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Tuesday, August 15th, 2006
Okay, this is my idea for a "meme" -- it doesn't quite fit the questionaire model that's out there but whatever: what creative work or works (book, movie, music, painting, sculpture, etc.) do you wish was part of the vocabulary of everyone you will ever speak to? What prompted the question was me thinking about Look at Me, that I wished everybody had read it so I could use ideas in it as premises and assume people were going to understand what I was talking about -- this often happens with books I am in the middle of reading. But I want to generalize it a bit and take it outside the experience of reading a book and digesting its ideas. Anyway -- I am going to work on an answer and tag some people later on. In the meantime if you are interested feel free to write your own answers.
posted afternoon of August 15th, 2006: Respond
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A note about Look at Me -- I really want Charlotte's and her brother-in-law's mutual antipathy to be explained -- it is so deep and intense, right now it is just sort of hovering over the story without contributing anything.
posted afternoon of August 15th, 2006: Respond
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I am reading Look at Me [SPOILERS FOLLOW] voraciously. Constantly adjusting my perspective as I read it, at times I am perched above the story looking down into it and thinking about its structure, frequently I am drawn down into the guts of it -- when Charlotte made her plan to get Anthony to start drinking again, I reacted with a wave of visceral disapproval; but when Charlotte made her suicide attempt I was only very marginally with her, thinking more about what would happen in the story around this event.
posted morning of August 15th, 2006: Respond
➳ More posts about Jennifer Egan
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Monday, August 14th, 2006
This morning I started Look at Me by Jennifer Egan, author of The Keep. I'm happy to say it is living up to my expectations so far -- beautiful prose and character development with occasional surprising insights.
posted evening of August 14th, 2006: Respond
➳ More posts about Absurdistan
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Friday, August 11th, 2006
Tonight I read "The Haunted Boy", which is by far the best of the stories I've read so far in Collected Stories of Carson McCullers. The voice is absolutely flawless.
posted evening of August 11th, 2006: Respond
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Tuesday, August 8th, 2006
A really nice thing about Carson McCullers is her range. I said yesterday she was reminding me of J.D. Salinger -- and was reminded of him again this morning when I was reading "The Jockey" -- but not at all last night, when I was reading "Untitled Piece". All of it feels somehow familiar, but the linkages it is calling up are all over the place and most of the time, I am not certain where they are pointing.
posted morning of August 8th, 2006: Respond
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Sunday, August 6th, 2006
Carson McCullers is a name I have always had floating around in my consciousness as somebody I ought to read and would probably like. I've always associated her with Flannery O'Connor as a female southern writer of short stories from the mid-20th century. But come to find out, she is not really like O'Connor too much. This is kind of out of left field but I'm thinking her writing reminds me a bit of J. D. Salinger's. I have not read any Salinger in a number of years -- but the thing I remember best about it is the excellent description of people feeling discomfort around other people and failing to connect with them. And I'm picking up on that same discomfort as a major them in the few McCullers stories I have read so far. I think there is a similar way of using language too, but I might just be making that up. McCullers is (thankfully) missing the stuff that annoys me about Salinger -- the precious Glass family situation and the bogus mysticism. I am wishing now, that I had read these stories as an adolescent -- thinking they might have been really helpful.
posted evening of August 6th, 2006: Respond
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On Wednesday the 23rd at 8, Jennifer Egan will be reading from The Keep at Rocky Sullivan's, 28th and Lexington. If you're interested in meeting up there, drop me a line.
posted morning of August 6th, 2006: Respond
➳ More posts about The Keep
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Saturday, August 5th, 2006
At last year's Unfogged meetup, I arrived carrying a copy of Flannery O'Connor's collected short novels -- I had been reading The Violent Bear It Away that morning, and I gave the book to John Emerson, since I had a couple of other copies of the same material. By a weird coincidence, yesterday morning I started reading Carson McCullers' Collected Stories, so I had it in hand when I arrived at the Unfogged meetup. I came away with the book still in hand though -- fortunate since it is looking like a great read. I'm a bit pissed at The Gingerman (bar where the meetup was held), or at myself (for not divining that Gingerman would not allow children in) or something. My meetup experience only lasted until 6:00, when Ellen and Sylvia showed, at which point the weirdly hovering waitress informed us they had a over-21-only policy. So I only got to chat with Jackmormon and with Teofilo, too bad. We went over to the Pierrepont-Morgan library, where there is currently an excellent show of Rembrandt's drawings. I was very taken with his "Monk in the Cornfield", which could almost have been drawn by R. Crumb. Dropped by The Gingerman briefly on the way home, where I had a nice chat with LB and Becks, and got to meet Adam Ash.
posted afternoon of August 5th, 2006: Respond
➳ More posts about R. Crumb
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Thursday, August third, 2006
So Bookslut (in the person of Maureen McClarnon) thinks The Keep would be a better book without the final chapter. And I can sort of see where Ms. McClarnon is coming from -- the end of Chapter 15 would make an excellent book ending. And 16 takes the book off in a new direction. But, well, I like the new direction. I've been wanting throughout the first 15 chapters to learn more about Holly. I'm glad 16 is in there. On the train this evening I took a look back at Chapter 1 and was shocked all over again, at what a beautiful piece of writing this is. The structure of the whole book is contained in the first chapter, in amazingly compact miniature. Ray's first intrusion into the narrative -- wow! Also -- I looked through the book and realized that there really is not a lot of space devoted to Ray's story; it stands out in an exaggerated way, in my memory of the book.
posted evening of August third, 2006: Respond
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