Technology novels

The ten top technology novels as listed by PC Magazine.

And this is my shortest blog on record.

Global literature

It used to be that the provenance of literature, especially that of the novel, was the nation.

I may sound a tad anachronistic, but I'd definitely buy into Ian Watt's (in his 1957 book, The Rise of the Novel) thesis that the novel "rose" along with the political strengthening of the nation and in some ways contributed to the myth of the nation.

But today the word transnational is sprouting like weed in our discourses of literary genre, as much as it is pervasive in the corporate parlance. We have the massive transnational corporations whose markets brook no national boundaries.

Novels too, or their provenance rather, are transcending nations in a global age. If the nation was the locus of power in the traditional novel, then what is the corresponding loci of power in global fiction? The world?

Perhaps. In a majority of 21st novels whose provenance spans the globe, one sees another major locus of power--technology. Global novels are typically starting to be concerned about the rise of technological power, a power that has no specific geographical habitus but has a borderless network.

Take for instance Dave Eggers' The Circle; the protagonist pits herself against the might of the global giant Google.

In Spark, John Twelve Hawks' hero is a global assassin and is cast in the mold of an artificial intelligence though he has a body and the form of a fully functional human being. He resembles AI in the sense that he is amoral. As the novel unfolds, the assassin begins to lose his amorality, which signals his return to humanity.

Increasingly, the provenance of the global novel then is technology and the hegemonic rule of the same.

Is the business of the 21st century novel primarily to challenge this hegemonic assertion?

Two truths and a lie

Novelist Lily King, says that one of her favorite exercises in the creative writing class she teaches, is to ask students to write the first paragraph of a short story. The first two sentences of the paragraph have to be two truths like "my sister has brown hair" and "her name is Lisa"; followed by a third sentence which is a lie, like, "Yesterday she went to prison." Why the "lie"? Because,

It's the lie that brings the story to life, makes it hum. The lie is the steering wheel, the gearshift and the engine. The lie takes your two true sentences and makes a left turn off road and straight into the woods. It slams the story into fifth gear and guns it.

By "lie" King means imagination which allows a novelist to "slip out of the shackles of history." In an interesting piece on the inception of her new, highly regarded novel, Euphoria, based on the life of the legendary American anthropologist, Margaret Mead, King shares the story of her "lies" as she plots the lives of Mead and her two fellow anthropologists, husband Reo Fortune and lover, Gregory Bateson, and runs free into the "jungle" of her imagination.

A bit of a slap on the face of the discerning reader

Christos Tsiolkas’s novel The Slap is, has been, for me a good reading experience. I read the novel, during my long subway rides to and from work, in November 2010, and 7 months later, much of the novel exists on the canvas of my mind as vividly illuminated flotsam.

What I’ve managed to salvage from the 500+ page-long novel is a notion that Tsiolkas is offering readers a bird’s eye view of contemporary, multicultural Australia. Multiculturalism, as seen through the primarily Greek-Australian eyes of the novel’s main characters, is both a boon and a curse for the evolving fabric of a 21st century life down under.

For the Greek immigrants—and being of Greek origin, Tsiolkas writes of them with panache—Australian multiculturalism is nothing but the modern state’s attempt to police both public and private human behavior so as to manage and contain intra-ethnic conflicts, if and when they arise.

Many of the characters in the novel seethe internally at the extremities to which a culture of political correctness has traveled and distorted one’s will to live freely. People are in loathing of being berated, rapped on the knuckles by the local judiciary and even arrested by the police for smoking inside a cab or for making an allegedly racially insensitive remark. Minor domestic actions, like slapping a brooding, recalcitrant child because he is trying to crack open another child’s skull with a cricket bat, become occasions for a major discourse on anti-child offence. 

The excesses of multiculturalism is abhorred, and the excess is foreshadowed best in the beginning, when one of the central male characters, Hector, finds himself waking up on his bed next to his lovely Indian wife, Aisha, wholly dissatisfied and resentful. The experience of his conjugal bed-mating, he realizes, is artificially fabricated, not an expression of his authentic self. He has had to rein in his organic bodily functions, and sanitize his physical being to ensure sexual cordiality between him and his wife. He has had to ostracize a significant part of his physical reality simply to be sexually/conjugally acceptable and/or functional. 

Hector likes to fart, but in the presence of his wife, he has to censor this most natural of his bodily desires so as to keep himself desirable in her eyes:

His eyes still shut, a dream dissolving and already impossible to recall, Hector’s hand sluggishly reached across the bed. Good Aish was up. He let out a victorious fart, burying his face deep into the pillow to escape the clammy methane stink. I don’t want to sleep in a boy’s locker room, Aisha would always complain on the rare, inadvertent moments when he forgot himself in front of her. Through the years he had learnt to rein his body in, to allow himself to only let go in solitude; farting and pissing in the shower, burping alone in the car, not washing or brushing his teeth all weekend when she was away at conferences. It was not that his wife was a prude; she just seemed to barely tolerate the smells and expressions of the male body. He himself would have no problem falling asleep in a girl’s locker room, surrounded by the moist, heady fragrance of sweet young cunt. Afloat, still half-entrapped in sleep’s tender clutch, he twisted onto his back and shifted the sheet off his body. Sweet young cunt, he’d spoken out loud.

His wife makes similar compromises. The absence of authenticity in their marital bonding spills over from body to mind, from outside to essence. Thus Hector and Aisha compromise on mutual truth-telling—if the truth is told, the edifice of the marriage will collapse.

But multiculturalism has not only bred a culture of self-policing; it is also upheld as the inevitable and alternative-less direction in which the destiny of the industrialized Western world—a world that has for ages been hosting within its demesnes the arrival and settling in of migrants from every conceivable corner of the globe—unfolds. Australia has no option but to endorse diversity in order to survive as a modern nation.

As a genuflection to the marvels of accepting diversity as the norm rather than the exception of modern life, the novel creates another male character—that of the very Australian Richie. The characterization of Richie, a young adolescent who comes of age as an openly gay man in a society that’s pretty Grecian (Tsiolkas refers to contemporary Greece—not the mythical Greece of yore—and its practices of rampant sexism) in its intolerance of anything but the purely heteronormative, is, I feel, the most refreshing in The Slap. Richie is gay and sensitive and very intelligent; most significantly, he is loyal as a driven in nail to his friends and is capable of making cardinal sacrifices to protect the sanctity of friendships. He is, in other words, selfless without being naively cacophonic about being so.

Richie, the independent-minded, attuned-to-the global complexity of the world (he realizes he is emerging into a global society, not just an Australian one) gay male is, I believe, Tsiolkas’ best gift to his readers.

Master of the Paranoid Art

An Illustration of Thomas Pynchon's "Bleeding Edge"

Thomas Pynchon writes his new novel to give a novel interpretation of the "war on terror," a war that commenced with the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

I'll let Jonathan Lethem's evocative review of the book do the telling of what Pynchon's Bleeding Edge is about and how it's remarkably about what it's about.

Bleeding Edge is a masterpiece of Paranoid Art, which accomplishes what according to Lethem, Complacent Art chooses to avoid:

Paranoid art knows the more terrifying (and inevitable) discoveries are further questions. Paranoid art traffics in interpretation, and beckons interpretation from its audience; it distrusts even itself, and so becomes the urgent opposite of complacent art.

 Pynchon offers no monstrously simple answer to the question of the attacks on America. An answer to "Why it happened?" is looped back into "Modernity.":

In Pynchon’s view, modernity’s systems of liberation and enlightenment — railway and post, the Internet, etc. — perpetually collapse into capitalism’s Black Iron Prison of enclosure, monopoly and surveillance. The rolling frontier (or bleeding edge) of this collapse is where we persistently and helplessly live. His characters take sustenance on what scraps of freedom fall from the conveyor belt of this ruthless conversion machine, like the house cat at home in the butcher’s shop. In Joyce’s formulation, history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake. For Pynchon, history is a nightmare within which we must become lucid dreamers.

 Another review of the novel can be found here.

Pinched by Pynchon

What might only be a simple point on the workday cycle . . . becomes a million pedestrian dramas, each one charged with mystery, more intense than high-barometer daylight can ever allow. Everything changes. There’s that clean, rained-on smell. The traffic noise gets liquefied. Reflections from the street into the windows of city buses fill the bus interiors with unreadable 3-D images, as surface unaccountably transforms to volume. Average pushy Manhattan schmucks crowding the sidewalks also pick up some depth, some purpose — they smile, they slow down, even with a cellular phone stuck in their ear they are more apt to be singing to somebody than yakking. Some are observed taking houseplants for walks in the rain. Even the lightest umbrella-to-umbrella contact can be erotic.

A description of uptown Uptown Manhattan in the rain in Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Bleeding Edge.

How technology is anti-matter

[Paul] sleepily thought of how technology was no longer the source of wonderment and possibility it had been when, for example, he learned as a child at Epcot Center, Disney’s future-themed ‘amusement park’ that families of three, with one or two robot dogs and one robot maid, would live in self-sustaining, underwater, glass spheres by something like 2004 or 2008. At some point, Paul vaguely realized, technology had begun for him to mostly only indicate the inevitability and vicinity of nothingness. Instead of postponing death by releasing nanobots into the bloodstream to fix things faster than they deteriorated, implanting little computers into people’s brains, or other methods Paul had probably read about on Wikipedia, until it became the distant, shrinking, nearly nonexistent somethingness that was currently life—and life, for immortal humans, became the predominate distraction that was currently death—technology seemed more likely to permanently eliminate life by uncontrollably fulfilling its only function: to indiscriminately convert matter, animate or inanimate, into computerized matter, for the sole purpose, it seemed, of increased functioning, until the universe was one computer. Technology, an abstraction, undetectable in concrete reality, was accomplishing its concrete task, Paul dimly intuited while idly petting Erin’s hair, by way of an increasingly committed and multiplying workforce of humans, who receive, over hundreds of generations, a certain kind of advancement (from feet to bicycles to cars, faces to bulletin boards to the internet) in exchange for converting a sufficient amount of matter into computerized matter for computers to be able to build themselves.

An excerpt from Tao Lin's new novel Taipei. Technology and drugs play a dominant role in shaping the consciousness of Paul, the novel's protagonist.

The incredible diversity of the Man Booker list

The long list for the 2013 Man booker Prize has been published.

A surprising nominee is a multimedia ebook series.

The list: 

Five Star Billionaire, Tash Aw (Fourth Estate)

We Need New Names, NoViolet Bulawayo (Chatto & Windus)

The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton (Granta)

Harvest, Jim Crace (Picador)

The Marrying of Chani Kaufman, Eve Harris (Sandstone Press)

The Kills, Richard House (Picador) 

The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri (Bloomsbury)

Unexploded, Alison MacLeod ( Hamish Hamilton) 

TransAtlantic, Colum McCann (Bloomsbury) 

Almost English, Charlotte Mendelson (Mantle) 

A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki (Canongate)

The Spinning Heart, Donal Ryan (Doubleday Ireland)

The Testament of Mary, Colm Tóibín (Viking)

Cli-Fi

Once upon a time, there was "Chick lit"; then there was "Clit-lit".

Now there is Cli-fi, echoing Sci-fi, WiFi and Hi Fi, words that mean disparate things, but rhyme nonetheless). Cli-fi is a literary term, coined to denote works of fiction that grapple with global climate change.

Polar City Red, by Tulsa-based writer James Laughter, envisions life in the great frozen north, where populations migrate to after global warming has destroyed the earth's ecosystem. 

The hero of Odds Against Tomorrow is a mathematician who specializes in the math of catastrophe--global wars, natural disasters and ecological collapse. He is asked to calculate worst-case scenarios in the most intricate detail, and his schemes are sold to corporations to indemnify them against any future disasters.

The novel is more about cultural fears brought on by the spectres of an apocalypse.

Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior is on global warming and the abysmal failure of public education in enlightening people about this most significant of issues in a scientific and reasonable way.

The name, Cli-fi, maybe new but as the New Yorker writes:

Environmental havoc has flourished in postapocalyptic fiction, where it makes for vivid, frightening atmospherics and, paradoxically, fosters a sense of unreality. In John Christopher’s The Death of Grass, from 1956, a new virus infects grasses across the globe, causing mass famine. The Drowned World, by J. G. Ballard, published in 1962, is set in 2145, after solar radiation has melted the polar ice caps and London has become a tropical swamp. T. C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth, from 2000, is set in a nearly apocalyptic 2025—a hot, food-scarce U.S. that is plagued by mass extinction. Margaret Atwood’s great dystopian trilogy, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and the forthcoming MaddAddam, engages with similar disaster scenarios.

Do judge a book by its cover

I am amazed by the deep thought that often go into the making of a book cover.

I imagine that thoughtful books have thoughtful covers.

Take for instance, the cover of William Gass' new novel Middle C (at first, I had thought it to represent "middle class," and why not? The battered and vanishing middle class is the subject matter of so much discourse in Western media today).

Artist Gabrielle Wilson, had initially proposed a book cover with a half-concealed-by-music sheets-human face on it, to reveal a basic profile of the protagonist Joey, who is an introvert, average intellectual, a University lecturer and an amateur pianist. 

But Joey in his mind, is also a brilliant professor who runs an organization called the inhumanity museum, a dark place full of clippings of news of world catastrophes. 

Wilson was in a dilemma--to show or not to show the other immaterial life that Joey is steeped in on the book cover. She eventually settled for a cover that gives a hint of Joey's real life--a middling, ordinary one, best represented by the piano key of C.

The history of the book cover that stayed is as follows:

I asked piano-playing friends and piano repair shops in New York for a C key, to no avail. I called Steinway & Sons on 57th Street, and they connected me with Anthony Gilroy at their Queens factory. He was perplexed but entertained by the idea of shipping a single key to Manhattan. The next day I received a beautifully hand-carved ivory key, but I discovered that a full-size key is nearly two feet long. I called Anthony again to see if the factory could cut it shorter and add a black C sharp key. I photographed them from above on a giant turquoise Pantone swatch, aiming to give the ensemble a menacing, lonely mood. Once in the jacket layout, I paired it with the elegant, slightly traditional Sackers Roman typeface so as not to distract from the image.

What Jane Saw

What Jane Saw is an online exhibition that reconstructs, meticulously, like engineers would, the paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds, as they would have been displayed in an art gallery in Pall Mall on May 24, 1813.

Jane Austen, basking in the success of her stupendously bestselling novel, Pride and Prejudice, visited the gallery, not simply to gawk at the paintings themselves, but also to do some celebrity-spotting.

Austen was an avid celebrity-spotter and would be quite at home today in the celebrity-obsessed TMZ culture.

The online gallery celebrates the 200th anniversary of Pride and Prejudice and is a superb progeny of the marriage between the humanities and technology. As the NYT says of the gallery that used the 3-D modeling software SketchUp, to reproduce paintings based on precise measurements recorded in an 1860 book: 

If the notion of a Wii-ready Austen offends purists, others may be happy to see 21st-century technology harnessed in the service of the Divine Miss Jane.

Recently, scholars like Janine Barchas, Professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin, and conceiver of the project, have re-introduced Jane Austen as a history-minded, worldly woman, who isn't quite the country mouse writer preoccupied with revealing timeless truths.  

The watches and the shirts that are at the center of the universe of capitalism

It's the Rolex.

Few can possess it, but almost everybody ought to desire one in her lifetime.

The Rolex featured recently in an episode (I watched a rerun) of the television serial The Big Bang Theory.

Bernadette, having got a job finding the magic pill for yeast infection, in the R & D department of a big pharmaceutical company, gifts a Rolex to her fiance, Howie. Howie is wonderstruck with the object yet a feeling of envy sneaks in. 

The Rolex corrupts his relation with "Bernie" momentarily with a power complex: Will Bernie now become the "man" of the family?

Switching to reality, two of the bank robbers (a pair of Dominicans from Yonkers, New York) who were involved in the biggest bank heist in human history (it was a cyber-heist), photographed themselves with piles of Rolexes after they stole their share and went on a luxury goods buying-spree in New York City.

These two under-enlightened loafers were merely using the commodity as a thing possessed, something akin in their minds to the classy female "pussy," is my guess.

When the commodity is fetishized by those who have no previous context to attach the commodity to, then it's all vulgarly phallic. But fetishized, it is.

Rolex, as I understand, is more than a watch; according to Karl Marx, it's a commodity, that transcends its use-value and acquires magical, near-theological value.

When inanimate things acquire godly powers, then they become commodities, and just as primitive societies worshipped or fetishized objects, so we, dwellers of modern, scientific, times, fetishize commodities. Yet, the act of fetishizing doesn't regress us into the status of "primitives." The more we worship objects, provided these objects are not mere barks of enchanted trees, or the aroma of monkey-brains, preserved in a jar, the more modern and properly civilized we are regarded as.

That is the precise point of Australian director Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, as film critic A.O. Scott, so finely tells us in his discussion of the rising tide of commodity fetishizm in contemporary American movies.

In the novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald was ambivalent about the erotic life of objects, which is a foundation of materialism, excess and greed. That's why Fitzgerald's Gatsby, though he had a life of material excess, is punished with an unattended funeral. Arthur Miller's Willy Loman, the salesman who pined for making it better and bigger every single day of his life, was similarly punished with a thinly attended funeral.

When nobody shows up when you're dead, then it's a sign that nobody cared for you when you were alive.

However, the ambivalence toward the material life is removed from the latest film version of Gatsby.

The Rolex-centered universe is in full panoply through the 3D machinery in Luhrmann's movie. Additionally, and more fascinatingly, the aura of the rolex spreads to shirts. Gatsby enchants both Nick Carraway and Daisy with his collection of the world's "most beautiful" shirts, so beautiful that Daisy cries upon beholding and touching and feeling them.

Sometimes, it's said that Daisy is sexually aroused by the beauty of Gatsby's shirts, and the emotions transfer over onto the collector of those shirts.

I decided to take a look at the famous "shirt scene" from an earlier Great Gatsby (starring Robert Redford as Jay), since the new Gatsby has this scene in 3D and the idea is to enable the audience "feel" the shirts as well, in full, three-dimensional splendor.

Here is the scene:

Daisy is caressing the shirts; in the new Gatsby, she bursts into tears, sobbing into the thick folds of the clothing and saying, "It makes me sad, because I haven't seen such, such beautiful shirts."

A.O. Scott writes that in the novel perhaps the reader could attribute Daisy's tears to other causes as well. And they would be right in their attribution. But in Baz Luhrmann's film, one has no reason not to take Daisy at her word:

One of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s points is that "beautiful things in abundance can produce a powerful aesthetic response, akin to the sublime. And the sublimity of stuff, of shirts and cars and Champagne flutes and everything else that money can buy, is surely what drives Baz Luhrmann's wildly extravagant adaptation of Gatsby."

Commodity fetishizm, in other words, is at the center of the film.

Who is Daisy?

Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby has not only revived an interest in Fitzgerald's novel, but it has also revived an interest in the characters of the novel.

Daisy, for instance, remains an enigma; who is she? Don't look to the novel for much help, because in the prose, Daisy is less of a person, and more of an ideal, of all that, not only Jay Gatsby, but most of the romantically aspiring, male youth, of the novel yearn for.

Novelist Benjamin Lythal, whose debut novel, A Map of Tulsa, has a Gatsbyesque plot--in it a man goes home and stages a reunion with his former girlfriend, with disastrous consequences--says Daisy is to Jay Gatsby what Galatea is to Pygmalion (more or less).

To get to this analogy, Lythal quotes Joseph Brodsky's take on Pygmalion (from the essay, "On Grief and Reason"):

His fascination is not with what he sees but with what he imagines it conceals—what he has placed there. He invests her with mystery and then rushes to uncloak it: this rapacity is always Pygmalion’s double bind. It is as though the sculptor found himself puzzled by the facial expression of his model: she “sees” what he does not “see.”

The Jay Gatsby and Daisy relationship is akin to a Pygmalion relationship, in that Jay,

[The lover] is not even sure his beloved really exists but nonetheless craves her tutelage, her authority to see his life and judge it. She is the novel he has tried to write about himself.

Fiction is stranger than truth

Chinese-American writer Bill Cheng's debut novel Southern Cross the Dog, is wowing critics, especially those of the South.

The novel is set in the Mississippi of the 1920s and the great Mississippi flood of 1927 is a focal point of the novel's plot. 

Cheng has been able to recreate the texture of the 20s South with such skill that he has been compared to William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, two stalwarts of the Southern literary establishment. And these comparisons have been made by avid readers of Southern literature, especially the Southern Gothic.

Bill Cheng has never visited Mississippi or any of the Southern states. He was born and raised in Queens, New York and now lives in Brooklyn. He received an MFA in fiction from Hunter College.

Southern Cross the Dog began as a thesis manuscript.

My take on this unconventional, therefore refreshing, instance of an "immigrant" writer writing not about the expected Chinese-American experience, and not having a single Asian character in his novel, is a "bravo!"

Not only is it unusual for Cheng to have written a non-immigrant novel, but also the fact that he undertook to represent the American South, a cultural subject matter about which the Southerner is particularly protective (and possessive), proves his ability to transcend/defy labels.

Recently, an Indian-American novelist, Amit Majumdar, wrote of how fraught the category of the immigrant writer is, and I tentatively agreed, but upon reading of Bill Cheng's venture, I think it's possible for "immigrant" writers to crossover into native territories and represent, if not conquer them.

But then again, what's the big fuss about? If Adam Johnson can write about North Korea (The Orphan Master's Son) without setting foot on North Korean soil, and go on to win a Pulitzer for it, then why should it surprise the world that a Chinese American from Queens should be able to write about a geographical part of a nation in which he was born and raised?

A preview of the novel Southern Cross the Dog can be found here.

Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald sold the film rights of his novel The Great Gatsby (in the 20s) for a mere $60,000.

Perhaps the price was so flea-marketishly low because it was said that the novel itself was unfilmable as its real power comes less from the plot and more from the prose.

Some feel that The Great Gatsby, as film, would be closest to the spirit of the novel were it to be silent and black and white.

Above is the trailer of one such filmic version of the American masterpiece, made in 1926.

Agatha the good

There is a saying that it might be strange to see a clothed person shake hands with a naked one: it is like the meeting of two utterly different tribes.

What could then be said of the spectacle of a white South African shaking hands, proverbially speaking, with her black servant during the heydays of Apartheid?

Marlene van Niekerk's novel Agaat, speaks of such a meeting, between Jakkie De Wet, heiress and owner of a farm in the Cape Province of South Africa, and Agaat, a farm hand slash servant whom Jakkie had taken in when she (Agaat) was but a slip of a girl. 

Agaat is black.

The novel spans an entire historical spectrum, ranging from Apartheid to post-apartheid, and the "meeting" between white master and black servant hangs over into an extended relationship between the two: After political normalcy returns to South Africa and the black majority of the nation enters the phase of self-governance, Jakki suffers A.L.S, a degenerative disease of the nervous system. She is now in the keeping of Agaat. Agaat looks after Jakki who is immobile and cannot speak.

Jakki can think, however, and the following are her thoughts caged inside her; her thoughts are now Agaat-centric:

If I could suddenly find my tongue, I'd be able to tell it to you in so many words: All that we could think up to do, you and I, all our lives, was to unbosom ourselves in our inner chamber before the lord. Oh hearken to me, your little girl-child meek and mild, oh preserve me, your bleeding virgin, bless me, woman of your nation, but what did that make him?

Ulysses

I had no idea that somebody had actually attempted to make a film out of James Joyce's Ulysses.

In an interview, novelist Salman Rushdie mentions Joseph Strick's celluloid version of the Joycean epic.

Theodore Dreiser's descendants

Theodore Dreiser, popularized as one of America's earliest and best novelist of the "naturalist" school, wrote about the poor and the working class.

Yet, Dreiser's working class-poor were mostly people who left their homes in the American countryside, to have a better life in the cities.

The cities turned out to be hellish, rewarding the vicious, and punishing virtue.

In other words, Dreiser's world was a dichotomous one, with the countryside or small town America perceived as poor but golden, and the cities perceived as dens of corruption.

The 21st century descendents of Dreiser, seem not to care for such dichotomies. Characters in the stories of Frank Bill and Donald Ray Pollock, for instance, live in hell, and can't leave it because it doesn't occur to them to leave.

These hells are not imagined, but are located in the rural areas of the American Midwest. While Bill's hell is mostly in South Indiana, Pollock's is in Ohio. Violence, meth and ruthless poverty mark these places, and the lives of the people therein.  

As Craig Fehrman notes in a recent story, writers like Bill and Pollock, don't romanticize the Midwest, but depict them as they are. The title of Pollock's novel pretty much says that there has never been a "golden" era in the rural Midwest; it's always been hellish.

Fehrman names the emergent genre of fiction as "Country noir." 

Incidentally, both Bill and Pollock are natives of the places they write about and they are factory-workers who took up fiction writing at later ages. They aren't products of creative writing workshops.

While Bill was inspired by Chuck Palhanuik's The Fight Club, and decided to transpose masculine violence from the city to the country, he also makes masculine violence as a way of life in rural America, rather than as a fight back against emasculating forces of consumerism in the cities. 

Articulation of same-sex love

Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth’s witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils. Sometimes, in the days which are coming—God grant me the grace to live them—in the glare of the grey morning, sour-mouthed, eyelids raw and red, hair tangled and damp from my stormy sleep, facing, over coffee and cigarette smoke, last night’s impenetrable, meaningless boy who will shortly rise and vanish like the smoke, I will see Giovanni again, as he was that night, so vivid, so winning, all of the light of that gloomy tunnel trapped around his head.

From James Baldwin's novel, Giovanni's Room

Wondrous, barring the part where the spectre of Giovanni is said to rise up like that of Macbeth's witches! I like the fact that it is less cerebral and a trifle more emotional than Virginia Woolf's professions of similar sentiments to a fellow female lover.

Where are the great one's gone?

As a graduate student I had briefly encountered several luminaries and had taken their classes.

Here is a list of the luminaries I could scratch up from my memory:

1. Denis Donoghue

2. E.L. Doctorow

3. Harold Bloom

4. [....] 

None of them, I suppose match the star power of Vladimir Nabokov who taught at Cornell in the 50s and 60s. 

Anyhow, personally I don't remember anything outstanding happening with any of these Professors while I took their class. Stuff happened to some of my fellow grad students. A friend of mine, for instance, was told by luminary #1 that it's best for her were she to either revert back to high school English or take a long absence from the vanity fair that is life, lock herself up in a dark room, take a vow of silence and contemplate on whatever it is that brought her to believe, even fleetingly, that she was good enough to take on the study of humanities at a high level like this.

Luminary #2 would doze off, I recall, in the middle of his lectures while #3 eagerly rattled on about his close reading of Shakespeare and his inordinate fondness for Sir Falstaff. He was, in fact, Falstaff reincarnated.

There was one luminary whose class I didn't take, but who had the reputation of snatching books from the hands of students and throwing them into the corners of classrooms.

Compared to the aforementioned folks Nabokov should have drilled holes into the walls of his classroom, or done something like that--something moody and out of this world.

But as narrated by Jay Epstein, who remembers taking a course on the novel taught by the author of Lolita, Nabokov merely tried to teach well.

Nabokov would throw a long reading list in which Tolstoy's Anna Karenina would feature prominently. He would, Epstein recalls, ask students not to worry about the historical background and other context-related details accompanying the novels. A novel, Nabokov would say, "is a work of pure invention."

Once Professor Nabokov gave his class a pop quiz in which he asked students to describe from memory the details of the train station where Anna gets off to meet Vronsky. Epstein says he hadn't read the novel, so preoccupied he was with absorbing the sights and sounds of Ithaca's arcadian setting. His mind veered in the direction of a scene of the meeting in a movie version of Tolstoy's classic. Anna was played by Vivien Leigh (male memories are known to give preferential treatment to Leigh), and epstein expertly churned out the details.

The details did not match the details from the original (Tolstoy's novel), yet Nabokov gave Epstein the numerical equivalent of an "A." The legendary novelist hadn't seen or heard of the movie, but he believed that a good novelist generates pictures in the minds of his readers, and these pictures could very well be created by the reader himself.

What Epstein produced was then a picture of the picture, which meant, in the books of Nabokov, that Tolstoy was truly a great novelist and Epstein, the student, was an excellent reader.

Two thumbs up to Nabokov; a mark of the truly great is to have a little less ego...