also in no particular order:
1. Saturday, Ian McEwan. Hm, topical. Like ointment. All I know is that when the daughter of the story's protagonist is forced at gunpoint to strip naked and nearly raped, thirty pages from the end of the novel, all the clever neurological symptoms and "Dover Beach" quotes in the world are not going to justify the attempted mood of cautious optimism.
2. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand. Who IS John Galt? Who cares? I got to page 2.
3. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer. My visceral repulsion upon opening to the first page and reading Foer's utterly precious, stylized self-absorbed noodling about a tea kettle or some shit was only increased by reading the descriptions of the book offered by reviewers, most especially those who liked it. There's nothing that fits terrorism quite like twee.
4. Left Behind, Tim LaHaye & Jerry Jenkins. Crap crap crap crap crap. I got about fifty pages in before I wearied of punishing myself. Makes Dean Koontz read like Proust.
5. Desert of the Real, Slavoj Zizek. Wow, it's like being harangued by a drunk graduate student. Loop me again, baby, with the post-Lacanian provocation, hector me, shout at me, speculate and reverberate, just don't hit me with any of those tired old privileges of coherence, reason or argument! Is it too hard to think things through? Just theorize, man.
Honorable Mention: The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell, John Crawford and The Fall of Baghdad, John Lee Anderson. War writing at its worst. Also, most everything Christopher Hitchens wrote this year for Slate.com and several of his articles for The Atlantic as well.
About Me
- Roy Scranton
- Roy Scranton is learning to stop worrying and love the academy in Princeton, New Jersey. His stories, poems, and essays have been published in Boston Review, the New York Times, LIT, The Massachusetts Review, Theory & Event, and elsewhere. He is one of the editors of Fire and Forget, published by Da Capo press in February 2013.
27 August 2006
Five most interesting books I've read in the last year
In no particular order
Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
Molloy, Samuel Beckett
The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault
Middlemarch, George Eliot
The American Religion, Harold Bloom
subject to revision should my notoriously crappy memory suddenly kick loose some unfired neurons. . .
Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
Molloy, Samuel Beckett
The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault
Middlemarch, George Eliot
The American Religion, Harold Bloom
subject to revision should my notoriously crappy memory suddenly kick loose some unfired neurons. . .
26 August 2006
The Unreadable
I want to report that, in fact, Beckett's trilogy can be finished. The Unnameable is more gnarly brilliance from the high priest of solipsism and failure, an alternately profound and numbing dramatization of the essential implausibility of consciousness: cogito ergo sum taken as the whole of things, the most we can say is that we're saying and the only goal to keep saying, thought as suffering, the torment of being unable to speak, being unable to be silent.
As with the way when listening to any droning how shades and colors of tone and timbre will shift and reform out of the noise, stories and voices and arguments develop out of the single voice of the "unnameable" I, rise to confluence, fade and subside and emerge suddenly again. But enough of my nattering, let Beckett speak for himself:
we've gone wrong somewhere, no matter, there is no great difference here between one expression and the next, when you've grasped one you've grasped them all, I am not in that fortunate position, all, how you exaggerate, always out for the whole hog, the all of all and the all of nothing, never in the happy golden, never, always, it's too much, too little, often, seldom, let me now sum up, after this digression, there is I, yes, I feel it, I confess, I give in, there is I, it's essential, it's preferable, I wouldn't have said so, I won't always say so, so let me hasten to take advantage of being now obliged to say, in a manner of speaking, that there is I, on the one hand, and this noise on the other, that I never doubted, no, let us be logical, there was never any doubt about that, this noise, on the other, if it is the other, that will very likely be the theme of our next deliberation, I sum up, now that I'm there it's I will do the summing up, it's I will say what is to be said and then say what it was, that will be jolly, I sum up, I and this noise, I see nothing else for the moment, but I have only just taken over my functions, I and this noise, and what about it, don't interrupt me, I'm doing my best. . .
As you can see, hi-larious.
I'd like to take the moment now, actually, to mention a book I'd finished last week, Albert Angelo by B.S. Johnson. Albert Angelo starts with an epigraph taken from The Unnameable and while Mr. Johnson does certainly strive in the experimental vein he unfortunately comes off more like Beckett's early work than the later--that is, he doesn't go far enough, he isn't rigorous enough. Albert Angelo tells the by-now familiar story of the disappointed and frustrated artist as a young man, using a handful of interesting tricks to explore the narrative from different perspectives before finally discarding it with an unfortunately crude "Oh, fuck all these lies" (crudity of technique--obscenity need not be crude) and spending the last section of the book bemoaning the fictional nature of fiction and the discrepancy between fiction and reality--all very well and good but, to me, he does not go far enough, he does not make the difference live, the work speaks of the conflict but does not embody it. To which may be made the response "well, embodying it would be yet another falseness, another lie," to which I say then write that, not about it but write the thing itself, because fiction only really lies when it's bad, even if it's never strictly "true." That is to say, fiction itself consists in statements that are always true but never factual--the factual content of fiction is utterly irrelevant, and this discrepancy that Johnson nags at, between the reality and its representation, ignores the propositional nature of fiction--fiction exists as pure possibility, and its truth or falsity refers only to itself.
Next, Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Wa-hey.
As with the way when listening to any droning how shades and colors of tone and timbre will shift and reform out of the noise, stories and voices and arguments develop out of the single voice of the "unnameable" I, rise to confluence, fade and subside and emerge suddenly again. But enough of my nattering, let Beckett speak for himself:
we've gone wrong somewhere, no matter, there is no great difference here between one expression and the next, when you've grasped one you've grasped them all, I am not in that fortunate position, all, how you exaggerate, always out for the whole hog, the all of all and the all of nothing, never in the happy golden, never, always, it's too much, too little, often, seldom, let me now sum up, after this digression, there is I, yes, I feel it, I confess, I give in, there is I, it's essential, it's preferable, I wouldn't have said so, I won't always say so, so let me hasten to take advantage of being now obliged to say, in a manner of speaking, that there is I, on the one hand, and this noise on the other, that I never doubted, no, let us be logical, there was never any doubt about that, this noise, on the other, if it is the other, that will very likely be the theme of our next deliberation, I sum up, now that I'm there it's I will do the summing up, it's I will say what is to be said and then say what it was, that will be jolly, I sum up, I and this noise, I see nothing else for the moment, but I have only just taken over my functions, I and this noise, and what about it, don't interrupt me, I'm doing my best. . .
As you can see, hi-larious.
I'd like to take the moment now, actually, to mention a book I'd finished last week, Albert Angelo by B.S. Johnson. Albert Angelo starts with an epigraph taken from The Unnameable and while Mr. Johnson does certainly strive in the experimental vein he unfortunately comes off more like Beckett's early work than the later--that is, he doesn't go far enough, he isn't rigorous enough. Albert Angelo tells the by-now familiar story of the disappointed and frustrated artist as a young man, using a handful of interesting tricks to explore the narrative from different perspectives before finally discarding it with an unfortunately crude "Oh, fuck all these lies" (crudity of technique--obscenity need not be crude) and spending the last section of the book bemoaning the fictional nature of fiction and the discrepancy between fiction and reality--all very well and good but, to me, he does not go far enough, he does not make the difference live, the work speaks of the conflict but does not embody it. To which may be made the response "well, embodying it would be yet another falseness, another lie," to which I say then write that, not about it but write the thing itself, because fiction only really lies when it's bad, even if it's never strictly "true." That is to say, fiction itself consists in statements that are always true but never factual--the factual content of fiction is utterly irrelevant, and this discrepancy that Johnson nags at, between the reality and its representation, ignores the propositional nature of fiction--fiction exists as pure possibility, and its truth or falsity refers only to itself.
Next, Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Wa-hey.
24 August 2006
Will the real Thomas Jefferson please stand up?
So our debacle in Iraq continues apace, we continue to support Israeli aggression without supporting a real solution, we can't take drinks onto planes, a supposedly hugely important election waits right around the corner, yadda yadda yadda the world is falling apart and we're to blame so what is The Nation, that liberal leader, that clarion call of the voice of democracy in difficult times, that great forum of free and critical thought offer us for the current issue? Food. Organic food.
Clearly, self-congratulation about "morally" marketed, high-priced consumer product options and critical analysis of dietary choice are just what America needs right now. Way to go, The Nation!
Clearly, self-congratulation about "morally" marketed, high-priced consumer product options and critical analysis of dietary choice are just what America needs right now. Way to go, The Nation!
23 August 2006
Nonsense and insensibility (ooh, isn't that clever)
Can I say that the end of Sense and Sensibility is retarded? Is that allowed? Because as much as I grew to appreciate Austen's crisp and subtle irony, her wry turn of phrase, and her blunt admission of the force of money in the lives of her characters, when Edward just happened to turn up at the end, freed from his engagement to Lucy by her sudden and totally arbitrary seduction of his brother--who was, at last report, engaged to marry Miss Morton--I was flabbergasted by the crude, hurried and slipshod ta-da with which Miss Jane tied up her story. And Marianne was utterly happy marrying the boring, stalwart, weepy Colonel, twenty years her senior, the very opposite of her heart's desire, because after her terrible punishment for what? Desiring too much? Being too sensitive? Anyway after her tribulations, apparently she realized that she should do whatever she needed to do to get by, and all this with no loss to her vivacity or charm. . . right?
All that this illustrated to me was that George Eliot is a far superior novelist to Austen, far more subtle, perceptive and compassionate and what's more, far more tragic in temperament. In Austen the Good end Happily and the Bad end perhaps less Happily--at least Austen admits that vice is at least as materially rewarding as virtue--but in Eliot the "Bad" too have their trials, and the happiest endings are still tinged with a sense of their cost. You know, I'm saying Eliot and what I mean is Middlemarch, because that's all the Eliot I've read. So let me clarify--Middlemarch is way better than Sense and Sensibility.
So now I've started The Unnameable, hoping to finish Beckett's trilogy before school starts.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)