I was left very much wanting to know how Mantel intends to handle the
final weeks of Cromwell’s life in the next book, which Joan Acocella’s
review in the New Yorker, if I have this straight, mentions is coming.
(Mantel apparently took more space than she anticipated originally.) The
Duke of Norfolk comes across more like a character in a George R. R.
Martin saga than a historical figure, and to think of him being involved
in a successful interrogation/intimidation of Mantel’s polytropic
Cromwell is difficult to credit. This Cromwell is Italiante through and
through—-a Poundian Malatesta, who (jokingly?) is believed to have a
spent a summer in the employ of Cesare Borgia. He also, interestingly
enough, has learned the rhetorical art of the memory palace, which
enables him to rise high in Wolsey’s estimation.
Whenever I read a book in my field, the first thing I ask myself is if
the author happened to demolish a concrete patio (and sidewalk) with a
ten-pound sledgehammer during its composition.
The answer is usually no.
I’ve made a number of enemies in the inanimate object kingdom over the
years, but rebar now rules over them all.
This captures stage two of the enterprise, the shoveling of particulate
concrete matter into a wheelbarrow, then to be wheeled precariously a
hundred yards to a dumpster and re-shoveled.
I ordered all of the issues of n+1 a while ago, and they arrived
today. I’ve never actually read a print issue of it before, though I
have followed the magazine’s career with interest.
I liked Joshua Glenn’s “The Black Iron Prison” from the first issue, and
Chad Harbach’s piece on Oblivion has speculations about what we know
now to be The Pale King that are interesting to consider in
retrospect. I liked the essay by Masha Gessen also.
Alex Golub, an anthropologist who’s
blogged for a long time, is running a series of personal associations
with Library of Congress call letters, which is a truly great idea for a
series of posts. He’s starting each one with a color association, and I
don’t know if that synaesthetic twist came from the Rimbaud sonnet or
just memories of book covers, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
I’ve read Golub’s blog since I was a graduate student myself, and he
used to write amusing pieces about computer games. One bit in particular
was about how he imagined the in-game status updates of some type of
4X’er being read in Joe Pantoliano’s voice. (I’m a bit surprised he
didn’t remember M is for music, though.)
I read this while giving an exam today. I had forgotten to bring
anything to write with, and I was angry, for I was struck with what
seemed to be an urgent thought about the book: that Dania’s dance was
plainly derived from Slothrop’s V2 attraction. I found a pen at rest on
a chalk sill, then scrawled out that and the rest of my increasingly
irritated observations: The Man in the High Castle, etc.
This text seems to concern itself at some level with a proposed
determinative relationship between finance capitalism and male sadism.
Within its fictive logic, the transition from industrialism to a
speculative economy is timed more-or-less with the Gottfried Vanger’s
death; but Wennstrom is his true son. Gottfried dies, as I remember, in
1966, which is close enough for government work to the dissolution of
the Bretton Woods agreement. Wennstrom then begins his speculative
career, while Martin labors under the repetition-compulsion of the old
regime. His crimes, horrible though they are, become something of an
atavistic rebellion against the transformative new order. He loses,
except in the final desperation of being caught, any connection to the
race insanity (Levitical parody) that motivated Gottfried’s violence.
I saw a reference to Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask in Benjamin Kunkel’s LRB
essay
on Fredric Jameson, and it activated my impulse-buy reflex. I had read
nothing by Lipsyte before, but I did glance at some of the Library Thing
comments and was intrigued by what would seem to have been a relentless
and bleak satire. That it was a satire of academia somehow is what I
expected from Kunkel’s reference, which mentioned that the protagonist
remembered learning about only two things in college: late capitalism
and how to shoot heroin.
I first read Infinite Jest in October of 1996. I had been working for
an industrial manufacturing concern after I had graduated in May in a
capacity that involved certain manipulations of computers and also the
odd bit of filing. I was planning to go to graduate school the next
year, and I even retook the GRE that month. It’s possible that the book
raised my verbal score significantly, though the fact that I scored
worse on the quantitative section by the same amount suggests it might
have been accident, or that I wasn’t paying as much attention to the
book’s math as I might have. It took me about a month, as I recall, to
finish, and this included several daily breaks to go outside and sit in
my truck to read it. (I didn’t smoke, and smoking was frowned on around
the facility, which utilized several highly volatile and teratogenic
compounds in its inscrutable processes; but this was Eastern North
Carolina, after all, so smoking was part of the natural order. If labor
and other pink collars could spend time smoking, I reasoned, then I
could take twenty minute breaks to investigate our present condition.
The office manager, an ardent, quixotic Dole supporter, didn’t like
this—or me, as it turned out—very much.)
How many people does it take to make a gang? I would guess that it would
be more than two, usually, and so I was surprised when Elif
Batuman, in a footnote to her amusing and
piquant essays, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the
People Who Read Them, mentioned the “gang of thugs” who accost the
unfortunate protagonist of Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” I taught this last
semester, as it turns out, and my Penguin edition does seem to indicate
that it’s two thugs. But then I quickly realized that Batuman has almost
certainly read Gogol in Russian, which I have not, and even details her
finding errors in other translations. For all I know, this is a
translation artifact, and I am completely out of my depth. What am I
doing even writing about this book, with its evidence of commitment to
comparative literature far beyond what I could imagine (Samarkand,
Uzbek) and its somewhat hothouse intellectual atmosphere (particularly
in the last chapter)? I feel pleased with myself for reading a German
translation of Lem’s “Provocation,” for example, and here I found myself
wistfully imagining the vastness of the Hoover collections and the
unfettered opulence of a university that allows graduate students $2500
grants for overseas field work—in Slavic literature. We can’t imagine
the shape of our fate, that’s for sure.
An article of mine on John le Carre’s The Secret Pilgrim appears in
the latest issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection. Here’s the
abstract:
The Secret Pilgrim was John le Carré’s first novel to consider the
end of the Cold War. The author describes how the novel’s embedded
structure reveals le Carré’s political perspective more clearly than
previous works and argues that this narrative frame is an adaptation
to the sudden collapse of le Carré’s traditional subject matter.
