Jeremy M. Davies
Autore di Rose Alley
Opere di Jeremy M. Davies
The Knack of Doing: Stories 2 copie
Etichette
Informazioni generali
Utenti
Recensioni
When hyperirony meets sincerity: A writing manual for the present
This note is divided in two parts: a general complaint, and lots of praise for one story.
1.
I don't usually read short stories; I chose this because the author was editor at Dalkey Press, and because he'd published the wonderful Gerald Murnane. These stories are in a mode that's been common since Barthelme and other first-generation postmodernists, and especially since McSweeney's: it's as if writing needs to be as sharply self-aware as possible at all moments; the author can't let a sentence go by without twisting it to demonstrate his awareness of its implication in the contemporary quandary of writing. Because this strategy is applied to nearly every sentence (it's as if a lapse in energy would ruin everything), the opening of the first story is enough to conjure it. I'll quote sentence by sentence so I can provide the sorts of comments a reader might provide as she reads:
"What interests me most is that Schaumann, the state executioner, bred mice."
The first four words: it begins informally, apparently. But informality is studied, something the reader should appreciate. An executioner who breeds mice: this implies it wouldn't have been enough -- not surreal enough, not inventive enough, not imaginative enough -- if it had been either mice or an executioner. It's a signal of the signal strength, to use the kind of self-reflective metaphor Davies employs.
"In his spare time."
A second sign of the apparent informality, but once again carefully chosen, in this case to balance the longer first sentence, among other things.
"Sirens, ozone, exhaust are all words I might use to entice you into thinking yourself interested in the scene at Sing Sing where Schaumann, of whom you'll hear quite a bit more, was dispatching such and such a killer on a day, let's say, in spring."
First three words: the narrator's telling us that he's not telling us, not quite at least. "To entice you": signal that this is going to be a monologue between the narrator and each reader, imagined individually, and that it's going to be in the conditional, since the narrator knows us well enough to just go ahead and write his description, but that he won't, because we're the kind of reader who wouldn't put up with anything so straightforward. "Let's say": same. "In spring": showing the narrator's familiarity with things that don't interest us, such as precise meteorological descriptions.
In general I find varieties of "McSweeney's" prose hard to take. I don't find them funny, first of all, even though I realize that ideal readers often will. This kind of prose can be entertaining, but only in an exhausting way, and I don't usually know why I need to be exhausted. I tend to think about concepts like the precious, the coy, the arch, the fey, and they can become more engaging than the narration's own proposed forms of self-awareness. From this point of view it isn't funny or surprising, for example, to read this halfway through the opening story:
"Sorry, did I say that Schaumann didn't equate his mice and his prisoners? But you know I can't be trusted. I come from a broken home."
2.
My unsympathetic or impatient perspective prevents me from being an adequate reader of much of this kind of relentlessly self-aware North American style postmodern writing. However there is one very interesting story in this collection: "Kurt Vonnegut and the Great Bordellos of the Danube Delta."
It is a kind of manifesto of the impossibility of teaching fiction, or (the same thing) of knowing what fiction is. As such it rivals anything that's appeared on the subject since Ben Lerner's novels, the discussions around Knausgaard (of which the best so far is Toril Moi's essay, online), or Shields's "Reality Hunger."
The story opens with a half-page story fragment in italics. The narrator then wonders what he's got, and how he might use it. He decides to transcribe and comment on Kurt Vonnegut's eight rules for writing fiction, in "Bagombo Snuff Box." Davies's narrator is nonplussed by Vonnegut's instructions, and he treats them as if they made almost no sense. These pages are still arch, coy, wilfully dense, obstinately ironically obtuse. He pretends not to know what characters, plots, and such things are. But then, near the end of his comments to Vonnegut's third rule, "Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water," after remarking on a story he'd heard about someone who wants to go blind, Daniels has his baffled narrator say this:
"... I don't see how words want, or what words want. I know, however, that I do want to read a story that wants me to want to go blind. I want to root for a story ["rooting" is another of Vonnegut's desiderata, which the narrator affects to not understand] that wants me to want something I could not possibly want." [p. 87]
This is sincere, and interesting. Similar moments are scattered through the story:
"Unbelievable that fiction, still, to teachers of fiction, is a dollhouse in which to stage-manage suffering effigies." [p. 94]
And he then presents a series of questions, boldfaced like Vonnegut's, as his response:
"1. Is it an aid to the writing of fiction to be told to think or not think a certain way about the writing of fiction?"
"3. Is it an aid to the writing of fiction to be told to read everything, or to read certain things, or to avoid reading certain things, or to avoid reading at all?"
He then remarks that "it may be accurate" to describe fiction "as essentially a form of attention, attention specifically to language, attention to the 'absent friends' we can make believe that this language describes." (p. 96).
It's a spectacular list of six questions, all very serious. If I read it as a sketch for a critique of teaching, it's as pessimistic and corrosive as some ideas I explored in relation to visual art in "Why Art Canno be Taught." It would be an effective manifesto against teaching.
There are more conclusions and also insights about the failure of people who teach fiction to understand fiction (p. 97, third paragraph). And then, suddenly, disappointingly, he returns to his jokes and ornaments (p. 97, penultimate paragraph). And before he ends he quotes, unironically and without criticism, a passage from Murnane about putting sentences together.
This is a really wonderful essay, with the Zeitgeist packed into it. It's the sudden veering from dizzying precipices of irony and self-awareness, down into really refreshing but apparently dangerous depths of conviction, that makes it good.… (altro)
This note is divided in two parts: a general complaint, and lots of praise for one story.
1.
I don't usually read short stories; I chose this because the author was editor at Dalkey Press, and because he'd published the wonderful Gerald Murnane. These stories are in a mode that's been common since Barthelme and other first-generation postmodernists, and especially since McSweeney's: it's as if writing needs to be as sharply self-aware as possible at all moments; the author can't let a sentence go by without twisting it to demonstrate his awareness of its implication in the contemporary quandary of writing. Because this strategy is applied to nearly every sentence (it's as if a lapse in energy would ruin everything), the opening of the first story is enough to conjure it. I'll quote sentence by sentence so I can provide the sorts of comments a reader might provide as she reads:
"What interests me most is that Schaumann, the state executioner, bred mice."
The first four words: it begins informally, apparently. But informality is studied, something the reader should appreciate. An executioner who breeds mice: this implies it wouldn't have been enough -- not surreal enough, not inventive enough, not imaginative enough -- if it had been either mice or an executioner. It's a signal of the signal strength, to use the kind of self-reflective metaphor Davies employs.
"In his spare time."
A second sign of the apparent informality, but once again carefully chosen, in this case to balance the longer first sentence, among other things.
"Sirens, ozone, exhaust are all words I might use to entice you into thinking yourself interested in the scene at Sing Sing where Schaumann, of whom you'll hear quite a bit more, was dispatching such and such a killer on a day, let's say, in spring."
First three words: the narrator's telling us that he's not telling us, not quite at least. "To entice you": signal that this is going to be a monologue between the narrator and each reader, imagined individually, and that it's going to be in the conditional, since the narrator knows us well enough to just go ahead and write his description, but that he won't, because we're the kind of reader who wouldn't put up with anything so straightforward. "Let's say": same. "In spring": showing the narrator's familiarity with things that don't interest us, such as precise meteorological descriptions.
In general I find varieties of "McSweeney's" prose hard to take. I don't find them funny, first of all, even though I realize that ideal readers often will. This kind of prose can be entertaining, but only in an exhausting way, and I don't usually know why I need to be exhausted. I tend to think about concepts like the precious, the coy, the arch, the fey, and they can become more engaging than the narration's own proposed forms of self-awareness. From this point of view it isn't funny or surprising, for example, to read this halfway through the opening story:
"Sorry, did I say that Schaumann didn't equate his mice and his prisoners? But you know I can't be trusted. I come from a broken home."
2.
My unsympathetic or impatient perspective prevents me from being an adequate reader of much of this kind of relentlessly self-aware North American style postmodern writing. However there is one very interesting story in this collection: "Kurt Vonnegut and the Great Bordellos of the Danube Delta."
It is a kind of manifesto of the impossibility of teaching fiction, or (the same thing) of knowing what fiction is. As such it rivals anything that's appeared on the subject since Ben Lerner's novels, the discussions around Knausgaard (of which the best so far is Toril Moi's essay, online), or Shields's "Reality Hunger."
The story opens with a half-page story fragment in italics. The narrator then wonders what he's got, and how he might use it. He decides to transcribe and comment on Kurt Vonnegut's eight rules for writing fiction, in "Bagombo Snuff Box." Davies's narrator is nonplussed by Vonnegut's instructions, and he treats them as if they made almost no sense. These pages are still arch, coy, wilfully dense, obstinately ironically obtuse. He pretends not to know what characters, plots, and such things are. But then, near the end of his comments to Vonnegut's third rule, "Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water," after remarking on a story he'd heard about someone who wants to go blind, Daniels has his baffled narrator say this:
"... I don't see how words want, or what words want. I know, however, that I do want to read a story that wants me to want to go blind. I want to root for a story ["rooting" is another of Vonnegut's desiderata, which the narrator affects to not understand] that wants me to want something I could not possibly want." [p. 87]
This is sincere, and interesting. Similar moments are scattered through the story:
"Unbelievable that fiction, still, to teachers of fiction, is a dollhouse in which to stage-manage suffering effigies." [p. 94]
And he then presents a series of questions, boldfaced like Vonnegut's, as his response:
"1. Is it an aid to the writing of fiction to be told to think or not think a certain way about the writing of fiction?"
"3. Is it an aid to the writing of fiction to be told to read everything, or to read certain things, or to avoid reading certain things, or to avoid reading at all?"
He then remarks that "it may be accurate" to describe fiction "as essentially a form of attention, attention specifically to language, attention to the 'absent friends' we can make believe that this language describes." (p. 96).
It's a spectacular list of six questions, all very serious. If I read it as a sketch for a critique of teaching, it's as pessimistic and corrosive as some ideas I explored in relation to visual art in "Why Art Canno be Taught." It would be an effective manifesto against teaching.
There are more conclusions and also insights about the failure of people who teach fiction to understand fiction (p. 97, third paragraph). And then, suddenly, disappointingly, he returns to his jokes and ornaments (p. 97, penultimate paragraph). And before he ends he quotes, unironically and without criticism, a passage from Murnane about putting sentences together.
This is a really wonderful essay, with the Zeitgeist packed into it. It's the sudden veering from dizzying precipices of irony and self-awareness, down into really refreshing but apparently dangerous depths of conviction, that makes it good.… (altro)
1 
JimElkins | 1 altra recensione | Feb 10, 2018 |
JimElkins | 1 altra recensione | Feb 10, 2018 | 
The Knack of Doing by Jeremy Davies is a highly recommended well written debut collection of thirteen short fiction. The collection "runs the gamut from parody to tragedy and back." Also expect some historical along with present day settings in the stories.
Contents:
Forkhead Box: Contemplating the life of a man named Schaumann, the state executioner who just happens to breed mice in his spare time.
Sad White People: Reflections on the hipster couple, Chris and Chris, who have only been apart twice since they've been together. "Chris had never in her life met anyone else with Chris’s odd laissezfaire dependence."
The Terrible Riddles of Human Sexuality (Solved): Questions are raised and answered; the questions and answers tell the story of a dominatrix.
The Dandy’s Garrote: "Editor’s note: The author was asked to provide a blurb for the debut novel of an old and dear friend. He delivered the above text. It was returned."
Ten Letters: A gullible mother with plans for her two children travel on a Cunard liner.
The Excise-Man: The excise man is out making inquiries and bringing men to justice.
Kurt Vonnegut and the Great Bordellos of the Danube Delta: "Do you remember Kurt Vonnegut? Mr. Vonnegut has left us eight rules for writing, in the introduction to his short-story collection 'Bagombo Snuff Box.'"
The Sinces: Every sentence begins with "Since you went away...."
On the Furtiveness of Kurtz: Thoughts on a man named Kurtz. "It has been much remarked upon. By those who have observed him. He’s sitting. He’s crouching. Crouching as though expecting a blow. Or else: As though recovering from a blow."
Illness as Metaphor: A man is unhappy that his mother has made his illness public. "Such things are only for family consumption."
Henrietta the Spider: Henrietta, who tenaciously holds on to all perceived minor slights, is slowly going mad.
The Knack of Doing: "This is the story, he says, unclean thing, abomination of desolation, spitting a little into the mouthpiece. He was thinking, he says to his once-wife, that he, of the two of them, is the angrier: the medal goes to him, his anger is like unto the sun in its endless fizzle. His anger is on the table, she should weigh, she should measure, she can imagine it as a sort of a demipenteract; which by the way is a five dimensional hypercube, whereas her complaints are, as it were, strictly 2D."
Delete the Marquis: Set in the nineteenth century, this is the story of a ghostwriter told in numbered points that are not presented in numerical order.
Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Black Sparrow Press for review purposes.
http://shetreadssoftly.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-knack-of-doing.html… (altro)
Contents:
Forkhead Box: Contemplating the life of a man named Schaumann, the state executioner who just happens to breed mice in his spare time.
Sad White People: Reflections on the hipster couple, Chris and Chris, who have only been apart twice since they've been together. "Chris had never in her life met anyone else with Chris’s odd laissezfaire dependence."
The Terrible Riddles of Human Sexuality (Solved): Questions are raised and answered; the questions and answers tell the story of a dominatrix.
The Dandy’s Garrote: "Editor’s note: The author was asked to provide a blurb for the debut novel of an old and dear friend. He delivered the above text. It was returned."
Ten Letters: A gullible mother with plans for her two children travel on a Cunard liner.
The Excise-Man: The excise man is out making inquiries and bringing men to justice.
Kurt Vonnegut and the Great Bordellos of the Danube Delta: "Do you remember Kurt Vonnegut? Mr. Vonnegut has left us eight rules for writing, in the introduction to his short-story collection 'Bagombo Snuff Box.'"
The Sinces: Every sentence begins with "Since you went away...."
On the Furtiveness of Kurtz: Thoughts on a man named Kurtz. "It has been much remarked upon. By those who have observed him. He’s sitting. He’s crouching. Crouching as though expecting a blow. Or else: As though recovering from a blow."
Illness as Metaphor: A man is unhappy that his mother has made his illness public. "Such things are only for family consumption."
Henrietta the Spider: Henrietta, who tenaciously holds on to all perceived minor slights, is slowly going mad.
The Knack of Doing: "This is the story, he says, unclean thing, abomination of desolation, spitting a little into the mouthpiece. He was thinking, he says to his once-wife, that he, of the two of them, is the angrier: the medal goes to him, his anger is like unto the sun in its endless fizzle. His anger is on the table, she should weigh, she should measure, she can imagine it as a sort of a demipenteract; which by the way is a five dimensional hypercube, whereas her complaints are, as it were, strictly 2D."
Delete the Marquis: Set in the nineteenth century, this is the story of a ghostwriter told in numbered points that are not presented in numerical order.
Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Black Sparrow Press for review purposes.
http://shetreadssoftly.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-knack-of-doing.html… (altro)
Statistiche
- Opere
- 5
- Utenti
- 35
- Popolarità
- #405,584
- Voto
- 4.3
- Recensioni
- 5
- ISBN
- 4
My Review: In Days of Yore, my youthful audience, the knowing bookstore-browser of a certain taste and class would react to the presence of the Black Sparrow Press colophon with 1) immediate and unmannerly snatching, clutching, and unwilling surrendering to even the cashier; or 2) a delicate shivering, nothing so gross as a shudder, because the authors the press published were...louche, not parlor-chat material (eg, Wyndham Lewis, John Fante). I was in category 1.
Now Black Sparrow is an imprint of David R. Godine, Publisher. Godine books were also to be greedily snatched because (unlike Black Sparrow books) they were gorgeously designed and produced, and the Godine colophon was a rock-solid guarantee of an excellent book and an excellent novel or story (you DO remember the difference between books and novels/stories, right?). When I asked the Godine folks for a copy of this book and they obliged, off I went down the rabbit-hole into the weird world of modern publishing and its shifts, changes, disappearances and reappearances, and general not-like-it-was-ness.
Twelve stories and a novella in about 200 pages of text? Whew. Economy of expression, anyone? I’ll probably never match that in making my comments, comme d'habitude, story by story, and can pretty much promise my attempts at summation will be significantly more prolix.
Forkhead Box brings to somewhat dingy life one Schaumann, the official executioner at Sing Sing. In his spare time, he breeds mice. They don’t all live, obviously, since he’s breeding them for various qualities. And clearly such a hobby, carried on in his basement, is obvious to his family.
I was a smidge puzzled about this title. I Googled the phrase and came away with a much enhanced appreciation of the story. I won’t spoiler it for you, as I’m strongly in favor of discovery being left to the individual. 4 stars
Sad White People (are there any other kind?) introduces Chris and Chris, a young couple (M/F) who are just about to end up as statistics. Or maybe in News of the Weird. I’d bet both. 3.5 stars
The Terrible Riddles of Human Sexuality (Solved) um, well now, umm…
Sixteen non-sequiturs starring May, a young...sex worker, though not exactly a prostitute, as you’ll see. Her world is bizarre. It is also completely bewitching. I love May the way I love Marilyn Monroe, simply drinking in all that she pours forth. 3.5 stars
The Dandy’s Garrote shows, in one Proustian sentence, how hard it is to know, socialize, love, care for, writers. Heh. 3.5 stars
Ten Letters chronicles the fearful imaginings of a father as his wife takes his twin sons, Willie and Nillie, to England via Cunard liner. So we’re already clear it’s set in the past, which is reinforced by the (imagined?) presence on the cruise of a phrenologist called Mahaffy. Phrenology, the pseudoscience responsible for more immoral mischief in the world than you’d ever imagine! That supporting beam of eugenics, apologist for racism! Well, anyway, dad has written ten letters to his sons, one for each day of the cruise, and he’s very worried about the influences they’ll fall under with Mahaffy paying court to their mother as a way to phrenologize the boys. His fears become more and more outlandish even as he admits (in his letter) that he would have nothing to say to any of his family were they all face to face. A tale of missed connections, misconnections, and misery caused and endured and perpetuated in the name of conventional expectations. 4 stars
The Excise-Man makes a lot of mileage out of the distaste of the colonial-era drinkers for paying the Crown its excise tax. (That never stopped, did it, since moonshiners are still (!) with us today.) The mob that pursues the excise-man makes a lot of stops, always just missing the slippery guy. At one inn, Cooper the innkeeper reveals to the assembled men that he is responsible for the rotation and motion of the planet Mars. He shows the men the apparatus. They’re all duly impressed, as is the reader, with the baroque conceit of planets controllable by machines human beings operate. But the excise-man! They want his hide! No sooner do the mob’s men leave Cooper’s inn, they meet up with various folks from their town...but old, so much older than is possible...Rip van Winkle and the Headless Horseman and Faust would all recognize this tale. That doesn’t mean it isn’t fun, because it surely is. 4 stars
Kurt Vonnegut and the Great Bordellos of the Danube Delta doesn’t involve Kurt Vonnegut or the Danube Delta or bordellos...directly, anyway...but is instead a thorough and thoroughly amusing dissection of writing, advice about writing, and the writer’s eternal dilemmas: Is this genius or junk, should I keep going or quit, am I kidding myself?
It’s this kind of guff that writing advice produces. It’s the most complicated learning process of them all, learning how to make people want to read your words. I think it’s only possible to learn by doing, and that’s advice I got from...well...I got. And give. And Kurt Vonnegut? His eight rules for fiction writing success are very respectfully sent up. It’s a fun story to read, a pleasure to have read. 4 stars
The Sinces begins every paragraph with the sentence fragment, “Since you went away,...”, this being the lament of an abandoned husband. I found it more interesting as an exercise than a told tale:
It’s not a long story, thank goodness, and I for one say “good on ya, ya savvy sheila” to the lady for walking away from this navel-gazer. Still, it’s got an interesting point. I can’t remember what it is, but I remember thinking, that’s interesting; I should write that down; but, sadly, no pens were in reach and my computer was charging so not within reach; and by then, I’d forgotten it anyway. 3.5 stars
On the Furtiveness of Kurtz brings the jealous loathing of an abandoned husband for Madame’s new amour propre to its apotheosis:
Or, as Conrad said the same thing: He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: “‘The horror! The horror!” 4 stars
Illness as Metaphor bravely, if bewilderingly, co-opts the title of Susan Sontag’s famous long essay on exactly what it sounds like it’s about. A young woman’s mother, apparently with unintended (?) malice, announces to the nosy world that her daughter is ill.
I’ll be frank: I don’t care a single, solitary, tiny bit about this woman on page one of her blahblahblah. One thing she says resonates with me in a positive way: “You don’t appease illness by containing it. You appease it by spreading it.” So many illnesses are describable this way, social ills, mental illness, physical ailments, all appeased by their spread, their purpose to do entropy’s heavy lifting. Overall, though, not my favorite in the collection. 3 stars
Henrietta the Spider couldn’t be better named. The plump heroine, married to a skinny man and living with the man’s skinnier sister right next to their bedroom wall, snoring loud enough to wake the dead. Henrietta finds escape in killing their dog via spider-bites, which she’s also had but survived handily. As Henrietta loses herself in a haze of melancholy, her husband and sister-in-law dance attendance on her, try to ginger her up; in her turn, she hunts for the spiders that bit the dog to death and puts them in the beds of these kind souls. Nothing untoward happens. Damn. But as Henrietta lounges in a hot bath, her spider bite (long forgotten) starts acting up…. 4 stars
The Knack of Doing feels like the lack of doing. The husband/father/nephew we’re reading about has many people around him doing, acting on the world and being acted upon in return. Our nebbishy man has a moment of clarity as he defines his place in the world:
I don’t know if he’s overripe, but he’s sure as hell rotten with self-pity. The title story of the collection, this couldn’t better sum up what you’re going to get when you get here: men mired down, men weighed heavily upon, women who abandon them, and the consuming, subsumed rage that destroys and disfigures our modern world. 3.5 stars
Delete the Marquis is a postmodern novella, a riff of the late Wayne Dyer-esque “think it into being” school of self-help, and an hommage (intentional or not) to Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” mixed with The Count of Monte Cristo.
Don Miguel, a broke and broken hack writer, with a broken...let’s say he’d be a Cialis customer and leave it at that...pays a visit to the Mesmerist healer, Marquis de Puységur, whose Animal Magnetism cure for all that ails him is paid for by hack-writing crummy period romances under the names supplied by le Marquis. This visit Don Miguel is accompanied by that most annoying of traveling companions, someone that one used to know but can’t quite place, and one is very sure that it’s preferable not to. Victor, it turns out, is the young boy who tended Don Miguel’s father in his dying days. This is shocking, since threadbare Don Miguel sees before him not the deformed, stupid peasant lad he remembers, but a bright and wealthy (if overdressed) and articulate man also on his way to avail himself of the Marquis’s services thus also of Don Miguel’s:
On goes the parrying and thrusting, Don Miguel trying to evade the bullets Victor shoots into his character and his role in all the ills and developments of the world as we know it. Handy for Puységur, isn’t it, to have the author on his string, dependent on him and yet he depending on the hack.
Finally, as the men roll up to the Marquis’s gorgeous chateau, Victor shoots the fatal bolt into illusion’s meaty, beating heart:
Is there parity between the Marquis and the hack? Because each is solely dependent on the other for his place in the world, or is the hack’s involvement, being unwitting (he never remembers his visits to the Marquis thanks to his Animal Magnetism treatments), his absolution from guilt?
It’s a lovely, baroque conceit and made in the language of the period it takes place (as Victor notes), and in its arc it also strikes the self-help community’s tendency to invent or repurpose every cultural trend’s leavings, like any good scavenger would. 5 stars
As a whole, this collection was a pleasure to read. It promised me it was (or Rikki Ducornet did in her blurb and Davies was once her editor at Dalkey Archive so I can trust her) “...really dark, like a black chocolate bar deviled with morning glory seeds and strychnine.” And it delivered on that promise, delivered on the promise to make me laugh (“wit and a stupefying narrative abundance” per Harry Matthews), Davies is an author who delivers. If you want what he’s delivering, it’s a festive and pleasurable read. I wanted. I got. Isn’t that the best way to finish a review?… (altro)