I don’t remember what it was turned me on to Charles Bowden. (It might have been Hearing Voices, maybe even this episode. Or this one. That podcast has introduced me to several writers I should have been reading long ago.) However it was I heard his name, I went and dug up what I could find of his online, mining the Harper’s archive especially. And I was astonished at what I found. Is there a better essayist writing in America today?
What is Bowden’s work like? There are several ways in which Bowden and David Simon are similar, aside from their subject matter (both have written at length about the drug war and its consequences on their regions). Though Bowden remains a long-form journalist while Simon left that world behind to become a television producer in the 1990s, both writers put reporting at the heart of what they do. Bowden and Simon also write in the space between sociopolitical forces (Bowden: narcotrafficking, immigration, civic corruption, globalization, immigration/emigration; Simon: narcotics, cities, lingering effects of racial oppression, entrenched power of bureaucracy) and human attempts (not to say successes) to survive in the face of those forces. Both writers take darkness as a given, assuming that attempts to do good are successes in spite of ourselves and worth some amount of quiet admiration, if not congratulations. And it is particularly those who have highest to rise who warrant the most scrutiny, such as the junkie who turns his life around or the sicario (hit-man) who finds God and the strength to escape from his cartel.
Bowden’s work is underpinned by a knowledge that writing has real and sometimes terrible consequences. In “Torch Song,” a memoir of his time working as a reporter on the city desk at the Tucson Citizen, Bowden reveals the articles he wrote about rape and molestation resulted in civic rage and personal sexual conquest; in “Teachings of Don Fernando,” a eulogy for a drug informant—scratch that, the best eulogy for a drug informant ever written—he claims that an article he wrote for GQ hastened the death of Amado Carillo Fuentes, head of the Juarez drug cartel in the 1990s. A lesser writer would avoid admitting so much. But what brings Bowden to make them? Is it braggadoccio? Inflated self-regard? I can see how one might say either: he has Western roots and he writes about drug traffickers and murderers whom he both despises and admires (or neither despises nor admires, which amounts to the same thing), a stance that can be maddening; he has a gravely, poetically masculine voice that comes across in print. His essays are gripped by a clear notion of causality: actions—even inadvertent actions, such as staring too long at a parade of killers in Juarez—have real consequences. This clarity makes him an astute reader of the current scene, such as in his March 2008 essay “Ike and Lyndon,” ostensibly a meditation on Lyndon Johnson and an artist in a Texas mental hospital, which also uncovers the zeitgeist that made George W. Bush inevitable. Just his work in Harper’s is a remarkable collection. I’m looking forward to reading his books soon.
I read Gregory Maguire’s Wicked some time ago, and I thought it not great, but inventive. Maguire has built his career out of imagining alternate histories for iconic characters such as ugly stepsisters or, in the case of Wicked, the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz. In Maguire’s hands, the Wicked Witch was not so much wicked as she was misunderstood. Born of a tryst between her munchkin mother and the Wizard, her green skin and foul temper kept her apart from others. Then, like many young people, she goes to school, learns about injustice, and vows to fight it. When her radicalism contributes to the death of the man she loves, she retreats, and the rest of the novel follows her as she attempts—and fails—to atone for his death. Her life is a tension between action and fate, and fate ultimately wins.
Last night, I finished Wicked‘s sequel Son of a Witch, and my response to it was remarkably similar: not a great book, but alright. Its protagonist is self-confessedly useless, but he nevertheless acts to alter the political and martial reality of Oz, often in spite of himself. (In spite of Maguire’s atrocious dialogue, too, which clangs like a fork in a garbage disposal.) It’s at heart a bildungsroman, complete with journeys and discoveries about living a moral and ethical life. And there’s gay sex.
As a series, Maguire’s books are more or less a political history of the land of Oz, including its tyrannical leaders and the individual or democratic resistances arising in response to them. I don’t know that I have much more to say about either book than that. Perhaps I will after I finish A Lion Among Men.
Surely one reason 2009 was such a lousy year is that I spent much of it not reading. Of books, I read Opa Nobody, a respectable first book by Sonya Huber (I have intended to write about it for months); I read Time and Tide, a love song to Nantucket; I read A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens:melodrama::France:guillotine); as part of a reading list K and I began, I read To Kill a Mockingbird and several of Eudora Welty’s collected stories; I might have read Henry VI Pt. 1, but I might also have read it in 2008, and besides, compared to Caleb Crain’s generous reading of the same, my reading it is hardly worth mention. I also read essays for work and sundry magazine articles for entertainment and edification, but all told, the year was slim pickings indeed.
What reasons did I have? My time was certainly busy: an hour-and-a-half a day went to running and walking the dog, an hour or more to TV (though it was often really good TV), no small amount of time to daily chores, and more time than I care to recall to splashing around the Internet’s puddles. Perhaps more important was the uncertainty brought on by layoffs at work and medical problems. Such is the stuff to make a mind unquiet. Taken together, by mid-December I was no better than a nervously tapping a pen.
It was last month that I realized—I remembered—the tautology of distraction: an unquiet mind makes noise. Nervous tapping is its own worst enemy. My mother is an artist, a potter, who has always asserted the necessity of keeping her hands busy. She has never carried knitting needles to union meetings—she only picked up knitting a few years ago—but for years she kept a tatting shuttle at hand. (Recently, the thing closest to hand is an Iphone.) I have her need to keep the hands busy, but perhaps because my efforts serve no constructive purpose, for me, busy hands are not enough. Absorption, such as one gains when reading something good well, is one of the few things that makes the tapping subside. So I set about to pick up a few new books. Novels first: The Gate at the Stairs, Never Let Me Go, Home, and now The Wings of the Dove. Poetry, too. I’m taking them as they come, but I am trying to read with diligence—I don’t want to lose the practice again. Perhaps, like Josh, I will find the reading helps me write, too. I hope so—I could use more of that, too. But for now, I am content to recognize that the reading is good for my peace of mind.
Technorati claim code: 2SETUPES925V.
I was listening to Paul Theroux read Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Gospel According to Mark” and was surprised to discover that Theroux had been one of Borges’s readers. “I was taking the trip that I wrote about in The Old Patagonian Express,” he says,
I ended up in Buenos Aires. We had the same publisher, and I told him that Borges was my hero. He said, “Oh, well, he’d love to see you. He’s blind, of course, and he needs to be read to. You can be his reader.” So I went to his apartment. There was a white cat, I remember, sleeping on his lap. I read to him. He loved Kipling, and Chesterton, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Wrong Box.
Theroux then adds that he appreciated Borges’s sense of humor, which he describes as “self-effacing.”
It is an odd anecdote, not so much from Theroux’s perspective but from the publisher’s. It’s hard not to think of him sitting in his Buenos Aires office taking every odd opportunity to offer to visiting writers the chance to read to Borges himself. “Just behind this curtain, ladies and gentlemen, you, too, can read to Argentina’s greatest living writer!” Who could pass up such a chance?
Theroux makes much more of his meeting with Borges in The Old Patagonian Express. There he recounts Borges extolling the virtues of New England and Austin, Texas, scoffing at Canada, preaching about race and history and politics, divining writers and their writing, laughing at Jesus. Borges is such a raconteur in the book that Theroux excuses the detail of his transcription by noting the old man’s blindness was the perfect disguise for the fact he was taking copious notes. Despite concluding Borges was “almost angelic,” in Theroux’s hands younger Borges is actually more like a whirlwind.
Of course, Borges already had readers, including his mother and occasional boys whom he conscripted. Alberto Manguel read to him for two years and has written at length about it in With Borges and A History of Reading. I haven’t read the former (Scott Esposito has a nice review), but in the latter Manguel, too, recalls reading Kipling and Stevenson as well as a dozen other writers and their works, and he fondly remembers Borges’s humor. Manguel says that Borges would frequently interrupt him to comment on the line he just read, compare the text to another, or take a note on the end pages. He writes:
The experience felt like a sort of happy captivity. I was enthralled not so much by the texts he was making me discover (many of which eventually became my own favourites) as by his comments, which were vastly but unobtrusively erudite, very funny, sometimes cruel, almost always indispensable. I felt I was the unique owner of a carefully annotated edition, compiled for my exclusive sake. Of course, I wasn’t; I (like many others) was simply his notebook, an aide-mémoire which the blind man required in order to assemble his ideas. I was more than willing to be used.
I wonder how many others can boast, like Theroux and Manguel, that they read to Borges? I have found reference to and the names of a few:
Just as fascinating as who read to Borges is the question of who claims to have read to Borges but lied about it? For example, I don’t think John Moss ever did, but he did publish a brief essay titled “Reading to Borges” in Danielle Schaub’s Reading Writers Reading. He’s using the act of reading as a metaphor, not as a lie, but surely Borges’s fame has inspired one or another literary groupie to make the boast.
I’m sure more anecdotes could be turned up in Spanish-language searches.
