Sunday, June 12, 2011

Richard Price's The Wanderers

This afternoon I read Richard Price's The Wanderers (1974) and really enjoyed it. It is about a gang in the North Bronx (my old neighborhood) in 1962 and how they slowly drift apart as they grow older. I enjoyed it partly because of its depiction of the Bronx, including businesses I would go to like the White Castle on Allerton Avenue and Alexander's on Fordham Road, partly because of Price's gift for description (there isn't much food in the book, but it made me hungry every time it was mentioned), and partly because Price makes the reader care about the characters even though most of them are hoodlums.


The novel depicts the desperation felt by young Americans at the beginning of the 1960s that led to the societal tumult at the end of the decade in a heartwrenching, mesmerizing way. I couldn't put the book down. I don't feel very articulate about it yet because I am still processing it in quiet awe. It put David Bowie's "Star" in my head, mostly for the understated, needy, defeated mood of the music, but also because of the lyrics: "Tony went to fight in Belfast / Rudi stayed at home to starve / I could make it all worthwhile as a rock & roll star." The characters in The Wanderers all want to do something to break out of their routine, soul-crushing lives. If they could just find that one thing to make it "worthwhile" for themselves and the ones they care about...

Saturday, June 11, 2011

Foer's Tree of Codes

I just finished reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes and it is amazing! To create it, he cut holes in a copy of Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles so that a new narrative is created, partly from the words remaining on each page, and partly from the resulting combination of words on the page one is reading and later pages that one can see via the holes cut in each page. It is postmodern fiction at its best: a text that questions the concept of the book itself while still being a beautiful work of art that affirms the necessity of narrative for human existence.


It is only 134 pages long, and reads more like a long poem that consists of page-long, haiku-like poems than like prose. There is a basic narrative present, but it is secondary to the physical form of the book, which is just as much a piece of plastic art as it is a piece of literature. It is more empty space than text, and some pages (e.g., 60) are virtually all open space.


Here are three of my favorite page-poems (a full list would be about a third of the book's pages):


"Apart from them, mother and I ambled, guiding our shadows over a keyboard of paving stones. we passed the chemist's large jar of pain. we passed houses," 10
"her boundaries held only loosely, ready to scatter as if smoke. all her complaints, all her worries her no purpose, her eyes reflected the garden" 17
"he spoke almost incoherently. he blinked in the light, spilled darkness at each flutter of the lids. he said he had lost the way and hardly knew how to get back. perhaps the city had ceased to exist" 106


But it is difficult to get the full power of these fragments just from reading them; their physical manifestation is just as important.


One of my favorite aspects of the book is its inclusion of various metafictional statements that reaffirm the slipperiness of what the reader experiences:


"It was a dialogue" 29
"our creations will be temporary" 51
"tree of codes suddenly appears: one can see" 94
"nothing can reach a definite conclusion" 95
"The tree of codes was better than a paper imitation" 96
"Perhaps the spaces suggested by the mind did not exist?" 107 (this one is especially true, as the book is so well-constructed that it is often difficult to discern whether what one is reading is on the current page or a following page)
"The interior formed itself into the panorama of a landscape" 117


Tree of Codes is well worth its $40 cover price (amazon.com has it for $26); it is an essential text. I can't wait to teach it sometime!

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

The Bearded Doctor Sports Blog

Today I began a new blog, The Bearded Doctor Sports Blog, that will be devoted to posts about sports. As a result, A New Yorker in Exile will no longer include sports-related content, and the frequency of its posts will diminish, though I will still try to post on one of the blogs on a (nearly) daily basis. This frequency has lessened lately due to some traveling and move-related work I've been doing, but will go back to normal now.


I have decided to split my blogging between two fora because I find myself shying away from writing about sports on A New Yorker in Exile despite a frequent desire to do so. I worry about my audience's lack of interest in sports. My academic colleagues are frequently surprised when they find out that I am a passionate sports fan because they equate sports with the uneducated working class (i.e., they equate all sports fans with stereotypical NASCAR fans). This close-mindedness always annoys me, though it also makes me feel smug that I am not as elitist as they are. Just because an activity is enjoyed by millions does not automatically make it lowbrow, and of course the lowbrow can become highbrow, anyway (e.g., Shakespeare). As a friend of mine who likes pro wrestling says, "Whenever someone says to me, 'You know it's fake, right?', I say 'So what? So is theatre.'"


I believe that sports fandom has a place within intellectual life because it is not just about following the standings and worshipping idols, it is about the deeper issue of belonging to a cross-cultural community, which deserves rigorous contemplation. And, of course, fandom is enhanced by intellectual analysis, as the example of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) shows. The New Yorker's frequent sports articles illustrate that fandom and thinking are meant for each other. The Bearded Doctor Sports Blog tries to foster this connection.

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Books Acquired Recently

Books Acquired Recently

Bannon, Ann. The Beebo Brinker Chronicles. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1995.


I found this used at Better World Books in Goshen, Indiana. It includes four of Bannon's Beebo Brinker novels: Odd Girl Out (1957), I Am A Woman (1959), Women in the Shadows (1959), and Beebo Brinker (1962). I've read Beebo Brinker before and really enjoyed it because it gives a non-condemning view of lesbianism and is thus an essential early text in LGBT literature. I am a total sucker for omnibus volumes like this one, and it was only $5.98, so I had to buy it even though I am trying not to buy more books before I move at the end of July.


Foer, Jonathan Safran. Tree of Codes. 2nd ed. London: Visual Editions, 2011.


I am so excited to finally get this book! I ordered it in January when I first heard about it, and amazon claimed to have it in stock, but didn't because the first printing (called the first edition by the publisher, and the copy I have is labelled the "second edition" on the copyright page, but as far as I know it is the same text as the first; that is, it should be labelled the "second printing," not "edition") had already sold out. Copies of it were selling for hundreds of dollars. Once the second printing came out amazon fulfilled my order at their original price, $26, which is a great deal since the cover price is $40. I love Foer's work, and I love postmodern fiction, including his, so I am super-excited to see what he does with Tree of Codes, which has cut-outs on every page so that the words from other pages become part of the story of the page one is reading at the moment. It is as much an art object as it is a novel.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

"Is it better to burn out or fade away?"

The title of this post is from Jack Black's character in High Fidelity as he's considering Stevie Wonder's legacy after rejecting a customer who is looking for a copy of "I Just Called to Say I Love You."


It is a difficult question, one that I have been thinking about the past few days while reading William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch. I ended up liking the book and would recommend it as a thought-provoking read and enjoyable aesthetic experience, but during the first quarter of it was feeling that it wasn't very good and was another example of a text that is revolutionary when it is published, but loses its power outside of its original context (two filmic examples that immediately come to mind are 2001: A Space Odyssey and Midnight Cowboy). It just seemed like a bad prose rewriting of Allen Ginsberg's Howl (which makes sense because Ginsberg played a large role in editing it); it takes a little while to find its unique voice. Anyway, it was nice not to be disappointed by the novel's end.