The Last of the Mohicans (1826) by James Fenimore Cooper

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Last of the Mohicans (1826)

by James Fenimore Cooper

Cooper's Cave,  Glen Falls, New York

New York: 15/105

Upstate: 14/23

 I've been disappointed with the lack of 19th century picks in the 1,001 Novels project.  I understand that the idea is to provide a contemporary portrait of American life, and that if you go back to the 19th century diversity wasn't a huge concern among published and authors, but still, what's the point of an 1,001 Novels project without some obscure 19th century titles in the mix.  Instead we get The Last of the Mohicans, which, I read for the 1,001 Books project back in 2012.  That was a pretty good post, so I'm just going to re-post it.  No way I am re-reading The Last of the Mohicans for this project:

Book Review

The Last of The Mohicans (1826) 
by James Fenimore Cooper (6/8/12)

                                  James Fenimore Cooper

  You simply can't discuss James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans without discussing Sir Walter Scott's The Waverley Novels.

  The Last of the Mohicans is the second of a five-volume series called The Leatherstocking Tales.  The Leatherstocking Tales stand in relation to The Waverley Novels as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles stand in relation to Elvis:  One inspired and survived to maintain a presence during the ascendancy of the other.  Here, Sir Walter Scott's The Waverley Novels were Elvis, and The Leatherstocking Tales are the Beatles.

  The Waverley Novels are known as such because Sir Walter Scott wrote under a psuedonym- but Waverley was the first Novel in his series, and for the second book in the series it said that the Author was "The Author of Waverley;" referring to the TITLE of the first book.  Unlike The Waverley novels, which were just a series of Novels by the same Author set in the past (i.e. "historical, epic fiction."), James Fenimore Cooper's The Leatherstocking Tales refer to a specific character, birth name, Natty Brumppo, although in the books he goes by a variety of names:  the Pathfinder, the Trapper, Deer Slayer, Le Longue Carabine and, most hilariously,  Hawkeye.

 Similar to The Waverley Novels, The Last of the Mohicans is set in the past.  Written in 1826, the events of The Last of the Mohicans re-enact well known "current events" from a half century ago.   Like The Waverley Novels, The Last of the Mohicans and the other Leatherstocking Tales were not written in a political vacuum.  To talk about Sir Walter Scott and his line of descent, as some kind of autonomous "Art for Art's Sake" type work is to entirely miss the main point of these books, which is to entertain, and convince the reader of a set of viewpoints that corresponds to the strongly held beliefs of the Author.

 It may be a fascinating area of inquiry- parsing that out- but not really the concern of someone who is going to read The Last of the Mohicans because they saw the movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis or because, say, it's on the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die list.  For those readers, The Last of the Mohicans is an inevitable disaster because of the clunk methods Cooper uses to go "back in time."  All the dialogue is stilted, and the lavish depictions of scenery are hardly a revelation to anyone who has seen a photograph.

   It's easy to understand WHY James Fenimore Cooper has been canonized, because he's the first internationally famous American Author, and because America INVENTED canonization in the mid 20th century, a time that was more concerned with American roots then we are today.  However, the action doesn't hold the attention, and the politics are, to be kind, "politically incorrect."  Another way to put it might be "well-meaning racism."

At Home in the End of the World (1990)by Michael Cunningham

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

At Home in the End of the World (1990)

by Michael Cunningham

Woodstock, New York.

New York: 14/105

Upstate: 13/23

    The rest of the upstate portion of New York is from the Hudson River Valley, which runs north and south along the Eastern border area of New York state.  This was my second read of At Home in the End of the World- frankly, I forgot I had already read this book until I was writing this post- Cunningham is a two book member of the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list- this is the second book from that list.   Seems like this author has a decisive hold as a representative of the LGBT literary community based on his Pulitzer win for The Hours.

   In terms of the 1,001 Novels project,  At Home in the End of the World is another geographically suspect pick. There are strong arguments that this book represents Cleveland, the Village or the suburbs of Phoenix, all locations that have more scenes than the eponymous home at the end of the world, which is, in fact, a fixer farmhouse in Woodstock, NY- where editor Straight placed this book on the map. 

  Other than literally not remembering a single moment from my first time through, I don't have much to add to the 2017 review:

Published 7/11/17
At Home at the End of the World (1990)
 by Michael Cunningham

   At Home at the End of the World is a combination of a gay coming-of-age book and a contemporary relationship novel.  Each chapter is voiced in the first person by a different narrator.  The narrator rotates between the three main characters: Bobby, Jonathan and Clare with occasional appearances from Jonathan's mom.  The main childhood friendship is between Jonathan- essentially the main character and author stand in, Bobby- his straight friend, and Clare, who is the type of woman one might call a "fag hag" - in a non pejorative sense, of course.  

   Although these characters are 20 or so years older than I am, I recognized all of them, from the parents on down, as being accurate portrayals of urbanites in the late 1980's.   Unlike other gay-friendly lit titles from this time period, At Home at the End of the World explicitly deals with the AIDS crisis through the travails of a minor character who none the less features prominently in the unexpected resolution of the book.

Notes on Blood Meridian (2013) by John Sepich

Book Review 

Notes on Blood Meridian: Revised and Expanded Edition 

(Southwestern Writers Collection Series, 

Wittliff Collections at Texas State University)(2013)

John Sepich and Edwin T. Arnold

   Here are my highlighted quotes from this book:

Meanwhile, Blood Meridian‘s readership continued to grow, as did academic interest in the book and its author. Harold Bloom’s proclamation in 2000 that Blood Meridian was “the authentic American apocalyptic novel” and that “Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and of Faulkner” was the imprimatur that finally ushered the book into the realm of the modern classics.

Two possible influences on Outer Dark, apart from the obvious spirit of Flannery O’Connor, are Eudora Welty’s Robber Bridegroom (1946) and Madison Jones’s Forest of the Night (1960).

Bartlett writes of the New Almaden cinnabar mine located thirteen miles from the bay of San Francisco.

  Mostly what I harvested from Notes on Blood Meridian is a better idea of the primary sources that McCarthy likely used in preparing to write this book.  One of the issues that McCarthy clearly faced was the potential demystification of his work.  All artists face a potential "disenchantment" process that is linked directly to the production, evaluation and consumption of art-products by different audiences.   The classic posture of this art production dilemma is the artist who rails at false critics and later lives to regret it when there are no critics, not even false ones, describing their art.

  McCarthy managed to side step this problem by never talking to anyone about his work.  But that doesn't mean the work remained undone.  I was able to locate a host of primary sources- most related to the violence between American settlers and Native Americans in the American west and southwest in the mid to late 19th century.  Blood Meridian is very much about this world- the American southwest of the 1850's/60s/70s and McCarthy appears to have approached it much as a historian would. He pulled many ideas and minute details from the historical sources and then accreting is own artistic inspiration.

   I found many of these inspirational titles available in the LAPL and checked out a handful, but unfortunately they are almost all uniformly long and hard to read, so not sure how far that will go, but I'm very interested in the later history of the wars between the American Government and Native American tribes in the west in the 1860's and 70's.

Show Review: Gamma World & Total Pleasure (Wisteria Residency 1) @ Zebulon LA

 Show Review

Gamma World &
Total Pleasure

(Wisteria Residency 1)

@ Zebulon LA

   Man, I would go to Zebulon more if they booked more shows that weren't the indie/underground equivalent of legacy acts.  I mean, I get it, they are going for diversity in their programming, not trying to replace the Echo.  But the regular shows are so good at Zebulon!  So I found myself at night one of the Wisteria Residency in February- every Monday night!  

    The bill started with Gamma World- they were cool- a two piece with a drum machine- that's all you need! They had some anthemic song writing, some political lyrics.  It was fun- I can see a path to a real career for those two, but they've only got one release on Spotify and its "Demo" from 2019 on "Unsigned" so there is work to do there.  Every act needs to make a physical product, tape, cd, vinyl, whatever and then sell it at live shows.   When I looked up their socials I saw my like minded contacts in the world of music were already following these guys, so I would say, worth checking out, hope they do more shows.  Didn't love their look!  I bet they don't care!

    The second band was Total Pleasure.  This is a trad post punk outfit, with a rhythm section that sounded like the Cure, a pair of guitarists that sounded like the Smiths and a normcore singer who looked like one of the neo-shoegaze front men you see out there in recent times.   It didn't quite hang together- the rhythm section sounds like it needs to play more shows together and the songwriting was uneven- some of the cuts really jammed, others felt awkward and flat.   But you know, ever since the pandemic, I've really begun to appreciate EVERY local band- god bless them all, each and every one.  Just the fact that they are playing shows on a Monday night- god bless them.

       Didn't stay for Wisteria- I was curious to see whether Zebulon was mighty enough to keep a three band Monday night bill on schedule and the answer, sadly, no.   Gamma World didn't play till after 9 PM, and I left at 10:30 with Wisteria's set no where in site (they were supposed to take the stage at 10:20 PM).  Here's a tip for Zebulon, or Wisteria- don't book a three band bill on a Monday night if the first band isn't willing to take the stage at 8:30, as was the case last night.  Still was a good time and looking forward to next week.

The Orchard Keeper(1966) by Cormac McCarthy

 Book Review

The Orchard Keeper (1966)

by Cormac McCarthy

    

  This was Cormac McCarthy's first novel and if you don't think it sounds like Faulkner then you have not read Faulkner.  I'm not a huge fan of Faulkner but I'm generally appreciative of his influence on American literature.  He is, first and foremost, a literary modernist in that his books are difficult to understand in terms of the narrative/temporal techniques he deploys.  He is also the first and arguably only great modernist of the American South, which is not a region that generated a ton of modernist artists.  Literary modernism represents a kind of apex of the divide between an artist and their prospective audience. If you want to find readers of difficult modernist authors in 2024, you are going to have to go to an American university- and not an undergraduate class, but the graduate school, to find people who are "into" any kind of 20th century modernist author. 

 On the other hand, these writers have had a huge influence on the audience of future authors of literary fiction.  In fact, it is fair to say that "serious" literary fiction in 20th century America came to be synonymous with the deployment of these complicated narrative techniques to a greater or lesser degree. However, in the terms that this blog uses, The Orchard Keeper was clearly not a hit.  It was an interesting first novel by a promising young writer, but there is nothing necessarily in this book to indicate that the author would go on to write his Western Trilogy, The Road and No Country For Old Men twenty years later.  If you've read those books, you know that he abandoned complicated literary modernism in favor of a spare brand of prose that is more like literary minimalism.   I don't think he gets enough credit for that shift.

   That doesn't help The Orchard Keeper, which I found just as incomprehensible as any of Faulkner's books.  Certainly not a good pick for an Audiobook since the modernist technique practically requires interlineation on a page of text to keep track of the plot.  Like, when I read the Wikipedia description to prepare for this post I recognized what had happened but wouldn't have been able to tell you that as it was going on.

  On the other hand, if you have some kind of interest in the prose style of Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper is invaluable because it is the point of departure.  The reader can already pick up his trick of using simile and metaphor to elevate the description of a bleeding hillbilly to something approaching biblical reverence. 

       While there are some feints at the later McCarthy heart of darkness, The Orchard Keeper is a pretty light hearted affair.   There's no sense of the mythical in The Orchard Keeper and it weakens the impact of the prose.  Also the story is confused because of the literary technique- which is clearly something he figure out later in this career.

North Woods (2023) by Daniel Mason

 Book Review

North Woods (2023)

by Daniel Mason

1,001 Novels: Revised

  Like the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die project, I believe the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America is best conceived as a project that is meant to be revised.  In the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die, the first revision (2008) was to go back and introduce additional diversity via increased representation of women authors, authors from the global south and generally reducing the number of picks for those authors with more than one book.

  So far, I haven't come across any duplicated authors in the 1,001 Novels project.  Editor Susan Straight is clearly on top of representation in a way the original editors of the 1,001 Books project were not.  Thus, I think the primary concern in revising the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America is simply to make it better.  That brings me to North Woods, a novel about a patch of woods in Western Massachussets that made several year end best lists- I finally checked out the Audiobook after it made the New York Times books of the year list.  The fact that this is a book about a piece of land in the United States makes it particularly relevant for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America since it is an approach not embraced by any of the books I've read thus far.

    The book was critically acclaimed, and I enjoyed the Audiobook, though the episodic approach- switching from character to character over the course of hundreds of years, necessarily made it a choppy listening experience.  I'm sure that this would be a book to select for any revision of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project... specifically, one of the books from the Massachussets portion of the list, which looks like this:

1)Moby Dick by Herman Melville

2)The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

3)The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorn

4)The Wedding by Dorothy West

5)The Parking Lot Attendant by Nafkote Tamirat

6)Mystic River by Dennis Lehane

7)Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

8)Promised Land by Robert Parker

9)The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti

10)We Love You Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge

11)White Ivy by Susie Yang

12)Unraveling by Elizabeth Graver

13)Leaving Pico by Frank X. Gaspar

14)Born Slippy  by Tom Lutz 

15) Beyond That the Sea by Laura Spence-Ash

16)Union Dues by John Sayles

17) Faith by Jennifer Haigh

18)April Morning by Howard Fast

19)An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England(2007) by Brock Clarke

20)Caucasia by Danny Senza

21)Vida by Marge Piercy

22)Mermaid in Chelsea Creek by Michelle Tea

23)The Wishing Hill by Holly Robinson

24)Father of the Rain by Lily King

25)The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin

26)The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

27)Don't Ask me Where I'm From by Jennifer de Leon

28)Meeting Rozzy Halfway by Caroline Leavitt

29)The Giant's House by Elizabeth McKracken

30) Illumination Night by Alice Hoffman

  My natural inclination is to just pull one of the books out of the bottom three- I think Meeting Rozzy Halfway  by Caroline Leavitt makes sense, but that also moves the place for that slot from Boston to the west of Massachussets.  Not much of an issue in this case, but I'd be concerned about dropping a more geographically underrepresented region of the country.