MOVED

I’ve moved over to Typepad, so to go to the new site please click this link and adjust your feeds and links appropriately: thejohnfox.com

Return of the Fox

I’m back from my Belizean honeymoon all fired up for 2007. Whoopee! That’s what scuba diving in the carribean and cave tubing will do for you. Now I promised a report on the reading going on down there in Central America, and I always make good on my promises, so here: I reread Richard Ford’s Rock Springs (Great short stories set in Montana) started John Banville’s The Sea, and got most of the way through Mrs. BookFox’s selection, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. On that last title, I can’t remember a time when a non-fiction book threatened my lifestyle so much. I can’t eat now. In every little morsel I see Corn: corn starch, corn syrup, and chemicals-I-can’t-pronounce-made-from-corn. And even with my organic food, I think (derisively) “this is only commercial organic.” Although I couldn’t imagine a better book to inform you of all the ways your food is killing you, I can’t help but feel sorry for anyone who reads it, simply because they’re in for a whole helping of lifestyle-change. And if I thought Mrs. BookFox was picky about restaurants before . . .

One of my readers asked me to report on how the bookstores were down in Belize, so I will. I didn’t see any. The only collections of books I found were ones at Hostels and Internet Cafe’s and Travel Agents, available on a book-swap basis, and these collections consisted of a heaping mess of irksome pop trash with the occasional tolerable title. Luckily for me, I happened upon quite a good book – a nice hardback of Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, not only a relatively new title but one that won the 2006 Man Booker prize. I pilfered a loose copy of some James Patterson paperback in my hotel room and traded it for the Desai copy – now that’s a great trade.

Labels: Kiran Desai, Michael Pollan

Mrs. BookFox

Tomorrow I will double my teampower by marrying a wonderful woman who shall be dubbed Mrs. BookFox (at least online). So please enjoy some of the other book blogs in the blogosphere as I take a honeymoon until January 8th. Best wishes from Belize, where doubtless I will have at least some time on the beach to read, and once I’m back maybe I’ll even give a report on what tomes Mrs. BookFox is reading.

Round Up

• Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel Lecture.
• Conversational Reading’s Epiphany on how Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer critiques space (or the lack of a defined, unique space).
• Syntax of Things makes a list of Underrated Writers.
• Lastly, Pinky’s Paperhaus comments on After the MFA’s post about whether MFAs should take Lit Crit Class.

  On that last link . . .
  My opinion is that reading books and critiquing them is good (big news flash, eh?) but that Lit Crit, as performed by an English PHD, is very different than reading and critiquing as a writer. PHD programs are so inundated by critical theory nowadays that they very rarely read as writers – that is, they don’t read for the things that the author intends to put inside the book, and there is less and less overlap between authorial intention and critical commentary.

  After going through a MA program with a heavy dose of literary theory at New York University (but what program doesn’t rely heavily on literary theory for literary criticism?) and then transferring to an MFA at USC, I realized that the two ways of speaking were completely different. In essence, I had to re-learn how to use language (I nearly said utilize instead of use – that would be Theory-speak). I also had to re-tool how I read, and start to read as a writer looking to glean technique rather than a critic looking to trampoline off the original text and create a new one that deconstructs the original.

  So it’s really impossible to talk about Lit Crit nowadays without referencing and dealing with Literary Theory. And since literary theory is so much a part of Lit Crit, a writer is much better off sticking to an MFA rather than a PHD. A writer is also better off not doing Lit Crit classes in an MFA, unless the workshop is run by a writer rather than an academic (English PHD).

Labels: MFA

Cage Match!

From Litkicks:

More bad news: in recognizing the “blogosphere”, Tanenhaus disparages us (yet again, yet again) as sloppy writers. I insist to the New York Times Book Review staff that the best bloggers out here (and I volunteer to be on the team) can at least hold our own, and could possibly kick the Book Review’s ass in a grammar/style face-off. I hereby offer a challenge.

SMACKDOWN!!!

Bloggers VS Tanenhaus and the NYTBR.

In a pay-per-view match, a tag-team from the blogosphere will take on the fearsome establishment of the New York Times Book Review. See Ed, Max and Mark perform syntactical judo moves with arm twists of grammatical rules on Sam and Rachel.

This asskicking will be dirty.

Labels: NYTBR, Sam Tanenhaus

Told You So

As I suspected back in October from the vitriolic reviews by Marilynne Robinson and Terry Eagleton, Richard Dawkin’s God Delusion is the most overrated book of the year. Here’s the list of the other overrated and underrated books (hat tip to Ed)

Addendum: Rake’s Progress on Murakami’s political involvement

I-keep-finding-great-stuff Addendum: Foer (as in Jonathan Safran fame) World Domination coming soon.

Labels: Richard Dawkins

Ask and You Shall Receive

So since I had scored on a copy of Hear the Wind Sing (unavailable in the States) I thought why not go for broke and ask my loyal readers for a copy of Pinball 1973? It was mostly tongue in cheek, but lo and behold, Viktor Janiš emails me the Pinball text. Mucho thanks, my friend, mucho. Also, a grateful nod to The Literary Saloon who directed him to my site. Now to start reading . . .

Labels: Haruki Murakami

Books I’m Thankful For

In the spirit of thanksgiving, I’ll make a quick list of books I’m thankful for. First of all, the red book of poetry my grandfather wrote – it was a book that let me know writing was in my blood; an inspiration, so to speak. Also, Vito Aiuto’s collection of poems Self-Portrait as Jerry Quarry, because he was the first friend of mine who published a book, and the poems were funny, irreverent and just plain good. Also, for the book that originally got me writing: Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It gave me the measure of how much beauty could be created by arranging words on a page.

Remember the beauty in your life this thanksgiving, and give thanks.

Literary Mix Tape #5: Words

The devotchka sort of hesitated and then said: “Wait.” Then she went off, and my three droogs had got out of the auto quiet and crept up horrorshow stealthy, putting their maskies on now, then I put mine on, then it was only a matter of me putting in the old rooker and undoing the chain, me having softened up this devotchka with my gent’s goloss, so that she hadn’t shut the door like she should have done, us being strangers of the night. The four of us then went roaring in, old Dim playing the shoot as usual with his jumping up and down and singing out dirty slovos, and it was a nice malenky cottage, I’ll say that. We all went smecking into the room with a light on, and there was this devotchka sort of cowering, a young pretty bit of sharp with real horrorshow groodies on her, and with her was this chelloveck who was her moodge, youngish too with horn-rimmed otchkies on him, and on a table was a typewriter and all papers scattered everywhere, but there was one little pile of paper like that must have been what he’d already typed, so here was another intelligent type bookman type like that we’d fillied with some hours back, but this one was a writer not a reader.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name. Mother dubs me Alexi-stop-spleening-me!, because I am always spleening her. If you want to know why I am always spleening her, it is because I am always elsewhere with friends, and disseminating so much currency, and performing so many things that can spleen a mother. Father used to dub me Shapka, for the fur hat I would don even in the summer month. He ceased dubbing me that because I ordered him to cease dubbing me that. It sounded boyish to me, and I have always thought of myself as very potent and generative.

Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

Right ‘bove my head some’un whisped, Name y’self, boy, is it Zachry the Brave or Zachry the Cowardy? Up I looked an’ sure ‘nuff there was Old Georgie crossleggin’ on a rottin’ ironwood tree, a slywise grinnin’ in his hungry eyes. ¶ ‘I ain’t ‘fraid o’ you!’ I telled him, tho’ tell-it-true my voice was jus’ a duck-fart in a hurrycane. Quakin’ inside I was when Old Georgie jumped off his branch an’ then what happened? He dis’peared in a blurry flurryin’, yay, b’hind me. Nothin’ there . . . ‘cept for a plump lardbird snufflyin’ for grubs, jus’ askin’ for a plunkin’n’a spit! Well, I reck’ned Zachry the Brave’d faced down Old Georgie, yay, he’d gone off huntin’ cowardier vic’tries’n me. I wanted to tell Pa’n’Adam ‘bout my eery adventurin’ but a yarnin’ is more delish with broke-de-mouth grinds, so hushly-hushly up I hoicked my leggin’s an’ I crept up on that meatsome feathery buggah . . . an’ I dived.

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Labels: Mix Tape

Richard Ford’s enduring voice

Richard Ford has been well covered in the blogosphere recently, with the third installment of Frank Bascombe in The Lay of the Land, and that’s not territory I can one-up, so I’ll cover slightly different ground.

Reading Ford alongside Raymond Carver, as I’ve been doing the last few months, has been a lesson in the power of minimalism. How the sparse word is potent. But what has stuck in my head from Ford (among many things of course, but some things really stick, you know what I mean), has been the pronouncement he made when announcing the winner of the Story Quarterly contest (I know, rather odd). This was back in 2003, issue 39, and the contest was the Robie Macauley award for fiction. Sylvia Sellers-Garcia won for A Correspondence. This was what he wrote:

A Correspondence’ is excellent and is my selection. This story is sustained and serious, and the complex fictive world it reveals is entirely persuasive and pleasingly under the writer’s authority. Importantly too, it is a very interesting story to read.

I must have read it twice, perhaps by accident, and it kept with me through the next few days. Those passive verbs! Five in three sentences. By using so many he inverted their usual weakness into a strength. And the trio of adverbs – what a mistake . . . that works.

It has to be a testament to the power of his voice that even a paragraph announcing a contest winner remained with me, haunted me, and echoed about in my head until I gave in to its cadences.

Labels: Richard Ford

Pynchon: Against the Day

If you haven’t yet been seduced by Pynchon mania (or even if you have been unaware of the blogosphere intensity), you should go to the The Elegant Variation and check out all the links and commentary on old Pynchon, New Pynchon and all of the infinite conections.

There. I’ve thrown you into the pit. Enjoy or die.

Labels: Thomas Pynchon

NYTBR Podcast Highlights w/ Sam Tanenhaus

Sam Tanenhaus on the efficacy of the New York Times Book Review:
“Welcome to our podcast, with the caveat that this sick crew long ago abandoned the illusion that we have any insight to offer or even have a clue what we’re talking about.”

The distorted-guitar quasi-punk theme song opening that tries so hard to be cool (lyrics: “I’m reading for the New York Times Book Review.” No, seriously.)

Rachael Donadio, on the sordid love affairs between writers at writers’ colonies:
“Yaddo is better for sex, but MacDowells is better for work.”

The “jokes” that are so obviously read from a script (perhaps some timing or emphasis might help?)

Rachael Donadio, on how former writers didn’t have writers’ colonies to motivate them:
“Doestoesky had the firing squad, not the writer’s camp.”

Edward Champion offers this advice: “Had I been the producer, I would have demanded that all the on air talent have a good glass of wine. Or perhaps I’d pass around a bong.”

Labels: NYTBR

Salman Rushdie’s Defense of Fiction in Haroun

When you become doubtful of the impact of stories upon culture, Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories will cheer you up. Not because it is so clearly a book that has had an impact on the world (no, The Satanic Verses will fill that role), but because it’s a book that discusses, through the vehicle of a magical, childlike story, the power of stories and how easily they can be corrupted. I suppose the corrupted part shouldn’t cheer you up – but every book needs to have a villain, and the villain happens to occupy the role of story-corrupter, which cheers me because those who corrupt stories aren’t often portrayed as villains, they are feted by marketing agencies and earn millions. Plus, a book for children that also entertains adults is a cheery prospect, not often enough enjoyed.

What makes this book even more entertaining is reading it parallel to Rushdie’s life. Haroun’s father – the Shah of Blah – is a master storyteller who is co-opted by the politicians to support their political campaigns (Compare to the enormous pressure put on Rushdie after the fatwa to say the Muslim profession of faith – there is no God but God – pressure exerted by the British government) The attacking army in the Sea of Stories wins by promoting freedom of speech between the ranks, for they all argue and their arguments make them stronger (The fatwa was placed on Rushdie’s head in the first place because dialogue about the validity of Islam wasn’t permitted – instead, an Imam threw down a death sentence for blasphemous speech) The anti-stories that are poisoning the sea of stories are there to control (the law invoked to condemn Rushdie was, ultimately, about controlling his freedom of speech)

The underlying question of the value of fiction – What’s the use of stories that aren’t true? – is repeated throughout the narrative and finally answered: stories bring his mother back, stories sustain the world (especially the older stories), and this very story is the one that Haroun’s father the Shah of Blah wins back the people with.

It’s a quick read, and ultimately, one that not only entertains but reminds us how much is at stake for writers and readers.

Labels: Salman Rushdie

Unbearable Lightness of Being out in Czech!

I thought our patience was tried by having to wait two years for the translation of The Curtain, but it took the Czechs twenty-two years of waiting to get the Unbearable Lightness of Being translated.

(Via The Elegant Variation)

Labels: Milan Kundera

Will Self: The Book of Dave

So the latest hyper-idiosyncratic vision of Will Self is out in the form of The Book of Dave. Summary: Deranged cabbie pens manuscript, buries the metal tablets in the backyard, and five hundred years later, after the apocalyptic flood, the tablets are unearthed and become the template for a new religion (sounds Mormonistic, but in the interview in the Telegraph he cites Christianity as his target). Self has always been excellent at creating worlds, whether in the short stories of Grey Area, where in Chest a man slowly dies from a poisonous atmosphere, or in Great Apes, where all of humanity is replaced by apes, and Book of Dave is no exception as he creates an entire world, language included. The language, however, sometimes goes over the top: consider this sentence excerpted by the NYTRB: “Mì awdas R onlë 2 tayk U sarf 2 Wyc, ware U R 2 B landid. Eye no nuffing uv oo U R aw wot U av dun, mayt, so folla ve rools uv mì ferrë an Eyel giv U no aggro.”

Right. Let me run out and buy more of that.

Although I usually like Will Self, I’m warded off by some of the early feedback about Book of Dave – a common complaint seems to be that certain sections are unreadable and that the rants against organized religion are hardly new critiques. But since Self has steadily produced work that I like over the years, I will probably end up reading it at some point.

Extra tidbit: Quote on writing from Self in a Telegraph interview:
“I think that what blocks so many writers is a platonic view of the text – the need to write an ideal. I’ve always subscribed to the other view that everything is a version. The best I could do at the time.”

On the whole, what he’s produced so far has been good enough.

Labels: Will Self

Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners

I’m very taken by Kelly Link’s new collection of short stories, Magic (for beginners), not the least because the title implies the genre: she writes otherworldly, magical stories, lying somewhere between Amiee Bender and Haruki Murakami. To read a story from the collection, check out The Faery Handbag (which won the 2005 Hugo and Locus Award). It has whimsical humor and keeps the magical realism grounded in the concrete details of a tangible world – absolutely bewitching.

Her website (well done – especially like the moving dinosaur!) has info on her touring schedule as well as a thorough bibliography.

Lastly, (seriously, the last link) is a piece of advice Link wrote for the newsletter of the Online Writing Workshop, telling students to write eccentrically and bravely.

Labels: Kelly Link

The Curtain: Milan Kundera

Publisher’s Weekly couldn’t give a more enthusiastic thumbs up for Kundera’s last book in a trilogy on the poetics of the novel:

“It’s not often that a work comes along that so perfectly distills an approach to art that it realigns the way an art form is understood.”

For early takes, check out this early review from a French prof. at UCLA.

Also, Chekhov’s Mistress has a short blurb on the New Yorker Oct. 9th edition that featured an excerpt from Kundera’s Curtain.

Nota Bene: the date of release from Harper Collins has been moved up to January 30st, 2007.

Labels: Milan Kundera

Richard Dawkins The God Delusion

So Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion is #4 on Amazon.com right now and #8 on the New York Times Bestseller list. His shill is simple: Belief in God is irrational and religion has caused irreparable damage to society. Unfortunately, his ideas are a bit too simple. Marilynne Robinson, in an essay in the November issue of Harper’s, thoroughly dismantles the idea that Dawkins possesses even an undergraduate-level grasp of logic. Her review can be found here, and please, please, do your critical reasoning skills a favor and read her critique before you make the mistake of purchasing his book.
Or, here for a similarly scathing review by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books.

Labels: Marilynne Robinson, Richard Dawkins

Mix Tape #4

An irony, of course, was that as soon as he’d surrendered – possibly as soon as he’d confessed to his depression, almost certainly by the time he showed her his hand and she put a proper bandage on it, and absolutely no later than the moment at which, with a locomotive as long and hard and heavy as an O-gauge model railroad engine, he tunneled up into wet and gently corrugated recesses that even after twenty years of traveling through them still felt unexplored (his approach was spoon-style, from behind, so that Caroline could keep her lower back arched outward and he could harmlessly drape his bandaged hand across her flank; the screwing wounded, the two of them were) – he not only no longer felt depressed, he felt euphoric.

Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

Inside the back room, the woman has crawled out from underneath the man. Now fuck me like a dog she tells him. She grips a pillow in her fists and he breathes behind her, hot air down her back which is starting to sweat and slip on his stomach. She doesn’t want him to see her face because it is blowing up inside, red and furious, and she’s grimacing at the pale white wall which is cool when she puts her hand on it to help her push back into him, get his dick to fill up her body until there’s nothing left of her inside: just dick.

Aimee Bender, “Quiet Please”, in Girl in the Flammable Skirt

But once I’d gotten him to speak out on the open water, once I’d heard our story in his words, there’d been in me my own desire for this, so that as I lifted my skirts to him, helped him myself with his jeans buttons and gently lifted the suspenders off his shoulders, then felt him inside me for the first time in all that while, there rose in me the low moans, the sounds I’d heard our first night together in a hotel in Hattiesburg. There rose up around us the ghosts of my momma and daddy, the sounds they two made, and I couldn’t help but remember our wedding night, couldn’t help but recall the fear I’d felt, the trembling I’d made at his touch, the two of us finally alone. He’d been seated on the edge of the bed, me standing before him, and he undressed me with careful hands, my dress taking months to find its way free of buttons and clasps, his big hands fumbling, trembling of their own. He was young then, only a boy, me only a girl, our bodies new and unexplained, and when finally my dress fell away from around me, and then my petticoats and slip and underclothes, he’d leaned back, taking me in with his eyes. And then I undressed him, and we started in on the long and beautiful task of learning each other.

Bret Lott, Jewel

Labels: Mix Tape

The Road of Cormac McCarthy

So I just finished McCarthy’s The Road last night. I didn’t mean to finish it last night, I meant to start it, but by midnight I was convinced that it was good enough to lose sleep over. And the rest of the book certainly didn’t disappoint. Here’s a few bullet-pointed thoughts:

• The most common dialogue between the son and father is “okay.” Rather ironic for such a hauntingly dark postapocalyptic tale.
• The book’s obsession with food – missing it, finding it, describing it, eating it – turns every meal into a sacramental act, laden with the symbolism of memory and love.
• What is most intriguing about this novel is not what is included, but what is excluded – McCarthy writes with enviable restraint. In a lesser novelist’s hands, it would have doubled in size to include much more backstory, internals, and explanation of the plague.
• The religious element is pronounced – both anger towards God and the child associating his father with God – but mainly at the beginning and end of the novel. God is slipped in subtly in the middle – as curses referencing Christ or as references to Job: “Curse God and die.”

The story is told in fragments, and here’s an excerpt:

There was a skylight about a third of the way down the roof and he made his way to it in a walking crouch. The cover was gone and the inside of the trailer smelled of wet plywood and that sour smell he’d come to know. He had a magazine in his hip pocket and he took it out and tore some pages from it and wadded them and got out his lighter and lit the papers and dropped them into the darkness. A faint whooshing. He wafted away the smoke and looked down into the trailer. The small fire burning in the floor seemed a long way down. He shielded the glare of it with his hand and when he did he could see almost to the rear of the box. Human bodies. Sprawled in every attitude. Dried and shrunken in their rotten clothes. The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again.

Labels: Cormac McCarthy