christopher cocca

I set up Google Alerts for my current reads and favorite authors. You should, too. Two things I wanted to share from today. Consider these as literary trick-or-treat treats from me to your virtual goodie bag.

Victor LaValle’s The Big Machine is a Top Ten Book of 2009 at Publishers Weekly (links to Nigel Beal’s blog). Victor LaValle read from The Big Machine at The New School a few weeks ago and was awesome, like I said. My copy of The Big Machine just came in the mail. The new Cheever biography by Blake Bailey is also on this list.

I’m reading Donald Barthleme’s Sixty Stories between Flannery O’Connor for my prose lit seminar and short story writing and novel revisions. I came across Barthleme’s syllabus at The Believer. His 81 required texts for writers.

This is very cool.

When I was a teenager, maybe 16, 17, I used to watch reruns of the Dick Cavett Show on VH1.  This was in the late middle 90’s.  George Harrison, Paul Simon, those kinds of guests.  There always seemed to be something slightly subversive about Cavett’s nerdy cool and nervous, low-key way.

Check this episode out from 1981.  John Updike and John Cheever are the guests.  What happened to this kind of television?

I saw this yesterday and forgot to comment.  I think it’s a fine move and that it is, of course, a direct response to Disney buying Marvel. (When the current Marvel-Nick deals are done, Disney’s not going to renew them, that’s for sure).  I did think it was interesting that MTVN used the word “superhero” to describe the Turtle franchise in their press release, not because I don’t think they’re in the genre (of course they are) but because Marvel and DC (that is, Disney and Time Warner) technically own that term, don’t they?

Turtles and Nick are a good match.  They have roots in the same era, just like WB and DC.  They feel like part of the same kind of thing.

We just wrapped The Stories of John Cheever in my prose lit seminar.  Next week we start discussing Flannery O’Conn0r.

Some thoughts, not about Cheever, per se, but inspired by some of the discussions, follow:

I’ve been wrestling with a question about whether or not it’s true that writers with WASP backgrounds have been viewed as the default generic white voice in American letters. From an immigrant perspective (I know we’re all immigrants), there are obviously strong Jewish, Irish, and Hispanic literary traditions in the United States.  I’m not Hispanic or Jewish, and the half of my family that isn’t WASP is half Pennsylvania Dutch and half recently-arrived Italian. Ours are the suburbs as in “between the blighted urban center (Allentown, Reading, whatever) and the farming townships,” not as in, say, Ossining.  Ours is a middle middle class, a working middle class.  Our ancestors are more likely the cooks and nannies of the Cheever stories than, say, his central rich-for-my-blood-but-never-rich-enough characters.  We do not boat, at least not after Ellis Island, and “Summer” isn’t a verb, it’s a kind of bologna.

John Updike is the only genuinely famous writer of Pennsylvania Dutch/German heritage (besides Elsie Sangmeister) I can think of.   And who are the great Italian-Americans of literary fiction?  There is Don DeLillo, of course, but does his work have about it an Italianess in the same way that Cheever’s exudes WASPness?

Is there a fiction of people like me?  Generically white, sure, but with Italian or Polish or Slovak or whatever last names, raised in odd spaces between township and town, suburb and farmland, half of our family here since before the Hessians, the other half since 1910, with grandparents calling us loving sweet names in languages we can only tell dirty jokes in?  Did you know that there are Pennsylvania Dutch cities?  That there are Italians in Cetronia, PA, and that even though I know it’s spelled riccotta I say “rhig-ought”?

There are many old worlds folding in on the new.  My eyes are Welsh-set.  My beard is Scottish.  My hair is Swedish.  My stature Italian. My son’s sames are Italian, Greek, and Hebrew, but he’s also part Native American.  Updike once said that rock stars come from suburban basements, but why not folded-over writers with composite identities?  We Italians have sewn oats out here with the Dutch, and we Dutch with Italians, we miscelleny with each other, America.  There are stories in our little suburbs, our working-middle class, our muddled traditions and hyphen-names beyond the port and river cities, out here in the state-road hinterlands and hill towns.

Of course this idea isn’t new.  But suburbs as melting pot strikes me as newer.  And I don’t mean by any of this an advocacy of some sick blood-nationalism.  I just mean to say that there are any number of stories to write from our families and circumstances of origin, and there are still many for whom such circumstances have been shaped by what Saul Bellow calls the old system even as the new system is continually reset and recombinated, and that whatever our systems may be, we should get about the business of sharing them.  My hunch is that we owe it more to each other, that is, to the people who are different composites, who have different traditions, than we do to our own clans, hyphens and all.  It’s not promulgation but expression and history seeking understanding, to be known, sure, but really, hopefully, at its best, also to know.  How can I expect you to know about the boomba at the Leather Corner Post Inn if I don’t ever write about it?  Or the way to say “go to Naples” in San Marchesi, or that there’s even such a thing as San Marchesi outside San Marco Dei Cavoti, Benevento, Italia, or that it doesn’t really mean go to Naples?  But if I tell you these things and you tell me yours, then aren’t we paisan?  I might be able to know you without knowing your family or your departed, but can I know you without your stories?  And anyway, what about those cosmic and terrestial forces that shaped a long progression of people on their way to you, to me, to us?  Willkommen.

I am unfortunately missing workshop tonight with soar throat, congestion, fatigue (it took me two tries to spell each of those, so let’s add lightheadedness) etc.

Things I’ve been enjoying mid-sickness:

There is No Such Thing as Half by Joanna Brooks.  How about some of those images?  Let the record show that I was blogging about Cold War suburbs (I know I probably didn’t make the term up either) before I ever read Joanna’s bio at the bottom of this piece.

Sometimes by James.

Cheap Jack’s.  I can’t be in the city today, so I finally got around to looking up a place that my best friend and I found when we college-visited around the Village a million years ago (or yesterday.  It’s foggy).  This link lands on the 60’s page because of that picture of Jane Fonda.  I mean, come on.  Just.  Yeah. (Although I love her most in Barefoot In The Park.)

And, of course, Vitamin C tabs, protien water, bananas, and chicken soup.

“This has remained with me: that there is no God of received ideas, but there is a God of writing, and this God is against received ideas, especially received ideas about God, and longs for meaning beyond the received idea of details in literature, and inspires me to break open the prison, to liberate the universal heart.”  – David Plante.  Context here.

From the Allentown Chen Artists group:

Holiday Haiku Contest Seeking Poets, Writers…

This event is being coordinated by poet Marilyn Hazelton in time for the Dec. 3 Allentown Tree Lighting Ceremony. Chen Artists are invited to contribute poems. Here are the details:

The 2009 Allentown Holiday Haiku Competition!!

Elementary, middle and high school students, and adults are invited to enter the Allentown Holiday Haiku Contest!

Fifty haiku writers will receive a “Spirit of the Season Award. Their haiku will be displayed in store and restaurant windows along Hamilton Street in Center City Allentown. Five writers will be chosen to read their haiku at the Allentown Holiday Tree Lighting Ceremony on Thursday, December 3.

More info here: http://chenarts.blogspot.com/2009/10/holiday-haiku-conest-seeking-poets.html

You’ll see that the submissions aren’t required to follow the line-by-line syllable counts of classic haiku.  Entire three-line pieces are to be no more than 17 sllyables.  I’ve blogged before about  Allen Ginsberg’s American Sentences, another sort of variation on the classic haiku.

I should really like “The Relator” by Pete Yorn and Scarlett Johansson. (Stream it from their website, here). I love all the Lee Hazlewood/Nancy Sinatra stuff. I love what Loretta Lynn does with Jack White. This is in that tradition, I guess, but I think it pushes all those buttons too self-consciously. It just seems like a work. Also, has Pete Yorn always sounded like Ryan Adams? He doesn’t on that old awesome Boss cover.

Dawes is from out of nowhere, and I really dig the hook to “Love is All I Am.” Check them out here: myspace.com/dawestheband.

Off the top of my head:

Davey Lopes, Phils first base coach, a former Dodger.
Mariano Duncan, Dodgers first base coach, a former Phil.
Larry Bowa, Dodgers third base coach, former Phillies great and manager.

Randy Wolf, Dodgers pitcher, a former Phil.
Jim Thome, Dodgers PH, a former Phil. Also a former Indian, along with Dodger Manny Ramirez and former Indians hitting coach, Phils skipper Uncle Charlie Manuel. Side note: I was watching the 1995 ALCS on MLB Network the other night. Manny and Thome looked (were) so young.

Pedro Martinez, Phils pitcher, former teammates with Manny on the BoSox and a former Dodger (rookie season).
Chan Ho Park, Phils pitcher, former Dodger.

There have to be more relationships. Who am I forgetting?