male writer Archives -

CATAPULT: HARRY AND I BUILD A SEIGE WEAPON by Jim Paul

Here is a book about a two guys who decided to build a medieval catapult. It is a story about many things, only one of them being catapults. But let’s start with them. Apparently when the catapult was first invented (by Archimedes!) it was a major shift in warfare. Fortified cities, for centuries the height of defense, were suddenly useless. At first, people though it must be gods sending bolts from heaven, because they could not imagine humans moving objects so large. One Roman commander is said to have cried “Oh Hercules! Human martial valor is of no use anymore.” This guy needs to get a load of the atom bomb.

Side bar, I also learnt that there are iron tools from 4000BC, about 2500 year before humans invented iron. GET THIS – It’s because early people learnt to carve iron out of meteorites! One community in Greenland used to pilgrimage annually to one they called ‘the mother.’

It’s not all about medieval weaponry. It’s also, probably more, about male friendship. It’s sort of charming the bloke-y way they build this catapult. And it’s kind of disturbing how amazed they are that they are managing to have a functional platonic relationship. Truly, men are lonely.

CATAPULT was first published thirty years ago; I have read it in re-issue. This has added another layer, because this means they are trying to build this catapult before the internet. I was alive before the internet, and I guess even I have forgotten what it was like. They go to the library to look at old pictures of catapults. They draw the catapult on paper. They look in the YELLOW PAGES for suppliers. They ask their friends for ideas. It’s just incredible how slow and how human the whole process is.

CALEDONIAN ROAD by Andrew O’Hagan

I liked the epigraph of this book, from RL Stevenson: “After a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through.”

I also liked the first sentence: “Tall and sharp at fifty-two, Campbell Flynn was a tinderbox in a Savile Row suit, a man who believed his childhood was so far behind him that all its threats had vanished.”

It sort of went dowhill after that, though I did managed about 400 pages. The idea of the book is cool, being a sort of state-of-the-nation, if the nation was North London. The main character is an author who married into the upper classes, though not unfortunately into money, who develops an unlikely friendship with a half-Ethopian student. And the word ‘unlikely’ here is kind of key. I liked the effort to show all London, from top to bottom, but I found half the characters unlikely (e.g., a poor student from an immigrant background goes to a cocktail bar ?!? has the author never been poor?), and the politics rather trite and poorly thought through. I guess the author is trying to say something about inequality, which is nice of him, but let’s do some research. For example, a news report is quoted as saying that ‘migrant children are doing worse than any other group in the UK,’ which is just factually untrue. I think it’s pretty well proven that the academic success of immigrants is why London has the beset school results in the country. ANYWAY.

MARTYR by Kaveh Akbar

Reviewers loved this book, calling it a ‘dazzling debut.’ I call it annoying. I feel bad to say it, because it is so hard to get published, and I don’t doubt it has many merits, but it just wasn’t for me. I pushed on for about 200 pages but then I just had to bail.

It’s about a man in Indiana who is loosely aspirational in academia but is not getting anywhere because he is drinking too much. He is toying -i n an annoying, apathetic way – with writing a book on martyrdom, because he wants his eventual death to ‘mean something.’ Leaving aside this is a stupid goal right off the bat, it is all wrapped up with the fact that he was born in Iran. He has never lived in Iran, mind you, but still much of the book is given over to his various thoughts about his ‘heritage,’ intercut with descriptions of the experience of his immediate family in Iran. Usually if you read a book about a country by someone from that country, it increases your understanding of it; this was just the reverse. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book by someone ‘from’ a country that actually went ahead and exoticized that country. Perhaps it’s because that ‘from,’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Let me stop typing though, this post is already bad-tempered enough, which is probably not very fair.

FAT CITY by Leonard Gardner

I read this book because it was recommended by Denis Johnson, whose TRAIN DREAMS I so admired. It’s about small-time boxers, trying to ‘make it’ in the ring in the 1940s. I can’t deny it’s extraordinarily well-written. Characters are evoked in just a couple of lines of dialogue and the arc of boxing failure is heart-breaking. What I didn’t like about it though was exactly that: it was heart-breaking. There was not a single character who was not very obviously doomed to disappointment. It wasn’t just the boxers (who were going to fail + have brain injuries) but also their promoters, and their variously pregnant or alcoholic girlfriends, and also random people they met in bars. I mean: okay? I am not sure what I am supposed to get from this? It was just dreadful and sad.

I DELIVER PARCELS IN BEIJING by Hu Anyan

I am always surprised there a so few books about working life, given that by some measures it is the majority of many peoples’ lives. But here is one. And work is definitely the majority of this guy’s life. It’s a memoir of him trying to find a way to make a living at the bottom end of the economy in China. He has done many roles: not just parcels, but nightshift in a sort center, selling bubble tea and bikes, etc.

He doesn’t complain, but he does drop some horrifying facts, in an almost off-hand way. E.g.: he has to deliver a parcel every 4 minutes to cover his expenses; he only gets the Spring Festival off (I don’t know what the Spring Festival is, but it doesn’t sound long); and in one mall job he had for two years he only saw daylight for 15 mins a day.

It’s unclear to me if he actually thinks this is bad, or if he just thinks it is what it is. Maybe both. One thing I found interesting, and I remember from when I was a new immigrant, is how he knows the price of everything, and feels telling you about it is important information. In this day of nepo-babies, it’s incredibly refreshing to read a book where you are never unaware of what his rent is at any time. And I get it: I guess I’ve never thought about it before, but the amount of the rent is probably the single most defining piece of information about what your life will be like. In his case, it means he has to work his ass off.

I loved this little part:

“I would while away the remaining hours at the Jingtong Roosevelt Plaza, to take advantage of the air conditioning. I liked to sit in the employee dining area, behind the Acasia Food Court on the basement floor, where delivery drivers waited to pick up order and take breaks. The mall stacked spare tables and chairs there, as it was a dead end only dimly lit with what little daylight filtered in through the south-facing wall. After being under the glaring lights of the shopping area, entering that space was like stepping backstage, with the curtains drawn. The time I spent back there was very meaningful to me. I will always remember it and how I felt then.”

His parents can’t help him financially, but more than that they also can’t help him with advice. He tells us they have spent all their lives in the managed economy, so how he should survive ‘capitalism’ is something they can’t help him with. He does not (of course) make any commentary on what life was like under communism but still there are some interesting pieces. Let’s end with this part, where we can ponder our own ‘freedom’:

“Consumerism is the new ideology, a different kind of lifelong imprisonment, which only gives the appearance of freedom. Compared with restricting you from doing everything you want, it is certainly the more stable and lasting way to maintain social order – instilling in you a sense of what you need and providing the means to achieve it. But this is still a form of enslavement, one in which the individual’s main route to self-realization remains through work. ”

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN by Thomas Mann

I thought I would give myself the challenge of this 700pg nineteenth century novel. Well, challenge failed. I got about 250pgs in before I decided to bail. There was just way too much undirected babbling about some seriously bullsh*t theories and I just couldn’t handle it. This sort of thing is fun at a party when you are drunk and you are doing the babbling but listening to someone else: no thank you.

I’m disappointed, because I enjoyed his other book, BUDDENBROOKS. It was his first, and seethes with the kind of rage at the bourgeois you only have when you are extremely bourgeois. I read it by the pool in Jordan, and maybe that was what I needed for this book too – long uninterrupted stretches of time where I could get into whatever nonsense everyone wants to talk about ‘art’ or whatever. But I didn’t have that kind of time.

One thing I did enjoy was being reminded of the horrors of TB. It takes place in a TB sanitorium, when they had no treatment other than ‘better air’. I just want to say how EXTREMELY PRO-VAX I am.

STOP TIME by Frank Conroy

Do I really need another coming of age story from an American man? Apparently so. I’ve enjoyed this one. Mostly, it reminded me of how boring childhood used to be. I know people talk about it a lot, but this memoir really brought back to me what it was like before phones and television. God, we were bored. And I had my cousins and a library card, so I was not even as bored as this guy, who had neglectful parents and a shack in Florida.

I am always awed/frightened by the idea of memoir. Imagine sitting down and actually trying to recall your childhood? It feels frighteningly impossible and also frighteningly possible. This deep in some Pandora box territory. I also really don’t like the idea of fixing the past into my specific narrative about it. I think the past does best when it is constantly changing, just like the future. That said, please enjoy this baller analysis of his step dad:

“Because for all his knocking around his view of the world was incredibly naïve. He believed important jobs were handed out in nightclubs by impulsive millionaires and that he was the sort of man they might be given to. Spoiled all his life . . . he deeply believed that the good things in life were given to one. Food, clothing, and the bare necessities had to be earned, but after that it was a question of being in the right place at the right time, or knowing the right people or simply being lucky. It never occurred to Jean to work hard anything except menial labour. He was always above his work, the secret possessor of an inner wealth untouched by the world – his image of himself.”

I came to this book from seeing that David Foster Wallace said it was the book that made him want to be a writer. I just love author’s recommendations of other authors. It’s sad this was only available in second-hand.

TRAIN DREAMS by Denis Johnson

Well this is an almost depressingly fantastic novella. It’s an eerie and beautiful story about a railway worker in Idaho in the early twentieth century.

It’s kind of frustrating for anyone to be this amazing as a writer. I looked him up and I see that he was widely acknowledged as the ‘big talent’ of his generation of Iowa’s Writers Workshop. I note I must be a bad person because I was almost relieved (!?!) to see he became a drug addict. He still went on to write more though, and apparently this is not even his best book! That is apparently something called JESUS SON. I haven’t ordered it yet because I almost dread finding out how good it is.

A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN by David Foster Wallace

I guess other people have noticed that David Foster Wallace is a good writer, but damn. I don’t even especially like essay collections, and still: damn. To be fair, I did skip a couple of the essays that seemed boring, but the ones I read were wonderful, especially the one about his time on a cruise ship.

Some of his descriptions are so perfect I think of them often. As for example a wide sky with “one or two clouds always in the distance, as if for scale,” and then later in the day the clouds “begin very slowly interacting like jigsaw pieces, and by evening the puzzle will be solved and the sky will be the colour of old dimes.” Or Montreal’s “EKG skyline.” Or when he could not see a powerpoint presentation because the room he was in was “so abundantly fenestrated.”

When are descriptions ever so interesting!?! This cruise essay is chock a block with ideas. Cruises he says “appeal mostly to older people. I don’t mean decrepitly old, but I mean like age-50+ people, for who their own mortality is something more than an abstraction.” As someone nearly 50+, I can only say: ouch.

And on the ship itself:

“It’s not an accident they’re all so white and clean, for they’re clearly meant to represent the Calvinist triumph of capital and industry over the primal decay-action of the sea”

It’s also very funny. Try:

“Since so many of my shipmates shout, I make it a point of special pride to speak extra-quietly to crewmen whose English is poor”

I had a vague memory that he killed himself, and Wikipedia tells it was even before he had a chance to get to that 50+. I couldn’t tell you why, but as well as being clever and funny and beautifully written this essay was just overwhelmingly sad.

THE REST OF OUR LIVES by Ben Markovitz

This book was shortlisted for the Booker, which made me hesitant. Typically the Booker indicates a book I will hate. But I decided to give it a go, because I loved the pitch: a man goes to drop his daughter off at college, and then just keeps driving.

It’s turns out to be a book about how weirdly free you are in the second half of your life; probably free-er than you were when you were young, and were burdened by having to make money and be a success and get married and oh god I feel stressed just thinking about it.

There was tons of stuff I really liked about this book. Here’s the daughter, arriving in her college town for her first day:

The city she had visited once before was about to become a permanent four-year landmark in her life story, and in the face of that fact you’re kind of helplessly the person you were beforehand.

And here is the dad, meeting a friend who he hasn’t seen in years:

If I looked hard I could see, under his old face, the shape of someone more elderly starting to push through

And here was one that made me really laugh, about what happened to be on the TV:

. . . Friends seemed to be on back to back. It’s like the weather these days, always going on in the background.

I’m sorry to tell you that he does actually escape SPOILER ALERT because he gets weird chest pains and it turns out he has a heart issue so his wife flies out to get him. And then the book abruptly ends. I’m not sure what that is supposed to mean, but it’s been haunting me.