Ice Friday: Stegner’s “Angle of Repose”

Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose,  a chronicle of frontierswoman Mary Hallock Foote, offers reflections on how life unfolds:

Time hung unchanging or with no more visible change than a slow reddening of a poison oak leaves, an imperceptible darkening of the golden hills. It dripped like a slow percolation through limestone, so slow that she forgot it between drops. Nevertheless, every drop, indistinguishable from every other, left a little deposit of sensation, experience, feeling. Ice Friday: Stegner’s "Angle of Repose"Familiar and unfamiliar swam and blended into a strangeness like dreaming as she saw Howie’s face out of her girlhood against the mountainside of her present life. A wash of confused feelings went over her like wind across a sweating skin, for the identity that Howie took for granted and talked to and reflected back at her was not the identity it used to be, not the one that had signed all her past drawings, not the one she knew herself. That what was it now? She didn’t know.

Ice Sunday: Haruki Murakami on Writing

Haruki Murakami writes extensively on the writing process in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, reflecting on the purpose of one’s work:

In the novelist’s profession, there’s no such thing as winning and losing. Maybe numbers of copies sold, awards won, and critics’ praise serve as outstanding standards for accomplishment in literature, but none of them really matter. Ice Sunday: Haruki Murakami on WritingWhat’s crucial is whether your writing attains the standards you’ve set for yourself. Failure to reach the bar is not something you can easily explain away. When it comes to other people, you can always come up with a reasonable explanation, but you can’t fool yourself.

Ice Friday: Cormac McCarthy’s World

What is wrong with this story is that it is not a true story. Men have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. Ice Friday: Cormac McCarthy's WorldThe world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of. Do you believe that? (From Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of the Plains)

John Barleycorn

And now comes John Barleycorn with the curse he lays upon the imaginative man who is lusty with life and desire to live. John Barleycorn will not let the dreamer dream, the liver live. 8414564821_4c8d32b584God is bad, truth is a cheat, and life is a joke. From his calm-mad heights, with the certitude of a god, he beholds all life as evil. Wife, children, friends – in the clear white light of his logic, they are exposed as frauds and shams. He sees their frailty, their meagerness, their sordidness, their pitifulness. 20140828_160719And he knows his one freedom: he may anticipate the day of his death – suicide, quick or slow, a sudden spill or a gradual oozing away through the years, is the price John Barleycorn exacts. 20150405_133802

(From Jack London’s John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs)

Your Holiday Reading: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is a book that you will never forget. Bury My Heart coverThe prose are terse and clear, the images startling, the narrative impossible to digest. It must be read.

“Father, your young men have devastated my country and killed my animals, the elk, the deer, the antelope, my buffalo. They do not kill them to eat them; they leave them to rot where they fall. Fathers, if I went into your country to kill your animals, what would you say? Should I not be wrong, and would you not make war on me?” (Red Cloud, Oglala leader)Red-Cloud“It is cold and we have no blankets.The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food; no one knows where they are -perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.” (Chief Joseph, Nex Perce Chief) chief joesph portrait“We tried to run, but they shot us like we were a buffalo. I know they are some good white people, but the soldiers must be mean to shoot children and women. Indian soldiers would not do that to white children.” (Louise Weasel Bear, Sioux)

Wounded Knee Massacre, 1890

Wounded Knee Massacre, 1890

If we are to have a chance of becoming anything, we must remind ourselves of who we are and where we have come from. Dee Brown’s book does exactly that.

The ‘It’ from “Woyzeck” to “Butcher’s Crossing”

I was academically introduced to the concept of the “it” in Georg Buchner’s unfinished play Woyzeck, where a man is terrorized by a vague unnamed force which lays in wait for him in the bushes. The 'It' from "Woyzeck" to "Butcher's Crossing"I had no idea what this “it” was – a ghost, a demon or what – until it dawned on me over the years that it was, as simply as I can put it, a primal force so overwhelming that we must instead coddle ourselves with poor facsimiles such as sports, work and travel.

The 'It' from "Woyzeck" to "Butcher's Crossing"

Rasafa, Syria

In other words, our consciousness is so puny and small-minded that instead of blossoming toward truth, justice and beauty, we drink and have sex. The 'It' from "Woyzeck" to "Butcher's Crossing"John Williams is succinct in his reflections on our futile struggles at the conclusion of Butcher’s Crossing: The 'It' from "Woyzeck" to "Butcher's Crossing"“You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all of your life on lies, and then maybe when you’re ready to die, it comes to you — that there’s nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain’t done it, because the lies told you there was something else.”

John Williams’ “Butcher’s Crossing”

It is hard to overstate the writing craft of John Williams; his narrative is clear and precise and his characters compelling while his ruminations on our place in this world are profoundly vertiginous. 20140830_114502Butcher’s Crossing is the story of a group of men engaged in the slaughter of buffalo:

It came to him that he had turned away from the buffalo not because of a womanish nausea at blood and stench and spilling gut; it came to him that he had sickened and turned away because of his shock at seeing the buffalo, a few moments before proud and noble and full of the dignity of life, now stark and helpless, a length of inert meat, divested of itself, or his notion of itself, swinging grotesquely, mockingly before him. (151) SlaughteredBuffalo1874Sometimes at night, crowded with the others in the close warm shelter of buffalo hide, he heard the wind, that often suddenly sprang up, whistle and moan around the corners of the shelter…at such times he felt a part of himself go outward into the dark, among the wind and snow and the featureless sky where he was whirled blindly through the world. (200)20140221_160008

We’re only Carbon Neutral

The Marquis de Sade writes in his controversial novel Justine that we, as a species, tend to exaggerate our relevance:The power of destruction is not in the gift of Man. He may, at the most, change the form of things but he does not have the power to annihilate.We're only Carbon NeutralOh, what does it matter to Nature’s eternal creation that the mass of flesh which today makes up a biped creature should be tomorrow reproduced as a thousand different insects? We're only Carbon NeutralI say this: all men, all animals, all plants that grow, feed and are destroyed, reproducing themselves by the same means, never truly die but merely undergo variation and modification.

Modest Mouse offers a similar sentiment in their 2004 song Parting of the Sensory. We're only Carbon NeutralI’d start at the dawn/Until the sun and fully stopped/Never walking away from/Just a way to pull apart/Dehydrate back into minerals/A lifelong walk to the same exact spot/Carbon’s anniversary/The parting of the sensory.

In other words, we’re just not that big a deal.

The Fantasy of Reality

Luis Bunuel wrote in his autobiography My Last Sigh, “Our imagination, and our dreams, are forever invading our memories; and since we are all apt to believe in the reality of our fantasies, we end up transforming our lies into truths.” The Fantasy of RealityGreenlandic explorer Knud Rasmussen reflected in his journals from the Fifth Thule Expedition, “Here on this lonely spit of land, weary men had toiled along the last stage of their mortal journey. Their tracks are not effaced, as long as others live to follow and carry them farther; their work lives as long as any region of the globe remains for men to find and conquer.” The Fantasy of Reality Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote in The Little Prince, “A geographer is too important to go wandering about. He never leaves his study. But he receives the explorers there. He questions them, and he writes down what they remember. And if the memories of one of the explorers seems interesting to him, then the geographer conducts an inquiry into that explorer’s moral character.”  The Fantasy of RealityAnd finally Italo Svevo offered these musings from Zeno’s Conscience: “Simply, I believed I had made an important scientific discovery. I thought I had been called upon to complete the whole theory of psychological colors. My predecessors, Goethe and Schopenhauer, had never imagined what could have been achieved by deftly handling complementary colors.” The Fantasy of Reality“I should say that I spent my time sprawled on the sofa opposite my study window, from which I had a view of a stretch of sea and horizon.”

Robert Heinlein’s “Orphans of the Sky”

Robert Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky is a most terrible book. robert-heinlein-orphans-of-the-sky

The characters are ridiculous and flat, the setting is barren while the prose are plodding, and that’s putting it nicely. On the few occasions when the scientist priests who ruled the ship under Jordan’s Captain met in full assembly they gathered in a great hall directly above the Ship’s offices on the last civilized deck.(93)

The plot elements and unimaginative prose are indeed so bad as to remind me of my own work as 12-year-old when I concocted the Secret Spitballer’s Society series and for which Mr. Bacon regularly gave me grades of “C” and lower. I only wrote two installments before abandoning ship.

To top it off, there isn’t a single woman in Orphans of the Sky, that is until the final ten pages when the heroes escape to a planet and remember the need for procreation. Hugh’s younger wife bore a fresh swelling on her lip as if someone had persuaded her with a heavy hand. (120) ku-xlargeKeep those damned women out of the way. (122)