Lawrence Durrell: Bitter Lemons

Bitter Lemons is an autobiographical work by Lawrence Durrell. He lived on the island of Cyprus for 3 years, and then left as the turmoil of the mid 1950s there ramped up. In 1959 the island was granted independence from the United Kingdom. But the book isn't about the political struggle, it's about people, Greeks and Turks and Cypriots; and Durrell is a master at describing people.

"No Greek can sit still without fidgeting, tapping a foot or a pencil, jerking a knee, or making popping noises with his tongue. The Turk has a monolithic poise, an air of reptilian concentration and silence. it is with just such an air that a chameleon can sit, hour after hour, upon a shrub, staring unwinkingly at the world, living apparently in that state of suspended judgement which can be summed up in the Arabic word kayf.I have seen Sabri loading logs, shouting at peasants, even running down a street; but never has he conveyed the slightest feeling of energy being expended. His actions and words had the smoothness of inevitability; they flowed from him like honey from a spoon."

His characters are old and young, comic and tragic and in this book he's working with a cast of at least ostensibly real people. One can never know if they truly are, but they are while it's leaves are open.

Flannery O'Connor

The very first sentence of The Violent Bear It Away:

"Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was sitting and bury it in a Christian way, with the sign of the Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up."

It is an incredibly powerful run-on sentence and a start to a book you can't stop. Front loading a story like that is unusual, but effective if the skill is there. Flannery O'Connor is virtually unmatched. The Violent Bear It Away was her second and last book. She was considered to be of the southern gothic style and you can see why. She died of lupus in 1964, she was only 39. More here.

To The Borrower

A Single Pebble

It was admittedly a hard read. John Hersey's naive Euro-centrism sort of tainted the text throughout A Single Pebble. But it had some hing points. He was after all the first western surveyor to visit the Three Gorges region where there is today an enormous hydroelectric dam. So the book, for all it's 1950s hubris, largely came to pass. Despite that, Hersey is a good writer, and he had some very memorable passages.

"Here was a terminal of commerce, a big shifting place of rice and salt and coal and cotton and tree oil and paper made from bamboo, and many other wanted things, and greeds and lusts and bitterness of the floating market were noisy and confusing, after the weeks of the spare, melancholy sounds of our progress up river."

It's the next best thing to being there. Which is good, because "there" no longer exists; not in the chronological sense and not in the physical sense. The face of the river was changed when it was dammed in 2009.

Burroughs

Burroughs is an icon now whose fame is nebulous, famous for begin famous, before being famous for being a writer. Tales of drug use, gunplay and a late life connection to Kurt Cobain have largely elapsed his literary legacy. He'd be both amused and concerned for us. I sometimes re-read some of his iconoclastic works to remind me why he doesn't need defending or lionizing.

"Contradictory commands are an integral part of the modern industrial environment: Stop. Go. Wait here. Go there. Come in. Stay out. Be a man. Be a woman. Be White. Be Black. Live. Die. Be your real self. Be somebody else. Be a human animal. Be a superman. Yes. No. Rebel submit. RIGHT. WRONG. Make a splendid impression. Make an awful impression. Sit down. Stand up. Take your hat off. Put your hat on. Create. Destroy. Live now. Live in the future. Live in the past. Obey the law. Break the law. Be ambitious. Be modest. Accept. Reject. Plan ahead. Be spontaneous. Decide for yourself. Listen to others. Talk. SILENCE. Save money. Spend money. Speed up. Slow down. This way. That way. Right. Left. Present. Absent. Open. Closed. Entrance. Exit. IN. OUT. etc., round the clock."

All that while in the context of comparing American media madly to an archaic Mayan calendar. Long live the king.

Handmade

I found a handmade book, bound by hand, written by hand. He quotes from Emerson and elaborates a bit for a dozen broken sparse pages. An equal number are blank. I'll probably never know where it came from.

DOWNLOAD 

HERE

FOG Index

I found this set of instructions inside a hardback set of Somerset Maugham's short stories. It concerns the FOG index, a  measure of the readability.What's interesting is that they're applying it to technical writing, a daunting task. This is the short version:

You can Download it here:
http://www.divshare.com/download/14942572-2b3

José Martí

He is probably the only writer more popular in Cuba than Hemingway. But he is relatively unknown in the US. he died in 1895, and as you might expect, his writing is a bit dated now, but more by topic than by flourish. Who writes essays about Buffalo Bill anymore? Today he's remembered more for his political writing. Martí was killed in battle against Spanish troops at the Battle of Dos Ríos. His death propelled the issue of Cuban independence, at the time from Spain but he continued to be embraced later in the revolution against Batista. His non-political writing is worth remembering.  (It's all public domain now, no reason to buy a print copy if you have an e-reader)

I quote here 2 sentences from an essay he wrote about Coney Island in New York.It reveals a revolutionary who was also awed by the scope and hustle of our largest city.

"It is a world full of stars, with Orchestras, dancing, merriment, surf sounds, human sounds, choruses of laughter, gentle breezes, barkers chanting, swift carriages, swifter trains, until the hour comes to go home. Then like a monster that vomits its contents into the hungry maw of another monster, that colossal crowd, that straining, crushing mass, forces it's way onto trains, which speed across the wastes, groaning under their burden, until they surrender it to the tremendous steamers, enlived by the sound of harps and violins, which take up the holiday throng, convey it to the piers, and debouch the weary merrymakers into the spread through slumbering New York like veins of steel."

Richard E. Byrd: Alone

He was a pilot and a naval officer. He was both an Arctic and Antarctic explorer. How many men have been to both the North and South Poles? Like Nicol Smith he traveled then returned to lecture to raise money for further adventure. Both wrote about their exploits. More here. He wrote 5 books I know of: Skyward, Little America, Discovery, Exploring With Byrd, and Alone. He's a surprisingly decent writer for an explorer.

"...I do not regret going. For I read my books—if not as many as I had counted on reading; and listened to my phonograph records—even when they seemed to intensify my suffering; and meditated—though not as cheerfully as I had hoped. All this was good, and it is mine.  What I had not counted on was discovering how closely a man could come to dying and still not  die, or want to die."

Dos Passos

That's a quote from my 1945 copy of First Encounter a book that's actually a reprint of his first novel One Man's Initiation.It was written about WWI and he had it reprinted in the middle of WWII.  He meant it politically as he did most things.  John Dos Passos had his career ruined by politics, but it was he who was so overtly to be political When the tides shifted on McCarthy, he failed to roll back.

"Red sweating faces, drooping under the hard rims of helmets, turned to the ground with the struggle with the weight of equipment; rows and patches of faces were the only warmth in the desolation of putty-coloured mud and bowed mud-coloured bodies and dripping mud-coloured sky." 

In that short quote he uses a lot of repetition. Repetition is a tool. Over-use is common, but Dos Passos was a master. He first describes each noun as it passes except "ground."  Red faces, hard rims, ... then does not describe the ground. But then used that ground to describe everything else: putty colored mud, mud-colored bodies, mud-colored sky.  It's perfectly balanced.

Fante and Bandini

I am not the first person to blog about this book. Hard to say who was first but the best was over at Mooks and Gripes.I however, fixate on a single sentence. It's what I do here.  This book was made into a film in 1989. I've never seen it.  It is probably the best known of John Fante's books.

The book was first published in 1938.  You cant tell. There's nothing dated about the language. It was reprinted in 1983 by John Martin's Black Sparrow Press.

"The world of inanimate things found voice, conversed with the old house, and the house chattered with cronish delight of the discontent within its walls."

Brilliant anthropomorphizing.the phrase "the world of inanimate things" is particularly powerful. They do have their own world wholly separate, silent and insentient. We are be-ing, and they are certainly not. Here he used it all to characterize the absence of a person, this is reflected by a secondary character projecting this sense of absence onto the inanimate.

Bruce Chatwin

"Mosquitoes bit the hard parts of my fingers."

Bruce Chatwin wrote that in Niger in 1971. The lines were published posthumously in 1993 in the book Photographs and Notebooks.  It's only 8 words but it says so much. It reminds me of the more famous six word sentence by Hemingway.

He avoids calling them callouses a charge word with a lot of connotations that are no longer there. Their presence indicates his hard living and manual labor. The mosquitoes are plural, not singular.  he's out-numbered, and that he passively lets them bite indicates either patience, indifference or masochism.

It's what I'd expect from the author of In Patagonia.

Words Are Tyrants

"...words are tyrannical things, they exist for their meanings, and if you will not pay attention to these, you cannot pay attention at all."

 -W. Somerset Maugham.  (The Summing Up)

What can you add to that?  The Summing Up was his autobiography and his statement on the world as he knew it. I have a nice old hardback copy from 1938. He'd write another 26 books in the next 24 years strangely putting it in the middle of his career. His biggest most enduring books The Razors Edge and Of Human Bondage weren't published until 1944 and 1946 respectively.  So in reading his words it is doubly interested to read what he thought of words, and most especially his own words. More here.

Larrouy, Maurice

Maurice's name appears nowhere in the book. he is credited at the time merely as "Y." It's a collection of letters, one half of an exchange between two men each serving in WWI aboard a different ship. We are left with only one half presumably because one of the ships was sunk. The reciprocated letters went down with him. It's all public domain now. You can get this book "the Odyssey of a Torpedoed transport" free here.

"They were exhausted. Some of them almost died, they were spitting blood. And as they were cold, bronchitis and inflammation of the lungs had set in. The only physician they had was Fourges, which means none at all. As a remedy he gave them rum in hot water, for our medicine chest had soon been emptied. Three of them died, which is not many, say the officers. We threw them overboard into the Atlantic with a sack of coal at their feet to make them sink."

Maurice had a gift for nearly awkward understatement. In an odd way that communicated many of the things that were otherwise left unsaid. Turn of the century British writing is usually very stiff, even dull or drab. these are personal letter and they have a more informal feel that helps keep the truth poignant.

Outerbridge Reach

I've remembered part of this quote for 18 years and finally tonight put together what it came from. I dont recall how I came to possess the book, Outerbridge Reach by Robert Stone, but I recall it was brand new when I read it.

"On the drive they passed a burning cane field and Indian cattle grazing under swarms of flies among ruined vines. The earth was blood red, the vegetation fleshy. Everything was death and fecundity."

It was the perfect words twisted into another meaning. Death and fecundity are used in biology to describe life cycles. In reality I think everything is death or fecundity, but Stone wrote what he meant. Ultimately his book Dog Soldiers was better, but never more elegant than this..

Rebecca West

I don't know a damn thing abotu Rebecca West. Black Lamb and Grey falcon was published in 1940. Mine is a hard copy from 1944. the beast of a book is 1,150 pages long. But from this one book alone I knew she was fervently political Black Lamb.org described her thusly:

"A vivacious, politically-committed woman, West began writing in radical periodicals while still a student at George Watson’s Ladies’ College in Edinburgh and took her pen name from one of Ibsen’s emancipated heroines. Her early novels and critical studies, excellent in themselves, nevertheless seem preludes to her masterwork Black Lamb and Grey Falcon..."

So here we have that very book and it is as they say.

"...If I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years I would always hear "No, there was fear, there were our enemies, without, our rulers within, there was prison, there was torture, there was violent death."

Giscombe

Giscombe is a poet first and foremost. I don't care for much poetry, and not his in particular; just poerty at all. Where I find allegory and metaphor very descriptive, I find poetry to be code. I find no pleasure in reading or writing in code. So C.S. Giscombe is not one I'd have encountered had he not branched out into prose. I bought this book for $3 because I liked a single passage and afterward read it and went onto enjoy it as a whole.

Into and Out of dislocation is a book about a hundred things: America, Canada, blackness, genealogy, teaching, writing, history, travel, research, sex, good food, bad food, drinking bourbon, mass transit, bicycling... It's disjointed like Saroyan. But skillfully tied together by a tight first-person narrative. The single quote follows. The italics are his, the bold is mine.

"I'm here to reclaim him, I wrote in my journal that winter in Fort George. This is the dry hump of kinship, my arrival at the public dock at Germansen Landing or Fort George or the mouth of Quesnelle to reclaim his ass. "

Sudden Sea

R.A. Scotti has great one-liners. it's very strange to think that her career began in writing spy and detective novels. Her prose isn't dense, it reads easily but then she'll drop a stone into your drink. She uses them artfully using them to slam on the brakes or the accelerator. In non-fiction it's unusual in it's poetry.

"All along the Northeast coast, riled by the wind, the sea became magnificent and mad."

It's simple and visual and it works with the alliteration. The clausulas are different but the near-rhyme is interesting. I like alliteration because it's difficult to use and when you fail you sound foolish. It's very satisfying when it works; and this works.

Read Everything

A complete list of the books I read in 2009 in Chronological order.

1. Karen Blixen - Seven Gothic tales
2. Philip Roth - Everyman
3. Don Mitchell - Four Stroke
4. William Saroyan - My name is Aram
5. Steven Kurutz - Like a rolling stone
6. Larry Zuckerman - The Potato
7. Ken Kesey - Once Flew over the cuckoos nest
8. Leonard Wolfe - Sowing: An Autobiography Of The Years 1880-1904
9. Betty Jeffery - White Coolies
10. Jamaica Kincaid - A Small Place
11. Howard S. Becker - Outsiders
12. Rockwell Kent - N by E
13. J.G. Ballard - Crash
14. Ira Judson Condit - Fig varieties: a monograph
15. Erich Kahler - Disintegration of Form in the Arts
16. Ernest Hemingway - By Line
17. Robert Ruark - Something of Value
18. Alan Lomax - Mr. Jelly Roll
19. Mark Baker - Nam
20. John Clellon Holmes - Go
21. M. Ageyev - Novel with Cocaine
22. Felix Feneon - Novels in Three Lines
23. Nathanael West – Miss Lonely Hearts & The Day of the Locust
24. Mezz Mezzerow – Really the Blues
25. Gary Marmorstein - The Label: The Story of Columbia Records
26. George Gaylord Simpson – Attending Marvels: A Patagonian Journal
27. Philippe Diole - Okapi Fever
28. Eugene O'Neil - the Emperor Jones
29. Steve Almond - My life in Heavy Metal
30. James J. Davis - the Iron Puddler
31. William Burroughs - The Burroughs File
32. Christopher Morley - Exlibris
33. Aage Krarup-Nielsen - Hell Beyond the High Seas
34. W.H. Hudson - Tales of the Pampas
35. Alejo Carpentier - The Lost Steps
36. David W. Elliot - Listen to the Silence
37. Charles Michael Boland - They all Discovered America
38. Harry Frankfort - Bullshit
39. Jane Smiley - A Thousand Acres
40. Lazlo Beke - A Students Diary: Budapest 1956
41. Jack Paar - I kid you not
42. John O'Brien - Better
43: Nick Tosches - In the Hand of Dante
44: Ludwig Lewisohn - Upstream
45: Andre Gide - The Immoralist
46: Lester Bangs - Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
47: Steve Almond - Candy Freak
48: John McPhee – The Pine Barrens
49: John Fahey – How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life
50 Daniel Duane - Looking for Mo
51. Josephine Johnson - now in November
52. Scott Huler - Defining the Wind
53. Walter Yetnikoff - Howling at the Moon
54. Robert Ruark - The Old Man and the Boy
55. Linda Stratmann - Chloroform: the Quest for Oblivion
56. Theodore Roosevelt - Hunting Trips of a Ranchman & Hunting trips on the Prairie and in the Mountains
57. Elliott Schwartz - Electronic Music a Listeners Guide
58. Henry Miller – the air conditioned nightmare
59. Mary King ODonnell – Those Other People
60. William Warner - Beautiful Swimmers : Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay
61. Bill Hicks - Love All The People
62. Caleb Earle - Martha Furnace Diary
63. Joseph Conrad - Lord Jim
64. Grace, Beverly & Charles Smith - Through the Kitchen Door
65. James A. Michener - The Quality of Life
66. Meredith Wilson - And There I stood with my Piccolo
67. Susan Seligson - Going with the Grain
68. David Yeadon - Secluded Islands of the Atlantic Coast
69. P.V. Glob – The Bog People
70. Ernet Hemingway - Green Hills of Africa

Beautiful Swimmers

William W. Warner died last year and is often the case I come upon these works after it's too late to ever ask the author themselves. Beautiful Swimmers has been in print continually since 1976, and rightly so. He wrote one other work abotu the sea Distant Water: The Fate of the North Atlantic Fisherman which was very similar to Beautiful Swimmers but with a different region of fishermen. He also published a collection of short stories that was quite good and strangely a dull as dry oatmeal treatise on Catholicism.

The strength of Warners work is in it's clean prose. This passage could have been reams longer detailing the disappointment, the emptiness or the dead grasses surrounding the square patch of bate earth. Instead Warner says everything by saying very little.

"Reaching Wenona, I was surprised to find an empty lot where Corbin's trailer home had formerly stood. Only a few cinder blocks of the foundation, a broken child's tricycle and some rusty crab pots remained."