recovery mission

Late last night, we recovered a few old friends who'd been M.I.A.

Behold T. C. Boyle's East is East, my father's college copy of The Sun Also Rises, and my first copy of A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley. I acquired the Exley while employed at a temporary remainders-only bookstore and "gulped it down," as Rushdie said of Pynchon's Vineland because "it beats getting drunk."

 

draft in progress: over a hundred favorite novels (and novellas) not in order

      A Fan's Notes by Fred Exley

      The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Vineland by Thomas Pynchon

Brothers Karamazov by F.D.

The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever

Chump Change by Dan Fante

The Sell-Out by Paul Beatty

The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner

Light in August by William Faulkner

Hunger by Knut Hamsun 

Candide by Voltaire

Lolita by Nabokov

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

Nanjing Requiem by Ha Jin

War Trash by Ha Jin

The Joke by Milan Kundera

Petersburg by Andrei Biely

Envy by Yuri Olesha

Native Son by Richard Wright

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

2666 by Robert Bolano

Home Land by Sam Lipsyte

The Ice Storm by Rick Moody

The Music of Chance by Paul Auster

White Noise by Don DeLillo

Americana by Don DeLillo

End Zone by Don DeLillo

Libra by Don DeLillo

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow

Herzog by Saul Bellow

Ravelstein by Saul Bellow

Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow

The Ghostwriter by Philip Roth

I Married a Communist by Philip Roth

Caucasia by Danzy Senna

Native Speaker by Chang Rae Lee

Hard Times by Charles Dickens

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Too Late the Phalarope by Alan Paton

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

The Human Stain by Philip Roth

Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner

Water Music by T. C. Boyle

World's End by T.C. Boyle

Budding Prospects by T.C. Boyle

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins

Another Roadside Attaction by Tom Robbins

Rabbit is Rich by John Updike

Rabbit at Rest by John Updike

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Nun by Denis Diderot

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Television by Jean-Phillippe Toussaint

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Revulsion by Horacio Castellanos Moya

Zone by Mathias Enard

Journey to the End of Night by Celine

Dreams from Bunker Hill by John Fante

Ask the Dust by John Fante

The Brotherhood of the Grape by John Fante

Outline by Rachel Cusk

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Correction by Thomas Bernhard

Extinction by Thomas Bernhard

Camera by Jean-Phlippe Toussaint

The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Concrete by Thomas Bernhard

Immortality by Milan Kundera

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard

The Trial by Franz Kafka

The Castle by Franz Kafka

Confessions of a Lady Killer by George Stade

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

Independence Day by Richard Ford

The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford

The Chaneysville Incident by David Bradley

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

Memory of Departure by Abdulzarak Gurnah

Afterlives by Abdulzarak Gurnah

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami

Wake Up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames

The Extra Man by Jonathan Ames

The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

Shame by Salman Rushdie 

I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabel

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabel

Firmin by Sam Savage

Mad Toy by Roberto Arlt

The Seven Madmen and the Flamethrowers by Roberto Arlt 

V by Thomas Pynchon

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

Billy Budd by Herman Melville

Benito Cereno by Herman Melville

Crime and Punishment by F. D.

The Possessed (Demons or The Devils) by F. D.

A School for Fools by Sasha Sokolov

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Washington Square by Henry James

Sula by Toni Morrison

Their Eyes Were Watching God

A Separate Peace

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Giants in the Earth by O. E. Rølvaag

Run Me To Earth by Paul Yoon

White Mythology by W.D. Clarke

Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu

The Story of My Wife by Milan Fust

The Incorporation of Eric Chung by Steven C. Lo

Straight Man by Richard Russo

Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Ice Storm by Rick Moody

Hating Olivia by Mark SaFranko

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke

Fight for Your Long Day by Alex Kudera

Auggie's Revenge by Alex Kudera

A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

A Passage to India by E. M. Forrester

All Quiet on the Western Front by E. Remarque

The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Roughing It by Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott

happy birthday

Thomas Pynchon turns 89 today.

"A Separate Piece," Parts III, IV, & V

"From then on, Ferguson haunted my thoughts. No matter what daily tasks I attended to, Evan was in the back if not the front of my mind. A cluttered existence, it had always been, but this was worse. Sitting on the back porch after mowing our meager lawn—crabgrass, dandelions, irregular yellowish turf—I found myself remembering Evan’s hints of literary analysis. Although his focus was art and architecture with an emphasis on the ancient Romans and Greeks, he also knew contemporary novels. In fact, he’d introduced me to Gaddis, Barth, Pynchon, and DeLillo. He’d read Ulysses and The Recognitions. Even as an undergrad, Ferguson could evaluate Gaddis and what he said about art, forgery, American life, and so on. I wouldn’t have stumbled down a literary path had he not encouraged me to read good books."

~~ from "A Separate Piece," Parts III, IV, & V, the second of four installments at Citywide Lunch.

rare pynchon

Maasists and Slothropians may find these of interest:

(1)

Small Archive : Complete run of Unauthorized Editions of Thomas Pynchon as noted in the Mead bibliography plus two variants not noted in Mead. Mortality and Mercy in Vienna; Lowlands; The Secret Integration; Entropy; The

(2)

Gravity's Rainbow | Thomas PYNCHON

brief note on White Mythology

I finished the longer of the two novels included in W.D. Clarke's White Mythology, and I highly recommend it. The novel I read is about 335 pages, and it is followed by a novella of about 120 pages. The longer one includes extraordinary sentences very reminiscent, at times, of the prose we see in early Pynchon, some Barth, Rushdie, and so on.

from the great Gary Amdahl

W.D. Clarke posted an article by Thomas Pynchon, Corona\Samizdat's Rick Harsch delivered a new video, and a couple months after finishing Gary Amdahl's Across My Big Brass Bed, I opened Gary's I AM DEATH to find these kind words. In other news, Eclectica Magazine is soon to publish "A Day's Worth"; it's my latest short story about surviving in America.

quite a wingding

“That was quite a wingding, yes. Wingding—the word—was only in my brain because I had Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift with me for the entire trip. The novel was quite a gas. This was in China, not Paris back-then, or at my dad’s house as a child in West Philly. In France, I’d found a UK edition of Thomas Pynchon’s V, and I’d also read Melville’s Moby Dick. The latter was a Penguin edition I’d brought from home. I knew I had to read if I wanted to write.”

~~ from “Chinese Sun” by Alex Kudera

a literary kingmaker

The new issue of the iconoclastic The Agonist is out, and in it for the first time, I got caught up with the Stephen King controversy. I had seen his name trending, and I know he is vocal on twitter, blocked by the president, etc., but there is too much of this stuff to follow it all. Anyway, in "The Doomed Equality Movement" by Daniel N. Davidson, I read

The author Stephen King has lately been excoriated for saying that he “would never consider diversity in matters of art, only quality. It seems to me that to do otherwise would be wrong.” For that he was accused of exercising white privilege, being an opponent of affirmative action, and promoting systemic bias. Rather, his critics insist, one should judge by the criterion of diversity–which would mean the division of all honors so that all self-identifying groups get theirs.  

I do not know if any current "equality movement" will fail or succeed, but the passage reminded me of Stephen King's lament, expressed somewhere in his famous On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. This memoir on the writing life is likely the only King that those of us who don't read horror have read, and in it, he expressed the wish that he were better recognized as a genuine literary talent—a "sentence maker" as we could say. In the passage I'm thinking of, he is also considering his fellow novelist-musician Amy Tan, and expressing dismay that their bestselling novels are never recognized as having literary qualities, in particular he notes they are not recognized for "the language." I am recalling this from memory, and I'm sorry I don't have the passage handy, but we've come a long way—or there's been a long fall?—when a figure such as Stephen King can be recognized and "excoriated" for being a kingmaker in the world of "high brow" art. Where is the Nobel committee? Or Joyce scribbling in his grave? Is Stephen King's opinion on "matters of art" supposed to matter at all? Why isn't Thomas Pynchon on twitter? And, no, I do not mean to imply that King is overrated in the genres he's working in—the horror novel and the tweet.

the knight of deliverance

“If the [virus] is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?”

~~ from Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49

László Krasznahorkai, The Art of Fiction No. 240

"Because they couldn't publish their own work under the Communist regime, the greatest writers and poets became translators. That's why we had wonderful translations of Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, and of every great American writer from Faulkner onward. The first translation of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow was really marvelous."

~~ The Paris Review, Summer 2018

Obituary

Philip Roth died famous, rich, and successful by common definition. He wrote an amazingly long list of books which are at least good, and they are always readable. By editing Penguin's Writers from the Other Europe series, he provided a major service to readers in English, and literature more generally, by widening access to Bruno Schulz, Danilo Kis, Tadeusz Borowski, and others from Eastern Europe. Pretty sure the last Philip Roth novel I've read is I Married a Communist, recommended, and the last one I began but didn't finish was The Counterlife. I haven't read any of them the year they were published, and I liked The Human Stain more than American Pastoral. The one with an imagined Anne Frank in it is great, but the title escapes me. I never finished The Great American Novel, but I had a copy as a teenager, purchased from Encore Books in their dollar remainder section, and I remember references to Hemingway as "Hem" in the opening. I believe that Portnoy's Complaint was the first Roth novel I've read, and the memoir Patrimony has always been one of my favorites. For one or two singular books, he's not as great as Pynchon, Barth, Bellow, DeLillo, and, no doubt, a few of his other relative contemporaries, but as of this writing, it seems like his books will last much longer on the shelf of bookstores than these other big names. His novels with historical or cultural themes almost always have a clever angle. I remember reading that Roth said he left academia because professors "weren't serious," and that he stopped dating because it was too time-consuming: "woman need to be entertained." A funny anecdote that I know of is that he requested a biography of Amiri Baraka from its African-American author, and the writer sent it signed, "Take it easy on the brothers." Roth thought that was hilarious, but it also relates to why I don't like American Pastoral. Last, sure anyone can detest being labeled as a "black writer" or "Jewish writer," but it's best to prove it by your pages. Roth could have shown much more often in his writing, and much more clearly, that he understood what it's like to be an American who isn't Jewish after World War II, the time period almost all of his books take place in. He's dead now, and I can't tell you with certainty what happens to him or anyone else at this stage of existence. Which sometimes is considered not existing. I'd be shocked if I made it to 85. Rest in peace.

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

National Novel Writing Month 2016

In November 2016, I am participating in National Novel Writing Month. Although it's easy to recognize that novels don't get completed in a month, some famous rough drafts were written in a literary sprint. Jack Kerouac's original scroll for the On the Road is said to have been written in less than a month, and Paul Auster's novella-length memoir "Portrait of an Invisible Man" is said to have been written in two to three weeks. It's possibly only rumor that Thomas Pynchon wrote a full draft of The Crying of Lot 49 in a few weeks.

For Fight for Your Long Day I used a period of significantly less than my usual workload combined with less access to the internet to write the full 90,000-word rough draft from late June through early August of 2004. Substantial editing was required before it was contracted in early February 2010 and then published on October 1 that year. Spark Park's 125,000-word rough draft was also written "on a roll," and I wrote many short stories that way years ago. Auggie's Revenge was written on and off from December 2004 through final edits in July 2015 without a sustained period of uninterrupted writing of more than several hours each day.

For #NaNoWriMo2016, I already have 37,000 words (135 double-spaced Word pages) for the sequel to Fight for Your Long Day, and my goal is to create a complete rough draft by November 30 and a good rough draft (something I could show a friend without too much embarrassment) by January 1. According to #NaNoWriMo's website the goal is a 50,000-word novel from November 1 through November 30, so what I am doing is similar, if not exactly the same.

books: 20 + 1

Lying on my couch at an uncommon angle, I looked up at a shelf with a small selection of paperback fiction and saw these ten titles in order: Lorrie Moore's Anagrams, Toni Morrison's Beloved and Sula, Murakami's Hard Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World, Arthur Nersesian's The Fuck Up and Chinese Takeout, Chris Offutt's Out of the Woods, Yuri Olesha's Envy, Pynchon's V, and Roth's The Human Stain.

I have so many books in storage and in piles on the floor or shelves in other rooms, yet, possibly, these ten represent in exacting proportion all the fiction I read. Having said that, I soon realize that 30% women might be high, sadly enough, and 20% in translation is low, I think, and it would be weighted more toward fiction from Europe and Russia, not 50/50 between Europe/Russia and Asia. Also, because I anticipated teaching contemporary literature, after 1945, when I drove down to South Carolina, I left most of my titles written before World War II in storage space in Philadelphia.

I do have the white whale and friends, Pierre, etc. on hand, at least a couple of the same Penguin paperback editions I read in college. Of the ten I just named, only Olesha's Envy is one I was assigned to read as an undergrad, but the copy on the shelf is one I procured years later. The British Picador paperback V is one of two editions I've owned, and I bought it in England when I was working as a busboy in Paris and then traveling in Europe the summer and autumn before the Berlin Wall fell. The Crying of Lot 49 rests on a different shelf where I keep the books I've been teaching most recently.

What's on the shelf above the first ten, you ask?

Ha Jin's Waiting, Denis Johnson's Angels and Jesus' Son, Edward P. Jones's Lost in the City, two different editions of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and then four Kafka Schocken Classics w/Dad's Kunderas leaning against them. Kerouac's On the Road rests horizontally on top the paperbacks just named.

When Over Fifty Billion Kafkas Served, my bilingual stack of stories, arrives from Romania, I'll let the copy I keep rest in its alphabetical place, between Kafka and Kundera, on the higher plane of shelf.

tweeting about John Gardner like the wild and krazy guy i am

Raymond Carver said John Gardner, PhD Iowa, famous, if forgotten?, had a 4 or 5 course load of fresh comp at Oberlin: http://t.co/r6f6A2ILAk
— Alex Kudera (@kudera) January 12, 2015

maybe i should be anti-Gardner since i'm in w/the #Pynchon crowd & am known to dig caricature, distrust too serious http://t.co/r6f6A2ILAk
— Alex Kudera (@kudera) January 12, 2015

on the other hand John Gardner's Mickelsson's Ghosts got me back into writing fiction, would sit on Friday afternoons in Van Pelt, comfy 1/2
— Alex Kudera (@kudera) January 12, 2015

cushioned seat by big glass window, March, April, May 2004, never checked the book out of the library, used a clean dinner napkin 4 bookmark
— Alex Kudera (@kudera) January 12, 2015

returned the book to the shelf every single time, always read from same book although there was another exactly like it up there in stacks
— Alex Kudera (@kudera) January 12, 2015

first paragraph of Mickelsson's Ghosts led me to conceive of Cyrus Duffleman https://t.co/LEw2lAGnrF
— Alex Kudera (@kudera) January 12, 2015

although i think chapters 2 and 3 of Fight for Your Long Day were the first ones i wrote, pen on lined paper, skipping lines, June 2014
— Alex Kudera (@kudera) January 12, 2015

bought a used IBM ThinkPad to bring to Korea, once there wrote the whole thing from late June to early August, mainly lined paper in COEX
— Alex Kudera (@kudera) January 12, 2015

shopping mall corner Starbucks and then typing in, improving in evenings and mornings. did not grade papers that summer. Gardner was right!
— Alex Kudera (@kudera) January 12, 2015

so now Fight for Your Long Day is up there on the 3rd floor of Van Pelt w/ the 2 copies of Mickelsson's Ghosts; somewhat unbelievable to me.
— Alex Kudera (@kudera) January 12, 2015

i think you can still get into UPenn's Van Pelt library with a driver's license, as i would, although they take your photo at the entrance.
— Alex Kudera (@kudera) January 12, 2015

"He came to Chico in fall 1959, after having been fired from Oberlin for leading a faculty strike, and left in 1962." http://t.co/r6f6A2ILAk
— Alex Kudera (@kudera) January 12, 2015

so if you're a sucker for this kind of "writer's life" medium-to-long journalism, as i am, then i recommend: http://t.co/r6f6A2ILAk
— Alex Kudera (@kudera) January 12, 2015

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. Books

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 Sellout by Paul Beatty

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

Which Side Are You On? by Ryan Lee Wong

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

Splinters by Leslie Jamison

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