Daniel Burton-Rose's Blog
August 26, 2013
China Fulbright Year Pleasure Reading
1: Contemporary Mid-Career Novelists
Unlike Japan and Taiwan, China doesn’t have strong English-language bookstores or sections. There are itinerant sellers of bootlegged mass-market paperbacks in posh Shanghai districts, dowdy classics in unreliable editions in chain bookstores, translations of the state-selected greats of Chinese literature in Foreign Language Press outlets, discards by fellow travelers in hostels; outside of academic libraries, that’s about it.
I like the catch as catch can of relying on the cultural landscape to provide reading; as I constantly accumulate Chinese language books wherever I go I’m never entirely out of reading. The single time the dreaded scenario of actually running out of reading material while traveling actually occurred I was hard up enough to pick up discarded copies of Stevenson’s Black Arrow and Heinlein’s And God Created Woman. Light, but conceivably interesting for a cultural history of boy’s adventure fiction and (ostensibly) straight male transgender fantasies, respectively.
I’m currently preparing for an entire year in China, and am embracing the lack of reliable English-language reading materials as an opportunity to clear the decks of a decade of over-optimistic used book acquisition. I always prepare for living abroad as if my destination is devoid of the written word, but since my travels are usually tied to language acquisition—be it France, Morocco, Latin America, Spain, or East Asia—I’m buying books the whole way. Which produces a forward wave of delayed should-reads that inevitably washes back over me as melancholy self-recrimination.
So, an opportunity for partial redemption. Of the Berkeley cottage batch stash of pleasure reading, I’ll confine myself to the three people I’ve recently decided are my favorite contemporary writers [I use Lethem’s self-description “mid-career novelist” above because I would be irritated if someone else called me “middle age”—not that they have any grounds to do so, yet!]
Junot Díaz, Drown
I picked up This Is How You Lose Her at the Taiwan University Eslite this summer, after noticing Díaz’ in The New Yorker (in which the fiction is almost the only section I never read, not for any lack of esteem for their editorial decisions, but, conversely, out of despair at the time demanded to keep up on the literary scene). I was impressed that many of his blurpers were intelligent women, like Ruth Ozeki; all the more so when I read the memoirish novel and ranked it the most unabashedly masculine prose I’d encountered since Thom Jones’ neo-Hemingwayian The Pugilist at Rest. I immediately went for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in the neighboring Bookman bookstore, and was not disappointed (yey, footnotes in popular novels! And believable sex! And good politics!)
So now, to be thorough, it’s evident enough I need to read Díaz’ first novel, Drown.
Ruth Ozeki, All Over Creation and My Year of Meats
Ozeki first came to my attention when a friend in Oakland was informed that a novel was out about her without her having realized it had been in the works. Her, her female lover, and a self-obsessed chattering boy had gone on a road trip exploring the consequences of industrial agriculture and GMO up close; apparently the loudmouth boy befriend Ozeki and his tales inspired her first novel. He is straight, so he told a straighter story.
My partner became engrossed in the Yokohama Public Library copy of My Year of Meats during the year we were living in that concrete desert, but I was too bowled over by life in an intensive Japanese language program to get to it.
A Tale for the Time Being first caught my eye in June at the Columbia Heights Busboys and Poets, but I resisted an impulse buy because I hadn’t read her other two novels yet. I solved this problem by buying the first two novels, used, in paperback, then purchasing the new hardcover. Time Being is wonderful; highly recommended. (I did have one impulse buy at Busboys and Poets: Questlove’s delightfully-titled autobiography Mo’ Meta Blues. File in “Beg, Borrow, Steal Must Reads.”)
Jonathan Lethem, Fortress of Solitude
After hearing his name for a few years, I started on Lethem last fall, and immediately tried to identify which friends I should yell at for not having urged me to read him earlier. Fortress of Solitude is the last of his major novels I haven’t read (the others being Motherless Brooklyn and Chronic City).
I read his (mostly) essay collection The Ecstasy of Influence this July. After spending so much time with his, I expected a post-script to mirror the introduction, like “Well, it’s been nice hanging out with you, hope we can talk again soon,” instead of the collection just ending.
Oh, and realistically, I’ll also probably pick up The Disappointment Artist and Gun, with Occasional Music from Moe’s in the few days before I leave, just to be thorough.
Unlike Japan and Taiwan, China doesn’t have strong English-language bookstores or sections. There are itinerant sellers of bootlegged mass-market paperbacks in posh Shanghai districts, dowdy classics in unreliable editions in chain bookstores, translations of the state-selected greats of Chinese literature in Foreign Language Press outlets, discards by fellow travelers in hostels; outside of academic libraries, that’s about it.
I like the catch as catch can of relying on the cultural landscape to provide reading; as I constantly accumulate Chinese language books wherever I go I’m never entirely out of reading. The single time the dreaded scenario of actually running out of reading material while traveling actually occurred I was hard up enough to pick up discarded copies of Stevenson’s Black Arrow and Heinlein’s And God Created Woman. Light, but conceivably interesting for a cultural history of boy’s adventure fiction and (ostensibly) straight male transgender fantasies, respectively.
I’m currently preparing for an entire year in China, and am embracing the lack of reliable English-language reading materials as an opportunity to clear the decks of a decade of over-optimistic used book acquisition. I always prepare for living abroad as if my destination is devoid of the written word, but since my travels are usually tied to language acquisition—be it France, Morocco, Latin America, Spain, or East Asia—I’m buying books the whole way. Which produces a forward wave of delayed should-reads that inevitably washes back over me as melancholy self-recrimination.
So, an opportunity for partial redemption. Of the Berkeley cottage batch stash of pleasure reading, I’ll confine myself to the three people I’ve recently decided are my favorite contemporary writers [I use Lethem’s self-description “mid-career novelist” above because I would be irritated if someone else called me “middle age”—not that they have any grounds to do so, yet!]
Junot Díaz, Drown
I picked up This Is How You Lose Her at the Taiwan University Eslite this summer, after noticing Díaz’ in The New Yorker (in which the fiction is almost the only section I never read, not for any lack of esteem for their editorial decisions, but, conversely, out of despair at the time demanded to keep up on the literary scene). I was impressed that many of his blurpers were intelligent women, like Ruth Ozeki; all the more so when I read the memoirish novel and ranked it the most unabashedly masculine prose I’d encountered since Thom Jones’ neo-Hemingwayian The Pugilist at Rest. I immediately went for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in the neighboring Bookman bookstore, and was not disappointed (yey, footnotes in popular novels! And believable sex! And good politics!)
So now, to be thorough, it’s evident enough I need to read Díaz’ first novel, Drown.
Ruth Ozeki, All Over Creation and My Year of Meats
Ozeki first came to my attention when a friend in Oakland was informed that a novel was out about her without her having realized it had been in the works. Her, her female lover, and a self-obsessed chattering boy had gone on a road trip exploring the consequences of industrial agriculture and GMO up close; apparently the loudmouth boy befriend Ozeki and his tales inspired her first novel. He is straight, so he told a straighter story.
My partner became engrossed in the Yokohama Public Library copy of My Year of Meats during the year we were living in that concrete desert, but I was too bowled over by life in an intensive Japanese language program to get to it.
A Tale for the Time Being first caught my eye in June at the Columbia Heights Busboys and Poets, but I resisted an impulse buy because I hadn’t read her other two novels yet. I solved this problem by buying the first two novels, used, in paperback, then purchasing the new hardcover. Time Being is wonderful; highly recommended. (I did have one impulse buy at Busboys and Poets: Questlove’s delightfully-titled autobiography Mo’ Meta Blues. File in “Beg, Borrow, Steal Must Reads.”)
Jonathan Lethem, Fortress of Solitude
After hearing his name for a few years, I started on Lethem last fall, and immediately tried to identify which friends I should yell at for not having urged me to read him earlier. Fortress of Solitude is the last of his major novels I haven’t read (the others being Motherless Brooklyn and Chronic City).
I read his (mostly) essay collection The Ecstasy of Influence this July. After spending so much time with his, I expected a post-script to mirror the introduction, like “Well, it’s been nice hanging out with you, hope we can talk again soon,” instead of the collection just ending.
Oh, and realistically, I’ll also probably pick up The Disappointment Artist and Gun, with Occasional Music from Moe’s in the few days before I leave, just to be thorough.
August 10, 2012
Consuming Oeuvres
In a piece on dismantling the library of his father-and-law after his passing (“Shelf Life: Packing up my Father-in-law’s Library,” The New Yorker, Nov. 2, 2011, 40-43), James Wood quotes long-time New York Review of Books editor Edmund Wilson on his practice of “working my way through the oeuvre” (41) of a writer upon whom he was penning an essay. This doesn’t strike me as a symptom of a “relentlessness” particular to Wilson, as Wood characterizes it, but rather what one does to enjoy and understand an author.
The first writer I consumed in a systematic way was Kurt Vonnegut, starting with Breakfast of Champions (1973) when I was fifteen. I was startled by having a book make me laugh out loud (though it happened again soon enough when I picked up Don Quixote, which was all the more surprising as the humor transcended five hundred years!) I kept coming back for more Vonnegut until I had consumed over a bookshelf foot of his paperbacks. When I pursue this strategy with a reasonably productive author the law of diminishing returns sets in eventually. I know I’ve reached it when an author starts repeating herself; in the case of Vonnegut reiterating what he considered to be amusing anecdotes (I wasn’t so taken with them) in his essay collections. At this point my own authorial pride kicks in: ‘Instead of consuming every scrap by this guy whose imperfections are becoming increasingly apparent, I need to get some dignity, stop sitting around, and write some myself!’
The downside of this policy is that there are few authors with whom I have the satisfaction of being able to truthfully assert that I have read everything by them. The claim to have read “everything” by any given person is patently absurd if taken literally. The one time an enthusiastic admirer exclaimed to me “I’ve read everything you’ve written!” my initial reaction was bemused paranoia: ‘oh yeah? Even that misogynistic novel about breaking up with my high school girlfriend? The shitty angsty poetry … My dream log?’ He meant, of course, the few published books and articles; an infinitesimal fraction of everything I’ve ever scribbled on.
If one restricts oneself to plausibly public realm compositions, where, for example, do letter collections come in? And these, even if a comprehensive reproduction of surviving correspondence (which they rarely are), are inevitably incomplete in regards to what a historical personage produced on pen and paper in a lifetime. And what of alternate or expanded works which have come to light well after initial publication? Can I still claim to have read Naked Lunch or The Jungle without going back to the expanded editions? And translations? For all the languages I’ve studied and yet plan to tackle, there are a number I accept never being able to read in this lifetime. Russian ranks high among them. I “read” Anna Karenina, but haven’t yet gone back to the translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose renditions are undoubtedly more faithful to the originals than those available to me when I first read these works (though I did “re-read” their Notes from Underground).
Few writers have the stature to have their entire works made available in English. Browsing Japanese bookstores I was surprised to find how much of Murakami Haruki’s work hasn’t been translated into English. Short stories, essays, travel writing… none of which struck me as masterworks, but neither do many of his pieces that have been translated! Murakami himself is a prolific translator from English; the Complete Works of Raymond Carver among other credits. Can English language readers claim to have consumed Murakami’s oeuvre without reading his renderings of American literature into Japanese?
As globally prominent an author as Paco Ignacio Taibo II has a number of wonderful works still unavailable in English (My favorite being the collection of portraits of radical agitators Arcángeles: Doce Historias de Revolucionarios Herejes del siglo XX). How many Middle Eastern writers have their entire works available in any language other than Arabic? Even Tayeb Salih (1929-2009), one of the most piercing thinkers on the conundrums of the ostensibly post-colonial period, can’t claim this distinction in regards to his three published works of fiction, less alone his nine volumes of criticism.
Then there’s the B-sides problem. Burroughs is a prime example of a gratuitous offender in this regard. He was so fucking high that he doesn’t even remember writing much of his most famous work. Regardless he and Brian Gyson’s fascination with the “cut-up technique” of automatic writing gives Burroughs ‘60s works (Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Wild Boys…) a ticker tape feel from which a missing or inserted component here or there fail to radically alter the gist of the exercise—the point of which, as with spirit-writing before it, is to transcribe discrete slices of cosmic consciousness. Chasing down Burroughs’s minor works—such as Painting and Guns, currently moldering in my dad’s basement— is amusing for the fan or bibliophile, but hardly requisite in cogitating what the “literary outlaw” was all about…
The answer-that-there’s-no-answer here is that these sorts of problems are what keep us engaged and interested, roped into loops of re-discovery at oscillating levels of intimacy and relevance. They are inscrutabilities in a living—rather than dead and pickled—world, and, despite the frustrating impossibility of complete consumption, I image most of us wouldn’t have it any other way.
Verbose disclaimer disposed of, who are the authors I can claim to have read pretty fully? Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, and Dostoyevsky in high school. Indiginist and prisoners’s rights activist Ward Churchill and Critical Whiteness Studies pioneer David Roediger when I got more political my first couple of years in college (it is nearly impossible to make a claim of comprehensiveness in regards to Chomsky because of his Linguistic-anti-imperialism dichotomy and the relentless redundancy of his oeuvre). I didn’t read all of Poe or Flannery O’Connor in high school or college, which is unfortunate because such a feat is quite doable and they both deserve it. I went through William Vollmann thoroughly until the mid-‘90s, when I outgrew his irredeemably john sexuality. Intrigued by African religions I gobbled up Amos Tutuola’s three very oral novels without being able to light upon a critical lens through which to really get a hold on them. I only read two or three of Chinua Achebe’s considerable works—I found them dry—but all of Ngũgĩ’s novels (I finally met him at a reading on Cody’s on Fourth Street for Wizard of the Crow in 2006, though wasn’t able to talk to him at greater length because I couldn’t find a local tie-in to pitch to the Bay Guardian’s Lit section).
Between graduating from college in 1998 and the present I didn’t attack and methodically consume the oeuvres of authors so much. One factor was that while working on Guerrilla USA and Creating a Movement with Teeth the books I was writing was the only one I wanted to read; which helped me avoid the common grad school procrastination technique of reading to avoid writing. In this period, rather than reading everything by a single author, I read everything I could on a certain topic: left-wing armed cells in First World countries in the 1960s and 1970s. I didn’t read much fiction to off-set this rather intense material, but soon started to pick up more titles on East Asia reading. Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee mysteries were a candy-coated introduction to classical Chinese bureaucracy.
In orienting in East Asian literature, I followed certain translators to good effect: primarily Howard Goldblatt on China and Donald Keene on Japan. I made only a dent on their immense outputs, but both are work sticking with.
And it doesn’t end…
The first writer I consumed in a systematic way was Kurt Vonnegut, starting with Breakfast of Champions (1973) when I was fifteen. I was startled by having a book make me laugh out loud (though it happened again soon enough when I picked up Don Quixote, which was all the more surprising as the humor transcended five hundred years!) I kept coming back for more Vonnegut until I had consumed over a bookshelf foot of his paperbacks. When I pursue this strategy with a reasonably productive author the law of diminishing returns sets in eventually. I know I’ve reached it when an author starts repeating herself; in the case of Vonnegut reiterating what he considered to be amusing anecdotes (I wasn’t so taken with them) in his essay collections. At this point my own authorial pride kicks in: ‘Instead of consuming every scrap by this guy whose imperfections are becoming increasingly apparent, I need to get some dignity, stop sitting around, and write some myself!’
The downside of this policy is that there are few authors with whom I have the satisfaction of being able to truthfully assert that I have read everything by them. The claim to have read “everything” by any given person is patently absurd if taken literally. The one time an enthusiastic admirer exclaimed to me “I’ve read everything you’ve written!” my initial reaction was bemused paranoia: ‘oh yeah? Even that misogynistic novel about breaking up with my high school girlfriend? The shitty angsty poetry … My dream log?’ He meant, of course, the few published books and articles; an infinitesimal fraction of everything I’ve ever scribbled on.
If one restricts oneself to plausibly public realm compositions, where, for example, do letter collections come in? And these, even if a comprehensive reproduction of surviving correspondence (which they rarely are), are inevitably incomplete in regards to what a historical personage produced on pen and paper in a lifetime. And what of alternate or expanded works which have come to light well after initial publication? Can I still claim to have read Naked Lunch or The Jungle without going back to the expanded editions? And translations? For all the languages I’ve studied and yet plan to tackle, there are a number I accept never being able to read in this lifetime. Russian ranks high among them. I “read” Anna Karenina, but haven’t yet gone back to the translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose renditions are undoubtedly more faithful to the originals than those available to me when I first read these works (though I did “re-read” their Notes from Underground).
Few writers have the stature to have their entire works made available in English. Browsing Japanese bookstores I was surprised to find how much of Murakami Haruki’s work hasn’t been translated into English. Short stories, essays, travel writing… none of which struck me as masterworks, but neither do many of his pieces that have been translated! Murakami himself is a prolific translator from English; the Complete Works of Raymond Carver among other credits. Can English language readers claim to have consumed Murakami’s oeuvre without reading his renderings of American literature into Japanese?
As globally prominent an author as Paco Ignacio Taibo II has a number of wonderful works still unavailable in English (My favorite being the collection of portraits of radical agitators Arcángeles: Doce Historias de Revolucionarios Herejes del siglo XX). How many Middle Eastern writers have their entire works available in any language other than Arabic? Even Tayeb Salih (1929-2009), one of the most piercing thinkers on the conundrums of the ostensibly post-colonial period, can’t claim this distinction in regards to his three published works of fiction, less alone his nine volumes of criticism.
Then there’s the B-sides problem. Burroughs is a prime example of a gratuitous offender in this regard. He was so fucking high that he doesn’t even remember writing much of his most famous work. Regardless he and Brian Gyson’s fascination with the “cut-up technique” of automatic writing gives Burroughs ‘60s works (Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Wild Boys…) a ticker tape feel from which a missing or inserted component here or there fail to radically alter the gist of the exercise—the point of which, as with spirit-writing before it, is to transcribe discrete slices of cosmic consciousness. Chasing down Burroughs’s minor works—such as Painting and Guns, currently moldering in my dad’s basement— is amusing for the fan or bibliophile, but hardly requisite in cogitating what the “literary outlaw” was all about…
The answer-that-there’s-no-answer here is that these sorts of problems are what keep us engaged and interested, roped into loops of re-discovery at oscillating levels of intimacy and relevance. They are inscrutabilities in a living—rather than dead and pickled—world, and, despite the frustrating impossibility of complete consumption, I image most of us wouldn’t have it any other way.
Verbose disclaimer disposed of, who are the authors I can claim to have read pretty fully? Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, and Dostoyevsky in high school. Indiginist and prisoners’s rights activist Ward Churchill and Critical Whiteness Studies pioneer David Roediger when I got more political my first couple of years in college (it is nearly impossible to make a claim of comprehensiveness in regards to Chomsky because of his Linguistic-anti-imperialism dichotomy and the relentless redundancy of his oeuvre). I didn’t read all of Poe or Flannery O’Connor in high school or college, which is unfortunate because such a feat is quite doable and they both deserve it. I went through William Vollmann thoroughly until the mid-‘90s, when I outgrew his irredeemably john sexuality. Intrigued by African religions I gobbled up Amos Tutuola’s three very oral novels without being able to light upon a critical lens through which to really get a hold on them. I only read two or three of Chinua Achebe’s considerable works—I found them dry—but all of Ngũgĩ’s novels (I finally met him at a reading on Cody’s on Fourth Street for Wizard of the Crow in 2006, though wasn’t able to talk to him at greater length because I couldn’t find a local tie-in to pitch to the Bay Guardian’s Lit section).
Between graduating from college in 1998 and the present I didn’t attack and methodically consume the oeuvres of authors so much. One factor was that while working on Guerrilla USA and Creating a Movement with Teeth the books I was writing was the only one I wanted to read; which helped me avoid the common grad school procrastination technique of reading to avoid writing. In this period, rather than reading everything by a single author, I read everything I could on a certain topic: left-wing armed cells in First World countries in the 1960s and 1970s. I didn’t read much fiction to off-set this rather intense material, but soon started to pick up more titles on East Asia reading. Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee mysteries were a candy-coated introduction to classical Chinese bureaucracy.
In orienting in East Asian literature, I followed certain translators to good effect: primarily Howard Goldblatt on China and Donald Keene on Japan. I made only a dent on their immense outputs, but both are work sticking with.
And it doesn’t end…
