Pete Lit

"...and so to bed."

At Jacket Copy, Carolyn Kellogg notes the final posting at Pepys' Diary, which corresponds to the final entry in the diary of Samuel Pepys, on May 31, 1669, thus ending a nine-year run for the blog. Here are Pepys' final words:

...I must endeavour to keep a margin in my book open, to add, here and there, a note in short-hand with my own hand.

And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave: for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me!

Despite the ominous tone, Pepys would live for another 34 years, passing away in 1703 at age 70. I must admit that I didn't continue to follow the online diary as avidly as I did at first, nor did I ever learn the fate of Sir Minnes. Still, it was a fascinating project.

Sorry, Printers Row Lit Fest...

...but your festival happens to fall on the same weekend (June 8-10) as an event that is much more local and important to me, the Will County Book Recycling. There, just across town, not only will I unload my never-to-be-reread, less-than-essential books, but also bring home a whole new batch of books, for free. And without enduring a two-hour round trip, paying for parking, fighting crowds and facing the possible monsoon-like storms that hit Printers Row so often. Prior year Book Recycling recaps are here, here, here and here. Though I've read only a minority of the books I've brought home so far, there are very few that I've given up on and want to re-recycle.

Writer's voice, book's voice

Ordinarily I roll my eyes and flip/click past those "what writing is" essays, which are usually terminally plagued by vague generalities and so-broad-they're-meaningless pronouncements. But I actually like this piece by Sadie Jones at Powells.com about persistence and the writer's voice:

I prefer to think of it in terms of the book's voice; for me that is an altogether more vibrant and fascinating thing. The book itself has life, has its voice, and my job is to discover it. I am often convinced when writing that the world of the story exists effortlessly somewhere and I must use all my facility, all my energy, my persistence, in fact, to find it.

Though I probably haven't been persistent enough with that novel concept I mentioned a few months back (which is on hiatus for now), still, that story is doing a very good job of hiding itself.

Summer of Classics

Remember what I've been saying about this year's Summer of Classics, and getting away from the 19th Century slog (Dickens, Hardy, Flaubert, Stendhal) that I went through in recent years, and reading something more modern and lean instead? Well, forget that. Somehow my mind has gotten stuck on reading Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Gogol's Dead Souls. Both 19th Century, both lengthy. But other than Gogol's great novella The Overcoat, I've never read any of the Russian masters, so this year I'll give them a try. Maybe I'll read some modernists next year.

Elliott Smith

I listened to a lot of Elliott Smith over the weekend, including burning an retrospective disk for a friend. The brilliance of Smith's music and the tragedy of his life make such a compelling mixture that I can't help being drawn in, again and again. I didn't start listening to Smith until after his death, the shocking suddenness of which dove me back into the one song of his I owned, "Rose Parade", from an old CMJ Music Monthly sampler disc. I had never listened closely to the song before that, but after revisiting its near-perfect combination of melodicism, gritty street-level lyrics and pensive sadness, I was hooked.

After that I dabbled in a few free mp3s at the Paste magazine site, then bought either/or (with the proceeds of a check from, fittingly enough, a class-action lawsuit against the major record labels for price fixing), then got a burned copy of XO from a friend at my previous job, and finally received the posthumous collection From a Basement on the Hill and the utterly excellent Figure 8 as gifts. (I still haven't picked up the first two albums or the from-the-vaults collection New Moon, and I'm not sure if I ever will. The four albums that I own are so richly fulfilling that I don't feel much need to be a completist.)

For several years now I've had my eye on Matthew LeMay's XO, his short study of that album from Continuum's endlessly fascinating 33 1/3 series. I've never seen the book in person, but have had it on both my Powell's and Amazon wishlists, hoping someone would gift it to me. (I'm impossible to shop for, so when anyone asks I just point them to my wishlists.) But no luck there. So this afternoon, being a beautiful day in the city, I took a stroll over to Reckless Records on Madison to browse the short shelf of 33 1/3 books they stock. I didn't remember seeing XO during my previous visit, but this time, there it was. After paging through, it looked really good, and so I parted with some of my mad money (a small fund reserved for just such a small occasion) and bought it. The combination couldn't be more perfect: Reckless (whose Lakeview store I used to haunt for endless hours during my first city stint), literature and Elliott Smith. I almost couldn't not buy the book.

XO is probably my favorite Elliott Smith album. For me it perfectly bridges the gap between the indie-troubador strumming of either/or and the glorious power-pop of Figure 8, and beautifully encapsulates Smith's formidable artistic talent. I'm really looking forward to reading LeMay's book, preferably with the album playing on my iPod. And possibly a handkerchief to cry into.

Just this side of awesome.

Stanley Kubrick's marked-up copy of Stephen King's The Shining, filled with the director's notes and comments. How fascinating it would be to read through this, not just for King's original but for Kubrick's reactions, which undoubtedly influenced his making of the film version.

(Via Condalmo).

"That door of the library was the door into me..."

Spitalfields Life is always a pleasure for me to read, but even more so today with its profile of Bernard Kops, the playwright and poet. Kops seems to have had some harrowing stretches in his life, but he's come out on the other side, alive and well, with his wife of fifty-eight years still at his side. I really like his poem "Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East" which celebrates the redemptive and transformative power of public libraries and literature. Here are the closing lines:

Welcome young poet, in here you are free
to follow your star to where you should be.

That door of the library was the door into me

And Lorca and Shelley said “Come to the feast.”
Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East.

A poet who isn't afraid of rhyme and meter. I like that.

"The harvest days are at hand."

From "Mr. Peasley and His Vivid Impressions of Foreign Parts", a piece from George Ade's witty fictional travelogue In Pastures New:

This morning we are basking in the crystal sunlight of Naples - the blue bay, with the crescent outline on one side, the white walls of the mounting city on the other, Vesuvius looming in the distance behind a hazy curtain, and tourists crowding the landscape in the immediate foreground.

Three big steamers are lying at anchor within the breakwater - one from Genoa, one from Marseilles, and one from New York - and all heavily laden with Americans, some sixty of whom will be our fellow-passengers to Alexandria. The hotels are overflowing with Yankee pilgrims, and every Neapolitan who has imitation coral and celluloid tortoise shell for sale is wearing an expectant smile.

The jack-rabbit horses attached to the ramshackle little victorias lean wearily in their shafts, for these are busy days. The harvest days are at hand. The Americans have come.

Ade is probably my favorite humorist. I never tire of reading his work.

Algren at Riccardo's

As if I wasn't already enough of a sucker for the vintage photos posted at Calumet 412, now here's one by the great Art Shay of my literary hero, Nelson Algren, enjoying cocktails and conversation at Riccardo's in 1955 with actress Janice Kingslow. Beautiful. Riccardo's was renowned for its murals depicting the seven "lively arts", which can be seen here on the back wall behind the bar.

"I’m interested in what it means to be a good person. Good people do stupid things, and stupid people do good things."

Here's a well-done profile of Alan Heathcock, whose debut collection Volt I read and really enjoyed last year.

“Finding my voice as a writer coincided with having a family and feeling different things for the first time,” Heathcock says. “My preoccupations as a human being changed through loving my wife and kids and being worried about them.”

I can relate. I didn't start writing until after I had a family. Before that I just wasn't ready, and though I still go through phases of cynicism, I think my writing is much more positive and hopeful from starting later.

File Under: Solution in Search of a Problem

Mobylives passes along this head-scratcher of an app: Shelflook, which rotates an image of a bookshelf 90 degrees, so the spines can be read horizontally. I guess cancer and poverty have been cured, and our innovators can now move on to more minor concerns.

"He wanted to say that literature was above politics."

Sharp passage from James Joyce's The Dead:

It was true that he wrote a literary column every Wednesday in The Daily Express, for which he was paid fifteen shillings. But that did not make him a West Briton surely. The books he received for review were almost more welcome than the paltry cheque. He loved to feel the covers and turn over the pages of newly printed books. Nearly every day when his teaching in the college was ended he used to wander down the quays to the second-hand booksellers, to Hickey's on Bachelor's Walk, to Webb's or Massey's on Aston's Quay, or to O'Clohissey's in the by-street. He did not know how to meet her charge. He wanted to say that literature was above politics. But they were friends of many years' standing and their careers had been parallel, first at the University and then as teachers: he could not risk a grandiose phrase with her. He continued blinking his eyes and trying to smile and murmured lamely that he saw nothing political in writing reviews of books.

Though I've already read the story, in Dubliners, a few years ago I found (at Goodwill, of all places) a lovely standalone edition of the story from Melville House's Art of the Novella series, and thought it was finally time for another look. Terrific reading so far.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

I just finished re-reading Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, for what I believe is my fourth time, and it was just as marvelous as ever. Any attempt by me to review or evaluate the book here would never do it justice; it's one of those perfect yet indescribable works of art that simply has to be experienced rather than explained. As always I found it to be chaotic, propulsive, contemplative, visceral, devastating. I don't even understand all of its meaning - including just what Ellison meant by "invisibility" - but that's one of the things that I love about it. I'll gladly be puzzling over this book for the rest of my life.

"Mother died today"? Or "Maman died today"? Or...

There's a fascinating piece here by The New Yorker's Ryan Bloom over the French-to-English translation of the first line of Camus' The Stranger. As Bloom notes, a single word can color one's reading of an entire novel. Speaking of which, though I haven't decided on novels to read for this year's Summer of Classics, I'm definitely going much more modern to escape the 19th Century slogs of past years, and The Stranger is on my short list.

"'Curiosity never killed this cat' — that's what I'd like as my epitaph."

Happy 100th, Studs Terkel. We miss you.

"...you feel you have to rescue these things..."

My, this is certainly sobering:

"When your life is half over, I think you have to see the face of death in order to start writing seriously. There are people who see the end quickly, like Rimbaud. When you start seeing it, you feel you have to rescue these things. Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more."
—Carlos Fuentes

Fuentes just passed away, at age 83. Based on his prolific output, I'd say he rescued plenty.

"...each pigeon diving wildly as though blackjacked by the sound..."

From Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man:

And somewhere between the dull roar of traffic and the subway vibrating underground I heard rapid explosions and saw each pigeon diving wildly as though blackjacked by the sound, and the cop sitting up straight now, and rising to his knees looking steadily at Clifton, and the pigeons plummeting swiftly into the trees, and Clifton still facing the cop and suddenly crumpling.

He fell forward on his knees, like a man saying his prayers just as a heavy-set man in a hat with a turned-down brim stepped from around the newsstand and yelled a protest. I couldn't move. The sun seemed to scream an inch above my head. A few men were starting into the street. The cop was standing now and looking down at Clifton, as though surprised, the gun in his hand.

What fantastic, fantastic writing - I'm in awe of Ellison when I read passages like this. There's so much I love - the blurred, fast-paced action which still pauses, ever so briefly, to reflect on the pigeons in flight; the uncertainty in the first paragraph of what happened to Clifton and the abrupt explanation ("the gun in his hand") in the second paragraph; the exquisite control as the long, rushing sentences suddenly yield to short sentences; the suggestion in just three words ("as though surprised") that the cop acted more out of subconscious impulse than intentional malice. I think every fiction writer should read and study this great book.

Madame Bovary as a pie chart

Yeah, this pretty much nails it. You could also do a single-color chart with the label "100% - Emma Being a Self-Absorbed Narcissist." Hated the protagonist, hated the book.

I certainly never expected this.

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

This assessment was based on several paragraphs from Wheatyard. I tried a second excerpt, from the same chapter of the book, and got Wallace again. Then a third try, again from that chapter, gave me Arthur C. Clarke. The only Wallace I've ever read was one single essay, and I've never read Clarke, so it's doubtful that either writer was even a subconscious influence on me.

"...I stopped as though struck by a shot, deeply inhaling, remembering..."

Proust may have had his madeleines, but Ralph Ellison had his yams:

Then far down at the corner I saw an old man warming his hands against the side of an odd-looking wagon, from which a stove pipe reeled off a thin spiral of smoke that drifted the odor of baking yams slowly to me, bringing a stab of swift nostalgia. I stopped as though struck by a shot, deeply inhaling, remembering, my mind surging back, back. At home we'd bake them in the hot coals of the fireplace, had carried them to school for lunch; munched them secretly, squeezing the sweet pulp from the soft peel as we hid from the teacher behind the largest book, the World's Geography. Yes, and we'd loved them candied, or baked in a cobbler, deep-fat fried in a pocket of dough, or roasted with pork and glazed with the well-browned fat; had chewed them raw - yams and years ago. More yams than years ago, though the time seemed endlessly expanded, stretched thin as the spiraling smoke beyond all recall.

Searching for this text, I was pleased to see that in 2005 my blog friend Michael Leddy also excerpted a part of this same scene from Invisible Man, though that was several years before we became acquainted.

Largehearted Ben

Mi compadre Ben Tanzer scores another Book Notes piece* at Largehearted Boy, this time for the anniversary reissue of his debut novel, Lucky Man.

I am looking back, but I am also looking at now, and I am trying to make sense of something, nostalgia, emotions, decisions made and not made, and what the music means to me, the characters I write about and the stories we tell.

Lucky Man, incidentally, was what basically launched our friendship. We first met at a RAGAD reading we both did at MoJoe's in Chicago in 2007, and afterward I bought a copy of the book from him. With both of us working in the Loop, lunch soon ensued, which has now become a regular gig, along with our collaboration on This Zine Will Change Your Life and the occasional flurry of witty emails. Though I'm partial to the original cover design, I also admire the reissue's vivid cover (by Ryan Bradley) for its allusion to the four main characters.

(*If I could score even one of these, I might just immediately retire from writing.)

On the fume-clogged platform the women come and go...

Dmitry Kiper reads poetry on the subway. Nice.

Williams and Warner

Great conversation here at Hobart between two novelists with new books that have comedians as subjects: Tom Williams (whose The Mimic's Own Voice I just read, and loved) and John Warner (whose The Funny Man sounds great too). Williams has this great insight on the contrast between professionals and geniuses:

...in most arenas, the pros are around a lot longer than the geniuses, because the pros figure out what works, hone that until it can’t get any better, and don’t go around worrying about the nature of inspiration or the anxiety of influence. Geniuses often get lost because they don’t have to work as hard, I think.

In artist terms, I think I'd rather be a pro than a genius - I'll gladly take competent longevity over fleeting brilliance. Though of course I'm neither, but more like a journeyman.

Author Photographs: Gwendolyn Brooks, 1960

The esteemed Ms. Brooks at her South Side Chicago home, in 1960, in a photograph by Slim Aarons. It looks like she might have been interrupted in the middle of writing a new poem, and though posing politely for a moment, she really wants to get back to work.

(Via Calumet 412.)

Kirby Gann at Largehearted Boy

My friend Kirby Gann, whose new novel Ghosting is one I'm eagerly anticipating, gets the hallowed Book Notes treatment at Largehearted Boy. I already knew our musical tastes were similar, but with his nods to the likes of Charlie Patton, Elliott Smith, Paul Westerberg, Bill Callahan and James McMurtry, I now see those tastes are even more similar than I thought.

Opening Lines

"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."
- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

"I'd caught a slight cold when I changed trains at Chicago; and three days in New York - three days of babes and booze while I waited to see The Man - hadn't helped it any."
- Jim Thompson, Savage Night

"Since the end of the war, I have been on this line, as they say: a long, twisted line stretching from Naples to the cold north, a line of locals, trams, taxis and carriages."
- Aharon Appelfeld, The Iron Tracks

"The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry."
- Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

"Early November. It's nine o'clock. The titmice are banging against the window. Sometimes they fly dizzily off after the impact, other times they fall and lie struggling in the new snow until they can take off again. I don't know what they want that I have."
- Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

"Picture the room where you will be held captive."
- Stona Fitch, Senseless

"Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk."
- Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry

"Bright, clear sky over a plain so wide that the rim of the heavens cut down on it around the entire horizon...Bright, clear sky, to-day, to-morrow, and for all time to come."
- O.E. Rölvaag, Giants in the Earth

"Click! ... Here it was again. He was walking along the cliff at Hunstanton and it had come again ... Click! ..."
- Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square

"It is 1983. In Dorset the great house at Woodcombe Park bustles with life. In Ireland the more modest Kilneagh is as quiet as a grave."
- William Trevor, Fools of Fortune

"The cell door slammed behind Rubashov."
- Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

(A compendium of memorable opening lines of novels, updated occasionally as I come across new discoveries.)

Michael Czyzniejewski, Chicago Stories: 40 Dramatic Fictions

Michael Czyzniejewski's Chicago Stories: 40 Dramatic Fictions is an imaginative, funny and thoroughly entertaining read. However, these pieces are not really "stories", as there is little here in terms of narrative; instead, they are better described as fictional monologues, with each presented in the first-person voice of a broad range of Chicago's famous and infamous citizens from throughout the city's history. ("Dramatic fictions" was included in the title, quite wisely, for legal reasons. None of these should be mistaken for real-life accounts.)

Czyzniejewski puts an interesting twist on many familiar characters, reimagining them in pronounced departures from their public images: the second Mayor Daley delivers a verbal smackdown to Frank Gehry (in the men's room of the Michigan Avenue Bennigan's, no less) for the architect's excessively fanciful design for the Millennium Park bandshell; Jane Addams offers an apologia for abandoning Hull-House and her social justice crusade for the comforts of a five-bedroom McMansion in suburban New Lenox; Dennis Rodman takes full credit for instigating tattoo mania amongst the middle class; Skip Dillard (onetime DePaul basketball star, and later gas station holdup man and prison inmate) embraces Buddhism and its promise of reincarnation, which would offer him a second chance at life; Mayor Jane Byrne reminisces (quite touchingly) about her father and his onetime claim to be one of the subjects depicted in Edward Hopper's famed painting Nighthawks; early settler Jean Baptiste Point du Sable encamps at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland and tells that city, in painful detail, all of the ways it will never be Chicago.

These are just a few examples; I could easily go on and on, describing each of the forty delightfully witty monologues. Instead I recommend buying the book, or at least reading selected pieces at Curbside Splendor (the book's publisher) or Knee-Jerk Magazine. One need not be a Chicagoan to enjoy this book, although its pleasures will indeed be even greater amongst the locals.

Wingfoot? Huh?

As an avid student of Chicago history, I'm ashamed to admit I had never heard of the Wingfoot Air Express crash. Flaming blimp crashes onto a LaSalle Street bank, breaking through the skylight and raining burning debris onto the banking floor, and killing thirteen people? Nope, no idea. The tragedy is the jumping-off point for a new book, Gary Krist's City of Scoundrels: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago, which sounds a hell of a lot more interesting than The Devil in the White City, which I still haven't read, being seemingly the last Chicagoan to do so.

Tom Williams, The Mimic's Own Voice

Tom Williams' engrossing debut novel, The Mimic's Own Voice, relates the rise and fall of Douglas Myles, the world-famous professional mimic. If "world-famous" and "mimic" sound strange in the same sentence - most people, myself included, could name only Rich Little among mimics - it's not so strange given Williams' great skill at creating an alternate yet convincing culture in which stage comedians (not just Letterman/Leno/Conan TV-interviewer types) enjoy elite status in the entertainment industry and the United States is blanketed with sold-out comedy clubs and universities are filled with Comedic Studies academics.

Myles is a brilliant, unique talent who reaches the peak of the comedy profession decades after the mimics' heyday, and in fact as the only mimic of his day. And he does so without actually having an act or, more accurately, without writing any of his own material. Instead he vocally duplicates, to utter perfection, the comic routines of other comedians, from the one-liner (vaudeville) comics through the mimics, social critics and observational comics which developed over the decades. Then, after he has nothing left to accomplish in replicating other comics, he switches to a participatory show in which he mimics the voices of audience members, first after hearing them recite details of their lives and then, almost impossibly, before ever hearing them speak. Later, after a long seclusion leaves the public starving for his next act, he unveils a quite poignant but short-lived presentation which totally bewilders audiences and critics alike, and effectively ends his career.

All of the above might sound audacious and unbelievable, yet Williams deftly pulls it off. The book is written as a fictional biography of Myles, with the tone being learned but not academic (no jargon), with the narrator's distance from the subject allowing Myles' incredible talent to be described without having to explain just how the prodigy came to be. (The narrator never met the reclusive Myles, who left behind only a brief manuscript memoir as insight to his private life.) There is little dialogue involving Myles, with most of the narrative being the narrator's presentation of the known facts of Myles' life as well as the commentary of various critics. The narrator even establishes a chronology of various comic genres (one-liners, mimics, social critics, observational comics), which indeed roughly follows comedy's timeline over the past century. Further, although Williams completely manufactures the top performers, each genre is described in a familiar enough manner that the reader can easily recognize each genre and its real-life stars (Henny Youngman, Lenny Bruce, Jerry Seinfeld, etc.). This familiar parallel goes a long way toward selling the plausibility of Douglas Myles, or at least making it much easier for the reader to suspend disbelief.

Williams immerses the reader in a culture which is completely fictional, yet familiar enough to be believed. And somehow he makes the reader care about the aloof and retiring Douglas Myles, despite how little is truly known about the mimic's inner life. The Mimic's Own Voice is a quietly stunning debut from a writer of great promise, a truly unique book which gets my highest recommendation.

"...the dream of every rejected author come true..."

This is a bit of writer-geekery, but still irresistible: Norman Maclean's renowned A River Runs Through It was first accepted, then rejected, by Alfred A. Knopf. Then, after the book was published by University of Chicago Press (hooray for the home team!) and was very well-received, a Knopf editor wrote to Maclean, expressing interest in his next book. And here's Maclean's smart reply.

You must have known that Alfred A. Knopf turned down my first collection of stories after playing games with it, or at least the game of cat's-paw, now rolling it over and saying they were going to publish it and then rolling it on its back when the president of the company announced it wouldn't sell.

"The dream of every rejected author", indeed. His response is elegant and eloquent, which is testament to both his writing skill and obvious gentlemanly nature. I suspect that my own response would have been considerably more blunt, consisting of just two words of one syllable each.

Ralph Ellison

Yesterday marked the 60th anniversary of the publication of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, one of the greatest American novels. At The New Yorker, David Denby writes a thoughtful assessment of Ellison and the novel.

“Invisible Man” is a tumultuous book, an enormous book, liberated and responsible at the same time, a novel that, even now, turns readers upside down...Ellison presents American experience with a luscious eloquence and an abandon corralled by a stern sense of form...

I first read Invisible Man twenty-five years ago, shortly after graduating college. I loved it, even though not all of it made sense to me. After reading Denby's piece, I re-read the first chapter of the novel, and it's as marvelous as ever. I'm toying with the idea of interrupting my reading schedule to re-read the whole thing.

I've long often puzzled over Ellison's inability to publish a second novel, which he worked on relentlessly for decades, right up to his death. Which makes Denby's conjecture - that Ellison never finished his second novel because he already said everything he needed to say in Invisible Man - quite intriguing. That could very well be the case - it's certainly a huge book with a lot going on in it.

Ben Tanzer, My Father's House

As I've mentioned many times here, Ben Tanzer is a great friend of mine, and I make no claim to objectivity when passing along my thoughts on his books. Besides, I am in no way a critic, and my thoughts on books - not just Ben's - are instead those of a fan of literature. Although all of Ben's fiction draws significantly from his own life experiences, his latest effort My Father's House is probably his most personal work yet. In fact, by his own admission, the book began as a memoir which he couldn't quite make work, but which finally came alive after he fictionalized the narrative.

My Father's House tells the story of an unnamed narrator, a social worker in Chicago, and his conflicted response to the recently diagnosed, advanced-stage cancer of his father, who lives on the East Coast. The narrator precariously balances his life in Chicago - marriage, friendships, career - while regularly flying east to either be with his parents at home or accompany his father for his treatments at various hospitals. When home, he is invariably drawn back into things from his younger life - the local dive bar, old female acquaintances - which would be better left alone but yet he can't resist; he is already so lost in the face of his father's illness and looming death, that getting lost even further doesn't concern him. But even though he is regularly with his father during this difficult time, he is still unable to fully connect with him, and get answers to questions he has always had about his father's life. Meanwhile, when back in Chicago, he struggles with the fact that he can continue to lead his ordinary, everyday life while his father is dying a thousand miles away, and even feeling guilt over it - while never quite realizing that leading that ordinary, everyday life is probably exactly what his father would want for him.

In short, punchy chapters Tanzer movingly explores the bewildered, anxious and impulsive thoughts and actions of a young man still trying to figure out his place in the world while also facing the grim prospect that his father will soon no longer be part of that world. The father's fate is a foregone conclusion, but even amidst that great loss the narrator finally begins to make sense of it all, and finds a way to move forward. Which is something that any of us in that situation would wish for ourselves.

"...finishing his coffee and reading the late edition, waiting to make his move..."

I just started reading Michael Cyzyniejewski's Chicago Stories: 40 Dramatic Fictions, and really like it so far. Check out the wonderful "Jane Byrne Discusses Edward Hopper's Nighthawks With Her New Neighbors, Cabrini-Green, 1981", in this special sampler put out by the publisher, Curbside Splendor. The first page's incongruous Phillies reference had me shaking my head in disbelief (as well as the knowledge that Hopper probably based the painting on a New York street scene and not Chicago) but the final page resolved all of that very nicely, while also conveying something very true about fathers. Very well done.

"Medium and form you have utterly neglected."

Jack London, in 1914, replies to a letter and manuscript from an aspiring young writer.

Honestly and frankly, I did not enjoy it for its literary charm or value. In the first place, it has little literary value and practically no literary charm. Merely because you have got some­thing to say that may be of interest to others does not free you from making all due effort to express that something in the best possible medium and form. Medium and form you have utterly neglected.

London wasn't being harsh just for the hell of it, but instead to drive home the point that the writer was young, inexperienced and due for several more years of "apprenticeship" before even thinking about getting his work published. That last line ("I can meet you to the last limit of brass tacks, and hammer some facts of life into you that possibly so far have escaped your own experience.") is particularly appropriate. I didn't start writing until my late thirties, but don't really regret the time lost from not writing earlier - at twenty-five I had neither the life experience or maturity to write anything worthwhile.

Maddie and I are currently reading White Fang at bedtime. I hadn't read the book since I was roughly her age, but it's just as great as I remembered it.

"...making this overabundance a bit more intelligible..."

In Context, Todd Hasak-Lowy gives a great explanation for why novels exist:

Readers from Korea to Brazil are searching for someone capable of positioning a few well-drawn individuals against that wide canvas of historical, political, social, and religious overabundance (also known as "the Conflict"), thereby making this overabundance a bit more intelligible. This is how the novel, as a genre, compensates for its fictional status, how it manages to constitute a form of knowledge despite never having happened: it takes the political and the historical and translates them into the personal and the biographical so that the individual reader can finally understand.

Illustrating a broad, otherwise overwhelming environment by focusing on a few small but clear-cut characters. I like that.

"My dear Noel..."

Beatrix Potter's timeless 1902 classic The Tale of Peter Rabbit had its origins in an illustrated letter she wrote nine years earlier to the five-year-old son of a friend of hers. What a lucky little boy. Though I'd like to dream that one of my Month of Letters missives would achieve similar literary immortality, I realize that's highly unlikely.

"...the beauty of ugliness got hold of me again and again..."

Interesting interview here in the latest Context with Gerhard Meier from 1993, talking about his novel Isle of the Dead:

For a time it was pretty much my invariable route in Olten, and out of love for the things I came across, the banalities, I gladly laid out this route precisely in the novel...I especially emphasized the industrial quarter. I was drawn over and over to these out of the way places — or to put it differently, the beauty of ugliness got hold of me again and again in life...

I noticed in William Carlos Williams how gloriously the unbeautiful, the unaesthetic, the ordinary, the small, can shine forth when it is placed against the right background. I’m a little in love with these discordant phenomena. I have never been interested in aestheticism understood as the merely beautiful, the select, the dressed up. For me the aesthetic is anchored much more deeply, connected with the completely immaterial and with the movingly small, the eccentric, the vulnerable, the susceptible, the inconspicuous...

I never render such banalities cynically or arrogantly, they simply form the line of melody in a great piece of music, in the score of this character. I am — that’s why I recited Williams’s poem "Pastoral" — a lover of the banal, the small. It is so moving when it’s done right, when it is really banal, but it needs a background in front of which it can shine.

Meier talks a bit too much in aphorism for my taste, with plenty of "Art is..." pronouncements, but I admire his appreciation for the ugly, inconspicuous and banal. I feel much the same way - while like most people I'm awed by soaring mountains and classic architecture, I also see the beauty in ordinary marshes and abandoned steel mills. The everyday interests me just as much as the extraordinary.

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"I do not admire well-rounded people nor their work. So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design."
- Harry Crews

"I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am."

In 1973, Kurt Vonnegut penned this brilliant letter to the head of the school board in Drake, North Dakota, who had 32 copies of Slaughterhouse-Five burned due to the book's "obscene language."

Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

Bam!

Croweth the Rooster

The final tally at The Tournament of Books is in, and the Rooster goes to [SPOILER ALERT] Patrick deWitt's The Sisters Brothers, by a comfortable margin of 10-6. It seems that the judges were taken by what was regularly described as a "rollicking good read", somewhat more than the introspective meandering of its opponent. I was one of only ten people who called the winner and tally correctly but, alas, I failed to win the goodie bag. Now I definitely want to read The Sisters Brothers, but definitely don't want to read Open City.

"...the anxious midnight eyes of strangers..."

Nelson Algren's birthday was yesterday, so I really should have posted this then, but here is one of my very favorite passages of his, from Chicago: City on the Make:

"It isn’t hard to love a town for its greater and its lesser towers, its pleasant parks or its flashing ballet. Or for its broad and bending boulevards, where the continuous headlights follow, one dark driver after the next, one swift car after another, all night, all night and all night. But you never truly love it till you can love its alleys too. Where the bright and morning faces of old familiar friends now wear the anxious midnight eyes of strangers a long way from home."

The Orners

At Beatrice, Peter Orner reflects on his brother, the comix artist Eric Orner.

"My whole life I’ve pretty much been in awe of what [Eric] is able to do with his pen," Orner emailed me. "In some ways maybe my writing stories is a response what he does and I can’t do, which is make human beings and situations so alive on the page."

That image above is Eric Orner's lovely depiction of a Chicago water intake crib which, based on Peter's comment, was drawn entirely from memory. Impressive. I'm envious of visual artists too - I can't draw at all, but I can picture my stories very vividly in my mind. And it's very frustrating not being able to fully translate those images into words.

Algren

(Photograph by Art Shay)

"However do senators get so close to God? How is it that front-office men never conspire? That matinee idols feel such guilt? Or that winners never pitch in a bill toward the price of their victory?" - Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make

The great Algren was born on this date in 1909. My own writing is an endlessly fruitless quest to pay him honor.

Norman Mark

Longtime Chicago journalist Norman Mark has passed away, at 72.

"What I remember best about him through the years was his eclectic interest and knowledge. You could talk to the guy about politics, you could talk to him about pop music, you could talk to him about journalism," said Don Rose, a longtime Chicago political campaign consultant and former public-affairs talk show host. "He was extremely well-read and well-versed in cultural affairs."

I see that he was yet another alumnus of the City News Bureau, which I hadn't been aware of. I've had a copy of Mark's book Mayors, Madams and Madmen on my shelf for years, having found it at a garage sale [1]. I may have to move that closer to the top of the pile. Sometimes I need an event like this to prompt me to dive into long-unread books. Earlier this year, the closing of the Jane Addams Hull House social service agency finally compelled me to read Addams' memoir Twenty Years at Hull-House, and I'm glad I did.

[1] Upon further recollection, the book actually formerly belonged to my brother-in-law Al's parents, Helen and Joe Janicek. When the family house was cleaned out after Joe's death, Al let me have the book (and one by Studs Terkel) as keepsakes. Joe and Helen's basement was legendary for its wonderous clutter - a sort of suburban Smithsonian Institution.

Yes, we really needed more books.

Here's our haul from yesterday's Joliet Public Library book sale. The only one that's technically mine is Laila Lalami's Secret Son; I loved her first book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, but for some reason never got around to reading this one. Julie's books are Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace (she's a big Atwood fan), Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (she didn't even like The Corrections, but figured his latest was worth a buck - and we can always donate it back to the next sale) and Kevin Baker's Paradise Alley. The pile on the right is Maddie's - a lot of books on animals, one on HTML and a Roald Dahl two-fer that I found for her.

Total tab: $5.50. As far as addictions go, we could do a lot worse.

Kirby Gann

My friend Kirby Gann is interviewed at HTMLGIANT.

One striking difference is that I’m way more encouraging and optimistic with the work of others than I am with my own. It seems like I can always spot a way out of a problem or weakness in my students’ work; with my own there’s just the conviction of utter humiliating failure.

That kind of humility is something I really admire about Kirby, both as a writer and a person. His new book, Ghosting, sounds quite Southern Gothic, a style that doesn't generally appeal to me. (After reading the relentlessly grim A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, I have no interest in reading Flannery O'Connor ever again.) I hope that amongst all the drugs and mayhem, there is also plenty of the humanity and hope that made me so love Kirby's first novel, Our Napoleon in Rags.

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"A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth." - George Bernard Shaw

(Via About Last Night.)

"...driven by curiosity about the unfamiliar..."

Timely: in The Guardian, Chris Power writes a thoughtful essay on the short stories of William Trevor.

Like Joyce (and to a lesser extent, Chekhov), Trevor contrives to bury his own voice within that of his characters, so that comments which first appear to be authorial are shown to emanate from them...Read "The Ballroom of Romance" for the first time and you might think the final lines belong to an omniscient narrator. Read it again, and you realise the inflection is Bridie's: the words not a judgment passed down, but a realisation arrived at; an epiphany.

I happen to be reading his novel Felicia's Journey at the moment, but greatly enjoyed his story collection A Bit On the Side and, from another collection, the achingly beautiful "Three People." I'm not sure whether I most prefer his novels or his stories; both are consistently wonderful, and heartily recommended.

Irish March revisited

This month I'm once again reading nothing but Irish fiction, starting with William Trevor's Felicia's Journey. (I got a late start, not diving in until I finished my previous book. I might extend Irish March a week into April.) Though I love Trevor's prose, at forty pages into the book there's still mostly been backstory - I'm really ready for the narrative to finally move forward. After Trevor, I'll read either Anne Enright's The Gathering or Kevin Barry's City of Bohane.

And of course I've been listening heavily to my Pogues albums this week. Though I own their first four albums, only If I Should Fall From Grace With God has earned full-album-download status on my iPod, with just selected tracks from Peace and Love, Rum, Sodomy and the Lash and Red Roses for Me. Corned beef and cabbage is also on the menu at home tomorrow night, though I might skip the Guinness for some Two Brothers or Bell's that I already have in the fridge.

Carl Kock

Love these industrial illustrations by the artist Carl Kock. The immense, almost inhuman scale of the machinery in the above image reminds me of Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude, and the protagonist Hanta's tour of the modern paper compacting plant.