Finished Hari Kunzru’s God Before Men last night. About 4/5ths of the way in, this reader lost heart. Iuspected that Kunzru wasn’t going to tie all his loose ends together. After I finished the novel, I could see that I had not read carefully enough and the loose ends did make sense but I needed another chance. So I started on a second read.

Before doing that I figured out why I was reading this book in the first place. To the best of my knowledge I ran across Kunzru when he was featured in a NYT “By the Book” interview in March 2017. Although this novel is not mentioned, I must have done some checking around and found a used copy online and purchased it.

It sat on my to-read stack until recently.

The first time I read the book, I carefully noted the shifting times of chapters in the back fly leaf. I did so because there was no table of contents. One would have been helpful. Glancing over the shifts you can easily see that most of the story takes place in 2008-2009, since he alternates sections in the past with those.

This time I am catching much more since I recognize characters that he slyly puts in the beginning hundred pages of the book. I should have paid more attention.

After a puzzling quasi Native Indian parable about Coyote learning to cook meth in the desert, the first chapter ends with a character being actually welcomed into a flying saucer by aliens in 1947. It was quite some time before I understood that the character was hallucinating this. On a second read I can see why. It’s presented in way that made me think that maybe this incident actually, somehow, happened and the book was going to explain it.

My concentration wandered during the second chapter of the book which takes place in 2008. . It’s a lengthy description of an English Rock and Roll Band working or failing to work in a studio in L.A. Maybe Kunzru thought readers would be interested in this band, but I found the descriptions of the band struggling and falling apart accurate and therefore discouraging and a bit boring. I didn’t realize until the second read that Nicky, one of the band members, is important to the plot. He ends up driving by himself to the desert and holing up in a little motel near the same spot that the beginning section takes place in.

Place is practically a character in the book.

I just did some poking around to see where this story takes place. There is a rock formation called Trona Pinnacles. “Trona” does not mean three. It is the name of a mineral which results from the evaporation of salt deposits. “Pinnacles” is the word Kunzru uses to describes three mysterious columns of rock that figure into every story in the book that takes place in the desert. Trona Pinnacles is in the Death Valley National Park.

I don’t think Kunzru is being literal in the setting of his story.

In her essay, “That Craft Feeling,” which I mentioned in previous post, Zadie Smith talks about writers who are “macro planners” and ones who are “micro planners.” As you might suspect the latter map out their novels with great planning and detail, the former basically start with the first sentence and write towards the last. Smith is a “micro” planner. Kunzru is probably more of a “macro planner” since this book is very planned and crafted.

I was hoping that was the case. The book wanders around quite a bit depends on an alert reader. I’m not sure I fall into that category.. After I finished the book, I thought about the title which is only referred to in the French epigram at the beginning of the book. “Dans le désert, voyez-vous, il y a tout, et il n’y a rien . . . c’est Dieu sans les hommes.’” which I translate loosely to mean “In the desert, you see, there is everything and there is nothing, it is God without men.” Or something like that. This is a quote from a story by Balzc.

So not only does Kunzru tie it all together there are some interesting points he is making. Time for a second read.

‘Race is a lie’ Hope panel explores race, racism

This is about a local panel at Hope College. I can’t tell if Kevin Kambo’s ideas are silly as they seem (Race is an idol) or if the reporting is at fault, but this discussion seems woefully misguided and ill-informed.

I made the mistake of taking the WordPress software update on its own terms and not at least trying ways that I used the old version. Most of them work. That’s good. I can even see improvement. The help videos were useless to me. My orientation toward what I am doing is so different from techies. I spend most of the time watching help videos waiting for them to get to something that interests or helps me. This is another reason I prefer written help sections.

Thank you, Sarah Jenkins, for pointing out the easy way to do word count on this update!

Elizabeth and Alex arrive this morning. My morning often begins around 6 AM and Eileen’s after 9 and sometimes later than 10, so “morning” is a bit of a nebulous concept in this context. I moved most of my stuff from the study/guest bedroom. I’m still sitting at the desk right now. But it’s around 7:30 AM and Elizabeth and Alex probably wont arrive soon.

I gave my brother Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020, by Salman Rushdie and keep forgetting that I did so, to his amusement. I have read the first chapter of it three times now.

First, as an adapted essay in the New York Times Book Review I first read back in May. The online version is fun because of the illustrations that are not in the book. Secondly, I read it as the first chapter of the book. Yesterday I read it for a third time.

As usual I marked some sections.

We are born wanting food, shelter, love, song, and story. Our need for the last two is not less than our need for the first three.

Regarding Randall Jarrell’s notion that “A novel is a prose narration of some length that has something wrong with it” Rushdie writes this beautiful paragraph:

So: If a novel or indeed a play is bound to have ‘something wrong with it,’ then let it be at least a wonderful wrongness, speaking of the strangeness of the world’s beauty, a wrongness that seeks to wipe from our eyes and cleanse from our ears the dull patina and muffling wax of everyday which makes us see reality as monochromatic and hear it as monotonous, and to reveal the rainbow music of how things really are. Let it be a play or indeed a novel containing bright moments, dark changes, living characters, sudden transformations, images of fire and ice, horrifying metamorphoses, luminous insights, comic alterations, and stories that have nothing wrong with them at all.

Incidentally this paragraph seems to be omitted in the NYT version.

A high bar put in wonderfully composed sentences.

Also in this chapter, Rushdie comes up with a concept I find useful, “a personal tradition.”

Edward Bond and his Shakespeare are writers who, like Kafka, long ago entered my personal tradition, the only tradition that’s worth a damn to a practicing writer being the one he forges for himself, that is not laid down by high priests of literature, not a stone-carved commandment brought down from Sinai or the Cambridge University English faculty by a Leavisite Moses but a pagan thing, a melting down of treasures, a golden calf. Or, let’s say, a thing born of thee happy and —even better—the useful contaminations by others of the writer’s reading mind.

The same can be said about one’s personal tradition of music when one is a musician. Musicians are notoriously narrow or seem so because the ones usually interviewed or written about have zeroed in on one aspect of their art in order to excel in it. But I have found that more and more musicians I meet, usually younger ones, don’t have the calcified attitude or so many teachers, professors, and other students I have known in my life.

Salman Rushdie to return to India for his next novel – EasternEye

Something interesting coming from Rushdie.

Thelonious Monk’s 25 handwritten tips for musicians

These are great. I especially like “you got to dig it to dig it, you dig?”

What I learned from an unlikely friendship with an anti-masker | Lif

Getting to know someone you disagree with, always helpful!

Work begins on public observatory at Hemlock Crossing Park

Cool

Revealed: LAPD officers told to collect social media data on every civilian they stop | Los Angeles | The Guardian

Thanks to Jeremy Daum for tweeting this link.

VanRaalte Farm Civil War Muster

Apparently this happens every year. This year it’s Bull Run. Cool.

Serialised novel: A first for Rushdie, staple format for Bengal classics – Telegraph India

Other Bengal authors use this method.

The Telegraph uses “spread of classical music in Kolkata” to glorify conversion and evangelical work that marred Bengal

I love it when one media outlet criticizes another and does it pretty well.

NYTimes: How Sept. 11 Gave Us Jan. 6

Spencer Akermann was recently interviewed on Democracy Now about this.

“Eight months later, there is no political response to the insurrection at all, only a security response aimed at its foot soldiers.”