The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Gertrude Stein
Thoughts and Opinions:
A love story.
When Ben Folds sings “You Don’t Know Me” he did not account for this pair, who know each other and the insides of their heads.
Gertrude Stein is a detective trying to uncover who created art styles. Who invented what style and how and who followed and do the surrealists suck?
A great many of 35 years covered are spent in agreement that this great writier should be and was frustrated to not be published sooner and more often. Still, Stein was always a supporter and always funny and always more popular because she learned to drive.
Notable Quote:
“She also liked then to set a sentence for herself as a sort of tuning fork and metronome and then write to that time and tune.” (Stein 206)
Writing Prompt:
Write a list of compliments for yourself. Call yourself a genius too!
This might seem like an easy prompt.
The Savage Detectives
By Roberto Bolano
Thoughts and Opinions:
If I’m trying to sell this book: it’s about two poets who destroy the lives of everyone they come into contact with. If you let me ramble, this book is about the impossible task of accumulating an accurate representation of poetry’s history, let alone the history of any given individual, all while simultaneously examining the impossibility of and/or openness for artistic interpretation.
Notable Quote:
“Ah, what a shame they don’t make Los Suicidas mezcal anymore, what a shame that time passes, don’t you think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything goes goes galloping away from us.” (Bolano 185)
Writing Prompt:
Part 1: Describe yourself from the perspective of three people: 1. A close friend/partner. 2. An employer/coworker. 3. Someone you encountered only once. Focus on contradictions.
Part 2: Erase everything but contradictions.
By Night in Chile
By Roberto Bolano
Thoughts and Opinions:
English either improves a book or translators lack the praise they deserve in English lit education or my Torontonian book discussions. Chris Andrews’ translation of Bolano’s By Night in Chile is the first book I’ve read from either writer. I am again, as I have felt before, confused by why I’ve not encountered this writer in passing. I will surmise it was my own mistake, that I am the Wizened Youth confounded by the errors of a past I could not have ever hoped to handle diffrentely. Likely, Bolano was recommended to me before and instead of heeding warning I trotted and fumbled through repetition and formula and foundation.
I don’t know if I like this book because I can’t read or speak Spanish. I like the translation a lot.
Notable Quote:
I did not underline anything while reading this book but I found sand in the pages when I flipped through for quotes. I read this in a day at the beach. The whole book is one paragraph so I could not stop.
Writing Prompt:
Conjure an old memory. Write that memory from the perspective of: This memory proves (to an implied listener) that I am a good person.
Einstein’s Monsters
By Martin Amis
Thoughts and Opinions:
I read one of these stories in my undergrad and finally found the book years after. The opening essay matches themes presented by Nietzsche which is all to say that: We must all dismantle our weapons simultaneously or there will remain fear of violent power. The stories are upsetting and gruesome and cathartic.
Notable Quote:
“Like God, nuclear weapons are free creations of the human mind. Unlike God, nuclear weapons are real. And they are here.” (Amis)
Prompt:
Nuclear bombs destroy all but three things. What are they? Why?
Things is an intentionally vague term.
Ghost Wall
By Sarah Moss
Thoughts and Opinions:
Rare for the nightmare that begins a story to become a dream ideal scenario for its protagonist.
My notes say that this book made me feel ill - but that I also should clarify when a sentiment is positive. A book that provides or imbues in me physical sensation is an effective book, for me. George Saunders’ writing on historical reenactment makes me laugh or admonish the absurdity of historical fetishism and commodification. Moss takes the controlling villainous nature of the male need to dictate and command history through a horrific control of the present in the context of low-stakes Iron Age reenactment. Moss wields voice and perspective to the extreme through the forced internal numbing of pain and repression of negative experience.
Notable Quote:
“I thought hard about the tree between my hands, about the cells in its leaves photosynthesizing the afternoon sun, about the berries ripening hour by hour, the impalpable pulse of sap under my palms, the reach of roots below my feet and deep into the earth.” (Moss 52)
Prompt:
Choose an ancient tool - Iron Age for relevance. Research how that tool is created, physically.
Put a character, metaphorically, through that process of creation.
Checkout 19 and Pond
Claire-Louise Bennet
Thoughts and Opinions:
I have a literary crush on these prose.
Checkout 19 offers indecorous insight into a writer whose first novel, Pond, treats candour of emotion with ignominy. Both texts invite readers into a disparate mind with Pond showcasing a neurotic genius desperate to avoid the point she should be making while Checkout 19’s speaker’s fragmentation is grounded through vast input into her mind via reading and men and male recommendations for reading and male actions that cause effect upon her body and mind. Sentences in Pond pullulate while prose in Checkout 19 invites readers too far into a mind, with fair warning of this act, before showing all the dangerous depths within a mind that one should feel grateful they don’t receive from every other person on the street. Ben Folds sings “You Don’t Know Me” with the attitude that one can never truly know what’s going on inside a partner’s head. I closed Checkout 19 knowing how to better understand what is going on inside my own head.
Notable Quote:
“Of course its expressive—what could be more arousing than inexplicable disdain my God.” (Bennet 47)
Writing Prompt:
Describe yourself writing this prompt. Through your description, answer the following: How am I unique in my writing of this prompt?
Picasso
By Gertrude Stein
Thoughts and Opinions:
I have a lot of Canada in me. Picasso had lots of Spain in him and released it upon his arrival in France. Stein had much America in her and they all released what filled them up.
I am motivated to show the world as I perceive it; if not how I see it, since I am confident I see the world as others, not Picasso, do.
I am motivated to redouble production and create a fecundity of practice.
Notable Quote:
Rather yes, a genius is a genius, even when he does not work.” (Stein)
Writing Prompt:
Ekraphstic response to this portrait of Gertrude Stein.
The Beauty of the Husband
By Anne Carson
Thoughts and Opinions:
When I think of novel, I see Carson. Rare for narrative and form and voice to marry with as much beauty. I can impose as much as I want, but the husband will still get the last word. Carson guides readers with invocation and infrequent but solid and obvious moments of narrative clarity. Dance these tangos from cover to cover.
A fictional essay? Poems? Whatever. The consumer is correct and Anne Carson keeps serving meals.
Notable Quote:
“What makes you so strong.
He thought about it.
Lust he said.
You mean like Vincent van Gogh. Lust for life.
No he said. Like a bee.
Pollen she said.
He laughed.
Pollen keeps a callin old Ray.” (Carson)
Prompt:
Scary Epistolary! How many red flags can you fit into a single 300-word letter?
Sea of Tranquility
Emily St. John Mandel
Thoughts and Opinions:
What I would call a novella but a book I enjoyed more because I read through the lens of novel. Medium is the message!
Very light and causal, emotional and authoritative. At times I felt Mandel examine her sudden rise to fame with Station Eleven and other times I related to the indescribably isolation of disease times. I can’t relate to conspiracy theorists though because I don’t believe they’re real.
I made many notes in the margins but for all the threads opened, I closed this book with little left to wonder about.
Notable Quote:
I loaned my copy to my mom. I hope I didn’t underline anything too weird.
Prompt:
Write a character who feels guilty that they survived Covid. Show them at a career high point.
God’s Country
Percival Everett
Thoughts and Opinions:
I wish I could jump into talking about why I love this writer and every page he touches but I’m still upset about the movie Green Book. The white protagonist in Green Book learns to not be racist. The stupid, racist white narrator in Percival Everett’s God’s Country only seems like he’s going to learn. Sorry to spoil this book but there’s no redemption coming. I left Green Book confident enough to say “This is a children’s movie for adults about a white man learning that people of colour are actually people.”
Everett leans into cartoonish western tropes, characters get funny looks on their faces before falling unconscious, people have names like Rip Phardt and still nothing is hidden, the boy gets hung, the non-white group gets massacred, and the n-word only stops being spoken by the speaker out of fear. Everett blends cartoonish visual with racist gravitas to create a white perspective. The atrocities that befall the narrator, a lost home and kidnapped wife, do nothing to open his eyes to the everyday tragedies of being a person of colour in a white god’s country.
Notable Quote:
“I was staring at him and I don’t what come over me, but it was like some kind of blind historical urge and that black man in front of me weren’t no kind of real human being, just a thing.” (Everett 218)
No prompt for this one. Just a recommendation to go read James next.