I had trouble reading Suttree in the room with my sleeping infant
daughter, as I often couldn’t stop myself from cackling. It’s one of the
funniest books I’ve read: probably more funny than Bouvard and
Pecuchet, Decline and Fall, Cold Comfort Farm, or any of a variety
from Wodehouse, which would be the closest contenders in recent memory.
I’ve now taken the step of reading some of the criticism on the book,
and I was somewhat surprised that there wasn’t more of it. (I didn’t yet
finish the long recent article in Contemporary Literature by J.
Douglas Canfield, though I did notice at least one recent University of
Alabama book that is available in its entirety from google books, in
what I hope is a continuing trend.)
When in periods of extended sleeplessness, such as after the birth of a
child, I have found myself more interested than usual in comic books. I
read almost all of the various Ultimate omnibuses shortly after Henry
was born, for example, and this time with Clara I read one of those
black-and-white compilations covering 1978-1980 or so of the
Claremont/Byrne X-Men.
This sequence contains the “Dark Phoenix” storyline, about which I
actually wrote a paper in graduate school. (The premise had more to do
with what I thought were interesting ideas derived from cognitive
psychology about the narrative construction of the panels [or, how
narrative sequence is constructed from them, a common topic in the
secondary literature on comics] combined with some ideological analysis.
Such syncretism informed a lot of what I wrote in graduate school for a
certain period, and I can now identify it as a stage.)
For those of us who pre-order the latest Gene Wolfe novel and read it
immediately, irrespective of the circumstances, the last two books have
presented some difficulties. Wolfe seems to have entered a “late style,”
where the natural suspicion, caution, and, to be fair, interpretive
charity that veteran readers of Wolfe bring to the text have yielded
unusual results. Pirate Freedom seems to have escaped much of the
exegetical explosion that An Evil Guest received on the Urth mailing
list for Wolfe enthusiasts, even though both books involve reality
distortion and time travel (well, I think there’s some type of reality
distortion in Pirate Freedom), fictional devices that admit no logical
limits on narrative analyses. His latest, The Sorcerer’s House,
certainly has reality-distortion (alternate realities in the form of the
venerable faerie-land and also in the possibly demented imagination of
one of the main focal characters); there’s also at least putative
differential time-flow, though this is only considered time-travel by
the scrupulous. I liked the book a great deal more than the last two,
and it still remains a great mystery to me that I didn’t so much like a
Lovecraftian pastiche written by Wolfe. Perhaps I’ll give it another
try.
I was thinking a little today about the problem of snark. I haven’t read
David Denby’s book on it, but I was able to work out after thinking
about it for a while that the lowest form of snark possible on the
internet would be snark about John Byrne’s Canadian superhero team,
Alpha Flight:
(I apologize for the monochrome; I think I may own a colored original of
this particular issue, purchased by my loving parents at the City News
in Morehead City, NC when I was about five or so; but the mountains
around me are tall and deep with snow, and I could never find it now.)
You can’t really see her face here, but I’ve uploaded some more
pictures to Flickr, if you’re
interested.
Clara Madeleine Goodwin was born at 7:33 AM on Friday. She weighed 8
lbs. and was 19" long. She shows all the signs of being a good baby, and
her big brother is both tolerant of and occasionally interested in her
presence.
While in the hospital with Clancy, I read about two-thirds of Gene
Wolfe’s latest, The Sorcerer’s House, which I so far like a great deal
more than his last two books, even if Wolfe is drawing upon some fairly
outlandish academic stereotypes. More soon.
Like, I suppose many users of LibraryThing, I am curious about
statistics the site provides
about its users. While I understand why Harry Potter, Twilight, Douglas
Adams, and a series of high school and college staples would be among
the most popular books owned, I don’t quite see why Jeffrey Eugenides'
Middlesex would be the sixtieth most-owned item, with an astounding
14,000 copies listed. (Oh. Wikipedia just told me that it was in Oprah’s
book club. I still don’t think I have a good handle on the LibraryThing
demographic, though.)
Hermes, the god of pathways, appears at first to be the narrator of John
Banville’s The Infinities. The rapid shifts in perspective at the end
of the novel reveal that Adam Godley, a mathematician who’s had a
stroke, has been creating a type of parallel world, one apparently
predicted by what he thinks are his mathematical accomplishments, in
which those accomplishments have been at the center of world-historical
change. This change extends both backwards in time and
forwards—Elizabeth Tudor was beheaded before Mary, Queen of Scots,
acceded to the throne (36), for one example. (Another, where Banville’s
own wishes seem to overlap those of his character, is that Kleist has
the stature of Goethe, and vice versa. Kleist’s Amphitryon is alluded
to directly and is a significant influence on the story.)
I’m going to write a review of John Banville’s The Infinites before
too long. As I was preparing, I came across this interesting
interview
where Banville says: “John le Carré, for instance, not a great novelist,
but he has a genius when it comes to names. I mean, all the names called
in his cast are absolutely perfect. Henry James is similar.”
Was he thinking of Fanny Assingham? I have a paper on Le Carré that’s
coming out soon and have read almost all of his novels, and I can’t say
that his facility with names ever caught my notice. Lacon, maybe. (Not
for the silly reason that may come to mind. Or the other silly reason.)
Barley was also fairly inspired. Kurtz I’m not so sure about.
I am a late adopter of
LibraryThing, but I
have slowly entered most of my books into it over the last few weeks. A
goodly number have incorrect editions, and I was too impatient to fix
them.
The “members with your books” feature also seems to update sporadically,
which is mildly annoying. I also am not sure I understand the weighting
algorithm, though I hope it’s based on books shared by you and the
fewest number of other folks.
I just read this, and I have to admit that I resent its price. Moving
past that minor objection, I have read a few of the reviews (FT, CSM,
McGrath piece in NYT), and I would have liked for them to have tackled
what seems to me be an important question about the book–i.e., what
happens to Jessica. They chose spoiler avoidance, which is
understandable, but I have no such compunction. Jessie is Richard
Elster’s daughter. Elster is a former Pentagon consultant and
intellectual architect of “reality-based community”-like ideas, who’s
become, in his Spenglerian declining phase, a Teilhardian. Hence, “Point
Omega.” Jim Finley wants to do a Fog of War on him. Jessie meets our
anonymous narrator for two sections during a screening of Douglas
Gordon’s 24-hour Psycho. These two sections begin and the end the
book, while the rest takes place in a desert retreat where Finley tries
to persuade Elster to participate in the film.
