This is what shows of a spam in my gmail account, registering just as I clicked on the “spam” button to forever remove it. Not forever gone, we see.
Last night we went to Brock Clarke’s reading of his new novel, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England. It was filled, the Joseph-Beth’s reading area; more chairs were brought in at 5 minutes till, when we arrived, and then there were still more people standing after, and this was an appreciative crowd, some of whom appeared to be his students. Lots of chuckling. He read the excerpt that he has available on his website (see link above), and then skipped forward and read a little bit somewhere ten years after (I try not to think of the band when I type that phrase but it does no good, part of my formative years and all, with an older brother who taught himself to play guitar by replaying Alvin Lee’s guitarwork and emulating it over and over again, along with Hendrix and Carlos Santana and others, until these albums wore out; you could literally see the changes in the vinyl). So a skip of a decade later, with Brock Clarke filling in the missing details — the narrator is now married, etc. There were jokes in the text, something about academics’ letters being notable by their refusal to use contractions, and many in the audience laughed in such a way that made me think that they were likely colleagues of the author also from the University of Cincinnati. All in all, it was a good turnout for Brock Clarke and he must have been glad for it. Lots of listeners standing in line for a signed book.
And the book gets great reviews, many of which you can read the nice big chunks of flattery on the same website.
It was good to have an actual reading to go to, we said. Of a living, breathing, working writer in the same locale. We liked it. It gave us hope.
We think local book clubs should read this book.
VQR published this past summer a good essay of Clarke’s: The Novel is Dead, Long Live the Novel. A mostly reaction against a NYTBR, (Rachel Donadio) “Truth is Stronger Than Fiction” (which, of course, is a lie; let us not forget “The universe is made up of stories, not of atoms†(Rukeyser)–I have the HMR t-shirt with the quote printed on it (back, the front has the woodcut-looking logo of the cow grazing in very tall grassblades) to prove it); explaining that you can’t ask a novel to do what it’s not supposed to do. This is crudely put. Along the way, building the case, many strong points and useful ideas for the novelist as well others working with other forms of prose. Also, you can listen to a podcast (haven’t, yet) that takes up the essay topic, VQR points out: A Conversation with Brock Clarke (Kevin Holtsberry, Collected Miscellany blog).
(HMR = Hungry Mind Review)
What I’m reading now includes The Echo Maker, Richard Power; a National Book Award winner and finalist for The Pullitzer, and just about 80 pages in, I estimate, I am so glad that the guy who was in the accident, the brother, Mark, that’s right, is starting to have a somewhat more mended brain: those passages (long passages) in which we are treated to his first-person narration through the injured mind are almost enough to put me off the whole book. This is one of those books we’re reading aloud; i.e. I’m reading it out loud while C. is (usually) putting together some dinner or maybe just stretched out on the futon in the den, listening; so conceivably I’m doing a poor job reading these parts. Still, I read aloud a lot, and I happen to like (and have written, or tried to write) such bits, fascinated as I am with the inner mysteries, the mind, language. These book parts are off-putting; we have said that were we in a workshop with the MS, we would have advised against them. Still, we go on, compelled by the mystery of the note left at Mark’s bedside. And the knowledge of the awards!
Also reading Deborah Blum’s Ghost Hunters: William James and the Scientific Search for Life After Death; excellent. She writes like this:
… [Henry James, Sr.] would appear trailing Swedenborgian spirits like translucent fish hooked onto a spectral line.
And I am reading through old children’s textbooks, which inspire me lately (in the making of poems). The language. I came across the following in an old health textbook. Not inspiring, but startling: the moralizing and value-judgment pronouncement.
People who have no purpose in life but to be healthy and keep healthy are useless citizens.
Useless citizens, like others, breathing, breathing healthily.
But mostly I have not been reading, I have been writing. Next entry, when there’s time, some stuff on reading and writing.