The Incomprehensible Greatness of Dante

Years ago, when I first started reading seriously, trying to go through most if not all of the classics, I picked up and read Dante's Inferno, the Longfellow translation, because that was the one available at Barnes and Noble.  I didn't get much out of it: the next year, when I read Purgatorio and Paradiso in Mandelbaum's translation, I still didn't get much out of it; I was aware that Dante was important, the national poet of Italy--and you can tell, flipping through the endnotes of these volumes, that there is a lot of esoteric stuff you're just not going to get without a lot of work.  In all of the Divine Comedy there are figures from history both famous (Judas, Cassius, Brutus) and mildly famous (Pope Boniface) as well as obscurities, like Dante Alighieri's contemporaries, who he either wanted to praise by putting them in the empyrean or criticize by putting them in one of his circles of Hell, because when you don't get along with someone, writing an epic poem and including them getting tortured for eternity is the best revenge.
 

In any event, I read the Comedy, found some of the poetry moving and found much of it going over my head in a way where I said to myself, I'll figure it out later, and by later, I meant never.  I can't imagine ever putting in the effort to get Dante properly, but because of his place in the Western Canon (he's up there) I did want to get some appreciation of his impact.  And so it was that I picked up Erich Auerbach's short study, "Dante: Poet of the Secular World," which is illuminating in large part if aimed at a more scholarly audience than myself.

Lost in the rain in Juarez

I'm a nihilistic pessimist at the best of times, so when a non-fiction book about some serious problem--the drug war, Afghanistan, political corruption, fiscal corruption--ends with a chapter on how things are really turning around, how there are good people fighting the good fight, it disappoints me to no end.  That's because it's a compromise: it suggests hope where there might not be reason for it, giving a tragic situation a Hollywood ending, and ironically, depressing me, at least, even more.  If a book about the banking crisis of 2008 ends with the inspirational story of ten different people all doing the right thing, I think: there are only ten people doing the right thing?  And they're supposed to stop all this horrible shit?  Acting like the problem is being solved negates the tragedy of the problem in the first place.

So it's a very dark relief to read "Murder City," by Charles Bowden, about the violence from the war on drugs in Juarez, Mexico.  There is little sentimentality.  There are many slaughters.  The problems he addresses are not insoluble, but nevertheless they will not soon be solved.  And throughout the whole thing, he only describes--albeit very sympathetically--three or four residents who fight the noble fight, and it is all the more affecting because the reader is made to understand that they are just drops in the bucket.

NY Times on Pynchon's New Book

I've already ordered my copy of the new Thomas Pynchon novel, "The Bleeding Edge."  I am excited for several reasons--so many, in fact, that as I already said, I pre-ordered a hardcover book that will probably cause my backpack to double in weight.

Then this, in the New York Times review:
"The result, disappointingly, is a scattershot work that is, by turns, entertaining and wearisome, energetic and hokey, delightfully evocative and cheaply sensational; dead-on in its conjuring of zeitgeist-y atmospherics, but often slow-footed and ham-handed in its orchestration of social details."
To which I say: isn't that the point of Thomas Pynchon novel?
Also, New York Magazine had a pretty interesting essay on Pynchon the-guy-himself, who yada-yada-yada is notoriously camera-shy/reclusive/private/etc.  Still worth reading.

Jim Thompson goes to Hell

Of course I've read Jim Thompson before, probably the darkest of the great hardboiled crime novelists, and the most cursory knowledge of his writing bears out that title.  He's a great writer with that age-old problem of having written many good books but perhaps not great ones; and he's probably too dark to gain too large a following, the way another great writer with no clear cut masterpieces, Philip K. Dick, has.  Despite his obscurity, Thompson is a fascinating case study in terms of learning how fiction does what it does.  Example 1.  (How's that for a segue?) Lou Ford in "The Killer Inside Me" is his own kind of Satan, creating his own kind of Hell, but the motif I'm talking about comes at the end, when he's in the asylum.

This is what his books looked like when they were published. 

The cover/content discrepancy has seldom been so high.

Jim Thompson is an interesting writer.  I first read him years ago (by which I mean, like, five years ago) after going through all of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett's novels; I had an affinity for him the second I read that he thought of himself as a "dime-store Dostoevsky," and an even deeper affinity when I read on his Wikipedia page that he had gotten married in my home town of Marysville, Kansas.  Whether or not the latter is true--it's not the kind of town people lie about to tenuously link it to semi-obscure pulp writers--the Dostoevsky thing is pretty far-fetched.

"Rio"

Great band, great song, amazingly awful video.