Reading Notes

Sometimes, I will read any style if the subject is what I want.

Or, I will read any subject if the style is what I want.

Best practices, right?

Ursula K. Le Guin: Telling It

“Interactivity in the sense of the viewer controlling the text is also nightmarish, when interpreted to mean that the viewer can rewrite the novel.  If you don’t like the end of Moby Dick you can change it.  You can make it happy.  Ahab kills the whale.  Ooowee.


“Readers can’t kill the whale.  They can only reread until they understand why Ahab collaborated with the whale to kill himself.  Readers don’t control the text: they genuinely interact with it.”

—from “The Question I Get Asked Most Often”



“Prose does not have meter.  Prose scrupulously avoids any noticeable regularity or pattern of stresses.  If prose acquires any noticeable meter for more than a sentence or so (just as if it rhymes noticeably), it stops being prose and becomes poetry.

“This is the only difference between prose and poetry that I have ever been certain of.”

—from “Stress-Rhythm in Poetry and Prose”



"Nobody who says, 'I told you so' has ever been, or will ever be, a hero."

--Ursula K. Le Guin,
from "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie"

McGuane: "Swallowing Hot Soup Upside Down"

Here's a piece from Thomas McGuane's Panama, a novel that made a lot more sense for me in 2006 or so than when I first read it back in 1985 or '86, in my mid-forties than in my mid-twenties.

If you know the novel, you just may know what I mean.

I have a lot of respect for how McGuane writes, for how he mixes the verbal gymnastics here with the practical considerations of characters in motion.


She put some music on--Tejas by Z Z Top, I think, something hard--stood up, and slid out of the rest of her duds.  I was transfixed, all my general views gone, everything withering to make room for the present, the furious rifle vision which riddles everything, that madhouse of what seems like a good idea at the time.


I had come with the flowers in addition to my usual maladies, been touched, and now found myself just as addled as thrilled.  My mental focus left like water for her to swim in; and suddenly we were on the floor and she was slipping away and I'm thinking, I can settle this.  And then I thought about Catherine and how it could be when it was with someone you loved.  This was the girl from the storm cellar.


She said, "You've got premature ejaculator written all over you."  I glanced into mid-air.


I felt completely there for it; but the feeling of the inside of her ran up spreading through me like swallowing hot soup upside down.  I looked down, as I do, and thought, as I am afraid I do, that she couldn't get away.  But she had some little movement that ought to be against the law.  And I was grateful, wondering where my old vanity had gone, when it was always my benificence that I thought was on the line, not these glorious collisions.  The earlier theater between Marcelline and me evaporated and it all grew dead serious; and probably, objectively, maybe even a trifle grotesque, as in knotty and wet and uncoordinated.


--from Thomas McGuane's Panama, Penguin Books, 1978: pages 50-51.

Hemingway's Show-and-Tell

Here's a favorite passage from Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. I like what the young Hemingway is learning about the Russian writers in general and about reading and writing in particular. I like how he recognizes the mixing of elements and the finding of treasure. He celebrates these great authors and celebrates Paris and the way of life that always moves me with a touch of envy. As the passage finishes I like how Hemingway presents this moment of conflict between mentor and mentee. He explains how he felt about Russian literature and how he admired Ezra Pound, but when Pound's advice doesn't match with what he feels . . . we get this moment of defensiveness and disappointment. Hemingway is scrupulous about pointing out the integrity of the "straight answer" and yet . . . . We can see the student leaving the teacher behind here, not very happily, and how conflicted Hemingway was in that moment. He tells us the "facts," you could say, but the drama beneath the telling is the real heart of the last paragraph.

Hemingway recounts how his world expanded, and expanded again.

Well, that's plenty of telling, so now I'll turn the show over to Hemingway himself. From "Evan Shipman at the Lilas" in A Moveable Feast . . . .

In Dostoyevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev, and the movement of troops, the terrain and the officers and the men and the fighting in Tolstoi. Tolstoi made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady photographs that I had read and seen at my grandparents' house. Until I read the Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal I had never read of war as it was except in Tolstoi, and the wonderful Waterloo account by Stendhal was an accidental piece in a book that had much dullness. To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take your treasure with you when you traveled too, and in the mountains where we lived in Switzerland and Italy, until we found Schruns in the high valley in the Vorarlberg in Austria, there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems and your high shelter in the Hotel Taube in the village in the day time, and at night you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you. At first there were the Russians; there there were all the others. But for a long time there were the Russians.

I remember asking Ezra once when we had walked home from playing tennis out on the Boulevard Arago, and he had asked me into his studio for a drink, what he really thought about Dostoyevsky.

"To tell you the truth, Hem," Ezra said, "I've never read the Rooshians."

It was a straight answer and Ezra had never given me any other kind verbally, but I felt very bad because here was the man I liked and trusted the most as a critic then, the man who believed in the mot juste --the one and only correct word to use-- the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations; and I wanted his opinion on a man who almost never used the mot juste and yet had made his people come alive at times, as almost no one else did.

"Keep to the French," Ezra said. "You've plenty to learn there."

"I know it," I said. "I've plenty to learn everywhere."

Dorothy Dunnett's King Hereafter: A Descriptive Sample

I love this book, this novel, about the historical Macbeth, Thorfinn of Orkney. Dunnett's lively mind and comprehensive research provide a dense, demanding, rewarding reading experience. I've read and reread this book so many times that I enjoy dipping into it anywhere, which almost always draws me into rereading from the very first page. I always falter at finding the right words to describe this novel of action and intellect, force and cunning, passion and compassion. History as life, as a dynamic force or field, and thinking --mindfulness, thought undivorced from physicality and action--are the two house-pillars upon which this word-hall is built. The book is intelligent, often gorgeous, often brutal. Thorfinn is a Viking, after all.

Anyway, here's just one paragraph, selected almost at random, that I feel catches Dunnett's lively, observant, worldly style in a few sentences. Here, the people of Orkney are awaiting word of the war in Norway and they gather on the strand as the first ship with news approaches. Dorothy Dunnett's day-job, as it were, was as a portrait painter, and I think you can see some of that artistry even here in a minor paragraph from page 62.

"Instead of a clean half-moon of blue pebbles, the beach was thick as a bere-field with heads: the cloth-bound heads of married women and the shining cloak-fall of hair of young girls, as well as the cloth and leather caps, the untrimmed hair and beards of the farmers, and the smooth chins and snake-moustaches of those who had travelled and fought and fancied a foreign style would make them sound wittier. The roar of talk, as the longship's prow, sixty feet high, cut towards them, grew to a storm, pushing back the kindly sound, the surfing lap of the waves."