Sam Lipsyte's Home Land: A Look Back on High School

I was struck oddly by this book. I've thought of writing a not-so-fictional memoir of my high school experiences (a unique place) and the humorous tone of this book approximated the dosage I would use. Maybe it's due to our shared New Jersey heritage (though I'm from central and Lipsyte from north) or similar personal experiences. I'm not sure. The humor and absurdity of Home Land drew me in, but after a thorough read, I was disappointed it did not deliver more. You can avoid traps of kitschy epiphanies and platitudes while retaining some sort of genuine reflection.

First I must explain how I encountered Lipsyte's work. I came across a short story in the anthology The Anchor Book of New American Stories edited by Ben Marcus. Entitled "I'm Slavering" this short story captured a strained but meaningful relationship between the narrator and his drug addicted friend. Lipsyte is a master of exchanges, creating dialog with incredible movement and revelation of character, as seen in the closing conversation of the story:

I got up, took the man from Scarsdale's seat, pressed Gary's dead thumb in my hand.
"Are you sorry you did it?" I said.
"Get the hell off me."
I stroked his thumb, brushed it, tenderly, the way you would a blind, tiny thing fresh-pulled from a hole.
"Just tell me if you're sorry," I said. "Because here we are. Because, me, I've been following you. Do you understand that? I've been following you all along. So, just tell me, are you sorry?"
"Hell, no," said Gary. "I wanted to watch TV. Anyway, what's done is done."
"Done and gone," I said.
"Don't fucking wallow," said Gary, and pulled his thumb away. "Never fucking wallow. You wallow, you're pretending you were something else in the first place. I know who I am. I'm Gary. I go down into the street, I'm Gary. I've never stopped being Gary. There's no cure for it. There's no race. It's not a race, okay? It's a contest. Do you get what I'm saying?"
"Yes," I said. "I'm with you."
He walked over to the window, a vista of sky, brick.
"Don't be with me," said Gary.

The story begins with the narrator and a group of people waiting for Gary. He does not arrive so the narrator sets out for him. He tells the story of Gary cutting of his thumb because his parents wouldn't let him watch television late at night. After that, he got his way.

Then there are passages that are just funny like this one from Home Land:

"Lewis. Do you know, Lewis, that I can look right at you and tell by a single glance you are consumed by demons of nearly unimaginable ferocity? Do you know how I can ascertain this?"
"The shape of my head?"
"Primarily, yes. Do you pray, Lewis?"
"I don't believe in God."
"Who said anything about God, twat? Hey, do you like antiques? You'll never guess what I've got in my car."
"You're right, I won't."
"A goddamn war mace. It was used by Ostrogoths to split skulls. Fucked-up skulls like yours. Got it in the mail. From an Ostrogoth."
"I didn't know there were any around."
"He's an Ostrogoth by choice. You can be whatever you want to be in this country, in case you haven't heard."

I've continuously run into weak novels that take a good concept for a short story and attempt to stretch out for 200+ pages. So the protagonist, Lewis, writes sardonic letters to his alumni newsletter. He's an antihero; Holden Caulfield at 30; lonely and bitter and intelligent. Highlights: the absurdity of his life and his run-ins with the former principal, his friends, and enemies. Lipsyte avoids sentimentality - such a formidable trap for this novel's ambition. We can laugh about our shortcomings and ridicule the ones we love to hate, but in the end there isn't much left. There is an air of self-superiority, even for the burn-outs, but other than that is some fluffy appreciation for friendship. A complacency coagulates and we accept our circumstance and think happy thoughts. It reminded me of a John Hughes film straight out of the eighties.

Worth a read (quick one) for its hilarity, but don't expect to really care what happens. The anti-climactic climax with some slapstick sitcom action was fitting.

You Shook Me All Night Long: My Literature Manifesto

Lord, I have strayed away from the realm of an average reader into the dark, subterraneous waters of literary criticism. It’s a dark and dreadful place where people shoot arrows at you from ivory towers and with the snap of a finger take away your existence along with your fabricated purpose in life. God is dead; our creed relativism, not pluralism, and the literary canon is a cigar box filled with dried-up classics, foisted on you by a self-perpetuating old boy’s club of scotch-drinking, ass-slapping, jazz-loving white men who wear sweater vests and read Dylan Thomas poems for bed time stories to put their listless kids to sleep.

Alright, that is only partly true. I have encountered a good worth of literary theory and criticism this semester. And it’s not as abysmal as one may have feared. The myth has been dispelled. My mind has been rolling like a snowball down a mountain slope, amalgamating substance and groups of substance into itself before it crashes into some honeymooner’s cabin. It’s difficult to keep things separated and in the right place, but the experience has been welcomed. Some key questions: Why do we read books? What is it about the essence of literature and its function that’s kept us on our knees, awake late at night, fired up, or chilled frozen? Supposedly it begins with Plato and the Greeks and all thought since has been variations on the same theme. Imitation of the world. Passion captured. Imagination unrestrained.

Alas the issue of taste comes barreling down on us. It confounds us. Our palates differ; we get fussy over cake. Chocolate or lemon? Strawberry filling? Ice-cream. Mousse. One flavor. Multi-flavored. Textures. The writing on the top. Number of candles. Trick candles? A stripper inside.

One literary battle rages over the accessibility of a text. Jonathan Franzen, in his essay “Mr. Difficult” capitulates one side of the conflict:

“My small hope for literary criticism would be to hear less about orchestras and subversion and more about the erotic and culinary arts. Think of the novel as lover: Let’s stay home tonight and have a great time; just because you’re touched where you want to be touched, it doesn’t mean you’re cheap; before a book can change you, you have to love it.”

I agree with Mr. Franzen for the most part. A lot of work has become pretentious – difficult for the sake of being difficult, and even at times masking its lack of mattering. In other words, fuck subversion. Have something to say and say it well. William Gaddis is Franzen’s top suspect of erudition. He comments on the malaise of contemporary literature with such symptoms as a humanistic, calculated, self-aggrandizing attitude and masking vacuity with fancy dress.

We have lost our capacity for wonder. We are no longer surprised. I hope for the same thing as Franzen: we are familiar with what pleases us, but we still get weak in the knees when we come before it.

Jews and Christians have it right in their approach Scripture. The awe-striking reverence for the Torah during a commemoration of the Sabbath at a synagogue illustrates this perfectly. There is something profound to these words spoken, they speak to our hearts, souls, and minds, to our human condition and to timeless truths. I think of a work entitled Eat This Book by Eugene Peterson. Reading the word of God is much a phagorgasmic process. There is a very sensual nature to literature and language. We digest the sacred. I like how Ben Marcus puts it: “Plot would be another name for our bodies, carved hollow to receive something amazing.”

Marcus continues to describe a reader’s involvement in a story differently from Franzen:

“When plots are revealed they cease being plots. They are uncovered, as tedious as a fully nude person. Good fiction is busy keeping secrets, protecting its plots. The story, then, is what the story is hiding, and the hide is indeed a piece of skin, whose effect is to conceal the body.”

His emphasis on the undressing of a story is much appreciated. Artfulness and craft are critical parts of telling a story. Yes, there are times when a direct style is most profitable, but there is room for well-designed, unique forms of telling stories. Stories that reward upon multiple readings. As long as the method does not obscure the nature of the story completely, I enjoy an intelligent, challenging piece of literature. I think Franzen would agree. One of my favorite pastime activities is reading in between the lines. Both in literature and conversation.

Thus my own lofty ideas of literature are being formed and reconstituted throughout my reading endeavors. I am tattooed by traditional notions of literature, fundamentals of storytelling, character, conflict, but contemporary movements also have imprinted themselves on my mind. I enjoy existential angst. I enjoy flipping genres and readers’ expectations over and tickling their exposed bellies or punching them in the gut.

Reading Percy Bysshe Shelley’s defense of poetry, I was struck by some of his exuberant romantic reflections:

“Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them or in language or in form sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide – abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.”

This passage reverberates. We try to make sense out of a senseless world, and literature is one of the primary facets of this struggle. Desperate for redemption, we search for atonement. Akin to the plots of many tales, we are strangers in a strangeland, searching for signposts to lead us home. Our yearning is co-mingled with most characters in the novels we read, with the voices of poetry, with Dante's Virgil we journey through hell, only to arrive at paradise.

Wells Tower and Some Old Fashioned Pillaging

No, he is not some 18th-century British landmark. He is a writer who was schooled at Columbia and perhaps there exists a connection between him and Ben Marcus that contributed to his eventual contribution to Marcus' anthology "The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories." Despite possible collusion, his piece "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" was entirely worth a look-through. The voice of the narrator coupled with the diction makes the story. It's as though Beowulf existed, knew the prominent and forerunning epic was written about him and his secret identity is Samuel Jackson as Jules from Pulp FIction. He's like the actor/wrestler Rowdy Rodney Piper, kicking ass and chewing gum, except he's all out of gum. You want conflict? How about this: "Sons of bitches three weeks' boat ride off were fucking up our summer and were probably going to need their asses whipped." So our grisly but lovable host, Harald, goes off with his posse of vikings for some healthy marauding.

Juxtaposed with the machismo and utter brutality of these men is their sensitive love for women. Harald reveals his intense love for his wife Pila and their soon-to-be-born twins. One of his buddies, Gnut, falls in love with a one-armed woman from the village they attack. They steal her away from her father, beating the smack out of him in the process. Tower includes disturbing of intense violence in Tarantino fashion, divulging the reader with the art of a "Blood Eagle" which involves carving slits in the victim's spine and playing puppet master with their lungs and arms. Absolutely absurd. And finally, we are given a typical reflective ending one would expect Tower is up to: an attempt at a meaningful elaboration dealing with carnage, fear, and love. It works sufficiently, but does not reward the reader upon further readings of the story. It comes close, though, but cannot be taken seriously given the tone of the whole story. Here's a little bit from the end (spoiled!) that begins with one of the most ridiculous things a savage pillager could say:

"Where had the good times gone? I didn't know, but when Pila and me had our little twins and we put a family together, I got an understanding of how terrible love can be. You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know what awful things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself. It's crazy-making, but you cling to them with everything and close your eyes against the rest of it. But still you wake up late at night and lie there listening for the creak and splash of oars, the clank of steel, the sound of men rowing toward your home."

I am interested in reading more of his work, even moreso after reading this condemnatory comment (directed to Mr. Towers and the MFA alike) online by a Mr. "Johnny Zhivago":

"Down through the Valley" by Wells Tower was about the phoniest bit of nonsense I've ever read. It is because of Tower and the horde of MFA grads that I seldom read fiction anymore. The thing is so calculated rather than lived.... One senses that this is a person who has never lived life; never been married, or had children, or even is that experienced, yet he writes about "Life" -- and that is what it is, "writing about life" as if for a college course, rather than being art, which is life itself.

I allow room for such dismissal, but methinks it befitting to see for myself how pretentious this author may be.

Poets Brand New

"All our ingenuity is lavished on getting into danger legitimately so that we may be genuinely rescued." -Bob Frost

And thus we quote Bob Frost for the thousandth time and compile a hefty collection of up and coming poets, who have not published more than three books or outside the last seven years or so. After sifting through the collection, a good number of the poets begin to repeat each other in their stubborn, unintelligible fashion. I don't really buy into the avant-garde, but I do find that with cautious reading, you can discover some dynamic poets. Here's a look at a few from the collection entitled, "Leigitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century."

STEPHEN BURT

From what I gather, in lieu of his degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Oxford, Burt is more a valued and prolific critic of contemporary poetry than anything else (see his essay on the elliptical poets). So how does this verse guru fare in his own exercise? He uses an easy-going free form while experimenting with line, most notably with white space in "Ocean State" (an ode to Rhode Island) and "Paysage Moralisé" in which every line ends with the word “place.” "Paysage" resonates with a confused nostalgic tone, the speaker caught in wanderlust and attempting to find a “place” in this world. "Morningside Park" casts many images together to net the speaker’s discontent as he is tossed about a “vertiginous” day. Burt adheres to his own observations pertaining to recent poetry: how it captures persona and personality and “close calls with uncertainty [and] critiques of language.” I can see hints of O’Hara’s spontaneity as he walks down a street and journalizes in his head. Alas, Burt shows good hustle, but should stick to coaching.

DA POWELL

I am already a lover of Powell (reading through his trilogy Tea, Lunch, and Cocktails) and was more interested in what selections the editors would make than reading his work for the first time. His approach to the line is gutsy: his length either amplifies a moment in the poem or arguably contains a poem remotely. His diction stands out immediately and connects with the visceral emotion of his poems. Your mouth will have to work strenuously with the rhythm, length, and word choice. Almost a sexual experience to read his work, which I would not dismiss as unintentional. Ending poems with phrases such as “pull me quick into winter” add a mysterious quality which lures the reader into further readings. There is a confessional aspect to much of his work, namely his experience as a gay man with AIDS in America: combating the illness, being treated, side effects, and losing many friends to the disease. And of course there’s the attempt to fit into a homophobic society which does not want to grant homosexuals the same emotions and human capabilities as normal citizens. He has bravado, taking for himself what is rarely permissable, but never veering into the schmaltzy or preachy, while adding a healthy dose of self-deprecation and pop culture references to maintain a freshness to his work.

DAVID BERMAN

Eccentric. Berman’s surreal writing brings about disturbing revelations of reality. Traces of John Ashberry’s nightmarish reflection mixed with black humor. Favorite lines: “People who / wear turtlenecks must have really fucked-up necks” (Democratic Vistas). Big on persona. I can see evidence of cyncism left by Gluck here. Reads like prose at points. “Community College in the Rain” is a hilarious bizarre conversation between the “Dougs” and “Announcements” made at the school. Anti-establishment, man. “Wild hotels of the sea” is a tremendous metaphor in a poem that details instability so well. My self-assigned task is to check out his band, "The Silver Jews" and see if I can connect his music with his poetry in any way.