I hereby nominate this fine piece of work as the official Sonora Review theme music:
What say you?
–Jonathon Walter
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Elisa Gabbert is not happy with the work she’s been getting.
Choice quote: “Poems are not supposed to be beautiful (though they can be). They’re supposed to be good.”
–Jon W.
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It is impossible to read this, William Vollmann’s 2500-page examination of the morality of violence, without reflecting on one’s own relationship to violence. And so here is a story:
During my undergrad years I helped pay my tuition by working in a small mom-and-pop video store with an extensive (for our location, anyhow) pornography collection. I worked by myself in this brightly-lit closet for about four years, mostly without incident. It was boring, as almost by definition any clerking job must eventually become, but I used the time to read novels, do homework, and watch episodes of The Simpsons and incompetent direct-to-DVD horror films behind the counter. One day a man came in with his girlfriend. I had seen him before. He wore a backward baseball cap, thick glasses, white running pants and a white jacket that looked like an altered prizefighter’s robe. I don’t remember much what his girlfriend looked like, probably because she stared at the ground and didn’t say much of anything. I remember everything the man said very well. He walked up to my desk. There was nobody else in the store.
Hey you, he said.
Yes?
You go back there? Inching his head to the right, towards the door that led into the pornography room….You go in there, huh? Heh.
Yeah, sometimes. I mean I work here.
Okay. You know about any new movies, huh? Like in the past year? I’ve been in prison for a year or so, huh? Know why I was in prison? Because I made too much money. I made too much money. Now what do you think of that?
Huh, I said, not believing him but even beneath that not caring much either way.
I made too much money so they put me in prison. But now I’m out and making money again. I make even more money than when I got put in. Come here–and here he gestured toward his girlfriend, who had been browsing the stacks of the old comedy VHS, old thin cardboard encased in clear yet yellowing dusty translucent plastic shells, those badly drawn cartoon images of John Candy, Howie Mandel–come here.
She came there.
Now we want a movie, he said. Look what I got here. We want a movie. I haven’t been home for a year, you know?–he talked like this, asking questions of himself, performing, like I was not even there–So what’s new?
The new movies are on the center racks in alphabetical order, I said, not wanting to speak with him any further. Alright, alright, he said, and dragged his girlfriend behind him. She whispered something and he whispered back. And then he hit her in the face. I couldn’t tell how hard he’d done it; all I know is that I was able to hear the blow and once he’d done it she bent over a little and scrabbled at her nose in pain, alternately gripping it and letting it go. I didn’t see any blood. And of course I didn’t do anything about it: said nothing, did nothing. At the time I was working 30+ hours a week and taking 18 credits in an attempt to make up for my pathetic high school track record by overachieving in college. I had probably not slept more than four hours the night before. These are reasons, not excuses. I had not even done anything to indicate that what he was doing was wrong: he might have studied my (non) reaction and assumed there was nothing the matter with what he’d done. I had no empathy, and I was afraid. I still think about it.
William Vollmann’s book is a monument to empathy, to understanding. He does nothing by half-measure. He is shot at by snipers. Two of his friends are killed by a landmine. He kidnaps a child prostitute and gives her over to social workers, telling the child’s father to his face that he will kill him if he ever finds out he’s sold another one of his children into sexual slavery. He excoriates the parents of the dead children at Columbine who used the event as a political tool to help ban assault weapons, calling them “vultures”, and speaks with admiration of men like Bo Gritz and Ted Nugent. He speaks at length of his own weapons, many of which are now illegal.
The book is designed to offer a moral calculus for violence–when it is okay to kill or harm another human being (or animal, or the Earth itself) and when is it not okay? The first half of the book offers a series of potential justifications for violence (honor, war aims, defense of gender, defense of class, etc.) by analyzing the actions of various “moral actors” throughout history (Gandhi, Hitler, Robespierre, Trotsky, Lincoln, etc) and the second half offers a collection of Vollmann’s journalism and experiences throughout the world. Something few have commented on is how this structure almost undoes itself–the first half, such as it is, attempts to build an edifice of truth and understanding regarding violence (here is what should be done, and how, in order to live morally) and the second half totally destroys it. The first half is scholarly, the second half is the real world.
The first half is probably the less useful section of the book; while interesting for devotees of Vollmann’s ridiculously baroque writing style, it doesn’t quite work as history (Vollmann’s too much of a character motivation-obsessed novelist to totally subsume himself within his material the way a great writer of journalistic nonfiction like Robert Caro does) and if you’re not already familiar with the time periods described Vollmann certainly isn’t going to clear things up for you. What is worthwhile here is watching Vollmann attempt to carve his way through history’s thicket and impose order upon it. Vollmann also often discusses photographs and pieces of art in detail that do not appear in the book; in a book with a great deal of art, this is a serious lapse.
The second half is far more terrifying and essential. Vollmann offers personal tales of violence that beggar description and make one fear for the soul of humanity; I found the Soviet Union’s disguising of landmines as toys in order to lure Afghani children to their deaths to be the most horrible example but everyone who reads this is going to probably find their own example of violence to give them nightmares. Vollmann is not afraid to tell you his opinion, and for this I admire him. We know exactly what he thinks about everyone he meets and yet rather than make him seem judgmental it makes him seem more human. Two of Vollmann’s friends die horribly in Bosnia, and he has no compunction about saying that he hates and wishes ill on those who killed them. This is how we would all feel and to sugarcoat it is a lie. Each and every one of the conflicts described in this section is insoluble. Vollmann offers no answers because they’re aren’t any. For nearly 1500 pages we are pounded with this message: poverty, fear and something ineffable in human nature breeds violence, and there is nothing that can be done about it–but we have to try. Trying will most likely do nothing, but we have to. We have to. This is an incredibly significant work. –Jonathon Walter
“‘Something Happened’ is black humor with the humor removed.” –Kurt Vonnegut
I thought I liked depressing novels. And I do. But I’ve reached my limit. I will not be able to read a book more depressing than Something Happened, Joseph Heller’s second novel. If I read another book and find the emotional suffering to be more abject than in this one, I will probably stop reading it. Thankfully I doubt such a book exists.
Something Happened is unremitting despair from beginning to end, 600 pages of it, told in the single, obsessively parenthetical, shrill first-person monotone of one Bob Slocum, father and office worker. Bob is a racist, sexist, and homophobe. Bob is unhappy. He is unhappy at work (he hates his coworkers); he is unhappy at home (his wife and son and daughter are unhappy, as well.) They live the standard normal suburban life with grave doubts and hatreds simmering underneath. We’ve seen this before, but never at this pitch of intensity. The book is like a Man in the Gray Flannel Suit from Hell. It’s the literary equivalent of waterboarding. I felt my chest constrict, reading this book. But I could not stop reading. Bob’s monologue (and it really is the entire book) is a catalog of his hates, his problems, girls he wants to sleep with and can (and did) and girls he wanted to sleep with and couldn’t. The latter is the source of much of the novel’s misery. He has another son, who is mentally retarded.
In a book chock-full of scenes of complete emotional terror none is perhaps more horrible than Bob’s discussion of when he worked as a mail clerk in a telegraph office at the age of seventeen and protected one of his coworkers (who he was head-over-heels in love with) from being raped at the hands of some stockboys, who have actually asked him to join in:
“You prick,” they said (and I was relieved when I saw they were not going to beat me up. I was being set free). “We could have had her.”
“We’ll get her without him.”
That thought struck pathos into my soul. I was not allowed to feel like her hero for long. By the time I returned upstairs, she was at her desk chatting with both of them over what had happened, flirting brashly with them again, especially with the tough, coarse, sinewy one she hadn’t liked (mending her torn silk stocking with colorless nail polish, lifting her breasts for him as she had always done for me, tilting her head and tempting him with her ruby, saucy smile. He was a tough, swarthy Italian, like Forgione, and I felt he had just shoved me out of the way again, as he had downstairs. I hated her. My feelings were hurt. I felt she would have fucked him from that time or sooner than she ever would me, if he was smart enough to pose and wait–”I’m on my back, he’s in my crack,” was part of another bawdy song she liked to sing to me–even though she still liked me better), and I felt pangs of jealousy. (What good did it amount to, being liked, if she only wanted to fuck people she didn’t like?)
This is doubly tragic because 1.) Bob is disappointed, again, and 2.) but more importantly, he doesn’t actually care about his friend–he saved her because he hoped she would sleep with him as some kind of reward. Not minding that she has just almost been raped and might in fact be attempting to ingratiate herself with the boys out of fear (this is the early 50s, you understand, and she has to continue to work with these boys around her every day), no the important thing is that Bob’s “feelings were hurt”! Bob is of course too young to recognize the depravity of this, being a mindlessly horny teenager like we all are or were, and takes the entirely wrong lesson from his experience (which is expressed in the final parenthetical statement). What is the point, basically, of doing good things if you aren’t rewarded in exactly the way you want to be?
The tone is sustained despair. Everything builds up to some horrible event, and it does happen, and it is more horrible than you can imagine. This is a great novel. Please don’t read it.
–Jonathon Walter
Electric Literature. They’re doing great work.
–Jon W.
Currently working my way through the Paris Review Interviews volumes 1-4; this thing is a goldmine. It’s an MFA program in a box! Choice quotes:
“There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.” –Dorothy Parker
“Too many writers seem to consider the writing of short stories as a kind of finger exercise. Well, in such cases, it is certainly only their fingers they are exercising.” –Truman Capote
“I seem to remember reading that Dickens, as he wrote, choked with laughter over his own humor and dripped tears all over the page when one of his characters died. My own theory is that the writer should have considered his wit and dried his tears long, long before setting out to evoke similar reactions in a reader.” –Truman Capote
Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?
Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
Hemingway: Getting the words right.
“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.” –Ernest Hemingway
“I wanted to learn the technique of the theater so well that I could then forget about it. I always feel it’s not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.” –T.S. Eliot
“But let us look at one of the dominant ideas of the century, accepted by many modern artists–the idea that humankind has reached a terminal point. We find this terminal assumption in writers like Joyce, Celine, Thomas Mann. In Doktor Faustus politics and art are joined in the destruction of civilization. Now here is an idea, found in some of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. How good is this idea? Frightful things have happened, but is the apocalyptic interpretation true? The terminations did not fully terminate. Civilization is still here. The prophecies have not been borne out. Novelists are wrong to put an interpretation of history at the base of artistic creation–to speak “the last word.” It is better that the novelist should trust his own sense of life. Less ambitious. More likely to tell the truth.” –Saul Bellow
“When I was a young man I was always hunting for new metaphors. Then I found out that really good metaphors are always the same. I mean you compare time to a road, death to sleeping, life to dreaming, and those are the great metaphors in literature because they correspond to something essential. If you invent metaphors, they are apt to be surprising during the fraction of the second, but they strike no deep emotion whatever.” –Jorge Luis Borges
“Everness, of course, is better than eternity because eternity is rather worn now. Ever-r-ness is far better than the German Ewigkeit, the same word. But [Bishop Wilkins] also created a beautiful word, a word that’s a poem in itself, full of hopelessness, sadness, and despair–the word neverness. A beautiful word, no? He invented it, and I don’t know why the poets left it lying about and never used it.” –Jorge Luis Borges
“I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.” –Kurt Vonnegut
“If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.” –Kurt Vonnegut
“Students like to say that they stage no confrontations because people avoid confrontations in modern life. Modern life is so lonely, they say. This is laziness. It’s the writer’s job to stage confrontations, so that the characters will say surprising or revealing things, and educate and entertain us all. If a writer can’t or won’t do that, he should withdraw from the trade.” –Kurt Vonnegut
“When you’re young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can’t be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative-writing courses! The academics don’t know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.” –James M. Cain
INTERVIEWER: Did you ever go and see the film [of your book]? What did you think of it?
JAMES M. CAIN: I don’t go. There are some foods some people just don’t like. I just don’t like movies. People tell me, Don’t you care what they’ve done to your book? I tell them, they haven’t done anything to my book. It’s right there on the shelf. They paid me and that’s the end of it.
“Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It’s not all inspirational.” –James M. Cain
INTERVIEWER: Have you never had a close relationship with an editor, who has helped you after the books were written?
REBECCA WEST: No. I never met anybody with whom I could have discussed books before or after. One doesn’t have people on one’s wavelength as completely as that. And I rarely found The New Yorker editors any good.
INTERVIEWER: They have a tremendous reputation.
WEST: I don’t know why.
“I do think modern novels are boring on the whole. Somebody told me I ought to read a wonderful thing about how a family of children buried Mum in a cellar under concrete and she began to smell. But that’s the whole point of the story. Mum just smells. That’s all that happens. It is not enough.” –Rebecca West
“On the newspaper board they used to sit around and talk about how they could get published and so on and so on. I’d just hold my tongue. I was embarrassed by it. And still am. There’s nothing more embarrassing than being a poet, really.” –Elizabeth Bishop
“I began A Hall of Mirrors as a realistic novel, but my life changed and the world changed and when I thought about it I realized that “realism” was a fallacy. It’s simply not tenable. You have to write a poem about what you’re describing. You can’t render, can’t dissect. Zola was deluded.” –Robert Stone
“When I teach writing, I do things like take classes to bars and race tracks to listen to dialogue. But that kind of thing has limited usefulness. There’s no body of technology to impart. But that doesn’t mean classes can’t help. The idea that young writers ought to be out slinging hash or covering the fights or whatever is bullshit.” –Robert Stone
“In my experience of writing, you generally start out with some overall idea that you can see fairly clearly, as if you were standing on a dock and looking at a ship on the ocean. At first you can see the entire ship, but then as you begin work you’re in the boiler room and you can’t see the ship anymore. All you can see are the pipes and the grease and the fittings of the boiler room and, you have to assume, the ship’s exterior. What you really want in an editor is someone who’s still on the dock, who can say, Hi, I’m looking at your ship, and it’s missing a bow, the front mast is crooked, and it looks to me as if your propellers are going to have to be fixed.” –Michael Crichton
“There are editors who will always feel guilty that they aren’t writers. I can write perfectly well–anybody who’s educated can write perfectly well. But I dislike writing: it’s very, very hard, and I just don’t like the activity. Whereas reading is like breathing.” –Robert Gottlieb
“The first book is always the most fun, because when you write your first book you’re just a writer. Then you get published. Then you become an author, and once you’re an author the whole thing changes. You have a track record. You have a public. A certain literary persona. You can become very self-conscious and start to compete with yourself. No fun at all.” –Richard Price
“I was also puzzled by the fact that so many of the established poets didn’t like each other. There’s competition, naturally–and naturally you relate to someone who can promote you. That’s not awful; that’s the way the world works. It’s just not the way I work. But don’t get me wrong, what they’re doing–these meetings where they give each other prizes–I think it’s wonderful.” –Jack Gilbert
“Why do so many poets settle for so little? I don’t understand why they’re not greedy for what’s inside them. The heart has the ability to experience so much–and we don’t have much time.” –Jack Gilbert
“I was never a big fan of people who didn’t leave home. I don’t know why. It just seems part of your duty in life.” –Joan Didion
Recently on an internet-surfing session that was directionless as it was attenuated, I came upon this peculiar list: The 100 Greatest Writers of All Time. Leaving aside for a moment the inherent absurdity of such a list (and it is pretty ridiculous) it’s a nifty little conversation piece. There seem to be some big misses (Where’s Camus? Gass? Kerouac? Ginsberg? McCarthy? Christina Stead? Patrick White?), and not putting Shakespeare first is just nonsensical, but some time was clearly put into this thing and it’s a worthy vehicle for discovering great authors. There are some nice surprises on there too (W.G. Sebald! Stanley Elkin!).
Anyway, take a look.
–Jonathon Walter
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Tagged 100 greatest writers of all time, camus, gass, ginsberg, greatest writers, internet, kerouac, mccarthy, sebald, shakespeare, stead, white
We’re pleased to announce that the first annual Sonora Review poetry contest will be judged by Caroline Bergvall. We honor work that displays innovative technique and a fine attention to craft. The winner of the contest will receive 500$ and publication in the Winter 57th issue of Sonora Review. All contest entrants will be sent a complimentary Winter issue.
Entrants can submit 3 poems with a 10 page limit.
Multiple submissions to the contest are accepted, but every set of three poems must be accompanied by the reading fee.
All work will be considered for publication for the Winter issue.
Entries will be screened blindly by Sonora Review staff. The top entries will be sent to Caroline Bergvall, whereupon she will choose the winning entry.
The winner will be notified by email in November.
Eligibility
Alumni from the University of Arizona who have graduated in the past three years are excluded from the contest. Participants in contact with Caroline Bergvall or former students of hers are also excluded.
2. For online submissions:
Sonora Review is now accepts manuscripts through ManuscriptHub.com.
Create an account at ManuscriptHub and follow their instructions to submit your manuscript electronically.
The reading fee for the contest is: $14.00
Posted in Sonora
Tagged caroline bergvall, contest, issue 57, poetry, poetry contest
Hello Everyone,
The orders for the latest Sonora Review issue, featuring an expansive in-addition-to-the-awesome-fiction/non-/poetry-lineup Wallace tribute section, including the uncollected Wallace story, Solomon Silverfish, essays and reflections from Sven Birkerts, Michael Sheehan interviewing Tom Bissell, Charles Bock, Marshall Boswell, Greg Carlisle, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Ken Kalfus, Glenn Kenny, Lee Martin, Michael Martone, Rick Moody interviewing Michael Pietsch, and art and prose from Karen Green, are still available and are being shipped. We’ve had a wonderful response, and while issues are still for sale they’re no longer available through paypal: just follow the check mailing instructions below and you should be able to get your hands on this truly remarkable issue, which also includes new work by Aimee Bender, fantastic short-short contest winners, and interviews with Marilynne Robinson, Junot Diaz, Ron Hansen and Ben Marcus. THEY ARE STILL AVAILABLE!!!!!
The issue’s DOUBLE FANTASTIC complete content (as if the tribute wasn’t enough), work that makes up our Sonora 55/56 pages, includes:
cover art by Matt Furie
&
fiction from Etgar Keret, Kellie Wells, John Holliday, Ryan Call, Jarod Rosello, Sharma Shields, Wendy Rawlings, Katherine Lien Chariott, Michael Conn and David Lombardino
&
non-fiction from Sean Lovelace, Elizabeth Bennett, Riley Hanick, Henry Ronan-Daniell, Jennifer Schaller and Luis Alberto Urrea
&
poetry from Eliot Khalil Wilson, Yi-Fen Chou, Peter Jay Shippy, Tamiko Beyer, Dan Pinkerton, Martin Moran, Ryo Yamaguchi, dawn lonsinger, Keith Montesano, Laynie Brown, Joshua Butts, Clinton Frakes, Cralan Kelder, G.C. Waldrep, Cynthia Arrieu-King, Tim Peterson and Gregory Lawless
&
reviews of James Wood, Marilynne Robinson, Eça de Queirós and David Ohle.
If you’d like to order the issue now you may send a check for 18$, payable to “Sonora Review,” with an accompanying note with your address, to
Sonora Review
55/56 Order
Department of English
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
Any questions? You can hit us up at sonora@email.arizona.edu. We should be responding in a timely fashion; don’t get upset if it takes a few days! Thanks so much for the interest.
Sonora Review
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