Josh Ritter, Bright’s Passage, 2011.

This blog is meant to be a journal: it’s a place for me to reflect on the book I read. At times that means entries are akin to reviews, with jottings to help me remember the book if I struggle to recall it; other times, I’m trying to work through ideas. With this novel, though, both tasks are made more complicated because of my fan-boy-ish adulation of Josh Ritter as a musican, song-writer, and story-teller. I’ve loved Ritter’s music since I first heard “Come and Find Me” as the end credits rolled on an episode of “Six Feet Under” many years ago: I rushed out and bought Golden Age of Radio the next morning.

There’s a rush of language in Ritter’s lyrics that delights and entrances. Sometimes the lyrics are almost cryptic (‘I keep you in a flower vase / with your fatalism and your crooked face / with the daisies and the violet brocades’); at other times, the narrative is funny and engaging (‘At this, Sir Galahad got angry, / “Angel,” he said, “don’t you tempt me. / I wish to go to heaven and not to hell. / So when stable boys look lonesome, / when the women call me handsome, I’ll hold me virtue very firmly by myself.”’). There’s an interesting tension between agnosticism and ire at God that’s frequently expressed as in “Thin Blue Flame” (‘If God’s up there he’s in a cold dark room / the heavenly host are just the cold dark moons / He bent down and made the world in seven days / and ever since he’s been a’walking away’) and the ever-stunning “Girl in the War” ('... the keys to the Kingdom got lost inside the Kingdom / and the angels fly around in there but we can’t see them / I got a girl in the war Paul I know that they can hear me yell / if they can’t find a way to help her they can go to Hell'). And yet, the cadence and rhythm of scripture express themselves in deeply positive ways, too, as in the brilliant (and Paul Simon-influenced) “Lark”: ‘I am assured, yes I am assured yes / I am assured peace will come to me / A peace that can yes surpass the speed yes / Of my understanding and my need’.

Why go through those examples? Well, it’s impossible for me to read Bright’s Passage except through the lens of Ritter’s music that I have listened too so often and so carefully for a number of years now. Playful language, careful story-telling, and a deeply ambiguous sense of the numinous are as present in his first novel as they are in his songs.

Bright’s Passage follows Henry Bright. Just back to his home in West Virginia after serving in the First World War, Bright is coping with the death of his wife, Rachel, and his son’s birth as the story begins. That coping is complicated by an angel inhabiting the body of a horse who keeps giving Bright directions, and then made worse by the pursuit of both a nasty fire and the malicious father and sons of Bright’s dead bride. Interwoven with this story in the present is the story of Bright’s experiences fighting in France.

The writing is vivid and evocative in both time periods, and well-crafted. It’s spare, and uses details that make sense to Bright. The first sentence opens with the true freight of the book: “The baby boy wriggled in his arms, a warm, wet mass, softer than a goat and hairier than a rabbit kit.” (3) This novel is about life and death and possibility, simultaneously attached and disconnected to the world that never does run away. The opening of the second chapter—a switch from West Virginia to France—functions similarly:

Mud and water and the stumps of trees. In every direction that was all there was. Bodies fell, but the trees died standing up. Nightly they were crucified upon themselves by the zip and whine of machine guns, their leaves corroded by gas, their branches and trunks hacked for kindling, some roots cut by entrenching tools, others drowned by the ceaseless, steady dripping of blood and rain. (13)

There’s an obvious contrast between the crucified trees—and the entire passion that is the war—and the new birth of his son into an uncertain future that is the central tension of the novel: how can Bright enter a new future, leaving behind the cruelty and pain of the past? It’s a question intensified by the dubious quality of his memory, when we read of him seeing Rachel’s brothers cruelly kill fellow soldiers despite our certainty from our perspective as readers that they’d not have been in France. Bright is like a blind man, running unseeing from a terror that’s hunting him to a future that he’s unable to see. All is made worse by this peculiar angel with his own agenda—and angels are never easy or felicitous creatures in Ritter’s work! (I really do love the brilliance and humour of “Galahad” that offers another great example of why angels are to be feared, if they’re Ritter’s creations.)

It’s an impressive first novel, perhaps precisely because of Ritter’s care and practise of story-telling in so many other genres. It has some infelicities—it’s heavy-handed at times, and the ending is a little over-easy—but they’re easy to overlook whether you’re as fond of him as I or not. I’m looking forward to hearing what others make of it.

David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 1997.

This collection of essays is my first foray into reading Wallace. I’ve been meaning to spend some time with his work for a while now, and am now both glad that I have and hoping to find more time to spend with Consider the Lobster and Infinite Jest.

The writing is fun: recursive, exuberant, given to marvellous and unexpected comparisons as a way of bringing a scene to life, and richly evocative: “an unshot skeet’s movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome of the open ocean’s sky is sun-like—i.e. orange and parabolic and right-to-left—and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.” What I found most remarkable were the two travel pieces, “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All” about the Illinois State Fair, and the title piece “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” about a Caribbean cruise. They feel at first like deeply personal travelogues, essays that describe the scene and bring you into the author’s experience complete with all his entertaining and identifiable neuroses, and seem to lack coherence other than that given by the passage of time. In reading them, though, I came to see that the seemingly-relaxed structure is a front: Wallace has very deliberate points about what it means to be human and what it means to experience, that are worth discovering in his meandering and footnoted-way. And oh, the footnotes ¹ in all their parenthetical and humorous delight, never detracting from the piece but always adding something. One has to read the footnotes!

The only piece in the collection I found myself skimming rather than reading was the essay on David Lynch, and while it examines what makes Lynch a different sort of auteur than many directors, my lack of familiarity with and interest in Lynch himself wasn’t overcome by Wallace’s engaging writing.

Captivating but difficult is the essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” a piece I wish I had read many years ago. Arguing that television exists as a medium wholly invested in irony, Wallace builds on the brilliant Lewis Hyde to argue “… irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks” and thus television can never be a truly effective tool for the novelist: authors of fiction have an obligation to use modern references, to be sure, but to transcend irony to create something else. He quotes Hyde’s idea from “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking” that “Irony has only emergence use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” I’m excerpting an idea from a complex piece, but it serves to present Foster Wallace as someone who, in this postmodern age, felt that fiction is more than a player in the great game of deconstruction.

I look forward to the next bit of time I’ll be able to spend with his writing.


¹ and the footnotes to the footnotes ^{2
          2} and so on

Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership, 2010.

The lights lower in the house, and the screen brightens. Two or three commercials play across the screen as you lean over to your fellow cinema-goer to bet on how many trailers you’ll see, and before the first trailer seeks to tempt you into watching a movie that you have no interest in seeing, one final commercial plays: a young person in a convenience store shoves a couple of candy bars and a pop into his knapsack as the storekeeper sells a lottery ticket to an elderly woman, and then the boy takes off, high-tailing it from the store as the narrator’s deep voice says “We know that’s theft—so is stealing movies” as we cut to a young couple staring at a computer whilst slyly grinning at one another. My stomach tightens at the commercial, though I’ve never illegally downloaded a movie. While I could argue against the false equivalence being established in the efforts of this commercial and its brethren, nothing I could essay would be as erudite, as engaging, or as convincing as Lewis Hyde’s recent Common as Air.

Just as in Trickster Makes This World*, Hyde uses analogies and discursive examples to outline an argument that is very difficult to argue against convincingly. In Common as Air, he argues that copyright is broken: that what once existed to help the development of art and discovery now limits and prevents meaningful building on the “shoulders of giants” that have gone before. He proposes reform, asking us to move away from the notion of property to a commons with stints. Hyde develops this proposal with heavy reference both to the ancient structures and strictures of the commons and to the founding fathers or the United States. At times heavily historical, the reader would be forgiven for thinking in the early pages that she was reading more of an history of ideas than a book dealing with what may be the defining issue of our time. The fifth chapter makes heavy use of Benjamin Franklin to show how his work on a number of scientific fronts could not have occurred without heavy debts both to earlier investigations whose results had been freely shared and to his oft-forgotten co-experimenters. Its argument is that the “founders believed that created works belong largely in the commons so as to support and enliven creative communities” (112); the preceding chapters develop our understanding of the commons, and the successive chapters expand this idea and show how it has continuing relevance to our society and culture, with reference to Bob Dylan, the human genome, and the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., among others. Hyde captivates the reader both in the argument itself and in his myriad and surprising examples. Dealing carefully with both issues of law and culture, the arguments he makes are persuasive and intriguing. The sceptic—who is willing to agree that theft is theft, and copyright works just fine, thank you—will find himself challenged, and the already converted will need to nuance her arguments in the light of Hyde’s work.

What I find most compelling in Hyde’s new book is an essential underpinning of his argument. A serious problem that our contemporary culture faces is that we tend to conceive of freedom as negative: too often we are concerned about being free from infringements by others. Hyde shows that this way of thinking is backwards when compared with the bulk of thinking about freedom through time.

Social well-being in this view cannot arise simply by aggregating individual choices; private interest and public good are too often at odds. Citizens acquire virtue in the civic republic, therefore, not by productivity but by willingly allowing self-interest to bow to the public good (or by recognizing that the two are one). (93)

True liberty is not freedom from, but rather freedom for, a liberty that is entirely congruent with what is extolled in the Magnificat, for example. I need to spend more time thinking about how Hyde’s arguments are working on my own understanding of what it is to live in the communities in which I make my home.

My sole serious quibble with the book is composed of two lines on the frontispiece: “Copyright © 2010 by Lewis Hyde / All rights reserved.” After he so extolled the virtues of Creative Commons licenses, was there an effort to persuade Farrar, Strauss and Giroux to publish Common as Air under such a license?


* I first fell in love with Hyde’s writing when reading his magnificent Trickster Makes This World. If you haven’t read it, I remind you that old time is still a-flying.)

Dan Savage, The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family, 2005.

I first encountered Savage when I read, at the urging of a former co-worker, a couple of Savage’s advice columns: Savage Love. While far more entertaining than most such columns, I wasn’t hugely excited. Then I heard him on one of my addictions: the NPR show This American Life. Surely, if Ira Glass likes the guy’s writing... I was hooked. Even Savage’s voice works well, drawing you into his stories.

It was one of those stories which inspired me to get this book out from HPL. Savage was talking about his son’s opposition to Savage marrying his boyfriend Terry, and I found myself in tears by the end of that act of TAL (which you can listen to here). When I learnt that there was an entire book devoted to the musings, I placed a hold.

It is a book that is by turns touching, vitriolic, foul-mouthed, pensive, inquisitive; it is an incisive commentary on the state of the United States, with some travelogue-esque sections that made me remember de Tocqueville. At its heart, though, it’s a book about what family is and means. Savage’s own large family, whose various members have adopted diverse varieties of familial models, provides much fodder for Savage attempting to make sense of one question: should he and Terry get married? I didn’t cry again, reading it, but I found myself feeling a number of moments quite intensely. One such moment, well worth years of future consideration, is about our relationships in neighbourhoods: how they’re constructed, how we attempt to escape them, how we re-create them in later life. One large Catholic family, rooted in one area of a city for a number of generations offers a treasure trove for thinking about individuals, families, and communities.

So, it's a book I'm glad that TAL pointed me toward. I promise to let it pick my books for me even more frequently.

Thornton Wilder, Our Town, 1938.

I spent the last couple of weeks re-watching My So-Called Life, one of my more favourite tv shows from high school. A story-arc near the end of the series revolved around a production of Our Town, a play that's constantly being referenced, and which I've never seen nor read.

So I grabbed the copy from my shelf that I've been meaning to read for some years now, and read it the other night.

The play feels trite. It's wobbly, and a product of another era that doesn't hold up to the ravages of time. Gee whittakers, we realise that it's important to be fully present at all times. That all moments of life are potentially great (The famous moment, of course, being when Emily asks the Stage Manager "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?--every, every minute?" and he responds, "No. The saints and poets, maybe--they do some."). Treacle, all of it, and hard-pressed to hold anyone's attention.

I frequently hate book covers. Consider, for example, the picture for the most recent reprinting of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces.

I just finished this book (fortunately, with a more sedate cover--the sepia one, with faded pictures of new orleans behind the central stripe), because it was a condition for my getting an apfelküchen recipe. R-- said she'd give me the recipe if I agreed to read the book. (I'll let you know if I like the cake; I have no baking apples at present, to essay it yet). I'd heard both Toole's name and the title, which knowledge I attribute to the fact that it is a Pulitzer-winning book. R-- refused to describe it to me, though. For one thing, she was laughing to hard at the memory of her reading of it; for another, she said any description she tried to offer wouldn't do it justice.

Now, i don't think that the book is as stunning as R--, or as the Pulitzer committee for 1981, thought it to be. (I'd recommend some Rabelais, instead: perhaps Gargantua & Pantagruel.) All of which is not to suggest that i didn't like the book; I did. I even laughed out loud once or twice. The laughs for me, though, came not from events or descriptions, so much as the occasional turn of phrase that amused me. I sincerely doubt that i'd find it all quite so funny, were I to reread it, certain parodic elements (e.g. Dorian Greene, the professor) excepted.

I also object to the cover that is principally sepia: you see, immediately under the title, the book is described as "the marvelous [sic; silly americans & their crazy spellings], madcap adventures" of Ignatius Reilly. The adventures, you see are not marvellous. Nor are they madcap. The weakly Menippean satire that characterizes the book does not lend itself to the marvellous or to the madcap.

So. Read, & laugh. If you like it, try Rabelais. Better yet... try Lawrence Sterne's Tristam Shandy. hm. I feel a list of recommendations coming on:

1. Stephen Leacock, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town


2. Thomas McCulloch, The Letters of Mephibosheth Stepsure (excerpts)


3. Thomas Chandler Haliburton, The Clockmaker


4. Voltaire, Candide


5. Aldous Huxley, Point counterpoint

I may add to this list, but don't count your chickens.

There. You have a list. Go forth, reading always, remembering that "to read makes our speaking English good..."