Week Thirty-Five - Jeanette

Bartleby The Scrivener: A Story Of Wall Street by Herman Melville (1853)

Recommended by Dave

I’m an ignoramus when it comes to Great American Literature.

Twain? Pynchon? Steinbeck? Fitzgerald? Whitman? Carver? Hemingway? Besides Of Mice And Men and The Great Gatsby (and they hardly merit a brag, length- or difficulty-wise) I’ve read not a one. Those hours spent watching The Wire, re-watching The Wire, re-watching The Wire, watching The Wire commentaries, and re-watching The Wire commentaries have to come from somewhere, and I’m not subtracting them from reading Middlemarch (or re-reading Middlemarch). Starting something like Gravity’s Rainbow seems like an overwhelming chore: I would prefer not to.

Moby Dick is my one flimsy defense against being a total Eurocentric literary fascist. I read it during a university Easter holiday (and, crucially, I didn’t have to, it wasn’t part of a course) and loved it. The atmosphere of the Pequod, and its crew under the obsessive Ahab was magnificently drawn. I’m sure I missed much about American culture and history in my reading, yet I still feel I ‘got’ the book overall. Melville didn’t purposefully over-complicate an already Byzantine work; he urged understanding and care with his meticulous words, and I always appreciate that in an author.

A motionless young man one morning stood upon my office threshold, the door being open, for it was summer. I can see that figure now – pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn! It was Bartleby.

Bartleby is employed in a Wall Street law office. During the course of the story, he steadily refuses to undertake more and more of his allocated tasks and, when faced with the sack, refuses that too. The plot itself has an absurdist and fantastical bent, nicely captured in this scene from the 2001 movie staring the brilliant Crispin Glover. The full trailer is below, and it looks like it might be a worthwhile adaptation.

The narrator (and Bartleby’s boss), an elderly lawyer who holds the venerated office of Master in Chancery, struggles with the unexpected passive resistance of Bartleby. He swings between indulgence and annoyance. His mania to understand Bartleby’s behaviour becomes every bit as compulsive as Captain Ahab’s search for the Whale.

Gradually I slid into the persuasion that these troubles of mine, touching the scrivener, had been all predestined from eternity, and Bartleby was billeted upon me for some mysterious purpose of an all-wise providence.

Bartleby’s wraithlike presence could encapsulate a dozen, a hundred, meanings. His thousand-yard stare, penetrating nothing yet everything – is this modern urban blankness? His denial of work – is this a comment on the farce of bureaucracy? His squatting in the offices of his former employer – does this relate to the futile wish to rid ourselves of psychological baggage?

Or is it a relatively straightforward tale of a man with chronic depression?

Our narrator takes his sweet time to get to anything. We get intricate detail about each of the copyists in his employ (not just Bartleby), and these descriptions are all in woolgathering prose.

In the morning, one might say, his face was of a fine florid hue, but after twelve o’clock, meridian – his dinner hour – it blazed like a grate full of Christmas coals; and continued blazing – but as it were, with a gradual wane – till six o’clock, PM, or thereabouts; after which I saw no more of the proprietor of the face, which, gaining its meridian with the sun, seemed to set with it, to rise, culminate, and decline the following day, with the like regularity and undiminished glory.

This might be expected in a book the girth of Moby Dick but Bartleby, The Scrivener doesn’t even scrape novella status. I rarely read short stories because basically I’m prejudiced: I believe they will never satisfy me in the same manner as a longer work, reasoning that the word limitation just does not allow for sufficient richness. Simply a matter of physics. But Melville proves me wrong. Wrong with bells jangling. Bartleby The Scrivener rivals even Moby Dick in its vision and accomplishment, and it does so in thirty-six pages.

Dave’s first choice of book to me was something I read only last year: À Rebours. I’ve already bleated about this unique work in relation to Teju Cole’s fantastic Open City; like Bartleby The Scrivener, À Rebours is another, albeit very different, portrait of an eccentric at repose with his own thoughts.

Dave certainly has his fair share of unconventional characteristics. When I first met him he had a quiff and the type of outré glasses you wouldn’t see on anyone outside of a Top Man advertising hoarding. I remember there was once a fancy dress party and the theme was dressing as Dave. I also remember there was another fancy dress party where the theme was dressing as a pop star; Dave came as this Morrissey!

(I came as this Betty Boo.)

Now the quiff has gone, or rather it’s migrated south to form a rather impressive beard. Dave looks like what he is: a musician. His current band is The Drink. I’m almost annoyed that The Drink are my friends, because it makes people think I’ve a vested interest in celebrating them. Not at fucking all. Listen to ‘Microsleep’ and tell me this isn’t the greatest Deerhoof-meets-Essential-Logic-yet-still-utterly-unique song going.

You may have noticed that over these past few weeks I’ve been in a reverie myself; like Bartleby, my default state has been staring into the open plains of the mind. Perhaps with the occasional microsleep.

Come out of it? I would prefer not to.

Week Nine - Jeanette

The Panic Hand by Jonathan Carroll (1996)

Recommended by Ellen

I was on the phone to my esteemed co-blogger.

‘Yeah, I can talk, that’s fine, Jude. I’m at home. I’ve just had a tea of chips and vanilla vodka.’

After our chat, I picked up The Panic Hand and immediately read the following line:

Some people change as they grow older, while others only become more of who they were at fifteen.

           

*blushes*

I have read a Jonathan Carroll book before – actually, I’ve read it three times. I was given The Land Of Laughs, Carroll’s 1980 debut novel, in my early 20s; it was a present from a man I didn’t know very well. I was grateful, because it was a nice gesture, but I was rather perplexed. My confusion was not as to why he’d given me a book (I hoped it was because he liked me as a person, but also suspected there might have been a more, erm, ‘earthy’ motive); but rather why he’d given me this book.

As you can see, it is part of a series called ‘Fantasy Masterworks’. Orcs and elves and forests and sun gods and women in Red Sonja costumes. Not for me! I liked Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Angela Davis.

I slung The Land Of Laughs on my bookshelf and I didn’t read it.

A year passed. One day, I got sick. A week later, the lurgy still hadn’t gone anywhere. Confined to bed, wastepaper bin emptied out for a sick bucket next to me, I needed something to distract me from self-pity. Dostoyevsky and Davis weren’t about to do that. So I picked up The Land Of Laughs.

It wasn’t ‘fantasy’ in the way I had pigeonholed the genre, at all. It was easy to forget it was anything other than well-written realistic contemporary fiction until the last third. Then – holy, holy! – it slides into something completely incredible, yet at the same time, utterly logical. It’s about how we escape from the world into books. I escaped from my illness into The Land Of Laughs, and the other two times I’ve read it have also been when my body wanted to hide for a while.

The Panic Hand, a collection of Carroll’s short stories, was the trickiest of my Two Readers books to track down so far: out of print, not in the library, not in any secondhand shops. Less than twenty years old, and the recipient of great reviews, it seems to have sold little and faded quickly.

Which brings me nicely to a conversation I remember having with Ellen. A brilliant singer-songwriter, and former part of the psychedelic folk band Saint Joan, Ellen and I had met through a mutual friend at 2008’s Green Man Festival. I was immediately taken with her: charming, literary, funny. We both loved many of the female artists who had spent years in obscurity before being (re)discovered: Bonnie Dobson, Linda Perhacs, Vashti Bunyan, Susan Christie… ‘They were so good,’ Ellen said. ‘Why didn’t people pay attention at the time?’

Ellen’s own album, 2009’s The Crescent Sun, was poetic and nuanced and superb, but also served to answer her question: why people don’t pay attention at the time. Put out by a label that almost immediately went under, the album got snagged in the record industry’s cogs. The Crescent Sun wasn’t widely reviewed, and was difficult to find even in the early days of its release.

As for The Panic Hand, it too seems to have been badly served by its industry. That terribly misjudged cover must have had something to do with its failure. Just as I was put off The Land Of Laughs because of its association with stereotypically nerdish fantasy, The Panic Hand screams trashy-horror-bought-at-a-petrol-station. That embossed font! That blue demon claw! That small (i.e. not ‘literary’) paperback size! Toss it back in the bargain bin.

The panic hand is not a blue demon claw. It is a computer game played by Heidi, a twelve-year-old girl with a stutter. Heidi also conjures up a beautiful mother, Francesca, because she wants to see men falling in love and having sex with Francesca. These men always do, that is apart from our narrator: he’s far more interested in Heidi (in her personality, and in her vagina).

And that’s Carroll in a nutshell. We don’t get caught up in how Heidi created Francesca, she just did, because magic is everywhere, and the reader must accept this. In fact, it might have even been the narrator who invented both Heidi and Francesca. At the end of the story, we’re left wondering about the narrator’s intentions towards the daughter of his real-life girlfriend. Many of Carroll’s narrators are, to put it mildly, flawed.

It’s hard to précis these stories, because they usually only sound worth reading once you’ve given away the ending. The same with quoting chunks of prose: his writing is good, yet it’s the plot and its twists he excels at rather than any stand-alone lyricism.

A bizarre obsession of Carroll’s – it’s there in The Land Of Laughs, too – is of how animals watch us, judge us, relate to us. He imbues his animals, usually pets, with as much character as his humans. There’s also a powerful quasi-religious element to The Panic Hand stories. Just as Carroll accepts the personality of animals and the existence of the supernatural, he deals in hell, God, and angels throughout the book. The divine might not be conceptualised in the usual way, but its essence is consistent. It adds a magical realist morality to these tales.

I didn’t think this was as fabulous as The Land Of Laughs, but I think that’s because it frustrated me to get into one of Carroll's intriguing concepts, only to have it end five pages later. I like Carroll when he explores his ideas, revealing them slowly, rather than just exposing their raw meat. It felt as if many of these stories should have had more time invested in them.

            Nevertheless, even if those ideas aren't fully developed, they're original, and have a lot in 

            common with children's literature in both their whimsy and their scale.

For years, this small house had hosted family after family of losers, creeps, cheque-bouncers and wife-slappers who hadn’t paid their bills, loved their children, cared for anything other than their own thin skin. Then one day a family moved in and suddenly everything was different. These people loved each other, their lives, the house. […] The house gave back whatever it could to show its appreciation. It kept its windows from breaking in a storm, when the roof leaked into the parents’ bedroom, the house kept the leak from falling on the bed and ruining the patchwork quilt.

[quote ends here: Blogger won't let me unindent the text!]

So if your guttering keeps breaking, look to your humanity as well as your drainpipes. The Panic Hand: where the world is alternately sinister and hopeful.

Week Eight - Jeanette

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (1972)

Recommended by Rupert

Rupert and Kathryn (my best friend) had just got together. The three of us were driving somewhere, probably for a mooch around the record shops of north west London. It was only about the third time Rupert and I had met. We were all chuntering happily away about the Girls In The Garage compilation LPs.

Kathryn suddenly exclaimed, ‘I’m so glad you two are getting on!’

‘Well, we do like lots of the same things,’ said Rupert.

Perfectly in tune, Rupert and I said: ‘Like Kathryn!’

Yes, Rupert and I do like lots of the same things (although Kathryn remains the thing that we each like best). I am in awe of Rupert’s literary taste. I pretty much know that any book he recommends me will be a challenge. I don’t mean a willfully awkward read, nor something full of tricksy prose: but a book that challenges the way I think.

One of the earliest books Rupert and I discussed was Georges Bataille’s Blue Of Noon. I gave a brief nod to Bataille’s Story Of The Eye last week, and Blue Of Noon is equally brilliant, if unsettling in a totally different way. After talking of our mutual admiration for Bataille, Rupert pointed me towards Henri Barbusse’s Hell: I read it and my mind was blown.

Rupert says he found out about a lot of his favourite literature in his early twenties through reading the music press. Rupert has one of the country’s best record collections, and he is particularly attracted to the independent spirits of post-punk and 80s cerebral indie. He would read interviews with artists he admired in the NME, they would namecheck books, he would read them. In this way, he came upon some of the twentieth century’s most remarkable modernist works.

I had read the little Penguin 60 Italo Calvino, Ten Italian Folktales, many years ago, and greatly enjoyed it. Calvino’s rolling of language was divine, and the content appealed to both my Aesop- and folklore-loving tastes. I had always intended to read more.

Gore Vidal says of Invisible Cities:

Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvellous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant.

Thanks for that, Gore. Let’s give it a go anyway.

Invisible Cities is a series of short prose descriptions of locations in the Mongol Empire. The travelling merchant, Marco Polo, tells them to the emperor Kublai Khan; every so often, the tales of the cities break off for a conversation, or a chess game, between the two men.

The city must never be confused with the words that describe it. And yet between the one and the other there is a connection.

Yes. For these cities are entirely created by words. Unlike Polo’s genuine travelogue (the thirteenth century work The Travels Of Marco Polo), Invisible Cities constructs the imaginary rather than maps the real. Some cities are grounded, and it’s easy to believe that they exist.

A stain that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets, houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the darkness.

                                                            (Eudoxia, ‘Cities & The Sky 1’)

Others initially seem impossible in the corporeal world. Yet, deliberate over them, and they become deeply plausible. What seems more fanciful than Argia, a city with dirt instead of air, where the residents’ bodies decay quickly with damp (‘Cities & The Dead 4’)? But, then, what happens after a natural disaster vomits the earth into a city? What is Trude – ‘the world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end’ (‘Continuous Cities 2’) – if not a prescient comment on globalisation?

I found Invisible Cities an interesting contrast to the book Jude discussed in Week Three, Jane Jacobs’ The Death And Life Of American Cities. In Jacobs’ work, she considers the function of a city, and how it should serve its people. As does Calvino.

It is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it.

                                                                                      (Zenobia, ‘Thin Cities 2’)

How a city is designed, and how this moulds its populace is a strong philosophical idea in Invisible Cities, and nowhere more so than in the sad case of Perinthia. ‘Nature’s reason and the gods’ benevolence would shape the inhabitants’ destinies’, a team of learned astrologers argued, as they set about designing the perfect city. But:

In Perinthia’s streets and square today you encounter cripples, dwarves, hunchbacks, obese men, bearded women. But the worse cannot be seen: gutteral howls are heard from cellars and lofts, where families hide children with three heads or with six legs.

                                                                                       (Perinthia, ‘Cities & The Sky 4’)

Were the astronomers’ calculations wrong? Or does Perinthia actually reflect what the gods’ desire for human destiny?

And then, there’s my favourite, Sophronia. I grew up in Norwich, and every summer my parents and I would day-trip to the seaside towns of the Norfolk coast. Some of these are beautiful; some of these are gaudy, tatty blots of unhappiness. Look at Hemsby:

Like many seaside towns, Hemsby is divided into the tourist Hemsby - all one-armed bandits and fatal-looking funfairs - and Hemsby village, a quiet residential area.

The city of Sophronia is made up of two half-cities. In one there is the great rollercoaster with its steep humps, the carousel with its chain spokes, the ferris wheel of spinning cages, the death-ride with crouching motorcyclists, the big top with the clump of trapezes hanging in the middle. The other half-city is of stone and marble and cement.

Every year, one half of this city is taken away. It is not the half of the funfair; it is the half of the administration, the money, the public services. And what happens to the half that remains?

The shout [is] suspended from the cart of the headlong rollercoaster, and it begins to count the months, the days it must wait before the caravan returns and a complete life can begin again.

                                                            (Sophronia, ‘Thin Cities 4’)

Invisible cities are memory, invisible cities are the future, invisible cities are life, and invisible cities are death. And, sometimes, as I walk around Sheffield, I think of how my own emotions have grown and crashed on its streets. Then, visibility or invisibility, it suddenly makes no difference.

Week Six - Jude

Anthropology and a Hundred Other Stories by Dan Rhodes (2000)
Recommended by Lisa Baker


101 stories, each of 101 words: Perec trickery again, but pithier, dafter. Lovely Lisa Baker, with her long black hair and literary encyclopaedia brain, kindly recommended a book suited for the commute. Women with names like Nightjar and Honeysuckle romp around these tales, twisting men around elegant digits. The stories are funny (Herself is pure Tommy Cooper, plus brilliant punchline), but also often disturbing (Kangaroo) or desperately sad (Crying). I’ve read criticism about the female subjects being either witches or ditzes, but the male narrators aren’t feted; they’re shown unadorned, and unravelling. The older jacket’s better too. 101 words yet? Yes.

Week Six - Jeanette

Revenge Of The Lawn by Richard Brautigan (1971)

Recommended by Stephen

1998. ‘You’ll like this,’ Stephen said, pressing a 7” single on me. We were in the basement of Brighton’s Wax Factor, having only met a couple of hours previously. The single was post-punk perfection:

I not only liked it; it became one of my favourite singles of all time. I went on to buy everything else by LiLiPUT. The search for their second LP, Some Songs (released in Germany only), dragged on until 2008.

Stephen and I had been writing to each other for eighteen months or so by the time of our meeting. He had contacted me, asking for my fanzine Kirby (then on its second issue), and I had been delighted to get his letter. For Stephen was a well-known name to people who wrote fanzines. His reputation preceded him: someone with excellent taste, kind and supportive, a scourer of the charity shops down in Brighton, and the person with the best collection of books, records, and ephemera. My cultural horizons would be a whole lot narrower without Stephen in my life. He must have turned me on to well over two hundred things I would never have discovered without his guidance: from Helen And The Horns offshoot bands to obscure Caribbean dub poetry.

However, and by degrees, a new person emerged to me. Stevie was within Stephen. Because while Stephen and I would talk about books and records, Stevie and I – via letter and telephone – shared our lives.

It was a mixture of Stephen and Stevie that recommended Revenge Of The Lawn to me. Stephen, with his eclectic taste in books, was perfectly capable of dealing me an oral history of waitresses in Balham or a book of Cuban horror movie poster art; but I know Richard Brautigan is an enduring part of his collection, nestled within its heart chambers. And Stevie, who knows my inner world, felt I would react well to the book's tone, its detail, and its compassion for human eccentricity.

How many short stories can you fit into a 174-page book? Richard Brautigan can fit in 62. This is ‘The Scarlatti Tilt’ in its entirety:

‘It’s very hard to live in a studio apartment in San Jose with a man who’s learning to play the violin.’ That’s what she told the police when she handed them the empty revolver.

If the creative writing advice is true, and that in a short story every single word should count, ‘The Scarlatti Tint’ has to be the medium’s flawless exemplar. Not every one of Revenge Of The Lawn’s component parts is so concise. But, in many of the stories, Brautigan encapsulates something in a few words that other writers would need a paragraph or more to describe.

           

            They all looked like people whose names you forget.

                                                                        (‘The Pretty Office’)

           

              Love affairs that were breathing mirrors of my unhappiness.

                                                            (‘American Flag Decal’)

We see a café resting in the snow’s leisure.

                                                 (‘Thoreau Rubber Band’)

It is the polished nucleus of writing.

I’ve often heard Brautigan’s work described as ‘surreal’ yet – in Revenge Of The Lawn, at least – I found this judgement shallow (although the titles do all sound like lost tracks from Trout Mask Replica). While a few stories do have an otherworldly aspect, such as the sad consumer daze of ‘The Wild Birds Of Heaven’, most are very human and relatable. A note of deep profundity is often struck at the end, which sometimes only makes sense in the context of the title.

Witness my favourite, the one-page ‘A Complete History Of Japan And Germany’. It begins:

           

A few years ago (World War II) I lived in a motel next to a Swift packing plant which is a nice way of saying slaughterhouse.

The narrator describes the sound made by the pigs:

                        A squealing lament equal to an opera being run through a garbage disposal.

However, he soon gets used to the anguished porcine cries. The final line:

Whenever the pigs weren’t screaming, the silence sounded as if a machine had broken down.

Thinking about that title, and the reference to the war in the first line, plus the fact it was written in 1969, during the Vietnam conflict… this story seems a subtle update of Nineteen Eighty-Four doublethink: war is peace.

I can see the huge influence of this work on modern America, and not just in literature. I would wager Larry David is a fan; ‘Complicated Banking Problems’ is nothing if not a lost Seinfeld episode. Some musicians openly acknowledge his influence, like Neko Case and Devendra Banhart, while dozens more simply rip him off, hoping their audience won’t twig.

Brautigan was also a poet, unsurprising given his talent for expressing intricate ideas in a compact package. Hear him reading 'All Watched Over By Machines Of Love And Grace':

I was glad when the bus came. There is a certain happiness sighted when your bus comes along. It is of course a small specialized form of happiness and will never be a great thing.

                                                            (‘The Old Bus’)

Stevie, your hope was realised: I did enjoy this. XXXOOO.

Week Three - Jude

The Beautiful Indifference by Sarah Hall (2011)

Recommended by Rebecca Bream

I love short stories. They don't take long to read, after all. When it's been a cow of week – as my last one has with work – reading one on the way home is always a treat. When they're good, they're  lovely half-hours of pleasure, like an episode of a soap opera when you've just got in, or a hot bath with your favourite magazine. In Sarah Hall's case though, these half-hours usually involve bigger, fuller language, and far fewer ads.

Rebecca Bream – Beck – recommended me this book. She's not long had her second son, and told me she lapped this up. Beck is cool as fuck, calm, funny, and an Actual Proper Journalist, someone who's worked down diamond mines and oil rigs while I've been at home in my 'jamas. My fondest memories are her are at my wedding, simultaneously DJing and dancing to The Breeders on a bench in stockinged feet. Aso, if you want a crash course in getting to the front of a moshpit, with charm rather than bother, then Beck's your girl.

Booker Prize-shortlisted and longlisted, Sarah Hall is also an impressive woman. Her four novels up to now (I say confidently, having had a quick scan through her website) have explored the destruction of 1930s Cumbria, dystopian sci-fi, the world of fine art, and a man who leaves Morecambe Bay for Coney Island. This is her first book of short stories, and I'll admit here and now that I found few of them tough. Hall writes the kind of prose that book reviewers call “luminous” – a metaphor that's always stuck in my craw, because words don't bloody glow. But she does describe nature in bright colours, and with plenty of texture.

Take the first page of The Nightlong River. It involves “November berries...hung and clotted in the bushes, ripe and red, like blisters of blood”. “Yarrow and rowan” hanging out “their own gaudy bunting”. Hawthorns sending “the hedgerows as ruddy as battle”. Typing those phrases out now, they read beautifully, don't they? I suppose what I wanted from that story from the start was more pace – a plot that grabbed me straightaway, that didn't take its merry time to gently weave me in. I also realise this shows my flaws as a reader, much more than it shows Sarah Hall's as a writer.

I wasn't surprised to find out that Sarah Hall's also a poet. As well as that fulsome, visual stuff she conjures up, she's always leaving little mysteries that never get solved. I loved the book's title story (are they called title stories?) and how Hall slowly unravelled the tale of its protagonist and her lover – but never completely. I also gobbled up The Agency, which I suddenly realise was another saucy offering. No, I haven't – and won't – read Fifty Shades Of Grey, but I bet this is ruder and filthier. Rather than disclosing the mucky details that are suggested within it, we find our protagonist going into her living room, hours later, to “clear up the children's mess”. The gaps in our knowledge aren't filled. We're allowed imaginations.

My favourite story was Bees, about a woman who'd just moved to London, which began with her sitting in a garden, thinking about the dead insects around her. Typical me, really: it's the second shortest story here. But its description of a character losing something – still wanting something they shouldn't really have – captured feelings I'd once had, so powerfully, so dramatically, that I found myself suddenly standing up between Tottenham Hale and Blackhose Road.

I mean, that's a proper short story, isn't it? I'll definitely allow Sarah more time. One of these days – she says, contemplating next week's book with fear – I might even allow myself some.