Books and Pamphlets

Sometimes when you buy a box of books you find nothing but garbage. But sometimes a box of books contains retro subversive and lefty literature: Ernest Mandel, Fred Halstead, Peter Camejo, Leon Trotsky, George Novak, and James P. Cannon. It's a nice find.

The Assault

Harry Mulisch wrote The Assault in 1982, but across it's time line, it's largely set in post-WWII Netherlands.   The book's time line is brilliant, flashing backward through the memories of multiple characters piecing together the unseen opening event of the story. But the book is largely dialog, and in keeping the dialog realistic, laid back on the prose in much of the text.

"Everything is forgotten in the end. the shouting dies down, the waves subside, the streets empty, and all is silence once more... With a quick gesture he tosses his straight graying hair, dragging his feet a bit, as if each step raised clouds of ashes, although there are no ashes in sight."

Though there are absolutely glowing sections such as the above...

Bruce Pollock

In the book When Rock Was Young, author Bruce Pollock strings together magazine-type artist biographies into a historical narrative. Rock n' roll history is a well-tread topic but Pollack was among the best writers to cover it. Most of his prose here is pretty straight ahead but he has moments of true grandeur. This is one of them:

"Progenitors of the draft-dodging, pinko, student protestors, the pot-smoking, acid-swallowing, hippies yippies, and the free-love, back-to-nature, love-and-peace, organic, ban-the-bomb, dropout radicals, early folk singers could be found somewhere south of the Top 40 and east of Rock 'n' roll."

R.B. Cunninghame Graham

R.B. Cunninghame Graham was the first MP ever to be suspended from the House of Commons for swearing. He had uttered the word "damn." I use it a lot myself. Be was famous for his the "radical" politics and infamous for his ravels and adventures. He was also a damn fire writer. I recently read Rodeo, a collection of his works. He was a friend of Joseph Conrad, and nearly as good.


I like him best when he is either gothic and morbid or rambling in sociopolitical commentary. His works there reminds me oddly of David Milch.

"Your nine day's wonder is a sort of five-legged calf, or a two-headed nightingale, and of the nature of a calculating boy-a seven month's prodigy, born out of time to his own undoing  and a mere wonderment for gaping dullards who dislocate their jaws in ecstasy of admiration and then start out to seek more idols to adore."

Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia was written by George Orwell and published in 1938. It's difficult to imagine the time. It was in Spain, during it's civil war in the years leading up to WWII. It's a fascinating first-person historical account, but it's also Orwell so it's well written. The best sentence in the book is not about Spain but about England, written to describe it upon Orwell's return home.

"The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth's surface."

The Cloud Forest

Peter Matthiessen wrote about his travels and his books were written partly as an adventurer and partly as a naturalist. In that manner they harken back to a style popular in a prior century. The Cloud Forest was first published in 1961, in a genre that was already dated. But his prose was contemporary. His style changed radically at the end of his career, from first person to multiple narrator and he rightfully won some awards and accolades. But his skill was evident decades earlier as it is here. 

"A simple grace prevails here, in the postures of children waiting for nothing in the doorway, the young girl breast-feeding her baby, the old man in the corner with his hands folded in his lap—the grace of people who have never gone anywhere and never will go. Only their grief is ungraceful, and perhaps grief should be..."

An average writer may not write something so eloquent in the whole of their life.

Richard Rodriguez

From the book titled Days Of Obligation, subtitled An Argument with my Mexican Father. Richard Rodriguez is a great writer in search of a great book. his use of language and context can be powerful and his observations of people insightful. This books meanders, nearly directionless. It's a survey not a story, and it ends not abruptly, but  beautifully.  I wish he wrote fiction.

"A crow alights upon a humming wire, bobs up and down, needles the lice within his vest, surveys with clicking eyes the field, the cloud of mites, then dips into the milky air and flies away."

The Subterraneans

There is a reason that Kerouac gets so much credit.  I'd explain more but it's not necessary. The following is a quote from The Subterraneans, published in 1958. My copy has coffee stains on it which is all too appropriate. It's a book of rambling run on sentences, not absent punctuation, but instead more often punctuated with pauses than periods. 

"Then she was running down the street with her $2, going to the store long before it opened, going for coffee in the cafeteria, sitting at the table alone, digging the world at last, the gloomy hats, the glistening sidewalks, the signs announcing baked flounder, the reflections of rain in paneglass and in pillar mirror, the beauty of the food counters displaying cold spreads and mountains of crullers and the steam of the coffee urn."

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.