Only a Blockhead

Charles Bowden

I just finished Charles Bowden's Murder City. See the sidebar for my thoughts on it, but the author's own observations are more worthy of your time.

At the risk of sounding like the cubicle-bound writer that I (mostly) am, can you talk a bit about the challenges of reporting a subject as dangerous as this one? You have said that Juárez is a city where if you’re in need of help, there’s no one to call. How do you report in an environment like that? I have trouble with this question. The way I was trained up, reporters went toward the story, just as firemen rush toward the fire. It is a duty. As it happens, I am a coward and would rather write about a bird or a tree. But, I don’t know how to be aware of such a slaughter and not report it. As for safety, the Mexican press is being slaughtered, not the U.S. That is why the book is dedicated to a Mexican reporter murdered November 13th, 2008. That is why one of the main characters in the book is a Mexican reporter now seeking political asylum in the US. They’ve really put their lives on the line, not guys like me.

—David

Best of 2015

It was a great year for reading. Eight books brought the greatest pleasure. The blurbs are taken from slightly longer notes in a sidebar to this blog.

The Children’s Act (Ian McEwan) “Classic McEwan. Magnificent, educational, satisfying”

The Bone Clocks (David Mitchell) “A massive entertainment with a sting in the tail. I haven’t enjoyed a book so much in I don’t know how long.”

Slade House (David Mitchell) “A compelling, amusing tale of fiendish cleverness and surprise. Sheer pleasure.”

Freedom (Jonathan Franzen) “Showing the mystery and difficulty of growing up, and inviting our compassion for human frailty, it’s like the movie “Boyhood” writ vast.”

The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz) “Through novels, I live lives I’ll never live. This is about the Dominican Republic. It’s written with verve and love, and I loved it.”

Gilead (Marilynne Robinson). “A triumph of voice. Novels are related to humanity’s burgeoning empathy. This extended mine. Haunting and affecting.”

The first three were by favorite authors. The last three were off a list of 21st century books expected to endure—now I can’t wait to complete the list. Honourable mention, also from that list: Dear Life: Stories (Alice Munro) “A master at work.”

In non-fiction, I really enjoyed Walking the Woods and the Water (Nick Hunt, retracing Patrick Leigh Fermor’s 1930s cross-Europe walk; great armchair travelling) and The Worm at the Core (Sheldon Solomon et. al., a surprisingly readable academic study of how our unconscious fear of death impacts our life). Honourable mentions: H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (“A thrilling, extraordinary book”) and Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality by Crispin Sartwell (“A take-no-prisoners, balls-to-the-wall pursuit of the elusive truth of life and death.)

I spent most of the year rewatching my DVD collection until I was recently lent a box set of Larry David’s TV comedy Curb your Enthusiasm, and have been chuckling, laughing out loud, and being generally spellbound by that since.  

--Julian

Go On

" . . . Beckett’s experience is of a world lacking any overall, final meaning. It is not even, as Hobbes asserted, that life is nasty, brutish and short. Rather, it simply goes on. Beckett remains fascinated with the way life continues: What counts is to be in the world, the posture is immaterial, so long as one is on earth. To breathe is all that is required, there is no obligation to ramble, or receive company… Life ticks on through the boredom of youth and the loneliness of old age. But in all that tedium, there is, especially in the novels and plays in Beckett an almost manic, exulting, joy. Life is like that. Take it or leave it. But enjoy the joke."

            —Dermot Moran, "Beckett and Philosophy"

—David

The Worm at the Core

A decade ago, on the recommendation of a friend, I tried to read Ernest Becker, who wrote about, to quote one of his book titles, the denial of death in everyday life. It was tough going, and didn’t sink in.

 Now, I have an empirically validated, extended, and entirely readable version in The Worm at the Core. It’s one of the most enlightening books I’ve ever read, making the point that we construct our way of life to hide the debilitating fact of our impending death from ourselves. I write this on a Saturday, for example, and the fact that a last Saturday and a next Saturday and so on are mapped out masks me from the uncertainty of my existence. Saturdays, no matter how certain they feel, are just a part of our invented scheme of things.

 “The scheme of things is so deeply ingrained that virtually everything we think, feel, and do is shaped by it. It not only provides each of us with our knowledge and explanations of the world, it also supplies the fundamental structure of our conscious experience. Right now, your current author and professor of psychology is writing this important book on Friday, October 10, 2014, at 1:55 P.M. sitting in his office in the United States of America. What could be more meaningful than that? But if he peers in from outside his cultural worldview and the meanings it provides, he sees just a warm-blooded animal pecking at a piece of plastic in the midst of an undifferentiated flow of experiences that will, sooner or later, inevitably be interrupted by a heart attack, cancer, car accident, or the ravages of old age. What time is it now for you, the reader? What does it mean that it’s some day of the week, some month, some year? Isn’t that all an illusory structuring of your conscious experiences provided for you by your culture to help you impose order and permanence on something chaotic and fleeting? If this is a Thursday, how comforting an illusion it is that there will be another Thursday, and another one after that” (p. 36).

"the fundamental structure of our conscious experience"  Wow! 

--Julian

The World of Zoran Živković, Part 2

The second of my reflections on the work of the Serbian writer Zoran Živković is up at the Kurodahan Press Blog.

Check it out here.

The World of Zoran Živković

I'm writing about  Zoran Živković over at the Kurodahan Press blog. You can see what I said here.

--David

Nick reaches Istanbul

I’m taking my vacation at home this summer, but by coincidence and good fortune, the book I’ve been reading is Walking the Woods and the Water by Nick Hunt about his recent solo walk from Holland across Europe to Istanbul. So I got to mentally accompany him and travel anyway. 

If Nick’s course sounds familiar, it’s because he was retracing the same walk that Patrick Leigh Fermor—Paddy to his friends—made 70 years earlier. Paddy’s three books about his trek were magnificent, and the good news is that Nick is every bit the writer he was. He gives us a vivid, often poetic account of where he went and who he met, with a ton of adventure and humor thrown in. This morning, Nick finally reached Istanbul, and my fantasy travel ended along with the book. 

Nick concluded, “Walking itself became a source of happiness, something to be enjoyed in its own right, bringing an intensity of experience and a sensual awareness of surroundings that grew more addictive by the mile.” On the other hand, this on a friend’s cycling blog: “Cycling is possibly the greatest and most pleasurable form of transportation ever invented. It’s like walking only with one-tenth of the effort” (Daniel Pemberton, The Book of Idle Pleasures). Distance walking—as Nick’s account makes clear—is an incredible, sometimes excruciating effort. But I find that cycling can be a bit too fast.

Can I find a happy medium?

--Julian 

The Conversation Continues

Joanna Scott's fine essay on the importance of difficult books.

Difficulty is neither a virtue nor an evil. If it is going to earn our patient attention, it must make itself an essential element of a text’s expressive powers. In the adept hands of a masterful writer, demanding techniques enhance rather than impede comprehension, strengthening our abilities as readers. The familiar criticism that difficult literature is elitist assumes that the reading public is not capable of learning more than it already knows. Do we need our athletes to explain the value of testing their limits? It is both logical and democratic to defend those books that test ours. The difficulties of a literary text, just like the subtleties, require educated readers to be appreciated—and that is essential. Education offers the potential for independence and empowerment, so let’s not replace difficult novels with easy ones, or pretend that the two are the same. Let’s not give up on the intricacies of ambitious fiction. Let’s not stop reading the kind of books that keep teaching us to read.

Read the whole thing here.

--David

March

On these days and nights of early March, the temperature is a few degrees warmer, but not enough that a fire isn’t still comfortable in the evenings. The plum blossoms are out in clouds of white and pink across the countryside. Tonight the clouds are banked over half the sky, ending in a coastline. On the clear ocean side, the full moon shines down, round and bright in the blackness.

I am enjoying David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks more than I can remember enjoying a book. And it's not like I haven't read everything else he's written. This latest novel is massive, and I hit the halfway mark yesterday. Apart from the characters, the humor, the writing, much of the pleasure is in having absolutely no idea where this story is going to lead. 

I met my neighbor, a woman in her 80s, for the first time since New Year. She said she was out of hospital. I hadn't known she'd been in. Health is the most important thing, she said. 

--Julian

Don Wong

My review of Running Through Beijing by Xu Zechen is on-line at Kyoto Journal.

Different times call for different literary forms, and in an age during which more and more people are leaving the security and poverty of the country for the insecurity and poverty—but also possibility—of the city one suspects we will see more picaros—engaging underclass rogues—in the novels that define our time.

Read the rest here.

—David