Posts Tagged ‘Poe’

“We Others: New and Selected Stories” by Steven Millhauser

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011

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Are you wondering the same thing I’m wondering? Would you like to call the senior editor at Knopf to the witness stand to answer a few questions starting with this one: Why this book?

The “New Stories” half of “We Others: New and Selected Stories” by Steven Millhauser occupies just 144 pages. Does the publisher view us readers of Millhauser as an impatient lot, unable to wait the few years it would take this methodically productive author’s backlog of unpublished stories to grow from the seven found here to a total of, say, a dozen? Why not wait for enough material to satisfy our expectation for a hearty, stand-alone book of new stories? And what about the back half of the book — the “Selected Stories” compilation? Does this indicate Knopf considers Millhauser undeserving of a “Collected Stories” compilation (the treatment respectfully accorded Lydia Davis, Amy Hempel, Grace Paley, Deborah Eisenberg and others)?

The 14 previously published stories, which come from Millhauser’s four books of short stories, are:

From “In the Penny Arcade”:  A Protest Against the SunAugust EschenburgSnowmen. From “The Barnum Museum”: The Barnum MuseumThe Eighth Voyage of SinbadEisenheim the Illusionist. From “The Knife Thrower”: The Knife ThrowerA VisitFlying CarpetsClair de Lune. And from “Dangerous Laughter”: Cat ‘n’ MouseThe Disappearance of Elaine ColemanHistory of a DisturbanceThe Wizard of West Orange.

Millhauser explains in his “Author’s Note” how he worked past initial trepidation to pick these pieces: “I chose stories that seized my attention as if they’d been written by someone whose work I had never seen before.” Millhauser fans may object to the omission a favorite or two from his inventory, but I think he generally made good choices. This compilation will allow a new reader to get an honest perspective on Millhauser’s work. So: the book may be an excellent gift idea.

Part of the pleasure of reading Millhauser (who is on the faculty at Skidmore College’s Department of English) is to enjoy the ways in which his literary inspirations flavor his writing. Even when his plots are ensconced in late 20th or early 21st century settings, something in the atmosphere, some note or tone, will harken back to 19th century American writers, especially Hawthorne and Poe. When a protagonist proclaims that “anxiety’s our pastime, desperation our sport,” one is reminded of the restlessness, the fevered unease (nay, panic) that seizes so many narrators of that period. Then, too, there is the author’s infatuation with T.S. Eliot’s The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock. Most boldly, in the story Klassic Komix #1 (collected in “The Barnum Museum”) Millhauser re-conceived Prufrock’s anxious meanderings in the form of a 44-panel comic book. Now, in one of his new stories, we read of a similarly drifting character emerging from his lonely room with desirous thoughts — thoughts that parody Eliot’s lines (note, for example, what happens to Prufrock’s final fantasy of becoming a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas):

“. . . one has come down from the attic in search of — in search of what? Shall we say, a pleasant encounter between two like-minded souls, in a suburban living room, of a September eve? And yet the craving to reveal ourselves spreads in us like a disease. It’s also true that we long not to be seen, never to be seen, to live out our existence — our existence! — like growths of mold in the depths of forests.”

While Millhauser is not breaking any new ground in the seven new stories, I perceived a heightened emphasis on what in one story he calls “a savage loneliness of which you can know nothing.” Opening with “The Slap” in which a quiet suburban community attempts to fathom the meaning of a stealthy stranger who randomly approaches residents and delivers a slap to their face (“we had been violated in some definite though enigmatic way”) and ending with “We Others” which is narrated by the ghost of a recently-deceased doctor who self-examines his attraction to a couple of lonely women (“our desire is infused with a darker, more ferocious longing: the desire for all that we have ceased to be”), these new tales are a continuation of Millhauser’s hallmark obsessions played out within solidly crafted surreal worlds — worlds which mirror what we understand, perhaps mistakenly, to be our real world.

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An abbreviated version of this review is posted on Amazon, here.

“Pym” by Mat Johnson

Sunday, March 6th, 2011

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The first thing you’ll probably want to know is whether you should read Poe’s “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” before picking up Mat Johnson’s “Pym.” The answer is, that’s not really necessary. Johnson helpfully devotes 15 pages in the second chapter of “Pym” recapping the plot of Poe’s solitary novel and discussing its still-debated meaning. This background is all you need to appreciate this new, inspired-by-Poe, piece of imaginative fiction.

The novel’s narrator, Chris Jaynes, is a recently dismissed professor of African-American literature. He believes Poe’s enigmatic novel, maddeningly obsessed with motifs of black and white, is the talisman that can open up our understanding of race in America, especially the nature of “Whiteness, as a pathology and a mindset.” He seeks to discover, through literary detective work, “the primal American subconscious, the foundation on which all our visible systems and structures were built.” Sleuthing leads to grand adventure. Jaynes assembles an all black crew of six for a voyage to Antarctica to find “the great undiscovered African Diasporan homeland.” This quest is set within a satirical framework that allows Johnson to launch sallies against a slew of social and political targets.

A caution: You’re probably better off not reading reviews of “Pym” found in the mainstream press and magazines — or avoiding, at least, the type of review that spends paragraph after paragraph exposing too much of the plot, revealing too many of the critic’s favorite scenes, highlighting too many jokes and puns (for example, this one). I mean, please. “Pym” is a novel whose twists and turns and revelations you yourself deserve to encounter (and judge) afresh, without prior interference. Set aside those reviews for reading once you’ve finished.

One reason I enjoyed “Pym” is a nostalgic one, frankly. If you’re a reader of a certain age you remember living through what now appears, in hindsight, to have been a golden era of the American satirical novel. There once was a tribe of writers who yanked our chains, social and political. I’m thinking of the years that saw the publication of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” and “Our Gang,” and the works of Terry Southern, John Barth, Gore Vidal, Robert Coover and others. First among them was Kurt Vonnegut, who sustained a long career of telling common truth to ignoble power. Who is extending that satiric tradition into the current day?

Based on the antic fun and strength of “Pym,” Mat Johnson may come to join that assembly of noble writers. The intelligence behind his satire is combined with a hearty sanity that reminds me of Vonnegut, especially.

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A version of this review is posted on Amazon, here.

Some amazing photos of the real Antarctica can be found here.

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Frank Gehry Scores Big With Disney Concert Hall

Monday, May 4th, 2009

As with all great works of architecture, Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (completed in 2003) richly rewards visitors willing to engage their senses, reconnoiter the structure, enter its interior courtyards, experience the squeeze and release through tight and open spaces, enjoy its forms and gestures, admire its skin in changing light, absorb its physical beauty, and breathe sympathetically with its rhythms.

Professional photographers of the structure usually try to capture the totality of its iconic presence, highlighting the mass of shapes Gehry based on sailing, “wing on wing, the wind behind you.”

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Rarely is the building photographed from a ground level perspective directly across South Grand Avenue.  (In the photo above, you see a bit of the street’s asphalt in the lower left corner.)  This may be for the simple reason that the six-lane corridor is a noisy crossing, a sorry, off-putting, quotidian presence estranged from the visionary building emerging from its flank.  Then too, Gehry fans may be avoiding photographing the site from that perspective for fear of adding support to a common criticism of Gehry’s designs: that his buildings do not seem to relate “organically” to their surroundings.  And yet by standing on the east side of South Grand Avenue you’ll find yourself in the best position to see a defining architectural detail.

Google Maps, through its street view function, allows you to “walk” — or more accurately, to “drive” — past the street level facade.  Unfortunately, individual photos taken from the drive-by Google Van are of disappointing quality, as evident in the two screenshots below.

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Flickr and other photo sharing sites contain pictures with finer resolution.  Here is a virtually identical shot, from a slightly more oblique angle (credit: core.formula on Flickr):

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Finally, here is a full frontal shot, apparently taken from across the street (the ideal vantage point), looking straight-on at the sidewalk entrance to the building:

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All four photos include the detail that is of interest to me.  Focus for a moment on the base of the composition and the single, wide, rectangular shape that swoops across and projects outward from the building.  Of the dozen or so curving pieces or individual “sails” that comprise the skin of the structure, this one stands apart somehow.  Viewed unkindly, you might conclude it is an afterthought, an empty, ungainly, tacked-on piece, a doodle, a patch protecting the lowest portion of the building.  I disagree.  I think  it is different for a reason.  There are clues, if we open our eyes.

This particular piece has a more subtle rotation, is less of an arabesque, and more of a standard shape, than the other pieces.  Although made of unadorned sheet metal (stainless steel), it manages also to look like a blank billboard, floating with no apparent support above glass walls and doors.  Stretched horizontally with a slight incline from left to right, the entire form seems to be lifting up to grant you entrance to the ground floor.  Viewed in isolation, it is a kind of tabula rasa.

So, if the other individual pieces are whimsical cut-outs, enjoyable for their own sakes, what extra meaning does this frontal plane possess?  What does it remind you of?  What is it referencing?  Or, to ask the question another way, what do you want to project upon it?

One reference, consistent with the theme of the building as a whole, might be to a nautical flag flowing in a sustaining light breeze.  Although this is a reasonable thought, I think Gehry’s intention was something else entirely.

On closer inspection you notice ten horizontal lines of crimping, ten visible seams if you count the top and bottom edges as “lines.”  (This is best seen in the next-to-last photo above; in person, the lines are even more plain to the eye.)  As a matter of engineering, of course, these lines are merely the residue of a structural technique binding expanses of sheet metal, lapping the pieces together.  You may also notice that scores of  individual stainless steel sheets are the constituent notes making up the whole.  These small units (rectangles positioned horizontally) together compose a similarly-shaped, but much larger form.  This may be an example of a phenomenon mathematicians call self-similarity.

The horizontal, seamed striations lend a pronounced grain to the convex swoosh, reminiscent of Roy Lichtenstein’s brushstroke paintings and prints from the mid-1960s:

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So we have an unfurled nautical flag and the choreography of a painter’s brushstrokes — both suitable ideas to associate with the architecture of this cultural center.   But I return again to the singularity of that expansive sheet above the entrance, to its discernible separateness even while it participates in the dance of the overall composition.  I think it wants to communicate something on its own.

It wants to sing.

Step back a moment and ask, What is the purpose of this complex building?  To house a particular form of art: music.  Philosophers devoted to the study of aesthetics consider music to be the highest form of art.  Music is unencumbered by the compromise of physical form.  It avoids constraints afflicting sculpture, dance, and architecture.  Goethe declared that architecture is frozen music.  It would not be surprising if a thoughtful and gifted architect such as Frank Gehry, tasked with designing a grand physical container for music making, were to choose to comment on this subject somewhere in his design of the Disney Concert Hall.  I think what Gehry decided to say is writ large in that floating blank sheet with ten horizontal lines.  Or, inching closer to the answer, he’s saying something ought to be writ large there.

As in Poe’s The Purloined Letter, the object of our search may be hidden in plain sight, so obvious that it becomes all too easy to overlook.

Remember that Gehry is a leader in adopting new tools to assist in the visualization, modeling, and execution of his visionary designs.  A man who cares passionately about the tools of architecture would no doubt reflect on the tools of the sister art, music, that his commission has bound him to serve.  (A side note: When I attended the final performance of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s inaugural season at Disney Hall, I saw Gehry and his wife in their customary seats; the architect is an inveterate concert-goer.)

What I believe Gehry has chosen to emblazon across the entrance to his work is a replica of — an homage to — the essential tool for the communication and dissemination of music.  Here is the transformation:

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The Grand Staff of music — a framework upon which notes are marked in relation to ten lines, five above middle C and five below — has in Gehry’s hands become a grand architectural gesture.  Remember also that this place is the Walt Disney Concert Hall — a place where imagination, creativity, and engineering magic can turn a pre-scored skin of metal into a giant treble clef (there to hold an unfolding melody) and an equally giant bass clef (there to host a supportive harmony).

A place where music begins.

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UPDATE 07-13-2009:  A different Lichtenstein print, created in 1995, recently came to my attention.  Roy and Frank, humming the same tune:

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