DISCONTINUED

I just read Phil Roth's "The Ghost Writer" for no specific reason. There was a vague mix of curiosity and obligation.

I also found the experience positive, a vague mix of appreciation and actual enjoyment.

Attempting to project a more particular or solidified impression would be a complete fabrication in this case. This also best describes my digestion of many other books I read. This is something I really couldn't have discovered without going through the process of describing every single book I read for a stretch.

It's different if I'm reading for a review, or to teach a particular work. Then I am reading with the readers or students in mind. This isn't the way I would want to read for pleasure or personal advancement, especially those given to me so thoughfully.

CURRENT READ

Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy

HOW I GOT IT: When I read Tess of the d'Urbervilles in high school, I thought it was the most artfully-told novel I had ever read. In addition to the extreme use of imagery and sensual detail, there was a strong sense of honest, quirky characters, dynamic settings and place and a dramatic flow of events.

As with Jude, there was also the controversy of it all. Not so much in the sense of pure scandal and salaciousness, but of the significance of the book in literary history (or, at least, in its placement betwixt and between the Victorian and Modern chapters in that history).

Supposedly with Jude the Obscure, the scandal is ever greater - compelling the author to abandon fiction and take solace in a prodigious career in poetry. But to some, the scandal is that there was an outcry at all. A friend of mine I had not seen in awhile proclaimed that he was reading this. Oddly enough, just a couple weeks before I had taken my own unread copy down from my parents house.

I've read a lot of books since the last time I read Hardy. I feel very close to the Victorians in my own storytelling sensibilities. We'll see how this one stacks up.

The Death of Rhythm & Blues, Nelson George

The Death of Rhythm and Blues, Nelson George

HOW I GOT IT: Recently I've been trying to learn more about music and music history. Hip-hop has held my interest for the last 16 years or so, and one of the things that compelled me was that it was the music of our time. I thought perhaps it was as important as rock 'n roll was to the 60's. Of course, then the question becomes: Were the 90's as historically significant as the 60's - and is music in general as integral to the times in the last two decades as it was back then? And then you ask: What the hell does integral mean? And then, as a wise person once said, you get surly and you cop an attitude.

Needless to say, hip-hop and my adolescent years are two inextricable enigmas. Racial politics, the future of art and intellectual property are three more thrown in. Music history is still a very useful lens through which to observe this great nation of ours. I read about George's book in Jason Tanz's cultural study/squeamish confessional, Other People's Property: A Shadow History of Hip-hop in White America. Tanz is extremely articulate and honest about his own experience, a journey from ignorance to educated speculation. He sites many sources, and George is perhaps the most highly touted. It is also a foray into a music genre of which who's history I know very little.

HOW IT WENT: In 1942, the president of the American Federation of Musicians succeeded in a proposed ban on recorded music. According to George, too many musicians at the time (many being "Big Band" bands) relied too heavily on live, on-air performances for income and exposure - and technology was impeding this. The only records allowed to be sold were ones recorded prior to the ban, which were sometimes new recordings pawned off as newly discovered "bootlegs."

However, by the close of the war, George says that tastes were beginning to change. The crooning singers (Sinatra, Perry Como, et al) eclipsed the full brass bands and band leaders that were combating the record companies and radio stations over this issue. Not only did tastes change, but the economic potential of music dissemination via the record versus the limitation of flesh-and-blood music only must have seemed more than a little silly. The record, apparently, never looked back from this triumph.

I read this the very same week as notable contemporary band Radiohead's landmark decision to sell their latest album for as little or as much as their audience deems appropriate. Not to oversimplify, but it seems that these two stories encapsulate a full circle of sorts, spurred on by technology. Record companies never feared music being played for free on the radio. In fact, they pay for this privilege. Each new technology provides new ways to create revenue. And if the old guard fails to adapt and, instead, chooses to bellyache about how the new technology stifles their cashflow through the previous outlet, then not only is their argument futile (technology will win out anyway), but their moral argument is unfounded. The artists who actually make the music are never paid as much as the company that gets the music to the listener. If the music can be brought to the listener for free on the web, then the money is made on live performances - which haven't been threatened at all by the advent of recorded music. The band promoters who bribed dj's to play music of a band in a particular market a week before they played in that town were the ones who learned this lesson. The executives (and yes, in this context Metallica acts as a corporation) who cry about music theft are gougers at heart,who have been driving up the price of music-listening to build their mansions and their yachts. A rational musician desires to have as many people exposed to their music as possible.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Philip K. Dick

HOW I GOT IT: As with many line-cutters, this one is spur of the moment - and spurred on by a book event. Philip K. Dick will be discussed by Jonathan Lethem tomorrow night, and I picked up the book yesterday. I would have to say that Jonathan Lethem is the best writer I've been introduced to this year, having read Motherless Brooklyn and his latest, You Don't Love Me Yet. He is in keeping with several of his contemporaries who are seen as writers of high literary merit that also explore genre (detective, science-fiction, etc.). In his own day, Dick hoped to me acknowledged as more than just a sci-fi writer. So has been done with the recent Library of America canonization. Lethem edited the edition.

HOW IT WENT: Rich would be an understatement for this, my introduction to P.K. Dick. In his presentation/discussion, Lethem laments at the dearth of success screen adaptation has had in retaining the author's ideas and talents. Who would challenge that cardinal rule that the book is always better? But this imposes an inverse negative on my reading experience. I can never bring myself to read the book if I've just seen the movie. I would be anticipating key plot points and contrasting the differences in tactics and style. (It's also kept me from watching a couple good movies, if I intend to read the book.) I couldn't read the book for what it is, even though it would, in a vacuum, be better. This blog is not about the works themselves, but about my experience with them. They stand in my room as a testament to futility and mortality.

So does Dick. Only he's not confined to my room or a particular volume. He is immortal through his words, and that is because he will now never be out of print (and the book will also lie open, as the book is bound with the grain of the paper). And he is in constant print because he has been aptly selected by LOA, a result of his tapping into the very essence of human existence. I hope I'm not getting too deep here. But if you want to go down another twenty levels or so, then read this book.

My own acid test for this writer is that I have seen several movies based on his works (Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall) and I am fully confident that the reading of the antecedent texts will be an entirely unique experience. It doesn't take away from the films, because they are all great and decent flicks. But Dick generated these incredible premises and plots and dystopias in the form of books, and his command of language and ideas underlines the inherent advantage of the book when it starts out as such.

This book is rich. It's also brief. It creates two solar systems with a dozen characters. Written in 1964, it is haunted by the greatest specter of 2007 - that we're making our planet uninhabitable. Lethem says that what makes Dick unique not only among SF but other great writers in general is his utter commitment and investment in his characters, no matter how stark and isolating their situations are. In keeping with what I find to be the most riveting science fiction, Dick keeps everything tidy on a literal and scientific level. But he goes further. It is also philosophically and metaphysically sound (at least to a layman's eyes). The characters are, at times, as vapid as their circumstances - and their physicality. Where an excessive coincidence sits heavy, an existential epiphany soars. The pseudo-theology might be undercooked romanticism, but the anthropologically-informed futurism is ready and crispy.

Or maybe the theology is richer still, at least for a less-evolved Terran.

"So I assumed. And if you imagine people are going to pay out skins for an experience like this...you're not just out of your body; you're out of your mind, too."

The Way We Live Now

The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope

HOW I GOT IT: Over the holidays, I read a NY Times book review that referenced not only a great Victorian, but named this novel as one of his finest. (Out of 47 novels, that says a lot.) What really sent me to Barnes and Noble to devote some of my gifted plastic to it was that it was similar in topic to something I was working on at the time. Therefore it was also that all-powerful writerly conviction, which gets me every time.

A quick note, I will link to the exact edition of the book I am reading, when available. A discrepancy will be otherwise noted. Yes, I purchased a B&N paperback edition. This line of classics is well edited and enriched with useful scholarship. Are you kidding me? These are the guys who released Leaves of Grass with First Edition and Death-bed Edition together between two covers in case a curious reader, like myself, is interested in the zeitgeist of 1855, but might also wish to read "O Captain! My Captain!" in the same sitting. This kind of consideration from a category killer??

I've crossed the halfway mark and hope to complete by the weekend.

HOW IT WAS: Clairvoyant in theme, turgid in plot. Compared to the much earlier and concise The Warden (the only other Trollope I've read), characters are multitudinous, yet calcitrant. Waiting to see what big decisions each person makes, they never startle with cleverness or cunning. They simply continue to be themselves. And yet this malaise is the novel's intended achievement, for better or worse. It is a tragedy wherein every delusional character is knocked down a peg or two, toward less delusion and a thinner wallet. The few exceptions to this formula are, once emancipated, never seen to their end, even in these reams of paper devoted to their murky situations. How do we know if a particular heroine thrives in the New World or gets cut down by train robbers on her way out there? Again, that's really not the point.

Not to say that wit and comical circumstances are missing from the Trollope prose. Observations abound, many as if stolen from today's headlines. The high society of London is enraptured by the empty promises of America's railroad bubble, in the form of the South Central Pacific and Mexican railway - and by its primary shareholder, Augustus Melmotte, a man of dubious origin, means and intentions. He is a Gatsby of sorts, having entirely invented himself from rags. And though few of the city's big players buy his story, they can't help but join him in society and commerce.

In the way that Melmotte is heavily shrouded, so is near the remainder of the dramitis personae. Each attempts to elevate one's facade beyond their intrinsic structure in the name of opportunism. "Men (and the ladies, too) reconcile themselves to swindling." To Trollope, each character is "a swimmer...conscious of his skill and confident in his strength [until] he begins to feel that the shore is receding from him...that there is peril where before he had contemplated no danger." Essentially, they all bite off more than they can chew.

In Trollope's England we are also treated to that prototypical, bias-laden press that today's blogs get constantly compared to. When the Trumpian Melmotte asserts political aspirations, he is laid under the microscope of conservative and progressive papers alike. Calling it a "sign of the times," Melmotte exclaims: "They'll want before long to know where I have my clothes made, and who measure me for my boots." (They were actually speculating about his religious affiliations.)

I look forward to reading Trollope's two major cycles, Barsetshire and Palliser. With so many great books I've read, and for the achievement of The Warden, the first of his Barsetshire novels, I have to say that the time put in just barely outweighs the entertainment gained. But there are some really great LOLs.

King Lear

King Lear, William Shakespeare

HOW I GOT IT: This is how I never get to the stack, and why it has stood strong these eight months - and even grown, smiting me. It starts with my writing a novel. In his writing memoir (a wonderful past gift), Stephen King says a writer should read for pleasure. But with writing on my mind, it lends a sense of urgency to the selection and acquisition of such books I will read for pleasure. Browsing book shops and libraries, my eyes are piqued for writers and books I should read - and any welcome advise along the way.

At a book store at the mall, Jane Smiley's 13 Ways caught my eye, as did the blurb on the back that mentioned her Pulitzer Prize, for A Thousand Acres. I escaped the book store without sin, and headed for the library. (Though guess what I let get away: a supposedly seminal study, Bowling Alone, for $1.99. It was referenced the very next day on the McLaughlin Group by Pat freakin' Buchanan!)

So I spend a little more time with Smiley's novel study/testimonial - and it is extremely cautionary, which is exactly what an optimistic zygote of a not-yet-novelist needs. I have to read her opus, see her "in action." Just this one, and then I'll get through the rest of Trollope, and onto Pynchon.

But I can't even touch A Thousand Acres yet, because I discover that it is in part derived from King Lear. Having missed the Oxford education this time around, I moped over to the British Drama section and picked up this Learean paperback, beaten down and creased by all those before me, five acts to the wiser.

HOW IT WAS: So what can I say about Shakespeare? I found the language to be much more intuitive than what Signet concluded. Often, I got the gist of a phrase and, yet, interrupted the flow to trace a footnote for fear of missing something. I stopped doing this about halfway through, and would recommend looking The Bard squarely in the face with as little mediation as possible. You can always backtrack later.

There is no way for me to begin to articulate an insight into this work. And it's not the freshest, since I finished reading it two weeks ago. I also don't look at Shakespeare's plays (or sonnets) as something to be done with, once read. I'll be coming back to this baby time and time again. Plus, I must continue reading.