Rake's Progress

A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever

Palahniuk, fuck yeah.

"The Lowboy" (A Cheever Snippet)

This is an opening, kiddies.

Poe, Broke & Lonely

I just learned that Poe Ballantine is a Denverite by birth. Thanks, Wikipedia!

As it happens, I'm reading Ballantine's 501 Minutes to Christ. Again.

About which:

My inner landscape, which I describe in 501, is an exposition of personal philosophy. My philosophy has developed over the years from staring at motel room ceilings and sitting in working-class bars with bugs in my drink. It has come from wide reading and sleeping with women I probably shouldn't have. It has come from elaborate failure and smoking too many cigarettes. It has come from seventy-five different jobs. I explore a place, a person, a situation, and draw whatever conclusions I can. These conclusions may take twenty years to properly develop. How I am still alive to tell them I cannot say. The simplest stories are always about more than one thing.

One of the reasons I don't teach is because I'd tell my students to quit. Go out in the world. If you want to write about the world, about America, go find out about them. Take odd jobs, travel, meet people, drink in strange bars, be sworn in as a Muslim, cross-dress, fart among the Episcopalians, chase a buffalo in your leotards (how that buffalo got into my leotards I'll never know), spend a few weeks digging graves without a dime. There are things to learn in school but there are more things to learn out in the world. Experimenting, risk-taking, self-knowledge, are more important than reading Victorian novels or writing essays on Beowulf. You can read Victorian novels in your motel room. Shakespeare, I'm fairly convinced, never wrote an essay on Beowulf.

Here be monsters, o' course, but Ballantine is pretty deft, coming across as a proud peripatetic without feeding one a line of bullshit about the noble poor (for example).

Good stuff. Here's some more.

It's not the size of the press, it's what you do with it

Via Dan Wickett, here's a commendable article from Our Man Milofsky:

Last month I commented that the fact that many fine writers have been dropped by New York publishers has provided an unexpected bonanza for small presses. I couldn't have found a better example of this than Robert Boswell, a sometime resident of Telluride who published five novels and three short-story collections with Knopf before finding his way to Graywolf. "The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards," a new collection, is the result and affords readers who may not have noticed Boswell before the opportunity to experience his tight, imagistic prose in small, memorable bits.

Though University of Denver professor Laird Hunt has a tendency to lapse into a mannered prose reminiscent of Raymond Chandler, his new novel, "Ray of the Star" (Coffee House), has a mesmerizing quality that is hard to resist and is frequently dazzling in its evocation of both place and states of mind. Mixing genres of pulp fiction and surrealism, there's something here for almost all devotees of the dark and mysterious in life.

I have not been aware of the work of J. Robert Lennon, and I think I should have been. He is an extravagantly talented writer with two new books out this summer from Graywolf — "Castle," a novel, and "Pieces for the Left Hand," a group of deft, very short stories, all of which have the ability to stay in mind long after you've finished reading

I'm pretty sure I tried to turn him on to JRL years ago, but late's better than never. See also some fulsome praise for the aforementioned Mr. Wickett, who, according to Milofsky, "annually does more for authors and alternative publishing than anyone I know."

Well done, gentlemen.

It is the best of times, it is the "blurst" of times!

Why, here's a potential little ray of sunshine for all our post-literate friends:

Forget that most of the pundits lambasting Facebook and Twitter are familiar with these devices because they use them regularly. Forget that no one is being manacled to computers and forced to read stupid prose (instead of, say, reading Proust in bed). What many professional writers are overlooking in these laments is that the rise of amateur writers means more people are writing and reading. We are commenting on blog posts, forwarding links and composing status updates. We are seeking out communities based on written words.

Go back 20, 30 years and you will find all of us doing more talking than writing. We rued literacy levels and worried over whether all this phone-yakking and television-watching spelled the end of writing.

Few make that claim today. I would hazard that, with more than 200m people on Facebook and even more with home internet access, we are all writing more than we would have ten years ago. Those who would never write letters (too slow and anachronistic) or postcards (too twee) now send missives with abandon, from long thoughtful memos to brief and clever quips about evening plans. And if we subscribe to the theory that the most effective way to improve one’s writing is by practicing—by writing more, and ideally for an audience—then our writing skills must be getting better.

I dunno, kids. Seems a tad Panglossian for my taste.

Of course, I'm probably saying that because on more than one occasion I've waded into the craigslist rants and raves section, not to mention the YouTube commentariat (for example). And Gawd love the internet, but to paraphrase Mr. Capote, that ain't writing, that's typing.

We are all typists now. If that.

Or as Buk sez:

there'll always be money and whores and drunkards
down to the last bomb,
but as God said,
crossing his legs,
I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry.

And I should hasten to add that this piece cites the Atlantic's execrable Megan McArdle as an example of how blogs are indistinguishable in eloquence and intellect from published works.

O RLY?

YA RLY.

Terra Haute Blogger Beginning to Think Lit Blog Co-op Isn't Going to Call

In a dim basement in Terra Haute, a voracious reader yearns to share her literary passion with the world, but is starting to lose hope.

Jayne Darkbloom (not her real name), the proprietor of the second-wave book blog EatMeDrinkMeReadMe: Digesting Books, has been waiting for over a year for the Lit Blog Co-op to ask her into the fold.

Darkbloom gestures across her squalid hovel to a stack of the latest releases from the Graywolf and Small Beer Presses and sighs. "There's a lot of great stuff right there that the reading public needs to hear about," she says. "But I'm just one person. To really get the word out, I need the collective voice only the finest literary blogs, speaking in harmonious agreement, can provide."

She pauses to leaf through a Percival Everett novel, and chuckles to herself for a moment. As she closes the cover, her mood again grows somber.

"I'm starting to think they're never going to call. But I keep telling myself: Maybe they're busy. Things have been really slow at the LBC blog, so it's possible they're just doing a ton of reading for next quarter's selection."

When asked how she copes with the ongoing disappointment, Darkbloom doesn't hesitate.

"I just read and read and read some more," she replies, brightly. "Right now, I'm wolfing down No Surrender: My Thirty Year War by Hiroo Onoda. Fascinating stuff."

On second thought, let's not go ask Alice

Now we're talking: Reviewer kinda pans Alice Hoffman; Alice Hoffman, who we can safely assume is not aware of all internet traditions, releases the Flying Monkey Brigade; aaaand the Twitterverse gets a half-chub for AH, eventually somewhat browbeating her into a you-a culpa.

All culminating in this article. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

About which: Can we stop with these "Richard Ford, Bad Boy" anecdotes? Collectively, they show him to have the emotional mettle of a pudgy 13-year-old goth kid.

There Will Be Blood Meridian (Redux)

Your pal the Rake already spent a tweet on this, but it really deserves a re-posting here as I reboot the franchise. Here are two of my favorite things, Harold Bloom and Cormac McCarthy:

AVC: You placed Blood Meridian not only firmly in the Western canon, but in your own “canon of the American Sublime.” Have there been any books since that time that you’d consider to be part of that canon?

HB: Well, we have four living writers in America who have, in one way or another, touched what I would call the sublime. They are McCarthy, of course, with Blood Meridian; Philip Roth, particularly with two extraordinary novels, the very savage Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral, which I mentioned before; Don DeLillo’s Underworld, which is a little long for what it does but nevertheless is the culmination of what Don can do; and, of course, the mysterious figure of Mr. Pynchon. I don’t know what I would choose if I had to select a single work of sublime fiction from the last century, it probably would not be something by Roth or McCarthy; it would probably be Mason & Dixon, if it were a full-scale book, or if it were a short novel it would probably be The Crying Of Lot 49. Pynchon has the same relation to fiction, I think, that my friend John Ashbery has to poetry: he is beyond compare.

AVC: Blood Meridian is a book that’s filled with all sorts of religious symbolism and mysticism, but it’s often difficult to discern its exact attitude towards religion.

HB: The citations and references to the work of Jacob Böhme, who is, after all, a very specific type of Kabbalistic Gnostic… I think you would have to say that they’re something of an evasion of the themes in Blood Meridian. McCarthy knows exactly what Gnosticism is, and he could have made Judge Holden into an explicitly Gnostic figure if he’d wanted to. He wants to keep Judge Holden completely inexplicable. Saying that he is a sort of Gnostic demiurge is too facile for McCarthy’s portrayal of him.

AVC: You’ve been extremely critical of the politicization of teaching literature…

HB: Critical, young man, is hardly the word. I stand against it like Jeremiah prophesying in Jerusalem. It has destroyed most of university culture. The teaching of high literature now hardly exists in the United States. The academy is in ruins, and they’ve destroyed themselves.

Try saying that last bit in your best Howard-Cosell-in-high-dudgeon voice. Works like a charm, doesn't it?

It makes perfect sense, though: Both classic bloviators, with one foot (at least) firmly planted in the tradition of the Great American Huckster.

Rake's Progress IV: The Undeadening

Your font of wisdom has returned.

Above: Fountain?