Questions, Questions, This Time abt. Eng. Lit. Dying

"Reading" in this context usually means "the reading of novels by adults," or, in some cases, by students, K-16.

Reading in this sense, particularly in the last 25 years, has been simultaneously dumbed down, hollowed out, fetishized and promoted. What is read has been greatly determined by corporate mergers from the mid-'60s on, which has left us with the Big Five... Four... Three... publishers, tasked with making e-media levels of profit. This has narrowed the range of work widely available.

What's left of the adult reading population has also been fragmented beyond belief by identity politics and age cohort. The drive for inclusion quickly became a means to cultural clout and whatever cash rewards were left in teaching and commentary* – and this has led to ever diminishing circles of content and whatever style was lying around.

(Identity politics/political correctness has more than half killed the endeavour. Saw a rack of featured books at my local library branch & turned to examine them for something interesting to take home. It was XX ethnic group month. My blood turned to a taste of metal and my skin felt burnt from within, exhausted exhaustion.

Why can't anything just be a good book? Why does it have to be a good [ethnicity here] book? Why do I have to read a fucking sermon?

Why does someone's book have to be a sermon, or presented as a sermon?**

This approach is self-destroyingly narrow, even as it claims to be widening the reader's experience. As though anything widely distributed & sold for profit is going to seriously challenge manufactured consent! I turned away in another tired & beaten fury. So much for "always had her nose in a book".)

Teaching literature is in an abysmal state. All sorts of mad non-systems replaced phonic in schools & kids were left permanently unable to decode the words on the page with any certainty and fluency.*** People turn away from that kind of experience, and "don't read."

There are all sorts of specialized sub-bits of reading people do do: nonfiction of general and specialized nature, schematics for car repair, science journals, etc., etc.

But "reading" in the sense it is usually meant is a product of the Prussian-inspired move to mass education and literacy from the C19th onwards: it was necessary for the workforce in a technological age.

The pic of Shakespeare as the personification and symbol of English Literature tells you what is really going on. He wrote plays. People watched them & heard them. They attended or performed "English Literature" such as miracle and morality plays. Now "English Literature" is on the BBC & HBO & Netflicks & Canal+ & ...

Literacy of the sort that is in decline has never been necessary to a population of peasants, serfs, tradies... Universal literacy no longer serves the State, and the State is retreating from its former functions in the mass of ordinary lives.

Which leaves ordinary people where they have always been: creating oral traditions.

==

For Extra Credit:

1) Which do you think would be more frightening to the status quo?

a) a book written by a member of an under-represented community set aside and identified as a good [ethnicity here] book
b) a book written by a member of an under-represented community displayed, without ethnic designation, as a good book like any other good book

2) If you watched the video: At the beginning of the 19th century, why would a nation with a nascent empire suddenly start studying the literature of empire?

a) policies, job descriptions and manuals
b) self justification in the face of a near-universal Christianity, which would advocate loving your neighbour / rescuing the man who fell among thieves

Justify your answers on the sheet provided.

==

*Attributed to Mark Twain: "You can make a fortune but you can't make a living." Truer now than it was then. The only reliable money in writing is teaching.

**If you want a sermon, go to church.

*** One of the great grifts perpetrated on the Dept. of Education in the ealier days of public-private business opportunities, begun under Bush the Younger's unfunded mandate, "No Child Left Behind."

The Omen Of Troy

as the cover said when my bookmark fell across across it –

There are 36 chapters in the book; 8 of them are in present tense (3rd person singular POV). These chapters belong to Pyrrhus or Calchas, who are men, the only men whose points or view are included. All the other chapters are narrated in the voice of Briseis, 1st person singular POV, past tense.

At one point Barker describes Pyrrhus as a sociopath. That, with his red hair, might suggest a recent real-life model for some of the character’s behaviour and his first predicament.

Calchas isn’t described as a sociopath, though he is described as “cold.” And so I think the point is that both men are in cults – Calchas a Trojan priest, pretty much indentured to the temple by his parents; Pyrrhus, as his son, encased in the cult of Achilles. Neither feels he has had any choice about the path his life must follow.

When Helenus, Andromache’s twin brother, points out to Pyrrhus that his father was a guest of Achilles and that this guest-friend relationship has passed down to them both, he asks Pyrrhus for food. Pyrrhus opens the hut door to him, “and lets the future in.”

This is the only utterance in the book that lies outside the situation itself, the strip of beach on the Trojan shore the Greeks have made hideous. It's abstract; it leaps off the page.

The syntax is being used to say that only adults have a past and future, that the choiceless are like children, confined to an uncontrolled and unevaluated present. Oh, the present is experienced, all right, but not stood apart from, judged accurately, coped with, modified in any self-directed way; the present is like the cult and all-encompassing: unbreakoutable of, unprogressable from.

Time passes for Briseis and the rest; people die, fates wend their way to their horrible, bursting ends. The point about adults and children is made in passing, but passing is the point.

The Women of Troy, Pat Barker, Doubleday, New York, 2021

Ragtags & bobtails - bits of 2020

1. Allergic to Harold Bloom
Looked at the table of contents for Harold Bloom’s How To Read And Why – no Judith Wright. From the second Sargent began talking about it I knew there wouldn’t be. Yank additions & the Euro cannon.

Bloom says he is writing for the solitary reader, “the reader with one candle.” I suppose he means people who read desperately, for their lives, who are so poor or constricted as to only have one candle, as it were, one source of nourishment, one focus, one lifeline out of circumstance. He says that, from time to time, people like that have written to him in gratitude and he was “so moved he was unable to reply.”

Really, dude?
Not to a single one?
Your whole life?
Not one postcard with “Thank you” scrawled in the blank spot?
No wonder you haven't read Judith Wright.
(Why do we leave these judgements to arseholes?)

2. Reading Shakespeare’s Wife
The most shocking phrase: people too poor to have names.

Even taking apart the few of his sonnets I have taken apart phrase by phrase, I’ve come to the conclusion that what Shakespeare had was a huge variety of experience, stunningly clear perception and absolutely unparalleled access to his own processing. His whole body registered an experience, any experience, and translated it verbally, exactly, instantly.

… drops his knotted root – is a serial observation of the cross-section of a weed; you see it as he saw it and registered it, from the top down, in sequence.

Tolstoy has something of the same gift, all those graduated descriptions of the transition from one state of mind to another, from feeling to perception to motive to decision.

3. Colm Toibin, The House of Names
The difference between tragedy and grand guignol is that tragedy doesn’t include the forensics. I swear to God the next thing I’ll read is The Cambridge History of Music, Volume I.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Yesterday, for reasons unknown to God or man, I wanted to look at the weather forecast. I was waiting for a phone call so I tapped the weather app on my phone.

When I got there, there were text boxes. Essentially: we want access to your location & other material on your phone/in your cloud storage. (This app had come with the phone, I’m pretty sure. Yes, it did. I’ve been using it occasionally for going on for two years.)
Read our privacy policy
I understand / Uninstall

The app said I could alter things later in my settings. (I’m not so late to the party as to believe anything I want to do will be in the settings.)

Standover tactics have always got my back up. I Uninstalled and the thing went away. Presumably.

This meant that I needed a new weather app. Looked online, and each one I was considering wanted access to my photographs in storage “beyond [my] device,” my location, or other collections / clutches & records of information on my phone. One of them, whose name is lost to infamy by my swift decision to move on to the next possibility – also wanted access to my text messages and browsing history.

By this time I was ready to scream: why do you want access to my photos, texts, contacts, phone messages, and browsing history? You’re telling me the weather! And I pay for your app by suffering your ads to occupy part of my screen!

Why do you want access to my location? I want weather information about a particular place. Where I am is not necessarily related to my search! GET OUT OF MY STUFF!

Long story short, though I did download one of these horrors I found out how to uninstall it. I’ll get my weather information somewhere else, thank you.

I PAID FOR THIS PHONE. And it wasn’t cheap.
I OWN IT. And it wasn’t cheap.

In the world of Amazon’s self-publishing, “unpublish” does not mean “delete,” even though we might want it to. On Facebook “delete” means “unpublish,” even though we press a button or link that specifically says: Delete. Amazon and Facebook both retain our files not matter what we, the alleged owners, might have wanted or even explicitly asked them to do with them.

Even though Amazon and Facebook have long worked & traded on the difference between ownership and control: I DO NOT AGREE THAT CONTROL TRUMPS OWNERSHIP.

I know every remaining app on my phone does much the same thing, and there’s somewhere between little and nothing I can do about it.

And so we come to Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Public Affairs, New York, 2019).

The basic situation that Zuboff describes is this: there are two sets of activity on the internet for every single thing we do. The first, the one we are aware of, consists of the searches we make & the results we get, the pictures we put on Facebook or Instagram, the things we say on Twitter, and so on. These are the trails we are aware of, and this trail was the thing there was public concern about when website cookies were new. The concern with cookies was that our fondly imaged to be anonymous jaunts across the web could be tracked and we, money-having creatures, could be advertised to on the basis of our cyber-tracks, and persuaded to buy, or, at greater jeopardy, tracked for political or law-enforcement reasons.

However, for each of our overt and intended actions there is an unacknowledged second stream of data created simply because the net works the way it does. This data is pretty much the source of Google’s fortune: it is extremely granular, recording our behaviour in such detail that highly accurate predictions can be made about it. Selling these predictions to advertisers is what Google began doing very early on – it ceased not being evil about 2002. Selling these predictions to advertisers is Google’s core business.

Internet surveillance was ignored as a civil rights issue in the U.S. particularly because of the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. At that moment preventing another attack became the new Department of Homeland Security's highest priority, and was made highest priority of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Before the Spaniards invaded Mexico they first laid claim to it. They did this by means of declarations, written in charters which were kept in chests on the ships to be conveyed back to the king. They were written in a language the Indians did not understand; they made the Indians subjects of the king, subject to the king’s punishments for disobedience. “Disobedience” covered everything from existing to resisting.

Those declarations removed the land and its inhabitants, flora, fauna, minerals and other contents, from inchoate social space into private space owned and ruled by a single identifiable entity. Those declarations were the written foundation/justification for the crimes of invasion and colonialism.

Before attacking villages, as sufficient notice, the invaders whispered these declarations into their cuffs.

Zuboff points out that Google and other corporations have laid claim to the second stream of data our internet activity creates, which originated in and was also part of common, inchoate social space. Like the land and people of the Americas.

(When a declaration is made about common space that was barely conceptualized before, it is named and defined and identified, and identified as now being under the rule of a particular and foreign and other entity. In the matter of "Netiquette," I've always wondered who declared, who had the right to declare, on behalf of everyone, and despite the labels on 16mm documentary film cans everywhere, that "all caps is shouting." I have shouted above. Oh, why not. The whole thing is to scream.)

Google and later others, such as Microsoft, and lately our friendly, corporate ISPs, were never forthcoming about the second stream/set of data that everyones’s internet activity generates. They have acted at all times to obscure its existence.

Zuboff maintains that this data, created by the users of the internet, should belong to the users. That is, it should belong to us, to be used as we see fit, not as large, secretive, profit-driven companies see fit. The fact that this stream of data is not being treated as belonging to the people who create it constitutes an unimaginably large, new kind of theft.

Zuboff sees ongoing research into more ways to use this data to manipulate users through apps for commercial gain, particularly at this scale, as a new form of colonialism. Oh, says the screen you're not supposed to watch while you're driving, you’ve been to this restaurant before. How about now, since you're driving past...

But these commercial applications of highly accurate behavioural predictions are just the beginning. The next obvious application is political, surveillance of all of us and our political activity via the COINTELPRO boxes in our pockets, the face recognition technology in CCTV cameras in public spaces interior and exterior, the fridges and personal digital assistants which listen to more than our commands, the smart TVs that watch us as we watch them. An Internet of Things constantly detecting and reporting... All the dystopias anyone’s ever nightmared about, everywhere, all the time.

Nowhere will be unmonitored. Sanctuary will cease to exist.

Industrial capitalism came to terms with labour and ultimately supported the workers it employed, Zuboff says; this was a social contract that was explicitly negotiated. (Though it did take bloody battles from the Luddites to the New Deal for labour to accomplish that.)

Surveillance capitalism has made no such agreement: the sheer speed of the tech firms in seizing this data leaves the deliberative processes of democracy far behind. If lawmakers don’t know what’s being done they cannot gather information about it, debate it, legislate.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a complex and lucid book, a formidable accomplishment. However, I do think its predictions for the future may rest on a fact not often alluded to in overviews like this: most of us have less and less money.

Google & its pards can poke us all they like, point us at any point of sale they like, but we have less and less money. They can advertise what they like using all the data since the Big Bang; but without money, we just ain’t buyin’. Google, etc., are getting so rich, determined as they are to force us back into the dust from which we came, I can see them collapsing for lack of users/used to throw to their actual customers, the vendors who pay for super-reliable predictive sales data.

And so it seems to me that our general financial impoverishment will make political surveillance and ever-nastier law enforcement the enduring purposes of the net. (And Google and FB will join law enforcement to keep themselves relevant and solvent.)

A note on author photos:

Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, a formidable intellect, complex, comprehensive, and lucid:

While I was reading this I did what I always do when I’m greatly taken with a book: I gaze at the author photo wondering where and how, under the skin, between muscle and bone, the writer stores the magic that’s in the writing.

Zuboff’s both is and is not a very female photo. There are 4 circles close to its centre: the lenses in her glasses & the hoops of her earrings, a small, cheerful, symmetrical path through the picture, echoed by the curls at the end of her hair and the round pendant below her neckline. There are counter-currents creating tension, too: short hair brushed to her right but long hair falling over her left shoulder; her straight gaze.

And yet it’s a puzzling photo. Two of the fingers of her right hand are bent. I finally realized my question actually was: why is the author’s right hand in this photo at all?

Her gaze is direct. Without her hand the photo is still interesting: her hand has not been placed on her right cheek quest to enliven an otherwise boringly symmetrical composition. Without her hand cradling her right cheek, we are left with Zuboff’s very direct gaze and her perfectly symmetrical face and eyes. Perfectly matching eyes are unusual and arresting in themselves.

In Anglo culture, at least, a direct and unwavering gaze is a challenge. It’s “staring,” it’s “rude,” particularly if it’s coming from a woman.

Placed along her cheek, cradling or supporting her cheek, Zuboff’s hand is a much larger element in the image than her eyes and their remarkable gaze. The angle between her hand and her wrist is awkward and sharp; it directs the viewer’s eyes to her neck and throat, vulnerable areas, showing age, indicating fragility and mortality. Zuboff’s right hand de-emphasizes her gaze. Its positioning directs the portrait into the semantic area of I'm just a girl, works to lessen or remove any sense of challenge the reader might feel in the face of either her eyes or intellect.

And yet it also works against its intended distraction.

By stretching the skin on her cheek, her hand stretches her smile. The left side of Zuboff’s mouth seems to be smiling (the upturned end of her lips), but the right side does not. The smile has become a grimace. Her lips can still be read as smiling if the viewer isn’t paying much attention. That the positioning of her hand may not have been the original concept of the portrait seems indicated by her two bent fingers. They suggest that she isn’t committed to this placement, isn’t “authorizing” it, isn’t anxious to smooth over the subversion of the image its inclusion has led to.

A direct and close-up gaze is generally avoided in women’s author pix. After a short and informal survey of author pix on a local literary website, this is the range of poses I find:

Medium shots:
the writer’s body faces the camera/viewer but her gaze does not
the writer’s gaze is directed towards the camera/viewer but her body is not

Close-ups:
the writer’s face is turned towards the camera/viewer but her gaze is directed above the camera/viewer
the writer’s face looks upward to the camera/viewer
the writer’s body and face both fully face the camera/viewer, but her head is tilted

There are lots of smiles.

By not aligning the writers’ faces/gazes with their bodies, all these poses lessen authorial assertion, conviction, or challenge.

These conventions are so enduring and so well understood they are gleefully parodied in this portrait:

But, delightful as it is, this photo was taken a long time ago.

If parody is the best or all we can do in the face of these imperatives / conventions / imperatives, then we're already in a panopticon beyond the dreams of glass, a digital debtors' Bedlam and prison which no-frill phones won't be enough to dismantle.

Our Signature Activity

Some books of contemporary essay leave me muttering, “I’m not your therapist.”

Porn is essentially voyeurism. Surveillance – all those drone-shots in all those military & espionage movies, security cameras, speed cameras – is essentially voyeurism. When information is currency, voyeurism becomes the culture's signature attitude & activity. Memoir becomes voyeurism…

Douglas Spangle - 2016 winner, the Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award

There is a footnote in Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which cites an unconsciously gender-based and class-based argument by Aldous Huxley to the effect that, because of more generally-available education and technological advance, there may be 4 men of literary talent now to every 1 of earlier times. Huxley’s corollary is that the demands of our vastly-expanded market must result in the production and consumption of a great deal of trash.

If we look at rock’n’roll we see that musical talent is widespread. Of course it is and always had been – where does the music in ethno-musicology come from if not from the ethnos? Where did folk music come from if not from the folk?

Folk tales. Border ballads. The blues.

Literary talent is similarly widespread, and that’s one of the things verbal art is now demonstrating and discovering to itself and the wider community. Speech and narrative clearly confer an evolutionary advantage. Narrative is central to humanity, and so is sputtering with rage, and so is singing.

Open mic is a forum / venue / performance / form which has proceeded quietly, and often just out of the range of vision of more formal and established literary forms and institutions.

That is its virtue, in many ways.

Being out of official sight means that literally anyone can apply, anyone can have their say and be heard. Because it is free and accessible, the concerns tend to be common human concerns – love, death, taxes… Like SF fandom it can be limited in scope by being invitational in nature – you can get fragmented groups and communities. But once the event or series is known the invitation is established, and the invitation remains open as long as the series lasts.

The Slam Poetry end of the spectrum can be quite formally innovative. The grass-roots, my first time in public end of the spectrum can often be perceptually innovative and emotionally subtle. Occasionally there is an astounding feat –

One night in late 2006, at the Broken Word open mic at the Alberta Street Pub, founded by Arlo Voorhees, a young woman read a long set of linked sestinas. They built and built and built, a Jacob’s ladder of exploration and explication from the nerve-ends of a relationship. It was the only piece I ever saw receive a standing ovation. It was a tour de force and a force of nature and ferocity.

Michael Shay organized a group of six active attendees – Douglas Spangle was one of the six – to edit the second published volume from those Broken Word readings. We all asked who that young woman was. None of the regulars knew her; none of their friends knew her; no one who listened to Talking Earth, on KBOO, knew her. We never found her. The poem's not in the book.

But we had heard it. We remember our mounting amazement as it built and crescendo’d – And then it disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared, this amazing piece of art from, in, and of the community. Where it has always come from, where it has always been.

For those of us caught between I can’t go on and I must go on, open mic gives us the chance to draw from each other the spirit to go on.

And so we come to Oregon, Portland, and Douglas Spangle. Who has nurtured this form and forum of weekly readings for more than 30 years.

The Broken Word reading at the Alberta Street Pub (founded and emceed by Arlo Voorhees, occasionally emceed by Douglas Spangle, and featuring readers such as Judith Fay Pullman and Jaqueline Freeman) followed the Meander reading (founded by Elizabeth Domike and Elizabeth Archers, occasionally emceed by Douglas Spangle, and featuring the intricately-talented Andrew Macarthur, sadly no longer with us); and Meander followed the reading at Murray’s Pizza (emceed by Douglas Spangle), which followed the reading at A Shot in the Dark (sometimes emceed by Douglas Spangle), which in turn followed the long-running reading at Café Lena (emceed by Doulgas Spangle with Brian Christopher Hamilton), which succeeded the long-running reading at the Satyricon (emceed by Doulgas Spangle, and featuring such writers as Walt Curtis and Katherine Dunn).

That takes us back to 1983. 2007-1983.

From 2008-2013 Douglas curated Verse in Person at the northwest branch of Multnomah County Library. The Stone Soup reading at Marino’s, was founded by Curtis Whitecarroll, an alumnus of Broken Word, who Douglas had mentored. Stone Soup and its successors, Ink Noise, Word Warrior and Poets' Challenge have featured writers such as Dan Encarnacion, Coleman Stevenson, Brita Emeel, Brenda Taulbee, and JM Reed. The young & formidable poets are often transplants to the city from elsewhere, though not always, but because of Douglas Spangle’s work, they have a committed emcee, a gathering place, a continuing reading series, and an audience.

Nurturing open mic that is not all that Douglas has done – in addition to producing fine poetry of his own he was active in Portland Artquake / Write Out Loud, co-edited Rain City Review (which debuted many Pacific Northwest writers, from Sherman Alexie to Lidia Yuknavitch), has written for Anodyne and The Asian Reporter, produced the last Portland Poetry Fest (dedicated to Mary Barnard) and been a Visiting Poet at Benson High School. His activities in and on behalf of poetry in the Pacific Northwest are really too numerous to mention here.

With the 2016 Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award, the Oregon literary community recognizes the devoted nurturing of the weekly readings that has been the hallmark of Douglas Spangle's life: the constant, selfless, week-after-week-after week welcoming, nurturing presence, giving a venue and a voice to those who may go on to be well- and widely-known, to those who come and go in a single night, to any who write a name on a sign-in sheet.

And we at GobQ/Reprobate Books books add our heartfelt congratulations!

And the Answer Is -

In the little time I have to read I have been pursuing* Joseph Anton, Rushdie's account of his years in hiding after the Iranian fatwa /death threat issued after the publication of The Satanic Verses.

I find the publishing details fascinating, and the identification of both courage and cowardice compelling. Of course they surround or compose Rushdie's concern with free speech and free movement and the horrendous stacking of power which is addressed in the U.S. Constitution in the non-establishment clause.

Around the middle of the book he writes a letter to Religion. The final paragraph of the letter reads, in part:

What sort of club is it that makes it compulsory to be a member? I thought the best clubs were exclusive and tried their damnedest to keep the riffraff out.

And it occurred to me, the kind of club which makes membership compulsory: a protection racket.

==
*I never peruse books; I'm always behind, trying to catch up -

ILL and Recovering

I've just passed though a long, quasi-legal, semi-legal process. It has aged and exhausted me and left me with a tinge of understanding of PTSD.

But the weather's spring with more than a tinge of summer; the young green in the trees the way I saw it as a child when I hadn't seen it very many times, and the sun on the leaves, a white-yellow shining, and the air, soft and cushiony. I want to wrap myself in the air and my shoulders in comfort. The fruit-tree leaves and the occasional lone clutches of pencil pine in the hazy blue distance put me hazily in mind of Rome – I think of re-watching HBO's Rome but don't have quite the – not energy, not time, though I haven't got the energy and I haven't got the time  –  The screen is a distance away; the story won't wrap me closely enough. And then there's the screen's proximity to the kitchen's space and activity and noise.

There's a good enough novel about Catullus I wouldn't mind reading again, but the local County Facility hasn't got it any more, and a novel about the C4th century poet Claudius Claudianus by a Dutch woman – fascinating, it seems to see everything from underneath – but the local County Facility hasn't got it any more.

I could get them from Inter Library Loan. But my shoulders immediately slump, the tension oozes back into my stomach and throat. I'd have to fish around on the net for the titles and authors; I'd have to find them in WorldCat, order them from this spot on the website I can't quite remember how to find and read them in 3 weeks –

And though I probably would read them in three weeks in any case, these books are so far off the beaten track they get weeded they could be renewed often enough, at the local County Facility, to suit my need to be dilatory. Which is the point at this point – This is idle summer, or a hasty simulacrum of it; this is therapy.

ILL's so remote it changes your relationship to a book. Which is something I hadn't noticed before, except subliminally.

==

Claudius Claudianus – Threshold of Fire, by Hélène Serafia Haasse (1918-2011).
Catullus – The Key, by Benita Kane Jaro.

After Smilla's Sense of Snow

I gave up reading Scandinavian mysteries a while ago, after the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, after some Kurt Wallender, after some Edward Åke, after opening and closing a Nesbø, after reading a couple more I have very much forgotten; and the reason I stopped was that I could no longer read descriptions of tortured and dismembered women.

At first it seemed to me a tic, a trope, lazy shorthand for this criminal is a real badass, you can see how much of a badass he is from page one, if not paragraph one, and how anything the detective might do in the detecting of him is absolvable because he is such as badass badass.

But the repetition was striking me like a blow.

After assuming that it was an overworked and self-absolving trope, and after ignoring it for several years, I found the news from the news sources beginning to filter through to some other level of my awareness.

In the light of voter suppression, rape culture, fundamentalist patriarchal religions of all theologies (including the armed forces of the first world) becoming more heavily armed, more insistent, and bloodier in their insistence; in the light of global warming and its causes, I came to see that Thomas Harris and Michael Connolly and the Scandinavians are right. The torture and dismemberment of the feminine is the signature crime of the age.

The Bookstore Opens

The Legacy of Ashes

I'm up to the Bay of Pigs, or between a quarter and a third of the way through, Legacy of ashes : the history of the CIA.*

The CIA was deeply lunatic from the git-go. (James Jesus Angleton was a champion alcoholic who shared his operational details beforehand with Kim Philby. For example.)

As always, I'm at a loss. Which aspect of the tale renders me speechless? The epic criminality or the epic incompetence? The kabuki nature of the the Cold War or its hundreds of thousands of real murders?

The one thing that comes reeking off the pages is that every one of these CIA planner-motherfuckers - before or after lunch or electroshock - operated with a sense of impunity.

===

*Legacy of ashes : the history of the CIA / Tim Weiner, Doubleday, New York, 2007.

Reading

May it Please the Court

The American workplace is top-down, modelled on the military, on slavery, on the late mediaeval court: management is capricious and treacherous, with quasi-absolute power. The true business of employees is to dance attendance on these petty kings – hence the universal sentiment when the boss is gone (for the week, for the day, for the morning): Thank God. Now I can just do my fucken job.

That's why I'm so engrossed by the York and Lancaster queens, consorts, and relatives of Phillipa Gregory's depictions: they are (also) surrounded by capricious, treacherous, and absolute power, which they must navigate past and through to survive. The fact that these books of Gregory's are so popular, that the Tudor period is so much on our minds & in our media (or the other way round), suggests our growing intuition of the nature of the epochal divide we've crossed.

And so here they are, in historical chronological order:

The Lady of the Rivers (2011) - The story of Jacquetta of Luxembourg, the mother of Elizabeth Woodville
The Red Queen (2010) – The story of Lady Margaret Beaufort and her quest to place her son Henry Tudor on the English throne
The White Queen (2009) – The story of Elizabeth Woodville, the queen consort of King Edward IV of England and mother of Edward V
The Kingmaker's Daughter (2012) – The story of Anne Neville, daughter of Warwick "the Kingmaker" and wife of Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales, and later of Richard III of England, and of Anne's elder sister Isabel Neville, wife of George Duke of Clarence
The White Princess (2013) – The story of Elizabeth of York, daughter of Elizabeth Woodville and Edward IV. Wife of Henry VII and mother of Henry VIII of England
The Last Rose (TBA) – Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury (not yet released)

Callou, callay!

Callou, callay!
The galleys, the galleys
for White Concrete Day!

And the first chapter of Swimming with Heraclitus, "Stephen and the Others," has just been published, here.

The Virtue of Memoir

"The Trinity, understandably called a mystery, lies at the heart of Christianity. It achieves two major goals: it posits a realm that transcends the physical world, in which reality is made by the word. History is filled with rulers who claimed divinity to justify their superiority, but not until Christianity and the sacralizing of the notion that language creates reality does the debate between appearance and reality begin to pervade Western literature and thought. Increasingly what is said - the Emperor has new clothes - is called real, while physical reality fades into invisibility or is denied..."*

This is exactly why the difference between memoir and fiction is important.

A Wolf at the Table** is hyper-clear, vivid, tense, exact... There are charismatic people; this is charismatic writing, as it were: all the good things intensified.

As autobiography, A Wolf at the Table speaks intimately to all varieties of modern culture: titled for the dinner-table, sited within the house - that nexus of neurosis, ambition, jealousy, dissatisfaction, bullying, denial, invisibility, quasi-slavery, all called love - the house and the psyche both isolated.

It says monsters and madness can exist among some of the people we knew, are bound to, frequent, depend on in one way or another: the words for known people and places are not antonyms of humanity's nastier aspects.

It says outrageousness can be as close as the sweat on your skin, and don't you forget it.

==

* French, Marilyn, From Eve to Dawn: a History of Women, Volume 1, Origins, New York, The Feminist Press, 2008, p. 245. 

** Burroughs, Augusten, A wolf at the table: a memoir of my father, New York, St. Martin's Press, 2008.

Of course!

That's why books like Never Coming Back

"Struggling with fear, despair, and suspicious Swedish authorities when his wife fails to return home, Mike endures a nightmarish existence with his daughter, unaware that his vigil is being secretly filmed and shown to his wife by her abductors in a nearby cellar..."

have moved, like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, out of crime or mystery sections and into general fiction sections everywhere! It's the pandemic corruption.

General fiction has always covered war (Stendahl) adventure, comedy (Defoe), domestic fiction, adultery (Flaubert, Tolstoy), and horror (Shelley) - the plain bloodsimple used to be mystery (Hammett).

Between them the drug trade (begun in earnest during the Vietnam War and continued throughout the Latin American sectors of the Cold War and the Friedmanite collapse of the Soviet bloc) and the War on Terror have corrupted everything. Middle class reality (Chekhov, Cheever, Updike, stretching to Burroughs & Heller) is turned to genrefic.

The Word's the Thing

I was tripping around my local facility the other day, looking for and at this and that, reading the intervening spine-labels, when it occurred to me that the shelf-dividers & other descriptors on offer have been somewhat overwhelmed by developments in the publishing industry.

So, with great humility, I offer the Library of Congress the following possibilities for fiction and non-fiction, print and other formats:

Belleslettristic trash

Hipster epistemology

Debordian spectacle

Gormless clusterfuck

Further suggestions wined, dined, & entertained below...

On Being a Publisher

Publishing – small press, micro press, book packager, co-publisher… Over the last 10 years GobQ has published Gobshite Quarterly – a multilingual quarterly magazine (now back I print after a long hiatus), co-published Curse + Berate in 69+ Languages, a multilingual dictionary of language from the dark side; a bilingual edition of Gato Eficaz, an early novel by Luisa Valenzuela; and Golems Waiting Redux, an account of the vandalism of local sculpture in downtown Portland in 2002.

The first time I ever held a manuscript in my hands was when Oriel Gray let me take Scraps of Paper home to read. It was her memoir, fresh and vivid. There was something about the unbound pages and the indented lettering (Olivetti portable) that made me shiver – some life or power fresh from her mind and hands came, straight and unmediated, to my hands and mind.

Though that manuscript became part of my furniture for almost 30 years, I forgot what handling real manuscripts is like. When RV Branham suggested starting a magazine I wasn't paying much attention, truth to tell. But when the manuscripts started coming in…. I'll never forget the day Vénus Khoury-Ghata's Words arrived at the Gobshite Quarterly office, as a mailed fax from Marilyn Hacker in Paris. It was a delirious experience: I couldn't focus on them, the sense of awe and strangeness and déjà vu was so strong; I couldn't stand quite upright. I put them down and picked them up again, read them, and finally took them to my own office – a quiet, west-facing room upstairs, with nothing but a desk, 2 chairs and 2 windows – even northern light on the one side and filtered western light on the other – and laid them on the desk, in order, and began again. They were so good, and so far outside the realm of English poetry that having them in my hands felt made me feel as though something I'd never known but always known was trying shake itself free of the categories I always thought in, or lived in.

We ran them all in issue 1, in French and English. (That is, we ran 14 in French and 13 in English: The New Yorker had bought one of the translations.)

In that issue we also ran "Sirens," a short story by Frederic Raphael (Two for the Road, The Glittering Prizes), which hadn't placed in England. It's a great story, another world-view shatterer. I couldn't believe it'd been "Good luck placing it elsewhere"-d. In England. Couldn’t believe it.

The 3rd most wondrous experience was an email from Palestine (long after we'd given up hope), allowing us to reprint some of Mahmoud Darwish's poems. (Typesetting the Arabic was an adventure – it was eventually done by one of the partners in a local printing business, who'd studied Arabic and been to Syria for a year as a Fulbright scholar. As we didn't have the right font at the time we scanned the page as a jpg and InDesigned it that way.)

Marilyn Hacker also brought us the French poet Marie Etienne. Writers from Cuba and Mexico and Argentina contacted us, looking for translators; translators contacted us, looking for publishers (Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Poland), and we found translators and published them.

On a visit to Portland Julienne Eden-Bušić chanced to see us mentioned in The Oregonian. She brought a treasure-trove of new Croatian, Slovenian, and Bosnian poets – Tomica Bajsić, Barbara Korun, Dubravka Oraić-Tolić and Ferida Durakovic, as well as prose-writers Edo Popović and Gordan Nuhanović. Tomica Bajsić's poetry was – seeing it in manuscript was just a rush, it really was. Seeing something that good, and new, already accomplished and huge with future possibility – fills you with hope and joy and repletion, all at once.

The other astonishing thing about publishing, perhaps particularly about Gobshite, was that the printed object travelled roads we'd never imagined. People kept saying they'd run across a copy in a train in Spain or some other obscure way-station. The Algerian poet Amari Hamadene contacted us after seeing a copy in an Algerian café.

And just as well the manuscripts shake the world and then travel beyond imagining, because the financial dance of publishing is awful. We were just beginning to get some ad-revenue when our major distributor collapsed, leaving us with pennies on the dollar, unable to return to print until very recently.

And we are beginning to return to print, using Portland printers and very small runs. Issue 12 came out just before last Christmas, featuring a short story by Lidia Yuknavitch, essays on the Occupy movement by Richard Melo and Joyce Reynolds-Ward, Occupy sketches by Shannon Wheeler, an excerpt from a lost Russian novel about the Revolution (by Anatoliy Mariengoff; we are hoping to co-publish the entire book when translation is complete), an etymological reminiscence by Katherine Dunn; short, surreal prose-poems from Denmark – all sorts of things that do not appear elsewhere in English, and certainly not in conjunction with each other. We intend to print issue #13-14 this coming autumn.

Though I usually function as factotum, reader of first or last resort, proofreader, poetry editor, image-bank, and bookkeeper for Gobshite I am preparing a couple of books for publication later this year. One is almost ready; the other, which will be larger, I haven't quite mentioned to the writer, yet… I'll drop by later this week, and have a word.

The Inside-Out, Utterly Hypocritical, Pre-Paid, Jerry Who? from Where? "Review" "Scandal"

It's a Gordian knot of bad faith and absurdity.

Firstly, the matter of e-book authors writers paying a supplier for positive (5-star) reviews from "readers" who may not have read the books in question. (That's actually 2 matters - firstly, the automatic 5 stars, and secondly, and the one I assume the hoo-hah is about, is the availability of the paid service.)

Now this could not happen - the reviews wouldn't convince potential buyers - if customer reviews hadn't already been a large feature of Amazon's database, if people hadn't already been using them to make buying/reading/viewing decisions.

I've used the customer reviews there many times to decide about DVDs I wanted to use for some of the DVD film-festivals at work a few years ago. I needed them particularly for things I wasn't personally familiar with (Korean TV series, films from Mongolia and Iran, some older new-wave films from China I hadn't seen, and so on). I liked Amazon customer reviews because they are, generally, without guile. If people got bored half-way through, or even ten minutes into, they said so. There were usually enough reviews of a title to form a balanced judgement before setting in motion a lot of possibly needless activity in setting up the festival, and to save myself a lot of embarrassment.

So that was valuable knowledge. I appreciated its existence.

And, once more, there are 2 things to consider here.

Firstly, how can I go on trusting Amazon customer reviews if they can be bought and paid for?

Secondly: why do I value Amazon customer reviews for their honesty, if the old-media, "professional" reviews, are also honest?

Answer: because the professional reviews are not honest.* They are every bit as pre-paid as the "scandalous" e-book reviews - they just work in the 2.5-4.5 star range. (Their question seems to be: Is this book a good or bad example of its type?)

(Publishing is an assembly-line; the assembly-line mass-produces predictable objects. The potential book should announce its similarity to previous books; it  should not take place in a particular locale, but be equally local to all potential readers...) (But that's old news. This development began in the mid-'60s, when profits were first going to be "maximized" and corporate mergers were still just proposals and plans. It took another 10 years for the doing away with the mid-list to become an explicit, effective policy. Norman Spinrad was one of the first to raise that alarm among writers, in 1978.)

The function of professional reviewers has always been to keep the books selling, and, hemi-demi-semi-consciously, reviewers feel the pressure. (How many times have you read a negative review that revised itself into positivity before your eyes and its own end?)**

This is another kind of silencing of dissent, trivial, creepy, and indicative. If you can't tell the truth about a book you've read, what can you tell the truth about?

In an understandable effort to create an island of sanity/probity in this steaming swamp of payola, this anyone will do anything for money - which is a definition of slavery, among other things - 49 British authors wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph, condemning the widespread use, by authors, of fake identities to puff their own pieces and slam those of their "rivals". (See the introductory article here.)

Yesterday I came across a hard copy of Steve Lawhead's The Spirit Well (Nashville, Thomas Nelson, 2012). This is a transcript of the first two pages. (Emphases in the original.)

==

What Readers Are Saying about The Bright Empires Series

"His mastery of the art of description is beyond belief. (I had to stop several times to jump up and down because I loved his style so much, seriously.) His level of attention to details like period mind-set and speech is a delight to behold (especially for die-hard background-first novelists like me)." - Sir Emeth M.

"This is a story that has it all: mystery, history, damsels in distress, and a mind-bending meditation on the nature of reality. It is in equal parts Raiders of the Lost Ark, National Treasure, and Jumper. Highly recommended." - Chad J.

"Filled with descriptions that beguile all five senses and all the beauty and charm of the language I have come to expect from Lawhead, this book is a fascinating blend of fantasy and sci-fi." - Jenelle S.

"... a hold-your-breath beginning to a new series. This novel mixes ancient history, time travel, alternate realities, mystery, physics, and fantasy, to create a story so compelling that I find myself recommending it to any who will listen." - Sheila P.

"[A] sure winner for eager sci-fi readers... The vivid imagery and witty lines help keep the reader on the edge of their seats." - Jerry P.

"Time travel and high adventure abound in this brand new title from veteran author Stephen R. Lawhead." - Ben H.

"Imagine Narnia merged with Hitchhiker's Guide, and you have a starting point for the adventures of Kit Livingstone." - Rick M.

"Lawhead vividly describes the sights, sounds, and smells of the markets in Prague, the streets of Restoration England, and even the dry heat of Ancient Egypt... The premise of ley-line travel is fascinating yet mysterious, with scientific definitions that are detailed without being too technical. The characters are personable and complex, and it's easy to get caught up in their search for that elusive map." - Malinda D.

"... an excellent, mysterious storyline that draws the reader in." - Kieran

==

Let's leave aside the fact that The Spirit Well is volume 3 of the series and that at least one of the quotes does not strictly apply to the item in hand.

What I immediately notice is that:
*the punctuation is surprisingly correct for the level of prose - "I loved his style so much, seriously"
*the pitch-points/selling-points (bolded) are surprisingly concise for people who are "beguiled" by Lawhead's prose, which is flat, sloppy, flatly under-imagined and flatly overwritten, awkward in contemporary scenes and awkward in period.

None of these accolades is credibly sourced. They sound like some Amazon reviews but they don't sound quite real.  They smell of over-eagerness; they have such a sameness of tone and intent, such a single thrust of argument, they smell of some sort of fix.

A major publisher including such "reviews" in the book itself, is, to me, an even greater scandal than writers puffing themselves, no matter how deceitfully and underhandedly.

These pages in the book are not accessible to greedy individual authors, mavericks who suffer an unfortunate ethical insufficiency, and who will be discovered, eventually, pass through the mandatory brief public shame and so be absolved, i.e., forgotten and left to begin again under a pseudonym.

The beyond-Amazon, hard-copy corporate sponsorship of this kind of review is not being mentioned. The "scandal" is being confined to the behaviour of flesh and blood individuals. Corporate persons are exempt from, defined as above and beyond, whatever rage results from the hijacking of the mouths they call ours.

===

*Writers glad-handing each other's work is not just a recent occurrence: writers reviewing each other favourably and arranging exchange professorships / lectureships / fellowships for each other goes all the way back to the New York Review of Books, which was founded by publishers, notably Random House. (NYRB also pretty much founded the travelling writer's lecture business, another medium for promoting some writers, some books, some ideas.)

All this is detailed in The End of Intelligent Writing, by Richard Kostelanetz (Sheed and Ward, New York, 1974). This book is invaluable about the history and shape of U.S. publishing - and if nothing else, will explain why is is so important to know that Jason Epstein was Jeff Bezoz' mentor.

**In the Australian case I see the fear that bad reviews will kill a genuinely tiny industry. Unfortunately, that  industry can also die of good reviews. The precariousness of Australian book activity, like that of the other English-language publishers, comes from trying to make a branded, assembly-line industry out of an essentially unpredictable, low-margin business.

Poor Fellow, My Language: What Language Is This?

And so I pick up this book, runner-up for the 2011 Miles Franklin, and the apparatus of mediation and apperception – everything from The Australian Book Review to The Independent to The New York Times bestseller's blurb – says it's great – "fierce economy of style" and so forth: and I pick it up and find that it's written in dead-speak. Perhaps, I think, this is meant to be some sort of analogue to the early C20th newspaper accounts of disasters; perhaps it's meant to be like that. (This is the first chapter, where the murder takes place in the storm.)

I am slightly surprised to find, in the second chapter, Quinn, the falsely accused brother of the 12 year old girl, isn't 13 or 14, but 16. That seems old, for the father to have been so worried about them in the storm and flood. You'd expect a lad of 16 to have some physical strength and sense, enough to look out for a 12 year old; enough, at least, for that thought to have crossed the father's mind, even in a monstrous storm.

And then, in the midst of the stiltedness, the book begins to be populated by sentences like this: He steadied himself against a tree and was afraid. (p. 24).
??
"He was afraid and steadied himself against a tree"?

Quinn, waking from a nightmarish dream, frantically struggling with his gas mask, says to himself: Move it, move it, move it. (p. 32)

Not in 1919, in Australia, he doesn't. The Australian idiom was "Move!" or "Move your arse!" "Move it!" is American.

He closed his eyes to better enjoy the sun's warmth. – General tone & flavour. (p. 37)

Quinn visits Mary, his mother, who is dying of influenza. She speaks of going into the murdered girl's bedroom, hoping in her grief that handling the girl's things, reciting lines of poetry over and over again, can bring her back.
She says to Quinn: Your father hates that I go in there. (p. 57)

That's a particularly New York Jewish construction. You'll hear it in Woody Allen's early films. Neither Mary nor anyone else would have said that in outback NSW in 1919. There's no indication in the book that Mary's first language is Yiddish.

The woman in question was perched in a green armchair. Her thin and restless fingers wrung a pair of black gloves in her lap, as if to death. Her husband stood at her shoulder and each of them wore a startled, pensive expression like they had steeled themselves for bad news so many times that their faces were permanently set thus. (p. 62)

If the narrative voice of this novel is, in its stiltedness, attempting to evoke the starchiness of early C20th Australian newspaper speech, then "like" meaning "as though" is completely out of place. It is an Americanism that became familiar to Australians when American TV did; it entered Australian English (where it still clangs) no earlier than the mid-'50s. Combined with the fussy and self-important "thus," the passage becomes a whipsaw of USUK usages posing as a period Australian sentence.

The mise en scene is muddled... The hardscrabble of dry land and people driven crazy by poverty is well evoked (the Irish placenta on the river flats… Although by this time you are ready to suspect Kurosawa or the Chamberlain affair).

What's not clear is how the lush orange and nectarine orchards near the richer part of the town (named Flint), relates to the rest, where the water ends, how the grass high as his knees could survive away from the river. The farmer that must have brought his flock up here to graze – whereabouts would he have gone afterwards? What of the sheepdogs? (Never a bark, a nose, a threat of being sniffed out; never another allusion.)

It's all very well for The Independent to say the descriptions of the Australian bush have "a precise and transporting intensity." The Independent has no way of knowing these descriptions haven't got a feasible, realized geography. The Independent would never have let D.H. Lawrence get away with crap like this.

I have no objection to Australian writers or anyone else using American or English idioms whenever they like. What a good novel requires is that writers know what they're doing, where and what period the expressions they're using come from, and what their origins suggest; writers need to use them to build to deliberate and successful effect. Novelists need an ear for dialogue...

I don't even care that by my lights this is a bad book. Bad books sell well all the time; in certain moods I'm ready for a really bad book.

My real objection here is twofold: that the writer has no ear and no idea; and that that the "critical" apparatus of at least two countries has made a concerted effort to tell me this is a good book. More than a good book, a Miles Franklin runner-up. Does the critical apparatus of two countries have a tin ear? Doesn't it know what it's doing? (Doesn't it know that it doesn't know?) (Is it just that the cheques keep clearing?)

There are Henry Lawson stories that are pitch-perfect, still, a hundred and twenty years later. The Slap is pitch-perfect. They're written in a particular language.

This book's not alone in its lack of an actual language.

Another recent award-winning Australian novel featured, in its first chapter, an American soldier in WW2 Sydney describing Australian mouths as being (as thin as) "letter-boxes," when the word the character would use is mailslots – the American word, where the emphasis lies on the horizontal line the character is actually registering. A page or so later this same man sees a girl sitting on her "bottom" and not on her butt or ass…

So I end at my beginning. What language is this, where Australian characters normally speak Yiddish or standard American, and American characters speak in English euphemism?

==

Womersley, Chris, Bereft: a novel, New York, Silver Oak, 2012
McConnochie, Mardie, The Voyagers, a love story, Melbourne, Penguin, 2012.

==

I didn't finish Bereft; I read slightly past the 100-page mark, where I found it turning into a detailed treatment for the film it always wanted to be. (I won't mention Quinn training himself to be still for hours on end, to avoid snipers in the War, and then standing still in the bush, and noticing his stiffness after, as though it were not routine.)

I've only read the online chapter of The Voyagers.

I haven't read the rest of these novels. If I'd been in a bookshop looking for something to buy, the clear lack of command of the material in these books would have killed the sale.