Kakutani: The presence of absence

After Michiko Kakutani announced she was stepping down from her book critic post at the New York Times, media outlets treated it like a death. The pieces that have come out from The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Slate, etc. all have the ring of obituaries which is nice for Kakutani--she's one of those rare people who gets to hear what people will say about her before she dies.

But the piece I like most is the lead item in James Campbell's NB column in the TLS (if I had half his voice I'd be a happy man) for August 4.

Campbell's less interested in Kakutani's ability to skewer the high and mighty than in her temperament.  When he describes her, he uses a long list of "not's."

Kakutani, he writes, lapsing into the past tense, "was not the ideal literary critic... she didn't give interviews, judge prizes or appear at festivals....In her reviews, she avoided the first person and never opened a review with a dreary anecdote."

He adds other things: no memorable literary style, no taste for the red carpets and spotlights (even though I know at least one reviewer who would milk it if she were in her place), a personality as hard to pin down as her photograph, etc.

Campbell's language reminds me of the Buddhist teachings about the void, of emptiness, of expressing existence in terms of its opposite.  (I'm sure I'm oversimplifying this, but hey, this is my blog.)

I think I rarely attained these qualities when I was regularly reviewing at the Times.  I was striving too much, like other people, to cultivate a persona that might mean as much to people as the books we were supposed to be reviewing.

But the great thing about Kakutani is that she has never forgotten that: for her, it has always been about the books.

That's how it should be.

Throwing John Fowles

A long time ago, my sister threw John Fowles across the room. Ok wait, yes, she was a powerful little Italian - rest in peace, dear Sis - but I don't mean that she actually  lifted up the man from Lyme Regis and tossed him like a sack of potatoes.  It was his book, The Collector, that took flight in my sister's family room and smacked against the wall.

Lately, I've been feeling the same way about another Fowles' novel, The Magus (which inspired the 1968 film with Candice Bergen, Anthony Quinn, Michael Caine, and Anna Karina), probably for the same reasons.

The ending.

When I look at the bestsellers lists of the New York Times and other outlets, I realize how far away is the world that celebrated and raved over Fowles's books and made him wealthy enough to be a writer and only a writer.  Everything on the bestsellers lists today with a few exceptions -- Colson Whitehead probably -- smells of symmetry and neatly-resolved endings.

But, my beloveds, I must confess to you, and only to you, that I am not writing this post from a lofty pulpit.  I am not some ultra-refined reader who appreciates only the fiction that's heavy on the meta- and light on happy endings.  Symmetry and resolutions appeal to me, too -- I'm not saying I need happy endings, just a resolution that makes sense, even if it's a tragic one.

I'm sure that some of you reading this feel the same way.

And yet. And yet.

Despite my annoyance with both The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman, I'm turning to Fowles again.  Which book?  The one that fueled my sister's fury, of course.

I want to give  his work another try, even though I feel, as I turn each page, like a guy in a dark room who knows there are ninjas hiding behind the furniture.

I'll tell you all about it when I'm done, my friends.  Or after that book hits a living room wall in our house.

Until then, onward.

A collapsed sun in your pocket: The poetry of Michael Odom

I once wrote in this column that Michael Odom’s poetry reminded me in certain aspects—not in every way, of course, because he is not derivative; his voice is truly original and unique—of the poetry of Dylan Thomas. Startling imagery, unexpected words yoked together by violence, a certain defiant voice ... when I read Odom, I'm reminded of  Thomas’ "Do Not Go Gentle" and "Sullen Art."

Some of the poetry in Odom's recent collection Selene possesses that same defiance, and I think these poems may appeal especially to men of a certain age – either those in their early twenties or those in their late 40s (like me).

Why?  Because these two age groups are connected by their relationship to ideals and the hopes they carry for their lives.

The twentysomethings dismiss the 9-t- 5 treadmill and believe that life holds more for them, that they'll overcome that treadmill soon enough; the fortysomethings dismiss that same treadmill even as they recognize they’ve been walking on it for the past twenty years.

In either case, Odom’s opening poem “The simple strength of men who never know…” offers a catalogue of all the ways that people, men especially, define conventional success in this treadmill world:

Their climbing grasps, like primates, For leafier nests, prettier mates, shinier cars, And Power, the lying god…

Elsewhere, he reminds us how women receive such poor tributes from men. How men’s appreciation falls short—extremely short—of the beautiful creation that is a woman.  To the goddess whose name is the title of this collection, he says:

We poor animals, men, watch breasts, Selene, The way children were taught to sing along to TV lyrics with a bouncing ball

Our imaginations fall short in many ways, and we miss what is extraordinary in what is seemingly ordinary.  Imagine the desert, for instance.  It is just a bare, empty stretch of hot sand and dirt, right?  But in Odom's handling, he describes it in the following majestic, Thomistic (to my ear, anyways) line:

Under the tutelage of Orion's arm Lording above in the ocean's leprous cousin

That, my best beloveds, is breath-taking language ... the kind of inspiring, eloquent language we just don't find in many places anymore (including, unfortunately, the recent presidential inauguration address).

Ok, enough already.  You get it: I dig this poetry a lot.  I would urge you to seek it out.

Finally, what about that note of defiance in Odom's work that reminds me of Thomas?  He suggests to us that the only idealism that will ever seem to last is the idealism of art, of creative vision.  That earlier poem above, about the primates grabbing for success, ends on a splendid visionary statement:

...I know a boy much smaller Who carries in his pocket a collapsed sun.

This is the kind of language that we all need--this is what I want to be reminded about in the course of my own treading. While I’m at my desk, caught up with emails and projects, caught up in ephemera of all kinds, there's a part of me that is eternal. That’s what Odom's Selene tells us.

This collection is appropriate to any season of the year, but it seems especially appropriate now, in the early weeks of the new year. Selene is an ideal companion as you look ahead, plan your year, and realize -- please, my dear friends, remember -- that there is still so much you can change about your life.  It is never too late.

O little axe of Bethlehem

In the year of our Lord, nineteen hundred and eighty-three, a youth humbly approached his special destination — a little music shop in the heart of his city’s downtown. Inside, he took $188 in crumpled tens and twenties from his pocket.  Then the kindly shop owner reached above his head and took down a cherry-red imitation Les Paul electric guitar — a Japanese knockoff — from a long row of guitars hanging from the ceiling.

When the transaction was ended and the lad emerged from the shop with his guitar (in a very cheap black case), he whispered under his breath:

O Lord, though I’m pimply,

though the lenses of my glasses are very thick,

though my hair is oily,

though I am girl-less …

O Lord, please … let me rock.

This is my story.  Well, OK, it didn’t quite happen like that.

But at this time of year, a season that's full of old stories and myths, there’s just no other way to talk about the magic of the electric guitar — it is a thing of myth ... there's no instrument, I think, that has had more hopes and dreams foisted on it than the electric guitar.  I’m not talking just about the big myths — Robert Johnson laying down his guitar at a crossroads and making a deal with the Devil — but also adolescent ones like mine.

I can only wonder what would’ve happened to the dreams of so many poor young teens like me  if guitars had never been electrified, if a young Texan named George Beauchamp hadn’t come up with an idea for adding amplification.  Brad Tolinski and Alan Di Perna tell the story of Beauchamp's many experiments -- for instance, taking apart a phonograph and mounting its little pickup on a 2 x4 with a single string ... something Jack White would do -- in the opening pages of Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound & Revolution of the Electric Guitar, which Doubleday published earlier this fall.

Play It Loud is an entertaining, easy tour of the players who have had the biggest impact on popularizing the electric guitar and some of the companies that have dominated the industry.

In the end, Tolinski and Di Perna make me feel sorry.... Wait.  Sorry?  Sorry for what?

For all those kids who have spent their time (wasted their time) playing Guitar Hero and other video games that are supposed to give you the feeling of the guitar experience.

As this book may remind some readers, like this reviewer who once spent every last dime to get a knockoff Les Paul, there's nothing like crunching out power chords with a little overdrive and reverb … or the crisp ringing of six strings in tune ... or pulling on the B string up past the twelfth fret until it sounds like it’s crying, until your meager talent blends for just a second or two with all those mythic heroes of the past ….

You can play Guitar Hero until your fingers fall off, and you'll just never get it.

A-holes: What kind of writer are you?

I've been away for a long time, my beloved friends. A new day job and the weird, twilight frenzy of revising my novel (if you go into the dictionary and look up the word "palimpsest," I'm sure it says "for an example, see Nick's book") -- it has been impossible for me to keep up, and I'm sorry for that.  

Even if I haven't felt capable of posting an original thought on Call of the Siren, I have been capable of reading other people's thoughts ... like Seamus Perry's piece in the TLS, "Angry, Difficult D.H. Lawrence."  Lawrence was not the kind of writer you would want to get close to; Richard Aldington, Perry writes, said Lawrence had a "wounding capacity for not adapting himself to others."

Perry's piece gives us one kind of writer; I'm also reminded of Evelyn Waugh's cold attitude to his children if they played too loudly and disturbed Daddy; I'm also reminded of a former professor friend meeting the author of The Once and Future King, T.H. White, and finding him to be the complete opposite of the generous, compassionate, bemused narrator that my friend cherished in that book (the photo accompanying this post shows White during a lecture at Boston College).  This leads to a simple conclusion.

Writers can be real a-holes.

So can plenty of other people, of course, and my own prolonged experience of trying to get my gothic novel right ... I almost said "ordeal" instead of "experience" ... has been good.  I've learned a lot.  It's given me a chance to think about what it means to be a writer from the writer's chair, not from the point of view of the admirer/critic/reader/outsider.

When my "litel bok" finally leaves its maker behind, I think he (meaning: me) will be far more patient and sympathetic than he was before; far more supportive of others; far more self-deprecating, too ... because this whole process has taught me more about how little I know than about anything else.  I can't imagine what geniuses like Lawrence must feel from their Olympian heights; the air up there must be so thin that it's difficult to breathe.

Maybe that, finally, is what turns/turned so many of them into a-holes.  I'm glad it hasn't come easy to me.