Dusting off a few words

Reading is tailor-made for the Manhattan lifestyle. I spend at least an hour and a half on the subway every day. Over the years, I’ve developed two ways to fill that time hole - poetry and reading. The last few years have found me reading at pace unlike any I've enjoyed. I am so voracious for reading material, I'm actually going back to my bookshelf and reading all those books I was supposed to have read in college. A couple weeks ago, I finished the third Rabbit book by John Updike - Rabbit is Rich. I always reach a point when I’m reading Updike, 50 pages or so, when I become convinced that I am going to be bored to death and should just stop reading. By the end, though, I’m begging for more. Updike has a completely unassuming way of writing. His text is so non-stylized, it feels bland, at first. But it’s So Fucking True. His gaze settles upon details with such a deadly accuracy, it’s unnerving. Rabbit is frustratingly non-heroic, even ineffectual, but when he comes through you want to throw a party for him. He reminds me way to much of myself (bastard).

Early last week, I finally sat my ass down and read a couple Robert Louis Stevenson short stories - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Merry Men. Although Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has become a fixture in western vocabulary and has been emulated in numerous pieces of fiction, including the fantastic Fight Club, I still found myself pulled through the narrative. It reminds me of Dracula and Frankenstein, where a supernatural concept is used as a construct to examine the primal instincts of man. Stevenson keeps the action and discoveries so in-the-moment, it’s easy to forget that you already know the outcome.

The Merry Men started as a bored follow-up. I was stuck on the subway after finishing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and read it because it was in the only book I was holding and I was still stuck at the Canal Street Station on the way home from a TriBeCa volunteer gig. Holy shit, man. The Merry Men kicks ass. I wrote a stage adaptation of Stevenson's Kidnapped back when I was in college. I discovered that Stevenson is a fantastic writer and has some of the most powerful imagery I've ever known in a writer. When one tries to adapt the story to a visual medium, however, it becomes frustratingly-apparent that his images are not only deceptively complex, they would cost a fortune to render onstage or onscreen. There is a particularly fantastic moment towards the end of The Merry Men where the protagonist stands at a seaside precipice and witnesses the strobing instant of impact as a sailing ship is driven against the rocks by a seething tempest. Damn... good stuff.

Early this week, I pulled out a Kurt Vonnegut novel I’d bought 8 years ago for 50¢ and never bothered to read. It’s called Bluebeard and if I had read it within the first 3 years of purchase, I would have liked it but easily forgotten it. Living with a painter for the last 5 years, however, has granted me a little perspective on the Abstract Expressionist movement of the mid-20^th Century, not to mention the personal crises I’m undergoing with my craft. Vonnegut is one of those novelists that I’ve never actively sought out, but never fails to surprise me. Cat’s Eye was a serious mind-fuck for me the first time I read it and was, in fact, the impetus for my Bluebeard purchase. It’s strange - somehow it feels like I was waiting to grow up a little before I allowed myself to read Bluebeard… and I didn’t know what the hell it was about until I read it.

Right now, I’m half way through Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key. I’ve always been a sucker for hardboiled detective novels. I’ve read The Thin Man and number of Raymond Chandler books. I was initially piqued by this genre via my long, love affair with film noir classics like Detour, The Maltese Falcon, Kiss Me Deadly, and The Killers. Of course, I subsequently found the books to be far more fun. In fact, I used to keep a collection of quotations from these books. I’m pulling my quote pages out right now and I’m enjoying quite a few of them, including:

“Lead is his meat.”

“Grab a cloud.”

“Dangle, sister.”

“Go climb your thumb.”

(and my all-time favorite) “This ain’t my idea of a spot for a lead party. Drift!”

I’ve vowed to finish Updike’s Rabbit series, read Miller’s Tropic of Cancer/Tropic of Capricorn, climb the mountain of Joyce’s Ulysses, then try my hand at contemporary fiction. They’re still writing these days, right (joking – I’m joking!)? I’m anxious to try out some Irvine Welsh (The Beach, maybe) and Naomi Klein’s No Logo (not a fiction book, but hey…).

If anybody has any off-the-wall recommendations, I’m all ears.

of Deckard and the Book of the Obtuse

I finished the Lord of the Rings and now I'm perusing chapters out of The Silmarillion. Now, there's a hard nut to crack. It wasn't until last summer that I was finally able to slog through The Silmarillion - the bible of Middle Earth. It reads like the Bible too. Even as a longtime Tolkien fan I found the first few chapters impassable the first couple of times I attempted it. It's like reading those sections in The Iliad where Homer's describing so-and-so, son of such-and-such, who lived in Nowhereville slayed whazizname from those folks who ran the olive oil business in Eastern Nowhereville.

For those of you who have read the Lord of the Rings and want to read The Silmarillion, or at least get past the first couple chapters, it's important to get a good map. The one provided for the contemporary hardback editions is a little sketchy. It'll get you through the early chapters fine. The one for the paperback is a complete joke. I Googled up one on the net that must have come from a Tolkien companion book somewhere. Trust me, when you're following Turin through one marsh, across an obscure mountain range and into some lake at the east end of the forest where Barahir once hid out, you're gonna want to know where the hell you are. When Christopher Tolkien wrote this one, he wasn't exactly in full command of his father's evocative prose so it's probably best to think of it as more of a history textbook type of thing. Actually, Chris pieced this together from J.R.R.'s notes so I guess that I can forgive him after trying to decipher the hieroglyphics I write on Post-It notes.

With map in hand, your primary goal should be to remember names. They come fast and furious in the middle-to-late stages so if you're thumbing to the back every other sentence to figure out what the Valar are, who Morgoth is, or what was the name of the splinter group of elves made it over the Blue Mountains but didn't make it to the Sirion River during the first migration to the West, then you're gonna be in some serious trouble. Fortunately, there are some pretty cool details that you will discover if you can wade through it. Sauron has a pretty cool history, Galadriel puts in a few good appearances and Morgoth makes Sauron look like a total pansy in villain category. It was nice to get a few stories about dwarves and a killer elf named Turin and the whole book just underscores what an impressive and, thankfully, anal-retentive philologist Tolkien really was.

As for me, I'm going to re-read the Beren and Luthien chapter because I'd just recently saw that Tolkien had Beren written on his tombstone and Luthien on his wife's so maybe there's something a little special there in that story. Then, it's off to a little John Updike and Rabbit is Rich. I think I need a little dose of reality, albeit retro-reality.

beneath the resin-scented darkness of the Trees

I'm reading The Lord of the Rings for the fourth time in my life. After I complete it, I suspect that I'll stop trying to keep count. It's a tremendous series and one of the greatest influences of my adolescence. I never became one of those freaky Renaissance fair folks who talk in Olde English at home, but I might have been guilty of making maps of my own little world and writing hideously-derivative tales of dragon-slaying and wizardry. I went on to read a whole slew good-to-lousy fantasy novels, always hoping to recapture some shred of newness and wonder I felt the first time I read a Tolkien novel. Raymond E. Feist, David Eddings, Orson Scott Card - oh yeah, I read books like Zorachus and even made the mistake of checking out a few Forgotten Realms books. It was never the same, though. There's nothing quite like genre fiction after you get 1 or 2 generations away from the original.

Something far more profound about Tolkien grabs me as I turned one page upon another. Tolkien's rendering of scene is absolutely stunning. The descriptions and feeling of hill, dell, river and season rendered images of my imagination that that the movie could never hope to touch. In single, almost throwaway lines, Tolkien rendered a feel wiith all the thrift of Hemingway at the height of his powers.

Away eastward the sun was rising red out of the mists that lay thick on the world. Touched with gold and red the autumn trees seemed to be sailing rootless in a shadowy sea.

The land of Middle Earth has a physicality that feels very removed from the world of today. With electricity, industrialization and gas-powered vehicles, we can hurl ourselves from one space to another with little thought to the weather, time of day or time of season. Instant gratification allows us to eat a strawberry or eat a hamburger any day of the year. It has taken a girlfriend who knows far more about plants than I to tell me the names of plants and their seasons of flowering. I've never known because I've never had to know.