Book Review: In the City of Pigs, by André Forget

19 Tuesday Jul 2022

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After Realism, Andre forget, CanLit, Contemporary Canadian writers, Important modern writers, In the City of Pigs, New Canadian authors, Toronto writers

*Cover of* In the City of Pigs, Dundurn Press, June 2022

Finally, we get Forget’s debut novel. It was no disappointment! Forget knows a thing or two about Canadian literature—the former editor in chief of The Puritan also has a Master’s of English with a focus on CanLit. I only mention this to say he knows what traditional pitfalls to avoid.

In April 2022, Forget released a collection of short stories he edited and compiled called After Realism, “24 short stories for the 21^st century.” Whatever you expect upon hearing the dreaded phrase “CanLit,” you will get something different when you read In the City of Pigs.

*Cover of* After Realism, Vehicule Press, April 2022

Forget’s protagonist Alexander Otzakov navigates the semi-secret world of Toronto Money, which uses art as a mask in various ways, most notably to make itself seem noble and high-minded while committing shady deals. In the City of Pigs explores this literally and figuratively. ICP is refreshingly frank about sex and money in a way Toronto is not known for. What is really behind the large art grants? What is the nature of the grease that makes property deals work? Most profoundly and practically: does anybody who lives in the city even care?

The literal strain is the plot, which is straightforward, but I won’t reveal here to avoid spoilers. But the novel’s heart explores the relationship between art and money by asking what art really is. Forget is hardly the first author to ask, but his answers avoid debut-novel cliches, and are smart enough to make the novel essential reading, if for no other reason.

I suspect what people are liable to call “digressions” in my view is the novel’s meat and potatoes. No useful answer about the relationship between money and art can come from someone who doesn’t understand art, and Forget leaves his reader with no doubt about his grasp of the subject.

There are lengthy discussions about, for example, an underwater organ that makes the reader consider not only what hearing music really is but what seeing music is like, ie, pipes playing Bach underwater releasing air bubbles in certain patterns that render music visible. I happen to have read Pynchon’s Against the Day before reading this novel, and was reminded of Pynchon’s wonderful “digressions” about transmitting radio waves and other signals through the aether.

“God is the throbbing hum of an inhumanly low frequency, a bass note that sustains the universe,” is a sentence I’ll quote here for two reasons. I love it. Also, it describes Bootsy Collins’ role in Parliament Funkadelic so well. There’s no mention of funk in this novel, but great novels make you think of other unrelated things and tie them together. The novel’s in-depth discussions of classical music were joyful, even or especially when they were over my head.

The novel’s title comes from Plato by way of a fictional art group that launches guerilla events in abandoned buildings in the city. Without getting into the particulars, this is a novel that juxtaposes Plato, Toronto arts societies, Faust, Mozart, Toronto gentry, and gentrification. Local staples like The Communist’s Daughter abound.

For one thing, it references Dundas West and Norm MacDonald. It’s set in Toronto and Halifax, two cities I lived in. The protagonist is a former-musician, so dialogue brims with strong opinions and scathing judgements, two things always fun.

Perhaps the novel may be described as an apolitical look at political power via art. It’s also about love, sex, and money. It’s a broad novel I don’t mean to reduce narrowly. It’s about thinking and living.

The wealthy power brokers are treated fairly, which is to say the state of inner-life and creativity in their soul is not ignored while their deeds and machinations are described accurately. The loathing is earned, not pre-determined. The moral and artistic world of this novel may have exacting standards, but it gives everyone a chance!

Perhaps the best observation is that what seems like flagrantly corrupt business deals and cynical co-opting of art is something the general public will simply not give a shit about. When it comes to how business is really conducted, the public is as apathetic towards it as it is about serious art.

The novel’s highbrow strains are high, but Forget’s head is refreshingly not up his ass. Joyce responded to critics’ accusations Ulysses was inaccessible by pointing out that his characters were mostly poor. Bloom tabulates his day’s expenses at the novel’s end, and Otzakov looks for an affordable place to live. It is a very grounded novel.

There are tender, truthful moments where people discuss the full dimensions of their relationships in ways that echo Mordecai Richler in Barney’s Version. It’s funny and frank about unsavoury instincts and impulses that balance the highbrow chatter.

Forget takes on Toronto’s tendency to praise itself for being polite enough to avoid discussing how real power and money really work, while talking about much else along the way in novel ways, from booze to drugs and more. There are parties and pities aplenty.

It refreshingly explores whether the very idea of art is rarified, indulgent, useless shit in today’s age of ascending maga fascism just as intensely as it looks at the connection between art and commerce. In other words, the perspective comes from a deep desire for knowledge, honesty, and concern for people.

Without reducing an artistic, imaginative work to a didactic social novel, Forget recalls Michael Brooks’ edict to be ruthless to systems and kind to people. The “power” he explores here is not about a particular political party or easy satire of a specific corporation or industry. But about the interlocking systems we all operate within, albeit from very different positions and heights.

The moth just wants to move towards the light because that is the moth’s nature. “I’m the moth, you’re the moth…”

Forget understands that human nature may be constant in regards to this system, but not everybody needs to find somewhere to live. Moths may all be drawn to light, but some are flying in a podiatrist’s office while others are in Rosedale.

Jeffrey’s Version—My literary and literal journey with Richler’s beloved novel

19 Thursday Sep 2019

Posted by jdhalperin in Literature

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Barney's Version, Jeff Halperin, Mordecai Richler, Nabarun Bhattacharya, Noah Richler

One day I stumbled on Barney’s Version at a book sale at my local bank for $1, and because I had heard the name Mordecai Richler before I thought, sure. It was 2008 or so. I had just finished doing a literature degree at Dal and thought I knew something about books.

But this one was just so funny, so honest, and seemed in all conceivable senses to be designed for me personally. This is not the place to analyze the novel or discuss anything inside it. I just want to tell a story that has a middle and ending that you won’t see coming, because I certainly didn’t!

Barney’s Version made me want to become a writer. So I started writing, and soon went on to read all Richler’s other books (except, on the written advice of Mordecai himself, his first three novels). Currently on my shelf are 27 Mordy books.

I read his non-fiction, secondary criticisms, the wonderful Foran bio, and even found for $2 a signed hardcover copy of Don’t Stick Your Neck Out. The Incomparable Atuk was released in the US under this alternate title. What I’m saying is, I got big into him!

In 2014 I was writing arts stuff for a TO website with a small but noble readership when I learned Noah Richler was curating the Luminato literary fest. I emailed him some questions, and we went back and forth a bit.

We met at the event, and soon after he graciously and very surprisingly invited me to “his local” to chat more over beer. I was excited! Noah has worked for decades as a journalist around the world, and is a great writer in his own right.

We talked about literature. He asked if I had ever read any of his father’s work, and I responded, “yes.” He asked me if I write fiction and I said “yes” again. He asked what my novel was called, I said it didn’t have a name yet. He asked what it was about. “Love and advertising.” He said that would make a perfect title, and he was right, so I called it that. (This novel is currently unpublished.)

Anyway, in about a year’s time I moved to New Delhi to help launch an international news station, World Is One News. I worked on the web desk, and my editor at WION has since become a dear, dear friend of mine. Tathagata Bhattacharya has reported from four continents, and has an astounding depth of knowledg on topics ranging from dog breeds, world history, military armaments, finance, to Dead/Band/Dylan. He also knows literature in his bones.

His grandmother, who died in 2016, was Mahasweta Devi, one of India’s most revered authors and social activists, and I understand was a runner up for the Noble Prize in literature, having published over 80 works. T’s father, who died in 2014, was Nabarun Bhattacharya, a radical Bengali novelist who transformed that language’s literature.

T leant me a copy of Vasily Grossman’s epic Life and Fate, inscribed by his father Nabarun. “Dear Bao, For a Brave Life & a Bravely Faced Fate.” I loved that novel, and it was good to get my head out of news for a bit and back into literature.

After a visit home to Toronto, I gifted to him an inscribed copy of Barney’s Version. He read and really liked it, saying it was funny and so readable, but its weave and structure was deceptively complex. Precisely.

Anyway, witnessing Tathagata proudly handle his father and grandmother’s legacy–ie corresponding with publishers, fans, news agencies, posting pictures and anecdotes on Facebook–inspired me to contact Noah again. Why not just be straight up and share a story he’d probably like, rather than be self conscious and do nothing?

I emailed Noah, reminded him who I was, and told him that I didn’t want to be a Fan Boy back when we met, but actually I had read all his father’s books. I told him that BV is what made me want to write, and how I gifted BV to Tathagata and he enjoyed it, and I explained who Tathagata was and that seeing him honour Mahasweta and Nabarun’s works is what made me want to reach out to him. I also sent him a picture of a copy of Barney’s Version sold in India, with a cover I had never seen before.

I got back a very long and warm email! And to my total amazement, actually, Noah had interviewed Mahasweta Devi for the BBC. Jewish Montreal, Toronto, Calcutta, London — small little world! Noah’s email was extremely gracious and friendly. In it he politely asked if I could do a favour and buy and ship to him a copy of Barney’s Version with the cover he had never seen before either for his mother’s archive (the Florence, ie Mordecai’s wife, the model of Miriam in BV no doubt). He’d reimburse me, of course.

Back in Toronto we met and had a very nice talk. After our initial meeting but before I had gone to India, he had been a high-profile federal candidate for the NDP, and had written a fun, candid and very well received book about the experience, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

I gave him the copy of Barney’s Version with the Indian cover, and of course refused his money—I was very honoured and frankly tickled to contribute my favourite novel to Florence Richler’s own archive.

Over the years I’ve bought probably 10-15 copies of that novel for people. I left 3 or 4 in India. In addition to my reading copy I have the Uncorrected Proofs too, still with the handwritten notes from the reviewer and a letter from Knopf Canada outlining/boosting the novel, and advertising Mordecai’s availability for interviews.

I’m only telling this story because the other day on Twitter I saw someone with the handle “Barney Panofsky’s Best Intentions,” and told him that I followed him solely on the basis of his most excellent name. I couldn’t tweet this story to him, too long, so I wrote this. Why didn’t I tell this story earlier? Maybe I’m uncomfortable name-dropping and it’s impossible to tell this story without doing that. But really, who gives a shit.

I’m happy to celebrate Mordecai! My darling Mordecai! I say that while there are “Greater” novels, BV remains my comfort food, my bagel lox and cream cheese, and my death-bed meal.

And actually a documentary came out literally just two days ago entitled “Nabarun,” about the literature of Nabarun Bhattacharya. I had heard so much about him from T, and praise for his writing from other Bengalis, but until watching this documentary I had never seen him on video or heard him speak, either in Bengali or in English. The raw footage of him was excellent, and very inspiring even! Plus my dear bud Tathagata is in the documentary too, and I haven’t seen him since 2017. Pranati Bhattacharya, Nabarun’s wife and T’s mom, is also in it, a force to be reckoned with who I met briefly shortly before she died.

Looking back, that $1 I spent for my original copy of Barney’s Version was my best investment ever…I wish I could stretch every buck this far!

Love and Advertising — Prologue: Dean Galbraith’s Scorn

16 Saturday Feb 2019

Posted by jdhalperin in Literature

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fiction, Jeff Halperin, Love and Advertising, Novel

Dean Galbraith, up in his office in the tall tower of the Henry Hicks building, was giddy at the start of another academic season. But this year some hideous fear began to creep in and fester, threatening the pleasure he took seeing young students come into their own, maturing as thinkers and people. Schmoozing and balancing the departments’ budgets was always to him a sordid business way beneath the academic and interpersonal development he lived to foster in students. Nowhere did the Greeks or Romans extol the virtues of glad handing. Yes, the Romans were administrative pioneers, but it was their dullest achievement. Muses don’t sing about efficient, thorough public records.

A professor could affect too few students and Galbraith had no hunger to research, but he considered it a shame to spend time away from getting to know the students—challenging them, busting their balls, showing them that academia was rigorous and difficult but rewarding, civilizing and exciting but never stuffy or pretentious.

Of course he accepted that his job contained some unavoidable bullshit, but lately administration wasn’t just a banal chore. He saw himself as overseeing the death blow to the classical notion of university: business, management, and the ever-expanding rackets of marketing and sociology were choking real academics to death, enrollment and expansion in these departments slated to be higher than ever with no end in sight. The humanities, literature, history, classics, philosophy shrunk every year. Galbraith felt complicit, guilty. But the guilt fell most to another man.

The ultimate academic desecration was a fraud skilled in all ways of pretending: Berringer. As he did daily, Galbraith decided to recharge his animus by opening up Dr. Stephen Berringer’s latest work, reading from whatever page he happened to open (such a random disordered entry into the book jived with such an incoherent disordered text):

A scholarly Reflection:

Dr. Stephen Berringer

By applying a neo-Foucouldian lens to a systems discourse it’s easy to trace the setbacks caused by neo-cons and other critical analysts of their ilk. It can be seen, therefore, that more investigation is wanting, but, on the other hand, its corollary is true too, namely that the talk and feedback loop has increased the vivacity of grassroots initiatives, and plans are coming steadily along to bring about the fundamental change up from the ground. Fruit is bound for harvest as indispensable momentum has been gained in this and in other related and interrelated fields. Incidentally, a retrospective glance at historically bypassed alternatives to the accepted narratives and viewpoints isn’t just a vital reconstruction that adds definitively to the wider scope, as mitigating and transcending the accepted biases is required or we are hopelessly lacking completion, but often is a mirror of the real thing itself. The truth is the narrative as told for decades, flipped upside down and inverted. It is necessary, therefore, to bring up the rear, as it were, and ensure that this crucial aspect doesn’t dwindle. The strength of current bonds, agreements, and cross lateral academic joint suppositions depends upon the intrinsic strength of this arrived at result of reflexive academia. We ignore these findings at our collective peril: we cannot possibly move forward until we accept these findings and resolve to pledge solidarity.

Galbraith burst out laughing at this last preposterous bit, but checked himself, thinking mirth an inappropriate reaction to something already debauching a generation. Galbraith laughed hard and often, and that the suppression of joy was the proper response to Berringer’s writing proved that the prose was deplorable. He had to restrain two rumblings in his belly, laughter and the first stages of puke. Either to make spiritual amends for laughing or to physically expunge what was mentally ingested, he reached the toilet before getting sick then gargled mouthwash, specifically stored in his office to freshen his breath after Berringer readings.

Berringer was the spiritual guide, the chief fiend of the political radicals on tenure that infested Dalhousie, the “academic deadwood” pileup from which no university is immune. They weren’t new to Dal but could no longer be safely laughed away. They were gaining ground. But who could read this shit? You’d have to be a madman to find any meaning in it! The undecipherable, destructive and manifestly absurd claims cloaked in the populist underdog language wooed the innocent lesser lights of campus, students only guilty of signing up for education, not abuse. Of course this was a scandalous disgrace even if annual tradition, but resigning in protest would only replace him with a different overseer, one who would no doubt applaud and encourage the atrocity.

These blank-slate sociologists, tabula rasa Marxists, wilfully blind or shamefully ignorant of congenital inheritance’s impact on human nature, were here under his watch, safe and handsomely paid instead of interred and forgotten about in the local asylum. About these professors, cheerfully termed “social construction workers,” Galbraith consulted his lawyer about filing a human rights grievance, suing for obscenity or for loss of enjoyment of life. His lawyer counselled against it. “Besides,” the lawyer said, “you don’t want to create a toxic workplace environment.” “They’re a toxic work environment! Fuck them and fuck you! You’re fired!” So he fired this lawyer, an eminent distinguished professional with a sterling record that shone beyond Halifax to the furthest corners of Nova Scotia. But the next lawyer also advised against Galbraith’s wishes.

“Sorry Jerry, but Berringer’s students don’t meet the accepted legal criteria of ‘child soldiers.’”Anyway, he reasoned, they craved a cause, and even if they should win in court it would only give them another thing to cry about, demonstrate against, boycott, sit-in, lock-out, and spend pleasant afternoons plastering propaganda to telephone poles in solidarity against. These things, of course, not just their favourite pastime but their existential reason for being.

Berringer ingratiated himself to the student base by making radical claims about cultural capital he knew they loved. They loved him for transforming their views, making them see things in a new light, no matter how dim the light. He proudly attached his name to intellectual brands: every kind of Marxism, feminism, reconstructionism, socialism, even if in practice they were mutually conflicting. Say, promoting a UN petition demanding increased First World funding for the Third World while simultaneously supporting an anti-imperialist mandate urging an end to First World financial meddling in the developing world under the phony pretext of promoting economic sustainability. Berringer was a veritable bullshit hydra.

But there were more threats than Berringer. The cynical marketing and advertising professors, sophistry devils reappropriating university’s prestige earned from the bygone days when professors knew Latin and Greek, who taught subjects proudly developed over centuries, not simply invented last Tuesday. Marketing and advertising degrees were proudly framed proof students had not just the willingness but the expertise to swindle society, turning people with hearts and minds into lobotomized consumers. After leaving Dalhousie these uncultured bats from hell could now enter the world and amass a fortune by making everyone around them retarded. Galbraith believed that modern university, his included, was just about society’s largest threat. Not exactly a terrorist training camp, but close.

Galbraith once put out feelers to see if he could abolish the marketing and advertising program on humanitarian grounds, but was unsuccessful. A flabbergasted Kofi Annan wrote him back in a polite yet insistent tone claiming to be busy in Sudan. “I don’t want to take him from his important work,” said Galbraith, “because thanks to the UN Darfur is once again a tourist magnet. That putrid organization. As warlords butcher on industrial scales and blame it on Israel, Annan is busy making sure that, under absolutely no circumstance, does he dislodge his thumb from his ass.” Unsuccessful as it was, the effort caused considerable rumbling against him from professors in these departments. “Do you know that Galbraith voiced objection to our department in the UN? No, literally, the United Nations!”

Galbraith was the de facto leader of his faction, and was very far from the only traditional old-school academic. Higher education no longer favoured learning for its own sake. That anyone would study to simply elevate their soul was beyond naive. Decadent. Privileged. Suggesting university should exist so students could learn something earned you funny looks. It was just social emancipation for historically marginalized people, or an economic investment for the highly unmarginalized. The ancients lasted for centuries, but were disappearing because the economy demanded students learn contemporary garbage. His loathing for everything modern increased in degree and breadth.“Stare into the abyss and laugh,” was the Greeks phrase that best captured the outlook Galbraith cherished, that blend of stoicism and dark humour.

He laughed in the face of what personally and professionally threatened him. He just couldn’t help but giggle. Sometimes guffawed with everything he had. He despised how some profs concealed their radical views, unleashing them only once they were safely tenured, but enjoyed that tenure was an anagram for retune. He liked that the Marxists’ shanty offices crammed with messy book shelves, coffee-encrusted mugs and yellowing plants neighboured the newly constructed Marketing department, a lavish and gleaming steel-and-glass monstrosity.“Two appropriate habitats for two opprobrious rabid rats.” These private unshared quips popped into his mind constantly, making him smile through that thick red-tinged beard, a grin that appeared seemingly for no reason, leading others to think him a madman.

Though Galbraith saw the commoditization of higher learning developing a mile away, for years he pretended it couldn’t grow and swallow everything he stood for. Caring, intelligent, duty-bound professors, of who, again, there were many, constituted an impregnable fortress guarding centuries of noble tradition. But this year he felt something change, the momentum switched. He needed to fight more than ever.

In the official Dalhousie pamphlets welcoming students and parents to the city he inserted quotations from Tolstoy and Orwell. Inspired by a cherished comedy, during frosh week he instituted an academic decathlon featuring subjects like “Rabelais,” “Gogol,” “dog shit and the human response,” “Thucydides,” to take place before the cheers and jeers of packed drunks enjoying life inside the Student Union Building.

He should have known last year that change was coming when inviting students to his home for dinner was made illegal. He and his wife Sally served wonderful food and French wine to select students. These were put to an abrupt halt: Dr. Phyllis Stein’s popular “exploitation of females in society” lectures had a devastating effect upon the campus climate, and the way students regarded him and males in general. Stein, a rousing success, implanted in the students a higher awareness of “everyday sublimations of oppressive patriarchal gender hierarchies,” which eroded the students’ basic sense of trust in half the human population.

Stein’s treatment of Lolita convinced the helpless students that any old, seemingly-nice gentleman was just a cunning pederast, biding his time. The sweeter the appearance, the more elaborate and diabolical the impending debauchery. The calculus was grim: if a man who seemed like a gentleman was a brute and a man who seemed like a brute was a brute, who was left? Nobody was innocent. Galbraith’s formerly celebrated dinners didn’t just end, but that they ever occurred caused a dark fear and suspicion in many hearts. “I’m not some lecherous pervert, I’m the dean of this university!”

“Ya, because history’s never seen a powerful old white man lewdly abuse power.”

“Crusty wench.”

“Exactly.”

All he wanted was to feed kids delicious food! Offer good wine he knew students couldn’t afford! This was civilization to him. Most of all, to demonstrate that education and sharing their deepest thoughts could lead to wonderful laughs and an overflow of warm satisfaction, not just accursed grades or revenue.

And artistically misconstruing Nabokov, this, this was unforgivable. Satanic bitch! Yes Stein was attached to the university as a tenured prof, Galbraith reasoned, but could still be choked to death. No, she didn’t warrant that. Berringer was sociology’s ring leader. And Carrie in advertising—that Hollywood-vacuous, money-chasing philistine—was no slouch either.

The more Galbraith considered this sordid cast, the more assured he became in his belief that the highest form of intellectual honesty, the purest and most effective way to stand up for the enlightened values of Voltaire and his company, was to remain in his post to sabotage the guilty programs and people of Dalhousie.

The Arrogance & Ignorance of “Western Culture” Boosters

09 Saturday Feb 2019

Posted by jdhalperin in Literature

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art for art's sake, Gogol, Kafka, Literary views, Nabokov, Proust, Tolstoy, Western culture

I’d like to address here a common thing I see, which is North Americans assuming that Western Culture is automatically superior to the cultural output from other countries.

To begin, I will never say a bad word about the literature of the Canon—my point is a more basic one: how can anybody who only reads English possibly judge non-English literature? People judge culture based on its prestige. The literary heroes of the Canon are the best writers from the countries with money. Military and political centres. It is no accident! Let’s not confuse fame and prestige with talent.

Again, I am not taking away anything from Proust, Kafka, Bellow, Nabokov. Love these writers! I do, everyone should. But I can’t read Bhattacharya in his native Bengal, I can’t read Ghalib’s ghazals in their original. Or for that matter, Kafka or Proust, Or Belano in Spanish, or Tolstoy in Russian. When people say Western Culture is superior, what are they actually saying?

Western books are often considered, rightly, to be the bedrocks of literature because generations of writers around the world read the Bible and Homer, Shakespeare and Joyce. Often, an angry type of critic believes that removing these books from the centre of the discussion is nouveau philistine junk. I’d like to pause here and consider a few things.

The cornerstones of Western Literature were often originally banned in Western countries. Ulysses, Madame Bovary, Lolita. The notion that the West has always embraced what is now considered Western master pieces is simply not true.

With music, its record is worse. America only let Duke Ellington and his musicians enter through the back door of the club, and Jimi Hendrix wasn’t discovered in America. Black American blues musicians had to be validated in the UK before America embraced what it had. Son House, John Hurt, Frew McDowell…

But there’s another side to this. When I was young and the Maple Leafs won a game, I’d say to my mom, “we won!” She would tell me, correctly, “you didn’t do anything.” So when people talk about “our” culture, what do they mean? What did they do? The answer: jack shit.

This so-called cultural conversation is often just people co-opting the prestige of famous books they didn’t write, or even read, because they happen to have incidental geographic circumstances in common with the author.

The point that wealthy countries have their author’s celebrated is interpreted by some as a war cry—it sounds, to them, like what I’m really saying is political concerns should impact, or even determine, aesthetic judgments. This is not what I’m saying! On the contrary, my point is that only the aesthetic masterpieces from rich countries get their due celebrations, while masterpieces from poor countries languish, relatively.

Put another way, the aesthetes are more influenced by politics than they think. They will likely reject this notion, it will offend them, because they think they are driven solely by detached and impartial Eyes for Art.

Western Classical music is rightly beloved, but a lot of people judge other music by its terms, and just sound stupid when they shit talk music they don’t understand. I suspect African poly rhythms were too sophisticated for people conditioned to only understand Western harmonies and rhythms, and they’d criticize it as “savage” or “primitive,” which beyond the racist connotations is literally them just misunderstanding music because it is too complex for them to understand. If you asked such a person to identify the beat or the time signature, they couldn’t. But to them, it just sounds like noise.

People say this of hip hop, a beautiful, rich and varied art form. People relate to art made by people like them, because it reflects them, the listener/reader, and when they approach art that reflects someone else, they think the art is bad, when really what’s happening is, for once, the art they’re looking at reflects somebody else. They are making political judgments, not artistic ones, though it’ll be impossible to convince such a person that this is what they’re doing. They are convinced in their bones they’re viewing Art Only.

An open mind for literature/art isn’t necessary from a political point of view, but from an aesthetic one. Nabokov’s essay about the struggles of translation (fidelity to meaning, rhythms, a million other esoteric things to convert) is required reading for anyone who thinks they can sound off on books written in another language. VN tells us that a writer can’t be judged by a reader who can’t properly pronounce that author’s last name.

Can you pronounce Ghalib properly? Gogol? Tagore? Even Kafka, Proust, Goethe? It’s from an Art perspective that the imperialistic backers of Western art show deficiency. There’s a kind of foundation you need to understand foreign literature that they don’t have, but the international prestige of Western literature (that blessed, blessed thing!) convinces them that any haughty declaration of Western cultural superiority is justified.

“Western Literature” is a funny term, anyway, for suggesting it all comes from one place — the supposed united thing called The West is made up of countries that warred with each other relentlessly for centuries. Even Homer’s Greece had the Peloponnesian War (centuries later, but still), because “Greece” was a bunch of city states, not a country as we know the concept today. France and Germany and the UK went at it forever, and the US fought a war to separate itself from England — suddenly, there is one thing called The West which produces authors who fall under one category?

The authors who excelled from these countries probably did so despite the national influence on them, not because of it. Joyce wrote outside Ireland. Gogol never saw the Russian countryside he appears to have depicted in Dead Souls but from a passing carriage, and fled the country whenever he published a new work. Tolstoy was excommunicated from the Church and was out of favour with the government when he died alone in a train station, even though Putin’s Olympics had a ghastly Tolstoy caricature running around during the Sochi Opening Ceremony. Putin co-opting Tolstoy’s prestige is not very different than a strain of critic I see today, boosting themselves for being born in the same country as literary giants they had nothing to do with.

I don’t like the business of ranking literature—anyone concerned, like me, with art for art’s sake also doesn’t care about ranking. Nabokov judges each book one at a time—he loves Anna Karenin, thinks War and Peace is a rollicking historical novel for children, and thinks Late preacher Tolstoy is mostly garbage except for Ivan Ilyich, a true masterpiece. Gogol’s Ukrainian stories, junk. Dead Souls, immortal work of shimmering genius. What does it mean, that people feel emboldened to make judgments about “Russian literature” when each author is so uneven in their own career? What do the books in the Canon have to do with each other, exactly? Sometimes there is a link, or a direct line of influence, sometimes there really isn’t.

The thing for a critic today is to try to squeeze the most possible from every work of art, to narrow the focus. The point is to enjoy the art. This kind of nationalistic bragging is political jingoism dressed up as concern for art, and it strikes me as absurd, laughable, and embodies the smug stupidity it praises itself for being above.

Put another way, everyone bragging about Western Literature should shut up: anybody can read a book, only the person who wrote it is entitled to bragging rights. Let’s be humble, open-minded, and never forget that genius is universal, and that to take any view which limits our enjoyment of literature or art instead of broadens it is needlessly limiting, and warps our critical faculties.

It may strike one as surprising or counter intuitive that readers who emphasize the impact of colonialism on literature are actually more focused on aesthetics in literature than the ones who swear political power has no bearing on literature, and that there’s no room for political concerns in a conversation about art, but this is an odd truth.

It’s necessary to recognize both things at once: Tolstoy was a genius, but he could never have written such novels without having the leisure time on his estate to simply sit there and read and write all day. Sophia helped him with all kinds of things. Women weren’t encouraged to write, and people without money didn’t have the time to. Certain countries aren’t talked about or celebrated for their writers. But of course great writers can come from anywhere.

Because of money, power, race, nationalism, there are lost literary heroes whose names we will never know, and this should bother everyone concerned with art.

Empties

19 Monday Nov 2018

Posted by jdhalperin in Literature

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Empties, fiction, Jeff Halperin, Short stories

Jeremiah prepared his large open-concept apartment for tonight’s party. To make room for at least ten thousand people, he pushed the sofa against the wall. Yes, yes: he checked again and the numbers were sound — ten thousand people drinking an average of five beers each over three hours would yield $5,000. He could use the dough. That suit from Sydney’s being fitted cost something and the Beamer needed fixing.

Jeremiah had thousands of friends in the city, and not a single one knew what he did for a living. Evading this question wasn’t a high-wire act fraught with danger — he made a game of it, never repeating the same story. His guests, all wanting to appear intimate and familiar with the popular host, raved to each other about Jeremiah’s skill as a carpenter, bagman, lawyer, loan shark, architect, luxury toy maker, grade-four teacher, grade-five teacher, Deep Web hacker, stock trader, arborist, city planner, mob boss, gestalt psychologist, pilot.

When occasionally confronted by two people with conflicting reports of his livelihood they asked him, “Well what is it, are you a chef or a museum curator?” Jeremiah laughed and responded, both and none. “I dabbled in pizza slinging during the Tutankhamen exhibit, but currently I’m writing a long-feature for The Walrus about my time covering Iraq. Please, fellas, drink some more beer!” Everyone readily believed him because his aura of eccentric mystery jived with the outsized parties, and more than that, everybody really wanted to. The key thing was to slyly nudge them to drink more beer.

Jeremiah’s sole source of income, his actual profession, was luring masses of people to his BYOB parties held in his apartment, so he could redeem their empties. To get the rubes in the door, Jeremiah baited them with music and fun. It wasn’t hard. Everybody wanted to be at the huge parties with the city’s best eats and beats. That these DJs and chefs were in fact Toronto’s best was confirmed because Jeremiah had hired them. Even though Jeremiah didn’t actually hire them: in return for launching their career they sponsored the party extravagantly, and would never dream of accepting payment from Jeremiah.

So everybody came.

Before long Jeremiah’s apartment was littered with precious empties, which he secured methodically throughout the party under the guise of tidying up. Once the guests no longer produced empties –once they were done drinking– their function in the ploy was over and their continued presence unnecessary: there was nothing else for them to do in Jeremiah’s apartment but leave it. These people returned each week, so much did they enjoy this scam.

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Tactics were required. What looked on the surface to be merely ways to make parties more fun were really covert profit-boosting stratagems. Everyone loved the 80s and 90s-themed parties, but really they harkened back to youth when getting drunk meant drinking beer, and Jeremiah played on this pretext to quietly direct people towards bringing mostly beer. Hard liquor threatened his business; it got people very drunk but yielded only one returnable bottle. He frowned at it for years but never explicitly stated a ban. Until one night a few months ago.

In thanks for hosting these parties, a guest gave Jeremiah a bottle of Lagavulin single malt as a gift. This Dan, a quiet tactful man, managed to corner Jeremiah so the two could chat.

“Hi, Jeremiah. Nice to meet ya! You don’t know me. My name is Dan. Listen man, thanks for having me here tonight and, you know, like every week. Enjoy this with friends now, or drink it later. Whatever. Just again, thanks.” He proffered the scotch and a modest smile.

“You rotten son of a bitch,” replied Jeremiah. Inspired, he snatched Dan’s gift and stopped the music. Faces turned to Jeremiah in the silence.

“I live for beer! This is a god damn beer party! From now on all my parties are beer parties! Look at Dan over here,” he said, pointing to Dan. “He thought to bring hard liquor to my party. Let me prove how much I love beer by showing you all what I think of liquor. Watch!” Jeremiah took the bottle from its cardboard box, removed the seal and stopper and held it by the neck high above his head.

“What’s inside this bottle took 16 years to produce. Let’s see how quickly I can empty it.” With that he poured the scotch onto the floor (but safely stashed the bottle, to be returned later). As planned, this needless and flagrant waste of great scotch was taken as an authentic demonstration of Jeremiah’s love for beer. The partygoers applauded rapturously and took up the inventive chant, “Beer! Beer! Beer!”

Nobody ever brought hard liquor to another party again.

Things changed for Dan. At first he shuddered watching everybody cheer as the host wasted his expensive gift. He wondered what he did wrong. But this episode raised shy introverted Dan into a celebrity after it his important role in it was properly understood. Jeremiah couldn’t prove how much he really loved beer by spilling merely good scotch. Dan gave him the best. Jeremiah’s sacrifice needed to be valuable for the same reason God didn’t ask Abraham to only sacrifice a cousin.

Women and men congratulated Dan. He met a sweet smiley woman named Matilda and together they drank beer, fell in love, married, honeymooned in Cinque Terra. They would go on to raise three boys—a future track star, a west-end legend in bicycle repair, and a business mogul who, when he learned the details of his company’s exploitative operations, spent his personal money to fix the situation and travelled for three years in Uttarakhand’s Bandarpunch mountains to be mostly alone. Time here healed him, so he returned home to see Dan and Matilda, who rejoiced.

Dan and Matilda owed their life together to Jeremiah’s love for beer, as demonstrated by his legendary sacrifice of Dan’s scotch.

If decades from now you assembled the countless Torontonians who attended these parties and looked backwards to find the definitive moment of their lives, you would inevitably wind up back in Jeremiah’s apartment. His parties launched people in whatever direction they ended up. They weren’t just fun, they were nostalgia incarnate. So let’s return to tonight’s party, with Jeremiah in want of money for that suit from Sydney’s.

Thankfully Jeremiah just had two important breakthroughs. The thought of all the extra profit he missed out on for months by not having these breakthroughs earlier would have angered him, except he was delighted he had these breakthroughs now.

He stopped the music, instinctively and instantly reinserting the party goers into the identical stream of feeling they felt the night of the scotch sacrifice. Jeremiah sold his new demands to the primed crowd.

“Brothers and sisters! I have been struck by revelation: a more sacred form of drinking. Glass beer bottles disgust me, when there is simpler, cheaper packaging available. Let simplicity reign! Who needs fancy glass beer bottles? Long live the beer can!”

The rapt audience somehow knew to remain silent and let Jeremiah continue, avoiding that ugly moment in performances when audiences applaud before they should.

“But not just any beer cans, fellow partiers. The tallboy: the coarse American-style super-size tallboy. Its immodesty an insult against the dignity of regular-sized beer cans, which weren’t too small for our ancestors and certainly aren’t too small for me! Canada’s beer vessel is the regular-sized beer can! Nobody desecrate my home with tallboys, or glass beer bottles, ever again!”

Jeremiah began to hurl every bottle he could see against the wall, smashing them all to pieces. The guests plugged their ears for the roar of exploding glass, but laughed at the hilarious yet profound demonstration. Jeremiah knew he couldn’t redeem these smashed bottles, but justified the smashing as a sensible marketing expense, this loss of income essentially the cost of launching his new can-only campaign.

And it worked. The apartment was as filled with glass shards as the crowd was filled with enthusiasm for adopting these new rules. For them, anything but regular-sized beer cans was unholy. Of course the superficial charm of bottles was an insult against laudable simplicity! Of course tallboys were gaudy! How strange they never perceived this before.

Incidentally, crushed beer cans take up way less trunk space than glass bottles, while tallboy drinkers need fewer returnable cans to get drunk on. These changes to his parties more than quadrupled the Beamer’s trunk-to-profit ratio. Everyone was happy.

One night he overheard guests talking about environmental sustainability, a common enough topic in downtown Toronto. Someone mentioned a town in Southern Ontario, with a new Green government subsidy that offered not ten but fifteen cents per empty. The details were unclear, something about kick-starting a local recycling program. It sounded sketchy, but governments wasting tax dollars was hardly unprecedented, Jeremiah reasoned. 15 cents instead of 10. The thought of getting 50 percent more for each empty drove him wild. He began drawing schematics for the Big Haul that night.

Upon sober inspection, the numbers were surprisingly bleak. The Big Haul required renting a truck. Crushed cans might take up less physical space than intact ones but they weigh the same; carrying this added weight increased fuel costs. There was the time for driving, loading and unloading. Everything conspired to make the Big Haul financially less lucrative than he thought. He crunched the numbers again and again but to no avail. Still, he kept more and more bigger and bigger parties — a truck filled with such lucrative empties was just too alluring a fantasy to ignore.

Actually the fatal flaw was invisible. Jeremiah didn’t understand let alone account for the ire he aroused among his rival empties collectors. If he was asked, he’d say they had no reason to complain—they could still return the city’s discarded liquor bottles, beer bottles and tallboy cans. But they resented only getting the inefficient empties, Jeremiah’s crumbs, that he thought himself above. They couldn’t just watch while he single-handedly dominated their industry forever. Why should Jeremiah have everything? He was just a guy, not a god. And worst of all, they were the only ones not invited to his parties.

Eliminating the entrepreneurial empties collector destroying their livelihoods wasn’t going to be easy — he was surrounded at every party by thousands of loyal strangers. To get Jeremiah off his turf they assigned a couple plants to make sure Jeremiah overheard them talking about a town offering a much greater (but non-existent) rate per return. Of course Jeremiah couldn’t resist.

The day of the Big Haul was sunny with clear skies. Traffic was slight. Jeremiah was giddy. He sang whatever song came on the radio, while enjoying the pleasant breeze through the window. He was proud to transport more empties than he thought a single person could ever amass at one time, but this made him paranoid too. Though he wasn’t violent he carried a knife today. No way would his truck get robbed on its maiden voyage, the odds were too low. But in the unlikely event some highway drifter tried to stick him up he hoped flashing the blade would be enough to scare him away.

But Jeremiah never suspected to be assassinated, so when the ambush went down he got quite panicky. He brandished the knife and shouted wild threats, but the collectors only laughed in his face; Jeremiah’s rapacious empties collecting left his enemies armed with an entire city’s worth of glass beer bottles, each one smashed to become a fatal weapon. The glass he shunned would do him in.

Jeremiah realized his mistake too late. He should have harnessed his vast network to spy on his competition, or converted some rivals to his side by offering them a sufficient monthly supply of empties, or at least brought some damn security on this trip. But like many people he didn’t want anyone to know what he actually did to earn money. He enjoyed people believing his work was important and skilled, fascinating and noble. Mysterious, even. Practically speaking if the public learned his actual profession, people would see him differently and never attend his parties again. He’d lose his only source of money. Inside, Jeremiah was alone.

He offered to split the Big Haul but it was too late. The rabid pack of bottle collectors murdered him brutally. They let his corpse rot, then split the profits after returning by far the most valuable empties collection ever assembled by man. They celebrated together with a huge boozy party, and the next morning returned these bottles. They felt like billionaires living off interest.

When news of Jeremiah’s death returned home, countless friends wept over the fantastic obituary. It read:

“Jeremiah was a great man with a warm genuine soul who freely opened up his own home to the community. Above all he valued smiles and happiness. By all accounts he was an accomplished concert pianist, an unsurpassed literary critic, a wizard sommelier and a fearsome MMA fighter. Jeremiah made valuable contributions to an array of unrelated fields, such as economics, taxidermy, string theory and Lepidoptera. He leaves behind thousands of bereaved friends and colleagues.”

Many blogs covered the funeral, reporting on which taste makers and influencers gave eulogies. Many who attended the parties proclaimed to friends in a type of grief-stricken, melodramatic brag how close they were to the deceased, even if they didn’t really know him. To add a personal touch in the deceased’s honour to a common mourning ritual, many spilled beer on the ground from strictly regular-sized beer cans.

Dan and Matilda were on date four when the ghastly news reached them.

“I don’t understand, who’d want to kill him?” said Dan.

“I have no idea. I also still don’t really get why he poured out your scotch.”

“That was weird. Well, he brought us together. Cheers, then! To Jeremiah, one mysterious man.” They gently clinked glasses.

Jeff Halperin — Toronto 2013

The Sopranos V.S. The Wire

13 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by jdhalperin in Literature

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herman melville, moby dick, nathaniel hawthorne, scarlet letter, the godfather, The Sopranos, the wire

These masterpiece TV shows are in their sustained high quality more like novels (those lofty things!) than television programs (low vulgar trash). As far as American art is concerned, The Sopranos is like Melville’s Moby Dick whereas The Wire is like Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. Sorry, but The Sopranos is superior to the Wire. Both are equally taut and economic in storytelling, the character complexity and dialogue is comparable too. But The Sopranos beats The Wire because its ambition to reveal the inner workings of a single person’s mind is greater than the accomplishment of The Wire, which is to demonstrate the inner workings of society. Even if both succeed equally in their goal, ultimately a single mind is more complex than society. But this difference in function or purpose also accounts for the narrative flexibility in The Sopranos as well as the dark comedy that runs through its core, something which The Wire’s societal message forbids.

The writing in The Sopranos’ narrative veers and changes more because its object isn’t pedagogical like The Wire. The Wire must instruct and demonstrate how life really is, and though it does this with incredible artistry it is a burden they’re chained to. The dream sequences of The Sopranos are an obvious illustration of this ability to move laterally in a storyline and not straight ahead, but there are others. The story isn’t linear in The Sopranos for the simple reason that people’s minds don’t work in straight-ahead fashion, and at heart the show is about a single mind—Tony’s. The Wire is a wonderfully dense web of things happening on one external plane, the observable world. They can’t devote an episode to a single character, much less what a single character is dreaming of, or of what subconscious motivations make him act out. These things are implied in The Wire, but this is done through backstory—McNulty’s family and drinking problems impact his policing, but this is still observable, and it’s shown. The real action of The Sopranos happens on an invisible level. When we see Tony act it’s in response to the drives that even though they’re discussed very explicitly (literally, in therapy) are still only hinted at because the subject itself, the human mind, precludes us from full knowledge. This is reinforced as his therapist comes to doubt her own work toward the show’s end.

The Sopranos object doesn’t just make it deeper or more intellectual, but its mode grants the writers the usage of a darkly comical tone that The Wire’s format can’t access. It allows them great fun! It’s taken for granted that the members of “this thing we have” (the Mafia) have made a deal with the devil and redemption for them is impossible. The entire show is governed by what is essentially the law of comedy, where by definition the hero is never in danger; if a house falls on him, he simply stands up in the rubble, brushes his shoulder off and walks away. The Godfather II (and the gangsters in Sopranos reference these movies all the time) begins with a targeted hit on Michael in his family’s home. Family is the most sacred thing in this Mafia, and Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather novel and screenplay, called the Godfather a story not just about the Mafia but about family. Violence in the family home is the symbol of the greatest threat possible to the Corleone’s (compounded since Fredo, his brother, inadvertently caused it). This is subverted in the Sopranos to be dark comedy: though he’s surrounded by no shortage of people who want to kill him, the only ones who seriously threaten Tony are his mother and his uncle. His mother puts a hit on him and his uncle shoots him in the stomach, almost fatally.

By contrast, The Wire’s writing can’t engage in such dark, detached humour because their object demands an explicitly attached view of life as it is. Don’t get me wrong, there is humour, but it’s at the level of dialogue or embedded in the situation. The Sopranos writers invert conventional mob movies by making the drama not just about hits or robberies but ordinary conflicts, like family and sex, but also by doing its opposite, darkly and jokingly depicting ordinary people (not just Mafioso) suffering the violence of stone cold gangsters. In an example that cracks me up, Paulie and Chris get into a tiff over an expensive bill from a restaurant in the parking lot just after eating, and just then their unfortunate waiter approaches them with their paid bill to ask if they forgot to leave a tip. His kids are going through school, he explains, and Chris left only a $16 tip on a $1200 meal. The waiter gets lippy so, naturally, Chris hits him in the head with a brick. He begins convulsing, so Paulie shoots him then, for good measure, retrieves the $1200. This establishes that they’re cold-blooded gangsters and every mob show or movie would end here, but, emblematic of Soprano’s rich and dark comedy, the next day Chris and Paulie come to a sweet and heartfelt understanding over the phone. “Besides,” Paulie says, “somebody could have gotten hurt.”

Death in The Wire has attached to it all the consequences and implications death has in real life. The cops might make jokes about it because they’re numbed to it, but only because real experienced cops would too. Also, the bodies don’t disappear in this show like they do in The Sopranos. the Baltimore cops have to deal with the bodies because death matters in their world and in the world of the show. In The Sopranos, it’s just a joke. The waiter’s body never gets addressed in the show again. Better to kill a waiter than make a passing joke about Johnny Sack’s wife.

But nothing demonstrates the contrasting approach to each show’s writing more than their final episodes. The Sopranos finale was hated by people who didn’t understand the real point of the show. Those who wanted closure on the observable level of the everyday were upset when they got none. They wanted to imagine the characters living out their lives beyond the show’s finale. But the show itself is a dream, and there is no life after. Whether Tony is literally killed by some bum hit man is irrelevant. His life is only the show, and it expires when the show does. Anyway, he signed a deal with the devil before the first episode. When Chris gets initiated into the Soprano clan, Tony tells him, “once you’re in, there’s no way out.” Same goes for him. Whether he dies in a restaurant or keeps living his life of death is irrelevant. If the show itself isn’t art for art’s sake, it never set out to make an explicit value statement. There’s a Nabokov novel called The Defence where at the very end the protagonist is in mid-flight on his way to sure death. We’re tempted to believe he dies, but he doesn’t. Mark Lilly’s essay Nabokov: Homo Ludens describes how The Defence ends in precisely the same way I think the Sopranos does. Nabokov intentionally doesn’t depict the landing—his character “forever tumbles to a death that he will never reach.” We are not meant to imagine life beyond the book. He’s suspended. Same with Tony.

The line between reality, dream and death is constantly blurred. All throughout The Sopranos, images from Tony’s dreams pop into his real world (the toy fish that sings “take me to the river”), while real life images in turn intrude on his dreams (a real fish in the ice that begins talking to him after he kills his best friend, throwing him overboard “with the fishes”). The line between reality and dream world was always very fluid, constantly mingling. It’s instructive that while the tension of the climactic scene is building up and we’re meant to wonder whether or not Tony will die, the writers choose to show Meadow frantically failing to parallel park outside the restaurant where the action supposedly is. This is more dark humour, but it also reinforces how the real subject isn’t life or death. Will Meadow ever park successfully? It matters as much as whether Tony lives.

The Wire needs to end in opposite fashion because it has a point to make outside the show itself: it functions as social commentary, so as a systematic cross-section of society it must neatly wrap up every single storyline. By the end, they’ve touched on society’s primary institutions: school, unions, gangs, police, family, courts, and news. Each storyline from each institution has a counterpart, a mirror image, which completes society’s cycle. An exhaustive list is unnecessary, but here’s a brief sampling: a hack young journalist wins a Pulitzer for what we and he know is an elaborate, conscious lie; Bubbles the crack head finds redemption and gets wonderfully, mercifully clean; Omar is killed by some little runt who shoots him in the back, but his reputation, street-cred founded on genuine toughness, was such that the hood refuses to believe he was killed by anything but a posse’s gunfire, and his name and deeds live forever. Here are the mirror images, inversions of their counterparts listed above: the young honest journalist, the fraud’s peer in age, gets demoted and sent elsewhere specifically for describing how he lied; Prez’s young earnest student who tries so hard to escape the ghetto gets tragically addicted to crack, replacing Bubbles; Marlo, Omar’s mirror (their names are even composed of nearly identical letters) is rich and safely alive, but, unlike Omar, the street literally doesn’t even recognize his face or his name because he had people work the streets for him, and in a world where reputation is everything he is a nobody—he does live, but his name is worthless.

Watching these programs has restored my faith in television programming, which will probably last until I watch Breaking Bad. These shows are both masterful, but the takeaway is that The Sopranos is of a very different type. When satirizing one of those idiotic guide to the creative process books for writers that gave the imbecilic advice to “be able to summarize the structure and purpose of a book in a sentence of ten words or less,” Mordecai Richler imagined what this author might say to Herman Melville: “Herm, you’ve got a lot going for you here, especially for fish nuts and armchair adventure freaks, but we’ve got to think of promos in this office. So I want you to tell me in ten words or less, why Ahab just has to hook the big one.” Moby Dick isn’t a fishing adventure like The Sopranos isn’t about gangsters. It’s about the deeper undercurrents that defy a ten word explanation. But The Wire is about “all society.” The tone and narrative structure is accordingly different. Unchained to any purpose outside itself, The Sopranos can move in any direction it wants. Tangents, side trips, dream sequences are welcome. The Wire does incredible things within its confines, but it’s very limited, albeit deliberately and elaborately so. You’re free to like either show, but I do decidedly prefer Melville and Sopranos over Hawthorne and The Wire.

My next piece will either compare these two novels or dissect Duck Dynasty, which is an aggressive rebuttal to the bankrupt values and pseudo-spirituality of bourgeois capitalism, even if it’s an American reality TV show about entrepreneurial millionaires, though they do have huge redneck beards. Maybe TV isn’t so bad?

LIT CRIT–Haruki Murakami: After the Quake review

09 Thursday May 2013

Posted by jdhalperin in Literature

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Tags

After the Quake, Doug Miller Books, Haruki Murakami, Jeff Halperin

I decided to read some Murakami for a few reasons. So many girls on OK Cupid claim to love him, and they usually list other decent writers alongside him. I want to relate to these chicks I’ll never meet. Murakami is still alive, unlike all my heroes. I’ve read some Ishiguro, but not much Japanese writing otherwise. The proprietor of Doug Miller Books, the fantastic second-hand bookstore located at Bloor around Christie, recommended this one to me after I told him I had already read and loved Barney’s Version and A Confederacy of Dunces. You trust a man after he recommends you those.

I really liked the stories. The narrative alternates between swift glossing over of years and extended dialogue. To give a picture of his aesthetic, it seemed to me like a Japanese water colour painting in that the focus of the painting isn’t situated squarely in the middle. Murakami puts the central event of the story in a corner or over to the side, and this has the effect of rendering what went on before or after more pertinent. I think this is what gives his stories weight while writing with such a light hand. Each story has space.

Light hand: this may sound like a stupid, clichéd term, so let me expands. Murakami talks about hard ons and hangovers while citing different old jazz musicians and literary references, so there’s no pretentious baggage that often accompanies “literature.” He writes about people who are fun-loving and light-hearted people, and also dark and suicidal, portraying them all with a pretty full picture in a short space. He’s a minimalist, meaning there’s no room for bullshit. Though remember, I’ve only read these short stories so I’m only describing his writing as it pertains to this collection. I’ll get to his novels one day soon maybe.

He’s good on dreams and surrealism. What I mean is he takes for granted that the fiction doesn’t need to correspond to journalistic standards of writing where things must be proved, accurate, fact-based. If a frog comes to save Tokyo from an earthquake we must not ask if this is really possible. You will miss the point.

Imagination isn’t bound in good fiction.

I am amused that the Washington Post Book World described him as “poetic.” I hope this critic has read him in Japanese, not in English translation. I found the stories taut, moving, and suggestive of more than is there. Not poetic, but light. Perhaps this is what they meant, or maybe they meant to write something that would sell books.

The stories are easy to read, but I feel like they’ll reward rereading too. There’s more to get out of them. He’s anything but a stuffy, stodgy writer, and he is more wise than what people think of when they say “literary.” His sentences are stark and short, not the generous, expansive, majestic stuff of Melville. But still, he’s cool.

Good stuff Murakami.

7.3/10…a fine rating.

New reads: Faulkner and Hemingway

25 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by jdhalperin in Literature

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Nabokov thought very little of these two highly celebrated authors and their books had sat on my shelf for too long unread, so I decided to give them a whirl. I think Nabby didn’t like them because the structure of their novels, how the plot itself unfolds rather than the writing per se, is pretty straightforward in each. He hated extended dialogue and books about society, too. But I really liked both novels. I’ll read more of theirs soon, Nabokov be damned! Here are the off-the-top-of-my head reflections of each while they’re still kind of fresh. I’ll rank each book out of ten, although I do agree with Nabokov that there are only two kinds of books, bedside and waste basket. These are both the former.

A Farewell to Arms–Hemingway:

So much is made of Hemingway’s macho persona and his “tough” prose that I was kind of laughing when I started it. The sentences are short. Punchy. Ceaselessly short. The dialogue is repetitive. The same bland expressions used again and again. “Lovely,” “my sweet,” and others in that vein. But I love confronting a famous authors baggage and going beyond it, finally.

I thought Hemingway the tough guy would glorify the fighting more than he did, but I should have paid more attention to the title. The novel lays bare how arbitrary and senseless war is–tragic and stupid. I’d describe his writing as journalistic in a sense. He was a journalist after all, but it feels like he’s covering it objectively, without colour. Though a description of the colour of a lake as steel grey blue was memorable.

The blurb on the back literally describes a scene in the novel to be among the greatest in literary history. This is nuts. It’s not even close, but I really liked the novel. Hemingway is known for his glacier approach to writing, that is the little you see on top is what he writes and it gives you the impression of what’s unseen underneath. Yes, and there’s something to this, but the writers I like describe in vivid and palpable detail the unseen underside of the glacier, which is all the more remarkable because it’s not something you come into contact with otherwise. The difference in reaction is awe and rapture versus excited approval.

Still, there was very good humour, and there is no bullshit in his writing anywhere. The love between Henry and Barkley seemed a bit phony at first, developing from nowhere, but I came around to it. Maybe, like in advertising, repetition worked on me, but I think it had more to do with Hemingway’s selection of details–the little everyday sacrifices they made for each other. They were invested in each other to the exclusion of everything else, that’s for sure. I think the general lack of sentimentality in the style of writing balanced the corny dialogue: “I love you,” “I love you.”

The retreat of the army is memorable, and I like the contrast between Henry’s dicking around in Italy when he wears and doesn’t wear his uniform. The way he feels and is regarded. Henry drinks a lot, even in the morning. There are good musings on life and death at the end that refreshingly is expressed in brief, drunk chat and not the obnoxious academic, solemn sounding stuff. This is the novel at its most impressive. But the end was exciting too. For a book that represents, as the back of the novel claims, “a new romance” for Hemingway, it’s very dark: Henry and Catherine’s baby dies and so does Catherine. No happy endings. War is like that, so is life. No wonder Hemingway shot himself in the head with a shotgun. More should have seen it coming, perhaps.

7.3/10

As I Lay Dying: William Faulkner

I tried to read Absalom, Absalom twice and was overcome with boredom each time. It felt like trying to see through an impenetrable cobweb. But Styron’s Stingo in Sophie’s Choice, the author himself speaking for the fellow Southern writer I imagine, gives such high praise to Faulkner, and I really wanted to give the big guy a shot.

There’s something about the Southern Gothic sensibility I find very attractive. It’s old-world, darkly funny, and there’s an endearing feeling of innocence that always seems on the verge of being corrupted. You’re watching human’s biblical fall with the foreknowledge it’s about to happen, and they toy with that, making it funny rather than sad or painful. Flannery O’ Connor stories are like that. There’s a ghost lurking somewhere. You don’t know if the author is laughing while writing, but they are, and so should reader. The amusingly tragic Bundren family plods along, suffering their flaws with a good spirit.

Each chapter has a different narrator doing a first-person description of the journey. To recap, the mother of the family dies in the beginning and her wish is to be buried in Jefferson. The plot of the book is the journey. I think Nabokov resented this easy structural format, as he liked oblique references that don’t announce themselves. He thought writers who use italics to identify for the reader that a character is thinking something were hacks. He was demanding!

But Faulkner plays with internal dialogue, what a character says to himself, versus the images and content of what flashes through a character’s subconscious. The former is made up of speaking language, the latter can use diction the character doesn’t possess because it’s about the images passing through his mind, not the way he himself would describe them. This is a neat trick that allows Faulkner to use words that these uneducated country Southerners wouldn’t know. Bellow characters are either autodidacts or professors, allowing the author to speak almost as himself through the characters. This is another way of doing that.

I found the book to be very funny at times! The father is such a good hearted idiot and it’s charming how the people around him resent him but can’t resist helping him. I became accustomed to the way they talk, like being in a foreign country for a while where their accent stops becoming novel. I think the dialogue, of which there’s a good deal, is better for the content than strictly the captured patois. For poor country people there’s a lot of religious and existential musing. This is right. It’s a solid reminder that technological advancements or formal education have no real bearing on intelligence. I think people commonly believe that the masses become more intelligent as time goes on and they partake in advancements in various fields, suggesting people were more commonly stupid. Nope!

This book was not very long, and the way the pages were broken up made it breeze by kind of fast. I felt like the chapter always ended with four or five lines on a page and the rest blank, then the next page started a third of the way down. The whole thing was 260 pages. I find it’s very easy to continue another chapter when you see it’s only a page or so long, and most of them were very short. I read the book in four days. Apparently it was written in only 6 weeks. If only such efficiency was everywhere!

There were old or local words I needed to look up to understand exactly what was happening at times, and straightening out the characters at first required going back to reread some little sections, but going backwards in the book was rewarding and I expect I’m going to pick up the book again soon for pleasure.

Faulkner, cool guy! He joined the high to the low brow very successfully, something I demand of novelists. Intelligence and humour, too. Nabby would disprove of the novel’s form, and I get that, but I love some of Faulkner’s sentences. The guy could turn a phrase.

7.8/10

Christopher Hitchens on Literature

08 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by jdhalperin in Literature

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atheism, Christopher Hitchens, James Joyce, literature, Marcel Proust, Saul Bellow, Swann's Way, the Adventures of Augie March, Ulysses

Christopher Hitchens was best known as an outspoken atheist, and atheists are often known (absurdly) as being consumed by a vacuum, as if the rejection of the biblical god means they do and think nothing else. It’s strange, but I have often encountered the rejoinder to religion’s disparagement, “but atheism offers nothing.” Of course! Nobody claims any different. It’s important to reject conventional notions of god insofar as the old myths inform new and otherwise stupid laws, customs, morals, wars, etc. But the world is full of fantastic stuff, and the god conversation gets very boring very quickly. Among other things, Hitchens is underappreciated for being fantastic on literature. Check it out.

On Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March:

Hitch wrote the intro to a 2001 reprinting of Bellow’s classic. He very nicely reframes the importance of bringing Yiddish out of the American Jewish ghetto in a time before guys like Roth, Heller, Woody Allen were around. Hitch tours the book, describing nicely the protoganist’s central theme, “He decides to march himself against the continent, seeking no one’s permission and deferring to no idea of limitation. His making, like his omnivorous education, will be his own.” This nicely encapsulates what makes Bellow’s vision American, and, this done by an immigrant, what was new about it at the time. Hitch is refreshingly not at all priggish, something unfortunately associated with literary criticism: “To be blunt, Mr. March is led around by his cock.” Hitchens’ point is that the Bildungsroman requires the character be shaped by love, poverty, and war (incidentally, the name of the anthology wherein these writings are contained), and Bellow carefully includes plenty of episodes about Augie’s occupational hustles, romances, and his later foray in the navy. For the introduction of a book Hitchens gives much away, and perhaps it’d be better placed at the end of the novel, but his essay shows a deep love for Bellow’s language and heart, a charming affinity for many of its characters and episodes, and a great understanding of its place in history.

On Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way:

Hitchens is good on Proust, even if general. I like his summary of Proust’s achievement: “His work par excellence exposes and clarifies the springs of human motivation. Through his eyes we see what actuates the dandy and the lover and the grandee and hypocrite and the poseur, with a transparency unequalled except in Shakespeare or George Eliot. And this ability, at times so piercing and at times even alarming, is not mere knowingness…not…the product of cynicism. To be so perceptive and yet so innocent.” This nails Proust. Like Tolstoy, who shows you how everyone operates without telling you how to think about them or without revealing the author’s own opinion, it took me a while to see that Proust was having a private laugh at these people. Perhaps this had to do with me reading in translation, or is the fault of my own ineptitude. Proust doesn’t barge into the text and tell you how to judge, nor do his characters.

Oddly, without being able to speak French himself (like this writer, sadly) Hitchens sheds some good light on the various translations. “The whole point of downstairs peasant wisdom, as quoted with amusement by those upstairs, is that it be brisk, vulgar, and memorable.” This in response to a dirty, funny limerick that is five lines in one English version, three in another, and only two in French. Oh, to understand the original!

Fine fine, I’ll include them both for fun and to show how radically different the same thing can be translated:

Moncrieff translation:

“Dear, dear, it’s just as they used to say in my poor mother’s day:

‘Frogs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails,

And dirty sluts in plenty,

Smell sweeter than roses in youg men’s noses

When the heart is one-and-twenty.'”

The Davis Version:

“Oh dear! It’s just as they used to say in my poor mother’s patois:

‘Fall in love with a dog’s bum,

And thou’ll think it pretty as a plum.'”

Proust can’t be discussed without talking about time. Hitchens relates how as a child he was told that Oxford-to Woodstock was 10 miles apart, and he always imagined any future distance of 10 miles to be essentially this small journey. It told him, warmly, that he was nearly home. Proust is all about time and mnemonic devices that unleash floods of memory, but it’s also about “slowing [time] down, if not exactly holding it up, so as to enable himself to take longer sips of the precious but evaporating fluid.” Nicely put, Hitch.

On James Joyce and Ulysses:

Hitchens knocks this one out of the park! My favourite for sure. He nails Joycean double and triple entendres while describing neatly the humour, the fun, and the humanity in it. Wordplay is often considered snobby or stuffy, and this review rightly makes Joyce seem like a devoted humanist as lewd and funny as he was sophisticated!

He begins with a “Joycean” joke. A surly English overseer sees what he thinks is a bum Irishman approaching him for work, shabby and pipe in mouth. The supervisor says, “You don’t look to me like you know the difference between a girder and a joist.” “I do too!” The Irishman says indignantly, “The first of them wrote Faust and the second one wrote Ulysses.” This is paraphrased for brevity, but the point is, at Hitchens puts it, it doesn’t just revenge itself on the English caricature of the Irish as stupid (of all things…the people of Yeats, Swift, Shaw, and Wilde!), but this mutable brand of English is very much Joyce’s native language. He goes on in it indefinitely.

Hitchens is especially great describing how much masturbation and other bodily functions (burping, shitting, farting, nose picking, a lot more) figure into the novel. It’s not just vulgar: Joyce inverts the historically accepted search for finding heroism in war and killing by placing the body centrally in the human condition. Of course, added to this is the impossibly sophisticated “ventriloquizing” of Shakespeare in young Stephen’s round table discussion of art, and the general theme of Greek and Jewish culture coming together in the uniting of Leopold Bloom, the Earthy wandering Jew figure, with Stepehen Dedaulus, the intellectual with the Greek name. “The great Victorian Matthew Arnold thought that the true cultural balance was between Hellenism and Hebraism, or between the polytheistic, the philosophical, and the aesthetic and the spare, stern monotheism of the Old Testament.” In Ulysses, these two traditions in the climax of the book, and of Western literature, are enshrined together when the two men piss side-by-side outside Leopold’s house after a very long day/novel. This wonderfully parodies Homer’s “golden bow,” the bow and arrow Odysseus strings before killing the suitors. (Joyce describes the piss stream, the “golden bow,” at length.) Joyce profoundly and humorously prefers a glorified porch piss to killing, even if the suitors had it coming (it was sanctioned by Zeus’s thunderbolt, a divine authority Joyce is unwilling to abide by).

Hitchens points out that on the day Ulysses takes place, June 16, 1904, papers reported “…a war between Japan and Russia that would curtain-raise the events leading up to the great war of 1914.” Also, it was the first time Joyce got a hand job from Nora Barnacle, who he’d go on to love and marry. This accounts for the date. Hitchens includes Joyce’s description of the formative moment: “You who slid your hand down inside my trousers and pulled my shirt softly aside and touched my prick with your long tickling fingers and gradually took it all, fat and stiff as it was, into your hand and frigged me slowly until I came off through your fingers, all the time bending over me and gazing out of your quiet saintlike eyes.” Joyce would go on to inspire first-rate writers like E.L. James. Hitchens calls Ulysses, “A mastur-piece.” Yup.

In sum:

In the introduction of Hitchens’ anthology, he states, “I wake up every day with a pervading sense of disgust and annoyance.” He muses on how good his life is, but despite all the things he loves, it’s natural, and in a lot of way more practical, to write about what’s horrible and needs fixing. This describes much of his political and religious musing, but this isn’t all there is to the man! He writes lovingly about Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Borges, Bob Dylan, Huxley, and more. When it comes to the omission concerning probably my favourite writer, he says,”If you ask me why there’s no Nabokov the answer is quite simply because I am not ready. This is a love that matures in the cask, if you will, and deepens with time.” He was full of love and humour, and supremely wide in scope.

Despite all this, I bet there are religious people who still believe that, as an atheist, Hitchens, who like Augie was of an omnivorous education of his own making, was lacking in pleasure and moral ballast. To these imbeciles I can say nothing more, and I doubt they’ve read this far, if at all. But to the rest, I am glad to shine a light on the darkened corner of a man’s ouevre who, despite dying, hasn’t totally left the spotlight.

May he be remembered with Hitchensian breadth.