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What I’m reading

Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski.

Like most (all?) Bukowski novels, the protagonist is one Hank Chinaski. But instead of working odd jobs or womanising or gambling at the horse races, here Hank is a child. The grown-ups around him, his father especially, are doing the odd jobs and womanising and gambling at the horse races. So, as the introduction by Roddy Doyle explains it, this is the story of how Hank becomes Hank.

What is the experience of reading this novel like? Well, it’s Bukowski. It’s gritty and it’s funny and it’s rude and it has a certain marmite quality. I suspect that, these days, old Buk isn’t very fashionable. I don’t know. But what I’ve been wondering is: is it different from other Bukowski novels in an important way?

Like many young men who toy with the idea of being a writer, I had a Bukowski phase between about 17 and 21. I read lots of his poetry – Love is a dog from hell, The night torn mad with footsteps, A storm for the living and the dead (posthumous) etc. – which I tried to imitate; and several of his novels, Factotum, and the ridiculously named Women, and Hollywood and then, a bit later, Pulp. But, since then, I haven’t been too hot on him. There’s the misogyny stuff, of course, except I’ve also suspected that he’s one of those writers, who, when you’re nineteen, seems like writing-Jesus, and then when you try him again later, is a total let down. In fact, for me, Bukowski has been the prototype of this kind of writer.

At some point, though, it occurred to me that it was strange I’ve read so much Bukowski without reading either of his two most famous novels (being Post Office and Ham on Rye) and so maybe I was judging him unfairly. As a result, I decided to try the latter. And? Well?

Stylistically, it really has something going for it. The sentences have a beautiful staccato rhythm, and there’s this learned casualness about them, the sense that he’s doing a hell of a lot with a deliberately limited vocabulary. At times, it reminds me of the rhythm of Beckett’s Molly. (Is that sacrilege, by the way, to compare Bukowski to Beckett? Yeah, maybe). And there’s a deftness in the management of POV, where we oscillate between the knowledge of the adult and the child, something like in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew. I really liked this passage, for instance:

‘We got into the Model-T and drove over to see my grandfather Leonard. As we drove up and stopped he was standing on the porch of his house. He was old but stood very straight. He had been an army officer in Germany and had come to America when he heard the streets were paved with gold. They weren’t, so he became the head of a construction firm.’

‘They weren’t, so he became the head of a construction firm’ – great stuff. That’s when Bukowski is at his best, I think, when he’s being funny. Except, for all this, I’ve stalled with Ham on Rye at about one-hundred pages in. It’s just so fucking bleak. It feels like Hank gets hit with a razor strop every ten pages.

On Obsession by Malcom Knox.

So, because Ham on Rye wasn’t exactly bedtime reading, I decided to read something else. Since I loved Summerland so much, I thought Knox’s essay would be a good bet. It was a good bet.

It’s a nice length, long for an essay but very short for a book – just under 50 pages on Kindle. It’s about many things, but mainly our obsessions and our relationship to them; the way that this relationship changes over time. It’s about obsession as an object, you could say.

For example, he makes an interesting argument about OCD and obsessive love. Certain OCD-esque tendencies have a lot to do with memory: a person might torment themselves with the question of whether they have locked their car, or closed a cupboard in another room. They are completely unable to convince themselves that they have done these things, and are compelled to lock the car again, or go into the room to make sure the cupboard is closed; they simply have to, often many times. So then, with obsessive love, might the compulsive thinking about a beloved be because we cannot remember the beloved:

‘Those poor unfortunates who keep washing their hands or smoothing their bed are engaged in a fight with the immediate past, seeking the fixity that will “confront victoriously” their mercurial forgetfulness.

Wasn’t this what had happened between me and Sandra, and the others? Didn’t I keep thinking about them, in an autonomic way, purely because I couldn’t remember them? In stewing on them over and over, I was trying to compensate in quantity of impressions what I lacked in quality. Because I didn’t allow, or couldn’t entice, any of these girls to make a firm impression on memory from the outside, I might have been hoping that thousands of imprints of my own imagination would amount to the same thing.’

In writing about obsessive love, Knox draws, quite naturally, on Proust, who has perhaps written about the subject more deeply and definitely more voluminously than anyone else. To this end, Knox produces what is maybe my all-time favourite footnote (it’s footnote 25). Here it is in full:

‘There is no way Proust, or any other fiction, should be read as a handbook to life, and yet by the time I read Proust for a third time he had become a cliché, compressed and manufactured into an industry of fey little primers for the time-poor. Like many readers of Proust who claim a certain possessiveness (I think of the Gary Larson cartoon of the dismayed fans of a garage band gone bigtime – “We knew them before they were good!”), I detest books like Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life, the condensing of the fictive dream into life lessons. A friend of mine, a PhD in Proust, calls him ‘Alain de Bottom of de Barrel’. I have no sense of humour or tolerance towards this kind of book, which, to paraphrase the infinitely smarter English writer, Geoff Dyer, might be retitled Proust for People Who Can’t Be Bothered Reading Him. How can Proust change your life? Try reading him, for a start.’

(This one made reading the footnotes totally worthwhile.)

So between On Obession and Summerland, I’m now a big Malcolm Knox fan. I will probably be buying most of his novels over the next few months. Maybe not all of his nonfiction, though. In Googling him, I’ve discovered that he’s very prolific and seems to have published at least one book every year since 2000, sometimes two. Several of the books, it turns out, are about cricket. He was a chief cricket editor for an Australian newspaper. This makes me imagine that he’s a sort of modern day Ring Lardner.

A Question I’m thinking about

Where, in life, am I sparing energy that I should be spending it?

I was having a bad Monday last week – you know, Monday stuff – and this piece by Maria Popova really cheered me up. Mostly, it’s about the diaries of Nathaniel Hawthorne, which Popova reads through the question of ‘How Not to Waste Your Life.’ In the article, she references a poem by Mario Benedetti, paraphrasing thus: ‘it is only… when we cease sparing ourselves and start spending ourselves that we come truly alive.’ (Popova’s translation of the relevant poem can be found here.)

Now, normally, I hate that sort of line – most of the time, it feels self-helpy, like a Mary Oliver quote that’s been tacked up on a coffee shop wall.

But, in this case, I found the sparing/spending distinction pretty apt.

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Something I’ve noticed

As part of a project, I’ve been doing some reading about logical fallacies. I could remember the obvious ones (straw man, correlation fallacy, etc.) but there were a bunch I’d forgotten.

While doing this reading, I’ve realised which fallacy pisses me off the most. It’s the appeal to popularity (e.g. ‘Taking Human Growth Hormone must be a good idea because Dr. Mike says so’). This could be availability bias, but it also seems to me that this is the most common fallacy at the moment.

The reason it’s become particularly noxious, I think, is because of filter bubbles. All of us have our own little digital worlds of expert-avatars, our own individual pantheon of lauded personalities – and because of how fractured social media has become into sub-bubbles within sub-bubbles, the figures included in our pantheons are more divergent than ever. And, if we think that someone is an authority par excellence, we assume that other people agree with us.

This amounts to people supporting a claim by an ‘authority’ like Andrew Tate and expecting you to nod along. People have done this to me with Ben Shapiro more times than I can say, presumably because we share a surname.

So, to adapt the Koan: if you meet your expert on the road, kill them.

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See you soon,

Blake