Newsletter
# 37
January
10, 2003
A new year is beginning
with an attack on Iraq looking more likely and less rational. Hoping for
some insight into war, I decided to read a war novel. I found FIELDS OF
FIRE by James Webb on a list of best novels of the twentieth century as
the best Vietnam War Novel. I don't necessarily agree with the designation,
but it is terrific in two areas: first, its combat scenes are totally convincing: brutal, but with the nightmare alternating with other moods. Secondly, the
novel made it clear to me the real reason people fight in wars. I don't
mean why they sign up (and the people in this book are Marines who mostly
chose the military), I mean what keeps them from walking away from what
they recognize to be the utter insanity of shooting strangers and being
shot.
The rest of FIELDS
OF FIRE, I could do without. It is Webb's first novel, and the background
stuff tends to be sentimental. Worse, the book is consistently awful on
women, who are sexually responsive in all situations: prostitutes adore
their work; a villager, as she is raped, just can't help getting carried
away. The novel makes an effort at creating real human beings of its black
soldiers, but to a man they say "doan" for "don't," as if those of us who
speak other dialects pronounced each final "t." (Try saying aloud "don't
you dare" at normal speed and transcribing the actual sounds you make.)
Mostly, though,
the book stays with its strength, which is combat and the pendulum swings
from combat to mourning dead comrades and complaining about food. The reader
even comes away with a hint of infantry tactics: how combatants place themselves
in the landscape, where attacks come from. And finally, you come away with
an understanding of why these marines keep fighting. They fight for each
other, for their band of brothers, to save Private Ryan. This is hardly
news, but it is made sharply alive in this book. They fight to save the
lives of their platoon, their little scouting party, their buddies. Soldiers
will never walk away from war as long as there is a wounded man beside them
or a friend killed this morning. They are motivated by an intimate desire
to protect and revenge one another: He would die for me, so I have to die
for him. Everything else may be confusing, complex, stupid, pointless, but
the novel sets out as a supreme value the purity of one young life sacrificed
for another. There is a boyish idealism at the heart of it. It is without
politics, and it is addictive to those who engage in it. Soldiers will never
stop wars; that is something civilians must organize themselves to do.
The author, James
Webb, has had an interesting career: he is a former Marine and a lawyer
who has represented the defense at court martials. He has written other
novels including RULES OF ENGAGEMENT, made into a recent movie. He even
rose to be Secretary of the Navy under Reagan, a position he resigned over
fleet reductions. He has business connections in Vietnam and is working
on a movie version of FIELDS OF FIRE. His book is worthwhile. I just wish
I had skipped everything with a woman in it and a lot of the parts with
black guys.
Meredith Sue Willis
MORE GOOD READING
The stories in
Belinda Anderson's collection THE WELL AIN'T DRY YET have a disarming straightforwardness
that is unpretentious on principle. The people are generally more good than
bad, and the stories are about small but transforming changes in their lives.
Even a supernatural figure (an angel of death? The Holy Spirit Itself?)
is charmingly accessible: he tucks his pants into tooled cowboy boots and
drives a sports car. Everyone has the possibility for redemption: a little
boy whose life so far has consisted of coloring at kitchen tables while
his mother has sex with "uncles" in the back room is handed over to a pretty
sorry excuse for a father, but the story ends happily. Repeatedly, whatever
the dangerous or sad situation she sets up, Anderson manages to bring us
to a believable and upbeat finale. The collection is available from Mountain
State Press, 2300 MacCorkle Avenue, S.E., Charleston, WV 25304.
READERS WRITE
Norman Julian wrote
in response to last month's remarks about MIDDLEMARCH: "When I retire and
have less required reading to do, I will try some of the books you recommend
on your website. Last summer, I did find time to make it all the way through
WAR AND PEACE, after failing in four previous tries. I was a bit disappointed
with what is supposed to be the greatest novel. [Tolstoy] rambles and repeats
himself much too often and that results in unnecessary sprawl. He could
have written to half the length and not lost anything of value, and maybe
gained millions of lazy readers who could have got through it on the first
try. He pays too much attention, in my view, to only that part of Russian
society that was aristocratic. Concurrent to reading the novel, I read some
of his biographical writing. In later life he regretted how he wrote that
book. Said it was done in a style that made it mostly accessible to the
elite classes, and if he were to do it over he would have aimed more to
the proletariat. At least that's how I understand him. We lose so darned
much in translation. I like the Russian novelists as a group best of all
the non-Americans who work in that form, but how much more appeal they might
have if they had written in the ‘American language.'"
Shelley Ettinger
writes: "Just what you were waiting for, my holiday reading report! My plan
to tackle ULYSSES fell by the wayside after I found myself in our little
Queens branch library checking out armfuls of books. Several turned out
to be forgettable but a few stood out. I liked THE FROG by John Hawkes;
although I can't say with certainty that I understood it, it appealed to
my sometime taste for the weird, and I enjoyed the writing style which was
sort of like Proust yet sort of like Kafka. I also liked I'LL TAKE YOU THERE
by Joyce Carol Oates. It didn't bowl me over like [her novel] BLONDE, but
its character portrayals and social commentary were sharp. I think she's
a brave writer--holds nothing back, goes way to the edge in her truth telling.
I've never heard her referred to as a feminist and I wonder why, because
she says a lot of stark, harsh things that need to be said about being a
woman in this society. Also she takes on racism in a way few white writers
ever do. I'm just finishing PERMA RED by Debra Magpie Earling. It's a painful,
sad story of a young woman's coming of age on the Flathead Indian Reservation
in the 1940s, told with beautiful writing."
Shelley also makes
a recommendation to those of you in the New York area or coming this way
soon: " I saw DEF POETRY JAM ON BROADWAY and found it stunningly good. Just
exhilarating to hear the words of these talented young poets who are taking
the language in whole new directions, and most of whom are very political
to boot."
WEBSITE TO VISIT
Have you always
wished you had read THE DIARY OF SAMUEL PEPYS but found it too long and
disorganized? Well, it's disorganized because it was written one day at
a time without knowing the future. And now, thanks to the wonders of the
web, the famous record of seventeenth century life is being posted one day
at a time, the way Pepys wrote it at Pepys
Diary. It's like time travel to a web log of the past. You learn, for
example, that old Sam had a good dinner yesterday, except for the venison
pasty, which wasn't much to his taste.
Newsletter
# 38
January
24, 2003
I want to recommend
a book called NO NEW JOKES by Steven Bloom. This unusual novel is set in
Brooklyn, New York, in 1949, at the outbreak of the Korean war. The hydrogen
bomb has just been tested, and anti-communism is poisoning the careers and
lives of celebrities and others. Izzy, the main character, has a damaged
head: shrapnel from the Second World War and psychological damage from a
pogrom he experienced as a child. The other characters are damaged too:
some have bad hearts, some have bad marriages; his friend Mary can't bear
the horrors in the news. Izzy plays music in courtyards for money and love
and gathers with a gallery of Brooklyn guys in candy stores and grills to
talk and watch the World Series on a tiny television.
But the conceit
of this novel, of this sad protagonist's attempts to make love, to make
a life, is that every conversation and every interior monologue is larded
with an endless supply of Jewish jokes. Everyone tells the jokes, Jew or
gentile: Izzy, the women he sleeps with, the men he hangs out with, cab
drivers. And Izzy already knows all the jokes. He heard the original Yiddish
versions in his family's tavern in Europe so that he can finish any joke
in his mind even if the teller stops telling. Sometimes the jokes are Izzy's
way of explaining to himself something going on around him:
"This Jewish kid
sees a guy drowning in the river so he jumps in to save him...And when he
pulls him out, he sees it's Hitler. So Hitler says, for saving my life I'll
grant you any wish. And the Jewish kid says, I want you shouldn't tell my
father."
This wonderful book
was never given the recognition it deserved. I have a personal connection
to it, too: I read it in manuscript (and a pretty smudged typescript it
was, as if it had been making the rounds of publishers since before personal
computers) when I was a reader for the Associated Writing Programs novel
contest. I sent this one, along with two others, to the final reader, Ron
Carlson, who chose NO NEW JOKES as the 1995 winner. I was as proud as I
am when one of my students gets a book published.
W.W. Norton brought
out NO NEW JOKES commercially, if quietly. It is now out of print, but there
are plenty of copies online at the online used book outlets, and I certainly
hope it's available in your local library. Who else has a favorite lost
masterpiece, or, if not a masterpiece, a really good out-of-print book to
recommend?
Meredith
Sue Willis
POETRY IS FUN, FUN
IS POETRY
Don't miss Ron Padgett's
newest book of poems, YOU NEVER KNOW. Published by the redoubtable
Coffee House Press, the book works for me the way Matisse works: celebrating
movement and surface, which is, of course, to celebrate material life, and
also celebrating the spirit that suffuses life. Padgett has published a
lot of poetry and was one of the so-called New York School of poets that
included Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, and many others who often
figure in Padgett's poems. Padgett's new poems have some sadness and reflections
on the second half of a human life, but as always, he follows his metaphors
to delightfully extreme conclusions that are at once surreal, hilarious,
and true. A lot of the pieces have the boxy form of prose poems, but, with
or without line breaks, whether light or heavy, Padgett's work lifts the
spirit and sharpens language. Here's a sample I chose for being short but
also reasonably typical:
What to Do
"Show, don't tell,"
they say,
and I agree,
so here, take a look at my naked body, of which
I will tell you nothing, and here is my naked soul,
into which I will jump with both feet clad
only in socks, bright red ones from which
sparks are flying as I whiz into its depths.
READERS WRITE
Win
Thies writes in response
to Norman Julian's comments on Tolstoy: "Let
me concede I haven't even cracked WAR AND PEACE. That having been said,
in the context of Norman Julian's observation that he finds it sprawling,
undisciplined, repetitious, might it be that it could benefit from editing--?(!!)
Tolstoy didn't have the benefit of a Maxwell Perkins. Okay, we'll supply
that lack, posthumously. A skilled and sensitive editor could possibly cut
it in half and make it twice as interesting. ‘Less is more.' Are the canons
of Western literature immune to editing improvement? Surely there is a place
for sensitive editing for the unedited sprawling novel--however much a classic.
Now, there's a project...."
Greg
Sanders says he's struggling
with Gertrude Stein's ‘Melanctha,' the second story in the THREE LIVES collection.
"There are many beautiful phrases and sentences in there, but their worth
is diminished by the volume of bizarre repetitions and strange cadences
of the dialogue. The piece simply stretches on and on. I know that these
are all experimental elements of her style, and I found them interesting
at first, but how interesting would an abstract painting the size of a city
block be? I think I feel this more strongly with ‘Melanctha' than I did
with ‘The Good Anna.'That's
my current mood, which is changeable."
MONIQUE WITTIG DIES
Shelley
Ettinger alerts us to the
death on January 3, 2003 in Tucson, Arizona of Monique Wittig the French
writer and literary theorist. Shelley says she was "crazy about her work
in the 1970s, especially her book LES GUERRILLERES."
The following information on
Monique Wittig quotes the obituary by Douglas Martin in the NEW YORK TIMES:
Wittig, a French
writer and literary theorist whose imaginative, fiercely innovative books
tried to create a new mythology for the feminist movement, died Jan. 3 in
Tucson. She was 67 and lived in Tucson. The cause was a heart attack, said
Sande Zeig, her partner.
She advocated a
total rupture with masculine culture and pulled no punches, forcefully arguing,
for example, that lesbians are not women because the word woman is constructed
by sexist society. In one of her novels, female warriors torture men before
tanning and displaying their skin. In another, paradise is full of lesbians
on motorcycles. Ms. Wittig's startlingly rich imagery found its counterpart
in her experimental literary approach: she sometimes abandoned paragraphing
and normal punctuation and developed a lyrical style that could be called
neither prose nor poetry. ...
In the United States
she is probably best known among feminist scholars.... Ms. Wittig was born
July 13, 1935, in the Haut-Rhin region of Alsace. She earned a doctorate
in languages at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
She worked in Paris in
various semiacademic positions, including posts at the Bibliothèèque Nationale
and Les Éditions de Minuit, where she was a proofreader. She later wrote
radio dramas and became involved in feminist protests. "L'Opoponax" appeared
in France in 1964 and in American translation two years later. It
concerns children undergoing typical childhood experiences like the first
day of school and the first romance. It won the Prix Médicis literary award.
If
you use this link
You
Never Know: Poems
to buy books through Amazon.com, a few
cents comes back to the Newsletter writer. So far, in about five years of
this program, I've made $1.90 which won't be transferred to my account until
$10 accumulates sometime during the next decade. If you are interested in
similar extraordinary benefits for yourself, click on Amazon
Associates.
Newsletter
# 39
February
12 , 2003
Once again shadowing
my son's high school English class, I reread William Faulkner's THE SOUND
AND THE FURY. I asked Joel if his classmates liked the book, and he said
everybody was confused in the beginning, but all of the "outspoken" members
of the class liked it. My guess is that the students are at least partly
motivated by pride at working through the intricate time changes in the
various interior monologues. Modernist experiments in stream of consciousness
and fractured time have never been easy to read, but I agree with the students,
THE SOUND AND THE FURY is worth the effort. We aren't surprised by the experiments
now, but our skills at complex written language of all kinds are probably
weaker than they were in the early twentieth century. I would think that
fewer "common readers" (as opposed to students and scholars) are reading
Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner et alia for fun. Much of what the 20th century writers
did as whole books, of course, has been integrated into more ordinary fiction
today: stream of consciousness appears even in plot driven genre stories
to show a disturbed mental state, for example, by broken sentences and jerky
bits of memory.
Faulkner also, to
twenty-first century eyes, manages his working class and black characters
less insultingly than a lot of his contemporaries (think of Fitzgerald).
Considering Faulkner's own class, race, and where and when he wrote, Dilsey
and her family are far fuller people than, say, William Styron's caricatured
black people twenty years later in LIE DOWN IN DARKNESS. Dilsey's faithfulness
to the Compsons is a white man's version of reality, but Dilsey has considerable
depth and is given respect. There is an interesting minor character in the
Cambridge section who makes a financial specialty of getting tips from Harvard
undergraduates from the South: he starts out uncle tomming them all over
the place, then gradually stands taller, uses less southern black dialect.
He is comic and not exactly an inspiration, but he is believable (keeping
in mind always that he isn't presented in his own voice telling his own
story, which would no longer be Faulkner's novel).
Beyond the challenge
of its style and some dated ideas, THE SOUND AND THE FURY really is a young
person's book. Faulkner was youngish when he wrote it, and his characters
are even younger. Caddie and Quentin are children in much of the novel,
and Quentin is a freshman at Harvard on his famous last day. A friend of
my son's, a freshman at Harvard now, came back in considerable excitement
to tell his high school teacher that he had found a plaque marking the bridge
Quentin jumped from. Issues of sexuality and intense family conflict and
suicide may make THE SOUND AND THE FURY the perfect introduction to modernist
prose.
Bitten by the Faulkner
bug, I next reread SANCTUARY, a far less artful book, but gripping and quirky.
The first third is almost pure horror story, and yet, this strikingly violent
book (a lynching by fire, an indirectly described rape with a corn cob)
is probably a kind of comedy in that most characters end appropriately if
not precisely happily. The weakling Horace goes back to his wife; the victim
Temple Drake returns to her true role as a bored, beautiful luxury item;
the evil Popeye is punished, but never loses his gangster savoir-faire.
SANCTUARY begins
with its most terrible act, the rape, and then follows the consequences.
I remember that the first time I read this book I was totally repelled,
especially by Temple and her objectification. Her mere presence drives men
crazy, but she is incapable of any rational act of self-preservation. She
certainly does not deserve what she gets in this novel, but for all that,
she's a despicable little chit, at least as Faulkner writes her.
The book also has
passages of straight-up humor: for example, in one chapter a couple of good
ole Mississippi boys come to Memphis looking for sex and take rooms in a
whore house, never realizing that what they want is down the hall. The only
characters whose ending is truly sad are the moonshiner Lee Goodwin and
his common-law wife Ruby, perhaps the only admirable character in the novel.
Lee dies because he can't imagine a power higher than the little thug Popeye,
and Ruby, romanticized as a true ideal of Southern womanhood, the long suffering
mother-wife despite sexual history, stands by her man. The final impact
is bleak, dark, but extremely rich comedy. The joke's on us: to be human
is to be the butt of the gods. Not my philosophy, but Faulkner makes a good
case for it.
--
Meredith Sue Willis
DEPARTMENT OF WONDERFUL
OLD BOOKS
James Still's beautiful
Kentucky classic RIVER OF EARTH is about the moment early in the twentieth
century when agrarian life and industry clashed in the Appalachian region.
It may be the best choice if a person is going to read only one twentieth
century Appalachian novel, even though my favorite is still Harriet Arnow's
much longer HUNTER'S HORN. Some of the dialect in RIVER OF EARTH seems to
me to have been transcribed in more detail than was necessary, but on the
other hand, it really gives a flavor of how people talked. It would work
well in a classroom setting, broken into thirds, giving ample material for
discussion of Appalachian dialect, folkways, and also industrialization
of the region. Sad and lovely.
BOOKS RECEIVED
Janice Haas Kasten's
SURVIVAL OF A CATHOLIC SCHOOL GIRL is the work of a witness. It never says
if it's a novel or a memoir, and in some ways it's a roughly written work,
not in its sentences or grammar, but in its story telling style. The narrative
is omniscient in unexpected places, it predicts a suicide that happens far
beyond the scope of the book, it explains everything. At the same time,
though, it's the kind of honest psychological report from the front lines
of human suffering that I have always found absorbing. You keep reading
out of a kind of awe at such honesty.
The setting is Louisiana
in the late nineteen sixties, and the main character's family follows a
blindly conservative brand of Catholicism that finds birth control and divorce
worse crimes that adultery or maybe even murder. Not that anyone gets murdered
here: the main character Judy is a victim of family, place, time, and even
a victim of her damaged self, but, happily, you are left with the impression
that she will come out okay in the end. Learn more about the author Janice
Haas Kasten and how to get her book at http://members.aol.com/jhkast/index.htm.
READERS WRITE
Allan
Appel says: "NO NEW JOKES
[discussed in Newsletter #38] sounds wonderful, and I will order soon. Do
you know a book called STONER, by John Williams, a sort of Southerner, I
think, or border guy, from Arkansas. He was a professor and wrote a couple
of traditional historical novels, but STONER is a book about teaching. It's
kind of sad -- sad books alas appeal to me --- but it's about a guy utterly
dedicated to poetry and the word, in part because he grew up around a kitchen
table where the farmer parents (maybe it's Missouri) were almost completely
silent. Anyway, his life unravels, but his courses sustain him. I found
it powerful and inspirational and I guess I'm thinking about it in connection
with teaching. Irving Howe gave it a stellar review, if memory serves, in
the early 1960s, and I would be surprised if it's in print."
"Enjoyed the latest
Readers Newsletter," says Carole Rosenthal.
"I've recently read THE EMPEROR OF OCEAN PARK--which is quite interesting
on the subject of race and class, though written a bit stiffly; the mystery
is horrible, intricate and not credible, and I thought the book could have
been cut by at least 25%, but it was enjoyable and provocative anyway. I
don't think I would have been so critical if Stephen Carter hadn't gotten
sooooo much money from Knopf and all that publicity. But it really makes
you aware that being black in this country (or if you're a member of ‘the
darker nation' as Carter so puts it in his occasionally stuffy and conservative
style) is something you never, ever forget; no matter how well-paid, and
well-connected you are there is lurking suspicion and easily tapped rage
towards ‘the paler nation.' It's obvious why, of course, but it's worth
thinking about.
"On the subject
of books that have been around for awhile, I'm re-reading HOUSEKEEPING,
by Marilynne Robinson, which is wonderful. And which is a marvel of clear
and evocative voice and insights about the ties of family and community
and history--a very wonderful American novel. I'm so sorry she never wrote
another."
PRESSES TO DISCOVER
Phyllis
Moore tells us that West Virginian Jeff Mann's new collection BONES
WASHED WITH WINE is now available from Gival Press. Gival will
also be publishing a book by Cuban/West Virginian novelist Carlos Rubio
Albert, whose home page is www.carlosrubioalbet.com.
Newsletter
# 40
March
5 , 2003
GUEST COLUMN ON
JOHN WILLIAMS
BY ED MYERS
I enjoyed Allan
Appel's recent comments about John Williams and his novel STONER, as I have
admired his fiction for many decades and was fortunate to study with Williams
at the University of Denver during the early 1970s. I also knew Williams
personally through his friendship with my father, who taught for many years
at the same institution. A
few comments about Williams as a friend and teacher...
My relationship
wasn't particularly deep but went back all the way to my boyhood. Williams
and other writers were among my parents' friends in post-WWII Denver and,
like many other academic households, our home was the site of more or less
continuous informal discussions, bull sessions, parties, and other professorial
off-hours activities, many of which focused on talk about the arts. I can
recall Williams's presence in our midst as far back as 1955, when I was
five. He was the first novelist I'd ever met and in many ways fit a Central
Casting image for a writer of that era. Short, dark-haired, and sporting
a neatly trimmed goatee, he dressed in a style I'd call Dapper Beatnik--tweed
sports jacket, beret, silk ascot. Although gentlemanly in many ways, he
tended to be polite but not very warm, and his dry sense of humor could
easily become caustic.
From my early teens
on I became aware that Williams was a fine writer. He never attained a popular
following, but his early novel BUTCHER'S CROSSING, a coming-of-age novel
with an 1890s Rocky Mountain setting, drew some attention in the American
literary world for the quality of its prose. STONER, published in the mid-1960s,
inspired some favorable reviews but no popular acclaim. Perhaps it didn't
fit the mold of the academic novel then fashionable; it was straightforward
rather than ironic in its portrayal of university life, and its prose was
lean to the point of austere. Williams's virtues as a writer--a flawless
"plain style," understated dialogue, and almost invisible plots--never fit
the literary fads of his times.
In 1972, however,
Williams published AUGUSTUS, a historical novel about Caesar Augustus that
won the National Book Award for 1973 and drew the only wider attention that
he ever received. I can't say enough good things about this book. It's extraordinary
not just as an example of its genre but also as a beautifully structured,
perfectly written work in its own right. Presented as a series of fictional
letters, memoranda, and dispatches, Williams details the force and cunning
that allowed Augustus to defeat his rivals, among them Brutus, Cassius,
and Mark Antony. Perhaps most interesting, though, are the portraits of
other players in the drama, including Ovid and other poets. The book also
has one of the greatest ironic final sentences in English-language literature.
AUGUSTUS is so beautifully written that I've never understood its almost
immediate disappearance following publication, though the University of
Arkansas Press has had the sense to reissue it as a paperback.
As a teacher, Williams
was difficult, uncompromising, and miserly with praise. I benefitted from
two independent studies with him during my undergraduate years at the University
of Denver--a bumpy road that left me shaken at the time and deeply grateful
afterwards. I had finished my first novel shortly before that and submitted
the manuscript to Williams for comments and suggestions. Williams read the
book and remarked tersely when we met to discuss it. He hadn't found much
to like, and he said so. Let down, I revised the book and resubmitted it.
Williams still didn't like it. His main criticism: too much happened in
too short a span of time. "This book is so tightly packed it's like a bomb
that's ready to explode," he told me. I fished for compliments: "What do
you think of the prose?" His comment: "It's okay." My two terms of mentoring
ended inconclusively. I felt frustrated; I'd wanted more support, and I'd
grown accustomed to praise from writing instructors. Williams left me with
the sense that my book had little to offer, and that moving on to a different
project would be the only remedy. Within a few years I realized that he
was right on both counts.
Williams died of
cancer around 1980. My hope is that he'll some day gain the recognition
he deserves as a novelist, especially for AUGUSTUS.
--Ed
Myers
Ed Myers' website
is at Http://www.edwardmyers.com
DEPARTMENT OF VICTORIAN
LITERATURE
I reread Dickens'
GREAT EXPECTATIONS, perfect snowed-in reading during the blizzard of ought-three!
Always fun, far more melodramatic than remembered, including the revised
and original endings, but more especially the near-murder of Pip by Orlick
and the last instant rescue, I had absolutely no memory of that part. The
boats on the river scene at the end (also unremembered by me) is nicely
cinematic; Miss Havisham a magnificent creation; Estella and Wemmick too.
What is this novel
about? Parenting, maybe? The failure of efforts to live your life through
your children? Everyone seems to be adopted and/or orphaned. I love its
double voice, the Then and Now Pips, and the gradual dawning of a kind of
affection for Pip's convict, Magwitch. A minor problem for me is that I
like Magwitch from the beginning, and find it a stretch to understand why
Pip and company are so repelled by the crusty old felon. There's some assumed
bias here that doesn't translate well to the twenty-first century: maybe
we've had so many heroic convicts and anti-heroic heroes that we don't assume
the shackles make the man.
CHECK IT OUT! CHECK
IT OUT! NEW LITERARY ‘ZINE!
I'm proud to say
that New York University's School of Continuing and Professional Studies
has just launched a new online/hard copy ‘zine ( I think you call it a ‘zine
if it's online) called EPIPHANY.
It is scheduled to publish online three times a year with a hard copy once
a year, and it has fiction (of course) as well as poetry, drama, nonfiction
and photography. I've had the good fortune to be part of putting the magazine
together, and there was a neat reading/party in the Washington Square area
in late February. Work in the first issue includes several friends of BOOKS
FOR READERS: Carol Emshwiller, Shelley Ettinger, Ardian
Gill, Denise Mann, and Greg Sanders.
As the guy on the
street in New York used to say as he extended a tray of Rolexxx watches
for my perusal, "Check it out!"
READERS WRITE
Denise
Mann writes that she enjoyed
Greg Sanders' story in EPIPHANY. She called it "Paul Auster-esque" She also
says: "Having never read Jane Austen in high school or college, I recently
read PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and found it extremely engaging and witty. Hard
to put down, actually. Now, I am reading PERSUASION which I was having trouble
getting into for the first hundred pages but now am truly enjoying as the
pace has quickened. It is extremely similar to PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and each
of the essential characters seems to serve similar purposes. I also read
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST which I picked up at a used book store in
Philadelphia and I enjoyed it very much. I hear the movie is pretty good
too and it's on my list of movies to rent ..."
And Shelley
Ettinger says, "Last week I read Sandra Cisneros's new novel CARAMELO.
It's wonderful. Funny, touching, thick with rich, beautiful language and
insight. I also just read your recommendation NO NEW JOKES (which Barnes
and Noble.com does have, new, not used)--and loved it. Boy, these writers
who can make you laugh and cry with the same sentence!"
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MORE ON JOHN WILLIAMS
I read STONER rapidly.
It really is a wonderful, sad, energetic book. It imagines a whole life,
including the life's death, beautifully. The life has as its highest ideals
personal integrity, the graceful acceptance of what life deals out, and
the life of the mind as it is lived in an American university in the first
half of the twentieth century: teaching and studying. The main character's
failure is the same as his strength, he is passive in the face of many bad
things that happen to him to the point of being a sort of male Patient Griselda,
and you want to tell him to stand up to his wife, to his department chair,
but in the end, you find yourself, the reader, accepting the man for what
he is.
The other John Williams
books I have now read is AUGUSTUS. It is indeed a major achievement-- an
epistolary novel that works! Unlike Ed Myers, I think I prefer STONER--
not sure why, because I usually adore historical fiction. Maybe because
this one takes a certain amount of effort, to go back and forth among the
many speakers. Only at the very end do we have a long passage in Augustus's
own invented voice, and I like that part a lot. In fact, for all of the
history and reflections on people who make world changes, this too is the
story of a man's life.
--
MSW
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