After you read this issue of The Angler, feel free to leave a comment here if you have any thoughts you’d like to share.

While reading the last section of W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants I realized that the text was causing me to remember scenes from my past. On page 223 there’s a photograph of an unkempt cemetery, a vine covered gravestone standing erect. This reminded me of the cemeteries I had visited on my recent trip to Oklahoma. The cemetery at Isabella wasn’t as wild was the one in Sebald’s book, but the grass needed mowing. More than once I had to pull weeds and tall grass from around the grave markers so that I could take photos.

Sebald mentions at one point about going to a museum to see a particular painting and then finding that the painting he’s looking for has been moved to a different part of the museum, a wing with poor lighting that doesn’t do the painting justice. And I remembered a trip I took with my family to London and my wife was intent on going to the Victoria and Albert Museum to seem a collection of historic playing cards. We wandered the museum for the whole afternoon and never found the playing cards. The clerk even insisted that no such exhibited even existed. Then in some dark corner of the museum we encountered an old docent whom we asked about the historic playing card exhibit and he knew what we were asking about. “Yes, it was here, but last year it was put away because of renovations to this part of the museum, but they haven’t been put back out yet.”

I heard Karl Ove Knausgaard (Knausgård) read from and talk about his sprawling nombrilist epic on the Guardian Books podcast. He said that when he reached the age of 40 he felt like he could write about his father. He tried first writing a novel, but it didn’t feel right until he started using real names instead of made up names. Only when he started telling the truth did the words start to flow.

Writing is easy, you just have to sit at a typewriter and open a vein. Red Smith’s words seem to describe well the writing process that Knausgård used to write his six volume “true novel” Min Kamp, or My Struggles, the first volume of which is now translated into English by Don Bartlett and published by Archipelago Books.

Knausgaard has been hailed as the Norwegian Proust. I’ve not read My Struggles yet (my copy is in the post), but I’m skeptical of the comparison already. Writing a multi-volume memoir doesn’t automatically make you a Proust. From the impression that Knausgård gave in the Guardian interview, he wrote his 3,500 page novel quickly and it wasn’t rewritten or heavily edited. Perhaps this is part of the story given to the public as part of the media sensation. Knausgård and his confession have propelled him into the lime light. But at a cost. He’s earned the anger of family members. And by telling all, he’s the nakedest man in Norway. At least people are looking and he’s become a rich man for his dance (labors).

Michael Faber wasn’t so impressed with Knausgård’s prose.

In between, in a Proustian spirit of digression, there are philosophical pensées of varying interest, as well as vivid evocations of adolescent hypersensitivity and confusion. The bulk of the text, however, consists of mundane family life described in microscopic detail. All the dull stuff that most novelists would omit, Knausgaard leaves in. [see Faber’s review in the Guardian]

Faber gives some examples:

Half the book’s bulk seems devoted to activities such as lighting cigarettes, drinking beer, going to the newsagents, making small talk. “I unscrewed the lid of the coffee tin, put two spoonfuls in my cup and poured in the water, which rose up the sides, black and steaming, then I got dressed.” Eleven lines are spent on a fly buzzing in the window, half a dozen on the mechanics of rolling a fag (”licked the glue, removed any shreds of tobacco, dropped them in the pouch…”). This merciless specificity, which some readers may find maddening, serves two purposes. It lends an air of unedited truth to the project, and it adds power to the final third of the book, where Karl Ove and his brother Yngve are saddled with the grim job of cleaning the house in which their father drank himself to death. [see Faber’s review in the Guardian]

Actually, I don’t have (in principle) any problem (speaking as a reader) with detailed descriptions of mundane activities. I’m a proponent of elevating to the mundane to the level of art. And I do prefer a realism that pays attention to the minutia of living. This taste also manifests itself in the cinema I choose to watch (Éric Rohmer, for example).

By the way, if you are in New York, put this on your calendar: Knausgård will be reading from and speaking about his book on May 3rd (2 pm) at New York University’s Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House.

Terry wasn’t satisfied by Montano’s Malady. (My New Directions edition is titled “Montano’s Malady” after the first part of the book.) His post titled “Why Should the Writer Care about the Reader?” (June 25, 2007) acknowledges that writers are entitled to make demands of their readers. What’s more, some readers want the writer to challenge them. Readers that want a challenge might expect a reward for their efforts. It’s also possible that the challenge itself is a reward.

Vila-Matas hooked me on page one in Montano’s Malady. I was similarly hooked when I picked up Bartleby & Co. (a volume that Rasan had passed along to me saying, “I can’t get into this, maybe you can make something of it.”) Bartleby so entertained me that when I chanced across Montano at St. Mark’s I bought it and then sprinted around the corner to Jimmy’s No. 43 where I plunged eagerly in, quivering pencil in hand.

What hooked me in Montano’s Malady were shared interests, that is to say, interests that I shared with the author / narrator: doubles, memory, labyrinths, autofiction, writerly narcissism, Pessoa, Proust, Musil, Sebald, etc. The list could go on.

As a result of my interest in what Vila-Matas had to say, I didn’t find Montano’s Malady too terribly demanding. I crawled between its covers with the same regularity as a youthful lover does into the bed of his beloved.

Terry writes that “Never Any End to Paris is a playful homage to Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.” And perhaps the book gods thought to tug gently at my animating strings and send me on a lunchtime ramble.

I had lunch today Wyatt’s, at small restaurant on the ground floor of the oldest hotel in Long Neck. When I finished my morning writing session I grabbed my bag and walked the few blocks to the downtown (it being a sunny, albeit breeze day). Ellen poured me a glass of the Buffalo Pale and I ordered a bowl of chili (my usual). I took my notebook along and scribbled to pass the time. I glanced up and noticed something new hanging over the bar: a photo of Ernest Hemingway.

“Hey, Ellen,” I said distracting her from some restocking chore. “What’s with the photo of Hemingway?”

“Dale picked up that fishing pole at an auction last week. Paid three hundred thousand for it.”

And that’s when I noticed the bamboo fishing rod with the spinning reel attached behind the glass case.

“The rod belonged to Hemingway,” said Ellen.

“You don’t say,” I said. “I didn’t realize that Dale was the literary type.”

To which Ellen replied, “You know, Dale. He loves fishing.”

Saturday (yesterday), I woke early, feeling some relief that I wouldn’t have to open my home to workmen and their tools, their noisy machines. To prime the writing pump I dipped back into Sebald’s Vertigo, and this time I decided to read more slowly, to enjoy the language.

I recalled seeing a headline for an article (that I decided not to read) about the ten books that young authors shouldn’t read lest they be lead astray and lose themselves in the emulation of a style that would ruin them as writers. “Avoid reading Jack Kerouac at all costs!” And I wondered if W.G. Sebald would be on the list of authors for young writers to avoid because his writing is so fluid, so (deceptively?) simple, yet… what? It’s like music.

After an hour or so of reading I sat down at my writing desk and tried to turn my handwritten notes from last February into text for my book, Red Neck, secretly hoping that I would channel a bit of Sebald into my prose.

Durrell was said to have an ear for language, able to emulate the styles of different authors. I read that Hunter S. Thompson retyped the whole of The Great Gatsby because he wanted to know what it felt like to write so well. Yes, I’m guilty of attempting to mimic Kerouac, but it’s not something that I do anymore — not consciously.

Young writers should test out different styles. Why not emulate the masters? Find out what works for them. And through combination, amalgamation invent something new. Beware of meddlesome experts.

There might not have been a starting gun fired. In Angie Debo’s account in Prairie City folks just waited until close to noon and then collectively decided it was time and pushed into the territory.

The Cherokee Outlet (also called the Cherokee Strip — originally the Outlet and the Strip were different pieces of land, but now the names are interchangeable) is located in the northwestern part of the state.

I’ve always imaged that my great-great grandfather Jim and his brother Harry started the land run from the Kansas line since they and their other brothers had farms in Kansas at the time, but it probably makes more sense to imagine that they registered for the Run at Hennessey and started from somewhere near there. Everyone who participated in the run (or rush) had to register. Something approaching 100,000 people registered, standing in lines like the one shown here.

My family’s original homesteads were maybe twenty miles northwest of Hennessey on the southern bank of the Cimarron River, so it would have been the shorter route overland from Hennessey. Jim and Harry are said to have both had fast horses.

Once Jim and Harry had staked their claims they would have had to go to a land office and register. Here’s a picture of the registration booths at Orlando taken a few days after the run. The term “staking a claim” is quite literally what happened. Claimants drove long stakes into the ground to legitimize their claim. Once staked, the claims survey markings would be registered. One of them must have stayed behind to guard the claim. It might have been Jim that stayed behind. There’s a family story about him having to fend off a “sooner” who pretended to have staked the claim first.

I’ve always wondered if they stayed that first winter on their new claims, but now I think after they registered they probably went home. Jim would have wanted to get back to his family since his wife was pregnant with my great-grandfather Lester.

Plans are for the Farmers Market to start in May and be open every Sunday through November at the Old Depot Park (Gracie’s and Thurber Lumber Park).

The steering committee is asking for volunteers, entrepreneurs, vendors, farmers, craft/artisans, drivers, etc. Show up at the meeting on Monday, or contact Charlie Bevington 849-3488. Or email, cbevingt (at) optonline (dot) net.

That’s just what Gary M. Lavergne did. He wrote a book about his grandfather’s family. It’s called Lives of Quiet Desperation. Not my favorite title, but it’s better than “The Lavergne Family from 1650 to 1943.”

I admit that I’ve not read all of Gary’s book. We have a copy and I’ve read a few of the chapters. The chapter on “The Grand Derangement” is available on the web.