#175 Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote- Jorge Luis Borges

#175 Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote- Jorge Luis Borges

Ok, I found this odd at first, but its genius quickly revealed itself. Writers writing about writer’s writing is always a touch-and-go technique that can fall prey to gimmick and hackishness. However, this was pretty amazing.

Borges imagines a fictional author, Pierre Menard penning a re-write of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. It wasn’t going to be a newly imagined or a polished version, or even a sequel. He was going to re-write it word for word…but as himself therefore giving it a fresh take.

“To be a popular novelist of the seventeenth century in the twentieth seemed to Menard to be a diminution. Being, somehow, Cervantes, and arriving thereby at the Quixote—that looked to Menard less challenging (and therefore less interesting) than continuing to be Pierre Menard and coming to the Quixote through the experience of Pierre Menard.”

This is great literary satire, poking fun at meta concepts and over-thought criticism and analysis. Such a great concept, it reads at first like an academic piece. That kind of threw me off center until I saw what he was doing. Then I wished it was longer. This passage I found laugh-out-loud funny. I can picture some dusty, bookish, professor that looks like he shits tweed say this at a pompous campus cocktail party:

“Menard has (perhaps unwittingly) enriched the slow and rudimentary art of reading by means of a new technique—the technique of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution. That technique, requiring infinite patience and concentration, encourages us to read the Odyssey as though it came after the Aeneid.”

Perhaps this is just funny to book nerds, but I found it hilariously brilliant.

Rating: 9-10-10-9 Total=38

#151 Sic Transit Gloria- Jabari Asim

#151 Sic Transit Gloria- Jabari Asim

Gloria is paralyzed by fear, fear of people, fear of outside, and more of all fear of the Devil. She is a shut-in, trying her best to fend off the evil of this world and raise her son, Roderick. Roderick is a special child with unnatural intelligence, he is aptly named by everyone in the neighborhood, The Genius. Gloria rarely leaves the house, not even for her own mother’s funeral, because cemeteries have too many places for the Devil to hide. While looking out for Satan, she awaits signs from God.

“All these years of fearing—maybe even believing—that I’ve been marked by the devil. All these years spending every living minute looking over my shoulder for Satan, and here come God, right on time.”

Roderick’s story is an interesting one. He is a Christ-like figure in these tales. Born of a mother with no father, he will bear suffering to uplift the community, his talents likely will have to be sacrificed like his Mentor/Father (figure) Orville. But for now this story is about his mother. What will it take for her to overcome her own burdens, her own fear, and face her own demons. It appears that she is now prepared to face the world to protect her son, her very own savior.

“The sound doesn’t enter my ears like noise normally does. It’s born in my bones, rises out of my pores, and takes shape in the air. It makes me hot and cold at the same time. Chills up my spine, sparks in my limbs. My son speaks, God touches me, and I get up and go.”

Rating: 8-8-9-8 Total= 33

#137 The Genius- Jabari Asim

#137 The Genius- Jabari Asim

The stories of this excellent collection are all connected, surrounding the life and circumstances of Crispus, his family and his neighborhood in the summer of 1968. This story is about education in the black community.

“Thirteen years after Brown…and Gateway City Schools are still separate and still unequal.”

Roderick is a rare 13-year old genius and beyond most people in the neighborhood. Only Orville, a genius in his own right can think on his level. But like most geniuses, while everyone else worries about your mental abilities, his thoughts lie elsewhere:

“For all his legendary skill with solving equations, conjugating verbs, or computing faster than the cash register…he had no knowledge of his own origin. He didn’t know who his father was…He’d gladly give up everything—his intelligence, his health—to hear a man call him son.”

He thinks Orville is his father but cant be sure. His bigger, more immediate problems are the local bullies. They resent his brains, his weakness, and dog him at every turn:

“Go on using those big words all the time and you’re just begging for someone to beat you up.”

What’s the value of education, what is it’s worth, to the individual, the family, the community?

Notable Passage: “Tout a ete realize, a l’exception de la facon de vivre…Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”

Rating: 8-7-9-8 Total= 32

#119 The Soul Is Not a Smithy- David Foster Wallace

#119 The Soul Is Not a Smithy- David Foster Wallace

Reading David Foster Wallace can be a commitment. The length and meticulous detail in his works don’t lend themselves to “light-reading.” However, if you are willing to put in the effort, and keep focus (something missing from a lot of internet-aged readers) the payoffs can be huge.

To some, this style of over-prose may seem to be a bit tiresome, but I assume these are the same people that would rather fast forward the first 2 ½ hours of Die Walkurie, a tough opera to get through for a novice, just to listen to the 3 minutes they know…The Ride of the Walkurie. For an opera fan, or an avid lover of the long-form in any of the arts, the adventure and ride of the exposition makes the payoff so much sweeter.

Speaking of focus and boredom, Terence Velen is a fourth grade student having a hard time concentrating at school. He spends his days staring through the classroom window, subdividing his attention through small, reticulated metal mesh squares and letting his imagination create his own reality. Meanwhile in class, his substitute Civics teacher, Mr. Richard Johnson (a nice name for a civics teacher in the 1960’s) “had just written KILL on the chalkboard.” Then KILL THEM, and finally KILL THEM ALL.

We learn that Mr. Johnson had an obvious nervous breakdown and while most of the class fled the scene in a panic, there were four unwitting hostages, including Terence. These four were among the perceived "slow" or "deficient" students. But its seems that they were neither slow, brave, unlucky, or unwilling to leave. And it seems they weren’t really hostages, as much as daydreamers confused about what exactly was going on around them.

“In testing many school children labeled as hyperactive or deficient in attention are observed to be not so much unable to pat attention as to have difficulty exercising control or choice over what it is they pat attention to.”

Many of DFW stories follow a style such as this, a frenetic accounting of an unfocussed mind. Some have used his writing (unfairly to both him and the mental health profession) as a peek inside the mind of such young people who have suffered misdiagnoses or misunderstandings or worse, mis-medications. Beyond the obvious technical skills of these works, and beyond the comedic or tragic circumstances of the plots, there is a deep truth here, a soul that calls out to be recognized.  At once, impressive, touching, heartbreaking, and hilarious...there is only one DFW.

Notable Passage: “There is something about someone throwing up anywhere within a child’s earshot that serves to direct and concentrate his attention with an utmost insane force…”

Rating: Once again…Not Rate-able…it is unfair to compare DFW to anyone else. To do so I’d have to develop a whole new system.  He ruins the curve…so lets just say he gets a perfect score and move on. Do I sound biased here? Who cares, its my blog and my rating system.

#85 Good Old Neon- David Foster Wallace

#85 Good Old Neon- David Foster Wallace

Another round of O.Henry (award winner) Friday, this one is from my favorite author David Foster Wallace. DFW was included in the annual Prize Stories collection three times, this one is from the 2002 O.Henry awards. 

Good Old Neon is the mental stream of a troubled man going through psycho-analysis. We learn early on that he will commit suicide so there isn’t much hope in this story, but there is intrigue. It reads like a lecture in an Ethics seminar discussing the philosophy of a paradox, the fraudulent paradox in fact. Can you fake being a fraud? If you could, wouldn’t that automatically make you a fraud?

“…I’d been fraudulent even in my pursuit of ways to achieve genuine and uncalculating integrity.”

“I just couldn’t see myself talking pills to try to be less of a fraud.”

“how frustrating it was to get just good enough to know what getting really good at it would be like but not being able to get that good.”

It has always been DFW’s strength to tap into the manner in which we think:

“I know that you know as well as I do how fast thoughts and associations can fly through your head.”

We can have a thousands of thoughts go through our head at any one moment and somehow, DFW will find a way to verbalize it, make it real, and have it make sense.

“This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another-word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second’s flash of thoughts and connections, etc.”

“…and yet we all seem to go around trying to use [spoken language] to try to convey to other people what we’re thinking…deep down everyone knows it’s a charade…”

Speaking of paradoxes and DFW’s mathematical mind, did you know that “the very smallest number that can’t be described in under twenty-two syllables” can be described by using that previous sentence containing twenty-one syllables. I thought that was a fun aside that was thrown in.

The ultimate paradox about this piece is that by reading someone’s self-awareness about his own fraudulence, really about the fraudulence in all of the human psyche, we’re reading about as truthful a thing as I can imagine. 

Of course knowing that DFW was destroyed by his own mental problems, it is also heartbreaking to imagine that this was a glimpse of his own torment. And hearing DFW use a narrator to talk about his own suicide is unspeakably sad. Like what he says in here about the horror of knowing that his analyst isn’t smart enough to help him, all he wanted was somebody smart enough to disprove the logic of his own fraudulent paradox. With a mind like DFW, there simply wasn’t anyone out there smart enough to out-logic a genius.

Notable Passage: “The reality is that dying isn’t bad, but it takes forever. And that forever is no time at all."

Rating: Once again…Not Rate-able…it is unfair to compare DFW to anyone else. To do so I’d have to develop a whole new system.  He ruins the curve…so lets just say he gets a perfect score and move on.