Is It Possible to Be a Groupie for a Book?

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

First, the August issue of Marie Claire is going to bite it this afternoon. I can't even stand it anymore. And the Age Issue of Vogue is in trouble, too. Special thanks to nayrb5 and lildove42 for their input.

Second, the parking situation at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro is unbearable. I can't be held responsible for what I might do if I have to park three miles away from campus again.

Third, the Whatever Edition of "Clueless" will be released on August 30. Don't you see? Dreams really do come true.

Fourth, Rasputina is about to be on tour. They will be in Carrboro and Charlotte in one month. New Yorkers, they will be playing the Bowery Ballroom on Halloween. Buy your tickets now. No, right now. Seriously, open a new window, take out your credit card, and get with the purchasing.

Stephanie is a good friend. I once told her I wanted to wage open war on poetry, and she responded by sending me books of verse, chapbooks, several at a time. She included David Markson's Reader's Block in the box with Helen in Egypt and Friendship with Things.

So. Reader's Block is not a book of poetry. In fact, it claims to be a novel. A novel, if the writer of the backside blurb is to be believed, "with an almost unbearable emotional impact" and a "shattering" conclusion.

Yeah, I scoffed at that description, too. Then I started reading.

Let's be honest. There's no story there; at least, not one I can easily articulate. Reader is attempting to craft the story of Protagonist. However, Reader disrupts his narrative with fragments of details about the lives of famous poets, artists, and writers. The sentences line up on the page, disjointed, disconnected from each other. The text read like a long list of facts, some seeming more relevant than others.

And I couldn't put it down. I read into the night, into the early morning. I tried to figure out the cast of characters and how Reader positions himself in relation to all these historical figures. Who is Reader? Does it even matter? What is this refrain: "X was an anti-Semite"? How does reading affect writing? What is Reader's relationship to his sketchy character, Protagonist?

The Reader gorges himself on factoids about death and war. But then he recalls stuff like Alexander Pope's actual height or what Barnett Newman had to say about sculpture. (It is "what you bump into when back up to look at a painting." Oh, snap!) I tried reading it aloud, but the Greek, Roman, Russian names twisted my tongue. Even though I'd never heard of many of these authors and artists, they mattered, even if Reader only let me know them for a sentence.

The point? Oh, this novel has a point. The conclusion did not "shatter" me, and this realization was not unbearable. Stephanie and I agree Reader allows autobiography and his scrutiny of author's lives to distract him from his ability to tell a story. The magic of a great work is that it eclipses the minor accomplishes and tragedies of the person who created it. The suicides and disappointments and sex lives of artists occur as randomly as the arrangement of headstones in a graveyard.

Wow. I've started a new book, a novel that actually looks and feels like a novel, but the questions surrounding Reader's Block are still haunting me.

So you know what I have to do. I have to make t-shirts and follow this book on tour. I have to scream during its guitar solo. This book and I, we have something real going on.