Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1963)

The second entry in The Vonnegut Project (following Slaughterhouse-Five) is Cat's Cradle. It is being presented in its relatively unedited format (though I have agonized over the e's from judgements/judgemental), including our nominations for the third entry, which will be Breakfast of Champions.

EMILY: Reading CC was certainly different than reading SF. CC was published six years before SF, and, while there are certain similarities between the two texts (primarily in terms of how the protagonist witnesses catastrophic events without being particularly moved or changed by them), CC feels like an earlier work, without Vonnegut’s essential focus on humanism and humor. I remember loving CC when I read it nearly twenty years ago, but this time it felt difficult, unsettling. The rampant sexism and moderate racism felt more pronounced during our current moment of awareness, and although I appreciate the way Vonnegut consistently dealt with larger questions -- the firebombing of Dresden; the global danger posed by particularly destructive weapons -- after rereading SF, CC feels like a less mature work. I wonder if it would have been published today. I don’t mean to come down so hard on CC. There are moments that I love. Bokonon is, of course, fantastic. And there’s that certain moodiness Vonnegut always has, the ability to pass broad judgements on humanity’s absurdity that made me feel good when I was 15 and still make me feel good today. I don’t think we spend enough time discussing how foolish and judgemental and awful people (especially people from the United States) often are, and when Vonnegut writes sweeping statements like, “The highest possible form of treason is to say that Americans aren’t loved wherever they go, whatever they do,” and, “Americans are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier,” it still paints me with a smug, knowing smile (Chapters 45 and 44, respectively).

But some of his other statements, particularly about women or individuals who aren’t white or who are physically different, are problematic, to use the current term. All the “girls” who work for Dr. Asa Breed, vice president in charge of the research laboratory of the General Forge and Foundry Company, are painted horribly (“I’m dumber than an eight-year-old,” mourned Miss Pefko, a secretary, when she doesn’t understand a concept, and Dr. Breed patronizingly declares that the girls in the typing pool “serve science… even though they may not understand a word of it. God bless them, every one!” chapters 15 and 17). There’s also descriptions of “a small and ancient Negro” (chapter 28) and “beautiful Mona,” a blonde “Negress,” and, of course, poor Newton Hoenikker, a midget who has to constantly be reminded of his small stature.

Overall, this book is a warning against the dangerous power of ice-nine, which turns any liquid instantaneously into ice that won’t melt until temperatures reach 140-some degrees. Immediately deadly and vastly destructive, CC’s unnamed protagonist witnesses the end of the world when a small sliver of ice-nine contacts water (via the corpse of someone it already killed) off the small island (essentially a banana republic, though with neither the resources nor the political capital to make it worth controlling) where he’s recently taken control (the commentary on thinly-veiled Caribbean island life warrants addressing at another time). Ice-nine is a clear stand-in for nuclear weapons, and CC is clearly an anti-nuclear book. It’s useful to note that the Cuban missile crisis happened in October 1962, roughly a year before CC was published, and KV seems to use CC to respond to these ongoing global threats. Ice-nine is destructive, awful, and created by the father of the atom bomb, but its threat is surprisingly less than nuclear energy, since the protagonist and a few select others somehow survive the freezing of the earth’s waters -- though, perhaps, the effects will last longer. (Maybe global warming finally has an upside?) It’s also a book clearly written by a scientist, in which Vonnegut draws upon his years of study to influence the construction of his narrative. (The description of how water molecules stack upon each other like cannonballs in front of a courthouse is particularly charming, in my opinion.)

Despite this valiant purpose, however, CC still seems to fall flat. Vonnegut’s protagonists rarely grow as people; they are acted upon, but rarely act in turn. They’re witnesses, vehicles through which Vonnegut can express his feelings about nuclear war, or World War II, or human stupidity in general. But they’re rarely fully-fledged novelistic characters, in the sense that we witness them grow and change and evolve. They simply witness, Vonnegut inserts his trademark witty commentary, and that’s that. While that’s not a terrible model for a book (let’s face it, I ate this shit up when I was a teen), it doesn’t work as well for me anymore. It was enough for me then because I felt like I needed to hear that wry commentary about people being dumb and Americans being crazy. But now that I’m navigating my thirties, I want to see the interior of people too, rather than just comments from an observant outsider.

Overall, I was less impressed with CC on the second reading, unlike SF which rose in my esteem. But one of the best parts of Vonnegut’s work is that the reading is quick, especially for a book like CC which is written in micro-chapters. So I look forward to our next assignment, and seeing where the third book in our project stands.

JACK: There have not been many times that I have had occasion to say this, but at this juncture I must respond to Emily that I respectfully disagree.

Cat's Cradle, for me, for whatever reason, was my favorite Vonnegut novel, and likely still is. It is better than S-F. Unlike S-F, there is actually a plot. Also unlike S-F, the book is comprised of micro-chapters, which makes it easy to recall when and where major plot points occur.

Maybe Emily's criticism is that this book is all plot and no character, but it seems like she's really harping on the supposed racism and misogyny unwittingly conveyed. While I agree some moments are "problematic," I don't believe that Vonnegut intended to lazily expose his own prejudices (I am reminded of another dear friend who queried whether Nabokov was a "sick man" because he wrote Lolita). Like Breakfast of Champions, the stray comments on race (or, here, on female submissiveness/scientific ineptitude) may be shockingly raw, but they reflect the era. I mean fuck Emily, didn't society really only get taken to task for being shitty towards women in late 2017, a year after our collective misogyny put a megalomaniac (among many other appellations) in our highest position of power? Criticizing Vonnegut's portrayal of the female employees of the foundry company is like criticizing Mad Men because all the secretaries (minus major characters Peggy/Joan/Megan) can only type or connect phone calls. We all wish Vonnegut was a progressive saint but this is not meant to be a socially responsible novel. I would add that later on, Vonnegut's work did seem to take on an implicit air of social responsibility, but Cat's Cradle is more comedic science fiction than pointed political satire.

Apart from what I feel is a nitpicky criticism, I can't argue with how the book made Emily feel. I do want to argue that the micro-chapters MAKE the book. There are about 130 itemized chapters, each with a brief title. Sometimes, these are just pure, classic Vonnegut.

I would argue that the book has an incredibly strong first half, and that the second half sort of collapses under its own weight and conceit. Even so, this is a great book!

"Call me Jonah.  My parents did, or nearly did.  They called me John." 

So it begins.  It's a call back to Moby Dick (which I haven't read and probably should one day). Then, we never hear the name again. What does the narrator actually do? Is he a reporter? In a way, this framing mechanism is at the heart of why I believe this is such a successful novel, and why Citizen Kane is such a successful film. That is, the investigation: what is rosebud? What is ice-nine?

Emily brilliantly observes that this is likely an allegory for nuclear weapons and the Cuban missile crisis. But is San Lorenzo a stand-in for Cuba? I don't think so, though there is definitely talk about its communist bent (and the defiantly anti-communist spirit of the American people circa height of cold war).

I do want to ask, regarding the lack of character development: what Vonnegut novel truly does have fully-fledged characters that change and grow?

I wasn't alive and neither was Emily (though she is better equipped to draw such conclusions as an historian) and while I appreciate the interpretation, looking at the book this way sort of ruins it for me. I mean, I know it's a simple story and there's not much there that doesn't feel like anything more than thinly-veiled satire, but it's a story about the apocalypse or the end of the world or the fate of humanity as a whole and it feels Profound in the childish sort of way that Vonnegut sometimes projects perfectly. No, the book isn't as perfect as I remember it being, but it does have an ending to rival S-F. And while it may have come 6 years before (making Vonnegut about 40 at the time of writing?), S-F only feels like a more "mature" work because the characters are not all caricatures (to put it simply). Even with its flaws, I still love this book and think it should be read by everyone.

Nominations for next book:
-Mother Night
-Sirens of Titan

-Hocus Pocus
-Deadeye Dick
-Jailbird or Player Piano worth reading? (2 I haven’t read)
-Bluebeard
-Timequake

EMILY: I think Jack makes a ton of really excellent points and I also think it’s really fun when we disagree. This project is so great! My vote for the next book is Bluebeard, Timequake, or Breakfast of Champions, even though I think that was once nominated and then we took it off the table. I want to put it back on! Put it back on the table like the breakfast of champions it is!

How Judges Think - Richard A. Posner (2007)

Oeuvre rule: I have read dozens of judicial opinions by Judge Posner of the 7th Circuit and almost every one of them has been a good read.  I even remember reading one obscure bankruptcy decision which was very entertaining because he went out of his way to highlight the frivolity of the litigant's claims.  He has been a federal judge for more than 30 years.  He has written a formidable number of books and law review articles.  His name is synonymous with "economic analysis" and "law."  He was made to serve on the Supreme Court, but was never nominated because he could not be counted on to "vote along party lines."  He also teaches at the University of Chicago Law School and blogs at http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/.

Last year I applied to be his law clerk.  I applied to about 100 other judges.  Almost all of them sent rejection letters.  A couple actually sent invitations to interview.  Judge Easterbrook (Posner's colleague on the 7th Circuit) sent a postcard rejection.  Posner was the only judge who failed to respond.

And who could blame him?  After all, I sent him my rejected 40 page note on the plight of temporary workers in the wake of the Great Recession, and added, at the end of my mail-merged cover letter, that I was a huge fan of his.  I've heard he likes to have clerks with backgrounds in engineering and science.  So I completely understand.  And I would not be so petty as to criticize How Judges Think based on the mere failure of a response.

But this is not going to make the "best books of Flying Houses" list for one reason and one reason only: it has very limited appeal for a mass audience.  This book is made for law students, professors, law school administrators, judges, lawyers, and anyone who has been faced with the thankless task of poring over law review articles.  Occasionally, it is interesting enough for lay readers, but the proof is in the acknowledgments:

"I have incorporated material from the following articles of mine, though with much revision and amplification: "The Role of the Judge in the Twenty-First Century," 86 Boston University Law Review 1049 (2006) (chapters 3 and 4); "Judicial Behavior and Performance: An Economic Approach," 32 Florida State University Law Review 1259 (2005) (chapter 5); "Reasoning by Analogy," 91 Cornell Law Review 761 (2005) (chapter 7)...." (379)

And six other articles.  So while yes, Judge Posner is an extremely hard worker and probably one the most (if not the most) prolific writers in the history of American law, it appears that he writes his articles with an eye towards incorporating them into a book (though I did read one funny article by him called "Goodbye to the Blue Book" that may not have found its way into a book).  As one recent law graduate told me when I was a 1L, "Posner writes with an eye to being published in casebooks."

Posner begins the book by discussing 9 theories of judicial behavior (attitudinal, strategic, sociological, psychological, economic, organizational, pragmatic, phenomenological, and legalist) and whether judges's decisions are best explained by the political preferences they bring to their cases, largely focusing on the idea that "liberal" judges are appointed by Democrats and "conservative" judges are appointed by Republicans.  Some of this is confusing because it may be difficult to say what separates a "liberal" decision from a "conservative" one.  Of course there are easy cases like Goldberg v. Kelly (a Justice Brennan-authored decision requiring evidentiary hearings prior to the termination of public assistance benefits) and Citizens United (a Justice Kennedy-authored decision allowing corporations to make virtually unlimited expenditures in the area of campaign finance), but as noted in my previous review, certain areas such as criminal procedure do not always allow for such neat "left/right" categorization.

Posner then goes on to discuss the judge as a labor-market participant.  While Posner's reasoning on the matter is sound, it underscores how esoteric this book can get:

"Each bit of information the judge received that bore on that truthfulness [of a witness] would be likely to alter his prior probability [a pre-inquiry estimate of a witness's truthfulness], but not erase it; the prior probability would affect the posterior probability [a post-inquiry assessment of a witness's truthfulness], as in Ω(H/x) = p(x/H)/p(x/~H) x Ω(H), the simplest version of Bayes's theorem.
Ω is odds; the left-hand side of the equation is the posterior odds that some hypothesis, H, is true; the last term on the right-hand side of the equation, Ω(H), is the prior odds; x is the new information obtained in the course of the inquiry; p is probability, and p(x/H)/p(x/~H), the first term on the right-hand side of the equation, is the ratio of the probability that x would have been observed even if H was false (~H). (So if those two probabilities were the same, the new information would not alter the odds; it would be a case of multiplication by 1.)" (66) (brackets mine)

While I may have made that more confusing with my bracketing, it was the simplest way I could sum up what is unquestionably the most unreadable portion of the book.  Thankfully, Posner does bring it down to a more human level:

"Suppose the hypothesis is that the witness--let us say the plaintiff in a sex discrimination suit--is testifying truthfully, and that before she begins to testify the judge sets (almost certainly, unconsciously) the odds that she will be telling the truth at 1 to 3, which is equivalent to a probability of 25 percent (1 out [1+3]).  She testifies, producing new information, x.  Suppose the probability that x would be observed if she was telling the truth is .6, that while the probability that it would be observed if she was not telling the truth is .3, so that the ratio of the two probabilities is 2.  When this "likelihood" ratio is multiplied by the prior odds of 1 to 3, the result is posterior odds of 2 to 3 (1:3 x 2 = 2:3), which is equivalent to a 40 percent probability (2 out of 5) that the witness is telling the truth." (66)

I will not comment any further on Bayesian theory.

I could go through the rest of the chapters and summarize what each one is about, but that would be boring and a needless waste of time.  You may read the Introduction or the Conclusion to the book if you would like a bite-sized morsel of it.  Like any good law review article, it is systematically and structurally precise.  Posner does not exactly come out and say, "I am a pragmatist," but it seems clear that he favors the "pragmatic" behavioral model of the judge over the others.

Sadly, as I often mention when discussing Vladimir Nabokov's thoughts on Thomas Mann, Posner does not have kind words for my favorite Supreme Court Justice:

"Law is a methodologically conservative profession, and 'bad boy' rhetoric such as [Jerome] Frank's advocacy of psychotherapy for judges or Fred Rodell's proposal that the practice of law be made a crime and courts be replaced with administrative agencies including a 'Killing Commission to apply its laws about what are now called murder and manslaughter,' like the antics of the 'crits,' ensured that these scholars would not receive a fair hearing.  That the only avowed legal realist to become a Supreme Court Justice--William O. Douglas--flouted perfectly sensible norms of judging (FN 46) also helped to give realism a bad name." (112-113)
("Here is a sampling of criticisms of Douglas--none by conservatives.  'His [Douglas's] opinions were not models; they appear to be hastily written; and they are easy to ignore.'  L.A. Powe, Jr., 'Justice Douglas after Fifty Years: The First Amendment, McCarthyism and Rights,' 6 Constitutional Commentary 267, 269 (1989).  The carelessness of Douglas's opinions was rooted in his 'indifference to the texture of legal analysis, which arises from an exclusively political conception of the judicial role.' Yosal Rogat, 'Mr. Justice Pangloss,' New York Review of Books, Oct. 22, 1964, p.5.  'Douglas was the foremost anti-judge of his time.' G. Edward White, 'The Anti-Judge: William O. Douglas and the Ambiguities of Individuality,' 74 Virginia Law Review 17, 80 (1988).  Douglas 'refus[ed] to judge in tax cases.'  Bernard Wolfman, Jonathan L.F. Silver, and Marjorie A. Silver, 'The Behavior of Justice Douglas in Federal Tax Cases,' 122 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 235, 330 (1973))." (FN 46)

Posner is generally a very witty writer, but it can be difficult at times to mine through the seeming intellectual elitism of his prose to realize that what he is writing is actually funny.  But other times, he frames the law in a way that laypersons will understand:

"Versions of judicial modesty include [James Bradley] Thayer's principle that statutes should be invalidated only if they are contrary to any reasonable understanding of the constitutional text and Holmes's 'can't helps' or 'puke' test: a statute is unconstitutional only if it makes you want to throw up." (288)

I will make one final point about How Judges Think: while it is probably going to attract little interest from those outside of the "profession," it is good reading for law students, and it will probably be slightly more interesting than your average law review article or casebook reading assignment.  Most law students will probably find the final section of the book, where Posner discusses the political nature of the Supreme Court, to be most entertaining.  He gives brief (but always intriguing, given the level at which his mind is operating) remarks on most of the Justices then sitting in 2007, and delivers a pretty thorough review of Justice Breyer's book Active Liberty.  He also criticizes Justice Kennedy's constitutional philosophy:

"Justice Kennedy's opinions in Lawrence v. Texas (the homosexual sodomy case) and Roper v. Simmons [the juvenile death penalty case] make only limited efforts to ground decision in conventional legal materials.  They could not do more, operating with nondirective constitutional provisions and in the teeth of adverse precedent.  They are appeals to moral principles that a great many Americans either disagree with or think inapplicable to homosexuals or juvenile murderers.  The approach is consistent, however, with the judicial philosophy that Justice Kennedy expressed in the interview from which I quoted in chapter 9, when he said that 'all of us have an instinctive judgment that we make...You make these quick judgments...Judges do the same thing...But after you make a judgment, you then...have to see if that...accords with your own sense of ethics and morality.  And...[you have to understand] that you have the opportunity to shape the destiny of this country.  The framers wanted you to shape the destiny of the country.  They didn't want to frame it for you.'  This is the most powerful judge in America speaking, and, if we may judge from his decisions, meaning what he says--that the framers of the Constitution wanted Anthony Kennedy to shape the destiny of the country in accordance with his own sense of ethics and morality, though it strikes many as quirky." (310-311) (first brackets mine)

While the book reads fairly well from beginning to end, its genre likely falls into "legal theory," and so most readers may pass a chuckle when Posner goes off for five pages about Chief Justice Roberts's "umpire analogy" to judging, but few will stick it through to the end.  Through no fault of its own is the book dated (there are at least four major cases, involving Anna Nicole Smith, the Affordable Care Act, Campaign Finance, and gay marriage, on which Posner likely has something to say), but it is one that is a prime candidate for a "new edition." 

Posner opens up the book with an exclamation point--one of the few in the text--and closes on a powerful salvo, which nicely summarizes his raison d'être:

"For that recognition [that legalism is not the path to reform] to take hold, however, will require a change in the way in which law is taught in law schools.  Realism about judges is sorely lacking there.  Law is taught as if judges were second-class professors, professors manqué--legal analysts lacking the specialized knowledge of the law professor.  The motivations and constraints operating on judges, and the judicial mentality that results, are ignored, as if judges were computers rather than limited human intellects navigating seas of uncertainty.  As a result students are not taught how to present a case to a judge in a way that will strike a responsive chord.  The curious judicial passivity that results from judges' being accustomed to simply decide whatever is brought to them to decide, rather than to initiate anything, has made most judges shy about telling lawyers how they should be presenting cases to maximum effect, thus helping themselves by helping the judges.  The nation needs a better bridge between bench and bar, and its construction must be largely the work of the law schools." (377)

Ultimately that is who will get the most out of this book: law school administrators and practicing lawyers.  While it is highly doubtful that every judge possesses as masterful an intellect as Posner's, I am sure they would find many of his comments to be accurate.  I am sure that by reading this book, and taking out some of the "pro tips" he offers, one could become a better attorney.  Or you could at least learn how not to screw up an amicus curiae brief if you happen to teach at Yale.  

How Literature Saved My Life - David Shields

Recently I went to the post office to pick up a package, and the woman behind the counter said, "We've been holding this one since January 1, is this for you?"  It was a big, flat manila mailing package--a book.  "Oh yes, that's mine."  It said 184 Clinton St and it said Flying Houses (I live at 148 Clinton, f.y.i.)

This was the first piece of mail I received for Flying Houses from a major book publisher (Random House/Knopf/Borzoi Books).  I was expecting it to be Taipei by Tao Lin (from Vintage).  I had requested that book.  I did not request How Literature Saved My Life.

Regardless, I took this to be a moment of divine inspiration: slowly but surely, Flying Houses was turning into a reputable media outlet.  I would not pass up the opportunity. Unfortunately I wish I had because I fear this review will satisfy no one.

David Shields (not James Shields, the pitcher for the Kansas City Royals formerly of the Tampa Bay Rays, who has also written a book) has written thirteen books, the most prominent of which appear to be Reality Hunger and Remote.  They also appear to be written in a "collage" style that eschews traditional forms of character and plot development in favor of a sort of stream-of-consciousness.  How Literature Saved My Life is also written in this style.  I have many problems with this book so I will enumerate them.

#1: Shields does not really discuss how he was about to lose his life

This is not The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon.  It will not make you feel better if you are sleeping 20 hours a day and eating something and worry that you have no purpose to fulfill on earth.  He does describe some moments of ennui at a famous MFA program:

"I remember hearing my highly alliterative short story 'The Gorgeous Green of the Hedges' gently demolished in class and, upon returning to my apartment, eating bowl after bowl of mint chip ice cream until the room spun.  I remember admiring how some of my classmates (Elizabeth Evans, Mike Hutchison, Walter Howerton, Michael Cunningham, John Hill, Jan Short, Peter Nelson, Sarah Metcalf, Bob Schacochis) had figured out how to get their own personality onto the page.....I remember people saying that nothing ever happened to anyone in Iowa City and me wondering what in the world they were talking about.  I remember, above all, during the five years I lived in Iowa City, believing that what mattered more than anything else in your life was writing as well as you possibly could." (119-120)

He also later described being unemployed at age 30 and sleeping on his father's apartment couch in San Francisco and watching a uni-cyclist juggler on television, and how that had moved him to tears--and how, had he seen the feat in person, he would not likely be moved anywhere near as much.  This was a nice vignette.

The book is separated into more than a hundred of such vignettes, but the vast majority of them focus on Shields's engagement with a text or other such work of art.  In a sense this is prime material for Flying Houses because it gives us the very exciting opportunity of comparing his opinions to my own.

"Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.  The book that I think of as mattering the most to me ever, but I read it more than thirty years ago and I find that I have trouble reading it now.  Seems sad--do I still love it, did I ever love it?  I know I did.  Has my aesthetic changed that much?  If so, why?  Does one resist that alteration?  I think not.  The book still completely changed me, still defines me in some strange way.  Proust for me is the C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation in paperback, all the covers stained with suntan oil, since I read all seven volumes in a single summer, supposedly traveling around the south of France but really pretty much just reading Proust.  I came to realize that he will do anything, go anywhere to extend his research, to elaborate his argument about art and life.  His commitment is never to the narrative; it's to the narrative as such as a vector on the grid of his argument.  That thrilled me and continues to thrill me--his understanding of his book as a series of interlaced architectural/thematic spaces."  (152-153)

I could not read Swann's Way four years ago, and it is one of the three posts of Flying Houses that is (incomplete), though I did remark that,

"When I first heard about him, I thought it lied very close to the same aims I hoped to produce in my own work--the inexplicable singularity of a life, with all of its attendant idiosyncrasies, which thereby educates an audience more as to the total "meaning of existence." Lofty ambitions indeed, and I will say, after 60 pages, that I am sure Proust succeeds on his own philosophical level, but that 21st century American readers will find it extremely difficult to 'dig.'"

This does lead to the next topic, which is adapting literature to new forms of technology, but I would pause to remark that the above quotation may shed light on why I did not like How Literature Saved My Life: we seem to have a similar philosophy when it comes to creating literature that is "useful," but we go about it in different ways.  I do not like the "collage" method, though I did employ it in the past.  That method is popular with writing group peers and the so-called "MFA Contingent" but I prefer to take cues from modern masters and not try to invent new forms when society itself is enough of a spectacle that it bears relating in plain language, without the jumping around from topic-to-topic, channel surfing, twitter news-feed scanning, etc.  While I recently joined twitter about a week ago, and plan to use it sparingly, for marketing purposes (or to record funny incidents in my Tax Law class) I hope to fight against this urge to make literature more "user-friendly" for the "Me Generation."

#2:  This is not Taipei

I requested a galley copy of Taipei, which is Tao Lin's 3rd novel, from the author himself.  He told me that he would forward my information onto Vintage Books and that "hopefully" they would send one in January.  When nothing arrived, I cursed Vintage and major publishing houses (Melville House had sent my Tao's 2nd novel Richard Yates) and then went to pick up the package in early February.  It looked like they had come through!  Then I opened the package, incredibly, to find that it was this book and not Taipei.  Perhaps this is some elaborate trick or "test" being played on me (since Flying Houses may be "famous" for excerpting large sections of text), but I am sad that I will not be able to keep up with Tao's oeuvre.  However, while I don't necessarily disagree with Shields' statement, "I don't want to read out of duty," (167) I do want to read out of duty if people want my opinion on something.

But Tao is a good entry-way into the next point about technology.  For those unaware, Tao Lin is the foremost writer of my generation (we graduated in the same class from NYU) and has built his following entirely on his own through the various forms of social media.  His evolution as a writer has been fascinating to observe, and perhaps with this book he may actually enter some "year end best lists," as Mr. Shields apparently has. And the strongest part of this book, for me, are its comments on the current literary world:

"The individual has now risen to the level of a minigovernment or minicorporation.  Via YouTube and Twitter, each of us is our own mininetwork.  The trajectory of nearly all technology follows this downward and widening path: by the time a regular person is able to create his own TV network, it doesn't matter anymore that I have or am on a network.  The power of the technology cancels itself out via its own ubiquity.  Nothing really changes: the individual's ability to project his message or throw his weight around remains miniscule.  In the case of the web, each of us has slightly more access to a mass audience--a few more people slide through the door--but Facebook is finally a crude personal multimedia conglomerate machine, personal nation-state machine, reality-show machine.  New gadgets alter social patterns, new media eclipse old ones, but the pyramid never goes away....New artists, it seems to me, have to learn the mechanics of computing/programming and--possessing a vision unhumbled by technology--use them to disassemble/recreate the web." (188-189)

The only other point worth mentioning about Tao is usage of the term "scare quotes":
"Updike: 'I loathe being interviewed; it's a half-form, like maggots.'  Gertrude Stein: 'Remarks are not literature.'  Um is not a word, but I like how people use it now to ironize/mock/deflate put scare quotes around what comes next.  The moment I try not to stutter, I stutter.  I never stutter when singing to myself in the shower." (133-134)

"Scare quotes" are not a component of literature that has been accepted by the public on a mass scale by any stretch.  Tao Lin is largely responsible for the excessive use of "scare quotes" (and the reason I must put it in quotes, regarding Shields's failure to do so as a "hipper than thou" mistake) in new books, but Shields point is well taken nonetheless.  I confess this is a minor quibble but "scare quotes" deserve at least a moment of clarification.

#3: Recommended Reading

In order to fully appreciate this book, I really think you have to have read all of the books that Shields references--and there are many:

(1) Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
(2) Dead Languages by David Shields
(3) The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead by David Shields
(4) Spiderman (2002 film)
(5) Prometheus Bound - Aeschylus (?)
(6) Reality Hunger - David Shields
(7) Shortbus (2006 film)
(8) Laura (1944 film)*
(9) Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (1973 film)
(10) Le Gout des Autres (2000 film)
(11) Anagrams by Lorrie Moore*
(12) "Weekend" by Amy Hempel*
(13) Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
(14) The Last Studebaker by Robin Hemley
(15) Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer
(16) Built to Spill - Perfect From Now On (1997 album)
(17) In Bruges (2008 film)
(18) Calendar of Regrets by Lance Olsen
(19) The Guardians by Sarah Manguso
(20) The Name of the World by Denis Johnson
(21) Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer
(22) Zona by Geoff Dyer
(23) Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee
(24) This Is Not a Novel by David Markson
(25) "This is the Life" by Anne Dillard
(26) Butterfly Stories: A Novel by William Vollman
(27) History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life by Jill Bialosky
(28) The Brothers by Frederick Barthelme
(29) The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
(30) Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity by David Shields
(31) "The Dead" by James Joyce
(32) Sherman's March (1986 film)
(33) Speedboat by Renata Adler*
(34) Shit My Dad Says by Justin Halpern
(35) Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky
(36) Now and Then by Joseph Heller*
(37) The entire oeuvre of J.D. Salinger
* books I actually want to read after this.

Note that this does not include the "55 works I swear by" section, along with perhaps a handful of other texts that are mentioned more briefly.

You do not need to read all of these books to "get" How Literature Saved My Life, but the book tends to function as a collection of books that inspired it.  While the book is marketed as "blending confessional criticism and anthropological autobiography," there is decidedly a focus on the former.

There are three parts worth noting where Shields slams Toni Morrison for complaining that her book didn't win an award and where Shields admits that he is actually kind of like George W. Bush and where Shields talks about Bryan Singer sitting next to Bush in first class where Bush confesses that he has been on Ambien "for years."  These are probably the "sexiest" parts of the book, though other parts do indulge in vague-erotica.

#4: Been There, Done That

The big takeaway from this book (for me, at least) is the "collage" as the new form of literature--and I don't buy it.  My zine "Autointoxication," (2003) flirted with this medium, and while some viewed it rather charitably, I am mostly embarrassed by it in retrospect.

Bite-size chapters (like in, oh say, Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut) may be something else entirely, but blending a work of creative non-fiction by mixing in one's own patina with the aggregate of artistic cultural linguistics amounts to a book of aphorisms that may serve as a nice collection of potent quotables (things to write on a piece of paper that you tape to the wall in your "writing station") but does not compel me to run out to my friends and tell them to read.

Shields has written 13 books and has been quite successful, it appears.  However this book leaves the impression that he has given up on fiction as a method towards reaching psychological realism.  He is, as he notes, an extremely ambivalent person, and I am quite ambivalent about this book.  On the one hand, I am quite honored that someone decided to send it to me, and it has certainly opened up my mind a bit when it comes to literary experimentation (while I doubt that I will return to the "collage" form anytime soon) and there are a few nice passages, such as this one:

"Some people seemed to think I was the Antichrist because I didn't genuflect at the twin altars of the novel and intellectual property (there's an oxymoron if ever there was one).  I became, briefly, the poster boy for The Death of the Novel and The End of Copyright.  Fine by me.  Those have become something close to my positions.  The key thing for an intellectually rigorous writer to come to grips with is the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and thus more visceral forms.  You can work within these forms or write about them or through them or appropriate the strategies these forms use, but it's not a very good idea to go on writing in a vacuum.  The novel was invented to access interiority.  Now most people communicate through social media, and everyone I know under thirty has remarkably little notion of privacy.  The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently.  Art, like science, progresses.  Forms evolve.  Forms are there to serve the culture, and when they die, they die for a good reason--or so I have to believe, the novel having long since gone dark for me..." (129, emphasis mine)

Even in this comparatively pristine paragraph Shields make a comment with which I take issue: I am under thirty (for another 60 days, at least) and I think I have a notion of privacy.

There is also a nice part about him working at a law firm:

"My entire twenties, I lived on practically nothing, slept on my father's couch for ten months.  At thirty-one, I was a proofreader for Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro (PMS), a San Francisco law firm that represented the wrong side of every case.  The lawyers hated their jobs.  I loved mine, though, since I spent my entire time there finishing my second novel.  All the other subalterns were as bored as I was, and they were happy to print out copies of drafts for me, retype pages for me.  It was Team Shields.  We also discovered something new called a fax machine.  Very exciting.  I'd arrive before anyone else, and the lawyers would thank me for being such an eager beaver." (163)

That passes the LSAT Test!  A newly formulated test on Flying Houses that says any mention of legal culture on page 163 in any book passes the test (163 was my LSAT score).

But on the other hand, I just get annoyed when people write D.F. Wallace or DFW.  Sure, he is literature's answer to Kurt Cobain, but I think he's put up on a bit of a pedestal.  Sure, I've yet to review Infinite Jest here, but I will, I will...I just can't put him on the same level as FSF--and no one refers to that master as F.S. Fitzgerald.  In my opinion, David Foster Wallace is occasionally great, but more often tedious, and it can be quite difficult to derive pleasure from reading his work--he has about a 10% success rate and a 90% fail rate, though admirers of his will slap me for saying this, and I may disagree with myself whenever I get around to reading Infinite Jest (2013 or 2014--that's a promise!).

It's a petty thing but people that abbreviate him DFW are part of the larger problem of the "MFA contingent," who like to wax philosophical about Amy Hempel and Barry Hannah and maybe occasionally Nabokov but never Mann.  These are new 20th-21st century writers that have taken the short story form as far as it can go while still being recognizable as a prose piece.  I don't intend a blanket criticism of everything they've ever done--I just shudder at the thought that the new way to write is to get an MFA, get published, and just keep writing really good short stories--forget about a novel--takes too long--with the weird middle coming in "linked-short stories."

I guess I am like Kafka "who was unusually susceptible to textual stimuli, [and] read only a couple of pages of a book at a time" (182) and just don't have the time to go to the library, on a full stomach, and sit there for hours devouring literature in a huge chunk.  I want to check my e-mail and worry about some more "real" urgency ahead of me.

In summary, this book reads like a law review article.  It's not particularly enjoyable, there are tons of citations to authority (sadly without footnotes--but happily with a Cf. or two that I believe means "indirect support), and a reform is (sort of) proposed.  However, I am afraid that I have not gotten deeply enough into the mind of David Shields to fully appreciate his comic-linguistic asides.  Fans of his may love this, but as a newcomer and as a neutral critic, I can only regard this work as a "virginity loss" type experience--but laypersons generally don't receive galley copies.

Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle - Vladimir Nabokov

An excerpt from The Paris Review interview with Vladimir in 1967 (two years before the publication of Ada):

Interviewer: If you had the choice of one and only one book by which you would be remembered, which one would it be?

Nabokov: The one I am writing or rather dreaming of writing. Actually, I shall be remembered by Lolita and my work on Eugene Onegin.

And yes, in an ideal world, every class in American literature post-World War II or "postmodern" literature would feature Ada and not Lolita. But Ada is 625 pages long--a bit heavy for an undergraduate assignment. Let us hope that grad students at least will study this work for years to come, as it surely makes a larger "statement" than Lolita, or any other book by Nabokov for that matter. You'd have to hold a gun to my head to ask which novel is the best, but the simple answer is time. If you have the time, Ada is the best. If you don't have as much time, Lolita is best. If you have even less time, Pale Fire is best. And if you have even less time than that, Pnin may be your best option. However, Pnin is the only one of those four that may disappoint a reader because it does not reach the heights of the other three. All three are masterpieces, and Ada is the most redoubtable and grandiose of all.

So now--the difficult and fun question--what is Ada about? When I brought it with me into my restaurant of work all of my co-workers expressed intrigue as to the nature of the story of such a big book. If I only had a short time to describe it, I would say, "It's about incest." And if I had a long time, I would say, "It is a one hundred year love story and if you thought Lolita was risque, well, Ada is way worse."

And it's true--Ada does not quite portray illegal sexual abuse as in Lolita--but its descriptions of sex are far more graphic, about twice as crudely clever, and arguably more offensive. Now, why more offensive?

The main character is Van Veen, born in 1870, firmly implanted in my mind after spending three months in his company. Van has a cousin, Ada, whom he meets in 1884. She is two years younger than him. Actually they might be more than cousins. To what degree they are related I will not explain--but let me just admit that it was one of the many points that I was unclear on after finishing the book, and so I had to re-read the first 20 pages, where I did find my answer.

And this is another important point to mention: Ada is probably the most difficult Nabokov book to read. Apart from its intimidating length, the first 50 pages in particular pose a great challenge to the reader. Think 100 Years of Solitude but without the weird magical realism--and keep in mind that though the first 50 pages go as far back as great-great grandparents, of special importance is the description of Van's and Ada's parents--Demon and Aqua, and Daniel and Marina--who it seems incredibly, are 2 twins married to 2 twins, further complicating the family tree.

But who is Van? Van comes from an affluent family. He walks on his hands when he is fourteen. He is an acrobat. He visits his cousins for a summer at Ardis, their estate in the northeast...in Maine, is it, spelled Mayne?

Van lives on Antiterra (or what we might call "Earth"), in Estotia, which is the U.S. and Russia combined. Much of the time he lives in Manhattan. It's necessary to mention that Ada occurs in a parallel universe, or utopia, and this is hinted at in the very first line of the book, which is a reversal of the extremely famous first sentence of Anna Karenina. Happy families are not all alike--they are actually "more or less dissimilar" (3)--and unhappy families "are more or less alike"(3)--not unhappy in their own way. Ada is not science-fiction though--a reader will primarily notice that something is vaguely askew, and their investigation into the element that alters from "reality" as we know it will often yield epiphanies or profund ruminations on the nature of existence. This topic will be revisited later in the review.

Van goes to visit Ada for the first time in 1884, and lo and behold, they fall in love. This is really the moment at which Ada becomes easier to read. Because up until this point, I had no clue what direction this novel was going to take. The long sequence in Ardis is perhaps the major part of the novel itself, also the most risque part.

Why offensive? Because Van and Ada "discover" each other at an age that most today would deem premature--12 and 14--and the descriptions of their "embraces" hold very little back--in fact, they are probably more explicit than any of the later scenes involving prostitution, which is legalized. There is also the "taboo" nature of their relationship, obviously, but for a clear example, witness the "barn burning" scene (not a reference to Faulkner, I imagine), referenced perhaps a dozen times in the course of the book, with its first display in this nearly unthinkable moment:

"'Van, poor Van,' she went on in the narrow voice the sweet girl used when speaking to cats, caterpillars, pupating puppies, 'yes, I'm sure, it smarts, would it help if I'd touch, are you sure?'
'You bet,' said Van, 'on n'est pas bete a ce point' ('there are limits to stupidity,' colloquial and rude).
'Relief map,' said the primrose prig, 'the rivers of Africa.' Her index traced the blue Nile down into its jungle and traveled up again. 'Now what's this? The cap of the Red Bolete is not half as plushy. In fact' (positively chattering), 'I'm reminded of geranium or rather pelargonium bloom.'
'God, we all are,' said Van.
'Oh, I like this texture, Van, I like it! Really I do!'
'Squeeze, you goose, can't you see I'm dying.'
But our young botanist had not the faintest idea how to handle the thing properly--and Van, now in extremis, driving it roughly against the hem of her nightdress, could not help groaning as he dissolved in a puddle of pleasure.
She looked down in dismay.
'Not what you think,' remarked Van calmly. 'This is not number one. Actually it's as clean as grass sap. Well, now the Nile is settled stop Stanley.'" (126-127)

The "Ardis" section of the book almost exclusively takes this tone, and perhaps this is one of my very few criticisms of the book: this section can nearly firmly be categorized as "erotica." The first two hundred pages of this book (so 1/3 of the whole) follow Van and Ada as very young teenagers trying to figure out different places in the palatial estate to experiment with each other's bodies. It is perhaps worth noting that both characters are ridiculously precocious, to the point that practically no one today would be able to match their intelligence or powers of articulation. See first review ever on Flying Houses for similar example (third paragraph of post): http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2008/04/doctor-faustus-thomas-mann.html

So it seems to me that during "Ardis" (or Part 1, as it were, which actually goes up to page 350) Nabokov is overly preoccupied with unsettling the reader's expectations, and the episodes become rather repetitive. There is the important introduction of the third major character, Lucette, Ada's younger sister by two years. Eventually Lucette becomes the primary voyeur of their escapades. And it is unclear to what extent she becomes involved in anything resembling or approaching a menage a trois with them, but later on, oh around page 400, she comes to visit Van about fifteen years later in Manhattan, and she reveals a secret that even Van doesn't know about, and to me this constitutes one of the most over-the-top scenes in the book.

After Part 1, the book concerns itself a bit less with sex, and a bit more with Time, the intricacies of Antiterra (and Terra, which we might call "Heaven" or "Mars" (i.e. another planet that could house a civilization)), and the manner in which Ada and Van hope to spend their adult lives. They cannot be married for various reasons they give at many different moments. Ada does marry. Van does not. Van sleeps with hundreds of women (most of them prostitutes). They write letters back and forth. They meet every fifteen or twenty years, often drastically altered by time. Van becomes closer with Lucette for the majority of the remainder of the novel.

A lot happens, but one chapter I cannot figure out (Part 2, Chapter 3) is basically a description of how prostitution came to be legalized in Estotia (or Antiterra? I'm not sure.) -- and it basically has nothing to do with the rest of the story, so I found it amazing. It is quite risque, but also hilarious, particularly the wrinkle introduced into the common paradigm of the "whorehouse":

"One clause in the Rules of the Club seemed to indicate that Eric, though frenziedly heterosexual, had enjoyed some tender ersatz fumblings with schoolmates at Note (a notorious prepatory school in that respect): at least two of the maximum number of fifty inmates in the major floramors might be pretty boys, wearing frontlets and short smocks, not older than fourteen if fair, and not more than twelve if dark. However, in order to exclude a regular flow of 'inveterate pederasts,' boy love could be dabbled in by the jaded guest only between two sequences of three girls each, all possessed in the course of the same week--a somewhat comical, but not unshrewd, stipulation." (369-370)

Also of personal interest: Van attends school at Chose, and this description of "Note" does seem to indicate that the master himself was aware of those bizarre institutions of the northeast selling elitism. Of course, they are the finest schools, and that Van attends one fits perfectly with his character--which is, a spoiled brat, who automatically starts off with more money than he would ever know what to do with. Van is not the most likable character. For one, he has a pretty sketchy major romantic relationship in his life. For two, he is an "arrogant bastard." For three, he seems to take pleasure in psychologically (and intellectually) torturing those closest to him in life. The most likable things about him are that he is an excellent tipper and that he is a scholar and thinker of the highest level.

He retires at an early age and spends the majority of the next decade working on what will become his greatest masterpiece, The Texture of Time. But I am getting ahead of myself: what does Van do? It's rather difficult to pin down, but he is a psychologist that studies bizarre disorders related to the comprehension of time and memory. Nabokov displays learning on the topic, and much derision towards Freud (Froid), which is par for the course. He becomes a doctor at Chose, and lives in Manhattan, while frequently traveling to Switzerland for various examinations, procedures, and investigations.

There is the matter of Ada's sister, and Ada's husband, and many of the other characters in the book: Cordula, Demon, Marina, and Mme. Lariviere, Ada's governess who becomes a famous author that is almost definitely a stand-in for Guy de Maupaussant. But they are incidental. There is one major suicide that takes place near the end of the book that is one of the most effective methods I have ever read of making sure that you will be dead. The scene is horrifying and one might almost call it beautiful.

And there is no shortage of beautiful writing, which is why this is Nabokov's greatest: amongst the greatest quantity in his oeuvre, some of the greatest quality is to be found. One could argue that Lolita is a more concise, consistent, high-quality read, but for its sheer ambition and leisurely methodology, Ada is that all-too-rare book that actually eclipses Lolita. If anyone was going to do it, it would be the man himself!

It is hard to find quotable passages, but there are at least two of incredible beauty. One of them comes from what is arguably the most famous chapter in the book, which is a literary experiment on the level of Joyce or Mann (who eventually we will get around to discussing again), a "chronography" for lack of a better term, highly abstract, potentially positively sleep-inducing, and replete with notions that could be discussed for hours. The other takes place at a crucial moment, whose spoiler will be avoided in the interest of an open view:

"...Hunched up in a last band of low sun, on the bench where he had recently fondled and fouled a favorite, lanky, awkward, black girl student, Van tortured himself with thoughts of insufficient filial affection--a long story of unconcern, amused scorn, physical repulsion, and habitual dismissal. He looked around, making wild amends, willing her spirit to give him an equivocal, and indeed all-deciding, sign of continued being behind the veil of time, beyond the flesh of space. But no response came, not a petal fell on his bench, not a gnat touched his hand. He wondered what really kept him alive on terrible Antiterra, with Terra a myth and all art a game, when nothing mattered any more since the day he slapped Valerio's warm bristly cheek; and whence, from what deep well of hope, did he still scoop up a shivering star, when everything had an edge of agony and despair, when another man was in every bedroom with Ada." (480-481)

The other passage I recall occurs when Van comes to as close a synthesis as his Texture of Time is bound to relate, which bears a slight resemblance to the final scene in Waking Life:

"...This act of attention is what I called last year the 'Deliberate Present' to distinguish it from the general form termed (by Clay in 1882) the 'Specious Present.' The conscious construction of one, and the familiar current of the other gives us three or four seconds of what can be felt as nowness. This nowness is the only reality we know; it follows the colored nothingness of the no-longer and precedes the absolute nothingess of the future. Thus, in a quite literal sense, we may say that conscious human life last always only one moment, for at any moment of deliberate attention to our own flow of consciousness we cannot know if that moment will be followed by another. As I shall later explain, I do not believe that 'anticipation' ('looking forward to a promotion or fearing a social blunder' as one unfortunate thinker puts it) plays any significant part in the formation of the specious present, nor do I believe that the future is transformed into a third panel of Time, even if we do anticipate something or other--a turn of the familiar road or the picturesque rise of two steep hills, one with a castle, the other with a church, for the more lucid the forevision the less prophetic it is apt to be. Had that rascal behind me decided to risk it just now he would have collided head-on with the truck that came from beyond the bend, and I and the view might have been eclipsed in the multiple smash." (585-586)

Nabokov's knowledge of quantum physics or quantum mechanics or the theory of relativity is tested, and while I am unable to ascertain its verisimilitude, it seems clear that real physicists would take issue with some of Van's pronouncements, but on a purely artistic and linguistic level, while proving quite difficult, this chapter is ultimately more essential than any other part in the work.

There is not much else about Ada that requires reportage. It is for mature audiences only, it is a very challenging read (it took me longer than any other book on Flying Houses, though there were mitigating circumstances...)--and on a purely coincidental level, during the course of my reading this novel, my life became rather strange and heartbreaking. I recommend Ada more highly than any other book on Flying Houses--but I have decided, that when I leave, in August, for Brooklyn, I will do a top 10 books on Flying Houses list. All 3 of Nabokov's masterpieces will be included. 3 by Thomas will be there too.

And so our review ends--but it is not quite over because there is this issue to resolve. I would almost do a different post for this discussion but Ada still figures in conversation. Basically I just want to quote more from The Paris Review interview. I will post a link here. http://www.theparisreview.org/media/4310_NABOKOV.pdf Read it. I am perverting all of The Great One's notions. To witness the genius contained in the responses is to regard the enchantment of a bygone era, when writers were more like gods than people.

That is not to say that I do not take issue with any of his responses, and I wish he were able to respond to my accusations/criticisms on this count, because I really would appreciate the education, which is no longer of this earth. In particular, a phrase he has created, so to speak, and that was quoted at length in his obituary in the New York Times in 1977, primarily because it contains the ultimate zinger against Thomas, which is quite rude, I think, to include in an obituary (shame on you, newspapers of the intellectual elite):

Interviewer: What is most characteristic of poshlust in contemporary writing? Are there temptations for you in the sin of poshlust? Have you ever fallen?

Nabokov: "Poshlust," or in a better transliteration poshlost, has many nuances, and evidently I have not described them clearly enough in my little book on Gogol, if you think one can ask anybody if he is tempted by poshlost. Corny trash, vulgar cliches, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo-literature--these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, the journalistic generalities we all know. Poshlost speaks in such concepts as "America is no better than Russia" or "We all share in Germany's guilt." The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases as "the moment of truth," "charisma," "existential" (used seriously), "dialogue" (as applied to political talks between nations), and "vocabulary" (as applied to a dauber). Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Vietnam is seditious poshlost. Belonging to a very select club (which sports one Jewish name--that of the treasurer) is genteel poshlost. Hack reviews are frequently poshlost, but it also lurks in certain highbrow essays. Poshlost calls Mr. Blank a great poet and Mr. Bluff a great novelist. One of poshlost's favorite breeding places has always been the Art Exhibition; there it is produced by so-called sculptors working with the tools of wreckers, building crankshaft cretins of stainless steel, Zen stereos, polystyrene stinkbirds, objects trouves in latrines, cannonballs, canned balls. There we admire the gabinetti wall patterns of so-called abstract artists, Freudian surrealism, roric smudges, and Rorschach blots--all of it as corny in its own right as the academic "September Morns" and "Florentine Flowergirls" of half a century ago. The list is long, and of course, everybody has his bete noire, his black pet, in the series. Mine is that airline ad: the snack served by an obsequious to a young couple--she eyeing ecstatically the cucumber canape, he admiring wistfully the hostess. And, of course, Death in Venice. You see the range.

It is an all too rare occasion that the words of a dead writer from more than forty years ago make me want to cry in defense of another. I cannot stand by silent any longer. I will admit this: Nabokov is probably a better writer than Mann. He has many more books to his name. Both have an equal number of masterpieces (as I have indicated earlier)--and I do have to say that Thomas is the more consistent than the two--you can pick up a Nabokov book and not be sure you're going to "get it" or not--and with Thomas, provided you stick with him the whole way, you will at least "get it." They lived to a similar age. Thomas is older by more than twenty years. They both fled to the U.S. in the wake of totalitarian regimes. They lectured at schools like Princeton and Cornell. And arguably, they wrote very similar "most famous" books about taboo desire-- and evidently, Nabokov thinks Thomas is quite a fraud. Now, I will not argue that Death in Venice is better than Lolita. That's a losing battle I am not willing to fight. But to insist that Death in Venice is "poshlost?" Coming at the end of that tirade makes the statement all the more offensive.

Perhaps Nabokov is actually stating that Death in Venice is his other "bete noire" in the series, in addition to the airline ad, but I doubt it. His contempt for Thomas knows no boundaries. His airline ad, then, is the one element in Ada that I find annoying: Van's virility, his energy, and especially his relationships with all female characters, I find quite offensive. If anybody is interested in prolonging stereotypes about men not being able to be friends with women unless they are sleeping together, or only possible en route to sleeping together, then we have a very difficult "truth" to overturn in our future. I would prefer not to be lumped in with a gender that dictates bodily pleasure accompany regular discourse if it happens to be with the opposite sex. Of course Van does love Ada and does not leer at any other women when they are together. But it's the element in Van, and often Nabokov's other characters that I wish he would not portray with no explanation.

I totally disagree with Nabokov's assertion that Death in Venice is poshlost. Its merits as a work of literature are debatable, but it is certainly not cliched (though many might consider it vulgar), some may consider it "trash" but I don't believe it is "corny," I don't see how it is an imitation of an imitation--it is extremely original and unprecedented--um, just asking, but would Lolita exist without Death in Venice?--it may be "crude" but it is not "moronic," it is the opposite of Philistinism, it may contain "bogus profundities" depending on your view, but I do not find it to be "dishonest pseudo-literature" in any sense. Sometimes I think Nabokov is more interested in piquing the reader's interest with his acid-tongue criticism than giving a more transparent view of his "rules" for "sucessful art." I am hard-pressed to think of a more idiosyncratic figure in relation to criticism of any sort.

That criticism notwithstanding, Nabokov is The Great One and I will continue to worship him as I would a god. I wish he would have a higher opinion of Thomas so that I would not feel so foolish as to canonize him as well. But they belong together, as I lump them in the final page of my second novel, as they complement one another so thoroughly: a German and a Russian, a rebel against the Nazis and a rebel against the Soviets, a Nobel Prize Winner and a notorious iconoclast, intellectual giants both (though one might disagree) and careers that I would be more than happy to experience firsthand. I would have to favor Nabokov's life over Mann's, the Nobel notwithstanding, due to its rather fabulous and incredible nature. Not that either is within my grasp--but I must say--who amongst us bloggers in 2010 America debate the superiority of Nabokov over Mann? Very few, and so I would hope, that while I am sure neither cared much for their "immortal reputation," that if they were able to review blog posts beyond the grave, they would be able to make up and be friends and realize that few others beyond their years were able to equal their heights, and that this comparison would cement their work as essential, in the 21st century.

Hiatus #3

Recently a friend of mine wrote me a message saying, "No Flying Houses in 2 months? What gives?"

Actually, it's only been about 45 days, but yeah, nothing since the big news about Mr. Salinger. In a sense, I have not added anything because I believe he deserved to be the top story on this blog for a long time.

But there is a more obvious reason--after The Magic Mountain hiatus, and then the Ulysses hiatus, we now have the Ada hiatus. Ada is about 600 pages long, shorter than the other two, but there have been other elements causing this delay: a 5 day trip to L.A., a 5 day trip to New York (occurring in 8 days), a 5 day stint of playing independent homeowner, an upcoming 9 day stint of playing independent homeowner, and law school research/decision-making--so almost half the time I have been busy (though it's not like I don't read on the airplane)--and besides that, I've been at work, and behaving in all sorts of ill-advised ways in my free time.

I am also working on novel #3 (book #5)--we are 9,000 words into it--and I hope to finish the majority by August.

I did pick up Kafka's Amerika while in L.A. and briefly considered reviewing that before Ada, but I only got through 20 pages and feel that the first review of Kafka on Flying Houses should be a more momentous occasion (i.e. not quickly thrown together while another half-finished book lies in state).

In summary, please forgive this lack of activity. One day maybe someone will pay me to blog and they can collect all the posts and put them in a book like "Stuff White People Like" and then I won't have to go on hiatus because this will be my primary means of income, not restaurant work. (cue Wayne's World line: cccchhhyeah! and monkeys might start flying out of my butt!)

The Original of Laura - Vladimir Nabokov

If The Original of Laura were as great as Knopf would like everyone to believe, then I would have read about it before last September, or October, or whenever, when I read that Wall Street Journal article about "Ghost Writers" and new books by Kurt Vonnegut, Nabokov, and Ralph Ellison.

I love Nabokov; I am one of his biggest fans. But it was a mistake to read The Original of Laura before the majority of his other work. Oh, I have tackled Lolita three times, Pale Fire once, Speak, Memory once, Bend Sinister twice, Laughter in the Dark once, Despair once, Pnin once, and several of his short stories out of the sixty-five in the collection I have of his--but Ada looms as the final masterpiece that I have yet to digest--and it will be soon.

But still, even with Ada sitting on my shelf, there are so many others remaining: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Invitation to a Beheading, The Defense (which seems boring--if it is about chess...), The Eye, Look at the Harlequins!, King, Queen, Knave, Transparent Things, and I am probably forgetting one or two others. I bet all of these are far superior to Laura, and yet it is Laura which will receive far more attention than anything he has done since Lolita.

Why is Laura such a hot topic? Well, it's the myth surrounding it, but let me clear something up, probably the only time I feel like I am being a good samaritan since my review of the Times New Viking album back when this blog started--this is more of an arts and crafts/board game "Let's Play Author!" than a real novel. When I checked it out from the library, I was like, whoa, that's thick. Some 270 pages, not a slight novel in the least--but there is all that talk about index cards, and how there are only 120 or so, and that comprises all of the text....

Okay, so the edition is beautiful, credit where credit is due. It goes for $35.00 and I would be shocked if they print this in paperback. It's the index cards that represent the majority of the publishing costs--they are lovingly re-created, and anyone interested in Nabokov's handwriting will love it.

But it was one of the most bizarre reading experiences of my life--every two pages would not contain even a whole paragraph. As if this weren't annoying enough, almost half the time, the next index card poses no resemblance to the previous one, which means the story has almost zero continuity.

Well, here is the myth that surrounds this volume and accounts for its popularity--Nabokov revivalism. Probably around the 30th anniversary of his death, his son Dmitri must have decided that it would be a good time to put a different sort of book into the marketplace. Basically, Vladimir was working on this at the time of his death, and he told his wife to burn the index cards if he never completed it. Well, she didn't, and years later, Dmitri decided it should be published, despite intimations from the man himself that the work was not up to code.

Dmitri's introduction to the volume is probably the best thing about it, because you get about five or six pages of memories of Vladimir, as he neared death, and it is quite alluring, for example, to read about how he once collapsed while hunting for butterflies, and his cries for help were laughed at by passerby. But Dmitri compares himself to Max Brod, publishing Metamorphosis and The Trial after Kafka's death, though Kafka instructed him to burn them. The Original of Laura is not Metamorphosis. No. Fucking. Way.

What is Laura about? Well, it seems to me to be a highly self-conscious (which makes it seem interesting for Nabokov lovers, but really it's not so much) meditation on being a novelist in love who has published a thinly-veiled story about a girl named Flora titled Laura--the novelist Philip Wild's wife--and Wild is dying, and while in the hospital, he methodically imagines each of his bodily appendages and organs being removed, which becomes a kind of ecstasy to him. That is it.

Now, some passages are pretty good, but they are never attached to anything else to make them stand out as "great." This is not a great novel, or even a good novel, or even a bad novel. It is not a novel. It is supposedly "a novel in fragments," and in the introduction Dmitri states that "despite its incompleteness, was unprecedented in structure and style," (xvii) and maybe I'm not reading closely enough, but it hardly seems like Nabokov intended for so many of these index cards to abruptly cut and move on to something completely unrelated.

If Nabokov had lived another year or so, Laura might have germinated into something truly wondrous, a volume that could fit alongside his absolute best work. It is true that the basic story could have been a winner. But I am sorry, I feel bad saying this because I want to like this book, and I like Dmitri--his writing style is clever enough as it is--but I really feel that Vladimir's wishes should have been respected.

Take out the index cards, shuffle them as the author probably did, read them aloud at a dinner party, and laugh about how "dying is fun." But don't expect to read a real novel. Here's looking forward to Ada, and another entry in the "most difficult books to read reviewed on Flying Houses" category.

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov, born 1899, died 1977, published Lolita 1955, published Pale Fire 1962, remains one of the foremost intellectuals in the better part of 20th century literary world. Notably fluent in Russian, German, French, and English, it almost appears as if Nabokov is not so much interested in plot, character and story as he is flaunting his erudition and obscure knowledge under the guise of tricky wordplay. Regardless of his eccentricities as a stylist, he does not disregard or sacrifice story.

In keeping with the oeuvre mandate, let it be acknowledged that the critic has read Bend Sinister, Laughter in the Dark, Lolita, Speak, Memory, and a fair number of short stories. Pnin, Ada, or Ardor, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Despair, and Look at the Harlequins! are on my list of future books to read. Nabokov was extremely prolific but relatively underappreciated. For all the controversy that Lolita has brought about in the past fifty plus years, Pale Fire follows innocently undetected, while containing more than a few controversial episodes itself. While Lolita may continue to compete for greatest 20th century American novel, I recall seeing Pale Fire on more than one sort of list of books that people would like to read before they die, or a book that was so profound they wanted to read and study to unlock some sort of secret revelation.

That is not surprising given its structure. There is no other book like it. It begins (like Lolita) with a preface. The "foreword" is penned by Charles Kinbote, neighbor to the author of the poem "Pale Fire," John Shade. In the foreword, Kinbote explains how he came to teach at the same university in upstate New York as Shade, and how he happened to rent the house next door to his, and how he happened to run into him and become friends with him. Then he says he is getting too far ahead of himself and stops.

"Pale Fire," a poem in heroic couplets, 999 lines, divided into four cantos, comes next. For all the profound aspects of the novel Pale Fire, the reader might be urged to start here, particularly the majority of canto 3, though Kinbote refers to canto 2 as "your favorite, and that shocking tour de force," which concerns John and Sybil Shade's doomed daughter. We are told in the foreword, that Shade died shortly after completing the final line of the poem--indeed he wrote the poem over the last three weeks of his life.

After the "primary text" comes the "Commentary," which forms the majority of Pale Fire. In it, Kinbote notes some three or four dozen line references with varying degrees of copious analysis and confession and storytelling. Truly, this part is Kinbote's story, and soon he reveals a story he liked to tell Shade about, which was the escaped King Charles of Zembla. As we move closer to the end of Shade's poem, we get closer to the final revealing of the entire story as Kinbote has let us see it. He is meant to be mad, and indeed he seems overly obsessed with Shade, but like Humbert Humbert, he is not a narrative slouch. Indeed, Pale Fire becomes mostly about King Charles at a certain point.

I have almost no idea what these scenes are meant to mean, but they are certainly just as eye-opening as almost any scene in Lolita. What is strange is that Kinbote narrates the story of King Charles at a curious point of disconnect. The reader can almost easily guess the connection between the two by the 2nd or 3rd time Kinbote mentions him. The first time, in fact, I began to think, "how does Kinbote know such intimate details of the king?" Perhaps it is rather obvious, but anyhow, some of the scenes resulted in my doing double takes, memorably while making my way through what must be the most morally offensive segment of the book to conservative minds while reading in an outdoor hot tub at a hotel in Rancho Bernardo, CA on a weekend trip with my parents.

Kinbote becomes rather obsessed with the King Charles story, until eventually the King escapes Zembla, and manages to make his way to America, to happen to teach at a university...And like Clare Quilty in Lolita, there is Gradus, a man suspicious of all those who possess too much knowledge, who stalks the escaped King, and who eventually plays as intrinsic a role in the novel as that aforementioned "double" of a villain. But Charles is not only interested in exotic royal pasts--his ardor for Shade and his work shines through almost as clearly. Most memorable is a scene near the end of the novel, where Kinbote calls Shade on the phone, after not attending a party Sybil threw for the poet's 60th birthday, and screams that he must seem him at once and bursts into tears over the phone. His knowledge of the poet's life, and his possible (and idealized) influences, puts a funny spin on the academic snooping going on in any modern edition of any classic text.

Furthermore, Pale Fire introduces the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure genre, in a manner. The commentary is written so that the reader can refer back to the poem for greater elucidation, and read more than a line, a stanza, or even pages at a time. Also, within notes are references to other notes with references to other lines so that a times a narrative thread can be found with all ensuing references already marked out by Kinbote. Whether Nabokov intends the work to be a massive cryptogram, I do not know, but his typical obsessions like butterflies and chess and intellectualism arise and are treated here as well as in anything else I have read by him.

Nabokov is a master. He did not accumulate the Nobel, or the Pulitzer, but he is clearly a master, and a fine model to follow. Of course, one cannot hope to attain his level of erudition, but it is fun to see what he was capable of, given his talents, his knowledge, and his artistic spontaneity. Pale Fire may not be as densely-layered or as descriptive a work as Lolita, but its poetry is unmistakable. It is more entertaining than Bend Sinister or Laughter in the Dark, and it is more intellectually compelling than Lolita, though it would be difficult to say it is a greater novel than that nearly-untouchable work. It has the same quality of his finest short stories, such as "The Vane Sisters" (which, I have to admit, is really only the first one of two or three which truly amazed me). It may make you gasp, it will most definitely make you laugh, it might confuse the hell out of you, but when you finish Pale Fire, you will feel a sense of literary domination, and for how complex everyone wants to make it out to be, it's really not bad at all. Taken slowly with a painstaking line-by-line close analysis, or speed-read like your typical mass-market trade paperback, Pale Fire will please no matter the method.