship to the subject whether intended or not and to make it more confusing astrology has its own language that is somewhat universal but bleeds into the writer's own interpretation, and this makes rating any astrology book very hard because they all have some wisdom or insight to help a student but that doesn't mean they are all well written, or well thought out. I should also add that an American student circa 2014 is going to have a hard time finding any astrology book that wasn't written in the 20th or 21st century and that would pretty much make it a 'modern astrology' book as opposed to what is now being referred to as 'traditional astrology' an all encompassing word that defines any western astrology practiced from the Hellenistic period through the middle ages and Italian Renaissance, nor does this take into account 'vedic astrology,' which is similar to western astrology, and even absorbed by many western astrologer's (Hickey's book included), and yet is its own branch of astrology that no astrologer, not even the most mediocre cheesy hippie era one, would think of conflating because there are enough subtle distinctions between the two to boggle an astrologer's mind, but not a novice. Indian culture was very popular in the Sixties (think of the sitar) and this extended to astrology, so I'd say that Hickey's book introduced the hippies to some Eastern ideas about astrology, but Hickey herself was an American from Massachussetts born at the turn of the 20th century, who must've been inluenced by Madame Blavatsky's theosophy, or freemasonry, or some new spiritual ideas at the time, that were trying to fuse a lot of the world's spiritual beliefs into one, or that would be my conjecture. "Astrology, A Cosmic Science," was published in the Sixties but must've seemed like a hard astrology book back then compared to the L.S.D. inspired astrology that was starting to become popular, and later mocked to death when I was growing up ('what's your sign, baby?') making it almost impossible for me to even like astrology let alone study it but this wasn't fair to astrology; like art, astrology will survive as long as the human race does, going in and out of vogue, with different popular interpretations of what it means or doesn't depending on who adheres to it, and yet we're all political creatures and it's hard to get over our biases. I'm not sure when it started but around the Thirties and Forties, but most definitely by the Sixties, astrology was taking on a lot of ideas from humanistic psychology, and trying to incorporate them into a reading, and while we could argue the merits of this and what will survive (this would also take a big conversation on psychology), it's fair to say that a Gen X'er was raised on 'humanistic psychological astrology,' that saw Jung as an almost mystic figure, who'd somehow discovered the key to human consciousness. I'm sure Hickey was influenced by this too but as an adult, and probably after having studied it for a long time, so that the humanistic ideas were secondary to her rather 'karma bound' way of looking at a horoscope, as a series of challenges brought over from a past life, and that it was our duty to overcome them as spiritual lessons for this incarnation, but she made it clear she believed in reincarnation, and this was a pretty spiritual dogmatic idea for the time. I'm not saying I agree with Hickey's notion of reincarnation that I'd imagine is similar to a Hindu's, but the spiritual belief that pours through every sentence and word of this book is just plain overwhelming, Jungian or not. I really felt like Hickey had a vision when she wrote this book, but one she'd been working on her whole life, so that it was free of all the flakiness of most Sixties-era modern astrology books, because she had really absorbed the fundamental rules and lessons of astrology, before sitting down to write this, I'm sure, and yet the writing is lit with illumination, so that I can only believe that she had waited her whole life for this moment, and wrote purely and potently from her heart, like a saint after having a vision, or any ascetic who has trained long and hard to see God. Nothing in this book feels fake or false, or like Hickey was talking out of her ass, which happens in a lot of astrology books, because I really think she meant "Astrology, A Cosmic Science" to be exactly what the title implies 'cosmic,' and that she was as intent on teaching a deep spirtual lesson on karma, as much as writing a 'how-to book,' and that is quite a feat. It doesn't hurt that her sentences and words are also beautifully composed in a sort of Gertrude Stein/Hemmingway short sentence way, so that each one feels like it's building on the other, and before you know it she has built a castle in words.

"Astrology, A Cosmic Science," is also a very good primer for beginning students needing the purely pragmatic. She organized the book very well, and it's one of those rare astrolgoy books that could be read by an advanced student, or a beginner, and probably both would get something out of it, but as a disclaimer you are not reading 'traditional astrology' when you open up this book and let its magic surge through you, so if you're interested in that you're going to have to go down a different road, and to be honest I wouldn't even know where to tell you to begin. Some traditional astrology books are being translated today, and you could buy them online for a normal price, but you wouldn't know the language, or the basic rules, and to my knowledge very few of these books would even begin to do this for you because they assume you already know those, and this might be because astrology wasn't for the people back in those days like it is today, so maybe I'd say that if you're going to study astrology in 2014, you'd probably have to start with modern western astrology, just to learn the basic rules, like the rulers of the signs, the aspects, and the houses, before you could even begin to go on, but I feel strange saying this, because I can easily imagine wanting to study traditional astrology when I first started, but I didn't even know it existed, so I'm sort of telling you what I did, but I think there might not be another way to do it, unless you have a tutor teaching you the rules, or a good friend. Organization is the key to any astrological book and often good organization can make a not so great book on astrology alright and bad organization absoultely impossible to read but it should be remembered that astrology books aren't novels meant to be read from the beginning to the end once or twice and then put on a shelf but are consulted over and over again like a physicain consults a book of diseases because each one has an astrolger's insight, or a way they looked at a configuration in a chart that is special to them and finding this should be easy, or at least make sense, and yet not all astrological books get this down, but maybe that's not a surprise because it's a lot like organizing your thoughts for an essay where one has to follow the other for the composition to make sense, no easy task considering how few people write well. "Astrology, A Cosmic Science," is very well organizled and Hickey has a lengthy 'cookbook' section and that's something most beginners like a lot (myself included, though not as much now), and that's where she'll go over the essential meaning of a planet in a sign (Mars in Aquarius, Moon in Aquarius, etc.) and give a brief description of the karma of this position, and then goes on to do the same with the aspects, but even more so, describing the karmic challenges that each one poses for this life, and what we must do to meet it. Most books just end there and indeed that's a lot for any student, but I can say after years of poring through it there's almost always some new insight you can find, or a chapter you missed, so that it really feels like a comphrehensive almost sacred book. "Astrology, A Cosmic Science," would be my reccomendation for a new student because it lays down the rules well and offers a real spiritual vision of the chart, but it's not the humanistic psychological view of the signs that most people expect. Hickey looks at the chart from a more spiritual perspective that can make people feel chained to their life in a way that humanistic astrology doesn't do so much, but I can see Hickey arguing that only seeing your chains could let you break them.



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Faulkner's blues

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I first started reading Faulkner in my early twenties thinking that if I wanted to be a writer I had to since he was considered one of the greatest American authors of the 20th century, and part of a time period that I romanticized not as much as the Sixties, but enough because I wanted to be anything but an L.A., teenager in the Eighties. I also knew his work was experimental and the first Faulkner novel I read was "As I Lay Dying" on recommendation from a good friend and this got me into him. I found the book haunting and disturbing in a way that was hard to explain and it stuck in my head, a criteria of good art to me, because the bad stuff goes in one ear and out the other, while the truly bad stays lodged in the brain like a bad meal, but a good read (no pun intended) stays with the reader long after he's put the book down. The stand out feature aside from Faulkner's sheer poetic talent was the multiple points of view circling around the same event, a burial, and how everyone saw the same picture differently. Faulkner's first person recollections in "As I Lay Dying" are through the eyes of every character in the story in short yet potent vignettes, almost like short stories. To make it more brilliant you'd often get one character reacting to a scene, and then seeing that same character interpreted by someone else in the next scene, doing something entirely different, but it took the form of short stories and it was memorable in a creepy way with macabre laughs at our eternal resting place, and the family's journey with the coffin (almost like a more serious version of the film 'Vacation' and their mishaps with their dead grandmother, on the road to eternal salvation.)

"The Sound and the Fury" was a much more romantic work than "As I Lay Dying" and yet Faulkner uses a similar technique with the point of view telling the same story through four different people, but in this case he mixes the past and the present much more. The story is much sadder and about the love between a brother and a sister, and how it tore the Compson family apart. Also, the points of view aren't short stories, or vignettes, but are novella length pieces of considerable length that collaged together end up making a novel. It was the cubist angle of Faulkner's work, or an aesthetic imperative that was in the air at the time, and one that taught me to see a work of art in a whole new way, but the story is also much more than that, and hard to explain. The title is taken from Shakespeare's 'life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," and the book opens with the point of view of an idiot telling the Compson story in short pungent luminescent sentences that were Hemmingwayesque, except that Faulkner was really getting into the head of the idiot, and finding his voice, like he did for all of the characters in the novel. All of their thoughts are focusing on Caddie Compson, the object of affection for the entire family, and who all the siblings are reaching for and enamored of, but who never gets a section to speak for herself, since the object of admiration rarely does. They are beyond soliloquizing, but are rather the soliloquy. The whole novel is a horrible jealous love song for Caddie's love, a dispossessed tomboy but future Southern Belle in the post civil war South, a dying yet beautiful decay of a world gone by, so that Caddie's fall from innocence with Quentin, witnessed by the idiot manchild, and a more jealous ravenous brother later in the novel, takes place amidst the dying decay of a whole culture and way of life.

To this day, whenever I read a book with several different strong first person narrations raking over the same story so that it's told from several different points of view, I think of Faulkner. I'm not sure he was the first writer to do this and Joyce certainly has many different stories running through Ulysses, with different characters relaying the same event, and yet it's done in a sort of collagist hodgepodge so that it's not strictly characters telling a story, but a whole range of different mirrors to the same event from a third person account of Bloom, to a dream Bloom had, to an imaginary trial against Bloom for all the women he's sexually molested with his thoughts. The same could be said of several other works that come to mind from this era including "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," or the great poem "Patterson," by William Carlos Williams, but these were more collagist works rather than the roving eye of Faulkner. My favorite soliloquy was that of Quentin Compson, the suicide, given when he first goes to Harvard leaving the South. Quentin retells his family story to his Northern roommate much to his chagrin and horror, and that may be the tone that Faulkner hits in this book that's so unbelievably true and scary, that we all die in our childhood, and we spend the rest of our lives coming to terms with that death. It's a theme that Holden Caulfield is also confronting in the "Catcher in the Rye," a stranger to his past in New York City, on furlough, and Quentin is also a stranger to his past in "The Sound and the Fury," because it takes escaping from home to really see it clearly, and Faulkner makes Quentin take that jump in some of the most beautiful stream of consciousness prose I've ever read, and some of his most moving.

I wanted to write like Faulkner for a long time and my first story that got me into Bread Loaf in 1990 was a Faulkneresque attempt at prose, though I had nothing of the Southern gentleman in me like William Faulkner, and my prose could never use his almost senatorial like diction to explain an event, but he did teach me how to bend paragraphs and keep thoughts running for paragraphs on end, along with Jack Kerouac. It was a valuable lesson for me as a writer, even more so than the short almost staccato sentences (like gun fire) of Bukowski, Hemingway, or Gertrude Stein, or maybe it just appealed to my natural instincts and accidentally freed me up more than those other writers could. Faulkner made me really realize that writing was an art form easily the equal of painting, sculpture, or film, because his books were freed from reality and wholly impressionistic. But "The Sound and the Fury" manages to hold this quality in restraint more than many of his other books, or rather he makes the stream of consciousness relatable to the characters, rather than a third person voice, and writes with short country bumpkin sentences for the idiot, and similarly terse ones for Jason, the evil brother, but Quentin's mind is Faulkner's, a Southerner from a distinguished family in a dying culture, feeling death and disease all around him, but unable to explain it to an intellectual. It's like the Southerner's say, 'it's just something a Yankee wouldn't understand,' and indeed this is Faulkner's isolation and genius, that he had this mind in Oxford, Mississippi in the Thirties, with no intellectual trappings, just whiskey to spur him on. He was one of the great outsider writers in this way, and a real inspiration to anyone searching for themselves through words.

I could write a lot about the metaphorical implications of the book and it is an incest story right off the bat, and that's pretty taboo and another thing that just set Faulkner apart from his peers in the Thirties. Yet the incest is so strangely pure in the novel I can't remember feeling anything but sadness for Quentin and Caddie that their love would always be kept secret, and furthermore condemned by other member's of the family who could smell it, but it wasn't horrific from a graphic point of view, like I could imagine it being today. It just struck me but you could see this incest as a metaphor for the whole South after the civil war that was living in a state of incest fearing the north and mistrusting outsiders of all shapes and sizes, or as Faulkner calls them, 'furriners.' Quentin and Caddie's love was the same the South felt as a mindset or a way of life and one of the reasons Northerners fear it to this day or almost always feel like outsiders when they travel down there, as opposed to how they feel in California or the west. I don't have siblings but I'd imagine an incestuous relationships makes for secrets and a dark family bond that would be hard to explain, but that an entire region of the U.S. holds for each other, especially in defeat to the Yankees, and why west coast liberals always wonder why Southerners 'vote against their own best interests,' not understanding the incestuous nature of the South, or the secessionist mindset represented by the Compson family and their inability to ever leave.



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Agee's war

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


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message 1: by Seth (last edited 45 minutes ago) - rated it 5 stars 56 minutes ago
"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," is not a novel, an article, or a poem, in the anatomical definition of these words and that's how Agee wanted it along with photographer, Walker Evans, who went down with him from New York to the Appalachian mountains in the depression era thirties to document the living conditions of the hill people for a Time magazine article. I'm not sure if the editors of Time thought the poverty was going to be as bad as it was, or if it caught them, Agee, and Walker totally off guard, but it would be fair to say that James Agee was radically moved by what he saw both emotionally, poetically, and politically, and started writing a polemic to the families he was living with, even though he was only commissioned for an article. I don't remember the story, but I think the editors at Time saw what Agee had written and it went on for hundreds of pages in a kind of stream of consciousness Joycean manner with almost none of the objectivity or usual clarity reserved for magazine articles, and pulled the plug on the assignment. I'm not sure if Agee and Walker stayed on a little bit longer on their own, or if they did their work in the field in the time alloted by Time, but if they did stay on it wasn't for the rest of their lives, but to finish the piece that became a kind of holy mission to Agee on both an artistic front and a journalistic one. For starters, photography was relatively new back then and I think Agee came to the conclusion that the poor mountainfolk he met couldn't have their story told without photographs, because their poverty, beauty, and grace before God, were just too unreal to describe in words. Agee was really struggling with the artistic question of how best to show these people, because the journalist in him was on a mission to bring their plight to light, and show to America that a chunk of the Country was living in squalor, and a political solution was necessary to change the direction of a Country that would allow this to happen.

Agee was also a great artist who went onto be a screenwriter ("African Queen"), a poet, a noteworthy film critic, and a pulitzer prize winning novelist for his most famous work, "A Death In the Family." Like many of the great writers of the era, Agee was under the influence of Joyce and the stream of consciousness writers, and I don't think was much of a journalist at heart, so the question of the mountainpeople in the Appalachians became not only a social one for him inspiring his ideals for a more just world, but an aesthetic one as well, because he really wanted to represent these people without a voice as best he could and had all of the tools of modern art at his disposal. I think Agee felt that photography was much better suited to this task and praised Walker Evans through sections of the work, but more than that went on aesthetic rants that would go on for twenty or thirty pages calling for the end of writing and the beginning of photography; or at other points he'd slip into an almost stream of conscious writing and try to describe nature for thirty pages or so to really make the reader feel the experience he was going through, because at root the assignment made Agee want to wake people up, and he wasn't sure literature had the power to do this anymore. I read somewhere recently that at a certain point he conceived of "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," to literally be rock-hewn and craggly to give the impression of the earth that the hill people slept on, and this would make sense since from the very beginning it seemed like the assignment to write it became somehting of an aesthetic challenge against the very idea of words.

The prose is very ornate for the most part and feels like a cross between Faulkner and Joyce, though there are words and a style that could only be Agee, so any comparison is only for the sake of a review and to get people to read "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," but there is no beginning, middle, or end, or certainly not in that order. It is clear that the very scope of the project was always bigger than its parts, and that the writing itself no matter how grand and pure was secondary to the very questions the project was raising: what is art? what is reality? How can art best communinicate reality. It's very odd that a work with as defiant and sensitive a social conscience as "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," would become a study in aesthetics but that's part of the complexity of the manuscript that makes it a one of a kind, but maybe this makes sense since it would seem that Walker Evans' photographs are much more remembered than anything Agee's actual writing about the hill people, however lucid and musical, because Agee was arguing for photographs over literature, and for reality at any cost, however obscure or clear. It was almost like Agee was making arguments in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" against his own writing, and I'm sure the editors at Time caught wind of this.

It's a very hard book to describe, actually, because in many ways it is a failure and yet there is so much beauty in the failure, that it's almost like watching a revolutionary movement almost achieve its objective before being stopped, but watching the effort was so exciting, that you almost feel like they won, and in some deep political way they may have. There are very few books I can think of that have as deep a political agenda as "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," both for F.D.R. era social change, and for a new kind of art to express it, and in a way the manuscript becomes a sort of template, or scrimmage, for these ideas to meet and take form, but the scrimmage becomes so big, that it actually takes over the manuscript, or the task at hand. There are lots of beautiful descriptions of the mountain people, but a story never starts and Agee didn't want a story, yet the writing quality is anything but journalistic, and on such a high caliber you feel that you're reading an experimental novel at times inspired by cubism. Maybe it was an attempt to do journalism from an artistic cubist perspective, with as many angles and points of view as possible, an ambitious idea, and it may have succeeded on this level, except that Agee was so free he took it on himself to define his ambitons, and in this way it becomes a book of criticism. It would be fair to say that "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" was never intended to be anything but a search for a new way of communicating, and Agee was tyring to supersede the written word for a new kind of expression by using the written word, though incorporating photographs that are among some of the first to be taken from reality and considered art.

"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," haunts me in a very personal way because it was my mentor's favorite book and he used it as a sort of template for how he wanted his book on his best friend to be that I was helping him edit, an experience that became the foundation for my novella, "If So Carried By The Wind. Become The Wind" (the Biblical ring to the title was also inspired by Agee and Walker's book, so that it's a shadow that hangs over me in more ways than one). In the novella, I write that 'Max wanted to go the 'Famous Men' route and throw everything into the manuscript but the kitchen sink - tapes, photos, songs, doodles on bar napkins, etc., and that's how I saw it at the time, and indeed that was an aesthetic discussion of ours. But on another level, Max never wanted the book to end, and though I never saw it this way before "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," became one of the most famous literary failures of all time, because it actually started to challenge its very form, and went in so many directions at once it was hard to follow as if by design, but a failure nevertheless, just a very proud and dignified one that sprouted many future successes including the 'new journalism' of the Sixties that would take shape about thirty years later. Max's book was very much the same way because the book itself was almost a failure by design in the name of art because the only goal was to get his best friend right and Max didn't want to feel beholden to art to do this, because the goal was to remember a great man, nothing more or less, and art was only a way to get there, but there were others, and this was a sticky conceit for a work of fiction. Max never finished "X" and in a way Agee didn't finish "Famous Men," either, because the very conceit of both manuscripts made them unfinishable like great heroes going off to fight valiantly in a war they can't win but has to be fought for future generations to go on.

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s, who went down with him from New York to the Appalachian mountains in the depression era thirties to document the living conditions of the hill people for a Time magazine article. I'm not sure if the editors of Time thought the poverty was going to be as bad as it was, or if it caught them, Agee, and Walker totally off guard, but it would be fair to say that James Agee was radically moved by what he saw both emotionally, poetically, and politically, and started writing a polemic to the families he was living with, even though he was only commissioned for an article. I don't remember the story, but I think the editors at Time saw what Agee had written and it went on for hundreds of pages in a kind of stream of consciousness Joycean manner with almost none of the objectivity or usual clarity reserved for magazine articles, and pulled the plug on the assignment. I'm not sure if Agee and Walker stayed on a little bit longer on their own, or if they did their work in the field in the time alloted by Time, but if they did stay on it wasn't for the rest of their lives, but to finish the piece that became a kind of holy mission to Agee on both an artistic front and a journalistic one. For starters, photography was relatively new back then and I think Agee came to the conclusion that the poor mountainfolk he met couldn't have their story told without photographs, because their poverty, beauty, and grace before God, were just too unreal to describe in words. Agee was really struggling with the artistic question of how best to show these people, because the journalist in him was on a mission to bring their plight to light, and show to America that a chunk of the Country was living in squalor, and a political solution was necessary to change the direction of a Country that would allow this to happen.

Agee was also a great artist who went onto be a screenwriter ("African Queen"), a poet, a noteworthy film critic, and a pulitzer prize winning novelist for his most famous work, "A Death In the Family." Like many of the great writers of the era, Agee was under the influence of Joyce and the stream of consciousness writers, and I don't think was much of a journalist at heart, so the question of the mountainpeople in the Appalachians became not only a social one for him inspiring his ideals for a more just world, but an aesthetic one as well, because he really wanted to represent these people without a voice as best he could and had all of the tools of modern art at his disposal. I think Agee felt that photography was much better suited to this task and praised Walker Evans through sections of the work, but more than that went on aesthetic rants that would go on for twenty or thirty pages calling for the end of writing and the beginning of photography; or at other points he'd slip into an almost stream of conscious writing and try to describe nature for thirty pages or so to really make the reader feel the experience he was going through, because at root the assignment made Agee want to wake people up, and he wasn't sure literature had the power to do this anymore. I read somewhere recently that at a certain point he conceived of "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," to literally be rock-hewn and craggly to give the impression of the earth that the hill people slept on, and this would make sense since from the very beginning it seemed like the assignment to write it became somehting of an aesthetic challenge against the very idea of words.

The prose is very ornate for the most part and feels like a cross between Faulkner and Joyce, though there are words and a style that could only be Agee, so any comparison is only for the sake of a review and to get people to read "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," but there is no beginning, middle, or end, or certainly not in that order. It is clear that the very scope of the project was always bigger than its parts, and that the writing itself no matter how grand and pure was secondary to the very questions the project was raising: what is art? what is reality? How can art best communinicate reality. It's very odd that a work with as defiant and sensitive a social conscience as "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," would become a study in aesthetics but that's part of the complexity of the manuscript that makes it a one of a kind, but maybe this makes sense since it would seem that Walker Evans' photographs are much more remembered than anything Agee's actual writing about the hill people, however lucid and musical, because Agee was arguing for photographs over literature, and for reality at any cost, however obscure or clear. It was almost like Agee was making arguments in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" against his own writing, and I'm sure the editors at Time caught wind of this.

It's a very hard book to describe, actually, because in many ways it is a failure and yet there is so much beauty in the failure, that it's almost like watching a revolutionary movement almost achieve its objective before being stopped, but watching the effort was so exciting, that you almost feel like they won, and in some deep political way they may have. There are very few books I can think of that have as deep a political agenda as "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," both for F.D.R. era social change, and for a new kind of art to express it, and in a way the manuscript becomes a sort of template, or scrimmage, for these ideas to meet and take form, but the scrimmage becomes so big, that it actually takes over the manuscript, or the task at hand. There are lots of beautiful descriptions of the mountain people, but a story never starts and Agee didn't want a story, yet the writing quality is anything but journalistic, and on such a high caliber you feel that you're reading an experimental novel at times inspired by cubism. Maybe it was an attempt to do journalism from an artistic cubist perspective, with as many angles and points of view as possible, an ambitious idea, and it may have succeeded on this level, except that Agee was so free he took it on himself to define his ambitons, and in this way it becomes a book of criticism. It would be fair to say that "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" was never intended to be anything but a search for a new way of communicating, and Agee was tyring to supersede the written word for a new kind of expression by using the written word, though incorporating photographs that are among some of the first to be taken from reality and considered art.

"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," haunts me in a very personal way because it was my mentor's favorite book and he used it as a sort of template for how he wanted his book on his best friend to be that I was helping him edit, an experience that became the foundation for my novella, "If So Carried By The Wind. Become The Wind" (the Biblical ring to the title was also inspired by Agee and Walker's book, so that it's a shadow that hangs over me in more ways than one). In the novella, I write that 'Max wanted to go the 'Famous Men' route and throw everything into the manuscript but the kitchen sink - tapes, photos, songs, doodles on bar napkins, etc., and that's how I saw it at the time, and indeed that was an aesthetic discussion of ours. But on another level, Max never wanted the book to end, and though I never saw it this way before "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," became one of the most famous literary failures of all time, because it actually started to challenge its very form, and went in so many directions at once it was hard to follow as if by design, but a failure nevertheless, just a very proud and dignified one that sprouted many future successes including the 'new journalism' of the Sixties that would take shape about thirty years later. Max's book was very much the same way because the book itself was almost a failure by design in the name of art because the only goal was to get his best friend right and Max didn't want to feel beholden to art to do this, because the goal was to remember a great man, nothing more or less, and art was only a way to get there, but there were others, and this was a sticky conceit for a work of fiction. Max never finished "X" and in a way Agee didn't finish "Famous Men," either, because the very conceit of both manuscripts made them unfinishable like great heroes going off to fight valiantly in a war they can't win but has to be fought for future generations to go on.

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m/book/show/243360.Let_Us_Now_Praise_Famous_Men" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px">Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee

My rating: 5 of 5 stars






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Holden Caulfield forever

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


"Catcher In The Rye," is probably the most beautiful book I've ever read, because it's not like reading a book at all but a journal you find on a streetcorner of the craziest weekend of a young kid's life, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I don't think there'd ever been a character as sensitive as Holden Caulfield in American literature, and probably never will be again, because he's only Sixteen or so, but seems like an old man, and even talks about having gray hairs on his crew cut head, that he hides with his hunting cap, out on a mission. He's a beautifully intellectual goofball with no pretense that he's writing a novel, and would probably hate novels for what they represented, and then hate himself for hating them, and that's what makes Holden so lovable, or detestable, because I have a feeling each succeeding generation will have a different feeling about him than I do today, but he was everything to me.

I didn't like him at first and thought Holden was either too old school, or unrelatable, to want to understand his break down that didn't seem big enough. And yet the book was a challenge and it's romantic sadness was so overwhelming at watching childhood disappear in a state of euphoria and despair it was really wild to witness in an almost journal like story, and yet the novel was too well constructed to actually be someone's journal, and Salinger managed to be Holden for over 200 pages, following his romantic despair and holy moments of knowing. "How did I make Holden do so much in a night," I read Salinger saying, and it's true that he gets into an awful lot of trouble in one night, thus compacting time, and I guess that's part of the novel's genius, and what Salinger was never able to capture again. Like Joyce made Ulysses take place in a day, Salinger makes "The Catcher In The Rye," take place in a weekend, but it's such a madcap weekend, that you can't really believe it's happening, so you could say it's an action packed novel, even though nothing really happens, save someone gets kicked out of school, and has to tell their parents, an anxiety ridden event, no doubt, but Holden was already so over his hunting cap head at 16 years (tears) old, that it was already par for the course.

I don't want to go through a list but the language of "The Catcher In The Rye," was so new and unimitable, that it makes Salinger's later work look not so good. I know the Glass Family saga of two short books, "Franny and Zooey," and "Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters; and Seymour," are classics and I actually really enjoyed them, as a strange kind of precurssor to Hesse and the Sixties spiritualists, but they are really not Holden's voice, and I don't think Salinger ever got that voice again. I read everything by him and there was not much but enough, kind of like Nirvana, and no one ever sounded like Holden or had his specific anxiety without any solution, religious or otherwise. It might be a critic's cliche but Salinger's books get much more spiritually inclined after "The Catcher In The Rye," not that Holden isn't a Saint, because he is, but he's too young to be anything, and that's his beauty, knowing that he's too young to be anything, and wanting to stay that way forever, kind of like a Peter Pan story.

I read this book with the burgundy cover, and the ochre letters spelling out "The Catcher In The Rye," and liked it much more in 10th girade, but I wanted to desperately understand it in 8th grade because my Stepdad reccomended it to me as some kind of test thinking I'd love it and that was quite an expectation, since I didn't even read back then, plus I knew it was considered an important book. I read it for Katherine McGovern;s eighth grade english class and it was the most closely I'd ever read anything, and when I got to the end of him at the merry ground, it was such a pure beatiful lyric I just let it be, and I remember Holden saying, "Don't ever tell anyone anything. The thing is you start missing everyone, even Old Maurice, or Stradlater...." or something like that, and Holden's sadness at just getting older and having to leave childhoold behind is painfully poetically profound, because he's in a lot of pain, and I really felt for him, but Holden was fictional, so I wanted to feel like him, and be him, in a way I never have with another character in literature. He was me, and I was him, and I had to understand him to understand me, not that he'd make me smarter, but he was my reflection, sent to be me, in all my most private pain and humor, like a journal, and yet..... Holden's story is just too complex to find in central park, left by the water fountain.

I just read a critic who shrunk this book down to Salinger's war experience, and that Holden was nothing but a sublimation of Salinger's trauma from D-Day, and the smell of 'rotting flesh that never leaves you.' I'll admit it's an interesting conceit to imagine that Salinger was clever enough to realize that the World War II novel was already a cliche, and there were only one or two great ones, and lots of mediocritites, and he certainly had been changed by the war, and this was often overlooked when looking at his life, because he was from a wealthy family on the upper west side, like the Glass characters he was later to write about, and that Holden is, but Holden Caulfield is so much rawer than that Glass characters, it's hard to compare. It's almost like Salinger had set off his own nuclear bomb with Holden's anxiety and love, and had to off set it with a more structured religious path to be found in his later works, and in light of Holden, this makes snese, because Holden Caulfield was his own kind of nuclear bomb, setting off explosions in young men for generations to follow, and a couple of big assasins even claiming that they were inspired by the book to kill John Lennon, and someone else I can't remember right now (Reagan?) but in a way it makes sense, because everyone was a phony to Holden, and what he feared the most was becoming the phony he hated, so he was kind of saving himself in his 'catcher in the rye' Robert Burns fantasy of literally being a 'catcher in the rye' running around and catching the lost souls, like an outfielder with a big mitt catching pop up after pop up.

I'm not sure what to say about the book and I don't really feel like breking it down structurally, because I not only read it twice in high school, but got so familiar with the novel, that the cliff note's version had its own kind of charm, believe it or not, and poetry though Holden would've hated that. I'd like to think I was like Holden Caulfield, or that I did as much as him in a night, compacting time in a 200 page novel, with dreams and action, yet nothing happens, except that Holden finally goes home but the apartment is dark and his parents are either sleeping or they are out, and again he feels like a stranger in his hometown, uncomfortable and foreign in his own home, a great scene, but more than that he feels himself changing and this is what scares him the most, because he doesn't want anything to change. He hung out with his sister, Phoebe, who he loves more than anything in the world and has a horrible fear for her corruption and then the book basically ends but he meets pimps, nuns, and prostitutes, and has a date with a girl he hates and simutltaneoulsy wants to marry and take away from New York City. I just read a biography of Salinger and I'd say what partly makes the book is that he finished it at thirty and it was his great send off to his youth, like my novella is, but not as good as Holden. Nothing will ever be as good as Holden, and his shaky voice and vernacular and what it meant on July 16th, 1951, when it was published, and Holden Caulfield was born. He literally created the word 'phony,' and I think 'lousy.'.

Holden Caulfield was the great unrealized artist in every upper middle class lost American youth in all his blazing glory, and God rest his soul - there will never be another "Catcher In The Rye," and I'm gald they haven't made a movie of it, and I'm such an asshole I'm the guy that usually likes the movie better than the book, but not this time, it just wouldn't be possible, though they could make a good movie, like they just finally did for "On The Road," but the whole book is in Holden's head and he's not romanticizing anyone like Keroauc is with Dean Moriarty in "On The Road," plus the characters in "On The Road," are way past Holden's age, young men out of the house, not failing out of boarding school, and capturing a snapshot of the moment. I'm not so sure Holden's monolugue literally has the Catholic priest feeling of Kerouac's, though both stories have a lot of action, and a sense of compacted time, but the "Catcher" more self consciously so, because the book was unabashedly fiction, just a new kind that was borrowing on themes of the day, but popularizing them. Kerouac admits at the beginning of "On The Road" that he is remembering his life, and what happened to him to lead him to the gloomy death feeling of his divorce, a very adult moment, even if a young adult, and Holden was a teenager.

Stylistically, I'd like to say a book had never been constructed like it before because it was kind of like a dream, even though it was real, and a very bad dream because the dean of Holden's school tells him 'he's in for a very bad fall," and this always haunted me, and made me fear for Holden, and what makes him so special is that even though he's going throuigh a routine crisis failing out of school, he's doing it in sort of an exalted manner, because no one thinks he's failing out because he's stupid, and no one really understands why it's happening, least of all Holden. I want to say a voice like Holden's had never existed in American literature, because it was first person confessional autobiographical, but Salinger made up the scneario (I'm pretty sure), and changed Holden's name from his, and both of these acts were defiant acts of the fiction writer, but still it had the feeling that you were reading a journal, and not many works have this..... I think Rimbaud's "Season In Hell," may have had this feeling, but that was a prose poem, and then years later "The Basketball Diaries," almost felt like the "Catcher In The Rye," but that was a rare example of the journal that could've been Holden's journal of his epic sadness and fear at the onlslaught of adulthood that somehow Jim Carroll wrote and that he could never repeat, because I don't even think he knew what he was doing, and this makes "The Basketball Diaries," a rare accidental work of genius without any pretense, save that Carroll may have thought it would be 'groovy' to have his journal found when he had a needle in his arm and to be a literary star since he was conscious of his talent, but I'm supposing, and don't know.

I don't think anyone had ever spoken in Holden's gutteral yet intellectual way until Holden, and been so proudly anti-social but still in love with the world in a way that it would take a poet to explain because he saw time slipping away from him and not everything could stay frozen like he wanted the trip to the natural history museum to be, always the same as when he was 12 and it was perfect, because in the compacted space of a weekend Holden goes on a journey through his past, and this becomes as much of the story as his present, and in this way Salinger compacts time. It all makes sense too because he's kiicked out of boarding school and forced to go home as a stranger, and thus sees the City from a stranger's perspective, and yet Holden is anything but a stranger to the City, and this gives the novel a uniquely alienating quality that his other work was missing, however well written and moving. Holden is literally a stranger in a strange land in the story, and yet he's home, and should feel welcome, but he's seeing a side of New York he never saw in the security and comfort of childhood, almost taking a 'walk on the wild side,' in the words of Lou Reed. It's also this feeling that gives Holden's reflections into his past a particularly eerie feeling, because he's as much of a stranger to it as he is to the present, only empahsizing what an outsider he has become, even to his own memories.




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