Ken Chowder - DELICATE GEOMETRY

artwork (c) Anthony Falbo reproduced with appreciation

There are streets in Portland, Oregon - neighborhoods under the rainy trees, houses, sidewalks - where the utterest peace resides. Equanimous folk, in love with dogs, nurse-cradled by certain forms of music, rendered ablissed by certain wines and fulsome conversation. Add as one may: currant spreads and morning toast, a quiet half hour with coffee and newspaper, the sound of rain and the light of sunbeams. Here live Carrie and Evan and Rice. Napping in a hammock.
From cracks in the flooring seep:
invidiousness,
hate,
blackmail,
inheritance,
desecration,
and slaughter.
so that unusual love is murdered once again.

It would therefore appear that Ken Chowder has stopped writing novels.

More Chowder, Ken

BLACKBIRD DAYS is a beautifully-patterned language machine that immerses our memory in pools of anomie and acedia, the shadows of ambiguity, and the eccentric humor of Buster Keaton, as three brothers walk blindly through minefields of their own devising and the more normal sloughs of complexing parents, half-wrenched romantic-emotional situation comedies, and the damnable absence of an unwavering pivot. In matters of craft, the book has welcomed into the conspiracy we build with Chowder: bright lights of felicitous syntax, new movie locations and sets, and a Giotto of harmony (by way of rhetorical taleteller person shifts, happy tropes, and a significant enhancement of the world’s prose literature art). We are thanking Ken, tankards swinging recklessly above our heads to the choppy and catchy music!
In the earlier birdscenes of the book, it is suggested that we, like the boys, can take our cues from things, positions, shades, stations, perspectives, shapes, and from hue and light, speculating that the ways things only look and appear, really are the touchstones of the deepest meanings of our life; as if at any moment the feng shui of the things in the aquarium, in which we endlessly circle, is going to animate, to speak, to direct us as might a square dance caller, to form the patterns of our living lives in acceptable, desirable, and anguish-free ways.
Where resides the soul?
“The brush of artifice.”
“Deliberate delusions.”
“Time lost.”
“More to life than can be despaired of.”

Then: a true inflection towards equanimity appears, a slowly materializing rosy dawn: there is the allowance and possibility that Will‘s backyard picnic with reading Lucy and gamboling Sarah will include an eminently peaceful nap in a hammock, and a potato salad that does not include some neighbor’s or friend’s wildly estranging ‘extra ingredient;’ Delsey and Neal will laugh simultaneously at a joke that is nothing like Neal’s; and Howard abandons his profession and writes language philosophy based on his discovery of synonym paragraphs, those fluid bridge-tunnels dwelling in the space between metaphor and denotation. All of this is by way of our extended afternoon of café beers with amiable Chowder, though “a more objective chronicler” might have made us drear along the way.

Bonus punt:
A lot of guys might wish that the boys had been able to take to their heart the Karenin sections of UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING. KC’s unwavering faith in narrative (circa 1979-1980: typed) may be quaint, but a few barks and ruffs and woofs might have sprung the diffuse woes into the stick chased to exhaustion and the drooling, lapping tongue.

My Dinner with Chowder

bakst

The noble and wonderful Chowder wonders why I am reading JADIS. A re-read, actually, though it is one of those books one is never quite not reading, so persuasive and so new are the visions. I am reading several novels just now that obey my primary rule of art, that the novel sits before one as a novel, and does not show itself trying to become a novel. (I do not know where this leaves Proust.) In another such work, Robert Briffault's NEW LIFE OF MR. MARTIN, one finds the epigraph by Arthur Symons: "We have no longer the mental attitude of those to whom a story was but a story." Lucidity, force, ease. Briffault's Martin lives among the Moors, another culture one can speculate as displaying the first twinkle of satire. I'll keep looking.

Ken Chowder JADIS

Edvard Munch

In his novel JADIS, Ken Chowder does exactly what I imagine all novelists and moviemakers should do: cease the progression of story and plot at about the halfway mark of the work, and let the rest of the novel or movie, having provided you with enough mooring, lay before you an author's explication of character and sentiment, which is the only location in which aesthetic sense resides. That Jadis lights Egg's way to Tory in the very last few paragraphs of the book only happens to postscript Chowder's having already suffused you with integral, rhyming counterpanes of evolution and what is often called soul. The only true rockmark is imaginary. The browner skins are shortcuts. Annie dispenses with children on page 25, else we would be children.