other times i’m a copywriter. college marketing. it’s actually pretty fun and i like the people i work with.
but the higher ed audience can be tricky. you have to think like them, but you haven’t really thought like them in a long time (for me, eleven years). that can lead to a lot of trouble.
whenever things get a little corny in a meeting, i start arguing passionately that we should develop a whole campaign around the concept of a robot with a mohawk. for example:
i got a new boss a few months ago. it turns out he’s a good guy, but at the time i didn’t know anything about him. one morning at a meeting we were talking about how to utilize social networking and i didn’t like where things were going. as things started to get a little tense, i actually busted out with:
“i’m not against edgy stuff. i’m the guy who made up the idea of a robot with a mohawk.”
a real life emotional teenager
then-new boss looked really confused, but nobody else in the meeting batted an eyelash because they were used to it by then. the thing is, i’m pretty sure there are people at my work who think i would like to develop a campaign around a robot with a mohawk.
i’m going to tell you something right now: when i’m talking about a robot with a mohawk, unless we’re debating the merits of short circuit versus short circuit 2, i’m really talking about something else. this may go for other things, too.
on an unrelated note, here is a quote from kierkegaard:
There was a man whose chatter certain circumstances made it necessary for me to listen to. At every opportunity he was ready with a little philosophical lecture, a very tiresome harangue. Almost in despair, I suddenly discovered that he perspired copiously when talking. I saw the pearls of sweat gather on his brow, unite to form a stream, glide down his nose, and hang at the extreme point of his nose in a drop-shaped body. From the moment of making this discovery, all was changed; I even took pleasure in inciting him to begin his philosophical instruction, merely to observe the perspiration on his brow and at the end of his nose.
back to the real topic:
at work we recently had to enter a competition to decorate a school mascot. i managed to convince a number of my colleagues that we should turn the mascot into a robot with a mohawk. cooler, or maybe less cool, heads prevailed and the results were as decent as you could hope for from such a corny competition. but a different group put a mohawk on their mascot.
my style is viral.
does anybody remember that episode of mr belvedere where kevin tries to join a band and expects them to be all punk because they’re called the young savages, but it turns out they’re just a bunch of squares and the front men are named young and savage?
no?
now i will post about everything ravaged, everything burned by wells tower.
i said before, the book is perfectly good, but this is disappointing because tower demonstrates the ability to be much better than that, as in, among the best. so let me begin with what is excellent about this book:
the dialogue:
the dialogue is stylized, but in the direction of naturalism. exchanges tend toward the clever and are frequently politically incorrect. i have to point that last out because one of the book’s flaws … but let me get to that later. anyway, even dialogue that might look overcooked out of context is actually excellent within the story. here is an example (from “Executors of Important Energies”):
“You played with Kenny Loggins?” Lucy said.
“I did blow for Kenny on the European tour. My wife and me, we also blessed his outfit with some very beautiful backing vocals. Saw all the top destinations, stayed in fine hotels, rode all the major airlines, Qantas, Virgin, Atlantic. I’m glad you brought it up. That was a happy time of life.”
“You still married, Dwayne?” she asked.
“Enough about me,” Dwayne said. “I’m getting depressed.”
like i said, this might look overcooked out of context, but in the story it works beautifully. like, if you were to show this to me without the rest, i would think this story would be about where dwayne’s wife was, but that’s the thing — there’s nothing else in the story about dwayne’s wife. and talking about kenny loggins is good. and the fact that dwayne leaves the word “my” out of “that was a happy time of life.” that’s a great touch.
the prose in general and its rhythm:
there’s just really is no denying this. tower is the type of writer who will flow along with a great cadence and then come out with something that will pop you in the eye. here i’m just going to grab something (from “Down Through the Valley”):
She was molten in my bed, but she also suffered from depressions that were very dear to her. She would often call just to sigh at me for two hours on the phone, wanting me to applaud her depth of feeling. I cut it off, then missed her, wishing that I’d at least had the sense to take her naked photograph.
“molten” might be obvious, but the very dear depressions counteract it nicely and make it good. that she sighs “at” him makes up for the “depth of feeling” (too obvious a joke?), and then the naked photograph, while it might smack of posturing, is clever in context.
the only real problem with towers’ ability is that he can be accused of varying too elegantly now and then, and occasionally he’ll rock a passive sentence for no clear reason. (this, for some reason, is especially common toward the beginning of each story.)
the use of simile/metaphor:
there’s a sequence in the first story, “The Brown Coast,” where tower describes the sun in different states at different times. let me just quote here:
It was much hotter now, and the sun glared down through the sky like a flashlight behind a sheet.
…
The sun looked orange and slick, like a canned peach.
…
Bob walked home with the sunset nearly dead.
maybe it doesn’t scream genius, but it takes guts to even attempt that anymore, particularly in the third person (when you can’t blame it on your narrator).
but!
be true to yourself and you will never fall
metaphor also gets tower in trouble, at least in my book, particularly on a larger scale. the problem is, many of the stories operate as metaphors, and when the stories don’t, the protagonists do. the most obvious cases:
- in “the brown coast,” the protagonist is a poisonous sea cucumber.
- in “retreat,” the protagonist is spoiled moosemeat.
- in “wild america,” the protagonist is her chubby eunuch of a father.
the way i put it, they seem kind of funny, but i get the feeling tower means me to finish the stories and do that “hmph” that people do at readings, which i think is supposed to mean i would weep and/or dance if i had a soul.
in other words, many, that is, most of these stories are too easy, and most of them risk nothing. the politically incorrect actions and words lead to politically correct endings, when they end at all. several stories, in fact, meander forever to no effect, despite the excellent prose. and this is why i’ve been so pissed at the critics. i really get the feeling that — maybe because they’re a bunch of bloodless neuters — they either think, or have a reason to hope we think, that this is the way things are, and this is the way stories should be.
with all that said, there is one very good story in this collection and one great story.
the very good one is “down through the valley.” the great one is the title story. now, the common tie between the two is unexpected and exciting violence, but they actually create very different effects. the former would be great if it weren’t for the fact that the entire setup is like a beautiful transcription of high fidelity. the latter is great because it takes some of the aspects of the other stories, what workshop types call “well-made stories,” and sets it in viking times. yes, i love vikings, but this isn’t great because of vikings, it’s great because of the dissonance between its two components. that’s the closest thing tower takes to a risk in the whole collection.
i like wells tower’s writing. i would love wells tower’s writing if he would take some risks.
listen to me, wells tower, not daniel menaker.
and i will hate you for it forever.
as i mentioned before, i had been looking forward to a particular book for a long time, and then the press made me worried about that book (which i had bought by then), and then i was still going to read it with an open mind anyway, after i finished the savage detectives.
then i read more of the press.
first let me provide a little context for those of you who don’t know how to click a link. the book i was talking about was wells tower’s first collection, everything ravaged, everything burned, which, like i said in the title of this post, is perfectly good, but more on that next time. the press is everybody writing about it, everybody but me.
but saying the press is everybody writing about it would be letting the national newspaper of record off the hook, and when i say the national newspaper of record i mean the new york times, which published three separate pieces on the book (two reviews and a profile), all of which seemed designed to make people never want to read any book, much less this perfectly good one.
i’d absorbed the reviews by the time of my last post about it, but the profile made it more difficult than ever to give the book the benefit of the doubt. it was about a boy from a hardscrabble backwater called chapel hill, north carolina, whose parents, a professor of economics at duke (a community college, i’m guessing, named after john wayne) and a high school latin teacher (does that mean she teaches mexicans?), were so poor they had to drive beat up cars, which is why their son, who had to attend some (probably third-tier public) university called wesleyan and even work, occasionally for upward of a week, had such a good understanding of salt-of-the-earth types.
of course i love college
after i cried for a little while for wells, i decided that really what i should do was celebrate the fact that he was even literate, and my celebration of literacy led me to keep reading. i read a lot of stuff — an encyclopedia, some blogs, etc — until i stumbled on yet another review of wells tower. this one really hit home because it contained this passage:
I often distrust this kind of highly fictive and almost exhibitionistic imagination. Or at least it’s fictive-seeming; did the author in fact ever put a sea slug into an aquarium, shoot a moose, or marry a one-armed woman?
daniel menaker, it’s almost like you were reading my mind. i can’t tell you how much of my life i’ve spent trying to figure out if cervantes ever spent (even upward of a week) riding a haggard horse around spain in a rusty suit of armor with a basin on his head, or if jane austen actually ended up marrying a socially awkward but incredibly wealthy, handsome and sophisticated man, or if philip roth is really a black man, or michiko kakutani is actually holden caulfield.
that was sarcasm.
i feel a parable coming on, but the parable’s not by me, it’s by christopher kennedy, from his first book, nietzsche’s horse (which you should buy, or any of his books, really) (also, this post has not been endorsed by christopher kennedy, and i am using his parable in demagogic fashion). it’s about a man who, on getting change from a drugstore cashier, decides that one piece is his lucky dollar. this decision is immediately followed by a series of disasters that effect him directly. it ends with this line:
“I’d hate to think what things would be like without my lucky coin.”
apply that to fiction. apply it specifically to short stories.
the common claim is that nobody reads them. the response is that we should keep putting out the same kind we’ve been putting out. if you need me to explain the relation of the parable to this situation, you probably shouldn’t be reading my site, and you may enjoy having drinks with daniel menaker at some reception thrown by the new york times. and you are oblivious and irrelevant.
i do all the different things
but wells tower is neither oblivious or irrelevant. wells tower is extremely talented and also the author of a perfectly good book. but perfectly good is not good enough, and i will address that specifically next time.
in other words, it’s almost over. men on books, 1.3
this is the third and final part of my discussion with my brother timothy about the savage detectives by roberto bolano. read the second part here and the first part here.
from timothy:
the souls of white folks
hello, friend this will be the last thing anyone will ever say about “savage detectives.” i have finished the book for all time. i’ve been hesitating because i’m trying to put everything into a coherent logical stream, but it doesn’t seem like that is about to happen. so before we avaunt, be on yr guard (give up now).
i don’t have much to say in response to what you last wrote because i really think you encapsulated it quite nicely. if i may put a post-script to what you’ve put forth, i would say that the thing that bolano has done to make a truly global literature, and a great gift to latin american writers is to dislocate the narrative entirely. i would quibble with yr assessment of rushdie as relatable because he is so self-consciously other. bolano on the other hand, unlike the other light of the latin american 20th century, marquez, does not constantly beat you over the head with its latin american-ness. in fact, he even pisses on the idea with barrios (the character, whose name means not just neighborhood, but outskirts) educating the san diegan ex-pats on otherness.
i’ll mostly leave it unsaid how cheeky i am being, but the sentiment remains the same. i know there are many other luminaries, and frankly you know how well-versed i am in latin-american literature (ie not at all). i’ve purposely up to now avoided extemporizing, but the one thing i took from my trip that i feel comfortable saying in public is how much i enjoyed the intentional non-u.s.ness of mexico: the american tourist office that had no english speakers, the punk club that played the sex pistols followed by salsa. it was nice that unlike many europeans they don’t seem to actively define themselves in opposition with the u.s. (though this may be underlying it all, for all i know) and if i can call americans uneducated louts, i think this will do in terms of not being offensive.
how cheeky am i now? i even say cheeky. but it is truly freeing to have bolano actively allowing the reader to read this book wherever he is in life.
and we don’t read in a vacuum (wow, i almost made that seem fluid). i’m into delillo’s great jones street and was struck by this, the lapsed rockstar and his ‘girlfriend’ speaking:
“‘When am I going back to them? I know exactly what you mean. The people. The crowd. The audience. The fans. The followers.”
“The public,” she said.
“When I have something to go back with. Something or nothing. Nothing takes more time.”
maybe not the best way to get extra-textual, but it really helped me develop what i was thinking about sd. throughout the book, we are led to believe that ulises and belano are searching for something within cesarea’s life that struck them. so we construct their narrative: they were inspired by her life and wanted to live with as much meaning. but rather than retrace her steps, they would find cesarea by writing their own life stories.
but then we get to the final section, and we are told that they found cesarea and it’s up to us to decide whether they were inspired or deflated by the experience. i vacillate, but as i addressed in my previous missive, i think that the see-saw is the point. we pull back from one, and find its resting on another see-saw. see-saws all the way down.
kind of like life? exactly the sort of trite statement that made me avoid writing this for so damn long.
but i am old-school, a high-school hippie learning about and railing against deconstruction all at once.
literature can mean something, should be edifying, and is powerful. so what then to make of a cast of characters that are consciously trying to become literature?
‘Nothing takes more time.’- were ulises and belano disappointed or satisfied by their encounter with cesarea? i’ll leave it open-ended because answering it doesn’t suit my purpose. either way it is a deflating experience to search for something and find it; what then?
another unfounded statement on the nature of latin-american life. they (the characters in sd) feel comfortable claiming spain as the u.s. (we) does england (i do enjoy the linguistic shading being a we from us, highschool!!!), and it’s not a stretch to locate don quixote in this text. my memory fails me, but i even believe there is a mention somewhere.
the nature of don quixote, the book and the man, switches when he becomes aware of his biographer. the text folds in on itself. but, as readers we have been with him the whole time. throughout sd, we see ulises and bolano from a distance, except in the final 50 page section. yet readers can be confident that the characters are aware they are being written about. in fact, they live as though there is no other way, such that after his final deflating adventure in nicaragua we hear nothing more about ulises once he returns home. there will be no defeating the suitors.
meanwhile, belano’s story has major gaps, in between his dishwashing days to the days of africa, when he finally becomes the romantic ideal he seemed to be striving for throughout. and we don’t even get to see it. hmmm. nor do we get to see his relationship with arguably the love of his life or the birth of his son, both mentioned in passing. such is the fate of one who authors the content of a story but leaves the structure and purpose up to an editor. except this is a facsimile of real life we are talking about. and belano is bolano’s double, so this is the story as he meant it to be told. and as you mentioned, making yrself the romantic hero going off to yr death in africa is not too shabby.
And Cesarea gave me a look, a brief little sideways glance, and said that the search for a place to live and a place to work was the common fate of all mankind.
Stridentism and visceral realism are just two masks to get us to where we really want to go. And where is that? she said. To modernity, Cesarea, I said, to goddamned modernity…
so what do people do when confronted with a cesarea? well, i struggle with amadeo’s response. he is one of my favorite characters, but i cannot tell if his response comes from not getting it, or getting it all too well. even so, he does not follow cesarea, though it would have been exceedingly easy, which probably turns out to be the right decision for him, allowing him to romanticize this singular figure. but he is nostalgic to the point of paralysis, his writings achieving none of what he had hoped, so maybe it wasn’t the right decision. aquiles, on the other hand, has mostly forgotten cesarea and become a much more successful writer.
and madero either misunderstands or sees an opportunity for excuse-making in taking over the life cesarea has left behind, with the subtle improvement of regular sex. no wangknife? such a disappointment.
and what does cesarea mean to the reader, ulises and belano? is she authoring the romantic life of a poet who was able to escape, a prophet who foresees 2666? or is she a hack who ruminates on minor public policy quibbles? add to this the intentional confusion between her only published poem and madero’s mexican jokes and the final drawings are devoid of authorship. poems or jokes? both? regardless, we have no indication that ulises or belano contacted madero to retrieve the journals, though they knew it was possible.
none of this is to take away from the loaded question that haunts the end of the book. i’m not about to try to answer it. in fact, i could make an argument that everything i’ve written is to declare its unanswerability.
one last thing about intertextuality. something i’ve been skirting for quite some time but it has some resonance with what i’ve written above. there’s an obvious homage to ‘under the volcano’ in the shooting death of mi general in a brothel under vague political pretense. i’ll leave it at that in case you intend to read it someday, but its a fun winknnod, that underscores the character-literature play especially as it happens to a would-be patron of the arts who is noted as not particularly well-read or intelligent.
back with lowry then; the epigram about not allowing mexico to be saved by god. i enjoy the way that religion is so absent from the text (another divorce from trad latin-american lit and culture? as i understand it) and addressed only as myth and poetry, such as ulises’ theory on the camel and needle. one more pisstake, jesus lived his life and let others do the writing, only to have them get one letter wrong and fuck the whole thing up.
“Once Arturo told me that Ulises had his own version of one of Jesus’ parables, but either he couldn’t explain it very well or I’ve forgotten it, or, most likely, I wasn’t paying much attention when he told it to me.”
so, have i said something? nothing takes more time, but that wasn’t what I meant to say.
from me:
ce ci n'est pas une pipe
while i could tweak this or that of your theses one way or another, you’ve pretty much summed up my emotional/interpretive reactions to the book, and the only place i want to jump in is to clear up my comment about rushdie: i don’t think i got my point about him across in the last post because i agree (both now and when i first wrote it) with your reaction precisely.
and i would add that this book is a mindfuck.
otherwise i’m going to let our own conversation about the book fizzle out with something a lot less consequential (unless, of course, you care to rebut). i want to talk about mechanics. i mentioned a long time ago that i had certain problems with bolano’s technique, and i figured i’d tell you how they played out for me.
first, the book definitely dragged at times, as i suspected it would. what i didn’t expect was how often it dragged even in the final section of madero’s journals. overall, in much the same way that the end of the oral history justified the drag of the middle, the end of the book justifies the drag of the near-end.
but who wants to be justified?
i understand that the whole metapoint of this book is that the center doesn’t hold, no matter where you locate the center (belano/lima, tinajero, madero, the state of global art, life, etc.), but the artistry shouldn’t be sacrificed to the point.
can of worms and shit.
see, most of the criticism i’ve seen tries to skirt the issue by de-emphasizing the artistry behind it and tries to make of that part of the point, but that’s laziness at best and noble-savagizing at worst. there can be no mistaking that bolano put a massive amount of thought and work on behalf of an almost unparalleled talent into the structure and style of this book (as i know you agree). and not just this book. there is so much of 2666 in here (from the cryptic mention of the number itself w/r/t tinajero to the frequent appearance of a writer who sounds a lot like archimboldi, one ostensible focuse of 2666 the novel), as well as references to books that he’d previously published, that it’s hard to imagine that bolano didn’t have some overarching narrative in mind for his whole career. (this is going to get even more confusing as the industry descends on his papers — i’ve heard a sixth section of 2666 was discovered recently.)
i’m not going to deal with all that. it’s a dissertation at least, and we’re abusing the internet enough already.
but assuming this is so (and it has to be, unless he’s the most interesting charlatan of all time), how could he fuck up some of the things he fucked up?
the drag i mentioned is an example, but a hard one to defend. (one man’s drag is another man’s contact high.) since no one’s here accusing me, i’m going to say he knew it was, and is a bully. even if he’s bullying in pursuit of a point. this claim becomes very easy to substantiate in light of section 4 of 2666. i ain’t mad, but he didn’t need to go that far, same with the oral history.
but here is one that i’ll dip in before i leave: the unintentional gaps. i’m not talking about the disappearances of lima and belano (both obviously intentional). i mean, like, who compiled the oral history? i think the obvious candidate is madero himself, particularly in light of Grajales’ “Garcia Madero? He doesn’t ring a bell [...] There was another seventeen-year-old kid but he wasn’t called Garcia Madero. Let’s see … his name was Bustamante.” but then too many things don’t match up.
early (relatively) in the oral history, maria font tells the interlocutor about her first sighting of belano and lima after the suddent departure. she repeatedly mentions the “stolen” impala. at the end, we know madero ended up with it. why wouldn’t madero mention this to her? if she’s only relating a former mindstate (ie, at the time she thought they had the car, but at the time she relates the story she knows madero had it) this should be clear in the syntax. likewise, basically everyone covers ground that they know madero would be aware of (in this chapter, for ex, that quim’s in the bin; in another, angelica points out that pancho was her boyfriend, which she knew madero knew).
this could be a statement about everyone’s tendency to self-mythologize (your notion that the characters live as though they’re being written about, which i agree applies to belano and lima), but i don’t buy it because i see the lack of center and disillusionment as being linked inextricably, and really it would be cheap otherwise. here’s why:
for some reason, tinajero opted out. out of what, who cares. but her collected works amount to a straight line, a wavy line, and a jagged line. you were right in pointing out that madero’s sombrero and window riffs toward the end recall tinajero’s one published poem. doesn’t this suggest a shared mindstate? could madero idolize belano and lima enough to begin tracking their memory down almost immediately? (the interviews begin shortly after these adventures.)
even if you/anyone disagree(s) with that take, there’s still this: if the interlocutor really wanted to preserve the story of belano and lima, why leave so much (meaning the major points, like most of lima’s time in mexico and the love of belano’s life, both of which i’ve mentioned already, but also their poetry, which is absent) out? That’s totally appropriate for a novel, but not for an oral history, which seeks to document.
i have my hunches, but they point to bolano’s point (mentioned ad nauseum) and not to the form. the ideal is to match point and form up, no? and yet bolano is clearly too smart not to realize. i will think about this a lot, i know, just like i will think about the ending and also how it relates to 2666, which i also think about a lot.
but i will not post about it again for a long, long time.
this concludes the part about bolano.
add three snaps and you know the score
i will resume posting at slightly more internet-appropriate lengths shortly.
thank you, timothy.
