Reading Well: The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

Posted on July 21, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

The opening chapter of The Flamethrowers (2013) by Rachel Kushner is perhaps the best thing I’ve read in quite some time. In it, we are introduced to our protagonist through the overlap of two worlds: the first is art, specifically the New York scene of the early and mid 1970s (she is described as a land artist, using photographs to record events of interaction with the surrounding landscape); the second is motorcycles, as she is on her way to the desert flats of Nevada, where she will ride a new model bike on the same tracks where land records are threatened and set each year. It’s fantastic stuff: deeply ingrained in each world, finding authority in the details of language and behavior, and painting her character in crisply defined movements.

The rest of the novel is quite good, but never quite recovers the energy and electricity of the opening salvo. It traces her relationship with an older Italian artist, one of the heirs to the company that made her motorcycle (but whose fortune was really made in rubber sourced from Brazil and turned into tires for the near-infinite demand during World War II). The novel is very conscious of the complex contradictions of capitalism, making stops not only in Brazil, where indigenous workers are endlessly abused in the pursuit of rubber, but also spending a fair bit of time back in Italy, where factory strikes carry an ever-increasing threat of violence against both the workers and the factory owners themselves.

The book, however, is much more about the personal than the political: it is a story not so much of lost love, as of duplicitous behavior, of the cost of maintaining a facade for the world, whether that facade is emotional detachment or performance art. It is not a book of happy endings, but it is a moving voyage, well -executed and engaging to read.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Create authenticity. Kushner’s ability to embed details in her descriptions and, more importantly, in her character’s actions immediately conveys a sense of thick reality to her settings, from the mechanics of riding a motorcycle at high speeds to the rules of engagement for the production of modern minimalist art. It’s so hard to do that without either (a) limiting your writing to only those things you know well or (b) sounding stiff and forced. As someone who writes about impossible futures, (a) is not an option …

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@The Movies with PopPop: I Am Not Your Negro

Posted on July 10, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

James Baldwin, one of the mid-20th centuries best writers and speakers – some might insist on an “arguably” in there, but I’ll take my chances! – is often overlooked or at least under appreciated as an interpreter and prophet of the Civil Rights movement. While he returned from his self-exile in France in 1957 to participate directly and was always in or near the inner circle of planning, implementing, and publicly speaking about what was happening, he brought a long term view somewhat different from many of his peers, and at times in conflict with other major leaders.

Baldwin understood clearly that the struggle at its core had to do with white behavior and perceptions, and it was those that needed to change if the scourge of racism and its continuing impact on America were to be dealt with. He also understood that little beyond cosmetics could change until white folks and the country acknowledged that the country was built on genocide and oppression, of Native Americans and enslaved people, and that the ingrained institutional racism, attitudes and behaviors ended neither with the end of slavery, nor with the successes of the Civil Rights era.

I Am Not Your Negro, the 2016 (Oscar-nominated) movie directed by Raoul Peck, relies only on words written by Baldwin, and wonderfully and calmly delivered by Samuel Jackson, along with archival footage of Baldwin and some of the events he describes. The words come from an unfinished manuscript he was working on prior to his death in 1987 that was focused on the lives and deaths of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. It’s an important movie, that neither embellishes nor dulls Baldwin’s words.

The movie works well; it’s not preachy and will hold your attention and focus. You should see it – and then listen to additional excerpts from Baldwin’s speeches (Pacifica archives has many of them and google leads to even more), and if you haven’t – or haven’t in a while — take a look at his writings, both fiction and non-fiction. Much of what Baldwin said in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s seems even more on-target today.

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Reading Well: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Posted on July 9, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Homegoing (2016) belongs to an honored tradition of African-American fiction, a generation by generation narrative tracing a family’s life from a moment a few centuries distant in West Africa, through the horrors of capture and slavery (and often encompassing moments of both resistance and collusion), through some form of emancipation and into the 20th century. Yaa Gyasi adds a twist, in that she follows two families, one that remains in West Africa (Ghana) and one that survives the middle passage into North America.

The chapters alternate by location, with generational parallels. This structure makes Homegoing more a series of inter-related short stories than a continuous narrative–although towards the end of the novel, individuals persist more and more, becoming parents and grand-parents of the chapters’ main characters (this happened in Some Sing, Some Cry as well and is more a function of the longer lifespans and interconnected nature of 20th/21st century life than some narrative inconsistency).

Perhaps the most impactful moments of Homegoing are of the tragic variety: several individuals exist on the edge of mental illness, several others struggle with addiction of different types, and Gyasi’s skill at creating empathy for those characters and moments is impressive. There are some thematic elements that survive across the narratives as well, one of which is a necklace passed from generation to generation. Originally salvaged from a fire, the totem asks the joined questions of what survives and what is passed on, and, in the final scene (which also unites the two narrative lines), the answers are, as they should be, ambiguous.

It’s hard not to compare Homegoing with The Underground Railroad, given the close proximity of both their publication and my reading of them: I think Gyasi’s novel is more successful from a purely literary perspective, but Colson, in contrast, adds some new and distinctive elements to the conversation. Both are worth your time.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Stick with this kind of regulated structure. If I were attempting this, some characters would become novellas, others would struggle to hold my interest for more than a dozen pages. There is a rhythm and a regularity to these kind of novels that I think demonstrate a mastery of craft on the part of the author.

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@The Movies with PopPop: The Hero

Posted on June 30, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

The Hero, a 2017 film directed by Brett Haley, is a surprisingly strong, leisurely, contemplative and elegiac film that seems made for, and is made by Sam Elliott. He plays Lee Hayden, an actor in his 70’s, famous for one great Western, also called The Hero, made some 40 years earlier. Hayden now spends his time doing voice over commercials – ah, that Sam Elliott voice – and smoking reefer.

He’s divorced, estranged and somewhat alienated from his 30 year old daughter, Lucy, living an isolated life, and constantly reminded by himself and others of his role as the hero. In short order, he learns he has cancer, and he meets Charlotte, a woman in her late 30’s played by Laura Prepon (with a smile and a sexiness that dazzles). Together, those two events lead him to slowly relearn intimacy, to struggle with trying to rectify his relationship with Lucy, and to make sense and some use of his past fame.

None of this comes easy, and while little is fully resolved at the film’s end, Lee’s struggles with his mortality, with making sense of his life, and with trying to sort out his legacy is extraordinarily well done and powerfully portrayed.

The movie could have been a sentimental tear jerker or a depressing end-of-life reflection – it is neither of these, but rather a powerful, gentle consideration of issues we all do or will face. Well worth seeing – and oh, that voice. It carries us through whatever rough spots the film has. See it.

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Reading Well: This Census Taker by China Miéville

Posted on June 25, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

China Miéville is probably my favorite author of the twenty-first century, and when I saw that he recently released not one, but two new books, I was both excited and a little hesitant. Miéville had a run–from 1998’s King Rat through the Bas-Lag trilogy through 2009’s The City and the City of some of the most inventive, immersive, unapologetic fiction I’ve read. Fabulous stuff. As his star ascended, there seemed to be a lack of editing focus in his later novels, and some of the taut mystery seemed to fade.

2016’s This Census Taker is a novella, and perhaps barely that (the book also includes the first chapter of his other new novel, The Last Days of New Paris, to be reviewed her probably later in the summer), but it marks a return to the Miéville that I’ve been missing. This is a fever dream of a story, told through the eyes of a boy who lives on the side of a mountain who suspects that his father is a murderer. The boy flees, returns, and struggles with how to navigate an uneasy existence until a man appears who claims that his job is to count the members of a mysterious diaspora.

That’s it. And little beyond that becomes concrete, but the notes hit by the story are unfailing and the boy’s inner life is rich, if stricken with a constant and, at least from his perspective, understandable anxiety. Little is resolved, but that’s not the point: This Census Taker is an exercise in tone and perspective, deeply creative and perhaps more than slightly disturbing.

Most of all, as an unabashed fanboy of Miéville, it may mark a return to the creativity and directness of his earlier works. That would indeed be a treat.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Resist explanation. Miéville has always been great at this, dropping readers in media res and trusting them to learn as they read. To do that well takes such courage as an author, such belief in both their own skills and in their audience. When it fails, readers are left not caring and, quite often, perplexed to the point of insult; but when it succeeds, the mysteries of the text remain as questions to ponder, and the writing remains as well, pulling at you long after you’ve finished reading. That’s something I’d love to have happen in my own writing.

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@The Movies with PopPop: Seymour: An Introduction

Posted on June 20, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Seymour: An Introduction (no, not the Salinger short story of the same name, but a 2014 film directed by Ethan Hawke) is an extraordinary documentary that will charm and fascinate anyone who has either played or tried to play an instrument or just loves music – or excellence in any craft!

Seymour Bernstein is a piano teacher and composer, 88 when the movie was made, who lives on the upper west side of Manhattan (and summers in Maine). He is a gifted player who debuted with the Chicago Symphony and then played worldwide – until 1980 when he stopped playing publicly and turned his full energies to teaching. He claimed to never be comfortable playing publicly, while he palpably and obviously is a remarkable teacher.

He met Hawke – an actor who also claims to suffer severe stage fright whenever he goes on – seated next to him at a dinner party, and after their conversation (which Hawke claims was remarkably insightful and helpful), Hawke asked him if he could make a documentary about him, and thus the film. (Hawke stays off camera for almost all of the movie). We learn a little of a lot about Bernstein in the movie: his childhood; the hurt when his father said he had “two daughters and a pianist;” his organizing a trio while serving in Korea that played for other soldiers on the front line; his one room apartment; his interactions with students; his teaching of master classes; his friends with whom he discusses art; his belief in the need to both have the gift and to work ferociously at one’s craft; his dislike of Glenn Gould (“when Gould plays, I don’t hear Bach, just Gould”). But mainly we develop a deep feeling for his insights, patience, and absolute commitment. There’s a remarkable scene in the basement of the Steinway shop in midtown Manhattan when he’s trying out pianos with responses like “horrendous,” “OK,” and eventually “wonderful, this is the one I’ll use.”

Hawke has talked him into playing a private concert for perhaps 50 people (Hawke’s acting group plus many of the students and colleagues we’ve met during the movie) in the rotunda of the Steinway building, looking out at a Manhattan street. An “extra” on the DVD is the full 45 minute or so concert.

(A note on the title – though Bernstein had a brother who committed suicide, I could see little relevance in the title, other than Bernstein’s name is Seymour, and the film is an introduction to him!)

This is absolutely a film not be missed, it brings enjoyment, appreciation, and a certain peace.

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Reading Well: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Posted on June 11, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Published in 2016, Colson Whitehead‘s The Underground Railroad is a very hot property: best seller, Oprah Book Club selection, and extraordinarily topical. It’s not quite a work of historical fiction, but it’s not far off: the novel traces the story of an African in the Americas as she moves from state to state, experiencing quite different forms of slavery and oppression in each.

These range from the well-worn horrors of a cotton plantation to a seemingly integrated town that is using its population of ex-slaves in various medical experiments to a state hell-bent on eliminating all dark-skinned people from its population entirely to what seems like an oasis, a commune of farms owned and maintained by free folk (whether formerly slaves or not). While these are identified as states, and while they do follow the general arc of heading first north and then west towards better conditions for Africans, I would read the specific states in much the same way I read the railroad itself, as something that functions in the book as simultaneously real and ahistorical.

There are real trains and real tracks, but there is no claim for those to be historically real. Likewise, there is no claim that South Carolina (for example) was historically like this. Instead, Colson is working with the narratives of racism that plagued America’s early years (I’m not at all implying those narratives are done, but they are, while systemically and historically linked, different in the twenty-first century than they were in the eighteenth or nineteenth). Inextricably tied to that are considerations of early capitalism: what bodies and materials can be owned, what bodies produce capital, and at what cost.

These concerns are explored with skill, and with a deep historical awareness. The main character is well-drawn, and he succeeds at a very difficult task in humanizing her beyond her suffering. She is more than a target for whippings and degradations, and that makes those moments all the more powerful.

The Underground Railroad belongs in the pantheon of important novels that wrestle with the experience of Africans in the Americas: it may not reach the breadth of Roots, or even Some Sing, Some Cry, but that is part of what is striking about it: instead of following  a family of characters over several generations, it takes a single woman through successive slices of America as an illustration of how what is often seen as progress is just as much the same systemic failures in different clothing.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Tackle these topics head on. There is clear political bent to my writing, but it’s all displaced and transposed. Whitehead has a critique of American capitalism that is explicit in the novel, and yet it is never preachy or didactic. That’s impressive to me.

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Reading Well: A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter

Posted on June 2, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

When James Salter‘s A Sport and a Pastime was published in 1967, it was immediately subject to an ongoing debate about pornography (and it does have a series of fairly explicit scenes, even by today’s standards). That did not prevent it from being hailed as a minor classic, and, of course, may indeed have helped to send it on its way towards that status.

The story is pretty simple: the narrator is spending time in a small town in France, an American comes to stay with him, and the American embarks on an affair with a French woman. Salter’s technical skills are immense: the writing is at once expansive and direct, evocative without ever being fanciful.

There are two things of note for me about A Sport and a Pastime.  First, the novel–like many contemporary works–is overwhelmingly masculine. The two perspectives that matter are the narrator’s and the American’s; the woman, easily the most described object in the book. only exists as such, without any true agency other than her reactions towards and against the behavior of the American.

Second, and far more interesting, A Sport and a Pastime is far less a novel about romance or France or sex than it is a novel about narrative truth. We are told on several occasions that much of what is recounted is invented, created out of the narrator’s fantasies. Perhaps that is what saves the short novel in the end: instead of a fairly straightforward story of erotic conquest, it becomes a slightly oblique meditation on the nature of desire and its relation to reality.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Convey the nature of characters that are both deeply embedded in a place and foreign to it. Neither the narrator nor the American (obviously) are French, yet the French countryside is its own character in the novel, and while they never belong and never lose touch of their being alien to this world, they also exist and find their way. It’s a delicate balance, and one Salter holds without swinging too far towards either farce or a sense of desolation.

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Reading Well: Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

Posted on May 24, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Helen Mirrlees‘ Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) is experiencing a bit of a renaissance, probably not unrelated to Neil Gaiman’s effusive praise for it. It was never truly lost, but was hailed as an “unappreciated classic” for decades, undergoing surges of popularity and “rediscovery” in the 1940s, 1970s, and 2000s.

It is a delightful book, if a minor one, detailing the relationship between a prosperous trading village and the realm of the fairies, with which it shares a border. There is a forbidden, yet ever-present, commerce between the fairy lands and the human realms, chiefly the traffic of fairy fruit, an addictive and vaguely mystical substance, and this illicit trade marks out the primary plot points of the book, which also include staples of fairy literature: the retrieval of a child lost to the fairies, a love affair gone wrong and another gone right, etc.

Mirrlees was, from a quick perusal of her Wikipedia page, quite a character, one of who knows how many strong and talented women of a certain era largely lost or, at least, under-appreciated. Lud-in-the-Mist deserves its revival, and is a very pleasant interlude. Recommended!

#WhatIWishICouldDo

The whole fable thing. There is a focus in fables, an ability to exclude any of the questions around the story in favor of the things directly related to the movements of the underlying plot itself. That allows Lud-in-theMist to shift its focus several times as you realize the true story here is about the interactions between the fairies and the humans, and that various characters that come and go are merely incidental to that.

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Reading Well: Shadow & Claw by Gene Wolfe

Posted on May 12, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Shadow & Claw (1983) by Gene Wolfe is a little complicated in form: it contains two novels–The Shadow of the Torturer (1980) and The Claw of the Conciliator (1981)–which themselves comprise the first half of a series known as The Book of the New Sun.

It could be described in terms that are quite familiar: a student at a specialized (at least mystical, if not magical) institution undergoes a trauma that forces them to leave and wander, in search of their destiny.

And while true, that would also grossly undersell the book. The institution is compelling: the protagonist is raised in a guild devoted to the art of torture, and their place within society is never quite clear. This ambiguity extends to other parts of the society as well: the ruler may be a savior, or he may be a despot; the existence of magic is undeniable, but inexplicable; etc.

There are hints throughout Shadow & Claw of a grand destiny, of a kingship yet to be discovered. In some ways, I hope that proves untrue: Wolfe’s writing is strongest in the smaller moments, in the cast of characters encountered, and in the slow discovery of the world he has created. There is a “play within a play” element that may seem unfulfilling, but the rest of the writing more than makes up for it.

The narrative is more meandering than sweeping, and that may not be everyone’s cup of tea. It is a reminder that, perhaps as an antidote to the formulaic demands of contemporary publishing, sometimes the best thing is to wander with an author, seeing a new world through their eyes.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Wolfe is shockingly, expansively literate, to the point of creating an entirely new lexicon of invented, yet highly believable terms. Fuligin, the color darker than black; thalamegii, a boat powered by magic; metamynodon, a domesticated beast of burden. And that ignores the words that are obscure or entirely out of circulation that he revives: carnifex, anagnost, nidorous, quaesitor.

The intelligence sparkles throughout the text, yet somehow without being either overly obtuse or off-putting. That’s quite an accomplishment.

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