A New Start
It's well past time to do a proper entry on this site. The reason for the long break has nothing to do with the usual fact that I have nothing to write about. No, in fact, I have much to address. I moved from one side of Pittsburgh to the other. The New York Times named Beloved the best work of fiction from the past twenty-five years. My reactions to Philip Roth's new novel Everyman. I have all kinds of stuff to write about. Now, I just need to get it down on the page. So, in the interest of time, I'll devote this post to a shotgun like summary of the topics above.

First, the move. I moved during the middle of May from the rowdy South Side to the much quieter confines of Friendship. The difference is striking in many regards. First, I have a yard surrounding my building for the first time in three years. And this yard is composed of grass, unlike my other place which consisted of concrete. I never thought I'd be so enamored by trees and grass, but when you don't have them on your property for such an extended period, the change is dramatic beyond belief. Also, I have a porch! Yes, a real porch that I may sit on during the summer months ahead. Take that South Side and your measly stoops. All this to say that I really like where I am now. There are aspects of the South Side that I miss, but I think there are an equal amount of negatives that I don't give a damn about not experiencing on a daily basis that more than outweigh the positives.

So Beloved is the best work of fiction from the past twenty-five years. I can't argue since I haven't read the book yet. Oh, it's sitting on my book shelf at home along with the numerous other books that I haven't tackled yet. I'll read it someday, I hope. The list itself is pretty standard considering what's out there. There's a lot of Roth, some DeLillo, Updike, McCarthy, and a slathering of other writers. All in all it's a pretty solid list. The biggest omission, though, seems to be the lack of contemporary writers from the last twenty-five years. No David Foster Wallace. No Rick Moody. No Michael Chabon. It's amazing that these three alone, who have produced some pretty impressive efforts, were totally absent from the list. Maybe twenty-five years from now they'll make the list.

As for Roth, who is my favorite writer along with Thomas Pynchon, his latest novella, Everyman is pretty slim in size but pretty powerful in content. For the most part, I find that his fiction is nearly flawless, but I feel that sometimes he sacrifices the sustained flow of a narrative for the sake of a few crass sex scenes between an older man and a much younger woman. Anyone who is familiar with Roth's work knows that this is nothing new. It's his obsession, to say the least, that the power of male sexual prowess is somehow entwined with the desire to live. The decline of this ability is almost inevitably preceded by the death of the subject. I guess my world experience is much more limited than some others, but I've always found it almost unbelievable that there are these numerous older men who posses this omnipotent sway over younger women. It's just a plot device that I find stale in his work, and it, to me, detracts from the larger narrative that is portraying a decline in both the narrator's body and his familial relations.

Well, that's a start.