BIBLIOGRIND
The Life of a Wordsmith — Read … Live … Write
Archive for December, 2011
December 31, 2011 at 4:21 pm · Filed under The Letters of Mark Beyer, The Prague Blog
Deception by Philip Roth
An affair unfolds. Dialogue. Man & Woman, both married. She can’t let the husband go, and she can’t stop him from cheating. He is bored, adventuresome where his wife is not. They meet and talk, about what it is doing for them, why sex is one of the answers (or at least a diversion), and what it all means. Roth tells this intriguing story of love — and marriage’s remedy — through 95% dialogue. It’s a wonderful story, furiously delivered and ended on a note of … deception.
A Way in the World by V.S. Naipaul
A writer has traveled back and forth from his homeland to the lands of his ancestors, the ancestors of other island inhabitants, and the antecedents of colonial power. Along the way, he finds stories that had been hidden, or suppressed, or nearly forgotten, or plainly kept for personal memory. Naipaul has used his life, and the life & history of Trinidad, as the springboard for most of his life’s work. We learn history here, but more so the stories of lives that have helped form history as we hadn’t heard it before.
The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan
On a getaway holiday to a famous island (unnamed, but, eventually, obvious), a man and a woman meet strangers who befriend them for no apparent reason. The holiday is, at various times, slow, busy, drunken, sober, hot, chilled, light, dark, crowded, and deserted. In this world of holiday fantasy, anything seems likely to happen. And then happen it does. McEwan used such sparse space to create a language and image explosion as to keep you guessing, make you want, and then ask for more.
December 31, 2011 at 12:39 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
Ian McEwan is, perhaps, the most austere of writers, and one who can pack a single sentence with imagery, meaning, and echoes.
december 31, 2011
The furthest stars of the Milky Way were visible, not as a scattering of fine dust, but as distinct points of light which made the brighter constellations appear uncomfortably close. The very darkness was tangible, warm and cloying. Mary clasped her hands behind her head and watched the sky, and Caroline sat forward eagerly, her gaze moving proudly between Mary’s face and the heavens, as though she were personally responsible for their grandeur. ‘I spend hours out here.’ She seemed to wheedle for praise, but Mary did not even blink.
– Ian McEwan, “The Comfort of Strangers”
December 30, 2011 at 8:08 pm · Filed under The Prague Blog
We went to Tesco to shop for our New Year’s dinner and celebration. Then we stumbled into Tchibo to look at the coffee makers … again. We’d decided to wait for the Cafissimo to go on sale again, but then we realized that the difference between the tradition and deluxe models was one of color … and 500Kc. This is what did it (and, of course, the sudden surge of the USD against the Krona 
)
The coffee packets come in different strengths and flavors: espresso; crema; decaf; rich bean. And this puppy makes a good batch of milk froth, too! A very intuitive machine, easy to use, no fucking around; computerized and set to make the ideal cup of joe.
We also bought four cartons of coffee packets … and got three free!
All told, this has been one very successful Christmas-present-money purchase. Thanks Mom & Dad!!
Yeah … and right now I’m flying on caffeine.
AsiaWife with first cup of NEW COFFEE
December 29, 2011 at 4:15 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
Hermann Broch wrote what I think is the definitive pre-Hitlerian story of how Germany (and Europe, if you care to take the long view) lost its way, from about the time of Wilhelm II to the running brook that became Nazism. Broch’s THE SLEEPWALKERS is a trilogy that takes place some 16-20 years apart, with interrelated stories and characters. The effect is more than chilling, when set against what we have witnessed since post-WW II Europe and America (perhaps also from a post-colonial world-view).
june 14, 2010
” ‘Yes, you see, Europe has already become a pretty dubious field for the Church. But Africa, on the other hand! Hundreds of millions of souls as raw material for the Faith. And you can rest assured that a baptized negro is a better Christian than twenty Europeans. If the Catholics and the Protestants want to steal a march on each other for the winning of these fanatics it’s very understandable; for there’s where the future of their religion lies; there will be found the future warriors of the faith who will march out one day, burning and slaying in Christ’s name, against a heathen Europe sunk in corruption, to set at last, amid the smoking ruins of Rome, a black Pope on the throne of Peter.’ ”
– Hermann Broch, “The Romantic” (THE SLEEPWALKERS trilogy)
December 29, 2011 at 3:51 pm · Filed under The Letters of Mark Beyer
My second novel, title “What Beauty”, is complete. I put the final changes into the text, with a final re-reading, on December 22. The manuscript is ready for page proofs, then a proofreading, and final approval.
To tell the truth, I’m ready to be finished with this book, and this story. It has been a pleasure to write about Minus Orth, a Chicago sculptor living in NYC; and of his relationship with the once-famous writer, Karen Kosek, now a bag lady living on the Upper West Side. My emotional investment in these, and other, characters has been one of reflection on what it was like to live in NYC during my few years there, and for whom I met (including genuine homeless people) and worked with and fought against; reflection, too, on what it takes for an artist to create beauty. Not merely art, but something that is empirically beautiful; a beauty that transcends cultures, eras, and taste.
Likewise, to feel the emotions of characters in whom I created from nothing more than ideas, glimpses of what they look like, and how they see the world, is one of the highest achievements I think any artist can hope for. Poets, composers, dancers, and of course visual artists all make this commitment when they find their first image of “story.” I feel privileged to be a member of such a group.
Sometime in March, I think, my publisher, Siren and Muse, will have it available for online purchase. The ebook will follow shortly.
I’m excited about this book. Although its my sophomore effort to be published, it is my 5th completed novel. Not bad for 15 years of an apprenticeship. But then again, all the heavies in literary fiction have claimed that the learning process is a life-long achievement.
A book trailer is in the planning stages (see the trailer for my first novel, The Village Wit, here) I’d like to have that prepared before the book comes out. Two+ months seems short, but that also is the time for reviews, marketing, interviews, blog posts &etc. I’ll be busy.
“What Beauty” has taken me 2 1/2 years to complete. I’ve written three complete drafts, and have read through the book at least six times. Many changes have been done since the first, and rough, draft was completed nearly a year ago. It’s safe to say that I may have rewritten every sentence, in some ways. The book is 180,000 words. This is a good size for a novel; what used to be called “a full-length novel,” back when traditional publishers printed such works.
Here’s a bit of the novel, the first few paragraphs, something with which to tease:
What Beauty
by Mark Beyer
CHAPTER 1
The shoes give her away. People are otherwise fooled. She can walk the streets in anonymity without the shoes, only there they are. A straw hat, a child’s hat, covers the top of her head. She wears the hat in a manner to rival a queen’s crown. Its brim and crease are smeared black, the weaving pitted and torn. Her hair looks worse than the hat, if this is possible. Pigeon gray with stringy curls. The curls, like metal shavings, spill uncontrollably across her shoulders — and here’s a nice bit of added veil — the ends stuck together in pasty clumps, reminding me of a low-traveling dog which picks up detritus with its shuffle gait. The hair alone makes her unrecognizable. Added to this, this … cast … is an old corduroy jacket, fitted snugly over a yellow blouse, its original chroma (dark chocolate) yet visible under the arms, though faded to a weak coffee across the shoulders, the sleeves, and along the frayed lapels. All for the middling look, it strikes me, that an Ivy League prof from the Sixties would have liked, would have found anti-establishment. Straight off the pages of Life magazine, standing in front of a campus building, lacy vines in shadowy black & white, a grainy image. Maybe this coat is a twenty-five-year remnant accepted from the charity bin at the Salvation Army, or has been pulled from a dumpster behind a retirement home. Grease stains spot the lapels like sloganeer badges, the narrow cord ribs are crease-worn inside the elbows, and countless finger caresses have smoothed the cloth to halos behind the buttons. The collar on her blouse curls up at the points, high up under her chin, something a clown might invent using a lot of starch and imaginative ironing, a trick done to make children laugh (or cry). The linen blouse, faded to an off-yellow found in beach stones rattled in the surf, disappears into the waistband of canvas trousers, stained with white paint, like Christmas tree flock.
This grimy stew bum lacks the gestalt Karen Kosek wants. I’m certain of this; a certainty that touches me like religion touch others. I know this must not be the Karen Kosek that the world knows (or had known her) because she is none of these touchstone fragments. Except for the shoes and … something else.
Seeming to be a bag lady and being a bag lady are not the same. Go look at a bag lady and this becomes axiomatic: there’s a funky odor you smell ten feet around her — the stench of a sort that takes weeks to ferment; hair like matted sackcloth; watery eyes, blurred and vaguely unfocused, or else glaucomatous; pants crotch stained by piss, soaked and dried a dozen times (the root source of the reek?); green armpit stains of the perpetually unwashed, fading toward the edges and tinged white by perspiration salts; and the filthy skin whose grime penetrates the dermis so deeply you swear you’re in the presence of animal hide (no way to forge this look by rubbing fireplace ash like it’s a balm).
Yet here she is, in disguise.
Beneath her disguise, because it has to be that, I see Karen’s hygiene and vigor. Her skin is bright, not so loose around the eyes and mouth for a woman of her age (fifty? fifty-five?), what otherwise you’ll find on the indigent, the drunken, the commonly diseased; her fingernails gleam in manicured gloss when she stops to adjust the grip on two plastic bags; she takes a beat to look up into the sunshine, she smiles, and her teeth advertise money of a quantity having no use for group dental plans.
©2011-2012 mark beyer
December 28, 2011 at 10:55 am · Filed under The Prague Blog
We sailed off on a rail steamer last Saturday, Dec 18, and got home just a few hours ago. We’ve already done a load of wash!
The Chopin express to Warsaw was dreamy, literally. After an hour, we sacked out and woke up an hour before arrival. Then the long, slow coach across Poland began, which could have been worse, but wasn’t. I read nearly 150pp of a Roth book, and finished it with time to spare, so I jammed out on my iPod to some LOUD rock’n'roll.
Adam & Natalia’s flat is still for rent, so we got to stay there. It’s a nice flat with a stunning view of Gdynia suburban bliss.
Asia had lots to do on her Polish holiday, which gave me time to stop at a café for ice cream and a latte. Outside the mall, the “lights of Gdynia” were bright with holiday cheer.
Władek and Ewa made massive amounts of food, and we ate pierogi, krokiety, gołąbki, a Greek spicy fish dish, and lots of cake!
Christmas at Adam & Natalia’s was a nice food-fest, and we opened presents with the young Wojtik, whose main-line present was a Playstation handheld gizmo.
Asia got her hair done, and she looks hotter than ever. Grrrrrrr!
Then she sliced her fingers while cleaning a candle holder, and without proper medical supplies, we needed to improvise.
More pics of me later, when I get them.. And more stories!
December 21, 2011 at 6:13 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
If you haven’t read Iris Murdoch lately, I recommend “The Black Prince” … truly a wonderful farce that carries you from the first line to the last gasp of its twist-turn ending.
october 8, 2011
‘Bradley, I read such an extraordinary theory about the sonnets –’
“Be silent. So Shakespeare is at this most cryptic when he is talking about himself. How is it that Hamlet is the most famous and accessible of his plays?’
‘But people argue about that too.’
‘Yes, but nevertheless it is the best known work of literature in the world. Indian peasants, Australian lumberjacks, Argentine ranchers, Norwegian sailors, members of the Red Army, Americans, all the most remote and brutish specimens of mankind have heard of Hamlet.’
– Iris Murdoch, “The Black Prince”
December 21, 2011 at 6:06 pm · Filed under The Prague Blog
Yes, as I was having coffee and ice cream in a Gdynia mall, I looked up and thought it might be ten o’clock. But my phone-time read just 3.45pm
It’s dark up here along the Baltic Sea. Sunrise this morning was 7.40am. Not that we’d notice much, since work is a just a memory, at least for the next two weeks.
The Poles have no Christmas markets, per se. You can find a few stalls selling ornaments and miniature reindeer woven from sticks. But all of that is okay, and why fill Europe with a German tradition.
I tried to walk to the coast, along the beach, but got only 500 yards from the water; winter is here and the raw wind pushed me back to the mall, warmth, and holiday shoppers.
We’re eyeing a Tchibo coffee maker; it’s on sale for a great price, and has all the bells & whistles needed to make the latte of your dreams, an espresso to put you at a world-record sprint, or 44 flavors of “kava” to suit your every mood.
(I wish I had the choice between 44 moods!)
December 17, 2011 at 12:40 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
I was turned onto this novel by a writer friend, and reading its 100+ pages became a wonderful bath in warm, strange waters. The voice takes you into a story at once meaningful but awful.
july 4, 2009
“Sister Agnes slinks through a gap in the whiteness with a straw basket of underthings that they silently pin up in the hidden world inside the tutting, luffing, campaigning sheets.
Half an hour passes. Wind tears at their work. Sister Agnes aches from reaching. She blows the sting from her reddened fingers. She watches the postulant as the tilting sheets wrap around her and shape her. She watches the girl as she tederly releases herself, as though tugging a ghost’s hands away.”
– Ron Hansen, “Mariette in Ecstasy”
December 17, 2011 at 12:33 pm · Filed under The Letters of Mark Beyer
This past week my former teacher and colleague, Patty McNair, the author of Temple of Air, featured me on her blog under the title “View from the Keyboard.” I got a chance to tell about my writing space, my writing life, and the connection between the two.
Here’s an excerpt:
I have tucked myself into a corner to write. It’s my best mental space, a corner; no distractions, books nearby, a comfortable chair, the tea kettle ten steps away. The overflowing cork-board has too many pins to make sense, so any peek at it sends me back to the sentence from which I jumped. The room has many windows that give wonderful light. At night, I draw the blinds to create a cave atmosphere; a very writerly space.
Next entries
