Did you ever actually try to read The Gulag Archipelago? It’s like being trapped down at the end of the bar, two hours before closing time, buttonholed by a blabbering drunk who keeps clutching your lapel or your sleeve. He can’t keep track of what he’s already told you, so he just keeps repeating himself, urgently, leaning in too close, breathing whiskey fumes in your face. You can’t get a word in edgeways, and you can’t get away because he’s physically blocking you. You can’t even go to the bathroom, even though your bladder’s bulging and you’re desperate to micturate. The hands clutch and tug insistently at your sleeve: No, but listen… You don’t understand… It was like this… Listen… It was like this…

It’s probably best if we honor the memory of Solzhenitsyn the man, not (unfortunately) Solzhenitsyn the writer.

But no one seems to have noticed Kerouac’s eerie prescience. Readers, look at this quote from On The Road, Part Two, Chapter Two:

When daybreak came we were zooming through New Jersey with the great cloud of Metropolitan New York rising before us in the snowy distance. Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York. We swished through the Lincoln Tunnel and cut over to Times Square; Marylou wanted to see it.

Res ipsa loquitur, readers.

My blog is exemplar [sic] of A is A. That’s what I deliver here ….A.

What struck me was [sic] when I first read Atlas was living by the coda [sic] of moral values. Man’s moral value -his value through his work. His value through his his [sic] achievement and the evil that seeks to undermine it and destroy it at every turn.

In celebration I shall pick up Victor Hugo and read, perhaps, Les Miserables, as a gift to me from Ayn.

Stories

• “The Runner” (Sep. 1988) – (PDF, 1.2 MB)
• “Pafko at the Wall” (Oct. 1992) – (PDF, 12 MB)
• “Videotape” (Dec. 1994) – (PDF, 1.1 MB)

Articles

• “In the ruins of the future” (Dec. 2001) – (PDF, 3.3 MB)
• “The American absurd” (Feb. 2004) – (PDF, 1.1 MB)

Dramas (very short one-act plays)

• “The rapture of the athlete assumed into heaven” (Dec. 1990) – (PDF, 377 KB)
• “Open face” (Jan. 2001) – (PDF, 371 KB)

“Check the kerning! link, link! and blather!
Years ago we got that bastard Rather!
If we cross-link enough, and fight fight fight,
In seven years we may once more be right!”
Because everyone knows the media’s biased,
Which alone explains the current crisis.
“The Good Lord knows it just can’t be the war!
That’s going great! No! What plagues us sore,
Is how the NY Times loves Michael Moore,
Who is fat, just like that awful Albert Gore.”

(via LGM)

Don DeLillo: Absolutely. I was thinking about the impact of history on the smallest details of ordinary life, and I wanted to see if I could trace an individual’s interior life, day-by-day and thought-by-thought. It occurs to me that this could be the novelist’s initiative, even more than the story — to find the smallest intimate moments that people experience and share in conversation. I had none of this in mind. I just wanted to get the characters clear and, over time, create a balance, rhythm, repetition. This is what became satisfying to me. I was writing out of sequence and then began to fit the parts together and, as I say, look for these balances and the way in which the past yields the presence and vice versa. Sometimes this is what I think novelists do that makes them similar to painters. Abstract painters in particular. Looking for things in one part of a canvas that echo things in another part of a canvas.

(via Don DeLillo’s America)

DeLillo the novelist prepared us for September 11, but he did not prepare himself for how such an episode might, in the way of denouements, instantly fly beyond the reach of his own powers. In a moment, the reality of the occasion seems to have burst the ripeness of his style, and he truly struggles in this book to say anything that doesn’t sound in a small way like a warning that comes too late. Reading Falling Man, one feels that September 11 is an event that is suddenly far ahead of him, far beyond what he knows, and so an air of tentative rehearsal resounds in an empty hall. What is a prophet once his fiery word becomes deed? What does he have to say? What is left of the paranoid style when all its suspicions come true? Of course, a first-rate literary intelligence can eventually meet a world where reality acknowledges the properties of his style by turning them into parody, and in these circumstances, which are DeLillo’s with this particular novel, the original novelist may be said to be a person quietened by his own genius. This is another American story–the story of Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles–and it gives us a clue to the weakness of Falling Man.

When interviewers have pressed him on this issue [i.e. his Waffen-SS past], the answers have been vague and unsatisfactory. “It oppressed me,” he told Frank Schirrmacher of the FAZ, in the original interview that sparked last summer’s furor. “My keeping silent over so many years is among the reasons for writing this book. It had to come out, at last.” Why only now? asked Ulrich Wickert of the German television channel ARD. “It lay buried in me. I can’t tell the reasons exactly.” At the Leipzig book fair this spring, he mused that he had to find the right literary form for this confession, and that, he said, meant waiting until he was of an age to write an autobiography. As if that explained a sixty-year silence.

In the absence of a convincing explanation from Grass himself, let me attempt an inevitably speculative answer. Perhaps he just missed the moment. Had the fact of his brief conscript service in the Waffen-SS come out in Wagenbach’s biography in the mid-1960s, it would simply have become part of his story. The suggestion that he would never have been awarded the Nobel Prize if he had confessed to teenage conscript service in the Waffen-SS seems to me far-fetched. But as time went by; as more and more became known about atrocities committed by the Waffen-SS; as, after 1968, the condemnation of the way an older generation had covered up the Nazi past became ever louder; as Grass himself became one of the most strident voices in that chorus; so the price tag on the belated revelation became ever higher. Luther says somewhere that a lie is like a snowball rolling down a hill: the longer it rolls, the larger it gets.

I really enjoyed “How I Spent the War” by Günter Grass. It appeared in the New Yorker several weeks ago, and I’ve been meaning to link to it here ever since.

Günter Grass, 1999 Nobel laureate (for Literature), shocked Germany and the rest of the world when he admitted last year that he was a member of the Waffen-SS, at the age of 17, near the end of the Second World War.

Some might find this article cloying and self-serving, but I think it was well-written.

What do I see when I hold up that lone tank gunner by the half-moonlight and view him as an early edition of the man to come?

He looks like a character who has escaped from a Grimms’ fairy tale. He is about to cry. He clearly doesn’t like the story in which he appears. He is still armed, still holding his submachine gun at the ready. A gas mask dangles uselessly from him like an elongated drum. All he has left in his haversack is a few crumbs of zwieback from his last ration. His canteen is half empty. His Kienzle luminous-dial wristwatch, the birthday present from his father, has long since stopped.

Now he is asleep, propped against a tree. Now he casts a shadow like the tree trunks, because it is day, but he cannot find his way out of the wood and stumbles around in a circle without knowing it, takes some crumbs out of his haversack, unscrews the top of his canteen, and drinks, sending the helmet back over his neck.

Now it is dark again and an owl is calling, and, hungry and abandoned under the moderately cloudy night sky, he chews his last crumbs.

If you’ve got a few minutes on your hands, you could do worse than read the whole thing.