18 Blues Haiku

Combining two of my interests, haiku and the blues, just for fun (no disrespect intended). Here I mostly stay with the 5-7-5 format to create some structure (as with the 12-bar blues). All of these are taken from old blues songs; none are mine.

♪

oh, rock me baby
like my back ain't got no bone --
rock me all night long

♪

the sky is crying
see the tears roll down the street --
oh, where can she be

♪

baby please don't go
don't go down to New Orleans --
you know I love you so

♪

got my mojo working
but it just won't work on you --
don't know what to do

♪

ramblin' on my mind
I hate to leave you baby --
you treat me unkind

♪

turn your lamp down low --
you got no nerve baby
turn me from your door

♪

don't you want to go
back to old California --
sweet home, Chicago

♪

under a bad sign
down since I began to crawl --
have no luck at all

♪

I should have quit you
a long time ago, quit you --
went to Mexico

♪

down to the crossroads
fell on my knees, asked mercy
take me if you please

♪

woke up this morning
I looked around for my shoes --
mean old walking blues

♪

you gotta help me
can't do it all by myself --
I'll find someone else

♪

ain't superstitious
a black cat just crossed my trail --
I'll get put in jail

♪

up in the morning
I believe I'll dust my broom --
he can have my room

♪

can't quit you baby
got to put you down for awhile --
make me mistreat my child

♪

gonna leave running
got the key to the highway --
walking is too slow

♪

kiss before I go
'cause when I leave here this time
won't be back no more

♪

I should've quit you
then I wouldn't be here, down
on the killing floor

♪♪♪

The Hothouse by the East River by Muriel Spark (1973)

We meet a married couple in Manhattan, their children and friends, and soon wonder if one of them is insane, and if so, which one, or is it in fact all of them.

Book Review: The Hothouse by the East River is a bad dream, perhaps Muriel Spark's, perhaps ours. Not a nightmare, never so bad that one wakes up in a shaking panic trying to scream. Just constantly uncomfortable, uncertain, at times absurd or surreal, definitely mad. At least someone is, but the madness is calm, quite polite, courteous even. We quickly enter the minds of everyone, listening to them speak and think and fret, living their hellish lives, and we still don't know who, or which of them, is insane.

One is in good hands with Muriel Spark: she is always more clever than her reader, never sentimental, and always in control. Although in a novel as unbalanced as this one (I've read over a dozen of her books and this is the most disordered), the reader might reasonably (but unnecessarily) have doubts about her command of the situation. Her writing can be an acquired taste; she's like no one else.  Unlike so many of her novels, in The Hothouse by the East River religion is not obviously front and center, but instead psychiatry is a constant presence.

By the end of The Hothouse by the East River, the reader learns more, and almost enough. Still, the reader wonders if this a traditional story of long lineage, satire, metaphor, allegory, a fever dream. Perhaps a puzzle or a game of cat and mouse with her readers being the mice (as an ardent Spark fan I'm happy to be the rodent). Part of the joy of reading Muriel Spark is that she respects the reader's intelligence and assumes (right or wrong) that we're up to the challenge.  [3★]

"Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" by Thomas Pynchon (1959)

The story of a late Fifties Washington D.C. party in which cultures clash.

Story Review: "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" was Thomas Pynchon's second published work, appearing in Cornell University's formal literary journal, Epoch, in Spring of 1959. Written while still in college, for some reason he did not include the story in his short fiction collection, Slow Learner (1984). Which is a shame because it's easily as good as any piece in that company. The title comes from a line in an early speech in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure referring to the powers of life and death and of mercy. Apt and lovely title for this piece. Unlike so much of Pynchon's work "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" is written in a straightforward, quick-reading style. A story that encompasses the carousel of an "absurd, surrealist" party consisting of a fetal pig, Chianti, Kurtz, Seconal, T.S. Eliot, Peter Arno, a Bartok Concerto, and a Klee original. The sort of party in which "you might give absolution or penance, but no practical advice." A party which you want to attend, but might not stay till the end. Apparently written quickly, it's all the better for that as it exists in its natural state before Pynchon had time to gild it with myriad additional layers of his encyclopedic and many-lives-lived knowledge. Available for sale or in PDF on-line, "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" is well worth seeking out for anyone with an interest in Thomas Pynchon and an entertaining story.  [5★]

Slow Learner by Thomas Pynchon (1984)

Five early stories and an invaluable but confessional introductory essay by the Bard of Oyster Bay.

Book Review: Slow Learner is a necessary book for anyone who wants to know Thomas Pynchon. If you've read at least two of his novels and have any extant interest, you should read this as well. For die-hard fans the fun will be in searching out characters, events, scenes, and themes that reappeared in later works. For casual Pynchon readers seeing the author's maturation as a writer will be food for thought. My suggestion is to read the Introduction to Slow Learner after reading the stories. It will make ever so much more sense and will save re-reading. This will be difficult for acolytes who tend to salivate after any scrap of information they can obtain about the maestro. In the Introduction, Pynchon not only enthusiastically deprecates his early works, but also provides useful advice for beginning writers. Through his humility, Pynchon is trying to lower expectations, to discourage reading too much into work from his 20's when he was experimenting with and exploring his craft, and perhaps to assuage his own wincing and cringing when looking back. Else why release them at all? For another bit of insight into his world fans should seek out Pynchon's Introduction to the Penguin edition of his friend Richard Fariña's only novel, Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me (1966). Since there are only five stories here and this is one of the notable writers of our time, each deserves its own bit, along with year of publication.

"The Small Rain" (1959) - The simplest story here (published when Pynchon was 22), but still touching and effective. Here Pynchon aims at a big statement, but subtly and in an offhand manner befitting an enlisted man. A soldier story in the vein of Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead (1948)), or more distantly Ernest Hemingway (who comes in for a mention). His first published story and the most conventional. [3★]

"Low-lands" (1960) - Pynchon writing an allegory, a fairy tale for a modern and cynical age. Written well before the similarly titled but unrelated song by Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan (and friend of Richard Fariña), "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" (1966). [3★]

"Entropy" (1960) - The convoluted plot of the story encapsulates the concept of the title, down to the stilling of a heartbeat. Very Pynchonesque, and reminiscent (especially the dialog) of the aforementioned Richard Fariña novel. [4★]

"Under the Rose" (1961) - Reads like an outtake of V. (which it is, apparently -- see Chapter Three of that work), and includes characters from that novel. Rich, Baroque, complex, historical. I can't say that reading this story will provide the key to understanding any facet of that book. It actually doesn't seem like a short story at all. [3★]

"The Secret Integration" (1964) - Published a year after V. and two years before The Crying of Lot 49. Pynchon had decided that he knew how to write a short story. Along with "The Small Rain," the least Pynchon-like story in the bunch (though he can't help but flash moments of his shtick), and the most conventional (was published in The Saturday Evening Post, after all). This is Pynchon making social commentary and exploring the idea that children may be wiser than adults. [4★]

Slow Learner is an excellent place to begin reading Pynchon, following along in fits and starts as he finds his way. Also recommended are the more often suggested The Crying of Lot 49 and his first novel V., for those chronologically inclined. In these early stories we discover that Pynchon had already digested several encyclopedias, lived several lifetimes, and had mastered the art of looking at everything the way no one else does. Given his cybernetic store of knowledge, he makes disturbing and surprising connections. His writing is bizarre, but beautiful.  [3★]

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (2018)

A young woman in pre-9/11 Manhattan tries to sleep for most of a year.

Book Review: My Year of Rest and Relaxation tries its best to make itself unlikable, which is a clever if cynical way to make it even more likable. The main character is a privileged, entitled, disloyal, WASPy, Ivy League graduate who doesn't have to do anything and doesn't. She's alienated, misanthropic, angry, feeling connected to the world only by her building's trash chute. Moshfegh at length but offhandedly establishes her trauma, subtly detailing the scars of her upbringing and the recent deaths of those responsible. "We got along best when we were asleep." Her inability to grieve has become a wall between her and everything else. She doesn't have anything to grieve for, so she grieves by not grieving. The narrator doesn't like herself much and doesn't expect to be liked. Despite having pretty much everything we're supposed to want in life (looks, money, cool job), all is insufficient and superficial. Emblematic of that lifestyle is her best and only friend Reva, who self-conscious and self-hating engages in a constant battle of self-improvement. She lives a life of quiet desperation, but like so many stubbornly rides daily into the valley of death. Reva's concern is about what we're told life should be, what we should want, one of those people who have careers instead of jobs. This is everything our narrator doesn't want to be. She doesn't want to be one of the people in a country somnambulating through life, chasing meaningless goals. Consequently, she treats Reva horribly ("'You'll be fine,' I told Reva when she said her mother was starting a third round of chemo. 'Don't be a spaz,' I said when her mother's cancer spread to her brain."), which is how her tool of a so-called boyfriend treats her. Self-hating people find a way to accept such treatment. Unhappy with everything, she wants to live in a world of "fluff," where it all can be ignored. "I needed a way out of this -- the bathroom, the pills, the sleeplessness, the failed, stupid life." So our narrator enters My Year of Rest and Relaxation. She evolves a plan to eradicate her current life in "American" sleep. She wants to hibernate in a chemical cocktail. To undergo a drug-fueled metamorphosis in which she'll be reborn as someone who doesn't hate everyone and everything. "I knew in my heart ... that when I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person ... . My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets." The vehicle for this rebirth and the novel's comic relief is provided by the hilarious and incredible psychiatrist Dr. Tuttle, gleefully providing a level of medication that would hospitalize a racehorse and injecting fresh air and fairy dust on every page in which she appears. After our narrator's dark night of the soul, we and she come out the other side. The ending seems rushed, but her plan works. She has a newly born heart (and Moshfegh reveals her own). She's woken up, just as America awoke to what looked like a much different world after 9/11. Our narrator is now willing to connect to humanity (with charity shop Goodwill as her first step). In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Moshfegh is willing to use any trick in her bag, including Pynchonesque bad jokes, saying the unsayable, and mining dark humor and disgust for all they're worth. She goes to implausible and awkward lengths to deny the narrator a name, but I'm unsure why. She writes amazingly well, (somehow she reminds me of Bret Easton Ellis -- that's a compliment, btw), but I'm not sure that even this amazing book matches her talent. At this point we can only read Ottessa Moshfegh and marvel; someday we'll look back and be able to see how it all worked and where it all fit.  [4½★]

No Bones by Anna Burns (2001)

A Catholic girl in Northern Ireland growing up during the Troubles, from age 7 to 32. 

Book Review: No Bones is Booker Prize winner (for Milkman) Anna Burns' first novel, and similarly addresses the war zone that was Northern Ireland. Echoes of Milkman are abundant (yes, there's a milkman here, too, but everyone has names). If this novel is an only slightly distorted, many-year photograph of that brutal religious warfare, then Milkman is the unretouched negative: less clear, more stark. The novel contains an abundance of detail that can only be supplied by one who lived through those horrifying times. The story mostly follows young Amelia, living in the Catholic Ardoyne section of Belfast from 1969 when the British troops arrived to 1994 when there were stirrings of peace for the Northern Irish Troubles (a typically Irish ("it'll be grand") euphemism for a time that should have been called the Horrors). Each chapter is a terrifying stop along the way of that 25 year arc. A bit of knowledge about those extraordinary and abnormal times is necessary to fully understand No Bones, although they are expansively and painfully described. "Amelia was in blank mode. Amelia was at a funeral. She knew how to behave at funerals." Overarching all the moments and horrors are the simple lessons that insanity begets insanity and that violence begets violence: not in some trite circle, but in a magnifying and geometrically rising line, creating more horrors that beget greater horrors. The insanity of those desperate times drive the residents (especially the still-plastic children) to varying levels of fear, madness, and violence in response. In a community besieged, following on a history of 800 years of oppression, violence turns inward, murder is always imminent, British soldiers kill pet dogs, logic becomes unreasoning, rubber bullets become toys. As society deteriorates, so do families. As individuals begin to fall apart, descending into obsession and madness, people become wholly involved in the terror, viciously joining in the bloodshed, or become numbed, insulated, isolated, escaping into drink or psychosis. "The build-up to committing murder, as anyone will tell you, takes its toll on a person." Schools are no refuge, but only places of more and inescapable violence. Are the images and descriptions grotesque exaggerations devolving into dark humor, or simple reportage? As death leads to death there's no time to dwell on lost friends, there's just too many, so a moment to acknowledge and then back to a life that is anything but normal. For Amelia the guilt of the many deaths she never took time to properly grieve drives her into anorexia, madness, and an institution. "They'd all heard and forgotten about Danny Megahey ... already, he was gone." Although there are many examples of sexual violence, mental illness, and unexpected death, one of the most powerful scenes was simply Amelia describing how to get from one part of town back to Ardoyne, following a long and circuitous route so as to stay safely on Catholic streets, yet someone following the same path an hour later will die anyway. Burns' writing style reflects those Irish authors who came before her, a worthy part of the great Irish tradition, but she's wholly her own writer. No Bones seems like a first novel, however, in that Anna Burns tries to do too much: is this dark humor, is this a description of mental illness, is this a factual account of atrocities on both sides, is this reality become unbearable and distorted into grotesque fantasy. Is this a novel that reflects the complex chaos of the times by becoming complex chaos. The changing points of view are abrupt. At times it seems the descriptions of psychotic reactions will never stop. An eerie account of a shadowy time, a revealing journey for those strong enough to take it.  [3½★]