I was thinking maybe this year I'd use the blog as a reading journal. But not just a reading journal wherein (or, maybe in this case it's "whereon," because things are in a bound journal, but on a website, right?) I mention all the things I read. Or maybe just all the really notable things I read?
Let's try this.
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1. "Don't believe in writers block, but I do believe in analysis paralysis" by Reynard Seifert
I'd really like to read the book Reynard talks about here. Sounds fantastic.
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2. "Necropolis Now" by Paul Constant
This is, so far, my favorite wrap-up of the weird, distressing, comic/tragic field of Republican candidates fighting to run against Obama in the 2012 election. Paul's a very funny writer and an astute political observer.
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3. The Marbled Swarm by Dennis Cooper
This was great. Period was my favorite Dennis Cooper novel. Pretty sure The Marbled Swarm is now my favorite. Here are a couple of notes on aspects of the book.
NARRATOR: The glib charm of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley speaking like an overconfident Tristram Shandy. (Marbled page, marbled swarm?) Ripley tells readers his story because he knows there will be no consequences. Who the heck are we, anyway? To Ripley, the fictive world is real life, and the reader/audience is the imagined thing. So he can say what he wants. And yet, he feels the need to charm, to win his imaginary audience over. To win himself over? To tell his story to us (himself) in such a way that he convinces himself all is right and well and proper?
Shandy presents his evidence of the injustice of his life. But Shandy is not able to focus. Shandy builds, but he is an architect given to adding unnecessary reinforcements. Shandy says he was doomed from the beginning, wants to tell us all about the terrible injustices of his life, but he never seems to get to his life. He's easily distracted.
The Marbled Swarm's narrator is caught in the labyrinth of his own language. Enamored by a labyrinth of language built originally by his father. Trapped in a labyrinth of language built by his father. (Daedalus, Icarus? A bull-cocked driver named Azmir?) But he talks his way deeper and deeper into it, instead of out.
SETTING: On HTML Giant, I put up a quick, flip snippet: Setting is not character. Stop saying that. Blake Butler countered well. In his counter: "the tunnels & houses in the Marbled Swarm is a character".
Having read TMS now, though, I might respond: No. The labyrinthine setting is not the character here. The "maze" of them is only a maze because the character has a language that makes mazes out of everything. Out of sex, for example: "As I've mentioned, having sex is always new to me," he says late (very late) in the book. All sexual experiences, a new unexpected corridor. A sudden dead-end. A turn to a long, strange, unfamiliar, dizzyingly out-of-orientation hallway. The houses. The tunnels. The assholes. The mouths. The secret passages. They're all active and disorienting because the narrator only has access to his language, his "marbled swarm," to discuss them. And to think about them, too.
In his pre-language brain, the whole thing might make as much sense as: "This is meat. It may be human meat. It may be cow meat. It nourishes. I will eat it." (The book's cannibalism as the narrator's escape from the "marbled swarm"? Even though the cannibalism is also a result of the father's influence on the son? Doing double duty?)
PLOT: Read it. I'm not telling you anything about it beyond what I've revealed discussing the narrator and the setting.
A fine interview with Dennis by Mike Meginnis
A fine review by Ken Baumann
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