A Short Story for Halloween

I like to find cool, spooky things to read at Halloween -- stories more in the vein of folklore than horror. Last year, I checked out Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which I had mixed opinions on. (Read that post here.) This year, I think I've found something much better.
I got to thinking about the role of the Devil in literature: Old Scratch, Beelzebub, the Dark Man, the Stranger. Probably the Devil's first appearance in literature is Biblical: The temptation in the garden in the book of Genesis, but even more prominently in the Book of Job -- the devil is the instigator for the troubles that beset kindly Job. Then there's the devil as anti-hero in John Milton's Paradise Lost. More recently, there Stephen King's The Stand -- the devil comes to earth after a killer flu wipes out most of the world's population. Even the country music song "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" has its lyrical moments:

The devil went down to Georgia
He was looking for a soul to steal
He was in a bind 'cause he was way behind
And he was willing to make a deal

But I digress! (Read all the lyrics here.)
This year, spoonreader presents, for your Halloween reading pleasure, the short story "The Devil and Daniel Webster," by Stephen Vincent Benet. Webster was an actual historical figure, a noted lawyer and orator, and a proud unionist (though he died before the Civil War started). In this story, the farmer Jabez Stone makes a deal with the devil in exchange for bountiful crops and worldly gain. When it's time to pay up, Stone loses his nerve, and turns to his friend Webster to save him from the bad deal he's made. In this scene, the Devil has returned and informed Webster that he intends to collect on the soul of Mr. Stone. Webster responds to the contrary:

Dan'l Webster's brow looked dark as a thundercloud. "Pressed or not, you shall not have this man!" he thundered. "Mr. Stone is an American citizen, and no American citizen may be forced into the service of a foreign prince. We fought England for that in '12 and we'll fight all hell for it again!"
"Foreign?" said the stranger. "And who calls me a foreigner?"
"Well, I never yet heard of the dev -- of your claiming American citizenship," said Dan'l Webster with surprise.
"And who with better right?" said the stranger, with one of his terrible smiles. "When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on her deck. Am I not in your books and stories and beliefs, from the first settlements on? Am I not spoken of, still, in every church in New England? 'Tis true the North claims me for a Southerner, and the South for a Northerner, but I am neither. I am merely an honest American like yourself - and of the best descent - for, to tell the truth, Mr. Webster,though I don't like to boast of it, my name is older in this country than yours."
"Aha!" said Dan'l Webster, with the veins standing out in his forehead. "Then I stand on the Constitution! I demand a trial for my client!"

And thus Daniel Webster goes to court against the Devil. Read the whole of "The Devil and Daniel Webster" here -- The University of Texas Tarlton Law Library has posted a fine copy with illustrations at their web site.

Zadie Smith on David Foster Wallace

British author Zadie Smith is very high on my must-read list. She's been in the media quite a bit lately with the release of her new book, "On Beauty." (Listen to radio interviews with her here and here.) I love what she has to say about literature and writing. Last month, she was in O, the Oprah magazine, where she wrote about what literature means to her and picked out her favorite books. (This is a regular feature in O -- just about every month a celebrity picks out their favorite books and why. It's usually fascinating.)
So one of Smith's favorite books was David Foster Wallace's "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men." Smith writes:

Wallace is not for everyone, but he is for me. My blind spot in my own work is "the evil that men do." I think I know a thing or two about the way people love, but I don't know anything about hatred, psychosis, cruelty. Or maybe I don't have the guts to admit that I do. Wallace writes brilliantly about hideous men and hideous women and the hideous culture that produces them.

Read the rest of her take on Wallace here and read about her philosophy of literature here.
Her take on that book is interesting because I've been feeling a bit guilty about my recent post on "Brief Interviews" where I wrote "the characters were horrible, and I felt like Wallace was mocking them." (Read the full post here. ) I'll be the first to admit that might be a misreading the stories. Not all writing should be about love, happiness, etc. As readers, we have to grapple with the ugly, the cruel and the unjust without insisting on black-and-white moral certitude or sentimental mawkishness. Maybe I should go back and re-read "Brief Interviews." It's certainly rich enough to merit a second read and a re-thinking.
On the other hand, if I do that, when will I ever get to Wallace's "Oblivion"? I need more time to read!

Time's Top 100 Novels

Time magazine has published a list of the best English-language novels since 1923, the year Time published its first issue. I love lists, they're fun conversation-starters -- the nay-sayers who claim lists are too reductive need to lighten up.
Time's list has interesting caveats. Because it starts in 1923, that disqualifies perennial favorite Ulysses, written by James Joyce in 1922. It only includes novels (knocking out of contention my beloved Spoon River Anthology, a volume of poetry). And it includes works written in English from all over the world, not just American novels.
Here's my quick riff on the list:

• Books I absolutely agree with: The Catcher in the Rye, A Clockwork Orange, The Grapes of Wrath, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Infinite Jest, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Sun Also Rises, To Kill a Mockingbird, Watchmen.
• Books I haven't read but really want to: All the King's Men, Death Comes for the Archbishop, At Swim-Two-Birds, Lolita, The Moviegoer, The Sound and the Fury, White Teeth
• A book that shouldn't be on the list: Possession by A.S. Byatt -- I just don't think it's that good.
• A book that seems too recently published to have made the list: Never Let Me Down by Kazuo Ishiguro -- Didn't that just come out in 2005???
• Books on the list that I have never heard of, not even in passing, not even heard of their authors: Appointment in Samarra, The Assistant, Call It Sleep, A Dance to the Music of Time, Loving, The Man who Loved Children, The Recognitions, Red Harvest, Revolutionary Road, Snow Crash, The Sportswriter. Boy do I feel ignorant now.

Lest you think the list was created after exhaustive study and massive polling, you should know that apparently Time's two book critics merely put together their lists of favorite books and then hashed out small areas of disagreement. Not that I'm criticizing that -- the great novels are art, and there are limitations to how objectively you can quantify them.
Read the whole list here. (And thanks to my friend Ryan F. for telling me about it!)

Baseball fever

I don't get much reading done in October because I'm busy watching post-season baseball. It means late night games and mornings spent devouring the sports section. To add to the excitement, our local team the Tampa Bay Devil Rays have new owners and hopes are hesitantly but joyfully higher for the 2006 season. (Read all about it here.)
Meanwhile, my spouse and I are deciding on a baseball book to read together when Spring Training starts.
Here are some of the books in contention:

• Three Nights in August, by Buzz Bissinger. A relatively new book. Bissinger had total access to St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa (a Tampa native, by the way). Read an excerpt herehere.
• Ball 4, by Jim Bouton. A library colleague heartily recommends this one; it's one of baseball's first real insider's accounts. Bouton wrote a memoir about trying to resecitate his career with the elusive knuckleball pitch during the '69 season.
• The Curious Case of Sidd Finch, by George Plimpton. It started as an April Fool's joke: Sports Illustrated "reports" on a Zen mystic with 100 mph+ pitch hiding out in the Mets' Spring Training camp in St. Petersburg, Fla. (right across the bay from Tampa). The story was a prank, but it got so much attention it was later expanded into a book. I love the original article's lead (how a newspaper story starts). Here it is:

The secret cannot be kept much longer. Questions are being asked, and sooner rather than later the New York Mets management will have to produce a statement.

Read the original magazine story here.

A note on copyright and spoonreader

Unlike most people, I find copyright fascinating. It's as old as our country and mentioned in the U.S. Constitution (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8) as one of the rights of Congress: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
For a library science class, I wrote a paper on the problem of orphan works -- what do you do when you want to preserve or copy something, but cannot locate the copyright holder to seek permission or compensate them? It's a knotty problem, hardly promoting progress. Read more about the orphan works problem here and here.
I quote from a lot of books on this blog. I believe the quotations I use are permissible as a fair use under copyright law -- I'm commenting on the work, and I don't believe my quoting of the works undermines the commercial prospects of the books about which I write. In fact, just the opposite; I hope people will be inspired by my blog to purchase them or borrow them from a library. (Read more about copyright and fair use here.)
I also make a good faith effort not to link to works that I suspect have been posted to the Internet without permission from the copyright holder.
Copyright is a funny thing: If there's not enough, people don't have much incentive to create. Too much, though, and it stifles creativity by preventing people from building on the works of others. (This is a particular problem for popular music like hip-hop and techno.) My favorite book on this topic is Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity, by Siva Vaidhyanathan. Nancy Kranich, former president of the American Library Association, says of his book (and I agree):

Siva Vaidhyanathan has done a big favor for the academic and library communities. In this book, he has spelled out in clear, understandable language what's at stake in the battles over the nation's intellectual property. The issues brought forward are critical to the future of scholarship and creativity. Librarians and academics are wise to purchase this book and add it to their 'must read' lists.

If you have any questions or concerns about copyright and this blog, feel free to contact me: spoonreader [at] gmail [dot] com.

What I'm Reading Now,

I prefer to read one book at a time. But that's the ideal -- the reality is that often I am reading several books at once. Usually this is because I have to read a certain book for book group or some other obligation, or because a book is boring me at that moment but I may be willing to come back to it later. So I'm going to start posting from time to time a list of the books I'm reading and the books I want to read next.
What I'm reading now:

• Shock Wave by James O. Born. A fast-paced Florida crime novel. Born will appear at the St. Petersburg Times Festival of Reading on Oct. 29.
• Couples by John Updike. This books reeks of 1960s overpriviledged suburban malaise -- a major theme is adultery as self-actualizing quest. The Amazon reviews are diverse and fascinating -- read 'em here. I don't like the characters, but it's hard not to wonder what these awful people will do next. A few friends who are older than I am say that was just the nature of the era. The philandering couples in this book would be about 75 today.
  
• The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage by Paul Elie. This is a fairly dense biography of four American Catholic authors writing at about the same time: Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton and Walker Percy. Elie's style is languid and thematic, well-suited for his exploration of the writers' ideas and intellectual milieu.

What I want to read next:

• "A Good Man is Hard to Find," by Flannery O'Connor. I picked this short story collection for my book group because I knew I might not read it otherwise, and it would probably be really good.
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon. This novel won the Pulitzer a few years back. Subject matter includes the Holocaust, comic books and Harry Houdini. I have high hopes for this one.
• "Oblivion" by David Foster Wallace. I love David Foster Wallace on a very visceral, non-logical level. Having said that, I found his short story collection "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" to be very sad -- the characters were horrible, and I felt like Wallace was mocking them. I don't think is really typical of him -- his book Infinite Jest is one of the kindest novels I can this of. So I have some trepidation about reading his most recent work, Oblivion. You can find a couple of (mixed) reviews of Oblivion here, here, and here.

Kunkel's Indecision

I finished an endearing first novel today, Indecision, by Benjamin Kunkel. I liked it very much. His hero, Dwight Wilmerding, is an overeducated, underemployed twenty-ish Manhattanite trying to figure out what to do with his life. The answer involves psychoanalysis from his sister, a trip to Ecuador and democratic socialism.
I love Dwight's voice -- it's complicated, ironic, sincere and funny. Sample passage:

The train pulled out of another quiet white-painted town and recovered that slack regular ratcheting sound of all trains. I was on my way to see dad, to play some golf, to sip some scotch, and then in the end, or somewhere in the middle, at an opportune moment, before it slipped past, or maybe, on the other hand, right away, the minute I saw him, first things being first, and just in order to get it over with -- anyway I was on my way to ask dad for some money. I had every intention of telling him I had lost my job, and in the context of my resulting penuriousness I would request a loan. Or ask him to take me in for a while once I got back from Ecuador. Or both things, actually. That would make the most sense from an economic point of view, at least if I could deal with the psychic cost of living with him for the first time in fourteen years, and without mom and Alice around to parry him and distribute throughout the household their various counterpointing moods. It would be interesting to see what I decided to do, always assuming I did decide, which I shouldn't necessarily do.

Kunkel reminds me somewhat of David Foster Wallace, or at least informed by some of the themes that Wallace tries to deal with in his writing -- the self-consciousness of art, the problem of nihilistic irony, and the possibility of sincere emotional connection between author and reader. For more on this topic, or if you have a passion for contemporary fiction, I strongly recommend Wallace's essay, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," from his collection of essays and journalism, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.
But more than these emotive/aesthetic types of questions, "Indecision" is very much concerned with the inequalities of global capitalism and the appropriate response to the relative abundance of upper-class America. I'm very much looking forward to more books by Benjamin Kunkel.

The End

A rainy Sunday afternoon makes me think of the inevitable: death. Here's Shakespeare's Hamlet on the topic. (The lyricism of the passage is quite comforting.)

If it be now,
'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be
now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the
readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he
leaves, what is't to leave betimes?

The full text of Hamlet is online; read it here. Shakespeare's complete works are here.