Books are in a sad way these days. It's especially sad to think that this major way of communicating with other minds has dwindled to a point where it does not have the significance it hadwhen we were young (and just think how important the printed word was in the 19th century).
Books on the mid-list, for the intelligent and the literary have really taken a beating. However, we can get our books out through self-publishing, and due to the internet and digitalization they will be there forever so that those who want tofind them can find them.
Saul Bellow said many decades ago that in the future those who read literature will be a small group like those who read Latin, and maybe form clubs to discuss books. But it has reallyalways been that way, with the best-sellers supporting the mid-list,and the mid-list paying off over time.
The agglomeration of the book industry has meant that short-term pay-offs have replaced the investment in good books for the future of the company. And while serious book readers have always been a very small percentage of the population, the debasement of what is published is what is thesaddest. The sharing of great minds cannot take place on TV, not evenin discussion programs; unless viewed as history.
People who write will always write, because that is what we do. We write. No matter what. But at least the delusion so many have that money can be made writing serious fiction will fade, as it should, and we will havefewer books by the less serious, at least in the literary world.
Ah,well, acceptance is the key to all my problems. Neither of us is going to be around long enough to really see the loss of the book's importance to the growth of humanity.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Books
SOME FEW ODD BOOKS I HAVE ENJOYED
BUTCHER'S CROSSING by John Williams. Williams only published three novels in his life-time. But this is one, dealing with the last days of commerical buffalo hunting, that you will not be able to forget.
THE DYNAMICS OF FAITH by Paul Tillich has been another seminal book for me. In it Tillich explains the difference between faith and belief. Faith is something we have that is largely undefinable, though we do attempt it, while belief involves statements that are arguable. We go to war over beliefs, but not over faith (this, of course, is my own addendum). But read the book: a truly intellectual approach to the subject, which you rarely get from "believers."
THE TRUE BELIEVER by Eric Hoffer. What a wonderful little book. It's about the fanatic. Hoffer was a stevedore, I understand, who published this one book when he was in his sixties. But I would guess he had made notes on the subject for years, and finally, after much reflection, finally published them.
VALUES IN A UNIVERSE OF CHANCE: Selected Writings of Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), Edited by Philip P. Wiener and published by DoubledayAnchor in 1958 is an important book for me in as much as the philosophical values and beliefs it contains are pretty much those I also have come to after much reading of philosophy.
The first 50 pages of A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes, the part that takes place on the island before the kids leave withs the pirates.
A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES by John Kennedy Toole. Such a marvelous sense of humor. Too bad that, turned down by 8 publishers, he committed suicide. His mother, who is marvelously caricatured in the novel, persisted and got it published after his death.
CARDS OF IDENTITY by Nigel Dennis. Wonderful spoof on Communism and the Church of England in the 50s. Probably out of date now.
THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND by Julian Jaynes. Such a seminal book for me! I always wondered why history only began about 4000 BC; this book answers the question -- at least to my satisfaction.
BUTCHER'S CROSSING by John Williams. Williams only published three novels in his life-time. But this is one, dealing with the last days of commerical buffalo hunting, that you will not be able to forget.
THE DYNAMICS OF FAITH by Paul Tillich has been another seminal book for me. In it Tillich explains the difference between faith and belief. Faith is something we have that is largely undefinable, though we do attempt it, while belief involves statements that are arguable. We go to war over beliefs, but not over faith (this, of course, is my own addendum). But read the book: a truly intellectual approach to the subject, which you rarely get from "believers."
THE TRUE BELIEVER by Eric Hoffer. What a wonderful little book. It's about the fanatic. Hoffer was a stevedore, I understand, who published this one book when he was in his sixties. But I would guess he had made notes on the subject for years, and finally, after much reflection, finally published them.
VALUES IN A UNIVERSE OF CHANCE: Selected Writings of Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), Edited by Philip P. Wiener and published by DoubledayAnchor in 1958 is an important book for me in as much as the philosophical values and beliefs it contains are pretty much those I also have come to after much reading of philosophy.
The first 50 pages of A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes, the part that takes place on the island before the kids leave withs the pirates.
A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES by John Kennedy Toole. Such a marvelous sense of humor. Too bad that, turned down by 8 publishers, he committed suicide. His mother, who is marvelously caricatured in the novel, persisted and got it published after his death.
CARDS OF IDENTITY by Nigel Dennis. Wonderful spoof on Communism and the Church of England in the 50s. Probably out of date now.
THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND by Julian Jaynes. Such a seminal book for me! I always wondered why history only began about 4000 BC; this book answers the question -- at least to my satisfaction.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
WORK IN PROGRESS
My biography of John Adams, Architect of Freedom (1738-1826) was published August 24, 2009, and is available on Amazon.com, B&N.com, and other stores, both on and off the internet. It turned out well, and I think you will enjoy it. It's a short book of about 45,000 words, and since 10 years of research and writing into it, I have a little of the feeling of the elephant who labored so hard to give birth to a mouse. But it's highly readable and makes its points. The price they put on it is $18.95. If you wish to order a copy, the ISBN is 978-1-4401-4704-3. Joe Cowley
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
HUMOR/SATIRE
UNDERSTANDING POETRY
Symolism in Mother Goose
One of the difficulies in reading poetry, especially modern poetry, it is generally agreed, lies in its rich use of symolism. Each line, each word, is made to carry a weiht of meaning that goes for beyond the obvious. But this should not deter the serious seeker after beauty.
A good poem is meant not only to be read, but to be re-read. "Meaning lies layered in petals of beauty," as the famous line from Wordsworth has it. With each reading a good poem unveils itself like a shy woman, until we are to the inner core of her beauty and meaning.
Symbolism, however, is not a new phenomenon, as we shall see in the exegesis that follows. In it we will attempt to heighten (perhaps even arouse for the first time) your awareness and appreciation of the time-honored grace (in the largest sense of that word) that can be found in a few simple lines, beauteously wrought, penned by the world's greatest lyric poets.
The selection we have chosen is from the collected works of Mother Goose. It is entitled:
LITTLE MISS MUFFIT
Little Miss MuffitSat on a tuffitEating her curds and whey.
Along came a spiderAnd sat down beside her,
And frightened Miss Muffit away.
There is, of course, much that is obvious in this little poem. The author has cleverly made us aware, right from the start, by means of his (or rather, her) title and first line, that we are dealing with a woman -- a shy, frightened, little woman, who is single and alone. Like the opening of a Beethoven symphony, the Freudian overtones go ringing down the corridors of time right from the start.
Who is this mysterious woman? Why should she be eating alone? Why should a mere spider frighten her? These are significant questions, as we shall see as we undertake, line by line, our textual exegesis. Or, to quote Shakespeare, "there is more her than meets the eye." (Whether Shakespeare or Bacon wrote that line is another question which we won't get into right now. Mainly because some of our readers might not feel Bacon is kosher). Instead...let us reason together over that first line:
"Little Miss Muffit"
As we mentioned (cf. pp. 4, or maybe 5), this opening line highlights one of the main points of the poem: we are dealing with a "little" woman. Some critics have tried to claim this is a steal from Louisa May Alcott, others that it's merely a slip of the pen (but very Freudian), still others that it's a translator's error. But however it's translated, we become aware, very quickly, that the poem deals with a sex-starved, ultimately rather prim (it turns out) young lady who is not married.
Could it be, as the line so generously suggests, that she missed "it"? You may want to quarrel with this interpretation, but what is it a young lady coming into full flower is most likely to miss? And to miss it means she must have known it, which casts doubt on her virginity. However, the line goes on to hint, via her very name, that, somehow, she "muffed" it. Is she doomed to miss out on it, to continually muff it? As readers, our sympathies are immediately aroused. A male reader will want to soothe and comfort her, a female reader to straighten her out. The big question is, was this poem written before the days of the pill? If so, doesn't the whole question become anachronistic? Perhaps. But we can'be be sure. Let's go on to the second line...
"Sat on a tuffit"
The first question which is likely to spring to mind when you read this line is: What is a tuffit? But, then, there are secondary questions. Why did she sit on it? Is it customary to sit on tuffits? Or, if you will glance for a moment at the third line, should "curds" have been spelled with a "t" and "tuffit" with a "c"? This would reduce it to the level of a simple printer's error and indicate that the author was too cheap to pay for an AA (Author's Alteration). If so, do we see sother evidence of cheapness in the poem?
Next, of course, we become aware of the very obvious play on words. The author is saying that the "it", whatever it is, is tough -- perhaps too tough for a frightened, shy, little girl. And in a secondary sense, he is also expressing his sympathy fo her by implying that what happened to her is "tough titty".
Immediately, we want to cry out: Is that the clue to the entire poem? There is no question that some childhood trauma is behind it all -- the frightened bedhavior, the pervading sense of anomie, etc. However, the plain truth is that we don't know what happened to her when she was a child, and we shouldn't jump to a conclusion too soon. Instead, let's go on to the third line, which is also wrought with an overpowering symbolism.
"Eating her curds and whey"
We are dealing here, as we at last find out, with a compulsive eater. And this bolsters, of course, our theory of the childhood trauma. It also tells us why she is eating alone. She is ingesting food on the sly because, unconsciously, food has sexual significance for her. It is not only a mother substitute, a cry for love, but in particular it is a cry for sexual love. In Freudian terms, to quote from "The State of Anxiety," she wished she were pregnant.
She is, therefore, a poor, love-starved, sex-starved girl -- little (and also a little fat which the author doesn't come right out and tell us, but which we can guess from the circumstances of the activity) and lonely. Again, our sympathies are aroused. We wonder, is this poem to be a tragedy or a comedy? Our interest has been heightened and we wonder what will happen next. But before we go on, let's take a look at what she is eating -- "curds and whey."
Like most readers, your reaction is likely to be one of disgust. Even if you don't know what "curds" are, the very sound of the word indicates the level to which this poor, unfortunate girl has sunk ("whey" down, as the author makes explicit). She is also poor, it is clear, if she is reduced to eating such food -- perhaps desperately poor, which not only adds to her plight, but increases our understanding and sympathy.
She needs help, and not just psychiatric help (the rule is the body first, then the mind). For we must first feel those we would help (I meant, of course, "feed," not "feel" -- that was a slip. But I will not expunge the error, for it was suggested by the poem itself, which is a point I want to make at the end of this article: If we expose ourselves to pornographic filth, we can't help but be corrupted by it.). Before we leave the second line of the poem, I would be remiss if I did not point out the hippie-Marxist overtones of the word "whey." This girl is obviously "whey" out, as the author makes fairly explicit. The question left unanswered, however, is this: Is she a member of the radical left, or merely a dupe? We are never told, for example, what clothes she is wearing: could it be she is stark naked? But perhaps the thought of a naked fat woman is too weighty an idea for this simple poem to bare (another slip, of course).
Egad, with slips like that you might think I'm going to pot! Actually, of course, as any who knows me can testify, I haven't had any pot. The question is, has Miss Muffit? One certainly can wonder. Certainly that would put her "whey" out. Though we can never be sure, it is these little doubts and ambiguities that lend richness to the writing that is of the first magnitude. The author is demanding that we throw ourselves into the poem, bring something of our own to it. This, therefore, is a question you, the reader, must decide. But, then, no great work is necessarily easy to read. However, the rewards are great for those who struggle through, as we must now do.
"Along came a spider"
We know right off the bat, of course, that this is no spider. For spiders don't "come along." They drop down on silken skeins (gossamer, usually). But if not a spider, what? Do the many legs symbolize the many arms of love thast Miss Muffit cries out for? And yet can't accept when they finally arrive (because they are hairy, perhaps?). The meaning here is particularly difficult to unravel. Like Miss Muffit, we find ourselves in a frightening jungle, a nightmare world of menacing creatures who symbolize our childhood terrors.The question is, did Miss Muffit, as a baby in her crib, actually see something hairy (her mother and father making love, perhaps) that frightened her? Critics have argued this point, some of them unkind enough to suggest that Miss Muffit didn't have parents (in the normal sense of the word). But that's neither here nor there, and certainly doesn't negate ou central point -- mainly, that we're dealing with a very serious case of arrested development.
Miss Muffit may have all the accoutrements of a normal, well-developed young lady, but her emotions (especially her sexual feelings) are obviously those of a child. Our own pity for her at this point is probably excruciatingly painful. We wish her the best, we would like to reach out and help her, but we don't know how. It is this feeling which prepares us for the sad, the tragic, ending, we now realize is in store for her -- and for us as readers of this enthralling poem.
But, like the fake spider, let's "come along" to the next line, where the nightmarish terror finally erupts into a plangent expression of hopeless despair as this hairy, outwardly sexy (fiendishly so) beast moves in for what we anticipate will be the rape scene (but which our author mercifully spares us). Many women of faint heart have been known to put the poem down at this point, unable, understandably, to go on.
"And sat down beside her"
This, of course, was very clever of the spider (but as he is older, more mature we immediately sense what he is up to and what he has on his mind). "Thank God," we exclaim, that Miss Muffit, for all her tender years, comes to her senses in time to avoid the catastrophe. I could not, in all consciousness, recommend this poem to you, regardly of how great it might be, if it were otherwise. But, as I've indicated (see paragraph above), the author spares us, and the spider merely "sits" (in some adult versions of the poem this is not the case) beside her...
"And frightened Miss Muffit away."
The sense of relief we feel as readers is overhwhelming. This, at last, is the denouement. Miss Muffit, despite all her hang-ups (or perhaps because of them), has been saved. And yet (and this is where much of the greatness of the poem lies), at the same time, we feel sad, because we know that while Miss Muffit's maidenhead may have been spared, her maindenhood has not, and she will go on -- lonely, alone, pure, but eating her heart out (and her cupboard), waiting for a not-quite-so-hairy prince to come along and sweep her off her feet (or "tuffit," as we may say in Old English), and wondering, in the deepest sense, whether the spider might not have been her white knight in disguise.
As readers, we are left wondering whether the spider doesn't symbolize all of us -- the beast in us, that is? Are we all as pure as we might like to think we are? Or does there lurk ominously in our dark souls our own spidering beasts, waiting to ravish us (and any young maidens who might be handy)? But, of course, this we will never know, because the author herself never provides the answer. Which is what makes poetry great, and this particular poem a sheer joy to read.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
STORY
THY WILL BE दोने
It would be the perfect crime। The perfect murder. An act of nature, of God, really. Perfectly divine punishment.
Guilty, she glanced at her father in the passenger seat, wondering if he could sense her thoughts. He was hunched forward, oblivious, studying the Amish countryside. They had turned off the highway some miles back, the lowering sun glinting for a moment in her rear view mirror as she made the turn southward toward the Appalachian hills where she and Cecil had established a homestead.
Maybe “homestead” was too fancy a word for it. “Research station” might be better. They had purchased the twenty acres two years before, mainly for Cecil, who taught scientific farming at the University in Athens, in southeast Ohio. His doctoral thesis was on hardscrabble farming--that is, how to improve the productivity of poor soils in the poverty regions of the world, and Appalachia was an excellent place to test some of his ideas.
The sun, still above the trees, shone through the side window of the car, giving her father an aura of “saintliness.” Though she knew better. Almost eighty, he looked frail. He hadn’t been a good father. Doting if he had his way, brutal, even cruel, if not. But always dominating, her whole life long, her mother, her sister, all of them. Whether he had forgiven her for marrying Cecil she didn’t know. She hated and loved him.
At the small crossroads hamlet of Unity, where the small general store that served the local Amish was the only sign the hamlet even existed, she made a sharp, ninety-degree left turn on the narrow, macadam road. In the rearview mirror she saw the sun settling into the trees. Soon they would reach the dirt road that ran south into the hills.
Passing the occasional farm, her father, rapt, studied them, swiveling his head as each disappeared.
“You can tell which ones are the Amish,” she said, her voice startling them after the miles of silence. “There are no cars in their drive, and they don’t use electricity.”
Her father was silent.
“They don’t believe in them,” she added.
“Jesus,” he said. “In this day and age.”
He himself had always used the latest scientific advances to advance his business, injection molding. He got a job in plastics shortly after high school and, after ten years of experience, came up with an idea of his own and started his own firm. He had made a fortune. Today it was almost completely computerized.
Except for a handful in administration, marketing, finance, and engineering, all it required was cheap labor to watch the dials. That was where the bind was. His competitors were moving their plants overseas and he was caught in an increasing cost-price squeeze. Unable to let go of the business (he had never had sons and neither her older sister Beth nor she wanted anything to do with it), he worried the problem to death, like a bulldog that can’t let go of something once it has sunk its teeth into it. That was his strength--and his weakness.
She could read him like a book, using the lure of cheap labor to get him to make his first visit since they had moved here some two years before. Something Beth said when she was home this last time made it necessary. Their father was always their major topic of conversation. Beth lived for him, had dropped out of college to take care of him after their mother died. What Beth said was that their father was thinking of changing his will.
The panic she felt surprised her. It was then she knew something had to be done; she had put up with too much of his abuse over the years to lose her inheritance now. The thought of the dysentery a friend from college had suffered when he visited them the year they moved to Appalachia popped into her head. He had made the mistake of drinking the tap water in the barn; they should have warned him but forgot.
He almost died. They thought it was a stomach virus. When it hadn’t cleared up after four days they took him to the doctor, who said it was most likely dysentery. He had them rush him to the hospital in Cincinnati. Their friend was severely dehydrated, his blood pressure dangerously low, and his renal system had shut down. The build-up of toxins in his system might have killed a lesser man, someone older or frailer, or not in the best of health.
Her father said something, but she hadn’t been listening. Whatever it was, he didn’t seem to need a response. She turned south onto the dirt road that led into the hills, the land still relatively flat, still good for farming. In another mile the road would drop steeply into a tunnel of trees, and they would be in Appalachia, a land of green, rolling hills and dark valleys, land too poor for farming and only sparsely inhabited.
“Dumb asses,” her father added. “No wonder they’re so poor.”
“Not all of them are poor,” she said. “Some are quite wealthy.”
He swiveled his head to look at her, not sure he should believe her.
“Then where is all this cheap labor you’ve been telling me about?”
“Adams County is one of the three poorest counties in the state. The unemployment rate has been running above twenty percent for years. You can get all the labor you want for minimum wage. Add a dollar or two and you’ll have the cream of the crop. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
His eyes glinted. He didn’t like anyone telling him what was in his mind, especially his daughters, and especially this one. Beth was more submissive, like her mother; this one too much like himself. A thorn in his side she was, always willful and disobedient. They had been at odds ever since she was a child.
At fifteen she ran away from home; after that she made it clear she couldn’t wait to get away to college. But not the college he chose for her. He had wanted his daughters to become cultured, and ladies, and to marry well. Beth went to Swarthmore, but this one insisted on Cornell. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she majored in political science, a useless kind of subject, then switched to sociology, an even more useless field of study, when she stayed on for the PhD.
Her dissertation was on rural poverty, a subject she chose, he was sure, to spite him and show her contempt for the values he had tried to imbue her with. Their common interest in poverty made it inevitable that she and Cecil should meet. He was enrolled in the School of Agriculture, working for a PhD in scientific farming. Having grown up on a small farm outside of Albany that never provided more than a hard-scrabble living for his parents, his interest in poverty was understandable. But hers? It made no sense.
“Jesus!” he said. “Where’s the money to be made in poverty. Study the wealthy if you want to get rich. Who gives a shit about the poor?”
When she announced that she and Cecil were getting married, it was the last straw. That’s when he gave up on her. Disgusted, he said, “Do whatever the hell you want. You always have. But don’t think you’re going to do it on my money! I’ll be damned if I’ll subsidize your poverty.”
He had worked too hard to earn his money. His first wife cleaned houses for a living while he toiled in the plastics plant sixty hours a week to save enough to climb out of poverty. Unfortunately, she died two years after they started the business. From overwork, it was said, though others have hinted he drove her to her death. Two years later he married a woman from the moneyed class who divorced him after little more than a year.
Their mother was his third wife. She was twenty years younger than he, a meek woman in her thirties at the time he married her, who suffered his abuse without ever saying a word against him for the more than two decades they were married. She developed pancreatic cancer in her fifties. Beth dropped out of Swarthmore to take care of her, and when she died six months later never went back. She said their father needed her. He agreed.
Coming to the end of the farm land, she pointed to some cleared land on their right and said, “Those seven acres are ours. The building in the middle is a kiln for curing lumber. The large barn’s for storing the lumber, the small one’s a tool shed. Cecil keeps his tractor there. We may try lumbering again after he finishes some of his other projects.”
Before her father could reply, the car dropped precipitously into the tunnel of trees. After a hundred feet or so, she turned sharply up a steep drive and stopped the car near a large corrugated steel building that hung over the hill on the left. She said it was their garage. Ahead of them a ranch house, with a picture window and a screened-in porch, was dug into the side of the hill. In front of them the hills of Appalachia stretched to the horizon.
“That last hill you can see on the horizon is Kentucky,” she said.
“It’s a gorgeous view,” he said. “Too bad you can’t package and sell it. It’s the only way you’ll ever make any money out of a place like this.”
When they got out, Cecil, a small, frail-looking figure at the base of the hill, looked up and waved. He was filling a small pond he had carved out at the base of the hill with water from a hose. She waved back.
“He’s going to try growing rice in that pond,” she said. “We have two larger ponds, back in the woods, stocked with fish. Bass, mostly.”
Pointing to the terraces along the side of the hill, her father said, “Jesus, it must have been some job building those.”
“We had someone do those for us,” she said. “It took heavy equipment. Cecil’s growing fruit trees on some of the terraces, and grape vines. We hope to make our own wine in a few years. I have a small garden behind the house. I’ll show you around the place tomorrow.”
“When are we going to see the real estate agents?”
“I thought we might do that Tuesday. The nearest mall is twenty miles away, but I’m sure there’ll be real estate agents there who can tell you about possible plant sites, taxes, the employment situation, that sort of thing.”
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing at a building beyond the house.
“Our barn,” she said. “I’ve fixed it up as a studio for myself, with a computer and bookshelves, a small kitchenette, and a lounge area for TV. We don’t keep a set in the house. There’s a bedroom in the back we use for guests. I thought you might sleep there. It will give you more privacy.”
She took his bag and he followed her into the barn.
It turned out, of course, exactly as she had planned. As she showed him about the barn, she opened the refrigerator to make sure Cecil had removed the bottled water. She also put a glass in the bathroom, for his toothbrush she said, but actually to make sure he drank from the tap when he got up during the night, as Beth said he did, his mouth dry from snoring.
She sat watching television with him for an hour that evening after supper, and the next day showed him around their twenty acres--the two fish ponds, the garden where she grew vegetables and flowers for the house, and the seven acres and kiln on the flat land above the trees behind them. It was the next morning, after midnight, that he got sick. She could smell the mess when she went in that morning. It had been coming out both ends.
“I thought it was food poisoning at first,” he said weakly. He was lying on the sofa near the bathroom, his face white. “I could taste the piece of fat from one of the pork chops Cecil cooked when I first felt nauseous. Then I remembered that food poisoning always occurs within the first two hours of eating, and at least four or five hours had gone by since I ate. That’s when I knew it must be a virus. Sorry about the mess I’ve made.”
“That’s all right, Dad,” she said. “I’ll clean it up. No problem. But I think we’d better get you to the doctor. What do you say?”
“No, no,” he said. “It’s just a stomach virus. I must have picked it up on the plane. One of those twenty-four hour things. I’ll be fine tomorrow.”
He, of course, had no interest in food, and she left him alone most of the day, only looking in on occasion to see if he needed anything. But he hated her fussing over him and waved her away. Suggesting he see the doctor only got his back up. She knew he wouldn’t take advice from her.
By the fourth day he was pretty weak and finally let her and Cecil bundled him into the car and drive him to the hospital in Cincinnati. It was, of course, too late. He died shortly after admission.
They told the doctors about his diarrhea and said they thought it was dysentery, though they kept bottled water in the refrigerator and told him not to drink water from the tap. Her father never would do anything she told him to do, she explained. The doctors agreed that it was dysentery, but said the actual cause of death was failure of the heart, due to the stress of the toxins.
Later, when she called her sister, Beth wept inconsolably. Finally calm, but still sniffling, she said, “He was going to change his will.”
“I know,” she said coolly. “You told me.”
“Yes,” Beth said, “he was going to put you back in.”
And she began again to sob uncontrollably.
It would be the perfect crime। The perfect murder. An act of nature, of God, really. Perfectly divine punishment.
Guilty, she glanced at her father in the passenger seat, wondering if he could sense her thoughts. He was hunched forward, oblivious, studying the Amish countryside. They had turned off the highway some miles back, the lowering sun glinting for a moment in her rear view mirror as she made the turn southward toward the Appalachian hills where she and Cecil had established a homestead.
Maybe “homestead” was too fancy a word for it. “Research station” might be better. They had purchased the twenty acres two years before, mainly for Cecil, who taught scientific farming at the University in Athens, in southeast Ohio. His doctoral thesis was on hardscrabble farming--that is, how to improve the productivity of poor soils in the poverty regions of the world, and Appalachia was an excellent place to test some of his ideas.
The sun, still above the trees, shone through the side window of the car, giving her father an aura of “saintliness.” Though she knew better. Almost eighty, he looked frail. He hadn’t been a good father. Doting if he had his way, brutal, even cruel, if not. But always dominating, her whole life long, her mother, her sister, all of them. Whether he had forgiven her for marrying Cecil she didn’t know. She hated and loved him.
At the small crossroads hamlet of Unity, where the small general store that served the local Amish was the only sign the hamlet even existed, she made a sharp, ninety-degree left turn on the narrow, macadam road. In the rearview mirror she saw the sun settling into the trees. Soon they would reach the dirt road that ran south into the hills.
Passing the occasional farm, her father, rapt, studied them, swiveling his head as each disappeared.
“You can tell which ones are the Amish,” she said, her voice startling them after the miles of silence. “There are no cars in their drive, and they don’t use electricity.”
Her father was silent.
“They don’t believe in them,” she added.
“Jesus,” he said. “In this day and age.”
He himself had always used the latest scientific advances to advance his business, injection molding. He got a job in plastics shortly after high school and, after ten years of experience, came up with an idea of his own and started his own firm. He had made a fortune. Today it was almost completely computerized.
Except for a handful in administration, marketing, finance, and engineering, all it required was cheap labor to watch the dials. That was where the bind was. His competitors were moving their plants overseas and he was caught in an increasing cost-price squeeze. Unable to let go of the business (he had never had sons and neither her older sister Beth nor she wanted anything to do with it), he worried the problem to death, like a bulldog that can’t let go of something once it has sunk its teeth into it. That was his strength--and his weakness.
She could read him like a book, using the lure of cheap labor to get him to make his first visit since they had moved here some two years before. Something Beth said when she was home this last time made it necessary. Their father was always their major topic of conversation. Beth lived for him, had dropped out of college to take care of him after their mother died. What Beth said was that their father was thinking of changing his will.
The panic she felt surprised her. It was then she knew something had to be done; she had put up with too much of his abuse over the years to lose her inheritance now. The thought of the dysentery a friend from college had suffered when he visited them the year they moved to Appalachia popped into her head. He had made the mistake of drinking the tap water in the barn; they should have warned him but forgot.
He almost died. They thought it was a stomach virus. When it hadn’t cleared up after four days they took him to the doctor, who said it was most likely dysentery. He had them rush him to the hospital in Cincinnati. Their friend was severely dehydrated, his blood pressure dangerously low, and his renal system had shut down. The build-up of toxins in his system might have killed a lesser man, someone older or frailer, or not in the best of health.
Her father said something, but she hadn’t been listening. Whatever it was, he didn’t seem to need a response. She turned south onto the dirt road that led into the hills, the land still relatively flat, still good for farming. In another mile the road would drop steeply into a tunnel of trees, and they would be in Appalachia, a land of green, rolling hills and dark valleys, land too poor for farming and only sparsely inhabited.
“Dumb asses,” her father added. “No wonder they’re so poor.”
“Not all of them are poor,” she said. “Some are quite wealthy.”
He swiveled his head to look at her, not sure he should believe her.
“Then where is all this cheap labor you’ve been telling me about?”
“Adams County is one of the three poorest counties in the state. The unemployment rate has been running above twenty percent for years. You can get all the labor you want for minimum wage. Add a dollar or two and you’ll have the cream of the crop. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
His eyes glinted. He didn’t like anyone telling him what was in his mind, especially his daughters, and especially this one. Beth was more submissive, like her mother; this one too much like himself. A thorn in his side she was, always willful and disobedient. They had been at odds ever since she was a child.
At fifteen she ran away from home; after that she made it clear she couldn’t wait to get away to college. But not the college he chose for her. He had wanted his daughters to become cultured, and ladies, and to marry well. Beth went to Swarthmore, but this one insisted on Cornell. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she majored in political science, a useless kind of subject, then switched to sociology, an even more useless field of study, when she stayed on for the PhD.
Her dissertation was on rural poverty, a subject she chose, he was sure, to spite him and show her contempt for the values he had tried to imbue her with. Their common interest in poverty made it inevitable that she and Cecil should meet. He was enrolled in the School of Agriculture, working for a PhD in scientific farming. Having grown up on a small farm outside of Albany that never provided more than a hard-scrabble living for his parents, his interest in poverty was understandable. But hers? It made no sense.
“Jesus!” he said. “Where’s the money to be made in poverty. Study the wealthy if you want to get rich. Who gives a shit about the poor?”
When she announced that she and Cecil were getting married, it was the last straw. That’s when he gave up on her. Disgusted, he said, “Do whatever the hell you want. You always have. But don’t think you’re going to do it on my money! I’ll be damned if I’ll subsidize your poverty.”
He had worked too hard to earn his money. His first wife cleaned houses for a living while he toiled in the plastics plant sixty hours a week to save enough to climb out of poverty. Unfortunately, she died two years after they started the business. From overwork, it was said, though others have hinted he drove her to her death. Two years later he married a woman from the moneyed class who divorced him after little more than a year.
Their mother was his third wife. She was twenty years younger than he, a meek woman in her thirties at the time he married her, who suffered his abuse without ever saying a word against him for the more than two decades they were married. She developed pancreatic cancer in her fifties. Beth dropped out of Swarthmore to take care of her, and when she died six months later never went back. She said their father needed her. He agreed.
Coming to the end of the farm land, she pointed to some cleared land on their right and said, “Those seven acres are ours. The building in the middle is a kiln for curing lumber. The large barn’s for storing the lumber, the small one’s a tool shed. Cecil keeps his tractor there. We may try lumbering again after he finishes some of his other projects.”
Before her father could reply, the car dropped precipitously into the tunnel of trees. After a hundred feet or so, she turned sharply up a steep drive and stopped the car near a large corrugated steel building that hung over the hill on the left. She said it was their garage. Ahead of them a ranch house, with a picture window and a screened-in porch, was dug into the side of the hill. In front of them the hills of Appalachia stretched to the horizon.
“That last hill you can see on the horizon is Kentucky,” she said.
“It’s a gorgeous view,” he said. “Too bad you can’t package and sell it. It’s the only way you’ll ever make any money out of a place like this.”
When they got out, Cecil, a small, frail-looking figure at the base of the hill, looked up and waved. He was filling a small pond he had carved out at the base of the hill with water from a hose. She waved back.
“He’s going to try growing rice in that pond,” she said. “We have two larger ponds, back in the woods, stocked with fish. Bass, mostly.”
Pointing to the terraces along the side of the hill, her father said, “Jesus, it must have been some job building those.”
“We had someone do those for us,” she said. “It took heavy equipment. Cecil’s growing fruit trees on some of the terraces, and grape vines. We hope to make our own wine in a few years. I have a small garden behind the house. I’ll show you around the place tomorrow.”
“When are we going to see the real estate agents?”
“I thought we might do that Tuesday. The nearest mall is twenty miles away, but I’m sure there’ll be real estate agents there who can tell you about possible plant sites, taxes, the employment situation, that sort of thing.”
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing at a building beyond the house.
“Our barn,” she said. “I’ve fixed it up as a studio for myself, with a computer and bookshelves, a small kitchenette, and a lounge area for TV. We don’t keep a set in the house. There’s a bedroom in the back we use for guests. I thought you might sleep there. It will give you more privacy.”
She took his bag and he followed her into the barn.
It turned out, of course, exactly as she had planned. As she showed him about the barn, she opened the refrigerator to make sure Cecil had removed the bottled water. She also put a glass in the bathroom, for his toothbrush she said, but actually to make sure he drank from the tap when he got up during the night, as Beth said he did, his mouth dry from snoring.
She sat watching television with him for an hour that evening after supper, and the next day showed him around their twenty acres--the two fish ponds, the garden where she grew vegetables and flowers for the house, and the seven acres and kiln on the flat land above the trees behind them. It was the next morning, after midnight, that he got sick. She could smell the mess when she went in that morning. It had been coming out both ends.
“I thought it was food poisoning at first,” he said weakly. He was lying on the sofa near the bathroom, his face white. “I could taste the piece of fat from one of the pork chops Cecil cooked when I first felt nauseous. Then I remembered that food poisoning always occurs within the first two hours of eating, and at least four or five hours had gone by since I ate. That’s when I knew it must be a virus. Sorry about the mess I’ve made.”
“That’s all right, Dad,” she said. “I’ll clean it up. No problem. But I think we’d better get you to the doctor. What do you say?”
“No, no,” he said. “It’s just a stomach virus. I must have picked it up on the plane. One of those twenty-four hour things. I’ll be fine tomorrow.”
He, of course, had no interest in food, and she left him alone most of the day, only looking in on occasion to see if he needed anything. But he hated her fussing over him and waved her away. Suggesting he see the doctor only got his back up. She knew he wouldn’t take advice from her.
By the fourth day he was pretty weak and finally let her and Cecil bundled him into the car and drive him to the hospital in Cincinnati. It was, of course, too late. He died shortly after admission.
They told the doctors about his diarrhea and said they thought it was dysentery, though they kept bottled water in the refrigerator and told him not to drink water from the tap. Her father never would do anything she told him to do, she explained. The doctors agreed that it was dysentery, but said the actual cause of death was failure of the heart, due to the stress of the toxins.
Later, when she called her sister, Beth wept inconsolably. Finally calm, but still sniffling, she said, “He was going to change his will.”
“I know,” she said coolly. “You told me.”
“Yes,” Beth said, “he was going to put you back in.”
And she began again to sob uncontrollably.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID
One of the things that attracted me about writing was that it seemed possible to have one's works known, and thus reach others with one's thoughts and feelings, without sacrificing one's personal privacy.
Alas, that is far from true, especialy today. To have one's works become known, one has to jump up an down in the crowd, shouting, "Over here. Look at me, Mom. Here I am. Look, look what I can do."
Some writers have always down that, and not always the most talented: Hemingway, Capote, Mailer, and Gertrude Stein, to name a few. Hemingway and Capote were alcoholics and never became adults; Mailer thought he was a novelist, but he can't create character; Stein said and wrote a few brilliant lines and stories, but the most of the rest of her stuff is top of the head babel.
Most of the rest of them have been unknown, until "discovered" by someone: Poe, Melville, Rimbaud, just to mention a few without giving it much thought. I admire most the people who simply write, and do the minimum required for self-publicity, authors like Cormac McCarthy, Faulkner (who was out of print in 1947 until Malcolm Cowley wrote his famous forward to a collection of Faulkner's work), Ian McEwen, whose not best novel, Saturday, finally received attention, and brought him the fame he deserved; Muriel Spark, whose outstanding first short story brought her attention, but who, at the end of her life, would still ask her admirers to "buy" my books; Thomas Mann is my ideal: impervious outside, the artist hidden inside. I don't like people to know me, to know all the clutter and strangeness that makes up an intellectual, neurotic, alcoholic, and artist; I reveal myself in my books. There is where I want you to find me.
One of the things that attracted me about writing was that it seemed possible to have one's works known, and thus reach others with one's thoughts and feelings, without sacrificing one's personal privacy.
Alas, that is far from true, especialy today. To have one's works become known, one has to jump up an down in the crowd, shouting, "Over here. Look at me, Mom. Here I am. Look, look what I can do."
Some writers have always down that, and not always the most talented: Hemingway, Capote, Mailer, and Gertrude Stein, to name a few. Hemingway and Capote were alcoholics and never became adults; Mailer thought he was a novelist, but he can't create character; Stein said and wrote a few brilliant lines and stories, but the most of the rest of her stuff is top of the head babel.
Most of the rest of them have been unknown, until "discovered" by someone: Poe, Melville, Rimbaud, just to mention a few without giving it much thought. I admire most the people who simply write, and do the minimum required for self-publicity, authors like Cormac McCarthy, Faulkner (who was out of print in 1947 until Malcolm Cowley wrote his famous forward to a collection of Faulkner's work), Ian McEwen, whose not best novel, Saturday, finally received attention, and brought him the fame he deserved; Muriel Spark, whose outstanding first short story brought her attention, but who, at the end of her life, would still ask her admirers to "buy" my books; Thomas Mann is my ideal: impervious outside, the artist hidden inside. I don't like people to know me, to know all the clutter and strangeness that makes up an intellectual, neurotic, alcoholic, and artist; I reveal myself in my books. There is where I want you to find me.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
WRITERS AND WRITING
"The most important quality of a writer is not talent but persistence." Philip Freund
This is from "Mrs. Virginia Woolf" in Cynthia Ozick's What Henry James Knew and Other Essays on Writers. "A writer's heroism is in the act of writing; not in the finished work, but in the work as it goes."
"You have to write every day of your life because, once you stop, it's damned hard to start again." W. Somerset Maugham, as quoted on p.49 of the
Authors Guild Bulletin, Winter, 2007
"The most important quality of a writer is not talent but persistence." Philip Freund
This is from "Mrs. Virginia Woolf" in Cynthia Ozick's What Henry James Knew and Other Essays on Writers. "A writer's heroism is in the act of writing; not in the finished work, but in the work as it goes."
"You have to write every day of your life because, once you stop, it's damned hard to start again." W. Somerset Maugham, as quoted on p.49 of the
Authors Guild Bulletin, Winter, 2007
Monday, May 4, 2009
TWO WOLVES
One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.
He said, 'My son, the battle is between two 'wolves' inside us all.
One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.
The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility,kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.'
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: 'Which wolf wins?'
The old Cherokee simply replied, 'The one you feed.'
One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.
He said, 'My son, the battle is between two 'wolves' inside us all.
One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.
The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility,kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.'
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: 'Which wolf wins?'
The old Cherokee simply replied, 'The one you feed.'
Monday, April 13, 2009
SOME OF MY FAVORITE WRITERS AND BOOKS
These are just a few of my favorite great fiction writers, taken from a long list.
American
Saul Bellow
The Adventures of Augie March
Henderson the Rain King
Herzog
Humbolt’s Gift (my favorite)
Seize the Day
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
The Last Tycoon
Joseph Heller
Catch-22
Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises
A Farewell to Arms
(Some of his short stories)
Henry James
Daisy Miller
The Portrait of a Lady
The Turn of the Screw
(Avoid his long novels)
Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian
(Any of his earlier novels; don’t bother with The Crossing)
Carson McCullers
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Reflections in a Golden Eye
Herman Melville
Billy Budd
(The novella Barnaby the Scrivener)
Flannery O’Conner
Wise Blood
The Violent Bear It Away
J.D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye
Fanny and Zooey
Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(Anything else, if you like him)
John Updike
The Poorhouse Fair
Rabbit Run
Robert Penn Warren
All The King’s Men
Eudora Welty
(Any of her short stories)
Nathaniel West
Miss Lonely Hearts
The Day of the Locust
Thornton Wilder
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
(Any of his plays)
Writers from the rest of the world
Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice
(Any of her other novels if you like her)
Miguel de Cervantes
Don Quixote
Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness
(Anything else if you enjoy him)
Daniel Defoe
Robinson Crusoe
Charles Dickens
(Anything you want to read by him; the bigger and fatter the book the better)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov
Crime and Punishment
(And anything else)
Henry Fielding
Tom Jones
Joseph Andrews
Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary
A Simple Life (novella)
E.M. Forster
A Room With a View
Howard’s End
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitutde
Homer
Ulysses
(Don’t bother with The Iliad; it’s a whole ‘nother book)
James Joyce
The Dubliners
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Ulysses (read Homer first)
D.H. Lawrence
Sons and Lovers
Women in Love
Thomas Mann
Buddenbrooks
The Magic Mountain
Death in Venice
(Novellas)
W. Somerset Maughan
Cakes and Ale
(Fine short story writer and playwright; his plays made him most of his money)
George Orwell
(I like his non-fiction books best)
Down and Out in London and Paris
Marcel Proust
Remembrance of Things Past (at least from the Overture through Combray and Swan in Love, and as far into Within a Budding Grover as you can get.)
Stendhal
The Red and The Black
(You might at least try him)
William M. Thackeray
Vanity Fair (wonderful book)
Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace
Anna Karenina
The Death of Ivan Ilych
The Kreutzer Sonata
Anthony Trollope
Barchester Towers
Phineas Finn
(Love Trollope, especially the Palliser novels; you can start in anywhere. I started with The Eustace Diamonds and Phineas Finn Redux; i.e. out of order)
Ivan Turgenev
Fathers and Sons
(Good short story writer, too)
Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse
Mrs. Dalloway
Some personal favorites
THE TRUE BELIEVER by Eric Hoffer. What a wonderful little book. It's about the fanatic. Hoffer was a stevedore, I understand, who published this one book when he was in his sixties. But I would guess he had made notes on the subject for years, and finally, after much reflection, finally published them.
VALUES IN A UNIVERSE OF CHANCE: Selected Writings of Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), Edited by Philip P. Wiener and published by DoubledayAnchor in 1958 is an important book for me in as much as the philosophical values and beliefs it contains are pretty much those I also have come to after much reading of philosophy.
The first 50 pages of A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes, the part that takes place on the island before the kids leave with the pirates.
STONER and BUTCHER’S CROSSING by John Williams. Fine writer; too bad I have to wait until they’re dead before I find them. He has also written an historical novel called AUGUSTUS, which I haven’t read, plus an early novel he doesn’t recommend. Haven’t seen that, either.
A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES by John Kennedy Toole. Such a marvelous sense of humor. Too bad that, turned down by 8 publishers, he committed suicide. His mother, who is marvelously caricatured in the novel, persisted and got it published after his death.
CARDS OF IDENTITY by Nigel Dennis. Wonderful spoof on Communism and the Church of England in the 50s. Probably out of date now.
THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND by Julian Jaynes. Such a seminal book for me! I always wondered why history only began about 4000 BC; this book answers the question -- at least to my satisfaction.
WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys. This is considered her masterpiece, but I prefer her short stories, even though they all deal with the same subject. Rhys was an alcoholic who was still throwing up in the toilet at 82 (she died at 86). Fine stylist.
TO THE FINLAND STATION by Edmund Wilson. This is a great history of an ideology. Published in 1940, it provided great insight into the development of Communism, focusing entirely on the characters involved. Unless you’re a history buff, it may not interest too many people today.But if you want to understand the 19th and 20th centuries, it’s a must read. Wilson was also one of our finest literary critics, and I imagine his analyses of prominent authors probably stand up well.
ISLAND by Alistair MacLeod. Fine writer. Makes the landscape of Cape Breton and the people come marvelously alive. My personal favorite is “The Road to Rankin’s Point.” It’s a perfect gem, a masterpiece. You may find some of the others as equally good, maybe better. These are the collected stories of a lifetime, unless he is doing more writing in his retirement. His one and only novel is NO GREAT MISCHIEF. I haven’t read it yet, but will when I get the chance.
Andre Dubus (beware you don’t confuse him with Dubus II and III), THE TIMES ARE NEVER SO BAD. Fine writer, also. Great at the novella length. This and ADULTERY & OTHER CHOICES are both collections of stories. Writes about very physical people, and some of the stories are ugly. I especially like his attention to detail as to the physical surroundings of the characters. Makes it all very much alive. Takes his time detailing a scene; don’t know how he gets away with it. I don’t think I can, or do, in my own writing.
American
Saul Bellow
The Adventures of Augie March
Henderson the Rain King
Herzog
Humbolt’s Gift (my favorite)
Seize the Day
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
The Last Tycoon
Joseph Heller
Catch-22
Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises
A Farewell to Arms
(Some of his short stories)
Henry James
Daisy Miller
The Portrait of a Lady
The Turn of the Screw
(Avoid his long novels)
Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian
(Any of his earlier novels; don’t bother with The Crossing)
Carson McCullers
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Reflections in a Golden Eye
Herman Melville
Billy Budd
(The novella Barnaby the Scrivener)
Flannery O’Conner
Wise Blood
The Violent Bear It Away
J.D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye
Fanny and Zooey
Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(Anything else, if you like him)
John Updike
The Poorhouse Fair
Rabbit Run
Robert Penn Warren
All The King’s Men
Eudora Welty
(Any of her short stories)
Nathaniel West
Miss Lonely Hearts
The Day of the Locust
Thornton Wilder
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
(Any of his plays)
Writers from the rest of the world
Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice
(Any of her other novels if you like her)
Miguel de Cervantes
Don Quixote
Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness
(Anything else if you enjoy him)
Daniel Defoe
Robinson Crusoe
Charles Dickens
(Anything you want to read by him; the bigger and fatter the book the better)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov
Crime and Punishment
(And anything else)
Henry Fielding
Tom Jones
Joseph Andrews
Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary
A Simple Life (novella)
E.M. Forster
A Room With a View
Howard’s End
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitutde
Homer
Ulysses
(Don’t bother with The Iliad; it’s a whole ‘nother book)
James Joyce
The Dubliners
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Ulysses (read Homer first)
D.H. Lawrence
Sons and Lovers
Women in Love
Thomas Mann
Buddenbrooks
The Magic Mountain
Death in Venice
(Novellas)
W. Somerset Maughan
Cakes and Ale
(Fine short story writer and playwright; his plays made him most of his money)
George Orwell
(I like his non-fiction books best)
Down and Out in London and Paris
Marcel Proust
Remembrance of Things Past (at least from the Overture through Combray and Swan in Love, and as far into Within a Budding Grover as you can get.)
Stendhal
The Red and The Black
(You might at least try him)
William M. Thackeray
Vanity Fair (wonderful book)
Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace
Anna Karenina
The Death of Ivan Ilych
The Kreutzer Sonata
Anthony Trollope
Barchester Towers
Phineas Finn
(Love Trollope, especially the Palliser novels; you can start in anywhere. I started with The Eustace Diamonds and Phineas Finn Redux; i.e. out of order)
Ivan Turgenev
Fathers and Sons
(Good short story writer, too)
Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse
Mrs. Dalloway
Some personal favorites
THE TRUE BELIEVER by Eric Hoffer. What a wonderful little book. It's about the fanatic. Hoffer was a stevedore, I understand, who published this one book when he was in his sixties. But I would guess he had made notes on the subject for years, and finally, after much reflection, finally published them.
VALUES IN A UNIVERSE OF CHANCE: Selected Writings of Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), Edited by Philip P. Wiener and published by DoubledayAnchor in 1958 is an important book for me in as much as the philosophical values and beliefs it contains are pretty much those I also have come to after much reading of philosophy.
The first 50 pages of A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes, the part that takes place on the island before the kids leave with the pirates.
STONER and BUTCHER’S CROSSING by John Williams. Fine writer; too bad I have to wait until they’re dead before I find them. He has also written an historical novel called AUGUSTUS, which I haven’t read, plus an early novel he doesn’t recommend. Haven’t seen that, either.
A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES by John Kennedy Toole. Such a marvelous sense of humor. Too bad that, turned down by 8 publishers, he committed suicide. His mother, who is marvelously caricatured in the novel, persisted and got it published after his death.
CARDS OF IDENTITY by Nigel Dennis. Wonderful spoof on Communism and the Church of England in the 50s. Probably out of date now.
THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND by Julian Jaynes. Such a seminal book for me! I always wondered why history only began about 4000 BC; this book answers the question -- at least to my satisfaction.
WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys. This is considered her masterpiece, but I prefer her short stories, even though they all deal with the same subject. Rhys was an alcoholic who was still throwing up in the toilet at 82 (she died at 86). Fine stylist.
TO THE FINLAND STATION by Edmund Wilson. This is a great history of an ideology. Published in 1940, it provided great insight into the development of Communism, focusing entirely on the characters involved. Unless you’re a history buff, it may not interest too many people today.But if you want to understand the 19th and 20th centuries, it’s a must read. Wilson was also one of our finest literary critics, and I imagine his analyses of prominent authors probably stand up well.
ISLAND by Alistair MacLeod. Fine writer. Makes the landscape of Cape Breton and the people come marvelously alive. My personal favorite is “The Road to Rankin’s Point.” It’s a perfect gem, a masterpiece. You may find some of the others as equally good, maybe better. These are the collected stories of a lifetime, unless he is doing more writing in his retirement. His one and only novel is NO GREAT MISCHIEF. I haven’t read it yet, but will when I get the chance.
Andre Dubus (beware you don’t confuse him with Dubus II and III), THE TIMES ARE NEVER SO BAD. Fine writer, also. Great at the novella length. This and ADULTERY & OTHER CHOICES are both collections of stories. Writes about very physical people, and some of the stories are ugly. I especially like his attention to detail as to the physical surroundings of the characters. Makes it all very much alive. Takes his time detailing a scene; don’t know how he gets away with it. I don’t think I can, or do, in my own writing.
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