Book Review: Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy

This is the violent tale of a boy of fourteen, referred to in the story only as “the kid,” except toward the end, when his referred to as “the man,” who leaves home and gets involved with the Glanton gang, which ran around Mexico and the regions of the U.S. bordering on it, to collect Indian scalps. The story is at least loosely based on a real gang of such men.


This is the most violent and brutal thing I have ever read. It makes “A Clockwork Orange” look like a

Book Review: The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand

  


I begin by saying that I know The Fountainhead is some sort of holy icon to a lot of people. Even more than fifty years after its publication it is selling very well, and is quite popular. When I took my copy down to the shop here in Venice where I can trade in used books for credit toward other used books, the owner of the shop

Book Review: Ironweed, by William Kennedy

 


Ironweed, by William Kennedy, is one of the Albany Novels, so called because they take place in Albany, New York. The book is about a bum named Francis Phelan, and his bum friends trying to survive as homeless bums in the winter in upstate New York, i.e., one cold goddamn place. I suggest wearing a sweater while you read this, even if you’re at the beach, because the writing is so good, and the description of the cold so biting, that you will feel it.

Francis had a family, a wife and kids, but booze got the best of him, and he ended up on the streets starving and freezing his ass off. All of his bum friends are on the street for the same reason. His friend Helen, for example, is a talented singer, but she is a fucking drunk and could

Book Review: Across the River and into the Trees, by Ernest Hemingway

 


Across the River and into the Trees, by Hemingway, is a novel about a fifty year- old Colonel in the U.S. Army immediately after WWII, who comes to Venice to die. He as been there many times before, and it is where he wants to be. He falls in love with a young girl of about 17, and they have a bit of a relationship. In the end he dies while being driven out of town in his car.

I know that Hemingway is revered as a great writer, and rightfully so. But I did not like this book— it’s not his best work.

The title is a reference to the last words of Stonewall Jackson: “. . . let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” The colonel had been a general, but we are

Book Review: On the Road, by Jack Kerouac

On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, is one of the most famous and most misunderstood books in the world. From it came the term “beat generation,” and a lot of people think it gave rise to the beatniks and hippies. Maybe it did, but the interpretation of it that would do so was wrong.

Kerouac was on the road for about seven years, and claims to have banged out On the Road in about three weeks in 1951, typed on one continuous strip of paper created by

Book Review: Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison

 


Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, (not to be confused with The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells) is one of the best books you will ever read. It is brilliantly written, is from the point of view of a man, and does not go heavily into love and sex. It is therefore high on the list of Man Lit. It is a riotous and violent ride, and one that is difficult to put down.

Ellison starts the story at the end, where our hero is in his lightbulb-filled room in the cellar of a building, telling what happened to him, and bragging about the fact that he is stealing the electricity for his room, which is his way of getting back at society.

He begins as a promising young black man in the south wanting to go to college, and ends up a somewhat older man living in the room I have described. We never learn the name of the protagonist of the story, which I suppose adds to the notion of his invisibility. He is not really invisible, but he feels that people don’t see him.

Through a series of events and misfortunes, none of which are his fault, he is kicked out of college, fails at several other endeavors, and ends up in the cellar full of light.

The book, written in 1947 and published for the first time in 1952, on the surface deals with the treatment of blacks in the United States at that time. There is a certain amount of description as to how that was, but the book does not go overboard, or become preachy. But the book to me is about much more than black men living in a white world. In fact, the hero could have been any of us. It was not, to me, a black theme, so much as it was a human theme.

Writers are taught never to give the hero what he wants, at least not right off. Ellison had apparently learned that lesson. Nothing the guy did worked out—he was defeated at every turn. No matter what he tried to do, he failed, or the result was different than he expected.

For example, when as a young man he was going to give a speech to a group of white men in the south, for which he would receive some sort of reward, he first had to take part in a “battle royal,” where he and a number of other black men were expected to fight nearly to the death. In the end they fought on an electrified grid. He manages to come through it and give his speech through bloody and swollen lips, but he finally does, and gets a beautiful briefcase and a full scholarship as a prize. During that whole scene, though, I found myself wondering why he didn’t just tell them to go fuck themselves.

He does go to the black college, but because of another white man, ends up being expelled. And so his struggles went, all the way from being kicked out of school to not being able to accomplish even the slightest thing without failure and struggle. Sounded quite familiar to me.

The story is full of symbolism, some of which I suspect was obscure, but some of it was right out there. For example, there is an old iron bank in his room, which was being used as a doorstop, and which happened to be fashioned to look like a black man. He smashes it, but then has to hide it in his briefcase, and finds that he is unable to get rid of it. He ends up toting it around in his briefcase for half the novel. The briefcase was perhaps a symbol of the white man’s world, into which he would have to any dream of equality, and the bank is the weight of the past as slaves. 

This man finds himself scratching and clawing and fighting every minute of every day just to survive. This is not only the realm of the black with respect to the white, it is also the lot of the poor with respect to the rich, the citizen with respect to the state, the employee with respect to the boss, etc., etc. His greatest enemy in the story turns out to be another black man. What does all this mean? That the black man’s worst enemy is himself?

So far as I am aware, this was the only novel published by Ellison during his lifetime. I read an interesting theory that the invention of the word processor made it impossible for him to complete a book because he was an obsessive revisor, and the computer made doing that very easy.

This book is a must read for any Literary Man.


Click here to buy the book from Amazon

The Process and Tools of Writing

When I first started to write I looked for all the information I could on how other people did it. Things like did they outline? What word processor did they use? Did they use writing software? Here’s how I do it.

How do you write? To write, you sit in a chair and type words on a page. That’s it. Although that sounds flippant, it’s not. A writer has to be disciplined—perhaps the most disciplined person of all. We sit at home where it is very easy to be distracted. What’s on the internet? Maybe I should check my email. You will find yourself doing everything but writing. But you have to sit down and do it. Some other writer whose name escapes me said they used the AIC technique: Ass in Chair. So, if you want to be a writer, get some implement that will make marks on a page, real or virtual, and start putting one word in front of another.

Where to write? Someone else said that all the black turtlenecks and cafes in the world are not going to make you a writer. Writing is a solitary undertaking that needs to be done in isolation. You may envision yourself sitting like Hemingway at a Parisian cafe' writing, but you will never get anything done there. Stay home, write, then go out for coffee. Certainly observe and take notes while you are out, but the honest to God grunt work has to be done in solitude.

Do I outline? Yes, sort of. I find the task of writing a novel to be so complex that it is necessary to plan it out to a great extent before I start writing. Some people have a very complex system for it, saying they outline for several months, or a year. I don’t work that way. Before I start writing I usually have an idea how the novel starts and how it might end, and some ideas (perhaps) about what goes on in the middle. So I will make an outline to the extent that I know these things. I use a program called FreeMind Mind Map that is free. It is a great program because it is very easy to use, intuitive even, and very powerful. It is sort of a brainstorming tool. I start to write the outline, and brainstorm what happens. It helps get the creative juices flowing. One great thing about that program is that you can copy the outline from the Mind Map format, which is very graphic, to an outline form in a document.

When I start writing I follow the outline, but I am not chained to it. I often will discard an idea that seemed great when making the outline, but which sounds lame when I finally start to write.

There will inevitably come a time when I am writing outside the outline, or I have exhausted the outline. That’s okay. I sometimes go back and add more outline so I can figure out what is going to happen next. I also add ideas, which the software lets you mark as ideas, that may or may not end up in the novel.

Word processor wise, I use Atlantis. It costs about 35 bucks, but it’s worth it. It is much better than other software that is free or as cheap, and at least as good as very expensive software. You should give it a try. One thing I love about it is that it has sounds. I grew up using a typewriter, and I love to hear the sound of the keys hitting the page. I don’t know why, but my wife says she thinks it soothes me. Don’t know, but I dig it. The program also makes it possible to save a file as an ebook, and as html. It has a full screen feature for those of you who like a blank page. The support at Atlantis is extremely responsive. I mean to the extent of actually changing the software responsive.

For a long time I used a free program called Q10, which is great, too, but it is severely limited, and there is no support for it. The big thing with Q10 was that it had typewriter sounds and a full screen mode that did not have any distracting menu bars. But Atlantis has all the same features, and is a very powerful full blown word processor that is vastly superior, and at $35 is nearly free.

New writers are often interested in novel writing software, I know I was. I have tried them, and there are some very good and powerful programs out there for not much money. One free program I tried was Y-Writer. It is extremely useful and easy to use. My only beef with it is that it does not put out a document in a format that agents tend to like. I have to go through and do a huge amount of reformatting. With Atlantis, I write in the format the agents will expect to see. That might not matter to you—give it a try.

There are a plethora of other programs that I am sure are quite useful, but they were too complicated for me. For example, Scrivener (which is for Mac, but there is now a Windows Beta version) and Writer’s Cafe'. I think they are great, but for me, simple was better. You can try them free to see what you think.

What about editing? I work on a book until it is as good as I can get it. I type onto a computer, then print it out. Sometimes I print bits of it as I go, and sometimes I wait until the end, and then print the whole thing out. Either way, you must sooner or later print the thing out and read it and edit it that way. It’s the only way. I find that after about three revisions I feel like I’m beating my head against the wall.

Should you hire an editor? I did. Unless you have written a few books and have a real handle on grammar, punctuation, flow, character, and the whole kit and kaboodle, you need not only an editor, but a person who will look at the whole thing. I think your chances of getting an agent are slim if you don’t. Even if you self publish, you need to have it reviewed by an editor and writing coach. And believe me, it shows. I looked at one self-published book where none of the sentences were more that about five words. You can’t read that shit—it’s more like an outline of a story. A decent editor would have saved that person, and perhaps put out something that was publishable. As it was, though, it was unreadable.

How do you become a better writer? Write more. Get criticism and instruction, but in the end the real teacher is writing. The more you do it, the easier it becomes. When I first started to do it I felt like I had rocks for hands. After a while, though, it flows. Not all of it is good. Hemingway said that for every page of good writing he puts out, he has a hundred bad. The trick is that the hundred bad pages end up in the trash.