Dallas, 1980-93

Graduate school:

Poe, just about all. In grad school I had in mind becoming a crime fiction specialist, thus this seemed perfect.

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Novels course: A pattern here. Of the current canonical greats, I only warm up to GM and Faulkner.

Gide, The Amoralist;

Garcia Marquez, Hundred Years. I’d missed out on this completely, so it was quite a pleasant surprise to me.

Joyce, Ulysses;

Proust, Swann’s Way;

Faulkner, Absalom;

Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway;

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Lit Crit Course:

Pater, The Renaissance. Read first. Seemed dated. Interesting mostly as historical.

Foucalt, The Order of Things. Obscurity fascinating and irritating at same time. Now have doubts about method. Must buy into notion of one consciousness, maybe. I don’t know. Archeological idea, rather than cause/effect presumably, I need to think about more. It’s certainly fascinates me that physically speaking things get buried. Literally. And the idea, as you dig, is to find patterns, shapes, not causes. Opposite of Lovejoy.

Auerbach, Mimesis. Imitation and realism. Genesis and Homer.

Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being. History of ideas.

Neumann, The Great Mother. Jung.

Brown, Love and Death. Freud.

Mukarovsky, Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts. Structuralism? Whatever that is.

Stone, Dog Soldiers. Like Mathiesson, I think fashion may have had a lot to do with liking him.

Mathiesson, At Play in the Fields of the Lord. Recommended by Roxy. Just right for the time. Might seem preachy to me now.

Dallas:

Stone, Robert. Dog Soldiers, etc. I really liked DS. Fit in with Mathiessen, it seemed at the time, as writers contemporary with me dealing with things important to me: Vietnam, dealing with the exotic, raw and cooked thing. Not so enamored of either now. Stone’s later novels pretty much of a drag, to be honest. M too heart on sleeve ecological. Didn’t care for Snow Leopard that much. In fact, couldn’t finish. I think both stack the deck too much for liberal view. Might reconsider upon second or third glance.

DeQuincy, Opium Eater. I didn’t like this, heavy going, so much as the one about crime in London. Have to look this up.

Calvino, The Baron in the Trees; Winter Night; Invisible Cities. I was totally enchanted by Baron. Like Winter Night. Couldn’t read all of Cities. Went back to Baron in 06 and not so enchanted. Too bad.

Kundera, Lightness of Being. Too cool? As in hip. Don’t really know now, but was swept up in fashion of it at the time.

Kafka, Amerika and stories. Metamorphosis has that inevitably, like falling dominoes, that I think characterizes all great short stories.

Capote, In Cold Blood. Way back, C’s writing, to use a hackneyed metaphor, seemed like clear wine; now it’s more like water. Still clear, but no punch.

Puzo, The Godfather. Unbelievably crude. Interesting as class indicator, considering its mass appeal. Movie of course far superior in every way.

lots on Kennedy assasination;

Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky and stories.

Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find. Another great story. Haven’t read anything by her after that quite matches it. Garcia Marquez short story about bird cage maker who gets drunk and squanders his money is another great story.

Anne Tyler, Homesick Restaurant. It’s no crime to write the same novel over and over again, except when it’s about chronically dull people.

DeLillo, Libra, The Names.

Vargas Llosa, Conversation in the Cathedral. The first thing I read and blew me away. Made me want to move to Peru, though the opposite was probably the intention. Or maybe I read Mayta first, thought it okay, then went to C in C. Next most memorable is The Storyteller. That clash between traditional and modern was, maybe still is, a big theme with me. A branch of that is how in developing countries both the upper and lower classes have different standards. Lower classes more like peasants; upper classes more like European aristocrats. Maybe. Is the American middle-class really all that unique? I can recognize the Mexican peasant in my parents and grandparents and in old white farmers, usually Czech, I met in South Texas. Has that not survived? Is difference an illusion?