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just trying to keep score.

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One Times Square. I’m in the elevator, going up. Listening to Loverboy. Working for the Weekend. Muzak’s just like roaches. Even a nuke can’t kill it off.

This is not a poem, but instead a series of short one-sentence paragraphs. I remember the style working much better in Shovel Ready, the first book of the series; indeed, I remember the first book of the series working much better. And while I’m not predisposed to particularly like books in series, this one seemed surprisingly uninterested in providing any kind of service to the reader for context--even while it picks up very shortly after the first book ends, it’s still been a few years outside since the last one, and clues always help.

Adam Sternbergh, Near Enemy | Crown 01.13.15

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If you come from the future, he said softly, his head in his hands, then I cannot usher in the End of Days and I am not the Messiah. The world cannot end and produce a future.

It’s probably beside the point in this case, because Scenario is a farce set in a mildly-satiric future and decidedly not sci-fi, but the time travel in the book irritated me. Or, rather, was a symptom of a larger disregard for internal logic that irritated me. Now, it’s not like everything that uses time travel as a plot point has to be Primer, much less has to agonize over mechanical questions--but the application of implausibilities was just . . . inconsistent. So much so that this moment, where one character recognizes that all things cannot simultaneously be possible, comes as a surprising application of logic (and something you almost expect to be contradicted or undermined in the next paragraph).

Rachel Cantor, A Highly Unlikely Scenario | Melville House 01.14.14

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I looked inside my typewriter. There’s a city in there. Black and grey columns and no inhabitants.

Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox | Riverhead 09.29.11

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‘Hey, Good Lookin’’” was by the famous Hank Williams, the country music icon whose nasal voice personified the utter whiteness of the music, at least to our ears. Even someone as exposed to American culture as I shivered a little on hearing this record, somewhat scratchy from having been played so many times. Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera.

From a torture scene, but contributing here to my goal to run the foremost country-music-in-contemporary-literature tumblr. Because we all need goals.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer | Grove 04.07.15

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The mediocrities had been dispatched to Indochina, allowing France to staff its colonial bureaucracies with the schoolyard bully, the chess club misfit, the natural-born accountant, and the diffident wallflower, whom the great-uncle now spotted in their original habitat as the outcasts and the losers they were.

The Sympathizer is usually pretty great, if a little mushy in execution (it’s written in great slabs of text, no quotation marks, which is a valid choice except when it causes large chunks of dialogue to lose their snap because of the effort you expend tracking who’s speaking); even the points where the plot drags are packed with enough detail to glitter. The Sympathizer is also very much of its time--which means that as much as the book is about the late 1970s, narrated by its main character not long after the events he narrates, its perspective comes with nearly 40 years of telescoping hindsight.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer | Grove Press 04.07.15

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But the only evidence I’ve ever found of a compassionate God is how he allows us to excerpt our happiest memories up out of their contexts and hold them with the same care Saint Francis of Assisi holds up his little animals. I can remember passing around a joint in an orange Volvo with my three best friends, listening, in reverential silence, to Enter the Wu-Tang. After “Protect Ya Neck,” we plodded through a stoned debate over who was the better leadoff hitter: Rickey Henderson or Inspectah Deck. My friends were all Jews, who were working through their own psychodrama of strangeness. There’s no doubt we were “cultural tourists,” and while we might have occasionally felt the song, our devotion came more from the spike of confidence that comes with rapping bluntedly along.

For one reason or another, I’ve read enough of Kang’s writing online--and Kang is comfortable enough injecting himself into his journalistic writing, or maybe just spends enough time writing about the specific things that he loves--that I feel like I have a sense of his personalities, his tastes, prior to having started this novel. And the novel is good--a caper, with the humor and momentum that a caper needs to work. But a huge part of why this works is its first-novel-ness--the quirks and specifics of Philip Kim’s character are the quirks and specifics of Kang’s, at least from his journalism. Southern, Korean-American, marinated in ‘90s East Coast hip-hop. Makes you wonder what a second novel looks like, or a second novel’s hero.

Jay Caspian Kang, The Dead Do Not Improve | Hogarth 08.07.12

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I had just moved to San Francisco from New York. Staring down at the mass of dank heads, I asked Kathleen, “Who knew an entire city could be filled with ugly white people?” She said, “Calm down. This is a bluegrass festival.”

Jay Caspian Kang, The Dead Do Not Improve | Hogarth 08.07.12

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This is how you pictured yourself in Morocco.

Narration in the second person very seldom works. At best, it reads as a trick, something to inveigle you into easy identification. Here, it’s one of several obvious flaws that don’t wind up quite being flaws, with all credit to Vida’s weird choices. Rather than encouraging identification (or even the opposite, emphasizing artificiality or distance) the “you” works--largely because it’s not part of a transaction between writer and reader but an expression of character, one who is estranged enough from her own experience and her own body that the “you” seems natural. It makes for an odd dislocation, well-managed in the way that, say, Muriel Spark dislocates (more than anything else, this reminded me of a rather cheerier The Driver’s Seat).

Vendela Vida, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty | Ecco 06.02.15

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Raf has always envied couriers for the MRI scan they take of their city, front tyres like toroid dog noses, a dead leaf’s difference in the height of a familiar kerb felt somewhere in their sinews when Raf himself probably wouldn’t even notice an extra few inches; and because, like pirate radio, they were supposed to get squashed under the internet, but didn’t; and also because he once saw a game of bike polo and it looked like a lot of fun.

According to the jacket copy, an update on the conspiracy-theory novel for the something-or-other age, which is about right but also misses the important stuff. The conspiracy stuff is there, of course, for better or worse: the shifting allegiances, the McGuffins, the naif at the center of things, relatable as he tries to figure things out alongside us. It does what it says on the tin. But--and Beauman knows this--the thing that makes the book worthwhile is its city, and the style that the city is sketched out in. There’s a scene where Raf, our naif, stumbles onto a synthetic London street, and his reaction to its fakeness is wonderful; and throughout there’s stuff like these (totally incidental) bike messengers, initially described with their “famished muscularity . . . that you also see in gay men who’ve kept on clubbing for a few years too long, and the dozen standing in this pub look as if they all have resting heart rates so slow that by any strict definition they’re medically dead.”

Ned Beauman, Glow | Knopf 01.20.15

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He had read that the Puritans used to execute heretics by placing stones on their chests until their rib cages were crushed or they suffocated. And that’s a little what he feels like--and he supposes Marisol does as well--the sheer cumulative weight of death after death, sorrow after sorrow, crushing them, taking the air out of their lives.

At the risk of being rather too on-point, this is much the experience of reading The Cartel--Winslow’s perspective is so very high, so god’s-eye, that you don’t wind up identifying with the characters, even despite his very good circulation between perspectives and characters. It becomes a numbers game, where the dollar amounts and the bodies pile up, and it’s crushing. It’s also an interesting parallel to Bolano; 2666 has that long passage in the middle about the feminicido. But the feminicido is read as the most distancing bit of 2666; here, it’s the backstory of Winslow’s most sympathetic character, and it still plays as a numbers game.

I have a vague suspicion that The Cartel is a thriller for people that enjoy sabermetrics.

Don Winslow, The Cartel | Knopf 06.23.15

[danceonthelawn]

Visit Original Link

Marty Robbins, El Paso

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Every Jamaican can sing and every Jamaican learned to sing from the same songbook. Marty Robbins’s Gunfighter Ballads. Grab the collar of even the most top-ranking rudie and say El Paso, and he’ll follow up in a perfect croon; El Paso Citeee, by the Rio Grandeeheeee. It’s the Homo erectus of Jamaican guntalk, where anything you want to know about Kingston’s green versus orange war, everything you ever need to know about the rudeboy-cum-gunman is not in Bob Marley’s lyrics or in Peter Tosh’s but in Mary Robbins’s ‘Big Iron.’

The general excellence of this book aside--and it is generally excellent--it’s fascinating that after reading this bit maybe two months ago it’s spat out a huge amount of confirmation bias. Not just seeing Marty Robbins everywhere: I do live in Nashville now, and that means hearing ‘El Paso’ or ‘Cool Water’ coming from somewhere more weeks than not. But the unexamined link between country music, and Marty Robbins’s record with the perfect hot-pink cover, and Jamaican music. Which is fascinating, as it’s the rare example where the whitest country music pollinates back into black roots music. There are enough fascinating examples of black music informing (or being coopted by, stolen by) white music: Jimmie Rodgers yoking together twelve-bar blues with yodeling to create country music, Elvis singing R&B for Sam Phillips, even the hillbilly jazz of Chet Atkins’s studio crew (enough of them playing on Gunfighter Ballads). Putting Marty Robbins at the root of reggae and dancehall, Ike Turner to Desmond Dekker’s Elvis, unwitting and unacknowledged, is--lovely?

Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings | Riverhead 10.02.14

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When did the body first set out on its own adventures? Snowman thinks after having ditched its own traveling companions, the mind and the soul, for whom it had once been considered a mere corrupt vessel or else a puppet acting out their dramas for them, or else bad company, leading the other two astray. It must have got tired of the soul’s constant nagging and whining and the anxiety-driven intellectual web-spinning of the mind, distracting it whenever it was getting its teen into something juicy or its fingers into something good. It had dumped the other two back there somewhere, leaving them stranded in some damp sanctuary or stuffy lecture hall while it made a beeline for the topless bars, and it had dumped culture along with them: music and painting and poetry and plays. Sublimation, all of it, nothing but sublimation, according to the body. Why not cut to the chase?

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake | Nan A. Talese 05.06.03

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To the Editor:

I was grateful to see my book “This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage” mentioned in Paperback Row (Oct. 19). When highlighting a few of the essays in the collection, the review mentions topics ranging from “her stabilizing second marriage to her beloved dog” without benefit of comma, thus giving the impression that Sparky and I are hitched. While my love for my dog is deep, he married a dog named Maggie at Parnassus Books last summer as part of a successful fund-raiser for the Nashville Humane Association. I am married to Karl VanDevender. We are all very happy in our respective unions.

ANN PATCHETT

NASHVILLE

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At a stoplight, a man in the backseat of a cab, a cigarette hanging from his lips, rolled down his window and complimented the bike. He wasn’t coming on to me. He was envious. He wanted what I had like a man might want something another man has.

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers | Scribner 04.02.13

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It was true that we had smoked a little hash. Nonetheless also true that the pope made his plea for peace with a giant bullet propped on his head.

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

She describes, in the previous paragraph, the pope with “a huge ornamental headdress that looked like a brushed-metal bullet, a large pointed dome with a row of twinkling stones low around its girth, underneath a spiky gold base.” And one of the things that this book does so well is set up and pick up resonances: there are images of popes throughout, here a motorcycle brand, there a wistful dream, elsewhere a ceiling fresco of popes drowning; there are a couple of bullets, each freighted with significance; there is the futurist dream early in the book, of mechanized speed and half-human half-machine hybrids, which this resembles. None of which is, needs to be, remarked on, in the middle of this tossed-off story, which is one of the chief reasons this book is so good. It has invented a world, a coherent and consistent set of symbols and images and icons, that taken on their own might be heightened or hyperrealistic or hysterical even, but capture the moment they’re intended to more completely than stricter verisimilitude might.

Scribner 04.02.13

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People were arriving in buoyant swells, pushing in and talking loudly, bringing the energy from wherever they’d just been, different groups merging together like weather systems.

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

Which is great, and apt, and we’ve all been in that bar, right? But even better, a little down the page: “She shone like something wet, a piece of candy that had been in someone’s mouth.” Which winds up just being glitter and sweat, but is beautiful and cruel and ominous. So much of this book is so very good at sentence level.

Scribner 04.02.13