Prometheus brings fire

The Turn of the Wheel

The statue of the Buddha was old. It was already ancient when it had been set into the small mountain temple several hundred years before. Archaic when it had been carried over the Himalayas from India a millennia before that. It dated from a time of proto religions on the subcontinent when there was no clear line between Hindus and Buddhists. The face of the Buddha reflected this melting pot of belief where its sculptor had carved into it not the serene countenance of the enlightened one, but the face of Kali, the goddess of death.

Zhang knelt before the statue and lit a small scented candle. The light did little to push back the night’s shadows that hung heavily from the temple’s wooden beams. In the wan, flickering light, the lacquer peeling off the statue’s face made it look like the Buddha was crying blood from his closed eyes. Only the occasional lightning flash from outside lit up the whole statue. Zhang bowed his head.

Behind him he heard sounds of scuffling as a heavy booted footstep entered the temple. Zhang turned around to see the two men who had just entered. Chen was standing at the rear, patting the rainwater off his Hanyang rifle. The thick furs he was wrapped in hid his bulk, as well as the Revolutionary Army uniform he had on underneath. A second man, dressed in thin, wet saffron robes, knelt where he had been thrown to the floor. He was staring silently at the dark stains that had soaked into the floorboards.

“Well, priest,” said Zhang. “I’ll be direct - where’s the gold? You know, the money stupid peasants throw at you for a chance at a better life in their new reincarnation? As if it made a difference. Just tell me and you can go back to your nice, dry cell. Otherwise Mr Chen there behind you will shoot you in the head. Do you understand?”

The monk’s eyes flicked up to Zhang and Zhang saw he was much younger than he had thought, not even out of his teens.

“Look, son,” said Zhang. “This is simple. Help me out, and we’ll be gone by the morning. You can get out of this place, go back to whatever godforsaken plot of farmland your parents work. Just one small answer and this will all be over.”

The monk didn’t move. His eyes kept staring at Zhang. The drum of the rain on the roof filled the temple.

“OK, don’t want to do this the easy way do you? That’s fine. I know how to do this the hard way.”

“Your offering has been accepted. He is coming for you,” the monk said.

“He talks! You hear this Mr Chen? A miracle. Who’s coming for me priest? Mao? Chiang? I don’t fight for any of them anymore. They will be the ones who will be scared of me.”

“He’s coming for you Zhang Xun. And he’s coming for you tonight.”

Zhang stared at the boy. “How did you... “

The boy leapt up, grabbing a metal candle stick and stabbing it at Zhang’s heart. Before Zhang could react blood exploded out from the boy’s chest, spraying over Zhang’s face. At the door, Chen lowered his rifle.

As Zhang looked down at the corpse at his feet, a crack of lightning boomed down over the temple. Both men cringed from the shock of the sound wave that passed over them.

Chen looked out into the night. “What the fu…” and then he was gone, snatched out into the night like a fish at the end of a reel. Another thunderous crack roared over the temple.

“Chen,” Zhang yelled out. “Fuck. What the fuck are you doing?” He stepped over the monk’s corpse and walked to the door. Out of the rain that now pelted down an object flew into the temple and past Zhang. He turned around to see rolling up against the foot of the Buddha the head of Chen, his eyes, nose and tongue ripped out.

Zhang grabbed the temple door and slammed it shut, sliding the iron locking bolts into place. Scrambling over the floor to where his rifle sat, he scooped it up and sat back against a pillar, chambering a round. He scanned the small barred windows high up under the eaves. Nothing appeared. The rain kept falling, harder than before.

“Zhang,” a voice whispered. “Zhang Xun.”

Zhang whipped around. “Who’s there?” He looked down at the monk’s corpse lying on the floor a few feet away. As he stared, the corpses’ eyes opened and looked back at Zhang.

“Zhang Xun,” the monk burbled, blood from the gunshot wound gushing out of its mouth. “He is coming for you, Zhang Xun.”

A massive blow thudded against the temple door. The ancient wood splintered.

“You have pleased him Zhang Xun,” the corpse coughed. “There is no reincarnation without death, and that is what we offer at this temple. A faster path to Nirvana, not a better path. You have given us the greatest offering we have had in many centuries. For that, you will be rewarded.”

The door shuddered again from another blow. The corpse began to laugh.

“No one comes for me,” said Zhang and fired a bullet into the corpses skull but the laughter continued inside his head. Zhang looked up at the statue. The lacquer had now completely peeled off and blood was pouring off the figure. Its eyes had opened.

“I have come for you Zhang Xun,” the Buddha said.

Bauhaus

Carta Marina - 1539

Dominions 4

Your Mother was a hamster

and your Father smelt of Elderberries!

A Gorillion Dollars

Tehching Hsieh

Taiwanese artist Tehching Hsieh, who is best known for his 5 One Year Performances: between 1978 and 1986, the artist spent one year locked inside a cage, one year punching a time clock every hour, one year completely outdoors, one year tied to another person, and, lastly, one year without participating in art. This is the inaugural installation in an ongoing series that will bring performance documentation, original performance pieces, and live reenactments of historic performances to various locations throughout the Museum. Hsieh’s final performance piece, Thirteen Year Plan, was completed in 1999 after a process lasting thirteen years. This exhibition focuses on the artist’s earliest performance, commonly called his Cage Piece (1978–79), with 365 photographs meticulously documenting the daily passing of time.

Fly Guy

The search is over

Several months ago I decided I wanted to buy an older Seiko diver. I initially looked at buying an early 70s 6105 model for a while. These watches have a great history having been used extensively by GIs in Vietnam (and Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now). I liked the square hour markers, but these models are just too expensive at the moment (around $1000 for a decent original). Nor am I a fan of the cushion case that extends the watch out to around 43mm, which is getting too big for my wrist.

The horror... the horror

I then started looking at the generation after the 6105 - the 6309. The 6309 ('76 - '88) was made in two variants. The 6309-7040 ('76 - '84) and the 6309-7290 ('84 - '88). The 7040 introduced the now classic circle hour markers, as well as keeping the old cushion case design from the 6105.




However in '84, Seiko remodelled the case and made a 'slim' version - the 7290. It moved away from the cushion case and brought back the square hour markers of the 6105. They were allegedly slightly rarer than the 7040 model, but were still fairly cheap. This was the watch for me.

Except, not straight away. After six months of almost daily searching on ebay and various watch forums I learnt that there are thousands of 7290s out there, and they all have aftermarket parts on them. A lot of these 'Frankenstein' watches - made up from bits and pieces of other watches - are low quality and don't have that sharp 'Seiko look'. The easiest way to tell if they were replacements was to look at the 12 o'clock triangles on the dial, and the number 10 on the bezel. Aftermarket dials will have a much 'stubbier' triangle on the dial. And the '10' on the bezel will have a serif on the 1 instead of just a single straight line. Once you learnt to spot these, they were everywhere. Some of these Frankensteins are being sold for over $250.

The horror... the horror

But, patience won out in the end and I picked up this fully original, working order 7290 from a local antique dealer for just $75!

Beautiful piece of watchmaking history.

The largest prime.

five hundred eighty one quinmilliamilliaoctingenoctomilliatrecenoctooctogintillion,
eight hundred eighty seven quinmilliamilliaoctingenoctomilliatrecenseptenoctogintillion,
two hundred sixty six quinmilliamilliaoctingenoctomilliatrecensexoctogintillion,
two hundred thirty two quinmilliamilliaoctingenoctomilliatrecenquinoctogintillion,
two hundred forty six quinmilliamilliaoctingenoctomilliatrecenquattuoroctogintillion,
four hundred forty two quinmilliamilliaoctingenoctomilliatrecentreoctogintillion,
one hundred seventy five quinmilliamilliaoctingenoctomilliatrecendooctogintillion,
one hundred quinmilliamilliaoctingenoctomilliatrecenunoctogintillion,

Kingsley Amis

OK that's pretty badass

Description of Spring

THE soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale:
The nightingale with feathers new she sings;
The turtle to her make hath told her tale.
Summer is come, for every spray now springs:
The hart hath hung his old head on the pale;
The buck in brake his winter coat he flings;
The fishes flete with new repaired scale.
The adder all her slough away she slings;
The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale;
The busy bee her honey now she mings;
Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale.

And thus I see among these pleasant things
Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs.

-Earl of Surrey

The Peruvian Immortal

Sacrifice of two rooks and a Queen for mate!

Polovtsian Dances

Dunhuang Scrolls

On my first visit to the site the Taoist priest was away, engaged apparently with his two acolytes

 on a begging tour in the oasis. Nor would it, perhaps, have been wise to attempt starting operations then at once. But fortunately the young ` Ho-shang ' of Tangutan extraction already referred to, then the only dweller at the site, proved to be possessed of useful local knowledge, and it did not take Chiang Ssû-yeh long to extract from him some interesting details. The place of discovery of the manuscript hoard was a large shrine (Ch. I in plan, Plate 42) near the northern end of the main group of caves. Its gaily painted outer structures bore evidence of extensive recent restoration, the result of pious labours started and maintained by Wang, the Tao-shih, or Taoist priest, who had established himself here some seven years before. The entrance to the cave-temple had been formerly blocked by fallen rock débris and drift-sand, as was still partially the case at several of the caves situated at the foot of the cliff further south. While restorations were slowly being carried on in the temple cella and the place now occupied by its antechapel, the labourers engaged had noticed a crack in the frescoed wall of the passage connecting the two. An opening was thus discovered that led to a recess or small chamber excavated from the rock behind the stuccoed north wall of the passage (Plate 43 ; Fig. 200).

Manuscript rolls, written in Chinese characters but in a non-Chinese language, were said to have filled the recess completely. Their total quantity was supposed to be so great as to make up several cart-loads. News of the discovery having reached distant Lan-chou, specimens of the manuscripts were asked for from provincial headquarters. Ultimately orders were supposed to have come from the Viceroy of Kan-su to restore the whole of the find to its original place of deposit. So now this strange hoard of undeciphered manuscripts was declared to be kept by the Tao-shih behind the carefully locked door with which the hidden recess had been provided since its first discovery.

In the absence of the priest it was impossible to pursue these preliminary inquiries further. But I lost no time in visiting the alleged place of discovery. Fortunately, the young Ho-shang's spiritual guide, a Tibetan monk then also away on a begging tour, had borrowed one of the manuscripts in order to give additional lustre to a little private chapel of his own that he had improvised at his temporary abode in the tumble-down pilgrims' rest-house. The young monk was persuaded by Chiang Ssû-yeh to bring us this specimen. It was a beautifully preserved roll of paper about io inches high, and, when we unfolded it in front of the original hiding-place, proved to be about 15 yards long. The paper, yellowish in tint, looked remarkably strong and fresh. But • in a climate so dry and in a carefully sheltered hiding-place it was impossible to judge age from mere outward appearance, and with its fine texture and carefully smoothed surface it looked to me decidedly old.

Chiang Ssû-yeh had the same impression of the writing, which was very clear and showed excellent penmanship. It was, indeed, Chinese, and so beyond doubt was the language. But my learned secretary frankly acknowledged that on cursory reading he could not make out any connected sense in the text. This, however, soon found its explanation when, in frequently repeated formulas read out by Chiang, I recogized such words as Fu-saand fo-to-mi, the familiar Chinese transcripts of Sanskrit Bodhisattva and j5âramita. I knew how utterly strange the phraseology of Chinese Buddhism is to the average literatus,and there could be no possible doubt about the text being Buddhist even before Chiang Ssû-yeh, on the roll having been completely unfolded, had discovered that it was described in the colophon as a eking fig, or Sutra. Thus the rapid inspection of this single specimen suggested that the reported great manuscript deposit might prove to be largely of Buddhist character. At the same time the fact that the text was written on a roll, and not in the`concertina' or book form which has prevailed in China ever since block printing became common about the beginning of the Sung period (n. D. 960),1 seemed to raise a strong presumption as to the early date of the deposit. All further speculation had to be put off until I should secure access to the whole of the hidden library. It was enough encouragement at the time to find its existence confirmed.

Marriage is like a fortress besieged. Those on the outside want to get in while those on the inside want to get out.

QIAN ZHONGSHU is a tougher Nobel pitch than some of the other authors profiled in this series. He’s dead, for starters — traditionally an obstacle to many things, including winning Nobel prizes — and his total creative output consists solely of a few essays, several short stories, and a single novel.

Obituary: Takekazu Ogura

FEB 19, 2002

Takekazu Ogura, a former vice farm minister who once headed the government’s Tax Commission and the Rice Price Council, died Thursday of a heart attack. He was 91.

Ogura joined the farm ministry in 1934. In 1960, he became vice agriculture, forestry and fisheries minister after serving as director general of the Food Agency.

After retiring from the ministry in 1961, he served as chief of both the rice price panel and the Agricultural Administration Council. He also served as a Bank of Japan Policy Board member.

Ogura, who headed the tax panel from 1974 to 1990, was known for making such remarks as “Japan’s indirect tax system is rotten.”

Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle

First edition Large single sheet of newspaper stock, folded twice to form a booklet. The scarce first issue of this Cleveland underground newspaper compiled and edited by d. a. levy. Includes a poem by Dave Cunliffe. Cover collage from prints of Japanese artist Shiko Munakata. Newspaper includes a passage from Prajna-Paramita Sutra. In very good condition. A fragile piece of 60's Cleveland counterculture ephemera.

The Girl from Ipanema

A Headstrong Boy

I guess my mother spoiled me –
I'm a headstrong boy. I want every instant
to be as lovely as crayons.

I'd like to draw – on chaste white paper –
a clumsy freedom, eyes that never wept,
a piece of sky, a feather, a leaf,
a pale green evening, and an apple.
I'd like to draw dawn, the smile dew sees,
the earliest tenderest love – an imagined love
who's never seen a mournful cloud,
whose eyes the color of sky will gaze at me
forever, and never turn away.
I'd like to draw distance, a bright horizon,
carefree, rippling rivers, hills sheathed in green fur.
I want the lovers to stand together in silence,
I want each breathless moment to beget a flower.

I want to draw a future I've never seen –
nor ever can – though I'm sure she'll be beautiful.
I'll draw her an autumn coat the color of flame,
and maple leaves, and all the hearts that ever loved her.
I’ll draw her a wedding, an early morning garden party,
swathed in candy-wrappers decked with winter scenes.

I'm a headstrong boy. I want to paint out every sorrow,
to cover the world with colored windows,
let all the eyes accustomed to darkness
be accustomed to light. I want to draw wind,
mountains, each one bigger than the last.
I want to draw the dream of the East,
a fathomless sea, a joyful voice.

Finally, I'd like to draw myself in one corner –
a panda, huddled in a dark victorian forest,
hunkering in the quiet branches, homeless, lost,
not even a heart left behind me, far away,
only teeming dreams of berries
and great wide eyes.

This pining's pointless,
I haven't any crayons,
any breathless moments.
All I have are fingers and pain

I think I'll tear this paper to bits
and let them drift away
hunting for butterflies.

Gu Cheng

Arch of Ctesiphon

"I even got a lovely big bronze medal from the Egyptian Photographic Society in Cairo, and I still have the photograph that won it. It is a picture of one of the so-called Seven Wonders of the World, the Arch of Ctesiphon in Iraq. This is the largest unsupported arch on earth and I took the photograph while I was training out there for the RAF in 1940. I was flying over the desert solo in an old Hawker Hart biplane and I had my camera round my neck. When I spotted the huge arch standing alone in a sea of sand, I dropped one wing and hung in my straps and let go of the stick while I took aim and clicked the shutter. It came out fine." - Roald Dahl.

Hipster Axes

Dumplings

Mother’s Older Brother went back into the small kitchen after breakfast and started making the filling. Taking the leftover pork from the previous day’s soy noodles, he slowly fed it into the bright red Dice-o-matic™ that Mother’s Older Brother’s Wife bought in Hong Kong. The said purchaser of the device stood next to him, her hard eyes watching him work. Slowly and methodically he dropped the pork, prawns, onions, ginger and bamboo shoots into the noise of the blades to be hacked into neat, uniform chunks like perfect miniature dice.

Adding to the cacophony, Mother’s Younger Sister was pouring flour and water into the Blend-It-Right™, its high pitch whine the soprano accompaniment to the snare drum of the Dice-o-matic™. Out of its gizzards came yards of soft dough which were then passed to Father’s Younger Brother’s Wife to place inside the SpeedKneader™ that rolled out long, pale snakes to its own steady, thumping beat. The SpeedKneader Dough Separation Attachment ™ cut each serpent up into inch long blobs.

With a noise like a woodsaw being scraped over a washboard, the Dice-o-matic™ shuddered and stopped.

“Aiya,” Mother’s Older Brother’s Wife cried. “I told you you were putting too much into that. You stupid idiot, you know how much that thing cost?”

With a long suffering silence, Mother’s Older Brother took down a cleaver hanging on the wall and swung the large blade to knock the Dice-o-matic™ back into alignment. With a satisfied grunt he put the cleaver back, and tapped on the switch. Dutifully the blades got back to work and the Dice-o-matic™ resumed its effortless, high-pitched disgorgement of minced fillings into the waiting bowl.

The production line continued as the dough and filling were carried out of the kitchen by cousin and I to the living room. Mother’s Younger Sister sat next to Mother as they both silently watched the New Year pageant on the new 50-inch ViewDeluxe™ television. Without even looking down, Mother’s Younger Sister would take up each chopped tube of pastry and slide it into the Flattenit™ sitting in front of her. With a sibilant hiss, the Flattenit’s™ piston would drive down on the dough, forming a perfect three inch circle that Mother’s Younger Sister would pass to Mother.

Before Mother sat the new, silver X-85 DumplingMaster™. A funnel on top was kept full of filling hauled in from the Dice-o-matic™. Mother took the circle of dough from Mother’s Younger Sister and placed it on the special plate on the side of the machine and pressed the big green button. With a deep rumble, as if the DumplingMaster™ was reaching down through the floor, through Mrs Shen’s apartment and on to the centre of the Earth, the DumplingDeliveryPortal™ opened and out tumbled one dumpling.

We sat at the table, quietly eating the dumplings and watching the commercial for the new X-100 DumplingMaster™. With a soft blink, the power went out. Everyone froze, looking at each other in the muted sunlight filtering in through the window. I took a deep breath.

“Thank you Mother’s Older Brother and Mother’s Older Brother’s Wife for making the filling.”

“Thank you Mother’s Younger Sister for making the dough.”

“Thank you Father’s Younger Brother’s Wife for kneading the dough.”

“Thank you Mother, for making the dumplings.”

Silence. And then we all started talking again.

Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, And the Creation of the Modern Short Story

Art Matters way Craft, And the Creation of the Modern Short Story by sajasanaa



How a Hemingway Story Works

by Robert Paul Lamb

Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. 273 pages

Donald A. Daiker

The title and subtitle of Robert Lamb's excellent Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story clearly define its central focus. While virtually all Hemingway studies concentrate on the thematic and biographical elements of his fiction, Lamb focuses on aesthetics. Reminding us that Wallace Stevens once called Hemingway "the most significant of living poets" (125), Lamb proposes to examine Hemingway's short stories through the sort of close, formalist readings that, he suggests, are more often associated with poetry criticism than fiction criticism. "I will treat Hemingway's story art as one would poetry--or Joyce--through painstakingly close reading," Lamb writes," and I will deny him nothing" (xii).This statement manifests both Lamb's passionate commitment to his task and his great admiration of Hemingway, whom he calls the most influential fiction writer of the twentieth century.

Lamb succeeds brilliantly in achieving his four central aims: redressing the critical imbalance in Hemingway studies by focusing on craft; providing a set of analytic tools for analyzing short fiction more generally; situating Hemingway's work within the development of the modern short story; and, most ambitiously, reconfiguring the place of the short story in literary studies.


This is scholarship at its finest. Lamb's knowledge is comprehensive and encyclopedic. As his well chosen chapter epigraphs attest, he seems to have read and understood not only everything that has been written about Hemingway's short fiction but virtually everything ever written about the short story genre. His book thus provides an education in the history of American prose fiction as well as in the history and theory of the international short story. Lamb shows how Hemingway's work builds upon the European short story, principally that of Maupassant, who taught Hemingway brevity and understatement, and of Chekhov, who taught him how to replace prosaic explanation with suggestive prose. Both Maupassant and Chekhov encouraged Hemingway to eliminate verbosity from his fiction and to give readers a greater role in making a story come alive. Within the American literary canon, Lamb rightly aligns Hemingway with Poe's dramatized presentations rather than Hawthorne's more self-reflexive tales, and he shows how Hemingway's fiction extends the work of Crane and James while contrasting with that of Cather, whom he calls the yin to Hemingway's yang among modern American minimalists. Lamb is especially insightful in summarizing Gertrude Stein's aesthetics and their connections to Hemingway's style, while at the same time contending that Stein's influence has been exaggerated because Hemingway always learned fast from his mentors and then moved decisively beyond them.

But Lamb's most important scholarly contribution is his penetrating analysis of the short stories themselves, a dissection that he acknowledges Hemingway himself would probably hate. Such analysis is warranted, Lamb writes, because Hemingway "forged one of the few original styles of his time, produced some of the finest stories of the twentieth century, and changed the genre forever" (15).

It is above all on Hemingway's style--on the question of how a Hemingway story works rather than what it means--that Lamb focuses. In his pivotal chapter "Depicting Consciousness in Modern Fiction," Lamb draws parallels between Hemingway's aesthetics and T. S. Eliot's use of the objective correlative, "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula" for the emotion the writer wishes to evoke "such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked" (70). In Hemingway's words, the "greatest difficulty" for a writer "was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were that produced the emotion that you experienced" (60). For Lamb, Hemingway's "method of depicting the external phenomena that evoke the otherwise omitted emotion is the single most central element of his fictional technique" (71). In this chapter Lamb nicely redefines the tricky terms "expressionism" and "impressionism" in fiction, holding that Hemingway is an impressionist, like Cezanne among painters, in that his fiction depicts consciousness by focusing not primarily on subjective response but on external data. Lamb illustrates his position with extensive analyses of Chapter XI of In Our Time and of the openings of "An Alpine Idyll," "Che Ti Dice la Patria?," and--most impressively--"A Canary for One." Lamb agrees with past commentators that what Hemingway omitted from his fiction was often as significant as what he included, but Lamb contends that the real omitted elements are not the most popular examples--Peduzzi's suicide from "Out of Season," the war from "Big Two-Hearted River," the word abortion from "Hills Like White Elephants"--but rather the subjective feelings of Hemingway's narrators and characters.


In a second pivotal chapter, "Who Sees and Who Speaks: Hemingway's Art of Focalization," Lamb breaks new ground by refining the traditional definition of point of view offered by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. Through his detailed, complex, but eminently practical use of the terms "focalizer" and "focalization," Lamb shows that the perspective most congenial to I lemingway's impressionism, his "aesthetics of an effaced author" (80), his reliance on dialogue, and his use of the objective correlative together constitute what Lamb calls "external focalization." In stories like "The Killers" and "Hills Like White Elephants" that are characterized by external focalization, the reader is not given access to what anyone is thinking or feeling. This "Spartan restraint of the third-person narrator ... is a sine qua non of Hemingway's unique style," Lamb writes, giving his stories "a new kind of immediacy by removing the narrator from sight and allowing readers to pick up the impressionistic details" Hemingway lays out for them (89). Through brilliant analysis of Nick Adams as focalizer, Lamb shows how "Indian Camp" became Hemingway's first story masterpiece. In his equally incisive reading of "Cat in the Rain," Lamb convincingly argues that the shift in focalization to George the husband at the end of the story makes it impossible to know if the cat brought by the maid is the same or a different cat than the wife had wanted--and thus the story ends in uncertainty and rich ambiguity. Whether Lamb is commenting on the shift to Bill's consciousness at the conclusion of "The End of Something" or the language of the uneducated narrator of "After the Storm," his insights light up the page.

Throughout Art Matters you sense an inquiring, curious mind that, like Melville's Ishmael, cannot resist raising--and trying to answer--challenging and provocative questions. Lamb explores complex issues of repetition and juxtaposition in "Che Ti Dice la Patria?," "In Another Country," and "Now I Lay Me," and he interrogates what he calls the "disjunctive bump," the unavoidable mark of a story's limited compass, at the conclusion of "The Undefeated" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." In his survey of American prose fiction he traces the evolution from the "normative center" of nineteenth-century novels (the forest scene between Hester and Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter, "The Grand Armada" of whales and whaling boats in Moby-Dick) through the "luminous moment" of twentieth-century novels (Lily Bart's glimpse of the happy Struther family in The House of Mirth, Henry Sutpen's addressing Charles Bon as his brother in Absalom, Absalom!) to the briefer "illustrative stamp" in Hemingway, a sensory moment that crystallizes a story: Dr. Adams cleaning his shotgun after walking away from a fight with Dick Boulton, Nick Adams lying face down on a blanket as Marjorie rows away, Nick's cataloguing the papers of the dead in "A Way You'll Never Be." Lamb is not afraid to tackle the thorny issue of the Joycean epiphany in Hemingway, persuasively arguing--after providing a wide-ranging and well informed history of the term--that the epiphany played no significant role in Hemingway's aesthetics or his fiction. Why? Largely, Lamb argues, because of Hemingway's religious temperament. The "anti-epiphany" that concludes "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" enunciates Hemingway's "existentialist credo": Hemingway "loved the things of this world, but there is little evidence that he believed in an accompanying spiritual world" (166).

Lamb's chapter on "The New Art of Constructive Dialogue: From James to Hemingway" is one of his most substantial, most important, and most enlightening. For Lamb, "Hemingway's most original and influential contribution to the art of fiction was his creation of an entirely new role for dialogue" (169). In his full and illuminating discussion of the history of dialogue, Lamb applauds the achievement of James and Wharton, but through trenchant analysis of a representative passage from The Portrait of a Lady he shows that for these writers dialogue was complementary and illustrative rather than constructive: dialogue only illustrates what other methods of presentation provide. Hemingway makes dialogue do much more, assigning it a central role in advancing plot and developing character. And whereas James and Wharton give us speech from characters who are bright, perceptive, and cultured, it is not until we get to Hemingway that we consistently hear words spoken by members of other classes: waiters, bartenders, criminals, prostitutes, soldiers, jockeys, boxers, and boastful middle-class adolescents. For Lamb, one of Hemingway's most significant achievements is that he "greatly democratized fiction writing and fiction reading through his transmutation of vernacular discourse into high art" (227).

According to Lamb, Hemingway's three major technical achievements in dialogue are "minimum speech with maximum meaning, the elevation of banality into art, and the blurring of distinctions between the genres of drama and fiction" (177). As always, Lamb's generalizations are solidly buttressed by detailed discussions of the short story text. He illustrates what British author and critic Alan Pryce-Jones calls, in a wonderful phrase, the "laconic speed" (169) of Hemingway's dialogue through a penetrating analysis, the best I've ever read, of the concluding lines of "Indian Camp." Lamb is equally insightful in explicating dialogue between the husband and wife in "Cat in the Rain," between Max and AI in "The Killers," and--in what Lamb calls one of the most complex and effective passages of dialogue Hemingway would ever write--between the American lady and the narrator's wife in "A Canary for One." This excellent chapter concludes, as one would hope, with a close reading of the story that has become Hemingway's most popular and most widely anthologized, "Hills Like White Elephants," a story in which Hemingway's experimentation with dialogue is pushed as far as it will go. As to that story's debated ending, Lamb writes that "Hemingway leaves his talking couple to an ambiguous fate" (203). I am not always convinced by Lamb's conclusions--I think he may be harsh in his assessment of Dr. Adams in "Indian Camp" and in "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," and I believe he overstates the naturalist strain in Hemingway's philosophy--but I am always grateful for the clarity of his prose and impressed by the intelligence, sensitivity, and humanity he brings to his readings.

Lamb's insights extend, as he intends, beyond his book--both to Hemingway's stories and novels and to the short story form itself. Lamb's discussion of focalization allows us to see that the original but subsequently deleted beginning of 77/c Sun Also Rises, which F. Scott Fitzgerald faulted for its "condescending casualness" and "elephantine facetiousness" (Svoboda 138-39), fails because Hemingway's first-person narrator knows and speaks more than he should. His analysis of Hemingway's famous "ice-berg" theory from Death in the Afternoon-- If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of the movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water (40)


--encourages us to look for other deliberate omissions, such as Hemingway's not mentioning in "Cross-Country Snow"" that, because the snow is "driving like a sand-storm" (Complete Stories 143), Nick and George are the only riders on the funicular and the only skiers on the slopes, a sign of their professionalism, hardiness, and courage. And Lamb's analysis of a Hemingway technique he calls "repetition with variation" (123) in "A Canary for Cue" likewise invites this to discover it elsewhere. When Nick tells George that skiing in the future will be difficult because the mountains in California are too rocky, too wooded, and too distant, for instance, the conversation continues this way: "Yes" said George, "that's the way it is in California." "Yes," Nick said, "that's the way it is everywhere I've ever been." "Yes," said George, "that's the way it is." (CSS 146)


In this passage, the repetition and variation gradually widens the application of Nick's initial statement until it gathers greatness as an accepted generalization--a technique deployed throughout Hemingway's oeuvre.

Art Matters concludes with a highly useful chronological listing of Hemingway's stories from 1923-39 by date of completion. The listing also includes the dates of composition, first publication, and first inclusion in a Hemingway collection. Lambs "Acknowledgements" is the most generous and most appreciative 1 have read since Melville's dedication of Moby-Dick to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne "in token of my admiration of his genius." No wonder that in his two decades at Purdue University Professor Lamb has won so many awards--and so much love!--for his teaching and mentoring of students. Like Jack Chase, the "great heart" of Melville's White-Jacket, Lamb cares deeply about his people and his profession. Toward the beginning of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield says, "What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though" (25). But it did happen for me in reading Art Matters. Now- I'm not planning to call old Bob Lamb on the phone any time soon, but I do hope he will be attending the 15th Biennial International Hemingway Conference in Petoskey, Michigan during the third week of June in 2012 and leading a session on a topic like "Dispassionate Presentation and Authorial Judgment" or "Minimizing Words and Maximizing Meaning." You couldn't keep me away.

Building on and extending his substantial and well-argued essays in journals like Modern Fiction Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature, Studies in Short Fiction, and The Hemingway Review, Lamb's book elevates him to the top rank of current Hemingway scholars. He joins Joseph DeFalco, Paul Smith, and pre-eminently Joseph Flora as those who have written most cogently and most comprehensively about Hemingway's short fiction. But Lamb is the very first to focus this closely on Hemingway's craft. He succeeds not only in illuminating the techniques that make Hemingway's stories so powerful but in thereby helping to rehabilitate Hemingway's critical reputation at a time when cultural critique and sociological inquiry have largely displaced aesthetic appreciation and have helped engender a "strong current of antipathy among academic critics" (1), much of it based on Hemingway's public image.

Many of the stories about Nick Adams, Hemingway's alter ego and better self, end with Nicks anticipating a pleasure or a challenge: looking for black squirrels with his father, going into town on Saturday night with Bill, leaving the combat zone with Rinaldi, trying to find his way home alone in a foreign land without getting lost, cross-country skiing with George, fishing the swamp in the days ahead, and visiting his father's gravesite with his young son. Hemingway conveys that same sense of excitement when Bill Gorton says to Jake Barnes, "We're going trout-fishing. We're going trout-fishing in the Irati River, and we're going to get tight now at lunch on the wine of the country, and then take a swell bus ride" (SAR 102). Not only Hemingway aficionados but students of American fiction and the short story can now look forward with pleasure and excitement to a book that helps us to better understand and appreciate the writer who created a style that Lamb calls "more imitated than any author's of the last century" (225). Lamb concludes by acknowledging his great affection for Hemingway the writer--"I admire him enormously" (229)--and I confess to feeling much the same kind of admiration for the creator of this splendid and wonderfully crafted study of Hemingway's short story art.

Works cited

Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. Understanding Fiction. 1943. 2nd ed. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1959.

DeFalco, Joseph. The Hero in Hemingway's Short Stories. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1963

Flora, Joseph M. Finest Hemingway: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989.

--. Hemingway's Nick Adams. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1982.

--. Reading Hemingway's Men Without Women: Glossary and Commentary. Kent. Ohio: Kent State UP, 2008.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. The Finca Vigia Edition. New York: Scribners, 1987.

--.The Sun Also Rises. 1926. New York: Scribners, 1954.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Harper Brothers, 1851.

--.White-Jacket. New York: Harper Brothers, 1850.

Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Little, Brown, 1951.

Smith, Paul. A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1989.

Svoboda. Frederic Joseph. Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises: The Crafting of a Style. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1983.

Sri Guru Granth Sahib

By thinking, He cannot be reduced to thought, even by thinking hundreds of thousands of times. By remaining silent, inner silence is not obtained, even by remaining lovingly absorbed deep within. The hunger of the hungry is not appeased, even by piling up loads of worldly goods. Hundreds of thousands of clever tricks, but not even one of them will go along with you in the end. So how can you become truthful? And how can the veil of illusion be torn away? O Nanak, it is written that you shall obey the Hukam of His Command, and walk in the Way of His Will. || 1 || By His Command, bodies are created; His Command cannot be described. By His Command, souls come into being; by His Command, glory and greatness are obtained. By His Command, some are high and some are low; by His Written Command, pain and pleasure are obtained. Some, by His Command, are blessed and forgiven; others, by His Command, wander aimlessly forever. Everyone is subject to His Command; no one is beyond His Command. O Nanak, one who understands His Command, does not speak in ego. || 2 || Some sing of His Power-who has that Power? Some sing of His Gifts, and know His Sign and Insignia. Some sing of His Glorious Virtues, Greatness and Beauty. Some sing of knowledge obtained of Him, through difficult philosophical studies. Some sing that He fashions the body, and then again reduces it to dust. Some sing that He takes life away, and then again restores it.

Well I'll be braving the winters, the best that I know...

A house is a machine for living in

‘ If we eliminate from our hearts and minds all dead conceptions with regard to the house…we shall arrive at the house machine, the mass production house, healthy, (and morally so too) and beautiful in the same way that the working tools and instruments that accompany our existence are beautiful.' - Le Corbusier.

Down the River Road

http://www.gregorybenford.com/uncategorized/down-the-river-road-the-introduction/

To me the scientists and engineers of the last few centuries have been the unheralded elite emerging from the culture that has driven modern times. These folk somehow get left out of the equation of contemporary literature. The great modernist innovators – Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Stein, Eliot — saw the novel and poetry principally as an area of technical and formal innovation. They all spoke of the cultures they knew—Paris, Dublin, Yoknapatawpha. Faulkner created Yoknapatawpha as a fictional county inspired by Lafayette County, Mississippi and its county seat of Oxford, Mississippi. He often referred to it as “my apocryphal county.”

But they wrote about fantastic matters of the past, not the future. Science fiction is a form of writing but it’s also a way of looking at things – a mode of thought. It requires mental landscapes more demanding and inventive than modernism.

54-40 or Fight!

The acceptance of the 49th parallel as the international boundary was concluded without precise knowledge of the effects that it would ultimately have. Later, as the Boundary Commission was surveying the line, the British government realized that the peninsula of Point Roberts would be an isolated part of the United States.