Meaningful Audacity

Literary & Arts Magazine

Posts by Samuel Carlisle

Deep, Deep Books: Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt

January 16th, 2003

I bought this book for two dollars along with a large bag of other unused titles that a university library was discarding. These Signet Classics paperbacks would normally only sell for five dollars new, anyway. They seem like throw-aways to most people, but they’re much more likely to have something significant inside them than most other books. Signets have a great feel to them. They’ve got those thick, slightly recycled looking pages – “whole wheat pages”, if you will – with faded type and an ancient, musty library scent to them (even when they’re new). The covers always have some cozy old painting – Grandma Moses, Winslow Homer, or, in this book’s case, Edward Hopper. These are some of the covers I’ve learned to…

Deep, Deep Books: Frederich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner

January 16th, 2003

I have six of Nietzsche’s books on my shelves, every single one decked out in a pitch black cover. When I first came across that thick name (“Nietzsche”) with those at first un-pronounce-able five consonants in a row, I thought such a dark figure must somehow stand for NIHILISM or perhaps stand for DEATH, whatever that meant. Within philosophy, literature or any studies related to the history of thought, you see Nietzsche’s name referenced everywhere — referenced, in fact, far more than he’s actually quoted or studied. You see him mentioned in Nazi history (though that intellectual association has been refuted in the last half century) or read how he spent the last ten years of his life in an insane asylum, completely unrecognizable,…

Deep, Deep Books: Louis Ferdinand Céline’s Death on the Installment Plan

January 16th, 2003

I absolutely adore this book cover. It has such a beautifully despondent, very dark image of a lost looking man’s face on it, all done in the most archaic, most indistinct manner. The title is a little wit on buying on margin and the over blown credit systems in practice at the time the book was written (the 1930′s), just after making purchases in installment payments came into existence and, due to abuse, crashed the stock market. But just that mention of “DEATH” with its foreboding cover gives it this artistic pretension that I can’t help but love — like a portrait of a figure lying all sprawled out in a sewer with their wrists cut and eyes wide open like a zombie clutching…

Deep, Deep Books: Norman Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon

January 16th, 2003

The central thesis to Mailer’s book is that the “cold, sexless” way with which the U.S. Government and NASA approached the 1969 moon landing took all the heroics out of the endeavor and only made our world proportionately that much smaller. It’s a beautifully written, densely thick book (414 tightly packed pages in my copy) with a poignant, distinct idea at its core. Almost all other commentary on the Apollo Space program focused either on the Life Magazine angle – “man’s greatest achievement” or human interest articles on the astronauts’ wives – or else criticized that the $28 billion dollar cost of the program (in 1960′s currency) was far too extravagant given our nation’s current domestic short coming. Mailer narrates the book from the…

Deep, Deep Books: Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death

January 16th, 2003

The heaviness in this book is simply breath taking. That leaden, wrought-iron quality of such formidable all-capital letters spelling “LIFE AGAINST DEATH” is out of this world. Brown’s scope (“THE PSYCHOANALYTICAL MEANING OF HISTORY”) is so comprehensive, so eternal, so irrefutable. Its first chapter, “The Disease Called Man,” is such a beautifully smug condemnation of, well, the whole lot of us. The rest of the chapter titles maintain that same deepness: VII Instinctual Dualism and Instinctual Dialectics VIII Death, Time, and Eternity X The Ambiguities of Sublimation Sincerely, Life Against Death is a very intelligent, very novel study of psychoanalysis and sociology; and, if your sensibilities are so inclined, it also has that beautifully heavy-literary aesthetic to it. There are dense references to Martin…

Donald Lipscomb’s Into this Straight World: An Imagined Novel Receives an Imagined Review

July 1st, 2002

In Donald Lipscomb’s fantastically daring first novel, a young, hip, aspiring writer, also named Donald Lipscomb, infiltrates the world of the “straights” by doing the “day job thing” just long enough to gather material for his audacious novel. He plans to eventually expose the business world as the “homogenized, materialistic, conformist lie that it really is”.