This book, published in the mid-’80s, is an analysis of four thinkers: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida. I’m not sure how best to articulate Megill’s overall thesis, but he argues these thinkers constitute a direct line of thought in the way they respond to a cultural crisis, essentially the crisis of Modernism and Postmodernism. Megill posits that two ways of responding to crisis are nostalgia and futurism, both responses looking for a kind of utopia (either in the past or the future).

I didn’t really what the specific crisis was; rather, Megill points to a number of crises, including the expanding role of scientific determinism (and how that role poses a crisis to individual freedom?), the historical crisis (economic stagnation, wars, the downfall of religion), and, finally, the aesthetic and phenomenological crisis of the world-as-representation.

Megill argues that all four thinkers have a kind of aestheticism; they’re interested in art, and the constructed nature of art. Art creates a world, and Megill traces how in their writings, we have variations of the world-as-representation — art, language, discourse, text — and how the project of Modernism searches for the underlying reality, whereas the project of Postmodernism embraces the notion that there isn’t an underlying reality.

I have a limited, undergraduate exposure to these thinkers, so I can’t speak to the precision of Megill’s reading of these thinkers. He acknowledges at times that he’s reading them against the grain, and his presentation is rather logical, even though he says their philosophies at times defy logical cohesion. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in these thinkers, or in the projects of Modernism and Postmodernism. It’s a good book for artists, I think, because it gets you thinking about what exactly you’re doing with your art, which we don’t always do enough.

What it is:

Yarbrough’s newest novel is about Luke May, a high school history teacher whose childhood acquaintance moves back to town, and she stirs up old memories of violence in the ’60s and creates a spell of trouble for Luke in the present. Set in the fictional Loring, Miss., home of Yarbrough’s other novels, Safe from the Neighbors confronts small-town gossip and racial violence in the Mississippi delta.

Why it’s interesting:

I think this is Yarbrough’s first novel in the first-person POV, and the form works really well for him. All the work I’ve read of his deals with the interplay between past trauma and present tension, and the first-person voice allows Yarbrough to move seamlessly between then and now.  I’ve always enjoyed Yarbrough’s work, but this is far and away my favorite , because in addition to providing his usual texture of small-town life, and the tensions between white and black and rich and poor, this novel contains his most confident voice, and the narrative sucks you in and pulls you through. I would have read it in one sitting if I didn’t have a job, and even then I was a little late coming back from lunch two days in a row because I didn’t want to put the book down.

Further Reading:

If you haven’t read Yarbrough’s work, this is a great novel to start with. I’d also recommend The Oxygen Man for the way it captures the texture of the Mississippi delta.  The only other book I can think to compare Safe from the Neighbors to is Ron Rash’s Saints at the River. Both novels have a narrator concerned with facts (a history teacher in Yarbrough’s, a reporter in Rash’s), and both deal with the interplay of past and present. But the novels actually tell somewhat opposing stories: Yarbrough’s is “a stranger comes to town,” and Rash’s is “you can’t go home again.”

Based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell, this movie is about a teenage girl, Ree Dolley, in the Missouri Ozarks. Her father has disappeared and is due in court in a week, and he put their house up for bond. If he doesnt’ show, the girl, her mother, and her two young siblings will be thrown out. Like Woodrell, the filmmakers have captured the sense of place marvelously. This is go-nowhere country, where the only thing a man can do is go to the cattle show or cook crank, and Ree meets some damn scary individuals. The actors all felt authentic to the place — the only one I recognized was John Hawkes (from Deadwood and American Gangster), and he slid into the role of the uncle Teardrop perfectly: a skinny, scruffy man with a graying beard and a drug addict’s limp. Definitely check this movie out.

Esquire has an interesting article about the Red Bull Stratos project, which involves dropping Felix Baumgartner from a helium balloon at 120,000 feet. Skydiving from that height means he may break the sound barrier, which is all well and good, but the part that really stuck out was when the scientists made him wash out his hair gel (because at that height, hair gel is equivalent to napalm):

Felix’s confusion is understandable. Being camera-ready is an important, even essential, part of what he does. The greatest moments of his life are all on film. Take the Jesus jump a few years back, when he leapt from the outstretched hand of O Cristo Redentor, the ninety-eight-foot-tall statue that looms over Rio de Janeiro. The greatness of that moment was predicated on the fact that it had been recorded, preserved. His job wasn’t just to survive the feat but to survive the feat and be recorded while doing so, and the final product was not just a world record — lowest BASE jump ever — but, more important, a visual record: The handsome man leaping toward his death from the iconic colossus…

What it is:

To Have and Have Not likely is a minor work of Hemingway’s, but if you like him, you’ll like it. The story is about a charter fisherman, Harry Morgan, who during a rough time during the Depression begins smuggling liquor and aliens between Cuba and Key West. Things go sour.

Why it’s interesting:

I don’t want to spoil anything, but Hemingway does some funky things with this novel. For one thing, the main character sort of drops away in the middle, and this writer in Key West comes to the fore. There’s also a bit of POV shifting, some stream of consciousness stuff that I’d never associated with Hemingway. Somehow, it fits his style. Finally, the novel is worth reading just so you can experience the enigmatic Chapter 24. I haven’t looked to see if anything’s been written about this chapter (I suppose it has), but what a strange section. The narrative moves like a camera (or a fly) from one yacht to the next and gives us snippets of what is happening with this or that rich person. How any of that relates to the main story (besides just giving us a wider lens, so to speak), I don’t know, but the rhythms of the sentences and the beat of the paragraphs is amazing. Do check it out, even if you just read that one chapter.

Further Reading:

This book is Hemingway’s Key West drug smuggling thriller, which foreshadows Stone’s Dog Soldiers and Banks’ Continental Drift, both of which you should read.

Bookninja points to this article about Tin House’s submission policy for the fall. If you’re going to submit a story, you must also include a receipt for the purchase of a book. That policy stirred people up, but I say good for Tin House. In the deluge era, there’s got to be some way of screening applicants. Some magazines have begun to charge a reading fee, which must weed out some of the dilettantes. In economic terms, Tin House’s police taxes something bad (blindly submitting every POS you write to everyone, thus cluttering up everyone’s inboxes) and provides an incentive for something they want to encourage (reading — or at least buying — books). Good on them.

In continuing with the Perkins kick, I reread The Great Gatsby. It’s hard to begin to even think about this book, because I know the story so well and loved it so much when I was younger. I will say it holds up for me, though I’m not sure the book really changed for me. When I reread the Hemingway, I felt like I was coming to a new understanding of the book. I wonder if I was really in tune with as much of the Fitzgerald as I was with this reading, but my marginal comments (“class consciousness,” “racism,” “carelessness”) suggest I understood it just fine the last time I read it.

Jane Smiley, in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, doesn’t care for The Great Gatsby. She argues the characters are flat, the story implausible, and that the book should have been 100 pages longer. Smiley and I have almost diametrically opposed tastes at times, and while I’d agree her comments are fair, they seem to miss the mark. Gatsby seems to me a young person’s book. It was written by Fitzgerald in his twenties, most people read it for the first time in high school, and the themes running through it reflect the disillusionment of the young as they mature. Maybe it’s no masterpiece for someone in middle age, but neither, I suspect, are To Kill a Mockingbird or The Catcher in the Rye. Is it fair to judge a book written by someone in his twenties, and written predominantly for the young?

What struck me (what has always struck me) is the compression. The book is 50,000 words, maybe 15 scenes. I suppose it’s long enough to be a novel, though you can read it in a sitting or two. What would 100 extra pages do for it? Turn it into Tender Is the Night. I’ll reread that one and let you know how it goes.