A short story collection looking at romance, mostly from the point of view of the heterosexual male of 1960s communist Czechoslovakia (remember that?), from the sexually inexperienced and overeager, searching-in-the-dark twentysomething to the extremely experienced and somewhat calloused, mocking, reflective, overly-lit older intellectual, from the oft-defeated bashful type to the over-rationalizing forward type. They're all comedic, a couple even downright farcical (the one communism-themed story is actually by far the funniest one) which seems about the right sort of energy, jittery, for this sort of mission, which apparently involves exposing the messy, confused sentient being (who, really, never even asked to be born) behind the throbbing, perplexing, often caricatured testosterone fiend we never really ever even asked to be. Which is to say, it's a surprisingly enjoyable read from beginning to end. Similar to how watching the movie "Swingers" is a surprisingly enjoyable experience, even as it reminds you of all the romances in your life that you completely and totally fucked up and perhaps then even of several ineradicable sins you'd like to believe have long been out-run. I wish I could explain to you exactly what elevates this sort of comedy into actual literature, but I don't think I can, not immediately, not right now, though the writing is exquisitely strong, exciting even, in the meticulously plotted, musical way worthwhile comedy often is. The best I can do right now is say, rather than be entirely a force of idle distraction, or a force that lures you straight into pious, family-adoring treacle, the laughter seduces you instead into standing before and looking squarely at a harshly lit and coldly polished mirror for an uncomfortably long time. And I suppose if you happen to have been born a woman, perhaps you'll enjoy stumbling upon a number of solidly plausible explanations for your male partner's chillingly bizarre life decisions. Four stars.
"Laughter - Notes on a Passion" by Anca Parvulescu (2010)
The refreshing thing? This book does not contain one single joke, and never strains for a laugh, in that cloying, tweedy way you're usually forced to endure in these sorts of things. What it is instead is a rather dry survey of the philosophy of laughter in the 20th century. You'll have to get past a long introduction focusing on the physicality, mechanics, and early philosophy of the laughter response before you get to chapters focusing on laughter and the Black experience, laughter and avant-garde philosophy, laughter and feminism, and laughter and the cinema. Pretty interesting, right? A view of the 20th century through the strict lens of laughter?—that's why I thought this academic work deserved a shoutout. And it's not at all a difficult read, to boot. The hangup is, you spend a great deal of time asking yourself: What's the point? Why this lens? She notes that laughter is a sort of "violent mystery" that deserves more exploration—in my lifetime alone I feel there was a seismic shift in general attitudes towards laughter, for better or for worse—but her somewhat scattershot "notebook" only seems to offer a prism of smaller insights at the expense of overarching ones. The story, as I'm forced to deduce, is one of serious thinkers attempting to grapple with the implications of a seizing, interruptive, highly contagious force: Is it the spark of a revolution? Is it an oppressive balm? Is it a vestige of human purity? Or is it a corruption? Of course, the answer is all of those things and more. But Parvulescu seems to have her thumb on "revolution" which, given the depiction of laughter as an immense, distorting, elusive, God-given power, in the end feels lamely reductive. Three stars.
"Kudos" by Rachel Cusk (2018)
Book three of The Outline Trilogy. Was this whole thing a meditation on femininity the entire time? Featuring a main character whom you barely ever see? If so, wow. Four stars.
"Kieślowski on Kieślowski" Edited by Danusia Stok (1993)
Basically an oral autobiography, which ends while he's in the middle of making Three Colors. If you come here looking for insights into films that are notably *not* passive entertainments, then you might actually find them—it's a little refreshing when someone is talking and you can sort of tell that they're not trying to sell anything, or burnish their reputation, or relive past glories, or even merely turning themselves "on" for the crowd: they're just talking, trying to be as sincere and as in the moment as possible. How can you tell? Well, at one point he starts musing out loud about how, if none of us individually believes that we have an ounce of evil within us, how is it possible that evil can exist in the world? And later he goes on a long, somewhat sloppy, cigarette-fueled rant about how terrible Polish people are. Three stars.
"Jokes - Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters" by Ted Cohen (1999)
Well, it only gets interesting at the very end, when this University of Chicago philosophy professor defends offensive jokes; I'm not sure he does a good job of it though (basically saying that correcting the joke doesn't meaningfully solve any problems.) As for the rest of this short book, it frankly doesn't feel all that insightful, for instance, saying that jokes require some conditional knowledge/emotion from the receiver in order to work, or that Jewish jokes often play with absurd logic perhaps because Talmudic interpretation involves twisting logic games. There are a great deal of street jokes reprinted here, including a Polish joke I once heard Norm Macdonald tell, but I would argue that's not necessarily a good thing. I mean, I was promised philosophy. Two stars.
“Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte (1847)
Dickensian, in effort, that is to say alternately wasteful and worthwhile. A paltry tale of feminism, I think not. To decry "feminism" of this work deems most simplistic and, hence, most degrading. Difficult, dear reader, to impart modern tribes to so distant a world, duly acknowledged. The portrait of a woman is drawn strong, indubitably, but perceived strength oftwhile yields insufferable ignorance, hurtful to those perhaps underserving. Characters as symbol, by definition, hardly bests character as character, indecipherable and mystery full, I fain. Maybe that, reader, is the impart: the truly honest don't make any rational goddamn sense. Three stars.
"Ivanov - A Drama in Four Acts" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Peter Carson (1887, 2004)
The very first thing you see is someone pointing a gun at Ivanov's face. The very last thing you see (hear, actually) is Ivanov shooting himself. It's "Chekhov's Act I gun" in plain sight. But the rest of the play is kind of bad. Like it's overstuffed and rushed at the same time. Maybe it's okay if you see it in action, but I doubt it—his plays tend to assume obtuse forms, and this feels like an embryonic version of what he'd later refine. It's just funny that the epitome of his famous mantra, its literal manifestation, espoused as sacred gospel by generations of writing teachers, guarded as untouchable formula by generations of writing students, really kind of stinks. Two stars.
"It's Not Easy Bein' Me" by Rodney Dangerfield (2004)
If you didn't have a Rodney Dangerfield impersonation before you started this book, you will have one afterwards. It's jarringly odd to hear him talk about bouts of severe depression. Oddly, the most I laughed out loud was the chapter he talked about his best friend, the funniest guy he knew, a non-comedian named Joe Ancis. Two stars.
"Immortal Comedy - The Comic Phenomenon in Art, Literature, and Life" by Agnes Heller (2005)
It claims to be one of the few books to examine comedy from a philosophical perspective (even Aristotle, as far as we know, avoided it.) If you count literary criticism, that's certainly not true. What I'll say is it's one of the few books I've run into that tries to distinguish comedy as a high art form, analyzing plays, novels, jokes, paintings, and movies along the way; it seeks to identify comic works that achieve the sublime (as in sublimating innocuous laughter towards a higher, noteworthy aesthetic effect) which according to her definition would even exclude works like "The Simpsons" (memorable jokes, like fireworks, that always lead back to the status quo.) Whether or not that interests you, I suppose, is your business. But I will say her argument that our current comedy rarely does anything new, and in fact, steals liberally from past comedic innovations (see "Arrested Development's" similarities to commedia dell'arte, or even Charlie Kaufman's similarities to 20th-century existentialists like Kafka) is a rather damning one. That said, the main criticism I have of this extremely interesting, wonderfully accessible meditation on high comedy (tell an aspiring comedian that you consider comedy to be an art form and they'll consider you cuckoo, believe me) is, sure, that's all well and good, but is Samuel Beckett really all that much of a knee-slapper? Maybe not. In fact, Beckett sounds like he might be downright irritating. Yes, I may just be ridiculing something I'm too unsophisticated to understand, but it's not my fault I wasn't born into money, or into a culture that doesn't consider literature to be an impractical, time-wasting luxury.* Five stars.
*"All people are 'thrown' into a concrete social universe. The human genetic endowment is programmed for social life, but there is nothing in the genetic endowment which would encode a newborn for this or that particular, concrete social environment into which he or she is thrown. Philosophically speaking, there are two initial a priories in human life: a social a priori (the world into which each is thrown) and a genetic a priori (the inherited endowments of the thrown being herself). Since there is no initial connection between the two, and since only the experience of any single person can forge this connection, it is philosophically correct to speak of two a priories, given that they are prior to experience for all human newborns. To use a term coined by Hannah Arendt, this is the condition of human natality. In the process of socialization those two a priories must come together; they must dovetail in order for the individual person even to survive. But—and this is my hypothesis—the two a priories cannot be entirely dovetailed; there remains a tension between them. To use another kind of metaphor, an unbridgeable abyss remains between the two a priories. I call this existential tension and an existential abyss. According to the conception of laughing and crying presented here, both of these are reactions to the impossibility of a real jump over the abyss; laughing and crying are responses to the failure of any complete dovetailing between the social and the genetic a priori."
"If Only We Could Know! - An Interpretation of Chekhov" by Vladimir Kataev, Translated and Edited by Harvey Pitcher (2002)
One: Someone at the College of DuPage Library clearly has a hard-on for Anton Chekhov and, as far as I can tell, I'm the only person living in the district who appreciates it. Two: Yes, it's an academic book. So let me just say that the only reason I feel I should highlight it is because, as far as my experience goes, the interpretations of Chekhov's works are ALL OVER THE PLACE. And part of the reason for this, as far as I can gather, is that Chekhov's irony is bone-dry: for instance, in "The Student" a depressed character by the end reaches a grand, uplifting epiphany, struck by the eternity of human beauty, which leaves you the reader feeling pretty good unless you ask yourself, "How is a 22-year-old student supposed to confidently know all that?"; but you're barely force-fed the question, and if you miss the question it's easy to miss the point of the story. So the reason I'm highlighting this book is because I think (naivety pending) Kataev probably gets closer to what Chekhov was actually trying to do through his work than anyone else who has tried to explain him. Which is, basically, point out that not one person living on Planet Earth could ever possibly know what the hell they're talking about.* Chekhov, I imagine, died a lonely man. Four stars.
*Excerpt: "'Why should a little one have to suffer so much before dying?' the grieving Lipa asks the old man 'from Firsanov' (In the Ravine) / 'We can't know all the whys and wherefores,' he replies. 'A bird's meant to have two wings, not four, because two's enough to fly with; same thing with man, he's not meant to know everything, but only a half or a quarter. He knows as much as he needs to know for getting through life.' This is a very rare example in Chekhov of a character who accepts not knowing 'everything' calmly, as the inevitable lot of human beings."
"Insurrecto" by Gina Apostol (2018)
This book kind of makes you wish the story of the Philippine-American War and its aftermath were written by a white person, or any other ethnicity really. At least that way, using an outsider's point of view, they would know what to edit and how best to curb one's excesses. One star.
"In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" by William H. Gass (1968)
(1) You know those books that people gush about, especially in educated circles, but when you push them to explain exactly why they liked it so much you can never really squeeze out a clear, considerable answer? Partly because its reputation, particularly in educated circles, seems to have surpassed its actual quality? Something, among certain educated circles, you're supposed to like more than anyone actually does? Something you'll spend a proud year telling everyone about, all your educated friends, and years later struggle to remember? This is one of those books; (2) Maybe the reason revisiting postmodernist works feels so deeply unpleasant is that time has proven their “things are so fragmented truth no longer exists” theory absolutely, 100 percent correct. One star.
"In Love" by Alfred Hayes (1953)
There's this danger if you write a long prose piece using the rhythmic, structured beats of poetry, that the rhythm eventually becomes so incessant, like the steady drip of a faucet somewhere in the background, that the story actually takes a back seat. So while I kind of get it, that short, clipped, kinda calloused, clauses strung together can capture both the neurotic energy of New York City and the elevated inflammations of love, eventually all I heard was that damn dripping faucet—it was hard to absorb the story of a (somewhat standard, and therefore interesting) love affair because technique drifted into the spotlight. As if the disciplined grammar of poetry makes the story the writer's to dictate, not the reader’s to hold and inhabit. Still kinda good though. Three stars.
"Humboldt's Gift" by Saul Bellow (1975)
It's quite the rollercoaster ride, this book. Any attempts to reduce it to something pithy and sharp feels off in some respect. Is it a metaphysical farce? Is it a screwball satire on art and artists? Is it a highly intellectual adventure? You spend the entire book with one man, perhaps the world's most insufferable overthinker, as he gets overwhelmed by an extremely elaborate, continents-spanning plot. You eventually get the impression of a man, presently consumed with Rudolf Steiner's thoughts on spirituality, who so desperately wants to distance himself from a messy humanity (mainly characterized by a scheming, grimy, lawless, 1970s Chicago) whose constant propulsions and collisions become more and more impossible to evade (viewed through a modern lens, it can actually be considered a book-length argument for how the term "introvert" is nothing more than a sympathetic rebranding of "being a crassly antisocial, isolated jerk.") Can you sustain a one-thing-after-another, coincidence-laden, farce-like pace over 500 pages of text, though? Maybe? Almost? You never quite get lost, even as yet another name is thrown onto the pile, and yet another secret is unraveled, and yet another philosophical treatise is expounded. But, at the same time, there were too many moments where I slid my bookmark in at night and said, "No more. No more book. Please, please, no more book," and not at all in a teasing, curious way. I feel like this one's been forgotten, which it shouldn't, it's quite the unique novel—I can't think of too many modern urban novels that remind you of a relentless Indiana Jones film. But you kind of end the rollercoaster ride sensing the whole thing was soundly built, craftily designed, even inspired (I mean, instead of a giant boulder, the guy's trying to outrun humanity itself) but still lacking some sort of ... hard to place ... perhaps even harder to conjure ... spark. Maybe it simply needed more laughs. Three stars.
"Heart of Junk" by Luke Geddes (2020)
Well, it's good in the way seeing some random improv troupe pull off a surprisingly successful Harold is: even though it's kind of sloppy it's extremely satisfying, maybe uplifting even. You might even recommend the troupe to others, if it ever comes up in conversation. Maybe one day, it wouldn't surprise you if you ended up seeing that troupe on TV. For now though, chances are you're not going to remember any of it come tomorrow. Three stars.
"Humour" by Terry Eagleton (2019)
This book is a little difficult to grasp in toto, even at a brisk 164 pages, so permit me to work backwards. The final two pages point out that the Christian gospels contain a great deal of the carnivalesque: "Jesus and his plebian comrades do no work, are accused of drunkenness and gluttony, roam footloose and propertyless on the margins of the conventional social order, and like the free spirits of carnival take no thought for tomorrow." Naturally, that followed an elaboration on carnivalesque comedy as defined by literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, "a way of combining humour as critique with humour as utopia." Which followed a discussion of the Trevor Griffiths play "Comedians," wherein characters clash over the purpose and point—the philosophy, if you will—of stand-up comedy. All this, in a chapter titled "The Politics of Humour". So, yes, we've established that the book is rather discursive—the prior chapter begins by surveying the history of comic attitudes in society ("Cheerfulness and congeniality usurp a surly Puritanism") and ends with a lengthy definition of wit. Before that, the superiority, incongruity, and relief theories of humor get similarly torn apart and so we end at the beginning, with a winding definition of what laughter is. So it's not necessarily philosophical, it's not necessarily a historical survey, it's not necessarily anthropological or sociological, and it's not necessarily a critique of literature, yet it's all those things. Is it useful though? I guess, in its own disorienting, pointillist way. Though you could easily end the book feeling that it says so much it doesn't really say anything at all, if that makes any sense. Three stars.
"Having and Being Had" by Eula Biss (2020)
As far as meditative, book-length nonfiction prose poems about capitalism go, as far as I know this is the only one. Four stars.*
*Biss spends great deal of time ruminating over what is actually expressed through a single word.
"Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales" (1993)
I'm only on page 200 of 600 but I'm just gonna go ahead and call it: After you get past the novelty of finding out the original, violent versions of the Disney fairy tales we all know, you start to come across a bunch of German folk stories that seem to have been collected from the town insane lunatic—they have no point, they go nowhere, and they read like a series of wacky, random events all crammed together into one short story. If it wasn't depressing enough that a lot of stories feature innocent people getting chopped into little bits for no reason, and evil people humiliating the good, and oftentimes end with a moral that just basically says, "Welp, the world sure is unfair," soon the stories make you remember the time you were trapped at a party and the marijuana ran out before it got passed to you. I can't believe I have 400 more pages of this. (I suppose I should caveat that even as a child I couldn't stand fantasy—"What? People can't have wars in space. Why are you making me watch this?!") One star.
"Go All the Way - A Literary Appreciation of Power Pop" Edited by Paul Myers and S.W. Lauden (2019)
My best guess as to why power pop never exploded in popularity is that a lot of people don't necessarily love the music they listen to, they just sort of use it to prop up some image of themselves, usually a mirage. Four stars.
"Good Behaviour" by Molly Keane (1981)
I suspect the book is better than I'm giving it credit for—it's hard for a Filipino kid who grew up in a Chicago bungalow to easily relate to the horsey goings on at an Anglo-Irish estate in shambling decline at the turn of the 20th century. But I'll say it's a very densely packed book that gives you a hell of a lot to think about. Let me attempt to explain: the bulk of the book is spent inside the head of a Michael Scott-like character, an unusually tall, unusually self-conscious, unusually put-upon misfit named Aroon St. Charles who's prone to avoiding harsh realities and desperate to feel loved. Now, marry this with the revelation in the very first chapter that she eventually ends up ruthlessly murdering her own mother. All the tension is found in between those two spaces. And it's a neat little trick that kind of lingers with you even after you've left behind the final word. Possibly four following a re-read, but for now. Three stars.