new-ish fiction: neil gaiman's "a study in emerald"

a thought came to my mind: because i've always been terribly afraid of jail sentences, i feel hesistant about posting mp3s here. however, since this thing is supposed to be primarily about literature, i have decided to put up links to good short stories every once in a while.

the first story to be thus honored is neil gaiman's "a study in emerald." i don't really know whether it'll make sense to you if you haven't read something by h.p. lovecraft at some point in your life, so here's a primer: this writer (lovecraft, that is) developed an intricate cosmos populated by all sorts of creepy, pseudo-divine alien entities with funny names like cthulhu or nyarlathotep, and there's the constant threat of them being unleashed upon the unwitting human population. aesthetically, lovecraft drives home the feeling of constant, lingering malice by making frequent use of a quite limited set of adjectives (think "blasphemous," "unnameable" etc.) and generally refraining from actually describing the monsters that haunt his protagonists, focusing on the psychological terror of the - mostly doomed - characters instead. if you ever wondered where a good deal of metal bands get their lyrical inspirations from - here's the source. the hellboy comics and movies are also related.

i read lovecraft when i was really young and i'm not sure whether he's a great author (as, among others, borges and houellebecq think) or just another cheap pulp novelist from the first half of the 20th century. luckily, one doesn't have to ponder such questions any longer, because neil gaiman delivers a short story which juxtaposes lovecraft's cthulhu myth with the world of arthur conan doyle, thus adding a healthy dose of irony which makes this sort of thing palatable for grown-ups, not just role-playing, sex-deprived teenage nerds (i hope).

neil gaiman - "a study in emerald"

hope you don't feel like lovecraft in brooklyn after reading this one. now,"ph'nglui mglw'nafh cthulhu r'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn," indeed!

new music: dreamsludge and video gamers gone bad

i've come to notice that there are quite a few artists heavily influenced by endless hours of pushing buttons in front of a computer screen. no, i didn't all of a sudden realize that there is electronic music composed and produced on computers out there, but rather people like dan deacon and max tundra whose main sources of inspiration seem to be soundtracks to old video games. both "which song" and "get older" are beautiful, over-the-top exercises in blissed-out melodic weirdness which perfectly capture the excitement of a night spent in front of, i don't know, giana sisters while entertaining juvenile fantasies about girls. yes, i consider that sort of thing to be exciting. oh, while i'm at it: the depreciation guild has a somewhat similar approach, although they merge purely synthetic sounds with shoegaze rock in the vein of mbv and the likes. their album can be downloaded for free, so count yourself lucky.

in other shoegazing news, i discovered the label crucial blast whose artists seem to be into creating an unlikely yet interesting mixture of pop, sludge metal, noise, and - yes - shoegaze. i say " seem to" because i don't have the resources to actually buy some of their records at the moment, but once the money starts flowing, count me in. how can you not love a label that is responsible for inventing the subgenre "dreamsludge"? see, no one thought of it before, but the world is a happier place now.

a mixed bag of this'n'that

i should have expected this. posting my reading schedule seemed to promise some sort of rigorous literary exercise programme which would force me to read like a professional athlete. circle training: huxley, gaddis, crowley, and then a bit of marquez for cardio. what i failed to consider, however, is that i can only keep up that kind of discipline for a very short time. as so often, money is lost, gym memberships are abandoned, piles of books left unread.

i didn't stop reading though. far from it. the only thing is that i, despite of my impending bankruptcy, bought a huge load of other books. these i even managed to read, so there's an upside. let's have a look at some of them:



there's nothing more frustrating than coming up with a seemingly bright idea and then stumbling across someone who had that very idea way before you and acted on it far more convincingly than you'll ever be able to. case in point: this blog and nick hornby's "the complete polysyllabic spree." essentially a reader's diary he wrote for the US magazine believer, this is hornby at his best. even though i initially had little interest in most of his choices (a lot of british literature and remote american authors) , i still read the book cover to cover in two days. i didn't care for his last few novels, but once he's writing about his cultural obsessions - as he did in "fever pitch" and "high fidelity" - you just can't help being swept along with his enthusiasm. this man could probably even write a book about soccer and i'd still be interested. uh, wait, he actually did.

anyway, now i'll have to add another two books to my reading list: "citizen vince" by jess walter and "what good are the arts" by john carey. hornby's approach to keeping up a reading schedule also made me realize that it would help if i didn't only read novels but the occasional non-fiction book as well, just to spice things up a little. which leads us to another work finished during the christmas holidays:


yes, i know. uninspired and populist, this choice, no? well, i don't really mind because I'm ready to admit that i've been fascinated by the man ever since he decided to run for presidency. this book did little to lend further support to my enthusiam, but it also didn't diminish my view of the president elect. instead, what i got was page after page of deliberate dialectical reasoning which i've come to reckognize as being typical of lawyers. i don't know what it is, but being a succesful practitioner of the law seems to require a mock-regal, slighly dozy tone as well as tirelessly weighing one argument against the other without necessarily arriving at any sort of conclusion.
which, however, makes for a great meditative reading experience. on the one hand ... on the other hand ... still, there's no denying that ... relaxation guaranteed. the literary equivalent to a massage (although i never had a massage. it's actually supposed to be quite painful, isn't it?).

other honorable mentions: max goldt's "qq" (great as always, but since i'm writing about anglophone stuff here, i'll leave it at that). finished "the solitudes" and currently halfway through "love & sleep" (as promised, an entry on john crowley will follow sooner or later), while i've nearly given up on marquez. i wonder whether i should take to heart hornby's advice for people struggling with difficult books they're not really enjoying: "please, please: put it down. you'll never finish it. start something else."

we're going to ibiza: jaytech's "pyramid"

i've always been very particular as far as my taste in music is concerned. here's a formula which guarantees any artist at least one committed fan, dandunne:

• put all sorts of -sus (maybe also -9th) chords into your songs and avoid overt harmonic experimentation
• under no circumstances use -7th chords more than twice in a song (unless it's a -7th minor chord)
  
• put the vocals way back in the mix
• bury everything under heavy layers of guitar or keyboard
• don't make excessive use of different time signatures
• be as blatantly melodic as you can

some musicians that conform (sometimes to a lesser degree) to these guidlines are bob mould, my bloody valentine, various old emo bands, m83, christian fennesz, and others. but the truth is: the oppressive sounds of the dream-like happy-sad variety aren't only heard in indiestan, but also on ibiza! here's jaytech. that keyboard break around 02:02 kills me every time. notice how the bass then adds another root chord. unbelievable. i refuse to consider this a guilty pleasure - i'm raving, i'm raving.

reading schedule

man, i've got tons of books piling up on the floor, many of them tomes of 500+ pages! let's see which ones i should be reading in the next months:

gabriel garcía márquez: one hundred years of solitude (currently at it)

william gaddis: the recognitions

david foster wallace: infinite jest

aldous huxley: eyeless in gaza

john crowley: the solitudes & love and sleep

juding from the recent flood of books i purchased, it should come as no surprise that i realized i'm broke today! fuck. need to cut on my spending. in the meantime, let's not forget: "it'll get you drunk!"

jane charlotte is a-lying to you: matt ruff's "bad monkeys"

what a waste! i used to be (still am, actually) a great fan of matt ruff, as i often enjoy authors whose works osciliate between literary ambition and flat-out entertainment value. might it even be an option to consider the idea that both forms of writing are, in fact, not mutually exclusive? in case of ruff, this certainly holds true for his best novels, "fool on the hill" and - probably less known, but equally great if not better - "sewer, gas and electric: the public works trilogy". read them if you haven't. plus, he used to have awesome pieces on his favorite writers over at his website. unfortunately, they're not there anymore, but he's responsible for turning me on to john crowley, on whom i'll certainly write something once i finish "the solitudes."

back to topic: ruff's definitely one of the master storytellers of the "new weird," a label sometimes attached to writers like himself or neil gaiman, whose works display an inspired merging of different genres ranging from conspiracy thriller to bildungsroman. so, what happened in case of his newest novel "bad monkeys"? well, the problem seems to be that, just like some people who can't type anymore once they're aware of what they're doing, ruff's playing his cards all too self-consciously this time. the basic idea is familiar from movies like "nikita": the heroine, in this case jane charlotte, is recruited by a secret organization and becomes an assassin in the name of a somewhat dubious greater good. then, she realizes that her "department for the final disposition of irredeemable persons" is only one of many secret orders whose plans and actions seem to be interrelated, and thus, multiple plot twist and unexpected revelations ensue. a surprise ending in the vein of m. night shyamalan included.

the problem, however, is precisely the intricate plotting and ruff's constant play with the reader's expectations. there is one very essential thing lacking to back up the charade in order to turn it into something more than a self-reflexive exercise in cleverness: characters. yes, good-old fashioned characters you care for, until quite recently a strenght of ruff's writing. now, there'll be people in my imaginary audience of lit-crit afficionados who'll tell me: that's the point. this novel is all about ambivalence. it's all about the subversion of our atavistic need for stable, sympathetic hero figures. the novel's i-narrator, who relates the story to a psychologist while imprisoned, is quite the unreliable type, after all, and you better not take a thing she says for granted. add a few passages which are told from a third-person point of view and you get a novel that feels artificial and forced. there is virtually nothing gained from the juxtaposition of different levels of narration beyond a sort of stereotypical, hollow "my-expectations-are-being-toyed-with" sensation.

when i think of ruff's earlier novels, it's never the whole plot i recall - it's the beautiful college love affair gone mythical in "fool on the hill" or the foul-mouthed head of ayn rand in "the public works trilogy." i remember the christmas i got these books as a present and the next few days spent in the company of wonderful, albeit fictional characters. as so often, the real world couldn't hold up. well, if i were only less clumsy with girls, it just might one day. but it couldn't possibly get better than a thanksgiving dinner on the snowed-in campus of ithaca. let's hope ruff will return to form - there are christmases and desolate love lives to be saved.

character assassination: alan bennett's "the uncommon reader"

contrary to received wisdom, quite a few serious writers assume that literature might not be the most useful means to deliver us from evil. in other words: although books might do a lot of things, they won't change the world. or even a person. as jonathan franzen puts it:

"it's all too easy [...] to forget how frequently good artists through the ages have insisted, as auden put it, that 'art makes nothing happen.' it's all too easy to jump from the knowledge that the novel can have agency to the conviction that it must have agency."

i tend to share this sentiment. you'd thus expect me to hate books which promote any sort of "better-living-through-reading" agenda. why, then, did i enjoy alan bennet's "the uncommon reader"? after all, its plot revolves around the idea that the queen (yes, the empirical, living and breathing elizabeth II) discovers her love for literature, which makes her a more aware and, ultimately, better human being. self-transformation through art appreciation in its most emphatic sense.

i didn't read anything by bennet so far. however, i'm a huge fan of the "history boys" movie. had the novel been written by anyone else, the basic premise would have kept me away. i'm glad i made the effort, though, because "the uncommon reader" turns out to be an elegantly written, funny piece of literature with a twist. bennett traces the queen's journey into the "republic of letters" which causes great unease among her advisors and politicians alike, since it also makes her politically savvy. as she herself points out during a speech near the end,

"'one has given one's white-gloved hand to hands that were steeped in blood and conversed politely with men who have personally slaughtered children. one has waded through excrement and gore; to be queen, i have often thought the one essential item of equipment a pair of thigh-length boots.'"

standard-issue idealism that occupies moral high ground long held by the coelhos of this world, you say? far from it. this is the interesting thing about the novel - behind the elaborate sentences and the sympathetic depictions of the regal protagonist, there lurks a malicious author. instead of presenting a heart-warming tale of self-improvement, bennett actually perpetrates a subtle form of character assassination. everything the queen becomes after starting to read, the recipient must assume, she hasn't been before (i.e.: in reality). she gets smart (she's been dumb), she becomes aware (she's been indifferent), she's emphatic and emotional (she's been a stuck-up old hag). every sentence in this book implies its ugly dorian gray-ish mirror image.

the novel is thus indeed informed by the notion that art might change our outlook on the world. but beneath the lofty speculations about the relationship between literature and life that the text engages with on a surface level, "the uncommon reader" aims at a very real and tangible target - the corruption of power, symbolized by queen elizabeth II. bennett manages to turn such a utilitaristic, unappealing bottom line into an ambigious, ironic story that manages to entertain, if not to agitate.

a personal sidenote: i've been living in a small hell-hole at the western fringes of germany for the last two years. it's been a festering pile of minor catastrophes, boredom and general frustration. the idea that literature might be capable of illuminating the provincial darkness somehow seems more attractive than it did before. should probably be reading more thomas bernhard than i used to do.