Portnoy's Complaint- still about day 7

As he moves from invective and spleen, so we get this warm hearted vision of a tight -knit Jewish childhood, it's the voice of his conscience speaking. It gives balance in a mawkish but genuine sort of way. My mother sometimes says. "You did have a good childhood didn't you?, we were good parents weren't we?"   I can only ever grunt in reply and brush it off.  Yes I was well loved as a child, and except for the over sensitive child's fear and loathing ( I was over sensitive and very bright), it was a great childhood.  But both my parents had no comprehension whatsoever what it was like to be me.  They weren't educated, they weren't intellectual, they had no idea what it was like to be a teenager in the late sixties and early seventies. That wasn't their fault - they had completely limited backgrounds, but it is sad that it caused this huge gap between us - of course I loved them and was loved back, but I could see, from about the age of seven on, that they weren't worldly or experienced, they were naive and guileless in the new riches of that period.

One of the great things about going to Sussex University in the seventies was being to do all sorts of wacky course ( I was in the School of Cultural and Community Studies).  I did an experiential course on Family Therapy, and wrote a dissertation for it based on Alan Garner's Red Shift and my own education far beyond my parent's understanding.  Best image I have though is Julie Burchill saying that when she was writing upstairs ( at least she had an upstairs we lived in a fucking 2 bedroom bungalow - I never appreciated how much it really meant ot be able to be on a different floor until I moved into a house, anyway her mother used to say, of that's so nice that you're practicing your typing.
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Portnoy's Complaint - day 7ish

Beginning to read faster now, finding the genuinely funny bits every few pages, like flicking through the New Yorker or Private Eye just looking for the cartoons. It's still a great sustained rant, reaching out beyond just the Jewish background. As one of the most famous and most quoted lines in the novel says:


"What I’m saying, Doctor, is that I don’t seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their backgrounds— as though through fucking I will discover America. Conquer America— maybe..."

Roth, Philip (2010-09-07). Portnoy's Complaint (Vintage Blue) (Kindle Locations 2802-2804). Vintage. Kindle Edition. 


I like that rage and that ambition, biting the hand that feeds you, not because you don't want to be fed, not because you want it to stop, but because of what the other hand is doing, all the seedy, small time and big time injustices perpetrated by, for example, a cunt like Cameron.  That's always been my fallback position for the Tories, for the right wing - you have to look down on them with ridicule as well as dislike (not hatred - after all that's their trademark, their underbelly darkness).

Portnoy's Complaint - what day 4,5,6?

A terrible failure to write in this blog, which was meant to be daily. Mainly because busy and distracted.  But also Portnoy's complaint is a difficult book to write about, in that it says all that it needs itself. It's not a book with deep layers - it is a hilarious romp through insatiable male sexuality set in a Jewish context. It's the sort of book I'm really glad someone wrote, just to prise out of the woodwork all those repressed and unhappy people who don't like having fun with sex and identity. Apparently it caused outrage in some of the Jewish community, surprise, surprise, but it's pretty damning about Catholics too, and by extension, any guilt laden oppressive religious morality. Of course the sex offends the weaker sensibility - great! They need offending. They're probably musing on the possibilities of a piece of liver even as they complain.  

A lot is made of Roth's misogyny - but it's a COMEDY, and I think it's quite sweet and appreciative of the joys of women's bodies - what man doesn't look around and think about that secret, wet fissure of delights - men like cunts (and breasts, and - well you get the picture), get over it and that's a great thing for everybody. 

Wildlife Day 6, .Portnoy's Complaint, the beginning of The Centaur

Getting back into the habit of reading multiple books at the same time, swapping from one to the other. I suppose it is a bad habit, shows an inability to concentrate on one thing at a time. But I need to change. I read the first chapter of Portnoy's Complaint last night, and  before 8am in the morning, then finished Wildlife. In between I read the first dense, lyrical paragraph of The Centaur again, as I'd found my old brown paged paperback copy on the table, in the kitchen. I did write "battered" but it came out as "nattered" , and then I decided that it was too cliched a description and deleted it.  But "old brown paged paperback copy" seems too long and ponderous. Get rid of the copy.  An old brown paged paperback.  Still too long. a brown-paged paperback.  But I don't like brown-paged, even with the hyphen. The pages are brown now, especially at the edges, and I wanted that to be known, but brown-paged?? It's too ugly a construction.  Browned paperback.  Maybe that's it - now it becomes a better piece of prose - I can get rid of the "old", as well and  looking back on it I've retrospectively added the commas, after "dense" and after "table" - that just counts as correction.  But maybe that first comma doesn't belong there. Maybe the second comma doesn't either.  It doesn't read right. Maybe it should be:

In between I read the first dense lyrical paragraph of The Centaur again, as I'd found my browned paperback copy on the table in the kitchen.

Now I'm having problems with the "again". It jars the rhythm of the sentence too much. It could become:

 In between I read the first dense lyrical paragraph of The Centaur , as I'd found my much read browned paperback copy on the table in the kitchen.

But "much read" is too twee.  Just a  reread" instead of a "read".  And I've taken out all the commas again to make it one long trot of a read to the end of the sentence.

 In between I reread the first dense lyrical paragraph of The Centaur as I'd found my  browned paperback copy on the table in the kitchen.

Now I have an urge to to put "fiercely dense" in, which alliterates with "first", and gets across the  intensity of that first paragraph. Over-egging?

 In between I reread the first  fiercely dense and lyrical paragraph of The Centaur as I'd found my  browned paperback copy on the table in the kitchen.

This is why I like having a real life editor as well as an electronic capability to endlessly revise and revise.

Time now to pay homage to the computer and the word processor.  But when I look back at pages of prose that I've written in notebooks way way before home computing I can see the same process going on, but just full of scribble and scrawl and crossings out. Might be interesting to try writing a whole story in Word with Track Changes on.

Here's that first paragraph anyway, with the second paragraph thrown in for good measure as I actually reread that as well. Being a favourite book I have it on the Kindle as well as in paperback.


CALDWELL turned and as he turned his ankle received an arrow. The class burst into laughter. The pain scaled the slender core of his shin, whirled in the complexities of his knee, and, swollen broader, more thunderous, mounted into his bowels. His eyes were forced upward to the blackboard, where he had chalked the number 5,000,000,000, the probable age in years of the universe. The laughter of the class, graduating from the first shrill bark of surprise into a deliberately aimed hooting, seemed to crowd against him, to crush the privacy that he so much desired, a privacy in which he could be alone with his pain, gauging its strength, estimating its duration, inspecting its anatomy. The pain extended a feeler into his head and unfolded its wet wings along the walls of his thorax, so that he felt, in his sudden scarlet blindness, to be himself a large bird waking from sleep. The blackboard, milky slate smeared with the traces of last night’s washing, clung to his consciousness like a membrane. The pain seemed to be displacing with its own hairy segments his heart and lungs; as its grip swelled in his throat he felt he was holding his brain like a morsel on a platter high out of a hungry reach. Several of the boys in their bright shirts all colors of the rainbow had risen upright at their desks, leering and baying at their teacher, cocking their muddy shoes on the folding seats. The confusion became unbearable. Caldwell limped to the door and shut it behind him on the furious festal noise. 

Out in the hall, the feather end of the arrow scraped on the floor with every step. The metallic scratch and stiff rustle mixed disagreeably. His stomach began to sway with nausea. The dim, long walls of the ochre hall wavered; the classroom doors, inset with square numbered panes of frosted glass, seemed experimental panels immersed in an activated liquid charged with children’s voices chanting French, singing anthems, discussing problems of Social Science. Avez-vous une maison jolie? Oui, j’ai une maison très jolie for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain throughout our history boys and girls (this was the voice of Pholos), the federal government has grown in prestige, power, and authority but we must not forget, boys and girls, that by origin we are a union of sovereign republics, the United God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood —the beautiful song was blindly persisting in Caldwell’s brain. To shining sea. The old baloney. He had heard it first in Passaic.

Updike, John (2007-08-30). The Centaur (Kindle Locations 117-135). Penguin UK. Kindle Edition. 

Wildlife has a strange distant feel to it - Richard Ford's 16yr old protagonist is nothing like as on fire as Alex in Portnoy. His view of his parents split is filled with pain, but it's unexpressed except in his blank thoughts, and his trying to say and do the right thing in a situation that he just does not comprehend. He is a lonely boy who only has his parents, he has no friends in Great Falls. I find these characters strange - the boy is very like the 16yr old in Canada - it doesn't feel like my experience of adolescence. Updike and Roth both capture this intense sexuality and richness of feeling and thought, whereas Ford is describing, is telling a story, though the eyes of an almost completely uncomprehending child who has not even begun to understand his own life.

Exit Ghost - Day 3

"But isn't one's pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen? Not for some. For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most."

The impressive paragraph that , being  constitutionally lazy, I typed the first five words of into Google hoping to find it already to cut and paste into my blog. (somehow typing all out wasn't an option, though it is a para I would have happily copied out in longhand in my moleskine notebook  if I'd been somewhere warm and sunny like Crete, away from the distractions of computers and the internet). Of course I turn up a whole page of reading blogs and reviews of Exit ghost who have all seized on this paragraph  Going to have to have a look to see if they're saying the same things as me.  Which they probably are, although I can't find many comments from the actual bloggers / tumblrs in the first page of reference.  

Well I have found one, and satisfyingly it's abit bollocks, in that that (that lovely construction again, with a third that only separated from the first two by a bracket) reading doesn't appear to me to be right. Here it is: 

"What Roth seems to be offering here is a defense of the whole Zuckerman project. If the way one conducts one's life is sometimes no more real than fiction, as Maria discovered in The Counterlife, then why shouldn't the "unlived" life be equally as real? And so Zuckerman himself, the "ghost writer" of Roth's fiction, becomes more real to the reader than his creator. The writer need not choose between life and art; he can live just as fully--if not more so- - through his creations."

(quoted from Permananet Groping - a long, and I mean long, review cum essay on the book)

You see I like the original quotation from the book because it says to me how - well no, I'm probably about to say the same thing, and I can't be arsed enough to change ti round enough to make it snottily different. It's not a bad quote about a quote after all. It's just a bit too laden dwon with reference to the "whole Zuckerman project". Whereas I think Roth is writing about the exquisite satisfaction and pain of creating a perfectly imperfect but deeply felt fantasy of what might have happened, what could happen, but never did or does. If that makes sense. It's like dreaming about your anima, wonderfully enveloping and fulfilling in the dream, a sweet memory when you wake, gradually fading as the everyday business of the day occludes your warm fuzzy happiness. You see I take at face value - probably shouldn't.

Exit Ghost - Day 2, The Riches

I'm reading Philip Roth at a pace because he is so good to read, but at the same time not too fast( as before in another post. I think, I moderate my reading speed in order to pay attention). I'm also reading other stuff, and writing too, and thinking, so this blog could indefinitely branch off into that avenue or this. I like cutting and pasting bits of my own work, randomly - well not that randomly - new stuff that I am writing - into the blog.  What I'm watching too. The Riches deserves oscars or emmies or something like that , or Eddie Izzard does certainly, just for inventing the word "buffer" - what grifters call the rest of us in our settled homes and jobs. Uneven plot but great writing in this series. Fantastic names - the "Riches" alerts us to the fact there will be great puns throughout, and they make their new home in "Eden Falls". 

One sleepless night, when Wayne/Doug is woken by the running teacher, and groans out to him "I'm a fraud", the teacher (good guy) says, "We're all frauds. This is Eden Falls", or something like that. The American dream has never seemed more unattractive. Or the grifter life come to that. You can see that people live in what they are used to, and don''t get along with what they're not. 

There's a universal truth for you. Give someone complete freedom, to do whatever they like, and it's like you set them down on a limitless plain, the horizons so big and faraway and full of distant promise, they just spin on the spot. Confine someone, however, to one of those narrow trails, up the side of the hill, working your way up or just traversing, but ever with an eye to the drop down below, and the mind is concentrated  you know what you've got to do.  You may moan and cry, but you make sure you put one damn foot after another on the path because diverting to the one side is the drop, to the other a climb up a steep, treacherous  loose shingle. At least the path's marked out, at least there are footprints to follow, at least you know other people have gone before you.  At least you know there is a destination?

Exit Ghost Day 1, Baba Yaga Starta

Philip Roth writes so clearly and, one of those words that I've never really understood in the context of writing, economically.  Economically rather than sparing which sounds a bit leaner and more desolate. Economically because he crams a lot into a few pages, just like, but not like, filling up a supermarket trolley to the brim for under £100, or driving so well that you make  a five hundred miles in a car on one tank of petrol. You can see that I take the unclearly understood metaphor fairly literally. His story of the Larry Hollis is compacted, without feeling crammed, into a few short pages, seamlessly woven into the main story. No, what am I saying, "seamlessly woven", what does that mean? I should say stitched in as neatly as a talented seamstress would sew something, something not really part of the original dress but something that accentuates and makes it look better than it did already. 

If this book were a TV makeover, Larry Hollis and his family would be the great accessory that makes the whole outfit work. It might be a cheap accessory, which wouldn't help the economic metaphor, or it might cost twice the price of the main item, but the main thing is that it works.


Baba Yaga first draft extract

Baba Yaga

You’ve sure heard told about the Yaga strip and the weirdnessess that came out of that old song and dance.  Classic frighten the children tales, but there’ substance behind all that menace. The NewGen that was meant o feed us all did, but there were some who took it down dark paths and then some. That’s always the way – it’s not the NewGen it’s the people who uses it, and they ain’t going to go away never. I don’t know where they come from –m well I do – you can see them brewing and in the making in the poor man cells and behind the rich man gates where love and affection are stifled and not valued for their own.  There’ s always new creation of the good and the bad just like the fizz of quantum particles in space o the animacula that they used o think sprang out of the mud. Good and bad and indifferent, though those that’s indifferent surely lean towards the badness unless they gets  a steer. And yes that’s what my story is about, because even in the bad parts of the strip there was goodness that came out of it, if only by the skin of her teeth.