The Reading Experience

Pick Out Two

While going through my archives in order to export them to this new address, I came across this orphaned post, which I apparently wrote in a fit of disgust with Nobel Prize speculation but wisely decided not to publish:

The 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to Moe Howard. Asked about the apparent slight to himself and long-time partner Larry Fine, Moe's brother Curly proclaimed them "victims of coicumstance."

Moe is widely known for the use of such literary devices as the eye poke, the hair pull, and the windmill konk to the head. Although many observers believed the Prize might go to the American writer, Phillip Roth, Roth himself commented that "nobody can follow up the underhanded punch to the stomach with a devastating blow to the forehead quite like Moe."

Moe is expected to accept the Prize in person, but sources say he has promised to avoid pincering the nose of King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden with a pair of scissors.

Although for all I care about who wins this prize, they may as well give it to Moe. (All due respect to Curly.)

Review of The Laughing Monsters

The Laughing Monsters is not an altogether tedious read. Its origins in Johnson’s own reporting on the situation in Africa gives its rendering of character and setting a tacit authenticity. The plot has its moments of high tension, and the narration by Nair succeeds in immersing us in the story. The prose Nair employs is nimble enough to accomplish these larger purposes, although there are few of the kind of stylistic flourishes for which Johnson became much admired in his earlier books. In The Laughing Monsters Johnson seems content to produce an “entertainment” of the kind Graham Greene claimed to periodically write, a novel that engages the author’s characteristic themes, but in a manner that seems safely familiar.

My review of Denis Johnson's The Laughing Monsters.

Surrealist Poetry

Garrett Caples, "Surrealism Is a Romantic Critique of the Avant-Garde from Within":

The assertion that surrealism “eschews the traditional criteria…by which one judges a piece of writing” is certainly a strawman argument in 2014, inasmuch as the proposed criteria (“taste, beauty, structure, depth, symbolism”) haven’t been live considerations in any poetry worth taking seriously since modernism. That battle has been fought and won and no serious reader judges any contemporary poetry on these bases. The fact of the matter is that you must “assess the quality and value of surrealist writing in comparison to other writing,” for the simple reason that surrealism must exceed the quality and value of other writing. Despite one of surrealism’s earliest assertions, drawn from one of the movement’s key progenitors Lautréamont, that “Poetry should be made by all,” no “body of commitments” by itself is going to make you into a poet. If you would be a poet of any sort, it behooves you to know as much about poetry as you can.

Read the essay.