Kinds of Reading

From Derek Bickerton's Bastard Tongues -- “Most students read passively. They see themselves as vessels waiting to be filled. They have awe and respect for the printed word. I don't. I want to catch the authors out. I assume, correctly, that part of the stuff, maybe most of it, will be wrong. And I'm going to figure out which part it is. Even if you know nothing about a subject you can spot self-contradictions, and if you read two authors on the same topic you can spot regular contradictions. They can't both be right. (They could both be wrong, though.)”

“Most students hit their heads on brick walls. They're given a text to read, and somewhere in Chapter 1 or 2 they bog down completely. But they persevere, oh do they persevere! (That's unless they decide to drop out completely.) They feel if they don't absorb Chapter 2 to its very last syllable, they'll be totally lost when they get to Chapter 3. So they keep slugging away until their eyes glaze, trying to force understanding. Finally they sleep on it and start over again the next day.”

“What I do is skim through the text looking for anything I understand. Sometimes at first it's as little as the introduction and a couple of paragraphs here and there. No matter. I store that in my mind and do something else. Read stuff about the subject that I do understand, stop again the moment it gets to be hard work. Then after a week or two, I come back to the first text, skim it again for anything that makes sense. There will be more this time. I guarantee it. Maybe not much, but a little more will start to make sense. There will be more this time. I guarantee it. Maybe not much, but a little more will start to make sense. Repeat the process. You'll probably find you're getting patches all over the book. Okay, fine. The patches spread like inkblots; eventually they'll link up. Suddenly, what a few weeks before was a trek into impenetrable jungle becomes a stroll through the park.”

“You see, evolution has been programming brains for half a billion years, It has been programming them to sort incoming data and make sense out of it. A life-or-death matter: only those who can do it well survive. The brain doesn't care what kind of data. Whistles and roars on the savanna or words on a printed page – it just sorts, interprets, and soars, whether you're conscious of it or not.”

Some books are most rewarding when ransacked in this way – but obviously we need a different approach for, say, poetry. The word “reading” is used to cover a wide range of different activities. Compare for example the kind of reading Bickerton is talking about with the kind Gary Lutz describes. High literary reading owes a lot to religious reading, where the text is treated as sacred. The difference could have something to do with the two separate reading pathways in the brain distinguished by Stanislas Dehaene.

But there aren’t only two types of reading. Sometimes we read just for plot -- we may be fully aware that the author has bungled the background setting, and that his prose is dead, but still keep turning the pages to see what happens.

And rarely, we experience all these kinds of readerly satisfaction at once, penetrating the zone Nabakov described -- “For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books.”

“Cousin Teresa” by Saki

The story can be found here.

On one level, Saki (H. H. Munro) was clearly reproaching the British for being less concerned with the maintenance of their Empire than with the domains of popular entertainment and dogs – and who can blame them really? Expanding an empire is a thankless task.

“Cousin Teresa” also makes the point that, in the eyes of the world, solid achievements will always count for less than fluff. “It’s immense,” is how Lucas characterizes his idea for a dance routine -- and indeed it’s still the sort of idea that passes for “big” within the culture industry. Andrew Lloyd Webber should really come up with a tune for it.

Saki’s own nature was somewhat split between Lucas and Basset – how seriously after all can we take a colonial administrator named Basset? In Britain itself, the tendency to prefer Lucas over Basset has since played out most of the way to its logical conclusion.

Still... basset or borzoi... Saki may have felt that either way the country was going to the dogs. I wonder if the story was ever the subject of an Edwardian sermon.

Allow me to note that "Cousin Teresa" contains the following great sentence --

“’Literature,’ explained the Minister.”

Quite so.

Some info about Saki here. Other stories from his 1914 collection Beasts and Super-Beasts here.

Smeary Covers

Stephen King complained about the way Mischa Berlinski’s Fieldwork was marketed --

“Fieldwork's cover is a green smear (probably jungle) and a gray smear (probably sky). It communicates nothing.”

“Why, why, why would a company publish a book this good and then practically demand that people not read it? Why should this book go to waste?”

Lori Ostlund’s The Bigness of the World also has a smeary cover, suggestive of some kind of landscape. There's nothing smeary about Berlinski’s or Ostlund’s writing – both authors portray the world precisely, even starkly... so what's the deal here? Is smeariness supposed to communicate literariness? When the writing doesn’t lack focus, why should the cover photo?

One theory -- maybe the effect supposed to be conveyed is that of a saccadic eye movement? Literary fiction is supposed to be more three-dimensional -- and have more going on -- so reading it requires constant refocusing: is this what the blur signifies?

Reading is impossible without saccadic eye movements, so I guess it would make a deranged kind of sense.

Here's a classic Jessa Crispin piece on how to judge a book by its cover, containing the following words to live by --

"Some images to avoid are laughing children (demented looking children are okay), birds, pictures of ranch land, and angels. You should be okay with most other animals (especially fish for some reason) except for horses." Why fish should be better than birds I can't say, yet I know what she means...

Balm in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

Gilead takes us into the consciousness of a humble provincial minister preparing to die. It seems at first a peaceful, slow-moving book, but it contains a terrible wisdom.

The Reverend John Ames’s thoughts are precise yet spacious. Regarding the practice of watching baseball on TV, he notes that it “seems quite two-dimensional beside radio.” Of religious rhetoric – “the same words that carry a good many people into the howling wilderness in one generation are irksome or meaningless in the next.” A thought that might serve as his epitaph -- “It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire.”

A big part of what makes the Reverend John Ames sympathetic is his integrity -- this thought struck me as surprising at first, but now I wonder if this isn’t actually a crucial quality in all characters we find sympathetic...

Once I got sucked in, Gilead turned out to have plenty of plot. Robinson traces the history of three generations of Midwestern preachers from the buildup to the Civil War, through the First World War and the Great Depression, all the way up to 1950s anti-miscegenation laws. Ames’s grandfather was a fiery abolitionist, a vision-prone militant Christian soldier of the stamp of John Brown. Ames’s father became a pacifist and finally abandoned his preacher’s vocation. Ames in the 1950s is still preaching in Gilead, Iowa, but doubts his young son will want to stay or take up the family trade. Gilead takes the form of a one-sided epistolary novel, the whole book being presented as a journal Ames intends his son to read when he grows up. Marilynne Robinson told Powells.com, "I've never loved epistolary novels; I was surprised to find myself writing one."

In her “Paris Review” interview, she explained why she thinks of religion as a framing mechanism, and why she gets nervous giving sermons -- “You’re talking within a congregation. They know the genre. There are many things that the sermon has to resonate with besides the specific text that is the subject of the sermon. In my tradition, there’s a certain posture of graciousness you have to answer to no matter what the main subject matter of the sermon is.” Gilead is likewise resonant and gracious, and apparently one of Barack Obama's favorite books.

InsideStorytime COSMOS

Werner Herzog told Katja Nicodemus in a recent interview that "all the most important trends of the last century come from California: the collective dreams in cinemas round the world. The fact that homosexuals are recognised as an integral part of society. The computer technology. All the Internet innovations. And also idiocies like hippies and New Age. There are only two exceptions. The green movement is more of a Scandinavian thing. And Islamic fundamentalism does not come from California either."

Attempting to milk this legacy of universal significance, tonight (Thursday February 18^th, 6.30 - 8.30 pm) we bring you InsideStorytime COSMOS at Cafe Royale. Some real cultural heavyweights will be reading:

Lori Ostlund is the author of the Flannery O'Connor award winning collection The Bigness of the World.

Tony DuShane, a stalwart of the Mission literary scene, is the author of Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk.

Alta Ifland is the author of Elegy for a Fabulous World -- according to Sven Birkerts her "uncanny tales merge the child's innocent seeing with the sorrowful knowledge of myth."

Stephen Kessler is the author of the poetry collection Burning Daylight and the essay collection Moving Targets, and the translator of works by many illustrious foreign authors including the sonnets of Borges.

Genie Gratto posts intoxicating fiction at 100 Proof Stories.

Galaxies nowadays aren't forming new stars as quickly as galaxies did billions of years ago: a recent study shows this is because there isn't as much raw material available for star formation -- cf. the paper, "High molecular gas fractions in normal massive star-forming galaxies in the young universe," in the February 11^th 2010 issue of “Nature." But our little cultural galaxy seems to be churning out new stars faster than ever before. Tell us you heard about the event from this blog, and we'll waive the customary $3 - $5 cover charge.

Avoiding Words of Foreign Origin

Consider Orwell's famous rendering, from “Politics and the English Language,” of a verse from the King James version of Ecclesiastes --

"I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

-- into the language of 1940s bureaucrats --

"Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."

One reason Orwell's ironic “translation” lacks the sincere tone of the original is that it has fewer monosyllables. Another is that it contains more words of Latin and Greek origin.

Because “Politics and the English Language” expresses a preference for words of Anglo-Saxon origin, some have charged Orwell with racism. This is surely unfair – it just happens that, for historical reasons, the Anglo-Saxon words in English tend to be the ones with the simplest connotations. Nicholas Ostler notes in Empires of the Word that “much of a language's flavour comes purely by association” -- an example Ostler gives is that for the first few centuries after written Greek literature began, each genre had to be written in the dialect of its first practitioners. “So epic poetry had to be written in Homer's mixture of Ionic an Aeolic, lyric poetry in Doric, history at first in Ionic, tragedy in Attic.”

Of course, once such associations are set, they may tend to reinforce regional stereotypes. And excluding foreign words may also mean excluding new ideas. Dmitri Sologdin, a character in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's In the First Circle, disciplines himself into avoiding words of foreign origin --

“I make a mark here every time I use a foreign word in Russian when it isn't unavoidable, The number of such marks is the measure of my imperfection. This one is for the word 'capitalism,' which I would have replaced with 'moneygrubbing' if I'd had my wits about me. 'Surveillance' in my slovenly haste I failed to replace with 'watchkeeping.' So I've given myself two bad marks.”

That's the Harry Willetts translation. The old Michael Guybon translation has --

“I make these ticks every time I use a foreign word without any real need. The total numbers of ticks show how far I am from my goal. When I used the word 'capitalism' just now, for instance, instead of 'the rule of usury,' or when in the heat of the moment I was too lazy to use 'tale-bearing' instead of 'informing,' I gave myself two ticks.”

Sologdin's examples are very politically charged. Maybe without the importation of foreign words and ideas into Russia, the Revolution couldn't have happened. On the other hand, the terms "the rule of usury” and “moneygrubbing” seem more ideologically loaded than the term “capitalism...”

Parts Fitting Together

Every event that occurs in a novel sheds light on all the novel's other events. This annoys Thomas Kurton, the scientist character in Generosity by Richard Powers --

“... fiction's perpetual mistaking of correlation for causation drives Kurton nuts. Even Camus can't help deploying bits of his characters' histories as if they explained all subsequent behaviors and beliefs.”

What Kurton sees as spurious correlation, Marshall Gregory in Shaped by Stories sees as a big part of fiction's appeal --

“Too much of my life – and yours – gives us the sense that the parts don't fit together. In contrast, the analogies of fiction and other narratives provide us with points of comparison that let us see what greater focus, organization, and unity our lives might possess.”

It's in our nature to look for patterns; when it comes to spotting connections, a false positive is likely to be less hazardous than a false negative... at least until you become clinically paranoid...

How much of our enjoyment of fiction stems from its providing more opportunities for connection-spotting than our real lives do?

Housman's Razor

Robert Graves -- "A. E. Housman's test of a true poem was simple and practical; does it make the hairs at one's chin bristle if one repeats it silently while shaving."

According to Graves, "The reason why the hairs stand on end, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright or lust -- the female spider of the queen-bee whose embrace is death." I wouldn't want to go all the way with Graves on this one, but it interests me that certain poems induce horripilation and related physiological effects.

Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is the classic example. If the following lines cross my mind while I'm following a road across a moor in the dark, my pace reliably accelerates --

"Like one, that on a lonely road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turn'd round, walks on
And turns no more his head:
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread."

The generations of poets immediately rebelling against Housman also give me goosebumps sometimes. Eliot does it --

"There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust."

So does Auden --

"'O where are you going?' said reader to rider,
That valley is fatal where furnaces burn,
Yonder's the midden whose odours will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return."

But I think not many poets in the last half-century have aimed for this kind of effect. For late-twentieth-century examples, one might have to look not to poetry but to the lyrics of rock songs?

We're Sorry. This Book is too Well Written for us.

Steve Almond has a future-of-publishing piece up on the Rumpus, touching on what it's like dealing with an agent who says your novel is “too literary” for today’s market, and on why he self-published his collection This Won't Take a Minute, Honey --

“I was cool with Harvard Bookstore selling it. But other than that, Minute, Honey is available only at readings. My reasoning is pretty simple: I want the book to be an artifact that commemorates a particular human gathering, not a commodity.”

Recently I read Josh Lukin's “Minnesota Review” interview with Samuel R. Delany, Asked why he advises younger authors nowadays to consider self-publishing, Delany provides some perspective on the collapse of the publishing industry --

“When there was a greater variety of commercial publishers and more economic competition between them, self-publishing was a way to avoid competition. It announced that you couldn't take the heat. That's why I advised against it, back then. At that point, nobody really took self-published writers seriously. Self-publishing was for books such as Thoughts of God, by John Francis, Forty Years a Backwoods Doctor, or (the title is Auden's) A Poultry Lover's Jottings.”

“Today, the collapse not only means that there's no real economic competition, but the kinds of things that publishers are looking for have changed. Commercial publishers today are far more distrustful of good writing than they have ever been before, and usually won't consider it unless it comes with some sort of ready-made reputation or gimmick. In the last half dozen years, writers have shown me rejection letters from publishers such as Harcourt Brace that actually say, under the letterhead, 'We're sorry. This book is too well written for us.' This means that competition is of an entirely different order than it was, say, thirty years ago, when such a letter simply would not have been written.”

I find this state of affairs easier to accept intellectually than I do emotionally – which I guess just goes to show that taboos die hard. Delany notes in About Writing that Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Stephen Crane, Raymond Roussel, and Edgar Rice Burroughs all self-published notable works -- “But that is only to say that, for them, the competition began after publication, not before.” Which is part of why it's disingenuous of Almond to deny that This Won't Take a Minute, Honey is a commodity.

I'll be reading at Why There Are Words tonight (Thursday February 11th 2010) at Studio 333, 333 Caledonia Street, Sacramento, along with Stephen Elliott, Joan Frank, Tanya Egan Gibson, Lauren Becker, and Judy French.

Sacred Hunger, by Barry Unsworth

Sacred Hunger is set a few decades before the American Revolution or French Revolution -- but we feel them brewing in the novel's every line.

Unsworth makes the eighteenth century play itself out in microcosm as the story of a single slave-ship. The captain, Saul Thurso, is the ship's absolute despot, savagely superstitious and insane. He's authority made flesh, having “reduced the world to a dominant principle and wrenched his moral frame to accommodate it” -- the dominant principle being the “sacred hunger” for profit to which the title alludes. Matthew Paris is the ship's doctor, a radical free-thinker, a man of science and compassion whose actions help spark a mutiny.

Rereading Sacred Hunger, I was struck by the consistently felicitous word choices, the “distraught cries of lapwings plunging in the wind,” the “cruising jaws of crocodiles,” a snake “dandified as only the very venomous can be, in bands of red and black and yellow...” I think of something G.K. Chesterton wrote about Robert Louis Stevenson -- “Everybody who has been at the seaside has noted how sharp and highly coloured, like painted caricatures, appear even the most ordinary figures as they pass in profile to and fro against the blue dado of the sea. There is something also of that hard light that falls full and pale upon ships and open shores; and even more, it need not be said, of a certain salt and acrid clearness in the air. But it is notably the case in the outlines of these maritime figures. They are all edges and they stand by the sea, that is the edge of the world.”

“This is but a rough experimental method; but it will be found useful to make the experiment, of calling up all the Stevensonian scenes that recur most readily to the memory; and noting this bright hard quality in shape and hue.”

Sacred Hunger is Stevensonian in its verbal precision, precision somehow contributing to a bright hard maritime quality of light that pervades the book. After mutinying, the surviving crew members -- many of them press-ganged and scarcely freer than the slaves -- band together with the surviving slaves to settle in the swamps of Florida.

We do not see this society functioning until Part Nine of the novel. There's an interesting structural observation to be made here. Sacred Hunger opens with a second-hand account of a mulatto's childhood memories of an inter-racial paradise. The plot builds up to the moment of revolution that leads to this utopia -- then we skip forward twelve years, for a detailed account of the machinations to destroy the utopia. Accordingly when in Part Nine we experience the quasi-Rousseauist alternative society, we know it's a world about to be destroyed from without – while Unsworth simultaneously shows us that it contains the seeds of its own internal destruction. For a novelist working around the time the Soviet Union collapsed, it took a lot of craft to imagine a utopia.

The Way Forward Into Light

Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead -- “Obstruction, obscurity, emptiness, disorientation, twilight, blackout, often combined with a struggle or path or journey – an inability to see one's way forward, but a feeling that there was a way forward, and that the act of going forward would eventually bring about the conditions for vision – these were the common elements in many descriptions of the process of writing.”

Images of passing from darkness into light are common in fiction. In Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger, Deakin's childhood escape from the shed where his father locked him up is the last thing he thinks of before dying in Africa -- “That light, that enlargement had been destination enough. He had never found it again, he had run ever since between narrowing walls, under lowering skies.” Unsworth uses a similar image for Paris's emergence from the slave-ship's festering hold onto its deck, immediately before instigating a mutiny -- “In all the years of his life remaining, Paris was to carry the impression of that emergence into light and space.”

Joseph Conrad wrote in “Henry James, an Appreciation” -- “Action in its essence, the creative art of a writer of fiction may be compared to rescue work carried out in darkness against cross gusts of wind swaying the action of a great multitude. It is rescue work, this snatching of vanishing phrases of turbulence, disguised in fair words, out of the native obscurity into a light where the struggling forms may be seen, seized upon, endowed with the only possible form of permanence in this world of relative values – the permanence of memory. And the multitude feels it obscurely too; since the demand of the individual to the artist is, in effect, the cry, 'take me out of myself!' meaning really, out of my perishable activity into the light of imperishable consciousness.”

Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed my Life – “It is like the rubbing of two sticks together to make a fire, the act of reading, an improbable pedestrian task that leads to heat and light. Perhaps this only becomes clear when one watches a child do it.”

Fiction as Moral Technology

Richard Hughes, Fiction or Truth -- “... for most of us Fiction in one form or another offers our only way of experiencing the identity of others. This identity is the necessary ground of Ethics.”

Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid -- “This period of childhood provides the foundation for one of the most important social, emotional and cognitive skills a human being can learn: the ability to take on someone else's perspective.”

Stephen Pinker talking to Rebecca Goldstein in an interview for “The Seed" -- “We are getting less cruel, and the question is… why did it happen? What stretched our innate capacity for empathy? And one answer is mediums that force us to take other people’s perspectives, such as journalism, history, and realistic fiction.”

The word “realistic” here seems problematic to me – I think that, for reasons touched on earlier, it would be better to substitute the word “lifelike.” But I like Pinker's argument that “fiction can be a kind of moral technology," one of the ways simulated experience can be useful.

In this interview, Pinker's stress is on how fiction can help us identify with people from other ethnic backgrounds. Learning to identify with a fictional black person can make white readers more compassionate towards real black people -- Pinker gives the example of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

However as evidence that compassion for fictional characters can easily co-exist with indifference towards actual people, I call to the witness stand Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye --

“The part that got me was, there was a lady sitting next to me that cried all through the goddam picture. The phonier it got, the more she cried. You'd have thought she did it because she was kindhearted as hell, but I was sitting right next to her, and she wasn't. She had this little kid with her that was bored as hell and had to go to the bathroom, but she wouldn't take him. She kept telling him to sit still and behave himself. She was about as kind-hearted as a goddam wolf. You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart. I'm not kidding.”

Generalizations About Thin Women

"She never puts on any weight, you'll notice that's often true of selfish women." -- Joan Didion, Play it as it Lays

It's part of the job of novelists or their characters occasionally to throw out such over-generalizations. Ideally they ring somewhat true, or at least tell us something about the narrator.

From David Foster Wallace's story "Westard the Course of the Empire Takes its Way" --

"D.L. was severely thin, thin in a way that suggested not delicacy but a kind of stinginess about how much of her she'd extend to the space around her. Thin the way mean nuns are thin."

Maybe Wallace encountered thin mean nuns at some point in his life, but I suspect he drew this image from the well of his television-watching experience.

Claims about thin women tend to strike me as ideologically suspect.

From Betsy Lerner's Food and Loathing -- "A high school friend's father once said that losing weight was merely a matter of vanity. Thin people, he said, were more vain and cared more about their looks. The comment has stayed with me. I've searched my soul and I promise you: I'm vain. I'm Carly Simon vain. If it were just about vanity, I'd be Kate Moss."

Trauma, Perpetual Adolescence, the Moneyed Person's Whims

Nathan Heller, writing in “Slate” --

“Nine Stories is a book about war trauma, but in its setting, storylines, and style, it is the most oblique war narrative imaginable. Salinger captured the personal refractions of a national crisis and placed them into the hollowed-out shell of domestic narrative. This was, in many ways, the genesis of the postwar short story.”

Trevor Butterworth notes in Forbes, “If one can measure the weight of last week's literary deaths in links, the number of encomia on 'Arts & Letters Daily' -- tribune to a virtual intelligentsia -- seem to say it all: J.D. Salinger, 63; Howard Zinn, 7; Louis Auchincloss, 2.”

Gore Vidal famously called Auchincloss the only U.S. novelist “who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs. Butterworth argues that the lack of interest in Auchincloss relative to Salinger indicates that “adolescence has revealed itself as the perfect American state of mind -- knowledgeable enough to grasp phoniness, wise enough never to grow up. Both Salinger and Zinn, through the very sincerity of their writing, helped to reify adolescence as the dominant worldview, the most powerful mass-culture meme in the past 50 years.”

All three authors fought for the U.S. in World War Two -- Salinger was in the Army, Auchincloss in the Navy, Zinn in the Air Force. The comparison Butterworth draws may over-simplify things, since Auchincloss was arguably no less critical of prep school mores than was Holden Caulfield, and as Christopher Caldwell wrote in "The Weekly Standard," had his own beef with the elder generation --

“A favorite Auchincloss theme is the way those whose lives are already behind them reach out to poison all the sexual, intellectual, idealistic, and even ethical promise of youth -- to poison anything inconsistent with dynasty-formation, the moral order, or the moneyed person's whims, which grow increasingly hard to distinguish.”

Fraudulent Henshaws

In J. D. Salinger's “Seymour -- an Introduction,” Seymour Glass critiques a story by Buddy Glass:

“The first sentence threw me way off. 'Henshaw woke up that morning with a splitting head.' I count so heavily on you to finish off all the fraudulent Henshaws in fiction. There just are no Henshaws.”

Here Salinger invented a good example of a bad first line -- we disbelieve in Henshaw from the get-go. Reading story submissions, one encounters many examples of first sentences that make the story feel dead on arrival.

Are there any good first lines about waking up in the morning?

“One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous insect.”

Henshaw's situation is perhaps more statistically common, but it's Gregor who feels real.

A lot of Anthony Burgess novels start in bed, but there's always something attention-grabbing going on -- a catamite and an archbishop are involved, or a tour party of schoolchildren from the future are watching, or a man with two wives has to figure out how to get out of bed without waking either. Nothing like that will ever happen to Henshaw. Off hand, I can't think of any good first sentences about headaches either...

Seymour Glass Says Good Night

I have some thoughts on J. D. Salinger up at Open Democracy.

Will we find out now what he was up to for the last forty-five years? There should be a word “privashing,” meaning “to do the opposite of publishing.” Kafka privashed most of his work – although the concept is clearly contradictory from the get go, since if he’d really privashed successfully, we wouldn’t have heard of him. Dave Eggers, being himself a publisher, naturally suspects it’s unlikely Salinger managed to produce anything coherent in isolation.

Eggers writes, “To me the question of whether or not he continued to write strikes at the heart of the nature of writing itself. If he indeed wrote volumes and volumes about the Glass family, as has been claimed, it would be such a curious thing, given that the nature of written communication is social; language was created to facilitate understanding between people. So writing books upon books without the intention of sharing them with people is a proposition full of contradictory impulses and goals.”

More perspectives on Salinger here. Christopher Hitchens reports anecdotal evidence that American teenagers no longer "get" Holden Caulfield.

I think I'll be quoting Salinger's Seymour Glass a lot this week. Here he is writing to Buddy Glass, from “Seymour – an Introduction” --

“When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion. Never. I'm a little over-excited now. Since it is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? But let me tell you first what you won't be asked. You won't be asked if you were working on a wonderful, moving piece of writing when you died. You won't be asked if it was long or short, sad or funny, published or unpublished. You won't be asked if you were in good or bad form while you were working on it. You won't even be asked if it was the one piece of writing you would have been working on if you had known your time would be up when it was finished – I think only poor Søren K will get asked that. I'm so sure you'll get asked only two questions. Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. If only you'd remember before ever you sit down to write that you've been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart's choice. The next step is terrible, but no simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won't even underline that. It's too important to be underlined. Oh, dare to do it, Buddy! Trust your heart. You're a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you. Good night.”