We’re a scant four hours away from the new George Saunders book hitting the shelves, which means it’s time for me to put on a costume*, go to a midnight release party at my nearest bookstore, and commune with the rest of the teeming masses who are crowding the aisles while eagerly waiting to be allowed to hold our pre-purchased copies of Tenth of December.
Okay, George Saunders isn’t a hot enough pop-cultural property to warrant midnight release parties, but he should be, if only because those parties would be well worth remembering.
Saunders is a short story writer who came out of the gate already charging at full tilt with 1996′s CivilWarLand In Bad Decline, a debut collection with a voice that seemed impossibly disciplined and a satirical point-of-view that was both deeply empathetic and painfully cutting all at once. He followed it up with 2000′s Pastoralia and 2006′s In Persuasion Nation, cementing his reputation for short stories that skewered the grotesqueries at the heart of western culture and politics.
But everything I just wrote makes his writing sound inaccessibly intellectual. It’s not. It’s immediate. It’s visceral. It’s fantastical and fatalistic and serene and—most of all—it’s hilarious.
I will always love my high school English teacher Mrs. Gosbee for her reply to a starry-eyed classmate who interrupted a lesson on choosing precise adjectival phrases to ask, “How do you say something is indescribable?”
“You don’t,” Mrs. Gosbee spat back. “If you’re writing about something, the words exist to describe it.”
I believe that that is true—I’m just not good enough to describe writing as fun and exciting as George Saunders’. Trust me: He’s good. Pick up his new book tomorrow. You won’t regret it.
Like millions of Americans, I spent tonight with a small crowd of people watching the Superbowl in my living room. Until the last few minutes of the fourth quarter, most of us barely watched the game. Instead, we mingled, snacked and waited for the commercials. They were largely unimpressive this year, and few of them caught many people’s attention.
Except for the trailer for The Avengers:
When that trailer came on, this room full of young professionals fell almost totally silent. As the spot closed, everyone in the room started talking about it.
“Wait, was that the Hulk that I saw?” said one woman, awed.
One man excitedly asked another if he ever read comics. Neither of them did.
Someone in another corner of the room said, “This is all the super-heroes!”
My friend’s girlfriend turned to me and asked, “Who was that blonde guy?’
“That was Thor.” Then I added, apologetically, “I’m a bit of a nerd.”
The truth is, though, that despite a lifelong passion for Batman, my only childhood foray into comics was brief and tepid. I watched a spattering of super-hero shows in elementary school (Batman: The Animated Series after school, the occasional episode of Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman before bed on Sundays) but that was about it.
No, as a kid, I was more into mythology. The ancient stories of gods and champions seemed to unfold on two levels at once. On a deep plane, every enduring myth seemed to be a story about the life of primal ideals. Even as the ideals thwarted and fulfilled one another, the myths never became didactic, thanks to the myths’ other, more human level: The flawed and often petty personalities of the gods provided a compelling and relatable face for the myths’ deeper moral and philosophical dramas.
One night during my freshman year of college, a friend started waxing enthusiastic about an exceptionally talented representational painter named Alex Ross. He has dedicated his career to painting super-heroes, and his figures convey a sense of weight and presence that is rare in even the most skillful portraits.
One look at Ross’ work—Clark Kent slumped in a chair by a table lamp, his shirt unbuttoned to reveal the iconic Superman shield; Bruce Wayne donning his costume, his back criss-crossed with scars; Captain Marvel gasping with childlike concern at a landslide tumbling toward a schoolbus—and I got it. These weren’t thinly written caricatures of brutes and broads. These were olympian avatars of abstract ideals.
The titans and gods of ancient myth placed personalities on top of their respective virtues: There were gods of sport, romance, war, politics, duty, patriotism, revenge, justice. Their stories, though, weren’t always just neat allegories for prescribing behavior. They hit at deeper, messier truths about the way we relate to the world, to one another and to ourselves.
To quote one of my favorite passages from G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man,
…the barbarian who conceived the crudest fancy about the sun being stolen and hidden in a box, or the wildest myth about the god being rescued and his enemy deceived with a stone … knew more about the crisis of the world, than all those in the circle of cities round the Mediterranean who had become content with cold abstractions or cosmopolitan generalizations; than all those who were spinning thinner and thinner threads of thought out of the transcendentalism of Plato or the orientalism of Pythagoras.
I believe that the mythic impulse that seemed so common in many ancient cultures is not only alive today, but is just as fundamental to how we develop an understanding of ourselves and of the world today as it was to developing a similar understanding thousands of years ago. At first glance, contemporary western culture doesn’t appear to have overt narrative myths—iconic characters whose relationships to one another are always generally the same but undergo iterations as their widely known stories are retold from generation to generation. Until you remember super-heroes.
Super-heroes fulfill the mythic impulse in contemporary American culture. That’s why nearly everyone in the country can accurately describe Superman’s lineage, Batman’s history, Wolverine’s attitude, Spider-Man’s driving motivations. As the ancient Greeks related to the Homeric tales of Odysseus defying Poseidon, Jason stealing the golden fleece and Prometheus bringing fire to his people, we relate to the story of a scrawny kid from Brooklyn getting the opportunity to defend his hometown and calling himself Captain America. The medium may have evolved from blind bards singing poems by a roaring fire through amphitheater dramas through books and comic books to hundreds of people devoting years of their lives to putting together a hundred-million-dollar movie, but the social and emotional function is basically the same.
I don’t think I’m reading too much into it. The fact that the iconography of super-heroes brought a whole room to silence proves that these characters and these stories hit at something deeper in our collective poetic imagination. The buzz in the room after the Avengers trailer backs me up.
Turns out I didn’t need to apologize for knowing who Thor was.
During my freshman year of college, the director of my program suggested that we all spend some time reading the King James Bible and absorb its masterful command of cadence, voice and tone. Pretty sound, safe advice–I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t respect the KJV’s beauty. (Its textual integrity is another question entirely, of course.) However, there are plenty of other equally compelling translations of the material, and I consider Robert Alter’s translations of The Five Books of Moses, The Psalms and The David Story (1 and 2 Samuel) chief among them.
Seamus Heaney's translation is better than the Christopher Lambert movie.
We’re reaching number 12 in my list of 15 books that have stuck with me in some way, shape or form, and the mileage I’m getting out of this months-old Facebook meme is definitely satisfying to me. I’m going to try to knock out the rest of the posts in this series at a rate of at least two a week, so that we can get this done before the end of the year, but as I’m about to go through an inter-continental move, that may be disrupted.
Now, hit the jump for some nostalgic musings on an ancient old-English epic.
Sure, the fact that “Winter Dreams” is a short story and not a book means I’m fudging the rules a little bit for today’s entry in 15 Books, but such is life. Hit the jump for reflections on what is quite possibly my all-time favorite short story, plus a link to the full text. (This entry is pretty heavy on the autobiography, so I apologize in advance. Bear with me, and I’ll have something lighter for you tomorrow.)
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
A couple months ago, I gave in to a Facebook meme wherein I was asked to list 15 books that have stuck with me in some way, shape or form.
For number 13, I’ve selected a book that, try as I might, I could probably never give an accurate description of: Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which has been called the most thoroughly post-modern book ever written. It’s 300 years old. The book is essentially an assault on everything we imagine Victorian society considering good literature. Experimental to a point that wouldn’t be matched for hundreds of years, and laden with timeless humor that oscillates between bawdy and intellectual and that is still fresh and surprising in the 21st century, Sterne’s book makes it easy to forgive the fact that it’s almost impossible to get through.
William Maxwell on the cover of Wilkinson's memoir.
Sorry for the once-again abrupt halt in activity, just as I was getting going. There was a death in the family that sent things haywire for a while, and that’s all I say.
Now, back to 15 Books after the jump, with an entry I read three years back and have not been able to shake since. Continue reading →
So, the latest Facebook meme I’ve given in to was to list “15 Books That Stick With You.” The idea is simple enough: you write down 15 books that have stuck with you in some way, shape or form, without regard to how having those books on your list will make you look.
Here I present to you my 15 Books, one per day, with a little bit of accompanying commentary.
15: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
The cover of my edition of LAMB (which has been missing for some time, by the way).
Christopher Moore’s goofy (and at times vulgar) take on the “lost years” of Jesus Christ is fun, but somehow never irreverent. It’s hard to take offense at a book that has Jesus studying under one of the three wise men at the Shaolin temple. (Because Jesus refused to touch a weapon, they created a new fighting style for Him based on redirecting an attacker’s momentum without harming him and called it “Jew-Do.”)
In celebration of Y2K, Jesus has resurrected his best friend and closest disciple—Levi who is called Biff—to write one final gospel, covering not just His ministry, but also the “lost years” of His life. Biff and Jesus spend the bulk of the book traveling through Asia in search of the three wise men, whom they hope can teach Jesus what He’s supposed to do as the Messiah. Don’t expect a clear delineation of the gospel message: Moore goes to great lengths to try to incorporate principles from many eastern philosophical systems that just aren’t in Jesus’ message or scripture at all. But I classify this book under the same category as Kevin Smith’s Dogma: If you make it to the scene where Jesus makes friends with a Yeti—heck, if you make it past the premise that there was a thirteenth apostle whom the gospel writers left out because he was a jerk—and you’re still taking it seriously, you’ve missed the point.
Ultimately, it should be a fun and dismissible book, but the sequence in India (where Jesus and Biff find the third wise man) has some moments of surprising emotional impact: Most notably, Biff observing Jesus’ behavior after they witness ritualistic child sacrifice to Kali. The image of Jesus lost in such frankly horrified conversation with his Father, oblivious to the other people around Him, is a rare moment where Moore combines tasteful economy of language with emotional sincerity, and it is all the more memorable by the gleeful frivolity of the rest of the book.
I ran into Amy Hempel this evening. As usual, she radiated graciousness. Also as usual, and maybe this is just her talent influencing my perception, she was absolutely stunning. We made small talk for a few minutes about various topics before continuing on our ways, but the encounter got me thinking about perspective in fiction. Continue reading →
Welcome to Rick Barry's musings on politics, communications, writing, film, literature, culture and pop culture. I can't promise that the things I write about will seem relevant or interesting to anyone other than myself, but I'll try.
Sure, the fact that “Winter Dreams” is a short story and not a book means I’m fudging the rules a little bit for today’s entry in 15 Books, but such is life. Hit the jump for reflections on what is quite possibly my all-time favorite short story, plus a link to the full text. (This entry is pretty heavy on the autobiography, so I apologize in advance. Bear with me, and I’ll have something lighter for you tomorrow.)
