Not Only On Moral Fiction

As has been reported here, reading John Gardner's Mickelsson's Ghosts led to my return to writing novels and from there, through effort and luck I was able to publish one, and then two, but Gardner was never my favorite writer. Based upon my reading of that one long acclaimed novel, he was fundamentally sound and usually interesting, but the book was not on the same level as Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, or John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor. I once read an interview where Gardner placed himself in a big three, which possibly included Pynchon and Norman Mailer, I can't remember exactly, but this wasn't evident to me from reading Mickelsson's Ghosts. The novel trended toward realism, but for American realism, I prefer Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, John Updike's Rabbit is Rich, Fred Exley's A Fan's Notes (I think of it as such), and several others. Gardner did have wider range than all of these writers though, working as a scholar and teacher even as he produced in many different genres although to the best of my knowledge none were what we would call "genre fiction."

Everyone knows that Gardner was the first to mentor Raymond Carver, but before reading this new piece in The Paris Review, I was unaware that he also taught greats like Charles Johnson and Toni Morrison. And the final motorcycle ride off the road makes it seem as if he was a far badder dude than writers like Bellow and Morrison who aged gracefully in the comfort and security that we imagine prestigious tenure lines ensure. I suppose that would have been Gardner's destiny too if he had lived. But he died at 49, only a year older than I am now. The Paris Review article mentions that he has remained "on the syllabus," although I've only read On Moral Fiction for a class. In twenty years of teaching literature classes, the majority of which were for Gardner's period (American, after 1945), I've never assigned any of his fiction, and I think I've only seen Grendel and On Moral Fiction assigned by others. (It's possible that Bellow, Barth, John Updike, and a few others have done even more of a disappearing act. I'm not sure.) The only time I've ever discussed Gardner, I'm almost certain, was in the context of his lending a hand to a young Raymond Carver, janitor, who needed quiet office space. Gardner was there for many other writers.

"Zoyd was out of smokes."

“Zoyd was out of smokes.” 
― Thomas Pynchon, Vineland

schlemiel

Anyway, in unrelated news, I came across a couple articles that consider the schlemiel: exhibits A and B. I've yet to read them in their entirety, but they concern famous Jewish writers and comedians using, or associating with, the term, from Walter Benjamin to Woody Allen to Philip Roth. To me, it's worth noting that long before "channeling his inner Jewish mother" Thomas Pynchon was at home with the Yiddish word in V, if I'm not mistaken, describing Benny Profane as such.

L. A. Prose

I've recently been enjoying novels set mainly in Southern California such as The White Boy Shuffle and How To Get Into The Twin Palms. I've also been following So Cal fires and oil spills, and I'm even getting e-mail  on L.A. social-justice "gap year" programs.

So, naturally, I took it all as a sign that I was due to link and list:

Novels:

The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty

Chump Change by Dan Fante

Ask the Dust by John Fante

Dreams from Bunker Hill by John Fante

The Road To Los Angeles by John Fante

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

The Player by Michael Tolkien

How To Get Into the Twin Palms by Karolina Waclawiak

Memoir:

Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski

Fante by Dan Fante

I'll add links and other books soon, but please feel free to note your own in a comment.

Pynchon In Public 2014

"She hangs on the western wall." -V. #Pynchon2014 pic.twitter.com/ulG1qdfq1y
— Steven Fruhmoto (@StevenFruhmoto) May 9, 2014

Every day is #PynchonInPublic day. pic.twitter.com/I4dTFQQymu
— hook echo (@null_fruit) May 8, 2014

#pynchoninpublic #pynchon2014 pic.twitter.com/y209VY9KWQ
— Refined Quotes (@slothrop89) May 8, 2014

#pynchoninpublic i haven't been outside enough today to catch all the token copies of gravity's rainbow, alas pic.twitter.com/YoLO2WWNC5
— Nicole Dib (@ndib22) May 9, 2014

Reading #pynchoninpublic while enjoying a spot of afternoon tea #holdthehallucinogenichollandaise pic.twitter.com/m5yrgEHI5M
— Eilidh Macdonald (@thishereeilidh) May 8, 2014

Lenin Pissed Here: Muted Horn on Gents Cubicle at The Crown #Clerkenwell Green #pynchoninpublic #Pynchon2014 pic.twitter.com/QRBBHk2WQE
— liminallondoner (@liminallondoner) May 8, 2014

Muted Horn in pink chalk graces green telecom box nr The Fox & Anchor #London #pynchoninpublic #Pynchon2014 pic.twitter.com/0Vc57yn93K
— liminallondoner (@liminallondoner) May 8, 2014

Night falls over #Pynchon2014 #pynchoninpublic . pic.twitter.com/DANEF1z4GO
— Fred Kiesche (@FredKiesche) May 8, 2014

Heading out for #Pynchon2014. #PynchonInPublic #PIPcast #TrysteroBanana https://t.co/QRjse4Lsh6 pic.twitter.com/7HymsdOBlY
— Entrippy! (@Ntrippy) May 8, 2014

#pynchoninpublic pic.twitter.com/PytFSwAXFJ
— Tim Strzechowski (@MrStrzechowski) May 8, 2014

Only Pynchon book I haven't read yet for this years #pynchoninpublic #pynchon2014 happy birthday Thomas Pynchon!! pic.twitter.com/dMoLpnlX6o
— Thomas Sieben (@thomassieben) May 8, 2014

Hmm, thought I tweeted this earlier. Reading GR via osmosis. #pynchoninpublic #Pynchon2014 pic.twitter.com/wOCL11o3Eh

— Greg Thomas (@TrysteroCoffee) May 9, 2014

Stamped the rest of the bills in my change envelope. #pynchoninpublic #pynchon2014 pic.twitter.com/vvaWYLzZ72
— Greg Thomas (@TrysteroCoffee) May 8, 2014

a dead pynchon is as dangerous as a live one

Has Thomas Pynchon passed away, or is the twitter feed just playing tricks on me?

So my favorite living writer is dead. Is this true?

Rest, if possible, in peace.

Okay, this late breaking word just in that the Thomas Pynchon news may not be true because it was posted by a faux Delillo tweeter.

I'll leave you then, tentatively, with life, even more so, for TP.

In summary, let's plagiarize it as death on the installment plan but with 30% more life and heightened anticipation installed free of charge.

On the death topic, more than ever, we're all copycat criminals, no?

working and older working writers

Over at cnn.com, this American life befits the times, or at least the headlines.

In a way, it reminds me of this, possibly paraphrased, Paul Auster quotation about his father:

"work was the country he lived in, and he was his greatest patriot."

Of course, Auster's quotation implies that his father may have believed in work, or even worshipped it, and in his memoir "Portrait of an Invisible Man" we read about an older father clinging to his work, its habits (he quotes Beckett, too, on habit as "the great deadener"), and what seemed to be his entire life even as his real estate holdings were slowly decaying, depreciating, and disappearing.

And in other news, of other writers, America's greatest comic critic of our "Puritan work ethic," Thomas Pynchon, has another novel coming out. It will be interesting to see if The Bleeding Edge is another late long one, a la Mason & Dixon and Against the Day; more or less standard-novel size, a la Vineland and Inherent Vice; or if Pynchon finally succumbs to the short-novel disease that seems to have afflicted more than one novelist late in his years. Roth and Delillo come to mind first for me, and it's amazing that Pynchon, so late in his career, could actually be approaching those two prolific geniuses when it comes to quantity of published pages of fiction. Probably the biggest bullshit measure of a writer one could come up with it, but slightly interesting nonetheless. . .  Roth and Delillo have so many more titles, but I don't quite see that either of them has a Gravity's Rainbow kind of book. At the same time, it seems strange that Delillo hasn't won more awards although he has won some big ones, and my hunch is he appears on more college syllabi than the other writers mentioned in this post.

In my own reading news, the good tweeters at New Directions and Melville House recommended Mating by Norman Rush for something somewhat Bolano-like, and so far, this National Book Award winner has not disappointed. Sixty pages in, and I feel like I'm reading a great novel. . . comedy, politics, detail, Africa, everything. . .

I'll add some links, italicize here and there, correct the typos, and maybe add an interesting sentence or two at some later moment.

Have a reading weekend.

inherited vice?

I'm reading Inherent Vice and seeing a lot of connections to The Crying of Lot 49, but I hope this doesn't mean I'm paranoid. Well, perhaps I do have such tendencies, but I'd like to believe I don't need TP to tell me this (the other TP). The novel definitely leaves me longing for Southern California in all of its imagined states. To the best of my knowledge, it's the first time Pynchon has revisited the same time and place for a second novel (although, if I remember correctly, there is some WWII overlap between V and Gravity's Rainbow).

I remember that when I was twelve and my father moved to Marina Del Rey (from Philadelphia), a few of my favorite parts of a visit to Dad's became 1) playing basketball on the Venice Beach courts (early, before the local "stars" arrived and took over) and 2) cheeseburgers from a great chiliburger joint by the beach where Marina Del Rey meets Venice and 3) fishing off the Santa Monica pier, one of the few times in my life I ever caught more than a pregnant crab while fishing. But this was 1980s L.A., nothing at all like Pynchon's glorious 1960s version. My Dad may have been expecting the roach-clip culture Pynchon describes so well, but what he found was a cool club called AA, and the rest, as they say, is sobriety.

One oddity about Marina Del Rey in the 1980s is that it was affordable; my father started out with a two bedroom apartment for $850 a month and his last unit rented there was a $1000 per month efficiency. The writing was on the wall for him and by 1991 he was back in Philly before escaping to an affordable beach town in Northern Florida. Funny thing is, I visited that town, Ponte Vedre, two years ago and saw that it too now looked shiny, new, and pricey.

So be it.

9 days left in national novel-writing month!

With 9 days left in national novel-writing month, I imagine you are freaking out! But no fear, there are novels (well, yes, short ones mostly) that have been drafted in a month. For inspiration, I'll drop a dime on a couple: Paul Auster's Portrait of an Invisible Man and Jean-Philippe Toussaint's The Bathroom. I suspect in both cases that is the first draft alone, and we don't have the hard facts, the exact data as it were. Okay, I'll admit the Auster is packaged with another memoir and is more or less a long story told in fragments (but a good one).

Fans of Jack Kerouac's On the Road are no doubt already aware that the original scroll was produced "during a three-week period in the spring of 1951" (see http://www.ontheroad.org/ for the words surrounding this quoted bit). I've heard that Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 was first drafted in three weeks, but I've also heard this disputed.

But back to your novel. What to do?

Quit work, boycott Thanksgiving, and write your ass off! And if you are writing twelve to fourteen hours a day on November 30, let the momentum carry you into December and make that month your writing month too.

You need your novel in your life.

Happy word choice, writer.

Picasso in Luzern

Many years ago, in Luzern, Switzerland, I walked over a wooden foot bridge depicting a dance of death in its ceiling and soon after, arrived at my destination, a Picasso House. There were about 15 prime Picassos on two small floors, and the only other tourists were a group of camera-wielding Japanese. For each painting, each Japanese tourist would photograph all of the others standing by the painting. You can imagine it took some time for them to work their way through the museum. If I'm not mistaken I was saving money by staying in a youth hostel in Zug, forty minutes away by train, and reading V by Thomas Pynchon. This was in the fall of 1989, and soon after, the Berlin Wall would fall.

As the French would say, if they were to say it, "La vie est tres dur, mais il y a toujours des Japonais."

(On March 8, 2014, when I searched online, I could not easily find the house I visited; rather, it appears there is a much larger museum that holds some of Picasso's art, but I'm not sure if these would have been the same paintings that were once literally housed in a house.)

UPDATE: On February 15, 2025, I learned from a Swiss German Joycean that the lost Picasso House's collection was merged in 2008 with Luzern's Rosengart Collection. The Picasso's are still in Luzern.)