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       #Post#: 1582--------------------------------------------------
       Stanley Elkin
       By: agate Date: March 3, 2017, 8:59 pm
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       March is MS Awareness Month, or so I'm finding out from reading
       several e-mails. What better way to observe it than by
       mentioning a notable person who had MS?
       Stanley Elkin died at 65 after having MS for many years. One of
       his books was recently reissued and reviewed in the New York
       Times Book Review by Jonathan Russell Clark (February 10, 2017):
       [quote]PIECES OF SOAP
       Essays
       By Stanley Elkin
       404 pp. Tin House, paper, $16.95.
       Elkin, who died in 1995 at 65, published 10 novels, two story
       collections and a few novellas, all of which featured his
       vociferous skills with language. Indeed, linguistic brio was
       Elkin’s raison d’être. As William Gass wrote, “Voice: For Elkin,
       that’s no choir boys’ word.” In this reissued essay collection,
       which collects over 20 years of his nonfiction, Elkin puts it
       this way: “Point of view is art.”
       In his fiction Elkin interested himself in vocation (a bail
       bondsman, a D.J., a franchiser, etc.), whereas his essays
       revolve around his own proclivities and peccadilloes, so the
       voice that sings from “Pieces of Soap” is entirely Elkin’s. “The
       secret to life,” he writes in “Acts of Scholarship,” “is to
       specialize,” and Elkin is nothing if not an expert on himself.
       Throughout the pieces here, he takes the reader deep into, for
       instance, the myriad problems arising from multiple sclerosis (a
       limp, a cane, a wheelchair, grab bars in the shower), which take
       up the greater part of the lengthy “An American in California,”
       ostensibly a travelogue. In “At the Academy Awards,” Elkin
       describes his “first celebrity,” which turns out to have been a
       general he saw during basic training in 1955. He finds endless
       ways to digress into autobiographical tangents, usually with
       some crying and kibitzing.
       Elkin’s inimitable language is an exuberant blend of high
       allusions and colloquial registers, as bounce-and-pop as it is
       stop-and-go. His sentences can contain, on the same page,
       wonderful one-off puns (he refers to remainder shelves as “has
       bins”) and a stretch of boisterous brilliance — if a narrative
       begins, he notes, with “a couple holding hands,” it will “climax
       in some spectacle of outrageous sky’s-the-limit orgy of almost
       Busby Berkeley proportion, as choreographed as battle, as all
       Barnum’d and Bailey’d three-ring’d, combination lust.” But if he
       can inspire with his inventiveness, he also, as John Updike
       noted, “rarely knew when to stop.” This can grow exasperating at
       times and self-indulgent at others (the didactic description of
       the flamenco dancer in “Performance and Reality”). Such risky
       tendencies are common in the literarily dexterous — think of
       Joyce, Nabokov and Pynchon — but as at an elaborate buffet, if
       you can stomach the lesser parts, you’ll leave satisfied and
       completely stuffed.[/quote]
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