Bookstorm

Here's a Sunday-morning round-up for you ...

• Ron Howard wants Javier Bardem to play the Gunslinger in the television adaptation of Stephen King's The Dark Tower. (I think Bardem's a pretty inspired choice to play Roland Deschain.)
• Children reenact Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time in ninety seconds.
• I'm hoping to get around to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick later this year. Until then, I'll man up with Jay Parini's account of Melville's bromance with Nathaniel Hawthorne.
• I still want to read Adam Levin's The Instructions.
• I read Mario Puzo's The Godfather as a teenager, but the rest of this Mafia reading list sounds excellent.

I think one of the reasons I love Beowulf is because I managed to escape it in high school. (I finally read Seamus Heaney's translation a few years ago. I couldn't finish watching that terrible computer-animated movie, though.) Now The Believer, in a review of R. D. Fulk's The Beowulf Manuscript, asks a "central question": "What happens when an epic, seemingly stand-alone poem returns to its original digs?"

Any high-schooler who's battled his way through Beowulf could tell you that it's long on gore--zany, cartoon-type gore, with a constant lopping off of heads, limbs, you name it. There's a dragon, and a monster named Grendel with a monster for a mother who's a right bitch. It's a wonder Rob Zombie hasn't splattered out some filmic homage. But few readers of Beowulf seem to be aware that it's an excised text, an excerpt from a multiauthor volume that functions as a coherent single work, despite missing passages.

The entire review, which is pretty short, is worth reading. I don't want to read Fulk's book, for reasons unrelated to the review. I'll just stick with my Heaney translation.

"Reading WikiLeaks as literature": sorry, Bookforum, but I beat you to the punch.

I've been reading William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, which, despite being extremely wordy, is a pretty fascinating book. It's tempting to try finding James's own religious views here, but The Varieties of Religious Experience is devoid of any personal opinions. Instead, James uses a variety of first-person accounts to examine the psychology of religion and to further his argument that "[e]very religious phenomenon has its history and its derivation from natural antecedents." James, giving his lectures to a roomful of academics, concedes that religious experience may not be worthy of such thorough examination, but the subtitle--A Study in Human Nature--underscores how universal the book really is, and that religious experience, no matter how ridiculous, is worth looking at, especially by science.

Reading The Varieties of Religious Experience, one has to keep in mind that James isn't choosing sides or passing judgment, and that the book isn't about religion itself, but religious experience. James is very objective here; he doesn't ask you to agree or disagree. He presents his anecdotes with no comment, and only asks us to consider them in the context of his inquiry. By carefully stripping religion of its supernatural trappings and giving it back to the laity, James elevates it to the level of common human experience. You may not have experienced religion psychologically, but that doesn't mean James's book is any less palatable.

It's the last day of my vacation, so here's a round-up ...

• Has literary fiction finally come to terms with the Internet?
• Edgar Allan Pooh.
• You may need to set aside a block of time for this, but be sure to check out Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown.
• "Can a novelist write philosophically?": the short answer is yes. This article reminds me of Albert Camus, who believed that the novel was philosophy in images. (And let's not get started on Ayn Rand.)

I'm a little more than halfway through Tom McCarthy's C. And now I learn that, in addition to losing the Man Booker Prize (which I don't care about anyway), it didn't even make the 2011 Tournament of Books shortlist. (That's forgivable, I suppose, since Remainder played in the tournament a few years ago.)

But no matter: C is a very good book. It has a strange, dreamlike quality that stems more from the experience than from anything in the story or writing. I won't say whether it's better than Remainder, since the two books are two completely different animals.

In any case, go and read C. It's well worth your time.

So science--particularly modern physics--really is the devil's work.

Given his devotion to empirical fact, it seems odd to think that Galileo's most important ideas might have their roots not in the real world, but in a fictional one. But that's the argument that Mount Holyoke College physics professor Mark Peterson has been developing for the past several years: specifically, that one of Galileo's crucial contributions to physics came from measuring the hell of Dante's Inferno. Or rather, from disproving its measurements.

[ ... ]

Ever since its 1314 publication, scholars had toiled to map the physical features of Dante's Inferno--the blasted valleys and caverns, the roiling rivers of fire. What Galileo said, put simply, is that many commonly accepted dimensions did not stand up to mathematical scrutiny. Using complex geometrical analysis, he attacked a leading scholar's version of the Inferno's structure, pointing out that his description of the infernal architecture--such as the massive cylinders descending to the center of the Earth--would, in real life, collapse under their own weight. Later, Galileo realized the leading rival theory was wrong, too, and that even the greatest scholars of the time simply didn't understand how real-world structures worked.

This round-up might be a little outdated ...

• The copyright on F. Scott Fitzgerald's work ended on January first.
• Salon takes a look at the watering holes that inspired literary legends like J. R. R. Tolkien and Franz Kafka.
• Also at Salon, Laura Miller considers the implications of Jared Lee Loughner's favorite books. (See also.)
• For today's long read, here's Jennifer Howard on the afterlife of David Foster Wallace.
• "So I Shot Him," an unpublished story by Dashiell Hammett, will be published next month. (I'm still working my through Hammett's five novels.)
• And finally, here's something that'll make you feel old.

New York has been in the literary news lately: first, Stefan Kanfer takes a look at New York's "long literary line," which includes some of my least favorite authors, like John Steinbeck, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer. Then Sam Anderson makes his case for Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence being the greatest New York novel of all time. I haven't read The Age of Innocence--and I don't really want to--so I can't agree or disagree with Anderson. But I'm coming off Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which was a great fine New York novel, and the perfect dark horse for Anderson's list.

New York be damned: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is one of the best books I've ever read, period. There isn't much to be said that hasn't been said in the ten years since its release. Just read it if you haven't, and prepare to be blown away.

Happy deathday, Mr. Joyce.

On this day in 1941, James Joyce died in Zurich at the age of fifty-eight from peritonitis brought on by a perforated ulcer. Even without the dislocation of WWII, Joyce's last years were beset with difficulties--the schizophrenia of his daughter, his son's floundering career and broken marriage, his eyesight, ongoing battles over Ulysses and new worries about Finnegans Wake. "Though not so blind as Homer, and not so exiled as Dante," writes biographer Richard Ellmann, "he had reached his life's nadir."

One of these days, and with the help of Joseph Campbell, I'm going to get through Finnegans Wake. For the time being, I'm reading Tom McCarthy's C.