Finnegans Wake, James Joyce. Puns, malaprops, parody, rhyming slang, mock allusions, & the like make up the entire novel--or perhaps pseudo-novel, for it reads like something akin to mimicry, with each element of traditional novels, from plot to syntax, being skewered with great wit & creativity. While I won't deny it's a difficult book--I spent a half year reading it--its basic premise seems to be history is cyclic & static, rendering human existence, with all its struggles & anguish, pointlessly absurd. To that end, Joyce makes such fatalistic pessimism a joy to read. If there's a downside to Finnegans Wake, it's that, afterward, everything else seems tawdry & quaint in comparison. A truly remarkable literary experience!
*
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Joseph Campbell & Harold Morton Robinson. I won't say this guide, one of the first of its kind for Finnegans Wake, isn't helpful, but it's not as useful as it could be. The synopses of chapters is good--although the Finnegans Wake edition I read provides that anyway--but the long sequences of partially paraphrased passages from Joyce, presented without editorial interruption as way of explanation, seem superfluous at best.
*
Rashōmon, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, trans. Jay Rubin. Take note, fellow Kurosawa fans--the movie Rashōmon is less based on the story "Rashōmon" than on "In the Bamboo Grove," also included in this collection. Akutagawa spins gripping, depressing tales, especially those written, at least semi-autobiographically, just before his suicide. Haruki Murakami's introduction "Akutagawa Ryūnosuke: Downfall of the Chosen," provides enlightening comments & context re: Akutagawa. You might find it interesting, too, that the mini-series Aoi Bungaku, which adapted, albeit loosely, the works of famous modern Japanese writers into anime, features Akutagawa's "The Spider Thread" & "Hell Screen."
*
The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories, ed. Jay Rubin. Good selection of mostly modern stories, such as Hoshino Tomoyuki's "Pink," Ogawa Yōko's "The Tale of the House of Physics," Genji Keita's "Mr. English," Satō Yūya's "Same As Always," & Haruki Murakami's "UFO in Kushino," among lots of other good stuff.
*
Hagakure: The Code of the Samurai; The Manga Edition, Yamamoto Tsunetomo, adapted by Sean Michael Wilson, et al. I read a full translation on which this manga is based several years ago, & as way of compliment, it does a very good job of illustrating (pun intended) the way of the samurai, as counterintuitive as it may sound, by reducing the verbiage & examples from the original text.
*
Sixty Stories, Donald Barthelme. Still one of my favorite writers, Barthelme is the Monty Python of the literary world, for his work remains incredibly fresh & funny, even though he wrote it back in the days when Earth was still new to me.
*
Noir, Robert Coover. I place this somewhere between parody of & homage to hard-boiled detectives novels--I really need to organize my bookshelves better! As an on & off fan--crazy weather, huh--of the genre, I found Coover's venture into detective novels, told with his usual wit & flair, quite enjoyable.
*
The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell), Robert Coover. These short imaginative sketches aren't exactly ekphrasis, since none are about any one particular Cornell piece, but are impressions inspired by Cornell's body of work. I'm reminded of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.
*
Cronopios & Famas, Julio Cortázar, trans. Paul Blackburn. It's not clear to me why Cortázar isn't on the tongue of every student of literature. It's hard to think of another collection as creative & imaginative as this collection. It's not classified as such, but to me, it's poetry. The individual pieces remind me stylistically of Russell Edson's The Childhood of the Equestrian.
*
The Government Lake, James Tate. I put off reading this posthumous collection for some time because I knew it would sadden me. The poems collected here aren't as witty or tightly constructed as I've come to expect of Tate--it's as if he'd not fully revised them--but they're still amusing & delightfully weird. Speaking for myself, if not for poetry incarnate, he will be sorely missed.
*
The Big Game, Benjamin Péret, trans. Marilyn Kallet. Some call Péret the most bizarre of the first-gen French surrealists--as in support, James Tate called Péret his favorite--& this big bilingual poetry book certainly gives credence to such a claims. Sadly missing from this delightful collection is one of my all-time favorites, "Louis XVI s'en va á la guillotine," but there is "A Bird Shit on My Jacket Bastard":
Empty-handed and foot raised
the good child on two plates
was dying to laugh at a lonely
horse
at the moon
at the cops
Instead of dying
he could have laughed
he preferred to pound like a deaf man
on the nearest tree
The tree meowed
T.S.F. T.S.F.
The T.S.F. bit him on the right foot
and a bear on the left hand
Since he was young he didn’t die from it
They decorated him
made him an ambassador
Paul Claudel
*
Capital of Pain, Paul Éluard, trans. Mary Anne Caws, et al. Éluard's lyrical & elliptical mostly love poetry demonstrates (as is its right) why he remains one of the most popular & influential of the original surrealists. This bilingual collection includes a thoughty Caws essay on Éluard & his poetics.
*
Robert Desnos: Surrealist, Lover, Resistant; The Complete Poems, Robert Desnos, trans. Timothy Adès. It took me nearly a year to read this 500+ page bilingual volume--Desnos wrote many very looooooooong poems--& I applaud Adès for his labor. (He has a very cool site where he exhibits many of his other translations.) That said, the "rhyming translator" allows his penchant for rhymes at times (see what I did!) to make Desnos a trifle sing-songy, which, even with how little I know, rightly or wrongly, I know his poems don't normally sound like that in French. Still, it's an enormously wonderful book for seemingly unappreciative monoglots like me. One of my favorite poems is "Les Quatres sans cou"("The Four Cut Necks"), of which you can watch a most enjoyable video here (translated by Alix Fizet, I believe).
*
Treatise on Style, Louis Aragon, trans. Alyson Waters. For Aragon, style isn't merely a matter of syntax, word choice, tone, or other rhetorical & technical concerns, but to a much larger degree, it's about attitude. Briefly & bluntly, if you're an ass-kissing lackey, your work is likely to have all the appeal of a "shirt in a urinal," even if you check all the prescribed boxes of what makes literature worthwhile, because twaddle is twaddle, regardless of technique. With remorseless wit, Aragon delivers an outrageous & (at the time) scandalous repudiation of widely held literary theories & personages.
*
Possessed by Memory, Harold Bloom. At 89, the renowned literary critic contemplates mortality through protracted discussions of biblical tales, replete with lengthy quotations of scripture from the King James version, no less, in hopes of a "capital B Blessing of a more abundant life"--er, afterlife, I guess. Then there's Shakespeare, Milton, & so on in that manner, including . . .
*
Idylls of the Kings, Alfred Tennyson. I like Tennyson's ear--not so much his politics. Moreover, I don't care for romantic tales of kings & queens & have an especially dim regard for Camelot crap, but what the hell, I read Idylls anyway. All in all, but in particular Arthur's melodramatic chastising of Guinevere, Idylls falls with a dull thud on didactic grounds. That said, it's hard to fault Tennyson's technical prowess, though I recommend his shorter works instead.
*
Dear Elizabeth, Sarah Ruhl. I'm not particularly fond of literary dramatizations, but this play based upon the correspondences between Robert Lowell & Elizabeth Bishop makes me want to read Words in Air, so I guess it serves as an introduction.
*
Hear Trains, Caroline Knox. One of my very favorite poets, Knox dazzles in this collection of intellectual, absurd, playful, often hilarious, often difficult poems. The House Party remains her best book in my estimation, but this is damn good!
*
To Drink Boiled Snow, Caroline Knox. On a bit of a Knox binge lately. See above.
*
Shock by Shock, Dean Young. Another of my faves still living, Young's become more reflective if not pensive, perhaps given his health issues--he received a heart transplant, if I'm not mistaken--while never losing his reckless bent toward the bizarre & surreal. In short, good stuff!
*
Ararat, Louise Glück. Several strong poems here, though the book as a whole spends too much time "psychobabblizing" about familial relationships for my behaviorist tastes. Now in pizza flavor!
*
Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm. It's a fine book, especially for its historical relevance, considering it was written in 1941 with a real time analysis of Nazis, but for what it's worth, apples to oranges as it may be, as a former psychology major, I prefer B.F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom & Dignity.
*
On Certainty, Ludwig Wittgenstein, trans. Denis Paul & G.E.M. Anscombe. Or is it Uncertainty? Makes ya think, don't it? The point is that what we think we know & what we actually know are quite difficult to know. Let this be a lesson to all you censors & deplatforming zealots. It is through dialogue that we discover truth, not through repression & suppression. Stylistically, this essay is similar to Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus--& who doesn't love the Stylistics?
*
The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell. One of my favorite philosophers, Russell has the knack of discussing philosophic topics (see The Problems of Philosophy) in such a way that the general reader can understand. However, in this essay, he sounds an awful lot like Will Durant, with an emphasis on awful. While the main premise that people should do whatever makes them happy as long as it doesn't harm others is, though problematic, a good rule of thumb, the overgeneralizations based upon gender & occupations, for instance, are reductive &--as the kids say--cringe.
*
Ecce Homo, Fredrich Nietzsche, Dover Edition. Hey, Listen to Me! is how I translate the title of Nietzsche's last work, a tirade of a treatise & less funny precursor to Firesign Theatre's Everything You Know Is Wrong. Among the many provocative statements made, Nietzsche dubs love the ultimate act of egotism. Maybe so, but then again, maybe he just wasn't doing it right. Also: Wagner! Wagner! Wagner!
*
Existentialism and Human Emotions, Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Bernard Fretchman & Hazel E. Barnes. I discovered, after diving into this volume--comprised of selections from Existentialism & Being & Nothingness--that I had read it before, but had merely forgotten. O, but I'd not forgotten some of the basic quarrels I have with existentialism. For instance, I tend to think free will is illusory, so the notion that we have choices is absurd. I'm also reminded of some of the really inane interpretations of existentialism, e.g., if you're poor, it's because you've chosen to be poor, or if you're sick, you've chosen to be so. I had also forgotten that Sartre, at least for me, provokes more questions than he provides answers. I'm not saying that's a bad thing.
*
Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Lloyd Alexander. Personally, I've experienced worse--for instance, the time I was forced to eat a ghastly, sickly, ghost-white Frito chip, resulting in all too titular consequences. Rather than nausea, Sartre seems to be talking about ennui--oh, wait, I get it! I probably like Sartre's philosophical treatises better than I do his forays into the creative arts, I guess, though I've not read enough of either.
*
The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism; The Political Economy of Human Rights (Vol. 1), Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman. From the authors of Manufacturing Consent, before Chomsky became a shill for the DNC, this analysis of further media negligence & complicity in US involvement in creating & supporting fascist regimes abroad in the 1970s sadly could be applied today & it would remain every bit as accurate & damning.
*
Propaganda and the Public Mind, Noam Chomsky. In a series of interviews by David Barsasian, Chomsky gives his views on a variety of political issues of the day such as East Timor, the first Gulf War, the bombing of Sudan, etc. I find his statement that Nixon was the last liberal president less controversial than his statement that Marx was a theorist, not a revolutionary, who made only a few scattered statements about socialism. As one who's read both Das Kapital & The Communist Manifesto, I'd have to say that's bullshit. Nixon a liberal? Well, by today's standards, hell, he's practically a commie.
*
The White Album, Joan Didion. Maybe it was the time constraint of having to have it completed by Tuesday's 9:30am class, but I didn't much care for The Book of Common Prayer when I read it as a grad student. Lo & many years later, I wondered, were I to read Didion again, if my opinion would change. Even though several well-written, quasi-thoughty essays appear in this collection, a few too many strike me as a bit--well, to be frank--bourgeois for my tastes. So, yeah, I guess I'm saying I prefer the Beatles' original to Didion's cover.
*
My Discovery of America, Vladimir Mayakovsky, trans. Neil Cornwell. Written in 1926, Mayakovsky makes often witty, off-the-cuff observations and analysis of American landscapes & society from a Marxist's point of view, e.g., the treatment of striking clothing workers on the picket line, the sentencing of the rich (Leopold & Loeb, life) versus that of the poor (Sacho & Vanzetti, death), how uncomfortable Pullman cars are, bigotry, America's love of celery, segregation, etc. There's plenty to love about this book, plenty of quotable quotes, many just as applicable today as they were back then, such as, "There isn't a country that spits out as much moralistic, lofty, idealistic, sanctimonious rubbish as the United States does." I heart Mayakavosky.
*
The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck. What is especially gratifying is that Buck deftly avoids employing stereotypes & all that implies in relating the economic rise of a poor farm family in early 20th century China. This is my second reading of Buck's classic novel. You ought to read it, too.
*
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers. This first novel--a sad story, artfully told--is by far my favorite work by McCullers. While largely a sympathetic portrayal of black America, some of the statements may be, in retrospect, a bit problematic.
*
From Death to Morning, Thomas Wolfe. I hadn't read Wolfe since tackling Look Homeward, Angel as the only freshman--imagine me, a prodigy!--in Dr. Walther's major American writers class. Remembering the verbose yet poetic passages, I thought it might be rewarding to return to Wolfe. The verbose, poeticized passages are superabundant, but so is baked-in bigotry, however well-intended Wolfe's aim. In that regard, these short stories may not pave the road to hell, but they possibly serve as mile markers. That said, "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn" remains enjoyable, though I gave up reading the book in its entirety.
*
A Shropshire Lad, A.E. Housman. Primarily acquainted only with the much anthologized "Terrence, This Is Stupid Stuff," I'll admit this collection is not what I expected, what with its many melancholy, melodramatic poems, but in the final analysis, Terrence, he may have a point.
*
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet & Other Poems, John Berryman. I've not returned often to Berryman since my college days. Back then, I was a huge fan & devoured just about everything he wrote--the entirety of his Dream Songs, its follow-up collections, his early poems, & this book, a kind of "greatest hits" that includes three of my favorite poems: "Winter Landscapes," "The Moon and The Night and The Men," & "The Ball Poem." What I like about his poetry is his dark sense of humor, conveyed with playfully disjointed, if not convoluted, syntax.
*
Sonnets, John Berryman. Only one of these sonnets (which together form a narrative sequence) appeared in print prior to the publication of this volume, published at the height of Berryman's popularity, if "popularity" is a word that one can accurately ascribe to poets. True to form--pun intended--Berryman again demonstrates his signature fragmented syntax & melancholic wit in their early genesis.
*
Wheeling Motel, Franz Wright. You can listen to Franz Wright, son of James Wright, read many of these plainspoken, ruminating, playful yet melancholic poems on Spotify & other platforms--he sounds a bit like a less gruff Tom Waits--though I enjoy the printed page far more.
*
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, Terrance Hayes. Throughout this volume--each sonnet in the sequence has the same title as the book itself, & several later sonnets repeat bits from earlier sonnets as a way of giving closure to the whole--Hayes nibbles at the edge of politics but doesn't delve deep or stray far from the acceptable mainstream path, the "Trump is bad" variety of analysis that, albeit true, isn't exactly profound or original. For instance, when eulogizing Amiri Baraka, Hayes focuses on Baraka's most anthologized--& not coincidentally--least controversial, least radical, least political poem. Also, if you listen to Hayes reading this collection, his repeating the title, the same f'ng title, throughout is annoying as popup ads, if truth be told, which it rarely is these days. American Sonnets isn't Hayes's best work--I'd say Hip Logic or Muscular Music--but it's most certainly worth a read.
*
The Poems of Catullus, trans. Daisy Dunn. I have about a half-dozen translations of Catullus on my shelf & have read probably a dozen others elsewhere. The variance in the translations shows a tendency to interpret rather than strictly translate Catullus. Indeed, in the past, most translators felt the need to sanitize Catullus. What makes Dunn's translation fresh is her willingness to indulge in the vulgarities & perversities (by today's standards) that comprise a portion of Catullus's work. I still prefer my reworking of the infamous XVI, but I really enjoyed Dunn's overall take on Catullus. Kudos!
*
Methods & Theories of Art History, Anne D'Alleva. Since this is intended as a textbook for college courses in art history, I shouldn't be surprised that it reads like one. In sum, it provides a survey of the history of art theories, giving examples of how various isms might be used to analyze art. It's not bad if you're a novice, but at the risk of sounding pompous, it really didn't tell me much that I didn't already know.
*
The Real Anthony Fauci, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I can't say I agree with everything Kennedy says--especially given big tech's ear bent toward censorship--but rather than discuss the validity or invalidity of Kennedy's claims, I'd rather address the subject of censorship: I'm against it. "Night at the Improv, C. 1600," which first appeared in Segue (p. 56) about 20 years ago, speaks implicitly to the question of free speech; "Net Neutrality," which appears in a recent Home Planet News, addresses it more straightforwardly. Undoubtedly, Kennedy has long been considered a controversial figure, yet our flaccid facade of democracy has withstood his unorthodox views thus far without the state crumbling. If even a quarter of what Kennedy alleges here is true, then build the wall--no, not that one, but the wall to line all the hucksters & plunderers up against when the revolution comes.
*
Barabbas, Pär Lagerkvist, trans. Alan Blair. Lagerkvist's purpose in writing this novel, I'd wager, would be to put forth his belief in secular Christianity. Of the three Lagerkvist novels I've read, this would be my least favorite. It's not bad, just a bit plodding. For instance, did we really need the backstory about the crucifixion? Seems like that's pretty much common knowledge. Even so, I wish I could find more Lagerkvist available in English.
*
Holy Bible, various authors. A sprawling epic that stretches from the beginning of time itself to circa 60 A.D., it presents, utilizing the assembled writings of mostly anonymous authors, an uneven collection of tall tales & fables that range from the improbable creation of the world--nay, the universe & beyond--to its destruction & just about everything in between: tyranny, war, slavery, adultery, rape, incest, drunkenness, debauchery, temptation, death, taxes, & so on. While I applaud its ambitious aims, it wallows too often in pedantry, devoting chapter after chapter to the antiquated minutia of religious ritual & uninspired exposition of genealogy so that the flow of narration becomes too irreparably lost for even Jesus H. Christ, Esq., to save. Speaking of Whom, the supposed main character, Mr. Christ, doesn't appear until over halfway through the book, then--spoiler alert--almost immediately dies. Inserted throughout the pages are assorted instances of magic realism--a smooth-as-silk-tongued serpent, incendiary shrubbery that speaks with a voice straight from God, a down-on-his-luck man who lives inside an accommodating fish, a curious woman so cursed that she turns into a saltlick, both good & evil angels & gods, as well as what may appeal to many today, apparent zombies--which some may say makes for compelling storytelling, but ultimately, the over-reaching arc proves far too disjointed & didactic (hell, it's downright preachy) to recommend.
Anyway, that's what I think.
Comments