Shelf Actualization

Happy Friday!

2013-05-24T04:00:00.000-04:00

“Customers of Irish descent need not apply”

Profusion of Proverbs from the great Sancho Panza

2013-05-23T04:00:00.000-04:00

“That may be so,” replied Sancho, “but if you pay your debts, you don’t worry about guaranties, and it’s better to have God’s help than to get up early, and your belly leads your feet, not the other way around; I mean, if God helps me, and I do what I ought to with good intentions, I’ll be sure to govern in grand style. Just put a finger in my mouth and see if I bite or not!”

“God and all his saints curse you, wretched Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “as I have said so often, will the day ever some when I see you speak an ordinary coherent sentence without any proverbs? Senores, your highness should leave this fool alone, for he will grind your souls not between two but two thousand proverbs brought in as opportunely and appropriately as the health God gives him, or me if I wanted to listen to them.”

— A taste of the dialogue in Don Quixote , by Cervantes

Author Look-alikes Vol. 14

2013-05-22T08:14:00.000-04:00

Henry Miller and Jean Luc Picard. “Engage:”

Who can match Evelyn Waugh’s aristocratic airs? Lord Grantham, that’s who:

Swap the pince nez for regular specs and Anton Checkov isn’t that different from a goateed Robert Downey Jr:

Fyodor Doestoevsky wasn’t exactly handsome. In kind of the same way that Ron Howard’s brother isn’t handsome:

I wasn't sure this was really William Butler Yeats, and not a Steve Martin bit character. I'm still not completely convinced:

Title Chase: The Red Badge of Courage

2013-05-21T04:00:00.000-04:00

Yesterday we reviewed Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage , but said next to nothing about what the title actually means. Is it a military insignia? An honor bestowed by one’s superiors for valor on the field of battle? Not exactly. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 9, the one and only place the term is mentioned in the narrative:

“The youth fell back in the procession until the tattered soldier was not in sight. Then he started to walk on with the others.

“But he was amid wounds. The mob of men was bleeding. Because of the tattered soldier's question he now felt that his shame could be viewed. He was continually casting sidelong glances to see if the men were contemplating the letters of guilt he felt burned into his brow.

“At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.”

Review: The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane

2013-05-20T04:00:00.000-04:00

My reading’s been all over the map this year, but since I hadn’t tackled any Civil War-era war stories, I didn’t see any reason to turn my nose up at Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage .

Truth is, I had no idea what I was about to read. If you asked me a week ago, I would have been hard-pressed to tell you the difference between Captains Courageous , Profiles in Courage , and The Red Badge of Courage . All reportedly great books, all on my mental To-Be-Read list for years, but all of them a confusing jumble of "courage" in my poorly-read head.

Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage , as it turns out, is not a daring rescue at sea or an examination of valiant senators, it is a fictionalized account of the Battle of Chancellorsville, and of the second bloodiest day of the American Civil War as told from the perspective of a “youth” who is seeing battle for the very first time. And while there’s lots of tactical blow-by-blow, that’s not what makes it great. What makes it great is Crane’s fascinating probing into the psyche of soldiers who are in fact scared spitless.

You see them wrestling with the same questions we would all probably face in their shoes: Will I run when it gets ugly? Or will I have what it takes to stand up and fight? And what’s great about it is that we get to follow a main character whose experience runs the gamut: over the course of a few days he turns tail and runs, he deserts wounded comrades, he finds his regiment again and then fights bravely, he picks up the flag when the color sergeant goes down- and through it all he doesn’t come to consider himself a coward or a hero, so much as he comes to truly know himself and grow through the experience. It’s a book that’ll make you think.

And the language is beautiful. Here’s the first paragraph:

“The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army's feet; and at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills.”

Anyway, it’s short, and it’s sweet. You should do yourself the favor of checking it out.

Haiku-ption Contest #14

2013-05-17T04:00:00.000-04:00

Shall we? Yes, let’s. My haiku is below, add your own in the comments.

Cows are in estrus

Bulls are trumpeting their aims

Time for a new tack

Shakespeare & Co.: Know Before You Go

2013-05-16T04:00:00.000-04:00

A few days ago we shared a documentary on the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore on Paris’s left bank. Here, just for the heck of it, is a map showing the locations of all three iterations of the famous bookshop (plus some links to the current Google Street views for each).

The first, opened by Sylvia Beach at 8 Rue Dupuytren, is basically just across the street from the Odeon metro stop. And if you want to, you can get your hair cut there. It is now the location of “Easy Cut.”

The second, larger location is just a stone’s throw away, at 12 Rue de l’Odeon. If you want, you can complement your new haircut with duds from "Moi Cani" the small shop that has taken over the space— or browse in the tiny French boostore next door at no. 10.

The third and current location, originally opened by George Whitman as “Le Mistral” in 1951, and re-named Shakespeare & Co. in 1964 after Sylvia Beach’s death, is just a short walk across the river from Notre Dame Cathedral at 37 Rue de la Bucherie- not on the river, but one small street beyond it.

The current proprietor? George’s daughter: Sylvia Beach Whitman. Naturally!

The (literal) Snows of Kilimanjaro

2013-05-15T04:00:00.000-04:00

One of my all-time favorite Hemingway stories is “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” You may recall this image from the story, from which its title is drawn:

“Then they began to climb and they were going to the East it seemed, and then it darkened and they were in a storm, the rain so thick it seemed like flying through a waterfall, and then they were out and Compie turned his head and grinned and pointed and there, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.”

I stumbled across Google’s satellite time-lapse Earth Engine the other day, and thought it would be interesting to train the lens on those famous snows of Kilimanjaro. Go here, to see how they’ve evolved from 1984 to today. Hem's metaphor could be lost before long...

DFW's "This is Water"

2013-05-14T04:00:00.000-04:00

It’s commencement season, and David Foster Wallace’s somewhat famous commencement address to Kenyon College grads in 2005 has received a YouTube makeover. But it’s not just for recent college graduates or fans of Mr. Wallace. It’s for anyone who’s ever had to deal with “repulsive, stupid, cowlike, dead-eyed and non-human” people, or boring jobs, or any of the other crap that real life hands you. Enjoy:

-H/T, a whole bunch of people.

Another Month in the Can

2013-05-13T04:00:00.000-04:00

Over the weekend our staff worked to diligently put another month into the Shelf Actualization archives. Above are the authors covered in the past 30 days, and below are our 5 most popular posts from that period:

Finally, the nutty search terms that brought readers this way:

Edward Hirsch >> A basketball poem for tourney time.
Delta Wedding >> The review, or the Paul Simon lyrics
How to write like Kerouac >> Easier than you would think
White whale metaphor >> And a little Three Amigos for good measure
Significance of the dog in vast hell >> Search me. But the story was good.
Arthur miller and Eudora welty >> Was there a connection? Hmmm.
How are they alike Grapes of Wrath and Cry the Beloved Country >> It's the intercalary chapters, stupid.
Fictional geography >> That didn't end up being fictional
Map of don quixote’s travels >> Ours are as good as anything out there.
Is being unathletic bad? >> Well, it worked for Joyce.

Thanks for stopping by! You’re always welcome back.

Feature Film Friday: Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man

2013-05-10T09:16:00.000-04:00

I’ve been lucky enough to visit Paris twice, but for whatever reason, neither visit included a stop by the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore. <cue the sad trombones>

Thankfully we can all take a virtual visit to this fabled bookshop by watching the documentary below, “Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man,” which takes a look at George Whitman’s re-incarnation of Sylvia Beach’s left bank book boutique, including the Tumbleweed Hotel, where travelers can overnight amidst the stacks in return for a little day-time labor and the promise of plowing through some good books while a guest. Here’s part 1:

What They Were Reading: Haruki Murakami

2013-05-09T04:00:00.000-04:00

"When someone asks, “Which three books have meant the most to you?” I can answer without having to think: The Great Gatsby , Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov , and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye . All three have been indispensable to me (both as a reader and as a writer); yet if I were forced to select only one, I would unhesitatingly choose Gatsby. Had it not been for Fitzgerald’s novel, I would not be writing the kind of literature I am today (indeed, it is possible that I would not be writing at all, although that is neither here nor there).

"Whatever the case, you can sense the level of my infatuation with The Great Gatsby . It taught me so much and encouraged me so greatly in my own life. Though slender in size for a full-length work, it served as a standard and a fixed point, an axis around which I was able to organize the many coordinates that make up the world of the novel. I read Gatsby over and over, poking into every nook and cranny, until I had virtually memorized entire sections."

—from the Columbia University Press blog, H/T GalleyCat

A 2013 Reading Check-Up

2013-05-08T04:00:00.000-04:00

I’m baffled by this, but it’s already May, if you can believe it. I have yet to do a reading check-up to see how I’m doing on my resolutions for 2013, but now is as good a time as any. Here’s what I set out to do this year:

Read something old-school
Read something contemporary
Re-read a favorite
Finish (and most likely re-start) a “Did not finish”
And tackle at least one of the big boys

And here are the twelve and two-half volumes vanquished so far:

So, Read something old-school— I think both King Lear and Don Quixote qualify— check!

Read something contemporary—The Orphan Master’s Son , The Paris Wife , Nemesis, and Leaving the Atocha Station —I left nothing to chance on this one— check!

Re-read a favorite—Have not done this yet. Goose egg so far. L

Finish (and most likely re-start) a “Did not finish” —Babylon Revisited and Other Stories got me over the line, but there will probably be others— check!

And tackle at least one of the big boys—If Quixote doesn’t qualify, I don’t know what does. 640 Pages down, another 300 pages to go— almost check.

Three and a half out of five aint bad for early May. How's your reading coming?

Review: The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain

2013-05-07T04:00:00.000-04:00

So when the title sounds like chick-lit, and the cover looks like chick-lit, you expect chick-lit, right? But I was actually pretty pleasantly surprised when I opened up Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife a few weeks ago. It’s a view of Hemingway’s Paris years through the eyes of his first wife Hadley, and I’m happy to report that anyone with a predilection for the writer, and for Paris in the 20’s, will probably enjoy the book.

Now, I’ll admit that I didn’t read it like a novel, though the writing is fine and the story is certainly strong enough to carry the reader along. Rather, I read it like a Hemingway biography. Call me a pig, but that’s what I was interested in. And say what you will about McLain as a novelist, the woman did some pretty serious research to get the thing off the ground.

I was looking for fresh angles on familiar characters (the Fitzgeralds do not come off well, Joyce barely shows up at all), new tid-bits I’d never heard before (did you know it was almost Rome, and not Paris, for example?) and Hadley’s take on some of the bigger plot points (how would she handle the tragic loss all of Hemingway’s early work at the Gare de Lyon? Or the affair with Pauleen Pfeiffer?).

There were no huge surprises, but there were a few eyebrow raisers. I think we’re all fully prepared to see Hemingway revealed as a bit of an ass, but McLain makes Hadley out to be far more athletic, lythe and attractive than she really was. I mean, not to be mean, but we do have pictures after all. Here’s Pfeiffer, Hemingway and Hadley together in Pamplona:

At the same time, she portrays Hadley as such a weak, accepting, milquetoast of a character, who lets Pfeiffer walk all over her marriage and even right into her bed. (A diligent Googler will find some evidence of Hadley’s easy acquiescence, but no hard proof that the three ever shared the same bed— outside the plot of Hemingway’s posthumous novel The Garden of Eden , which contains a similar episode.)

Regardless of the Hemingway-McLain ‘he said-she said,’ you almost get the impression that you could read The Paris Wife alongside A Moveable Feast , and between the two of them, start to arrive at some version of the unvarnished truth behind Hemingway’s first marriage. But it was an interesting read, and I’d recommend it to others who suffer from Hemingway "aficion."

Author Look-Alikes Vol. 13

2013-05-06T04:00:00.000-04:00

Georges Perec and Daniel Stern: “All the great ones leave their mark. We’re the wet bandits.”

Someone get Honore de Balzac a perm and a luchador mask. He’d make as good a Nacho Libre as Jack Black:

Orhan Pamuk and Rick Steves aren’t an exact match, I’ll admit, but they have enough in common—the semi-shaggy “dad” haircut, the “don’t notice my glasses” glasses, the affable and harmless expression—for the one to remind me of the other.

George Eliot. Not exactly a looker, huh? Sadly, the closest match I could find for that schnoz was F. Murray Abraham:

The hair, the dramatic pose, the fact that she’s a little past her prime… alright Mr. DeMille, Katherine Anne Porter’s ready for her close-up.

(Fictional) First Line Friday: Chuck Stone spy novel, by Jay Pritchett and Manny Delgado

2013-05-03T11:08:00.000-04:00

I’m a big fan of meta fiction. I love stories about writers and their stories. Movies like “Barton Fink” or books like Slaughterhouse Five always seem to hit home. We’ve looked at fictional tidbits of fiction on Mad Men, and on Wednesday night’s episode of Modern Family (Career Day), Jay Pritchett and stepson Manny Delgado revealed their own dreams of penning the great American novel—or at least a compelling spy thriller—and we got a taste of what they came up with. Here are their first lines, in case you missed them:

Jay’s opener:

“Chuck Stone, six foot three inches of steely-eyed determination, sat at the interrogation table.”

Manny’s opener:

“Chuck Stone smiled and lit a cigarette as if he had all the time in the world, when, in fact, the world was about to end.”

And as a bonus, Manny’s final lines, which served as the episode-ending voiceover:

“We all weave a web of lies. Some we tell to try to help the ones we love, some we tell to try to fool ourselves, and some we tell because when you’re out of bullets and staring down the barrel of a Kalashnikov, the only weapon you’ve got left is guile.”

Love it.

The Great Trimalchio?

2013-05-02T11:11:00.002-04:00

So the premiere of the new Great Gatsby movie was held last night in New York. I’ve been wrestling with whether I want to re-read Gatsby before I see the flick, but I think I’ve landed on ‘no.’ That is, until I learned that Baz Luhrmann’s film may not be an adaptation of The Gatsby Gatsby , so much as it is an adaptation of an earlier, unpublished version of Gatsby called Trimalchio – that features a much darker James Gatz, who is more menacing and violent than the character moviegoers are probably expecting.

"'Trimalchio' was a tremendous resource," says Mr. Luhrmann, noting that Gatsby and Daisy's relationship is more fleshed out in that version. Several key bits of dialogue between Daisy and Gatsby were pulled from "Trimalchio." Mr. DiCaprio became obsessed with it, and carried a copy of "Trimalchio" with him at all times.

Full story here. Luckily for all of us, the Trimalchio version has been published for purists and curiosity-seekers alike. I just may read this one before I see the film. You should, too:

Review: The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson

2013-05-01T08:07:00.001-04:00

It’s been a couple weeks since Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son won the Morning News Tournament of Books, and about a week since it nabbed the Pulitzer Prize. So I know what you’re all wondering: “Well, MacEvoy, what do you think of it?”

Sagely anticipating your question, I have undertaken the reading of it. Here are my thoughts.

First off, it is a really good book, and a very compelling read. For most readers, myself included, it’ll be the first peek you’ve ever gotten inside the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. And you will not be disappointed with the sweep of history, culture and color that Johnson supplies. Some of the vignettes, like a fishing vessel’s discovery of mysterious radio transmissions from the international space station or from a pair of female American rowers working their way across the Pacific, give you a fascinating window into what it must be like for North Koreans to encounter the real world outside their borders.

Now, I’ve never set foot in the DPRK. But while Johnson’s sensationalized portrayal of North Korea doesn’t strike me as completely believable, I’m going to go ahead and assume he’s done far more research than I’ve ever done on the subject. So, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt on the details.

Here’s what’s really wrong with the book: He’s taken his research into a half dozen unrelated facets of life under the Kim regime, and woven them into a single character’s experience. And for me it just doesn’t ring true.

Pak Jun Do is introduced as a tunnel soldier, trained for combat in the pitch darkness of passageways beneath the DMZ. But then he is recruited as a kidnapper, plucking people off the coast of Japan by boat. After that, he becomes an intelligence officer who monitors radio signals on a fishing boat in the Sea of Japan. He is beatified as a hero of the people, and is whisked off on some high-level diplomatic talks with an American Senator in Texas. Then he is thrown into a prison camp. Then he escapes and assumes the identity of a government minister. Etc., etc. It just got to be a little much to swallow.

If you’re asking me— and let’s be honest, nobody is—this book should have been written as a mosaic story, with multiple main characters whose intersecting plot lines are woven together at the end of the book (Think “Crash”, or the “Modern Family” pilot episode.) That would have fixed it for me. Told as it was, with a character who wears just about every possible hat, just so he could observe every possible North Korean atrocity, I half-expected him to be fine-tuning nuclear weapons or performing open-heart surgery on the Dear Leader just because some government goons roughed him up and told him, “Okay, you’re a scientist now” or “ Your next assignment is as a heart surgeon.” Heck, he’d been everything else by that point.

But the sentence-level writing is first class, beautiful stuff. And he brings references from early in the book full circle so that there are plenty of overarching themes for the reader to absorb. I would gladly pick up Johnson’s next book, and I’ll even gladly recommend this one, with the one caveat mentioned above. Check it out.

The Brazen Bibliophiles of Timbuktu

2013-04-30T08:48:00.002-04:00

We don’t generally link to content in other corners of the web, but I thought this story about the rescue of rare texts from the Timbuktu library was pretty interesting:

“Starting in early May, every morning before sunrise, while the militants were still asleep, Haidara and his men would walk to the city’s libraries and lock themselves inside. Until the heat cleared the streets in the afternoon, the men would find their way through the darkened buildings and wrap the fragile manuscripts in soft cloths. They would then pack them into metal lockers roughly the size of large suitcases, as many as 300 in each. At night, they’d sneak back to the libraries, traveling by foot to avoid checkpoints on the road, pick up the lockers, and carry them, swathed in blankets, to the homes of dozens of the city’s old families. The entire operation took nearly two months, but by July, they had stowed 1,700 lockers in basements and hideaways around the city. And they did it just in time, because not long after, the militants moved into the Ahmed Baba Institute, using its elegant rooms to store canned vegetables and bags of white rice. Haidara fled to Bamako, hoping the Islamists’ ignorance about the texts would keep them safe.”

If only the Ptolemaic Egyptians had been as careful with the library of Alexandria…

Review: All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren

2013-04-29T04:00:00.000-04:00

Don’t know how I’ve missed mentioning this, but I’ve plowed my way through Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men , and it absolutely blew me away. Brilliant, brilliant book.

Warren melds pitch-perfect descriptive language with deep-fried country-boy-isms to create an extremely distinctive style. Here’s a free-sample tray:

“…her own glance strayed about the room in that abstracted way a good housewife has of looking around to surprise a speck of dust in the act.”

“ ’I know you and the boss was like that.’ He held up two large, white, glistening episcopal fingers as in benediction.”

“Then the boss spied a fellow at the far end of the soda fountain, a tall, gaunt shanked, malarial, leather-faced side of jerked venison wearing jean pants and a brance of mustaches hanging off the kind of face you see in photographs of General Forrest’s cavalrymen…”

I mean, come on, how good is that! Right?

The story doesn’t disappoint either. He weaves links to the past into the story in rewarding, surprising ways. As I’ve mentioned before, this is a sure-fire way to win me over as a reader. He also makes use of something I’ll call the Literary Cosmic Boomerang. It’s not quite Karma, and not poetic justice. But one way or another, the unseen ramifications of a character’s actions come right back to kick him in the crotch and give the story new and deeper meanings. (And even though Willie Stark’s assassination by the same doctor who just days before had operated on his son should have taken a private tale of corruption public, I can overlook that simple oversight.) I loved it.

There is, however, one chief complaint: The Cass Mastern side story. Our main character, Jack Burden, interrupts his main narrative thread tracing the rise and fall of a folksy southern political star, with a too-long, overly thorough side story of star-crossed lovers in the Civil War era. It was still well-written, and pretty compelling in and of itself, but I was antsy to get back to the main story, and saw little if any parrallels that would justify its inclusion in the book. And yeah, I’ve read the commentary that says the Cass Mastern line of research helps Jack see that every action will have implications and ripples we can’t control, but I just didn’t see the point. Warren and his editor were asleep at the switch on this one.

But it still won the Pulitzer, and it still deserved it. That’s how awesome the rest of the book is. Run, don’t walk…

Feature Film Friday

2013-04-26T04:00:00.000-04:00

Another short one today, How about giving 7 and a half minutes to Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart?”

Short Story Club: "How the Devil Came Down Division Street" by Nelson Algren

2013-04-25T04:00:00.000-04:00

Hey! Welcome to Short Story Club. Glad you could make it. Come on in and grab a seat. Jami was just about to tell us what she thought of this month's story— and there should be a shrimp cocktail floating around here somewhere. Jami?

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“How the Devil Came Down Division Street” is a nice snapshot of Algren’s world view, a view that permeated the many novels and short stories that followed, a world view that can be summed up nicely by a quote from the story: “The devil lives in a double-shot.”

This quote sets the tone for a tale that, at its conclusion, is an introspective look into the mind of a man not quite thirty years old, a man who has yet to overcome what his thirteen year old self saw, what he didn’t see, and what he feared because of the space between the two perspectives. Roman is the son of a renowned drunk, a street performer, a sad excuse of an accordion player who doesn’t live with his family so much as he has a place to sleep when he returns home in the mornings after a night of roaming the streets for pennies.

Roman’s father hears a constant knocking at the door of their home, at least that is what he tells his family but no one believes him. Rather, Roman and his twin siblings think their father is crazy. They share a bed at night when he is philandering or at worse, begging and in the daytime while their father sleeps it off, the children go to school and pretend he is different. Their mother doesn’t encourage nor does she dissuade her children from feeling this way and by allowing the speculation, she is implicit in the reactions her children have to their father, a mixture of embarrassment, shame, and ultimately, misunderstanding.

One day Roman’s father returns without his accordion. Things change. He doesn’t wander the streets at night any longer. He becomes a husband to their mother again, takes a job as a janitor but, he takes a bed too. The knocking is heard by Roman. He believes his father, doesn’t think he is crazy any longer but his mother does the unthinkable and trades the sanity of her son for the newfound respectability of her husband. So Roman then, at age 17 is pushed out, finds himself with nowhere to spend his nights, no place to call his own and so he takes to the bars himself. As Algren puts it, “he came to think of the dawn, when the taverns closed and he must go home as the bitterest hour of the day.”

The bitterest hour of the day. That’s where Nelson Algren takes the reader and with straightforward language and crisp descriptions, Roman is any one of us or all of us, giving up our accordions for a place to sleep, a place to call our own.

—Jami McFatter Balkom is an attorney, practicing in Panama City, Florida who writes short story reviews for her blog, www.wherewordslive.blogspot.com. She is currently writing fiction, working on a novel of literary fiction and a series of short stories centered around her hometown in northwest Florida.

So what did the rest of you think of the story?

Short Story Club Returns

2013-04-24T09:00:00.000-04:00

We’ve been derelict in our Short Story Club duties, but leave it to our audience to rekindle the flame. Reader and blogger Jami Balkom has offered to throw the spotlight on a short story by Nelson Algren, an author we’ve never covered on this blog. We’ll post the story today, and invite you all to throw in your own two cents tomorrow. Without further ado, here’s Jami’s introduction (Thanks, Jami!) :

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Nelson Algren was one of the most popular literary fiction writers in America during the later 40’s and early 50’s, providing a unique and loud voice for the down-and-outer, for the failures of society, for those who never made it to the inside of any circle. This reputation was largely based on Algren's novel A Walk on theWild Side which was made even more famous by this Lou Reed song:

But it was his short story collection, The Neon Wilderness, that started it all, published in 1947, just two years before the release of his National Book Award winning novel, The Man with the Golden Arm. The loser in all of his manifestations-- drug addict, homeless scavenger, cheating husband, street performer begging for change, all of them came to life in Algren’s short stories, paving the way for a career that would define the author as much as the author shaped the world inhabited by his stories’ characters. The short story “how the devil camedown division street” is a nice snapshot of Algren’s world view, a view that permeated the many novels and short stories that followed, a world view that can be summed up nicely by a quote from the story: “The devil lives in a double-shot.”

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Here’s how Algren kicks off the story:

“Last Saturday evening there was a great argument in the Polonia Bar. All the biggest drunks on Division were there, trying to decide who the biggest drunk of them was. Symanski said he was, and Oljiec said he was, and Koncel said he was, and Czechowski said he was.

“Then Roman Orlov came in and the argument was decided.”

Read the rest here, and come back tomorrow for Jami’s take, and to add some thoughts of your own!

Review: Don Quixote Part I, by Cervantes

2013-04-23T04:00:00.000-04:00

I have finished Part I of Don Quixote, so I thought it would be a good idea to stop and take stock. You’ve no doubt noticed that the book has already spawned quite a few posts, but I haven’t actually sat down to process what I think of it.

Before picking up the book, my closest encounter with "the Knight of the Sorrowful Face" was a lanky Lladro statuette that graced my family's living room, and whose fragile porcelain sword probably earned me a spanking when it broke in some forgotten, childhood, rough-housing. Funny that almost 400 years after he made his mark on the world, Quixote is still suffering all kinds of injustices and humiliations.

Anyway, here are some meandering reactions:

What’s all this garbage about windmills? Seriously, blink and you’ll miss them. My guess is that the windmill episode has settled so prominently into our consciousness, not because it was such a profound moment in the story, but because most readers give up on the book in the first one-hundred pages, and the windmills just happen to be one of the early vignettes that everybody reads before giving up. If you wanted an iconic image that recurs time and time again, and has an impact on the psyche of the characters, you’d probably be better off choosing the image of Sancho Panza being tossed repeatedly in a blanket to his great shame at the Inn. The Knight and his squire suffer more mishaps and indignities than Ben Stiller in a 'Meet the Parents' movie, but none of the physical punishment they suffer has quite the effect as that simple humiliation.

For better or for worse, Part I is a storyteller’s orgy. For long periods, we leave Don Quixote and Sancho for the unrelated tales of Gristostomo and Marcela, Cardenio and Dorotea, Don Fernando and Luscinda, Anselmo and Lothario, the captive and Zoraida, Don Luis and Clara and her father the Judge and on and on and on. Sometimes it’s a side character’s backstory, other times the travelers simply sit down and read an entire novella with eachother, while Don Quixote sleeps. Towards the end of Part I, when each new arrival at the Inn introduces its own 50 page tangent, it starts to get a little tiresome. If I had gone into the book expecting a Canterbury Tales Smorgasbord of travellers’ yarns, it might not have bothered me. But since I was expecting to cover lots of fresh ground with Quixote and Panza and windmills… yeah, I lost a little steam at the end there. I was pleased to see Part II, which was published 10 years after Part I, open up with an acknowledgement of his out-of-control tangents. Apparently his countryman had the same reaction as I did.

Having said all of that, it’s a brilliant satire. It must have been to Cervantes’s contemporaries, what a hilarious spoof of Fabio-covered romances would be in our day. But Cervantes raises some important questions about what art is exactly—what the masses want out of it, and what the duties of the author are. I was also amazed at what a profoundly modern feel it has, what with Cervantes referring to himself and his rivals, to contemporary works and pop culture references that must have felt very edgy and relevant when it was first published. By the time Part II kicks off, he’s already weaving then-current reader reactions into the story itself.

You’re also never quite sure where the narrator stands. Sometimes he complains that the fictional Moorish source documents are probably filled with lies to lessen the stature of Quixote, at other times he openly refers to Quixote as a lunatic.

For all its faults, Don Quixote must have been a groundbreaking work for its time. And there’s good reason why writers and readers still read it and emulate it today. On to Part II…

What They Were Reading: Clive James

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“After Shakespeare, my favorite poet is Dante. My favorite novelists are Proust and Tolstoy, closely followed by Scott Fitzgerald, and perhaps Hemingway when he isn’t beating his chest. But in all my life I never enjoyed anything more than the first pieces I read by S. J. Perelman.”

“I don’t do much rereading anymore because I’ve been ill and feel that I’m running out of time. But recently I did reread all of Evelyn Waugh’s novels, and was pleased to find that he was almost as thoughtful as, say, Olivia Manning, although his snobbery sometimes grates. Also, I enjoyed “Lucky Jim,” by Kingsley Amis, all over again: the funniest novel I have ever read. Is there some Bulgarian equivalent, languishing untranslated? Probably not.”

“In Australia 60 years ago, when I was an adolescent, nobody was reading the American author Booth Tarkington except me. His character Penrod Schofield — awkward, disobedient, adventurous — was the beginning of my love affair with America. Today, my friend P. J. O’Rourke is a big fan of Tarkington, but I wonder if anybody else is. Still, my real plan is to make P. J. a fan of Dante.”

-From the New York Times Sunday Book Review, April 11^th, 2013