Bookish Pics ~ Summer Reading

Happy Summer Reading!

Guardian UK says the "Novel Is Dead"

A gloomy writer in the Guardian UK says the Novel is essentially dead, thanks to digital media and the fact that writers and readers would rather chase squirrels on the internet than consider serious literature.

I think people have been saying the "Novel is Dead" for hundreds of years. So let's just say I'm skeptical. Jane Austen is as popular as ever. But as in her day, perhaps we are on the cusp of the new age of Poetry, for instance. Would that be so bad? There is new poetry on Twitter and Tumblr, and people are reading and posting just as many quotes from great writers as ever.

Or maybe this is the age of great screenwriters? Look at what TV is doing with shows like True Detective, combining literary symbols with visual art and performance. Would that be so bad? So I think the written word is alive and well, and if the novel suffers for a while, it is perhaps to let the light shine elsewhere. After all, Shakespeare wasn't a novelist - just a great poet and playwright. Beowulf was written in verse. The Bible is part narrative with lots of symbolism and poetry.

Just saying. I think Literature will survive in some form, or perhaps new forms.

And while I share this author's skepticism about the value of Creative Writing Programs, having been enrolled in one myself many years ago, I do recall people getting published on a regular basis. And for the vast majority of writers throughout history, there has never been one clear path to a writing life. Most writers in this world do something else to earn money, and any sweet moolah they get from their words is icing on the cake. It may be thin icing without sprinkles, but putting the cake on the table is the important thing.

See, I thought Children's Literature was "dead" until I discovered Harry Potter, written by an unknown author who was on welfare at the time, and look what happened with that. In fact, gloomy writer Will Self has to slam Harry Potter to make his diatribe possible. *eyeroll* Well, just as many adults read Harry Potter, and the form is the novel. So yeah, if you dismiss the most popular novels of our time, then yeah ~ death to the novel. Or not.

Will Self in Guardian UK

The literary novel as an art work and a narrative art form central to our culture is indeed dying before our eyes. Let me refine my terms: I do not mean narrative prose fiction tout court is dying – the kidult boywizardsroman and the soft sadomasochistic porn fantasy are clearly in rude good health. And nor do I mean that serious novels will either cease to be written or read. But what is already no longer the case is the situation that obtained when I was a young man. In the early 1980s, and I would argue throughout the second half of the last century, the literary novel was perceived to be the prince of art forms, the cultural capstone and the apogee of creative endeavour.

. . . the novel, I think, has led a very American sort of life: swaggering, confident, brash even – and ever aware of its world-conquering manifest destiny. But unlike Ernest Hemingway or F Scott Fitzgerald, the novel has also had a second life. The form should have been laid to rest at about the time of Finnegans Wake, but in fact it has continued to stalk the corridors of our minds for a further three-quarters of a century. Many fine novels have been written during this period, but I would contend that these were, taking the long view, zombie novels, instances of an undead art form that yet wouldn't lie down.

. . . I've no doubt that a revenue stream for digitised factual text will be established: information in this form is simply too useful for it not to be assigned monetary value. It is novels that will be the victims of the loss of effective copyright (a system of licensing and revenue collection that depended both on the objective form of the text, and defined national legal jurisdictions); novels and the people who write them. Fortunately, institutions are already in existence to look after us. The creative writing programmes burgeoning throughout our universities are exactly this; another way of looking at them is that they're a self-perpetuating and self-financing literary set-aside scheme purpose built to accommodate writers who can no longer make a living from their work. In these care homes, erstwhile novelists induct still more and younger writers into their own reflexive career paths, so that in time they too can become novelists who cannot make a living from their work and so become teachers of creative writing.

. . . As I said at the outset: I believe the serious novel will continue to be written and read, but it will be an art form on a par with easel painting or classical music: confined to a defined social and demographic group, requiring a degree of subsidy, a subject for historical scholarship rather than public discourse. The current resistance of a lot of the literate public to difficulty in the form is only a subconscious response to having a moribund message pushed at them. As a practising novelist, do I feel depressed about this? No, not particularly, except on those occasions when I breathe in too deeply and choke on my own decadence.

Today is World Book Day

Today is "World Book Day," and it shows my age that I immediately thought of our shelf of old encyclopedias from 1975. That's not it.

From Wikipedia

World Book Day or World Book and Copyright Day (also known as International Day of the Book or World Book Days) is a yearly event on 23 April, organized by UNESCO to promote reading, publishing and copyright. In the United Kingdom, the day is instead recognised on the first Thursday in March.

World Book Day was celebrated for the first time on 23 April 1995.

Happy Birthday, William Shakespeare!

April 23rd is the birthday of the Bard, William Shakespeare!

Happy 450th birthday, William Shakespeare! Join the celebration: http://t.co/VKocR6ETO5 pic.twitter.com/rpqqHi4l4d

— CNN (@CNN) April 23, 2014

Happy 450th birthday William Shakespeare! Here are 50 of his phrases we still use everyday http://t.co/C1CqPRTrC8 pic.twitter.com/nY2UAvBjuH

— IndyArts (@IndyArts) April 23, 2014

Happy 450th Birthday, William Shakespeare! (Infographic provided by @cbcbooks) pic.twitter.com/a8AYHwXu0w

— Robert Mitchell (@RLM_3) April 23, 2014

#Shakespeare450th pic.twitter.com/kyNJZi0Ohc

— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) April 23, 2014

Next time you're in a war of words, why not throw in some Shakespeare? You mouldy rogues! #HappyBirthdayShakespeare pic.twitter.com/g6vQTA1lHh

— VisitBritain (@VisitBritain) April 23, 2014

R.I.P. Peter Matthiessen

And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.”
― Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

The most "Zen" of authors has left this world for a new adventure: Peter Matthiessen, author of The Snow Leopard, Far Tortugas, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, and many more. His love of the earth and his philosophical musings on our place here had a major influence on all of us growing up in the 70s and 80s.

Obituary in the LA Times

Matthiessen, the only writer to win the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction, was both an elegant novelist and a rugged naturalist, a traveler known for his graceful yet spare descriptions of the wildest places on Earth.
Over six decades, he produced acclaimed volumes of natural history based on his treks through East Africa, New Guinea and the Amazon. He chronicled the plight of disappearing tribes. He wrote books about Cesar Chavez and Native American activist Leonard Peltier. He became a Zen devotee and wrote of a painful spiritual journey as he hiked through the Himalayas in "The Snow Leopard." At the same time, he wrote fiction; four of his novels centered on a respected and reviled sugar-cane planter who was killed by his neighbors in the Everglades.
He also helped found the Paris Review, the renowned literary magazine, which he used as a cover during his brief career as a spy for the CIA.

. . . Matthiessen traveled to remote corners of Alaska, Siberia, Peru, East Africa, Nepal and elsewhere. In central New Guinea, he was part of the 1961 Harvard-Peabody expedition that chronicled a Stone Age tribe, the Kurelu. Michael Rockefeller, the son of then-New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, disappeared on the same expedition.
Matthiessen's most controversial work was "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse," a critical look at the conviction of Leonard Peltier in the 1975 murders of two FBI agents. Lawsuits filed by an FBI agent and South Dakota's former governor, Bill Janklow, were dismissed in 1990.

Rowling Revisits Cormoran Strike

J.K. Rowling's next Cormoran Strike book is called The Silkworm
and is due out in June.

Readers may recall that the first Strike novel The Cuckoo's Calling was released under the pen name Robert Galbraith but she was outed by a publisher. Apparently she is still using the pen name!

Via Snitchseeker

Private investigator Cormoran Strike returns in a new mystery from Robert Galbraith, author of the #1 international bestseller The Cuckoo's Calling.

When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. At first, Mrs. Quine just thinks her husband has gone off by himself for a few days--as he has done before--and she wants Strike to find him and bring him home.
But as Strike investigates, it becomes clear that there is more to Quine's disappearance than his wife realizes. The novelist has just completed a manuscript featuring poisonous pen-portraits of almost everyone he knows. If the novel were to be published, it would ruin lives--meaning that there are a lot of people who might want him silenced.

When Quine is found brutally murdered under bizarre circumstances, it becomes a race against time to understand the motivation of a ruthless killer, a killer unlike any Strike has encountered before...
A compulsively readable crime novel with twists at every turn, THE SILKWORM is the second in the highly acclaimed series featuring Cormoran Strike and his determined young assistant, Robin Ellacott.

Carcosa and The King in Yellow ~ True Detective and American Literature

I loved the HBO Series "True Detective" because it was as darkly Southern Gothic as it could be, and you could write several books just on the use of religious symbolism in the plot. They really went all the way with every character, especially the flawed and misunderstood Rust Cohle who is becomes identical to Jesus by the end, scarred by a knife wound (like a Roman sword) and resurrected after the battle against the evil killer Childress in the Coliseum-like Carcosa, sitting up in bed like the figure from the Shroud of Turin with a large computer tablet beside him that resembles a Bible on a pulpit, Rust transforms into the Light of the World. And of course in the end he explains to his friend Marty that he really did die and go to heaven where he felt the love of his daughter (and his Father) but was sent back to earth again again for reasons he didn't understand. But I totally understood and enjoyed all the religious symbolism, having grown up a Southern Baptist.



However, the English Major in me kept wondering who the "Yellow King" was, and where did the name "Carcosa"  come from? I racked my brain from William Faulkner to Shakespeare, but could remember nothing on those two references.

Well, it turns out there is a long literary tradition about both the Yellow King and Carcosa, and it goes back to two American writers: Ambrose Bierce and Robert Chambers.

Ambrose Bierce wrote the story called "An Inhabitant of Carcosa."
Read it Here

The King in Yellow Wikia Site has a snippet about the Ambrose Bierce connection:

Ambrose Bierce's tale An Inhabitant of Carcosa is arguably the wellspring of the whole Yellow Mythos. It employs an exoticism of setting unusual for the author, and sprang from the alienation that dogged Bierce all his life. The story's genesis came from a terrible dream he had in his youth, in which he wandered through a blasted landscape and entered a colossal, deserted castle. The castle's dusty, echoing corriders filled him with the feeling that the entire universe was long extinct:

Man is long ages dead in every zone
The angels all are gone to graves unknown
The devils, too, are cold enough at last
And God lies dead before the great white throne.

In this cosmic tomb, young Ambrose found a bed on which lay a horribly decayed corpse. The cadaver's eyes opened, and Bierce saw, to his horror, that they were his own: "That hateful and abhorrent scrap of mortality, still sentient after the death of God and his angels, was I!"

That story by Bierce inspired Robert Chambers, who in 1895 wrote a collection of short stories that mention a play called "The King in Yellow." The place-name "Carcosa" is mentioned in the epigraph to the story collection as an excerpt from the fictional play.

Free eBook Here on Project Gutenberg

THE KING IN YELLOW
BY
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS

Original publication date: 1895

THE KING IN YELLOW
IS DEDICATED
TO
MY BROTHER

Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink beneath the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,
Where flap the tatters of the King,
Must die unheard in
Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead;
Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed
Shall dry and die in
Lost Carcosa.

Cassilda's Song in "The King in Yellow," Act i, Scene 2.

Rust Enters the Ruins of Carcosa


More from the University of Texas

Journalist and short-story writer Ambrose Bierce wrote the horror story “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” in 1886. The story explores death, light, and darkness and is about a man who awakens from a sickness-induced sleep to find himself lost in an unfamiliar wilderness. Sound familiar?
. . . Writer Robert W. Chambers borrows the name of Ambrose’s ancient city, Carcosa, and builds it into a mysterious and cursed city in his collection of short stories The King in Yellow. The stories in the book are linked by a fictional play of the same name, which induces despair and insanity in those who read it or see it performed. Considered “weird fiction” under the subgenre of speculative fiction, Chamber’s The King in Yellow has inspired many writers, including H. P. Lovecraft.

In "The Call of the Cthulu" by Lovecraft there's even a Louisiana connection in this passage about an Inspector Legrasse out of New Orleans who goes out in the Bayou to investigate some type of Voodoo worship of the First Evil Cthulu (which is something like the "Green Spaghetti Monster" mentioned in True Detective):

On 1 November 1907, there had come to New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte's men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.

So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragments of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch towards the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.

The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypus thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before D'Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and incidents.

. . . In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre's extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing and writhing about a monstrous ringshaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless bacchanale between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.

And if there's still any doubt that True Detective has deep literary roots, the screenwriter of True Detective himself has mentioned that Chambers/Bierce were indeed his sources, although not his favorite writers. Instead, he was merely inspired by the American mythos of the names involved. And he also suggests checking out Faulkner and Joseph Conrad ("Heart of Darkness" to be sure), plus the Holy Bible, too, so my own analysis was pretty close to what he intended. :)

From HitFix

. . . you wrote this entire thing in a vacuum, as someone relatively new to television, not knowing how it was received. And the show comes on, and people go nuts about it, they are penning raves, coming up with elaborate theories about the Yellow King and Lovecraft and everything else. How did it feel to see your creation being received in all of these ways?

Nic Pizzolatto: I felt like, look, it's all good, and I really mean that. To me, that is what it means to connect and resonate with people. It means that they are going to project onto the work. There's never been anything I didn't love that I didn't connect with on a personal level because to some degree, I projected upon it. That said, I think I've made clear that my only interest in the Chambers stuff (Robert W. Chambers wrote "The King in Yellow") is as a story that has a place in American myth. And it's a story about a story that drives people into madness. That was mainly it. Beyond that, I'm interested in the atmosphere of cosmic horror, but that's about all I have to say about weird fiction. I did feel the perception was tilted more towards weird fiction than perhaps it should have been. For instance, if someone needs a book to read along with season 1 of "True Detective," I would recommend the King James Old Testament. I wouldn't tell anyone to go buy Robert Chambers. It's not that great a book. Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner I think are in there far more than Chambers or Lovecraft. But again, I guess I hope that these 8 chapters, once the totality of it is evident, it might provoke a re-evaluation. But if it doesn't, I'm very happy with the reaction we've had. It couldn't have been better. I'm just surprised by it. I remember talking to you three months ago and having to convince you: "This just sounds like every other show," "I know, I know." And now my wife read a comment the other day that said I live out in the desert, and I run some kind of cult. (laughs) I don't know what I can say about that. I think this show answers everything it told you to ask. The questions it didn't tell you to ask are questions best left to one's self.