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Post Bro-dernism Lit Bro
Southern Gothic is my favorite sub-sub-sub-genre
Umberto Eco is my spirit animal
Don’t take me too seriously 😜

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The Dying Grass: Volume Five of Seven Dreams, A Book of North American Landscapes by William T. Vollmann

“I assure you, general, that as soon as you come into the West you will find no variance whatsoever between law, policy, philanthropy and common sense.”

After taking some time away and returning to it a few days ago, I have decided to put down The Dying Grass. All my frustrations and doubts about this book came to a head, and it’s time to move on. That said, I do have some thoughts about this massive tome that I want to share. As always, Vollmann pours everything he has into his work. The Dying Grass is one of his incredible achievements.

It tells the story of the 1877 conflict between the Nez Perce Tribe and the United States Cavalry, led by Civil War hero General Otis Howard. I feel that Howard might be Vollmann’s best character and, in a way, represents all the aggressors in the 7 Dreams series and perhaps the highlight of this novel. Howard is both hero and villain and a personification of American entitlement. Here is a god-fearing man who championed and fought for the freedom of African Americans, and yet he’s responsible for the murder and displacement of indigenous communities. We discover Howard through dialogue, with all his power, confidence and control. In a way, The Dying Grass is a 1200-page ego trip. Howard is a hypocrite through and through, and Vollmann enjoys exploring those complexities. Is he a man backed into a corner by the government, or a psychopath in hiding? The White Saviour or the White Exterminator?

As always, Vollmann drops us into the time and place and gives us hundreds of pages of notes, sources, and glossaries to guide the reader, but instead of a play-by-play historical retelling, he crafts an almost post-modern screenplay. The Dying Grass is made up almost entirely of unattributed dialogue and might be Vollmann’s most metafictional undertaking. It’s within this structure/style that, at times, it makes it a marvel but also a nuisance. At its best moments, this book is an epic literary opera of different voices; these voices shout from the plains and mountain ridges of the American West and when Vollmann is cooking, so to

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♾️ “In old age dreams are the weak current that rearranges the sand around your toes when you’re standing on the beach, helping you settle in so you can enjoy the sun and the wind.” ♾️

Years ago, my therapist told me “time does not heal all wounds, it adds layers to them.” If James Elkins experimental novel “Weak in Comparison to Dreams” could be distilled into one brief sentence (which the book itself would resist) I might choose that one. In Samuel Emmer’s world, this obsessive compulsive bacteriologist, this washed-up water management armchair psychoanalyst, there is no freedom, life is like a fire in the distance that doesn’t seem to move, a lovely danger that blazes very (or should I say veery?) slowly. And this fire, which is both dreamt and lived, can promise to chew up the bars of our caged lives, or fulfill the promise of psychoanalysis, where the dream attempts “to heal damage suffered during the day”, but the promise itself is always just smoke on the other side of the mountain, a far-off horizon never reached.

But is life truly weak in comparison to dreams? Perhaps. Emmer asserts that if Proust had lived long enough he would not be so optimistic about memory—for what else is a dream than a forgotten memory, a face that fades into the past and leaves us only with a feeling. Elkins writes, “music is strange portraiture: it preserves every nuance of mood and light, but faces are hard to see. The feelings are exact, but the people are gone.” One might say this is what occurs when reading a book like this. The majority of the book is like the present-tensed lived-experience of life, filled with the exactitude of anxiety and crises, entangled relationships, trauma responses and defence mechanisms, running in circles and figure eights. But time composts our catastrophes, breaking them down into inexact quieter landscapes.

(Continued in next photo caption…)

Many books carry the label “encyclopedic” or, like the works of W.G Sebald, blend genres and mediums like travelogue, visual essay, and documentarian prose fiction. Elkins gathers all of these labels, but what makes his experiment successful is his ability to allow the reader to au

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I’ve seen a lot of “10 before the end,” and I simply know I will not be able to achieve a good ten because of some larger books. So, I whittled my list down to 4 for November and 4 for December. Here’s my “8 before the end.” I hope to get to all eight, but Kin and Europe Central are my big plans. They’ve been staring at me all year, waiting to be taken off of the shelf. I’ve planned for both and other things have taken over on accident. So, here we go, I guess!

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After reading ‘Moby-Dick’ for the first time this week (yup, for the first time!), I think I’ve developed something of a crush on Herman Melville. By reputation, I was expecting MD to be good, but really, I was not prepared. I am entirely blown away (pun intended). It is stunning.

I knew it was more than just a story about a whale hunt, but I wasn’t prepared for its sheer beauty. It is deeply poetic and philosophical, with stunning prose; it is also brutal, gruesome and heartbreaking.

I’ve utterly fallen in love with it. For me, it’s going right up there among my all-time favourites, alongside ‘Ulysses’ and ‘The Recognitions’. I’ll definitely reread it soon, and next time I want to study it properly, as this first read was really just about enjoying it and getting to the end.

I should also say that I definitely found it a comfort read. Its beauty shines through without being nearly as taxing as some of my other most beloved works. Suspecting it might be just this, I chose to read along with an audiobook, and I can highly recommend the version narrated by Anthony Heald (see pics above). Perfect for curling up on the sofa with tea and cushions as the autumnal weather turns.

Sometimes it’s good for the soul simply to enjoy the pleasure of books, without the intellectual taxation.

So, with my newfound admiration for Melville, I’m moving straight on to ‘Billy Budd’, and possibly Andrew Delbanco’s biography. I would also love to reread Rodrigo Fresán’s gorgeous ‘Melvill’.

#mobydick #hermanmelville #classicliterature #billybudd #bookstagram

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William T. Vollmann’s mega-novel is here and it’s worth every minute we had to wait. I feel particularly lucky that I was within driving distance of an event where Bill and Sacramento author @devyndefoe read from their novels, answered questions, and signed all of our copies. In every way both Bill and Devyn were candid, gracious, approachable, and appreciative of the opportunity to engage with us as readers.

It was great getting to see both friends and strangers who have a similar appreciation for the type of books that Bill and Devyn write. It’s hard sometimes to find people outside the internet who feel the way that I do about literature and its necessary effect on our lives. This event was a reminder that there are plenty of other people who know and appreciate this kind of work.

So this is a post commemorating a magnum opus, a debut, and most of all for literature and its effect on us all. Happy reading, folks.

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The Rifles: Volume Six of Seven Dreams, A Book of North American Landscapes by William T. Vollmann

“It was important that the Canadian government know where he was. They could offer him no support, none. Oh, Polar Shelf could tell him horror stories...Go ahead. Well, just last year a Swedish gentleman went alone by dog-sled across the Great Slave Lake. He capsized, and got hypothermia. His dogs ate him.”

A few months ago, William T. Vollmann gave an interview to promote his new 3,400-page book, A Table for Fortune. During the conversation, the interviewer asked about the remaining two volumes of the Seven Dreams Series, and Vollmann gave a stark answer… essentially, he doesn’t have much time left and has abandoned the project…So, The Rifles is the final book in the series.

The novel tells the story of John Franklin’s doomed 1846 expedition to find the Northwest Passage, as well as Vollmann’s experiences researching and living with Indigenous communities in the Arctic Circle. Still, as with Vollmann, nothing is ever so simple, and what we get is probably the most dizzying and powerful entry in the series. We once again return to Canada, as we did in Fathers & Crows and The Arctic in The Ice Shirt; in a way, The Rifles could act as a sequel/coda to both of those previous dreams. The Arctic to Vollmann is a harsh, barren, and yet spiritual landscape (this is not Santa’s North Pole) that is extremely hostile and doesn’t want you to succeed; in fact, at every moment it is actively trying to kill you. Time is different up there, and it will play tricks on you.

Just like in the other dreams, Vollmann throttles you into the world, but this time The Rifles is more of a headtrip where both major storylines start to overlap, shift, and converge, page by page, sentence by sentence, and even phrase by phrase. It’s difficult to describe but makes for a dense, at times difficult, read, but it’s joyously disorienting. It is the most dreamlike of all the five dreams. In this confusion and convergence, Vollmann plays with style and form while also exploring moments of heart, pain, and struggle. [continued in the comments]

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Feeling very fortunate to have this on my table forever ❤️ See you tomorrow Bill!

#williamtvollmann #atableforfortune #grateful

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“If we hadn’t been expelled, Paradise would soon have felt like a small dull town and we’d have caught the first train. I know better than to pine, for I am a student of history, which is, after all, a chronicle of missed opportunities, invitations unsent though nicely signed, plans gone awry, cakes half baked.”

What would happen if Holden Caulfied grew up to be a misogynist asshole in academic garb? If he became a poet who could wax loftily about tits and “transmogrify a turd”? Can complaining be an art form, bigotry be a craft tended to in darkness and isolation, disappointment lend itself a political reality? Can digging a tunnel be a “quarrel with the earth?”

“The Tunnel” by William H. Gass raises these questions, raised by a man who crawls out of a hole in which he is prepared to (pretend to) die, only “to let loose one last opinion” before expiring forever “like a worm.” On the surface (of the tunnel?), “The Tunnel” is a diatribe against society, as though Umberto Eco’s protagonist of “The Prague Cemetery”—the shadowy figure who scribed the antisemitic tract “The Elders of the Protocols of Zion”—were to take his hand at a kind of Cioranian cynicism, his own rendition of “The Trouble With Being Born.” The effect Gass’ character, William Frederick Koehler, has on the reader somewhat resembles Philip Roth’s Mickey Sabbath, in that the first impression looks dark, horrible, and as the book tunnels into something more complex, a true-to-life psychoanalysis occurs, a portrait of a bigot, a Nazi-sympathizer, a member of “the party of disappointed people,” a person whose envy, spite, malice, and loneliness has fashioned in them what Gass has famously dubbed a “fascism of the heart.”

(Continued in comments…)

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What do you make of a life that’s already lived and died while you still inhabit it? How do you make sense of it when it happens more than once? What if it’s about to happen again? These are the kinds of questions I found myself confronting as I finished James Elkins’ Weak in Comparison to Dreams. At this point, much has been written describing the premise of the novel, so I won’t dwell on that. Instead, I’d rather share some of my experience in reading it.

I began this novel semi-naively, knowing vaguely who Samuel Emmer was, and that he was to visit zoos around the world, but around 150 pages into the novel, things finally began to fall into place for me such that I almost felt obligated to begin the novel from the top.

What appears on the surface as a story of a man driven to the brink by a failed marriage and festering dissatisfaction with his job and/or life is actually (I believe) a sort of Faustian exploration of how that life begins to unravel both inside and around him. He is epistolarily dissected and examined by his research assistants, and hopeless in terms of any real help he could offer the animals of the zoos. In fact, the animals function as a sort of mirror for Emmer’s own behaviors and life.

He is also plagued by dreams which do not behave like dreams; they continue in an unbroken stream in which he is fully cognizant from one moment of sleep to the next, showing him an increasingly dire scene of voracious forest fires. And so Samuel Emmer finds himself pressed on both sides towards a narrowing course of action left to him: escape from his own reality.

I personally believe there is a strong Judeo-Christian allegorical angle to Samuel Emmer’s story. Once I saw it, starting with Vipesh and Viperine’s names, I couldn’t help but find it everywhere; an expulsion from the Garden of Eden, a descent into Dante’s Inferno, Death and rebirth. It is this narrative thread that will have me reading, re-reading, and researching this novel/project for years to come. Suffice to say that Weak in Comparison to Dreams was one of the most transformative reading experiences of my life. I love literature. What a privilege to get to experience works like these.

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💀🍂 Some books I’ll be attempting to read this October

#fallreading #octobertbr #octoberreads #readingplans

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In my last post, I promised that I would give some thought to potential contenders for the category of “A Great American Novel.” Here are five I can speak to based on personal experience and another three that I have a strong suspicion about.

JR is the quintessential critique of American capitalism and the rot that eats away the heart of all of our lives. Its scenes are barebones; you get the sense that it could be a play acted out in a theatre in the round with little to no set, but the dialogue and prose elevate this from a quirky story about a boy who constructs a corporate empire from the back of a magazine into a careful consideration of what’s at the very core of a person in modern day America. For that alone I think it deserves to be in this category.

Tree of Smoke is a Great American Novel on the basis of its “Ideas.” There aren’t many novels that I know of that take up the notion of the Vietnam War and how it affected the country on an individual level. There’s an undercurrent of anxiety and helplessness to the characters here, and it feels poignant in a way that speaks to an American way of thinking about the world.

I have not read the Dying Grass yet, but I think the entire Seven Dreams series is a uniquely qualified project for A Great American novel, on the premise that each of them is about the interactions of indigenous Americans with white colonial powers. I firmly believe that The Seven Dreams should be read the way that Shogun or Gore Vidal is read, by which I mean to say ubiquitously and with due reverence.

The Public Burning is a tried and true postmodern masterpiece where Coover places the notion of America front and center. If this one has a fault for “Great American Novel” contention it’s that it’s a little too on the nose at times, but its subject matter, prose styling, and themes explored make it a perfect example of an absurdist entry in the category.

Mason and Dixon is also a perfect example of a Great American Novel because not only does it chronicle the origins of some of the original surveys that helped carve and chart this continent, but it’s also told in the rich oral tradition of a simpler America. Wicks Cherrycoke is a

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More jumbled thoughts the algorithm certainly won’t like! But I’d still like to hear from you.

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