Fantastic Metropolis

The first five choices, four books and a film, all link to Benjamin or Kafka; at the end I’ve included a book of poems, another film, and last but not least, the two Carol Emshwillers I read this year. I’d never read Emshwiller, but then Paul di Filippo compared my writing to hers in a review of Green Music, and I was taken with the beautiful covers of the Small Beer Press releases at Wiscon a couple of years ago. I didn’t buy them at the time, already having too many books to lug back across the border, but I eventually ordered The Mount and Report to the Men’s Club, and you should too; you won’t regret it. Having read her, I wouldn’t say we’re cut from the same cloth exactly, but that, perhaps, we till neighbouring fields. And now to the boys. Beyond the magnificent Carol, it seems to be mainly guys who have thrilled me this year.

1. Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Larry McMurtry

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Texas novelist and screenplay writer of The Last Picture Show and Lonesome Dove takes on the memoir form. This slim volume of essays on writing and the writing life begins on a very hot day in a Dairy Queen in Texas, as McMurtry reads Walter Benjamin’s essay on the storyteller, drinking lime Doctor Pepper, and looking around what has come to replace the village feed n’ seed as a rural gathering place, wondering if there are any great oral storytellers left in Texas, or for that matter, in densely cultured Europe, so antithetical to the lonely dust-ridden expanses of Texas. In various chapters McMurtry describes the differences between an oral tale and a novel, his cowboy ancestry, how his bypass surgery altered his personality, negatively affecting his ability to read, and how he came, unlike his forebears, to be a herder of books instead of cattle. McMurtry has worked most of his adult life as a professional book scout; he is glad, he says, he didn’t become a professor as he hates being bored, and there are better eccentrics to meet in the rare and used book trade than there are in academia. He discusses his friendship with Susan Sontag, a brain bag if there ever was one, and the somewhat alarming or at least eye opening fact that there are security people in airports now who don’t know what his typewriter is. As to why he wrote his memoirs in longhand, McMurtry theorizes the distance from mind to page is shorter when writing by hand, something napkin scribblers are likely to agree with. An utterly charming book, largely because it is not full of writing tips, although many such can be gained by careful examination of his wonderful exacting prose.

Illuminations, Walter Benjamin

Rediscovered in the eighties, Benjamin is now an icon, considered one of the foremost cultural theorists of the twentieth century. Because of the time of writing, his essays are blessedly free of terms arising from French theory in all its forms. His prose is nevertheless challenging and dense, demanding a careful read. Benjamin’s ideas are deft, original, startling. On each page a line springs out to be savoured all day, its cleverness, its poetry to be remarked upon. For instance, I’m currently ruminating upon his idea that the demise of the oral storyteller was linked to the emergent middle class denial of death. Benjamin’s Kafka essay is especially useful, as Kafka can easily be read as a proto-speculative writer. He relates a conversation between Max Brod and Kafka. “We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that come into God’s head…our world is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his,” Kafka said. Brod said, “Then there is hope outside this manifestation of the world that we know.” Kafka smiled. “Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope–But not for us.”

The Complete Stories, Franz Kafka

Unclassifiable to this day, Kafka might be seen as, among many other things, a precursor to urban fantasy. Born in Prague in 1883, of German Jewish descent, Kafka’s best known work is The Metamorphosis, published in 1916. His best known novel, not included here, is The Trial, made into a film by Orson Welles in 1962. Kafka’s stark images of decrepitude, decay and transmogrified insects, of shabby officialdom and cruel powerful fathers border on the supernatural. So many stark and drearily detailed and profound images; one could borrow from them forever and never run out. A writer who like the existentialist Albert Camus (who not surprisingly claimed him as a great influence) refused to deny the dark in the world, his courageous careful examination yet offers hope precisely because he refuses to turn away. An excellent compendium which includes all the stories published during his life as well as those Brod published posthumously against Kafka’s wishes, but luckily for us.