ZAMM

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Value
By Robert M. Pirsig

My initial interest in this book was superficially driven by the "mystic wisdom of the Orient" stereotype. I first saw this book while waiting in line at my local library. Judging by the cover, it had something to offer because I could not fathom the relation between Zen and motorcycles. (It's an indirect correlation, it's all about approach) Anyway, I was immediately turned off by the book's thickness. The second time I saw it in the hands of a friend during senior year of high school. She was an interesting character, socially awkward; my favored type of person; and that was the second spark of interest in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. After spending some time reading through and exploring far Eastern ideas and improving my reading skills, I saw the book in the library's Reading List section and picked it up.
As a slow reader, this book was painstakingly long for me, especially around three quarters of the way through ZAMM. You'll have to have some strong drive to power through some dull parts of the book. I, for one, was most interested in the craft of a mind once labeled diseased by institutionalized society. Indeed, Pirsig's life was tragic such that he was in and out of mental institutions and his son died at a young age, but he's survived by his awesome intellect displayed and transcendent wisdom demonstrated in this book. ZAMM is chockfull of eye opening interpretations of modern life, which I've chosen to simplify into two quotes:
The Inquiry into Value

And what is good, Phaedrus
And what is not good--
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
- ZAMM, Plato

The meat of the book explores this topic, value. In this context is where he reconciles motorcycle maintenance and Zen. With a precise voice, he discusses multiple humanist approaches to technology and what quality is and from where it comes.
The Duality of the Recanted Mad Man

I haven't been carrying him at all.
He's been carrying me.
- Phaedrus, ZAMM

The other half of the story in ZAMM is that of he—the narrator is never really called by name—and his son. Their motorcycle trip west through the U.S. Midwest, through the mountain and plains, gives us ample room to draw out for ourselves inferences on the effect of technological advancement, the eternal state of the madman, and the impermanent and illusory qualities of the thin veils of "cure."
There are a few twists that add extra dimensions to the characters throughout the book.
At some 400 pages, ZAMM is really quite depressing and wonderful. It gets all the way down to the bottom of life's muck to exposes brilliant nuggs. Pirsig's words rise from the pages like the stale scent of cigarettes on a wet morning and form a map of modern technological life. From those same pages are some truths of life, an insightful discourse on the origins of structure, art and quality.

Falling Man

Falling Man
By Don DeLillo

My uncle worked in the Pentagon—in a wing that has been entirely remodeled within the last 7 years. He abruptly stopped working there about 7 years ago. Because of scale, attention, and video footage, the Twin Towers have always been surrogates in a story I’ve never fully imagined or sought. So how then does a writer at the forefront of abstract “postmodernism” begin to unravel monumental tragedy?

Beginning with the event itself, the novel centers on Keith Neudecker—a middle-aged lawyer who escapes one of the towers. He appears at the doorstep of his estranged wife Lianne whom he hasn’t spoken to in years. He is covered in blood and clutching a briefcase—neither of which belongs to him. Bookended between two vivid depictions of horror are these non-chronological scenes of attempted recovery, brutal prologue, and thoughtful memory.

Filling these vignettes is a cast of characters as impersonally inhabited as they are introduced: There is the owner of the briefcase who finds a victimized camaraderie with Keith, the European Lover who is convinced of America’s decline, the reticent Jihadist who becomes more and more convinced as he follows Mohamed Atta, the members of an Alzheimer’s writers group who record their memories not for themselves, the Poker night regulars who cannot bear to meet once two of the chairs remain empty, the children who watch the skies for a man named “Bill Lawton” after mishearing the name of the Al-Qaeda founder, and the titular falling man who does acts of performance art by hanging himself posed as the famous photograph of the man leaping from the World Trade Center.

Most of these characters are only named after a prolonged exposure to them in the third-person as a he or she; is the pronoun-effused anonymity of the novel’s body supposed to mirror the eardrum ringing confusion of the aftermath? Besides masterfully capturing the tragedy, horror, and confusion, I am unsure as to what DeLillo was trying to do. Perhaps he explains it through the Alzheimer’s writers who write for posterity. Perhaps the advice I received about the book also reinforces its role as history: don’t begin to read DeLillo with this book.

Cutting Lisa

Cutting Lisa
By Percival Everett

Some books are worth reading just for one sentence. Cutting Lisa is one of these books.
I've blogged about Percival Everett before, but let it suffice to say I think he is the single most under-recognized author in America today. His stark minimalist prose can be devastating or comforting depending on what Everett wants.
Cutting Lisa is about an older man named John who visits his adult son Elgin and creates a new, albeit temporary, life for himself there. The book, as all of Everett's seem to do, deals with a lot of issues in a surprisingly short number of pages. John starts a relationship with a much-younger woman at the same time as he makes new friends his own age. He reconnects with his granddaughter while he discovers his daughter-in-law's infidelities. John struggles to stay on top of everything as the world spins underneath him.
The narrative isn't necessarily one of an older man trying to keep up with changing times, although that is a bit of it. It's more about a man trying to reconnect with his family the only way he knows how. John and Elgin's relationship is incredibly well-written. It has a feeling closer to friendship than a father-son bond but still feels natural.
But what really ties the book together is the beginning and ending. The beginning is about John at the hospital in which he works (John is an obstetrician) and another doctor calls him in to see a woman who underwent a successful home c-section at the hands of her husband. It disturbs John but also strikes him as beautiful. The ending I'll leave for readers to find out, but it ties amazingly to the beginning and showcases Everett's absolute genius in his ability to craft stories. At just under 150 pages, it's closer to a short story than a novel, but the last line will leave you shaking.

No Logo

No Logo

By Naomi Klein

After finishing this book I feel like I need a shower. Klein chronicles the modern world of branding and the resistance it engenders. Her work is comprehensive and profoundly disturbing, as it should be.

Klein goes everywhere in this one book. From export processing zones in The Philippines (if you don't know what those are you should read the book and then go cry in a corner for a while) to street protests in England to NikeTown in New York. She does an incredible job linking diverse problems with the root cause of neoliberal global capitalism.

But she does more than just decry sweatshops, Klein analyzes the way corporations create meaning for us. At its heart No Logo is a book about branding and the declining freedom from it. She writes about how we got to where we are and the process of corporations renouncing "things" in order to produce mostly semiotic signs. She then describes what this means in terms of our present reality - temp jobs and advertisements everywhere with CEOs cashing multi-million dollar bonuses while workers try to find full-time employment.

Yet despite all the problems Klein describes, she doesn't leave the reader without some hopes. She does not cave in to the simple lesson of the story which would be that we can all do better by purchasing responsibly blah blah blah Thomas Friedman bullshit. Instead she makes clear that the only solution to an institutional problems is institutional. The stories of resistance that accompany every problem are heartening and a necessary component of the book so it doesn't turn into a misery-fest.

No Logo is compulsively readable, which isn't the case with all books about the evils of branding and global capitalism. Klein doesn't fall into the trap of feeling sorry for herself or the rest of us, but rather is genuinely looking toward future solutions. The world is fucked up, but we're gonna have something to say about it. The most important thing readers can gather from No Logo is awareness, and with such a wide-ranging comprehensive book, it's a perfect resource for any commodity-obsessed young person in your life.

Love in The Days of Rage

Love in The Days of Rage
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I swore I wasn't going to buy any books. The English Graduate Association sometimes sets up a table in the lobby of the English building and sells used books to fund programs. Paperbacks cost a dollar a piece. I looked over and decided there wasn't anything I really needed enough to add it to my pile, so I sat down and read a book out of my bag. But I couldn't stop peeking at the piles out the corner of my eye. I saw Love in The Days of Rage and knew I would have to surrender. When I saw another student move toward the pile, I got up and bought it. Resigned.
Love in The Days of Rage is short enough to be called a novella. At just over 100 pages, it's a quick read, although not as quick as I thought it would be. Ferlinghetti - one of my favorite of the beat poets - writes prose in an unsurprising poetic way. There are pages that could pass as excellent poems; metaphors and similes not usually found in works of prose.
The story is about a woman - Annie - an American expatriate artist living in Paris in 1968 in the midst of the student uprising. She meets a man named Julian, a Portuguese banker with radical anarchist beliefs. The story revolves around their relationship as they grow closer against the backdrop of the revolution outside.
The biggest achievement of Love in The Days of Rage is its ability to intertwine the personal and political. Annie wonders constantly if Julian is all he claims - how could he be both an insurrectionary anarchist and a bourgeois banker? And what can't he tell her? She loves him but has a hard time justifying dating a plutocrat in the midst of a revolution.
The depictions of the students is romantic in the best way. Ferlinghetti does his job and raises question about how effective the protests are. But the demonstrators and demonstrations seem, above all, beautiful. This is Ferlinghetti's talent put to use, showing not just the anger, but the beauty of the protests. He writes about how poetry is used as both a sword and a shield.
It doesn't have as much protest-porn as I would have liked, but it still makes me wish I had been there.

Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest

By John Updike

John Updike's magnum opus series - Rabbit Angstrom - is one of those works that should be read in high schools but isn't for a lot of different reasons. Updike doesn't have the tragedy of a Hemingway or the shyness of a Salinger. He's undoubtedly a modern canonical author, but his work doesn't fit in the current trend in the literary world. With the opening of the canon, most modern authors that have been added - at least to school book lists -are from underrepresented minority groups. Not that these books aren't worthy, but it leaves out excellent authors like Updike. I'd be willing to trade some Shakespeare in for the more relevant Updike.

Rabbit at Rest is the final volume of the four-book series. The novels follow former-high-school basketball star Rabbit Angstrom as he moves through the 50's , 60's, 70's and 80's, each book taking one decade. Rabbit is a sort of everyman, a product of his times. With the shift of American society, Rabbit shifts too.

Rabbit at Rest takes place in the 80's, with the end of Reagan administration and Bush Senior taking office. Rabbit finally starts feeling like a relic. He's in his 50's and having serious heart problems. His illness and decline is paired with what he sees as the same decline of America. AIDS and the drug war are in the news, and he fears in his own family. His son Nelson is now an adult (sorta) and has taken over Springer Motors - Rabbit's wife's inherited car lot. Rabbit at Rest is largely about Rabbit and Nelson's relationship. All the trauma Rabbit has visited upon his son comes to the forefront as Nelson struggles with drug addiction while trying to raise a family and run a business - none of which he does very well.

Concluding a series like Updike's must be a difficult job. Philip Roth's Exit Ghost (also reviewed on this blog) did the same thing, and I think did it better. Updike's ending is clean, whereas Roth's is frayed. Rabbit's heart problems are neater and easier to deal with that Nathan Zuckerman's prostate cancer. Updike gives a sanitized version of decay, his protagonist doesn't suffer from impotence like Roth's, but instead deals with his continuing libido - and not very well.

Although the final installment of the Rabbit series is my least favorite of the four, it gives the reader a depiction of the 80's in suburban America, instead of the high-flying Wall Street version that's usually portrayed. It's a strong and solid novel that ends one of the better modern narratives, something people who lived it will remember, and those of us who didn't can imagine.

Fathers and Sons

Fathers and Sons

By Ivan Turgenev

According to his Wikipedia entry, Nabokov thought Turgenev was the 4th-best Russian author (above Dostoevsky) and he has the the largest recorded brain-weight. For these reasons alone I wanted to read his best-regarded novel.

Fathers and Sons is about two sets of pre-revolutionary Russian fathers and sons and their ideas about life and society. The new generation's philosophical nihilism is pitted against their fathers' traditional (albeit modernizing) beliefs.

I was surprised how much the character depictions and conflicts remain relevant to this day. It's definitely a good read for radical sons and liberal fathers. It teaches us that our kitchen-table arguments aren't that original. (Dad, I swear I just call you a fascist sometimes because it pisses you off).

The novel also deals with reconciling philosophical dogmas with the reality of human feelings and desires. Can a doctrine like nihilism overthrow the desire for family and love?

The depictions of college-age radicals is right on. They're not portrayed as petulant or dumb, but still in the process of solidifying their beliefs. The adults aren't condescending but are legitimately afraid of the generational shift. The parents also aren't aristocratic autocrats, but rather good-hearted men trying to keep up with changing times. Their interactions have a very realistic nuance.

Tom Stoppard seems to have stolen a lot of Turgenev's ideas in his Coast of Utopia play trilogy. Yet he lacks Turgenev's sympathy for the young men. Stoppard sees them as arbitrary and immature while Turgenev sees that they're bright and forward-looking, if not fully clear on their complete philosophies. The conflict and writing are both engaging and it's a quick read. I generally trust a guy smart enough to write Lolita in his third language, and he didn't let me down.

This Boy's Life

This Boy's Life
By Tobias Wolff

Writing a memoir that doesn't stink of trite self-obsession is a tough job these days. Wolff wrote This Boy's Life well before the current crop of made-up personal histories brought shame on the whole genre, and it seems like those fabricators might have read his book for inspiration.
More than anything, This Boy's Life is about the central role lying played in young Mr. Wolff's life. the story is of his childhood, from elementary through high school with his single mother. It has the elements that seem perfunctory in such a story, the crazy abusive step-father and the distant admired father. Thankfully Wolff portrays these people from his memories as just that instead of crude caricatures. He's too good a writer for anything less.
Wolff shows how lying becomes a lifesaver for him in his tumultuous childhood. He has some of the regular childhood experiences with fibbing, but when his trusting mother lets him get away with it, the lies don't contract but expand. It's easy to see the progression from sneaking cigarettes and graffiti to attempted check fraud and boarding school application-doctoring.
The virtuosity of the writing comes though in the lack of emotional blackmail that would have been simple with such a moving story. Wolff doesn't demand the reader's sympathy, but instead tells what happened and how it felt without an apparent an agenda. It's more a work of literature than a confessional sob-story, much like Dave Eggers's Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius.
I'm not sure why true stories tend to sell a lot better than novels about the same topics, it leads to people who have gone through a lot of shit writing about themselves and breaking into the literary world. But Wolff is not this, he is a novelist who tackled the story of his own history.
Just looking for the image for this review I found out there was a movie made in 1993 with Leonardo DiCaprio. Judging from the poster, it's everything I was thankful the book wasn't. That's probably why I never heard of it.

Weight

Weight
By Jeanette Winterson

I have to give my mom her due credit. Throughout my life she has suggested authors I'd like (Gide, Calvino, O'Toole and many more) and I usually ignore her at my own peril before eventually reading them and regretting not doing it years ago. Jeneatte Winterson is one of these authors. It wasn't until my narrative theory professor made me read one of her short stories (the most graphic depiction of lesbian sex I've read for class since grade school) that I finally understood why my mom had been badgering me. Winterson grasps post-modernism in a way no other author I've read does, she swims in it like a fish while other authors doggie-paddle to stay above the water line.
Weight is a re-telling of the myth of Atlas and Heracles with Winterton's signature firm touch. Heracles is basically the frat-boy we would be instead of the Disney hero. It feels like Winterson understands and embraces the brutal sensuality of the Greek myths that we seek to sanitize.
Atlas is long-struggling Christ figure, but his fight is more with himself than with socialism, sorry Ayn Rand.
To just tell the story wouldn't be good enough for Winterson. She integrates autobiographical elements and a Soviet astro-dog to add facets of the Atlas story not normally discussed. She manages to make the break between the (semi)mimetic and non-mimetic cleanly enough not to bother me. It doesn't feel like an exercise, but rather a confession.
Using a familiar myth that already has so much attached to discuss what our pasts mean to our futures is a tough burden, but Winterson shrugs it off with her overwhelming ability. The book is about 150 pages, read it in one sitting, it'll take you about an hour and a half.

Simulations

Simulations
By Jean Baudrillard

Woah.

Journey to Ixtlan

Journey to Ixtlan
By Carlos Castaneda

In the first two semesters of my time at Maryland I was looking to understand myself further. With my recent rediscovery of the wonders of words and literature, only three years preceding, I knew reading would be a significant factor in my introspective endeavors. At the same time, I was well in tune with my affinity for personal and direct experience and exploration. I found a meditation group where I was given a book list. Journey to Ixtlan was on that list. The story in Journey to Ixtlan was parallel to my own "spiritual" yet existential investigations.
Carlos Castaneda, an anthropologist, journeys to deep parts of a desert to visit Indian sorcerer Don Juan and discovers a lot from what he is not told. He goes with an objective taxonomic mindset: he just wanted answers to his questions about Indian demographics. In retrospect, he finds that his aim was a) existentially arbitrary and b) the Indian population was so mixed and multicultural that it would be quite difficult to get any straight answers. However, something kept him coming back though he was not making any headway on his assignment. The mystery of Don Juan’s ways in warriorhood brought him back season after season. In the end Carlos found a new outlook on life, not exactly in a new-age way, but that the fabric of his existence acquired a higher thread-count.
Oh yeah—I was very disappointed that no explicit accounts of peyote trips were recorded. But there was some trippy stuff in there.
I wondered why a book that explores Native American spirituality was on that book list. And I found my answer; Castaneda became fully aware of the robotic manners of his intellectual, academic, life pursuits. All the while, he thought he had some control and choice but in truth, he was totally limited to identifying with his “roles” and memories. To put it in a few words, I think Carlos’s Journey to Ixtlan points out how social and societal education entwines with self-identity to become a cognitive drug for the masses. It is possible to function without drugs or intoxication and still be part of a drug-culture: to be a warrior.

"Only as a warrior can one withstand the path of knowledge...because the art of a warrior is to balance the terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man."
~Journey To Ixtlan

Equus

Equus
By Peter Shaffer

When people would ask what I was reading and I told them Equus, the most prevalent response was, "Oh yeah! That's the one that Harry Potter was naked in!" Yes, this was the play Daniel Radcliffe was in, and yes the part required him to be naked. I don't really care. What's more important to me is that this play was fantastic.
The story focuses on a boy Alan and his psychologist Dysart. The play starts with Alan having had blinded 6 horses with spikes at the stable at which he works. Dysart probes the inner-workings of Alan's mind deftly.
Equus is more than anything a statement on the effects of the modern condition on the minds of its subjects. Alan is stuck between the conservative Christianity of his mother and his father's scientific intellectualism. The strain drives Alan into insanity and into the deification of horses that 5th grade girls could only dream of.
The way the play is staged is inventive and brilliant. All the actors stay on stage throughout the play. Flashbacks are done in the middle of scenes, with actors rising from their places on a bench (still onstage) to talk to the characters in the middle of the action. It's not hard to imagine what's going on and so this technique adds a sort of fluidity that is as beneficial to a reading as I'd imagine it would be to a viewing.
The mastery of the play is Dysart and Alan's sessions. Alan is obviously as intelligent as he is disturbed. Dysart is a very capable psychologist who doesn't fall prey to Alan's hysterics. Dysart has his own basket of psychological issues that are not all that different from Alan's, but Dysart recognizes them clearly but sees no escape. Except, that is, for the insanity that Alan has adopted.
Sexuality in the modern world is a main theme of the play. How is a young man supposed to reconcile newly-loosened sexual mores with traditional and irrational restrictions? Blinding horses seems to be the only way (okay, it's a bit more nuanced than that, but still).
The play doesn't offer any easy answers, only complex critiques, which is a relief. Shaffer asks us to examine the contradictions both in ourselves and our modern society.

The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon

So this guy I had a massive crush on in high school (he had nearly my exact taste in books; clearly it was meant to be) really liked The Crying of Lot 49. I finally got around to getting my hands on it, eager to read it if only to please my memory of this fellow.
The Crying of Lot 49 is about Oedipa Maas, a 28-ish year old woman who is suddenly notified that her ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity, has died and that his will names her co-executor of his estate. Inverarity, as Oedipa discovers, was an extremely talented real estate mogul who pretty much owned California. He also may or may not have been involved in a centuries-old, underground and rather violent postal organization called the Trystero, which itself may or may not exist. Saying more would give things away. It is very complicated.
The Crying of Lot 49 is essentially about the horribly unsettling effect of uncertainty. Conspiracy theories emerge as an attempt to explain isolation, alienation, empty relationships and meaningless hatred. America and indeed the entire western world are scrutinized through this lens. It is self-critical and quite cutting. Pynchon is clever with his references to literature, history and American culture. He is also incredibly funny. He has characters named Dr. Hilarius, Mucho Maas, Mike Fallopian and Genghis Cohen. The man has a sense of humor.
Overall, I wasn't as blown out of the water by Lot 49 as I thought I would be, mostly because the book is only just over 150 pages long. Pynchon writes like a cross between Vonnegut, Kerouac and the beat poets (except in prose), which, if you like that sort of thing, is just about the best thing ever. It makes for intriguing passages, but he rushes through the writing when he's trying to make plot points happen. The sudden shifts between events-- and there are a lot of events-- leave the linear plot a bit annoying to follow. I much preferred the poetry in Oedipa's head.
Still, the more I think about Lot 49, the more I like it. I certainly liked it well enough to want to read more Pynchon. His first novel, V., is approximately a million pages long, but I'm finding that exciting rather than daunting.

Mao II

Mao II
By Don DeLillo

I think Don DeLillo might have superpowers. Although his ability to write dialog that makes me want to kill myself on the off-chance Heaven exists and is filled with his characters is close, that's not what I'm talking about. I think Don DeLillo is psychic. I don't mean he-picks-up-the-phone-before-it-rings psychic, I mean really psychic. What makes me think that? Mao II is about a lot of things (as all of his books I've read are) but one of the major themes is terrorism and it's relation to art, which isn't that strange since terrorism is a major motif in our current society. The Twin Towers also figure largely in Mao II, hardly a scene goes by in the New York setting without them being referenced. This is only strange because Mao II was published in 1991, 10 years before 9/11. That's why I think Don DeLillo is psychic. I think Don DeLillo predicted 9/11.
Okay, I don't actually think that, but it was fucking eerie. It's strange how something that happened 10 years after the book's publication can permanently change its meaning. I'd read the passages about terrorism and think of how someone would have read them 10 years earlier. At the time, musing on the rivalry between terrorists and novelists must have seemed like an exercise in stilted philosophical musing, while now it cuts to the very core.
Mao II is about the reclusive novelist Bill Gray, his two assistants and a photographer named Brita who takes pictures only of novelists. Bill is her toughest find, as he has secluded himself pretty damn well. But the two immediately hit it off and their dialog is some of the best I've ever read. The discuss death and artistic representation so without small talk that it's made clear they aren't two individual characters, but rather two incarnations of the same god who happened to run into each other. That god is DeLillo.
The book makes points about the nature of crowd behavior contrasting (one of Gray's assistants was a Moonie) with isolation in a fascinating way. Both focus around the central theme of death. When Gray is roped into trying to resolve a terrorist hostage scenario, he runs up against the edge of his isolation as well as his capabilities as a novelist.
Mao II does have a few problems. DeLillo seems uncommitted to the character of Scott, Gray's assistant. He seems out of place in the novel. DeLillo also writes of the sexual relationships like he's bored with them and I couldn't help but react the same way.
But overall Mao II is an incredibly quick and engaging read (I think it took me two days). Someone else should go read it so I have someone to discuss it with, because it's that kind of book.

What?

What? 108 Zen Poems
By Ko Un

Working at McKeldin library affords me the opportunities of a book whore—to hold short fantastic affairs between myself and dozens of books, per hour, without commitment; But I remember the good ones. Ko Un's What? - 108 Zen Poems was one such book. A calligraphic Zen painting of a sword on the creamy skin of the pocket-sized book caught my eye. "I must have this book," I told myself. I checked it out that evening.
I read it in one sitting and loved every single minute of it, the first book of poetry dedicated to one person I have ever read. It was of course translated and had several introductions from Ginsberg, Zen Master Thich Naht Hanh, and others. Their introductions of Ko Un gave me the perfect frame of mind—though I had learned about and practiced several faces of Buddhism in previous years—to read and fully enjoy Ko’s poetry. But words and praises about a person can only do so much; some other deeper bond drew me to What?
Existential-Zazen theory...
The nothingness of existence that prevails in Zen Buddhism radiates between the lines of almost every poem in this book. This, however, is not to say the collection is a cold bleak outlook on life, it is more like a set of realist/naturalist/meditative blips of clarity from a very well-experienced Korean (that’s my endorsement for Ko Un).

"A Rosary

Angulimala was a devil of a cutthroat.
The fellow
sliced off the fingers of the people that he killed
and wore them
strung dingle-dangle around his neck,
including his father's fingers.

That was a real hundred-eight bead rosary.
Every bead on the string
a life."

"A Rosary" was the meeting point for the two of us: a metaphor for, and an agreeable way a Zen warrior ought to live in his time and culture. I think this is the most potent poem in What?
He, a Korean "jail-bird" rogue Bodhisattva, and I, an Americanized Africa-Born Romantic and anti-intellectual, through but a few words that allowed for cosmic transcendence, came to a mutual understanding and view on life. Check it out, maybe you'll find your own questions and answer to the question: What? [is this?]

The Inner Circle

The Inner Circle
By T.C. Boyle

I'm that "now-roommate" who gave Malcolm Drown for his birthday, and a few weeks ago, I loaned him A Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in exchange for his copy of The Inner Circle. I was extremely impressed with the writing in The Inner Circle, albeit the novel dragged on a little bit near the middle.
The plot involves a "fictionalized" account of the Kinsey studies that is being told in retrospect by John Milk, a narrator T.C. Boyle creates who explains his relationship to Kinsey as he transitions from a student into a fellow researcher on the team that records the sexual histories of thousands of subjects for what is now referred to as the Kinsey Report. Very early in the novel, you find out that Kinsey is a man of praxis who wants to sexually liberate the inner circle, which consists of the researchers and their wives, and most of humanity, but the sexual practices must remain discrete otherwise the credibility of the objective collection of interviews will be compromised.
I stopped wondering whether certain aspects of the novel are accurate or fictionalized because T.C. Boyle's characterization is complex so that the truth barely matters. The first person narration employed creates a fascinating profile for Milk. His strange sexuality and his alcoholism are just two aspects that Boyle explores in depth without making the passages seem forced. I don't want to ruin the sexual escapades of the book, so I'll just tell you that they become increasingly sensuous and will excite you regardless of your sexual preferences both through the aesthetics of the writing and the titillating content that is never crude or excessive. The use of smells in the book is fantastic whether John Milk is describing the smell of the office, a woman, or Prok's nasty herbal liquors. I'd recommend getting high before you read a few of the sex scenes later in the book; the experience becomes enveloping and I'd judge it as the most synaesthetic high read I've ever had.
The book isn't just an indulgent read for the pleasure seekers, although I was quite "aroused" during parts of the read. It raises interesting questions about the construction of sexual identity and what true sexual justice entails. Prok is a huge advocate of pansexuality and advocates that people should shed all of their indoctrination and respond to every sexual stimulus, yet John Milk and his wife, Iris, in particular have hang-ups over this premise. Despite the theory that Prok proclaims and John spews, Iris responds often very unpredictably to these claims and John too in the conclusion of the novel. Sexual liberation is more complicated than Prok simply declaring everyone pansexual and waiting for us all to fuck like bonobos. The social construction of sexuality and the indoctrination we all experience regarding proper gender and sexuality is powerful stuff that governs our psychological, even physiological responses.
The Inner Circle subtly explores this concept throughout the novel without using clunky terminology by contrasting all of these characters with Prok proclaiming we should fuck a lot with a lot of people a lot of the time. I mean, I'd like that revolution to happen immediately too, but I don't like vaginas all that much. Read the book and talk about it with lots of people of different sexualities and different genders. Oh, and religious fundamentalists. Definitely talk to them.

The Fortress of Solitude

The Fortress of Solitude
By Jonathan Lethem


I found this book when the History Graduate Student Association had a book sale on the stairs of the building in which I had a British Lit class. Paperbacks were a buck apiece, which is, for me, a lot like setting up a discount crack house next door. I had read some reviews of this book and had seen some of his other titles in book stores and I figured it was worth the book. Plus I'm an addict, and until I check myself into some 12-step program, I'm going to keep buying more books than I can read.
In one of the reviews in the first few pages of the book, a critic says that Lethem loves words. This didn't seem right to me, I think it's closer to the truth to say he loves phrases. He'll repeat in the narration without prompting small sentences of pop-culture or personal meaning. He has characters do the same and the feeling constructed is similar to being in the middle of a crowd. The reader can pick up just fragments of what the entire city is saying.
Solitude tracks the life of Dylan Ebdus from his moving to Brooklyn as a small child into his late 30's. I can't decide if the book is about his whole life with the appropriate reverence given to his pre-teen and teenage years, or if it's about a white kid growing up without a mother in an all-black neighborhood that goes on too long into his adulthood.
Lethem creates a character in Dylan that is not only believable, but someone you want to succeed. I found myself scared to turn the page fearing something bad would happen to the protagonist.
The author's foray into magical realism (Dylan finds himself in possession that can make people fly and later makes him invisible) feels like a heavy-handed metaphor more than something he was really devoted to exploring. For someone that has such a great grip on realism, I'm not sure why he felt the need to stretch the boundaries in this work. The way he nails certain teen experiences, it's clear Lethem hasn't forgotten his own adolescence. He gets everything exactly right, from how it feels not to be in your friend's band to sitting stoned in your friend's basement scratching the bottom of a box of Nilla Wafers for crumbs.
The last 75 or so pages are devoted to Dylan's friend Mingus Rude who is the best character in the novel. Mingus is Dylan's best and only black friend. Their lives run parallel enough to notice but not so close that it's a central theme of the book. This is perhaps the strongest statement about race-relations in the book, the difference between the two kids with similar situations and how they turn out, one white, one black.
The book does go on a little too long and a little too far into Dylan's adult life. While his childhood still haunts him, I just didn't think it was necessary to extend the book that far to make that point. I can't blame the author though, once Lethem decides that he's writing about Dylan's whole life, it must be hard to stop.

Killing Yourself to Live

Killing Yourself to Live
By Chuck Klosterman

I am deathly afraid of being or becoming Chuck Klosterman. Normally people don't express fear at the idea of being a best-selling author who writes for pretty cool magazines, but the fear remains. I bought hard-cover copies of both Killing Yourself to Live and IV for five bucks apiece on sale at the campus bookstore, having heard Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs was good. My problem with Chuck Klosterman isn't that his writing is bad (although sometimes it is), it's that he only writes about one thing, and that one thing is Chuck Klosterman.
Killing Yourself to Live is ostensibly about Klosterman's cross-country trip to visit death scenes of rock musicians. This is not what the book is about. The book is about three women Klosterman has slept with. His ability to make anything about the minutiae of his own life verges on masterful. I'm convinced he could interview Robert Mugabe and the piece would end up being about some girl he almost kissed in the seventh grade.
For whatever reason, Klosterman think self-awareness is an excuse for narcissism. It's not.
What kills me is that his writing (with a few notable exceptions) is not bad. It's cute and gimmicky and self-conscious, but it's actually pretty good. Killing Yourself is an engaging and really quick read, I just can't figure out why. It should be terrible, but it's not.
He references obscure pop-culture figures incessantly, which I think he knows doesn't make him cool. I think he thinks it makes him uncool, which he thinks makes him cool. I'm not sure which is worse.
Also, he doesn't like Robert Johnson. What's up with that?
Although he generally gives off the air of a middle-schooler who read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and decided he was going to be Hunter S. Thompson, Klosterman is incredibly readable. The idea that Klosterman could be this generation's Thompson scares the shit out of me but also makes a lot of sense. He's so painfully self-aware and introspective that it feels normal when he starts analyzing his own self-analysis. Gone is the reckless destruction of Thompson, now we have Klosterman doing cocaine so he can write about that time he did cocaine.
I want to hate Killing Yourself to Live so badly, but I just can't. Don't read it. Read something better. But if I see people reading Klosterman on the metro, I won't want to bludgeon them to death.
That's something.

Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas

Collected Poems
By Dylan Thomas


I recently starting commuting every morning to my summer job in D.C. and I've been trying very hard not to read this on the metro. It isn't that the work isn't incredible (it is) just that I don't want to be the one prick in the ocean of riders locked on Janet Evanovich and The Secret reading Dylan fucking Thomas.
At a certain point I just gave up. I've never read the fully collected work of a poet before and it's definitely an experience I'd recommend. His transition in style is palpable. Thomas's poems get progressively longer and more concerned with structure. Personally I prefer the earlier stuff (see, those are the kind of things that make me feel like an asshole) but there's great content all through.
About every third poem hit me hard. I found myself calling friends in the middle of the night telling them they needed to go online and read "The hand that signed the paper" because I needed to talk to someone else about it. For someone I certainly would not classify as a love poet, Thomas writes about love more convincingly than the so-called romantics. When he writes "Daft with the drug that's smoking in a girl/and curls round the bud that forks her eyes" I shudder.
Another interesting thing about reading a collection like this one is that it's easy to see patterns in word-use and subject. He has a big thing for the word "marrowed" and for animal imagery. But not obnoxious animal imagery.
It's not hard to see how Thomas influenced later generations of poets. He writes about love, politics and society as someone removed yet immersed in all of them. But most importantly, he writes about death. In fact all of his poems are about death. The last one in my copy, "Elegy" I've already decided I want read at my funeral. Thankfully I won't be around to see my mourners complain about what a pretentious dick I was to have that read at my funeral.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
By Junot Diaz


I read Junot Diaz's short story collection Drown last Winter Break when my now-roommate was going to sell it back to the school after reading it for a creative writing class. I convinced him to give it to me for my birthday (which it was) instead.
I'm a sucker for a good short story collection and Drown is excellent. I imagine it's what Raymond Carver would have written were be born Dominican in New York in the 70s. Diaz's writing is nerdy with a badass sensibility, or maybe it's the other way around. Either way, it's fucking good.
Oscar Wao took 10 years to write and it shows. The book is amazingly intricate for it's length (327 pages). It's about a nerdy Dominican teenager (Oscar) living in Jersey. But it's also about the Dominican dictator Trujillo and living under totalitarianism. But it's also about Oscar's entire complicated family history (very Marquez-esque). It's about a lot of things, but still doesn't doesn't feel overloaded or too dense.
The narrator is Diaz's alter-ego Yunior who also pops up in Drown and other short stories he's published. Yunior has a distinct sympathy for the title character, but is far enough removed to disdain him the same way most readers would a teenager 150 pounds overweight who plays Dungeons and Dragons and has never kissed a girl. The result is one of the more effective uses of narration I've read in a long time.
Oscar Wao is also the first book I've read that has footnotes containing the word 'fuck'. These footnotes contain a lot of Dominican history, but with Yunior providing such good narration they are some of the best parts of the novel.
To read the book it might help to speak Spanish and be a recovering fantasy-geek. The Spanish wasn't oppressive, I didn't feel like I missed that much with my high-school French. As for fantasy geek, having read The Lord of the Rings is sort of crucial, but the movies should work for anyone who had better things to do in elementary school.
Diaz has gotten a lot of praise from both mainstream audiences (hitting the bestseller lists) and literary circles (Pulitzer and National Book Award) and he has to feel vindicated after his decade of work. That said, I hope the next one doesn't take as long.

The few, the proud

This blog exists for the express purpose of providing a forum for people (okay, my friends) to do mini opinion reviews of books they read. According to an article I found (http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/07/09/survey_finds_drop_in_reading_rates/) 42.8 percent of 18-34 year-olds read a book in the last year. This blog is not designed to solve this problem. This blog does not bemoan the state of our culture. This blog is not written by Harold Bloom. I just needed a name. So when you read a book, write a few paragraphs about it. We won't save the culture or reading, but we will get good ideas for books to read. Because as members of the 42.8 percent, that's what we do.