Entries in the Category "books"
Roman Fever and Other Stories
I just read Edith Wharton's Roman Fever and Other Stories, a post-semester pleasure for me.
Everything about Edith Wharton's work is stately, like an antique fainting couch in a museum, its frame hand-carved, its fabric delicately embroidered. But somehow, the stories are not stifling. Some are sly and humorous, like "Roman Fever" and "Xingu," which both make fools of people who think they know more than they do.
What I really love about Wharton, though—and The Age of Innocence, arguably her most famous work, is a great example of this, too—is the way she lays out her characters' conflicts quite transparently, all so readers can admire how inevitably people misunderstand and unwittingly abuse one another. You want to take her characters by the shoulders and translate for them.
I especially love how she dissects marriage, the roles that couples play for each other and how restrictive they can be. "Souls Belated" is an amazing story about how you build a new relationship out of an affair--if you flouted the convention of marriage once, do you just jump back into it? Do you invite the same people to your dinner parties and pretend things haven't changed? "The Other Two" is about a man trying to feel disaffected about doing business with his current wife's last husband. In a way it's all very old-fashioned, but it's also incredibly relatable.
Wharton also never fails to comment on the way people and habits evolve over time. In "Autres Temps..." ("Other Times...") a woman who left her husband twenty years ago, and regretted the social isolation that followed, overhears two young women talking. Through their conversation she discovers that in the ensuing decades, behavior has become so much freer that leaving one's husband for another man has become the thing to do:
All of their friends seem to be divorced; some of them seem to announce their engagements before they get their decree. One of them—her name was Mabel—as far as I could make out, her husband found out that she meant to divorce him by noticing that she wore a new engagement ring.
The only legitimate criticism I've ever heard of Edith Wharton is that her work is exclusively rich and white. I once read a Marxist critic who complained that "the worker" wasn't present in Wharton's work, that the servants toiled behind the scenes. This is really not to be denied. (Well, I think one of the ladies in The House of Mirth works in a hat shop, but, you know.) Still, I don't find that a valid reason to discount the work she did. She had a narrow lens, sure. But can't we admire the depth of focus?
Life-Changing Art
This morning, I was reading a fun story over at the AV Club: Life-Changing Art
Some of the blog writers talk about works of literature, film, and art that changed their tastes fundamentally—that made them say, “if a movie can do this, how can I be satisfied with a movie that does less?” and so on. And I have a few of those: The Philadelphia Story, Flannery O'Connor, Arrested Development.
But somehow, my immediate reaction to this question was to remember my experience with Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility.
It came out in 1995, when I was a freshman in high school. Even though I was already mostly an oddball, not interested in skating along with what was popular or cool, at fourteen I was still feeling a selective kind of peer pressure. I had my small group of friends, and I believed that my tastes needed to be in line with theirs. If I took a step in a direction they didn’t agree with—well, they would drop me like a hot potato, wouldn’t they? When you’re fourteen and everyone around you allies themselves based on shared tastes, liking the wrong thing is fatal. The logic is unimpeachable, so long as you haven’t lived to know better.
So anyway, one day I was watching TV with Jamie, my best friend at the time. A commercial came on for Sense and Sensibility, and it was all British, and full of straw hats and gowns and fancy dancing. Please be aware that this was Pulp Fiction times. Absolute baseline requirement for coolness at the time was subversion—drugs and violence and swearing, the harsh, the crude, the angry. (I’m talking of course about popular culture, because in our own lives we were totally suburban honor students.) And Jamie scoffed at the commercial, because Jane Austen was clearly a tool of The Man. Any movie you could see with your mom was officially lame.
As it happened, I had seen Sense and Sensibility with my mom, and I had dug it immensely. And at that moment, all my teenage frustration and righteous anger—and outright exhaustion with the effort of trying to keep up with who and what I was supposed to be—overcame me, and do you know what I said? “I loved it. And I bought the book, and I’m going to read it.” I didn’t hedge, I didn’t hesitate, I may have said it in the timid mouse-voice I was mostly using at the time, but damn if it didn’t feel monumental. And Jamie? She considered for a moment, then shrugged and said, “That’s cool.”
And thus it started. Half my lifetime ago I came to a realization: if I like something, that’s justification enough to like it! In fact, it’s cool of me to be sincere about what I feel! It shows strength, and people respect it! And never again have I apologized for liking anything. My tastes—broad and diverse—are all a part of the strange and sometimes contradictory sum of me.
I have sometimes gone almost too far in the opposite direction, sharing my opinions much too freely. I remember discussing movies with someone once, a person I didn’t know that well, and getting a little bit too excited, and responding to one of their recommendations with, “No way—that SUCKS,” and then having that person look at me very confused and insulted. I sometimes have to remind myself that not everyone communicates this way.
But we all should! I’d like to inspire everyone to express a controversial or embarrassing opinion about art today, and to not care what anyone else thinks about it.
Now we can make fun of vampires electronically!
Just a quick note to draw everyone's attention to the fact that my favorite blogger, the wonderful Linda Holmes of Monkey See (have I mentioned her enough times? Linda, visit my blog already!) has been guilted into reading Twilight and is tweeting about it.
Check out the Monkey See twitter here and other followers of the Twilight read-in here.
A sampling:
The first note I wrote in the margins of Twilight says "There is no subtext; only text." 5:39 AM Mar 15th via TweetDeck
Long Did She Live... The Faerie Queene
Though seemed it never would transpire
Thought I 'fore I reached the end would I be dead.
Yet tonight did I finish what need be read*
Upon this moment could I ne'er be higher!
Blissful my rewards shall be
Red wine, cheese and macaroni.
*That's Books 1 and 2, incidentally. It took me two months to read one sixth of this work! I did more than half of it this week, however. That's the power of resolution after procrastination.
Memories of The Catcher in the Rye
Author J.D. Salinger died this week.
True story: in 12th grade, my English class read The Catcher in the Rye. Some students were complaining that Holden Caulfield was crazy, and they were "just waiting for him to go crazy and shoot everybody." My teacher asked everybody to split into groups according to whether they felt they could relate to Holden or whether he seemed totally foreign to them. When everyone had settled into their places, it was just me and my best friend from high school, Jamie, sitting in the pro-Holden area and the entire rest of the class circled around us, staring.
Usually "I am not like other people" moments don't unfold so literally. But it was nice to ally myself with the fictional Holden in a situation he would have totally appreciated.
I also love Nine Stories and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.
Note to that girl in my class
Hey, you know what's a really effective method for bugging me? To take a novel that's literally built around the concept of ambiguity (how our perceptions of events differ from others' perceptions of those same events) and, when talking about it, keep saying, "It's clear that the author meant..."
For the record, in literary interpretation, it's rarely "clear" that anything does anything. But especially not in that book.
Note to my prof: When you said pointedly, "I think we should take the word 'clear' out of the discussion entirely," you became my personal hero.
Strange Connections
It's always been fascinating to me how easily connections can be drawn between completely disparate fields of study. As an undergrad, I was always getting shocked when the same concept came up in lit class and sociology class, or in physics and women's studies, or whatever. Right now I'm taking two courses, and although both are literature-based, they cover different subjects and eras. And yet, everything I'm reading right now is strangely connected to everything else.
Firstly, I'm in the middle of The Mysteries of Udolpho, which is kind of the seminal Gothic novel, full of castles, mysterious portraits and people hearing noises in the next room, creeping in and finding it strangely empty. For the same class, I am also reading (actually just finished) Northanger Abbey. The connection between those is relatively clear: Jane Austen wrote Northanger as both an homage to and a parody of the Gothic novel. The main character, Catherine, reads Udolpho:
'But, my dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with yourself all this morning?--Have you gone on with Udolpho?'
'Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the black veil.'
'Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! Are not you wild to know?'
'Oh! yes, quite; what can it be?--But do not tell me--I would not be told upon any account. I know it must be a skeleton, I am sure it is Laurentina's skeleton. Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it. I assure you, if it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world.'
The joke of the novel is that Austen took this particular comic tone in narrating it; she writes as though Catherine's ordinariness is continuously overthrowing her expectations of Gothic happenings. For example, while traveling, Catherine is surprised to reach her destination without a crash or being harassed by bandits.
So, already there was tons of crossover appeal between those two books. Then, yesterday, I started Ian McEwan's Atonement for a completely different class. Imagine my surprise when I opened it to the beginning and discovered that McEwan opened it with a quotation from Northanger Abbey!
Weird, man. Weird.
30 Before 30 (Six Month Progress Update), Part 1
Just over one month late! Tee hee. Back in May, I established a 30 Before 30 list, tasks I aspired to accomplish within two years. I'm sure everyone's been wondering how I have doing on this, and so, over a fourth of a way through my allotted time, here is (the first half of) my update!
Click ahead for completed and half-completed items! Check back soon for not-completed and modified items.
Continue reading "30 Before 30 (Six Month Progress Update), Part 1"
Interesting Literary Debate!
...and nobody is still reading.
I wrote recently about Twilight and why I don’t care to sample that particular cultural phenomenon. Basically, literature is important to me, and all the accounts that I’ve had of Twilight suggest that in those books the literary development is subordinated to sensationalism and girlish squealing. I tend to get those things in other places.
In that post, I said that I didn’t care to read romance novels, but a debate that’s been percolating online has clued me in to the fact that I should be less dismissive and tease out my aversion to the genre in a way that’s not patronizing. Learning!
The post, about why we shouldn’t judge romance novels by the Fabio on the cover, is here at Smart Bitches Trashy Books. (Yes, that’s the name of the site.) They’re commenting on a post that appeared over at the Huffington Post written by some old man (who, it appears, is mostly concerned with promoting his own book). (I was tipped to the debate, as usual, by Linda from Monkey See.)
The writer over at SB makes the excellent point that the old guy has no right to draw a broad generalization based on checking a random stack of romances out of the library. She acknowledges, as do the numerous commenters on the site, that the romance genre is replete with crap writers and the fill-in-the-blanks style of plotting. But what the site appears to be designed for is acknowledging the romantic fiction that goes the extra mile and is good. SB makes a strong case that romance is a broader category than people generally realize and that, to employ a cliché in a post about good and bad writing, there are diamonds in that rough.
I don’t doubt it. And some of the commenters at SB made really good observations about the fallibility of the old guy’s argument. One says, “I don’t want someone who’s not familiar with pop music reviewing the latest CDs for me,” and another says, “Maybe what he really needs to do is take a statistics class and get a refresher on what it would take to get a statistically relevant sample.” Yes, absolutely. He was not qualified to make the judgment that he did, and yet! that fact points towards why I tend to avoid romance novels altogether.
I don’t know how to filter the bad from the good. I don’t know where to start. I don’t want to have to read ten bad romance novels to discover one terrific writer. I never know whose opinion I can trust—except for my own—and I just don’t have the reading time; my to-be-read list is long enough already, thanks.
Even catching one good one does not guarantee others. I remember reading Circle of Friends by Maeve Binchy in college because I really liked the movie. That was a terrific book (which has since disappeared from my shelves—I think, in fact, that it may have been absorbed by my sister’s bookshelf, ahem). It took me four more mediocre Binchy novels to decide that Circle of Friends was an anomaly.
In literary fiction, I’ve made inroads. I know which authors I like, I know which authors are like the ones I like; basically, I know the lay of the land. It would be a substantial project to explore a new genre and the takeaway—I would get to read really good romance novels—is not good enough. I read plenty of really good books and some of them have romance in them, and that’s enough for me.
The Twilight Phenomenon
Can I talk for a minute myself about the Twilight phenomenon? You might have heard that New Moon is kicking ass at the box office, thanks to the expendable incomes of both 14-year-old girls and their 45-year-old mothers. You might also have heard that the movies are adaptations of an adolescent book series.
I have not read these books. I’m not particularly interested in reading the books. I’m not a huge fan of the vampire thing anyway—I love Gothicism, but as it happens I’m more about ghosts and haunted houses, although I will grant that Bram Stoker’s Dracula is actually really good—and the romance element of it means nothing to me. I have never read romance novels, and again, I’m not particularly interested in starting.
On the other hand, I know a lot of people who have read the Twilight books, both people in real life and people in literature forums online whose opinions I trust. Most of them acknowledge that the writing is a bit amateur, but that the stories are undeniable page-turners. The literary equivalent of a TV crime procedural. Twilight and Order. CSI: Forks, WA. Although I don’t like it when people want to compare guilty pleasure reading with canonical literature (“oh, Twilight is just as good as Pride and Prejudice, you’re just being a snob about it”), I don’t have fundamental issues with people who want to float around in the guilty pleasure camp indefinitely. There are a lot of corners of my life in which I unapologetically take it easy.
Besides, one thing that is emphatically in the Twilight series’ favor—which can also be said for the Harry Potter series, which I have also not read—is that it appeals to people who are in general non-readers, and this, I would never quibble with. Reading is like pot—it’s a gateway drug! The more you do of it, the more you want to do it. (P.S., Mom, I speak hypothetically having never smoked pot.) If some fourteen-year-old girl wants to read Twilight from cover to cover and then tentatively graduate on to Wuthering Heights? I want to encourage her to do so. (Even if she doesn’t move beyond Twilight, at least it’s a couple hours she won’t spend watching The Real Housewives of Atlanta, know what I’m saying?)
One question I’ve been entertaining myself with is whether I would have been one of those Twilight obsessives if it had come out ten years earlier, or fifteen, or twenty. Looking back, completely clear-eyed, taking into consideration the goofy stuff I liked at various ages, I think I can honestly state that by fourteen or fifteen I would have been too old for Twilight. I had already started reading really good stuff by that age, and even though you can graduate on to Wuthering Heights from Twilight, I don’t think that you can go backwards.
I don’t want to play like I’m too cool for Twilight, though, because I really don’t think that’s the case. I watched Supernatural for two seasons because the brothers were hotties. And those airdates won’t lie, either; I was indeed in my twenties at the time. As a preteen I swooned over many a piece of even more ridiculous tripe. Had Twilight been placed into my hands around age twelve? Yeah, I think I would’ve fallen for it.
I will say this much: I am glad that I am a grown-up now and not feeling peer pressure to turn on to Twilight. One night I happened upon the Cracked.com complete series recap. I was not aware of the actual plots of these books—especially the later ones—and when I read this for the first time I was utterly shocked. Understand that if you read this, you may have an extreme reaction, such as bleeding out of the ears. (I am not kidding. Prepare yourself.)
In case that was too graphic for you, try this: the hilariously embittered commentary of Will and Tara at Sling Blog (who every week see the #1 movie of the previous weekend).
11:40:56AM Will Edmondson: I mean, if there's anything to be said in defense of the movie, it's that it definitely knows its audience, and it appeals to that audience. The problem is: that audience is not something that I want to admit exists.
Movie Review: The Westing Game
A made-for-TV movie based on one of the best children’s books ever written. I saw it playing on Showtime and decided to watch. A mistake, always. Very few movies retain the charm of the books on which they are based—and even fewer manage this feat when they are packaged to be ultra-palatable for even the dumbest of children. Just look at the DVD cover art for this movie.
I know, yuck.
The book, in comparison, does not pull its punches; I read it for the first time in the third grade, and damn if I understood what had happened when it was finished. I had to read it another time or two to grasp how the mystery came together, but eventually I did, admiring its cleverness along with its indelible characters, its funny non sequiturs and its strange, disaffected tone.
I probably would not have watched this if I had seen that DVD cover art first (and known what kind of movie this was going to be), but I did, so, with all apologies for bashing something too pathetic to defend itself, here are my complaints.
The trimming of the potential heirs down to ten (or was it twelve?) from sixteen was probably done for character economy. However, it laid waste to the thematic tie-in to chess, and the way Sam Westing plays the characters as pawns against each other. Presumably Flora Baumbach, Theo Theodorakis, and Mrs. Hoo were considered too boring to be included. The actor who played high school track star Doug Hoo had the worst running form I have ever seen (all plodding and floppy) and I’m convinced it was because he was disappointed that Doug was written out of the inheritance plot and thus served little to no purpose in the movie at all.
The one character I wish had been excised was our fair protagonist, Tabitha Ruth “Turtle” Wexler. The character is a preteen oddball with a prickly temper, a curious nature and a gift for playing the stock market. The girl in the movie was a full-fledged movie moppet, all perky enunciations and side ponytail. When she got emotional her voice quavered unconvincingly. The actress grew up to be a scenester who gets made fun of regularly on Go Fug Yourself, which seems about right.
Turtle’s sister Angela occupied a strange position in the movie, too. There is a bunch of invented BS about the girls’ father having lost their house to gambling debts and needing to regain his position in the finance world (in the book he’s a podiatrist). This is all meant to explain why her fiance from the book was relegated to a tertiary character and a tertiary character from the book was promoted to fiance status. This actress was not terrible, incidentally, but the character was pitched so bitterly she was unrecognizable from the Angela of the book, who is described as being too timid to have ever learned how to drive.
How about Chris Theodorakis? Well, besides handling the struggle of being a combination of himself and his brother Theo from the book, the character dealt with a completely nonsensical medical condition. The character in the book has an unnamed illness which was probably supposed to be cerebral palsy. The actor in the movie was in a wheelchair and spoke haltingly. When asked about his condition, he replied that he “thinks fast but speaks slow,” and that was that. For some reason, the character to whom he gave this response did not say, “…and the wheelchair is for what?”
They kept the chess game that Chris Theodorakis (actually Theo) plays with a mystery opponent, but wedged it uncomfortably into the 90s by making it an Internet chess game (like octogenarian Westing would hop onto Pogo to play a game—whatever). Turtle and Chris also figured out the key to the clues by plugging them all into a search engine and seeing what came up. WEAK! But I guess in ’97 the Internet was still exotic.
Ray Walston plays Sam Westing as well as his various alter egos in bad wigs. Diane Ladd, too good for this movie, plays Mrs. Crow. The settings and locations were actually the only thing I really liked about it; the city as well as the apartment building where the majority of the action takes place seemed old, musty, bleached-out and run-down, which is the perfect atmosphere for the story. I wish as much thought as went into picking those locations had been expended adapting the script. And that the little girl who played Turtle had been unceremoniously fired.
The movie predates the Harry Potter movies and all of the Pixar films except for the first Toy Story, a time when standards for kids' movies were a little lower. Even keeping that in mind, this was still a weak effort.
Some Thoughts on Audiobooks
Earlier, I wrote about my reluctance to join the Kindle movement. I now must acknowledge one form of literary technology which has me completely sold: audiobooks.
I got hooked on them last fall, because the audiobook is, without a doubt, the commuter’s best friend. In fact, I listened to sixteen of them last year, including Madame Bovary, which—let’s face it—I probably would not have finished in print.
Our move into Cleveland Heights, and the slicing of my commute down to seven minutes, could have been a real blow to my love for audiobooks, but actually I am finding ways to integrate them into my home life as well. I’ve been listening on my iPod while I walk the dog, and I’ve started playing them while I do chores at home. I’ve found that if I turn it up enough to compete with the sound of running water, I can even listen while I do dishes. Which will perhaps encourage me to do dishes more often.
There are a few considerations to choosing a good audiobook. More, after the jump.
Continue reading "Some Thoughts on Audiobooks"
Excerpt, When We Were Orphans
I’m reading this book right now, my second by Kazuo Ishiguro (I read The Remains of the Day earlier in the summer). It’s about a British boy living in Shanghai whose parents disappear under mysterious circumstances. He goes on to attend prep school in England and, as a young man, begins working as a detective in 1930s-era London. His success does not settle his mind about his parents, their disappearance representing the one case of his life that was never solved.
I wanted to reproduce the passage in which Christopher’s mother is abducted from their home, but it was both too long and too spoiler(ish) for people who might still want to read the book (not because of the abduction, which is part of the plot from the beginning, but because of which characters turn out to be involved in that scene).
This passage, which I chose instead, represents a major theme in the book—the unreliability of memory (especially that of a child) and how our perceptions of events may be shifted according to what we know and what we only think we know.
Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans
I suppose I must then have told her a few further things from the past. I did not reveal anything of any real significance, but after parting with her this afternoon—we eventually got off in New Oxford Street—I was surprised and slightly alarmed that I had told her anything at all. After all, I have not spoken to anyone about the past in all the time I have been in this country, and as I say, I had certainly never intended to start doing so today.But perhaps something of this sort has been on the cards for some time. For the truth is, over this past year, I have become increasingly preoccupied with my memories, a preoccupation encouraged by the discovery that these memories--of my childhood, of my parents—have lately begun to blur. A number of times recently I have found myself struggling to recall something that only two or three years ago I believed was ingrained in my mind for ever. I have been obliged to accept, in other words, that with each passing year, my life in Shanghai will grow less distinct, until one day all that will remain will be a few muddled images. Even tonight, when I sat down here and tried to gather in some sort of order these things I still remember, I have been struck anew by how hazy so much has grown. To take, for instance, this episode I have just recounted concerning my mother and the health inspector: while I am fairly sure I have remembered its essence accurately enough, turning it over in my mind again, I find myself less certain about some of the details. For one thing, I am no longer sure she actually put to the inspector the actual words: “How is your conscience able to rest while you owe your existence to such ungodly wealth?” It now seems to me that even in her impassioned state, she would have been aware of the awkwardness of these words, of the fact that they left her quite open to ridicule. I do not believe my mother would ever have lost control of the situation to such a degree. On the other hand, it is possible I attributed these words to her precisely because such a question was one she must have put to herself constantly during our life in Shanghai. The fact that we “owed our existence” to a company whose activities she had identified as an evil to be scourged must have been a source of true torment for her.
In fact, it is even possible I have remembered incorrectly the context in which she uttered those words; that it was not to the health inspector she put this question, but to my father, on another morning altogether, during that argument in the dining room. (70-71)
A Moveable Text
I first read Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast in high school, where it held inexhaustible charm for me. It’s got everything I was into back then—writers in Paris in the twenties. Man, how I loved the twenties.
The book is made up of sketches Hemingway wrote about what he was doing back then, in Paris. He wanders around museums and cafes and converses with some of the biggest literary names of the era: Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, James Joyce. He details the disillusionment that his youthful generation felt in the wake of World War I, and quotes Gertrude Stein coining the expression “lost generation.” (“That’s what you are. That’s what you all are,” Miss Stein said. “All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.”) The book is heartbreaking in its simplicity—it’s like the blueprint for an art film, just Hemingway walking around and having conversations with people—and it’s written in some of his best terse, powerful prose.
But what’s really most wonderful about the book, for me, is the glimpses it gives the reader of a writer’s mind and process, and the advice that can be gleaned from Hemingway’s account of his work. At the time, he had yet to publish any of the literary works he’s known for today; he made some money as a journalist, but in many ways, he was literally living the life of a starving artist. In fact, he titles one chapter, “Hunger Was Good Discipline,” and describes trying to focus his mind on his words while his stomach growls over its skipped lunch. Much more practical advice abounds, too: write a story, and then put it in a drawer and return to it in six months. That I learned from Hemingway. Also, when it’s time to finish writing for the day, cut yourself off before the action ends, so that you’ll be able to pick it up immediately when you begin the next day.
What you will also find in A Moveable Feast is Hemingway’s unvarnished opinions of the people he consorted with at the time. F. Scott Fitzgerald has an entire chapter devoted to his antics, in which he is portrayed as a paranoid, hypochondriac, henpecked, unmasculine alcoholic who sells out his work for the money. (“He had told me at the Closerie des Lilas how he wrote what he thought were good stories, and which really were good stories for the Post, and then changed them for submission, knowing exactly how he must make the twists that made them into salable magazine stories. I had been shocked at this and I said I thought it was whoring. He said it was whoring but that he had to do it as he made his money from the magazines to have money ahead to write decent books.”)
Also getting the warts-and-all treatment: Hemingway’s first two wives, who both make appearances in the book. Scarcely any words are wasted on the second wife, who appears in the last chapter, but in true Hemingway fashion what words are there are bracingly effective: “We had already been infiltrated…using the oldest trick there is. It is that an unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, goes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband. …”
Well, the son of that woman’s child, one of Hemingway’s grandchildren, apparently has been seething about this portrait of his grandmother for awhile. Sean Hemingway, working from the original manuscripts (archived in the JFK Presidential Library in Boston) has created a “restored” edition of the book, making changes that include adding bits and pieces of Hemingway’s material which is more complimentary of second wife Pauline.
This blog post by young Hemingway at Powells mostly steps back from the “be nicer to Grandma” angle in favor of the “it was butchered the first time; this is what he wanted,” angle. This is possibly true; Hemingway died at the tail end of the book’s publication process, and his fourth wife worked together with the publisher to get it finalized. However, a competing theory ran in the New York Times; the opinion of A.E. Hotchner, longtime friend and biographer of Papa Hemingway remembers the publication of A Moveable Feast quite differently. “I recount this history of A Moveable Feast to demonstrate how involved Ernest was with it,” he writes, “and that the manuscript was not left in shards but was ready for publication.”
Will I read the new edition? I don’t know. I was pretty happy with the old one. Also, I think there’s something a bit ridiculous about trying to make notoriously mean-streaked Hemingway seem a bit more cuddly—like when Lisa Simpson dated Nelson Muntz and made him wear a tie. (“I feel like punching myself.”) Kind of a sticky mess, but scholars are used to this kind of thing. The regrettable truth is that nobody writes a text from beginning to end; they’re all movable texts. And the archiving frenzy of the last fifty years or so means that writers’ notes, first drafts, and galley proofs are all floating around, accessible to scholars and just waiting to contradict each other as to what the writer actually meant to say. So that we could all spend the next fifty years making a living arguing about it.
It Doesn't Kindle My Desire
Sorry for the pun. It's late!
There’s been a Kindle-themed controversy in the news this week. You can read here for the complete story and here for a pretty shrewd prediction of the fallout Amazon can expect to experience; if you want my concise summary, here it is. Basically, two classic books by George Orwell which were purchased by Kindle readers were deleted from the readers’ systems when the publisher decided against making them electronically available. Money was refunded, but the situation has reminded consumers of the difference between purchasing a physical product and purchasing electronic data from a public network. It would be the equivalent of me waking up to discover all the Jane Austen books had been removed from my shelves over night, with a ten-dollar bill in the place of each. (Ten and a five for those fancy Broadview editions.)
It’s an interesting situation, and I think it’s a good thing that it came up; now policies can be developed and instated that will protect the consumer from this kind of ambiguity of possession (or, that will protect the producer/publisher from this kind of thing and sink the product, as the second link shows).
In the meantime, I am contentedly avoiding electronic books. It’s hard to explain what doesn’t interest me about the Kindle without sounding like Andy Rooney, but I can give it a shot.
I’m used to the tactile experience of holding a physical book in my hands, and turning pages. The Kindle is attractively small and light (so I hear; I’ve never seen one in person), but I expect there are elements of the reading experience I would miss—for example, the feeling of progress I get when I can see that I have read more than halfway through the book and will most likely finish it. If I get in bed and notice that my bedtable book has got just a small sliver of pages left to be read, I might pick it up that night when I wouldn’t dream of picking up a Kindle. For purely sentimental reasons, I would miss the smooth, glossy covers, the heft of the pages, and the springiness of the binding. (You will find I am not one of those people who fetishize the smell of books. In fact, I prefer my books to have no odor at all.)
Another factor is that I keep books. I can see the extreme benefit of consuming newspapers and magazines via the Kindle; getting a full newspaper delivered every day generates a lot of paper and a lot of clutter. I always hate throwing away magazines, too, because they cost so much, whether I subscribe to them or pay the newsstand price. But if you keep them, they pile up overwhelmingly. That’s why on TV those weird shut-in characters always have piles of newspapers built into forts around their furniture. I had an entire trunkful of old New Yorkers until my boyfriend made me throw them all away.
Some people don’t keep books, either—that’s why you’ve got programs like PaperBack Swap and Swaptree and Book Mooch and Title Trader, not to mention eBay, used bookstores and libraries. But I do. My book shelves have grown more and more packed—and that’s a huge commitment, considering how many times we’ve moved in the past few years—and they give me a sense of accomplishment when I look at them. I think, "I’ve read that, and that, and that. Oh, and I haven’t read that yet; I’ll get around to it sooner or later."
Another benefit of the Kindle is that it can hold multiple books at a time. I do tend to be in the middle of more than one book at a time, but I don’t need to be offered my pick of any of them at any time. I read different books on different occasions (this one is the bedside book, this one is in the afternoons, this one I only read in the library, etc.). Also, sometimes I am more likely to finish a book when it’s the only book available to me at a given moment. There have been times when I’ve read from a book I’m only lukewarm about when the book I really want to read is in the next room, all because I’m too lazy to get up and get the good one. And I have to embrace any limitations of access which end up having a positive motivational effect on me.
This may all become moot in a year; I hear some colleges are going to begin equipping their students with Kindles instead of requiring physical textbooks. Case is among them.
But for now I'm pretty happy with my paperbacks.
Excerpt, An Experiment in Love
I've been reading a lot of great stuff lately, but I just let the opportunity for reviewing it all slip by. I've decided that I'm going to start posting excerpts--or single paragraphs, or even single lines--that really speak to me from the books I'm reading.
Hilary Mantel, An Experiment in Love
This excerpt relates the narrator's first moments as a college student--it felt particularly familiar to me.
I rubbed my elbow. It felt disjointed, irretrievably strained. Should I be here? A vision came into my head of the home I had left, of the stuffy room, with the glowing electric coals, where I had performed the study, where I had formed the ambition, that had delivered me to this room. A horrible longing leapt up inside me: not the flames of apprehension, but something damper, a crawling flurry in my ribcage, like something leaping in a well. The suitcase lay across the doorway, at an angle and on its side. I stooped, crouching to apply a final effort to it, bracing my knees; as if they had been waiting for the aid of gravity, tears ran out of my eyes and made jagged patches on the sleeves of my new beige raincoat.I straightened up and opened the wardrobe door. Six metal hangers clashed together on a rail. I took off my coat and hung it up. I felt that it had somehow been spoilt by my crying on it, as if salt water would take off the newness. I could not afford to spoil my clothes.
A clock struck, and as I had no watch—I travelled without such normal equipment—I counted the strokes. I sat down on the bed nearest the window. It would be mine, and so would the bigger of the two desks, the better lit. It was more natural to me, and perhaps easier, to take the worse desk and bed, but I knew that Julianne would despise me for any show of self-sacrifice.
So, I sat on the bed. My fingers stroked the rough striped cover. The sheets beneath were starched and crackling like paper: tucked strap-tight into the bed’s frame, as if to harness a lunatic. There seemed to be no traffic in the street below. A lightbulb burned in its plain paper shade. A silence gathered. Time seemed to have stopped. I sat, and looked at my feet. Certain lines of verse began to run through my head. ‘Then we let off paper crackers, each of which contained a motto / And she listened while I read them, till her mother told her not to.’ I could hear my breath going about its usual business, in and out. I was eighteen years old, plus one month. I wondered, would I ever get any older: or just go on sitting in this room. But after a time, the clock struck again. ‘And dark as winter was the flow / Of iser, rolling rapidly.’ I got up, and began to put my clothes into the drawers, and my books on the shelves. (pages 6-8)
Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of one of the most remarkable books of the 21st century, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. That book, which I’ve read at least three times, details Ehrenreich’s experiences as an undercover journalist attempting to make it on minimum wage. She's a waitress, a maid, and finally, a Wal-Mart drone, and in none of those situations does she manage to even make ends meet, much less save any money and pursue the American dream. The book was meant to shine a spotlight on a socioeconomic group some people still don’t think exist: the hard-working poor. (If you follow that link I provided and read some of the reviews, you will see that some people remained unconvinced—they think Ehrenreich just didn’t “try hard enough.” I will say nothing about this except that denial is what keeps broken systems in operation.)
Anyway, in the introduction to Bait and Switch, Ehrenreich explains that people of her acquaintance asked her, after Nickel and Dimed came out, why the blue collar workers were getting all the attention, when so many white collar workers are struggling in the face of outsourcing, forced retirement, and lost pensions. And thus was born Bait and Switch, in which Ehrenreich looks at people who “did everything right,” got great degrees, joined the rat race, and played by the rules, yet whose fortunes did not smile upon them. She talked to forty-, fifty-, and sixty-year-olds who are endlessly attending resume workshops, mock interviews, networking luncheons, and skill-building seminars, who are paying hundreds and thousands of dollars to consultants, who are spending hours and hours a day filtering the job spam out of their Monster.com accounts (“Work From Home! $25 AN HOUR!”) in the weak hope that they’ll find an actual lead there. Of course, Barbara Ehrenreich wasn’t going to research this topic without getting her hands dirty. She scrubbed toilets for her last book, and she hits the corporate job hunt in this one, going to great lengths to appear as a viable job candidate (who, needless to say, is not famed journalist Barbara Ehrenreich).
I found the book to be quite enlightening, if not quite as crushing as Nickel and Dimed. As expected, Ehrenreich found that white collar workers on the job market are dealing with exploitation (in different forms) just as their working class counterparts are. Her resume consultant strung her along for weeks, often changing a comma, then changing it back (and actually giving poor advice—telling Ehrenreich that her resume could be three to four pages when common sense dictates that it should be restricted to one). Her resume was only deemed perfect when she informed the consultant she would not be paying anymore.
Also, the majority of the networking and job-finding events she attended were sponsored by or based around an organized religion—sometimes explicitly, and sometimes as a fun surprise. A resident of Florida, Ehrenreich went to most events in the nearest metropolis, Atlanta, where she was advised that if she found God, a job would find her. Even the events which were professedly non-religious were the hacky, new-age feelgoodery that Little Miss Sunshine made such accurate fun of. (Greg Kinnear! He was hilarious in that.)
Ehrenreich’s conclusions were much the same as what can be found in Nickel and Dimed: it’s not the people, it’s the system. She seemed quite relieved to leave the corporate world at the close of the book and offered the ray of hope that more humanities-based industries, such as higher education, did not seem to be showing the same symptoms of self-destruction.
Still, it won’t be long, will it? For-profit universities are springing up like weeds. Every raise in tuition means a drop in enrollment, but underenrollment means the university has to cut its budget, means…, etc. etc., vicious cycle, yada yada. Department budgets are fractions of what they were ten or fifteen years ago. An advisor at my former institution told me that tenure-track positions (basically, a professor job with a built-in future) are dwindling and assistant professorships or lecturer jobs with no hope of tenure (a “here’s something you can do for two years while you continue to look for something that will sustain you indefinitely” job) are increasingly common.
Too bad that the whole Ivory Tower of Academia thing is a myth, or becoming one. It would’ve been nice.
Every semester, like clockwork
For me, the academic semester is a continual cycle of motivation and energy, and despairing burnout. The problem seems to be nothing more than that 16 weeks is a long time to sustain the workload (to say nothing of the engagement required to sustain the workload) of grad school. (Or, I have some kind of severe mood disorder. Also quite possible.)
The most severe stage of burnout usually happens between weeks 10 and 12. This is not unrelated to the fact that most grad classes assign 2-3 major assignments (large-scale research projects, papers) over the course of the semester and midterm is usually when the first major project is due. When these projects are turned in, I rebound. My life becomes manageable again. Just a couple weeks ago, I was flying high. I created schedules meant to streamline the production of my final papers. Preparations were being made for summer—a change of houses, a summer job—and, a few snowy days notwithstanding, it’s been feeling like spring outside. The weeks of school were waning.
Yet, as of this weekend, I have reached the second wave of my despondency. Basically, I have no procrastination time left; my final papers must be begun. But they’re big projects; they involve tons of research and writing and idea-making. They’re hard. And the majority of the work is on the other side, the “not done yet” side.
In this mood, in the past, I’ve frequently blown off my academic work in favor of a TV marathon, or even a novel unrelated to my studies. In fact, I can reproduce the titles of a number of those Distraction Novels. Sophomore year, spring semester, there was The Age of Innocence during final exam week. Senior year, spring semester, I read The Nanny Diaries the same week I defended my senior thesis. Fall semester of last year, I put off final projects for a whole day to read The Catcher in the Rye. (That one…does not take very long to read.) This novel reading is a sort of deflection. I want to avoid thinking about the work I have left to do, and yet, I feel the need to accomplish something, like finishing a book.
The potential for distraction expands beyond my completion of necessary tasks. I’m also having trouble lately committing to (even the idea of) a field of study. It’s been a year since I’ve been allowed to study American lit (not counting some brief encounters with Faulkner last semester) and I keep having these basically laughable impulses to drastically change course and study weird things. I’ve been putting ridiculous suggestions on my summer to-be-read list all month, like Balzac, and “something about the Wars of the Roses.”
It’s times like this when I begin to question why I’m in school, and if I wouldn’t be better off just learning at my own pace, under my own direction. This is a legitimate question, and one it doesn’t hurt me to ask myself every now and then.
My usual answer to myself is this: “You had four years off from school. What did you accomplish then?” Point taken.
Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! (Fannie Flagg)
This is an in-progress review; I'm only halfway done with the book. It's the work of Fannie Flagg, who wrote the immensely popular Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-Stop Cafe (the book that became the movie, whose screenplay she apparently also wrote). Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! (exclamation point included, such an annoying title) is clearly one of her minor works.
I haven't got any affection for Dena, the main character, yet. The book may be set in the seventies, but it was written much later than that (2001), and I feel like Dena's particular brand of prickly, self-destructive commitment-phobe isn't as fresh as Flagg seems to think it is.
What's really been grating is the characters who occupy Dena's "cutthroat" world of television. Clearly, we're supposed to find them ruthless and sinister, but they all have this de-clawed quality, like a production of Glengarry Glen Ross that's been censored for twelve-year-olds to perform it. Probably the main problem is that Flagg seems to have limited herself to polite language (i.e., no swearing). "Whaddya mean by that, buster?" does not exactly send shivers down my spine.
I don't mind the "down home" characters from the South, and I quite liked the two psychiatrist characters, too, at first, but all the secondary characters have grown to share the same problem: they only discuss Dena. And we already established how boring she is.
Divining Women, Kaye Gibbons
(I read this a month or so ago, and just got around to posting this review.)
Kaye Gibbons is one of the most well-known (non-Grisham) Southern writers out there right now. She’s written a number of novels and can boast a fair amount of critical success. I liked the description of the novel itself—the historical plot seemed right up my alley. On the negative side, I’d read one Gibbons novel before this one (Sights Unseen) and found it sorely lacking.
Unfortunately, Divining Women (I keep typing Diving Women) did not work for me. My immediate reaction was to say that it didn’t work for me for a number of reasons, but actually, that may be untrue. It may just be that one element of the book was so overwhelmingly poor that it overshadowed everything else the book had going for it. The period detail was, as far as I know, accurate. The lifestyle of the main character’s family was vividly rendered. In fact, I liked the idea of the plot all around, and it could have been done very well. The concept was solid, but the execution was flawed.
To say that the male character who is the villain of this work was set up as a straw man is a staggering piece of understatement. This man’s capacity for inflicting humiliation and abuse, his intense narcissism—it was all so heavy-handed as to draw me out of the book entirely. When Maureen, the wife, began to stand up to him, it became even worse. She would give him these retorts, which for some reason always left him speechless; yet, they were not strong. They were not eloquent. They sounded like the feminist fan-fiction rantings of a fourteen-year-old, who creates a male character who spouts offensive things so that she can deliver these self-righteous diatribes in the voice of her lady protagonist. Look, I was fourteen, and I wrote them. It’s all very fun when your judgments are unsubtle, 99% theoretical and no one has to read the thing except your Facebook friends. But this is a published novel by a grown woman.
I’m all for tearing down patriarchal idols, rewriting history to foreground the woman’s story, and so on. When women have been oppressed and beaten down (figuratively and literally, politically, socially, bodily) for centuries and continue to be so to this day, yes, I want to continue to hear their stories. In fact, I want to witness their redemptive, “screw you” moment when they tell their oppressor that he just won’t get to be one any more. But it has to feel like reality; it has to not strategically disarm the oppressor at that moment so that her victory feels unearned.
It’s interesting that my dislike of Sights Unseen also stemmed from one major problem in the construction of the novel, though not the same problem; not even a related problem. Sights Unseen violated the basic tenet of creative expression which instructs, “Show, don’t tell.” The entire story lacked what I would call (vocabulary stolen from film) “set pieces” in which characters exchange dialogue and events unfold in a specific location in a specific narrative time. It’s not strange to begin a novel with, for example, a retelling of an event from childhood, narrated retrospectively by the main character. But for it to take place, unrelentingly, throughout the entire novel? It made the events of the story seem so remote; I felt no connection to the characters. I’m sure it was an artistic choice to narrate the novel this way, but for me, the result was to take what should be a piece of art and give it the aesthetic value of a talk therapy transcript.
The World According to Flannery O'Connor
I just read Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, a collection of the nonfiction writings of Flannery O'Connor. She was a notorious oddball who holed up on a Georgia farm with a flock(?) of peacocks and wrote some of the most haunting, gruesome stories to come out of the 20th century.
Here are some of her greatest hits:
- “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.” from “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction”
- “I’ve had a hard time all along with the title of that book [The Violent Bear It Away]. It’s always been called The Valiant Bear It Always and The Violets Bloom Away, and recently a friend of mine went into a bookstore looking for a copy of my stories and he claims that the clerk said, ‘We don’t have those but we have another book by that person. It’s called The Bear That Ran Away With It.’” from “The Regional Writer”
- “The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions.” from “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”
- “Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.” from “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”
- “Some people have the notion that you read the story and then climb out of it into the meaning, but for the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.” from “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”
- “If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.” from "The Nature and Aim of Fiction"
- “Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.” from "Writing Short Stories"
- “A story that is any good can’t be reduced, it can only be expanded. A story is good when you continue to see more and more in it, and when it continues to escape you. In fiction two and two is always more than four.” from "Writing Short Stories"
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
I listened to this (as an audiobook) after I finished Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle, and the differences between the two books were immediately apparent. Most noticeably, this one was incredibly good.
Didion’s memoir is both smaller and broader in scale than Walls’. Didion writes only about a stretch of about eight months in her life: eight months during which her daughter battled serious, serious illness (coma, embolism, brain surgery, physical therapy to recover normal functions kind of serious illness) and eight months smack in the middle of which Joan’s husband of 40 years, writer John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly of a heart attack. It’s basically the story of how tragedy knocks a woman sideways; in this case, a woman who is remarkably intelligent, rational, and organized, and who is unused to functioning without those skills.
Didion’s meditations on grief and survival are powerful and raw, and it’s in this sense that this memoir digs so much deeper than Walls’. Walls gave the outline (the blueprint) of about forty years of existence, but she barely scratched the emotional surface. On the other end of the spectrum, Didion’s story allows the reader (listener, in my case) real intimacy—painful intimacy, because we have to deal with her grief along with her, so intensely does she render it.
It’s beautifully written, and in and around the death and destruction, it provided an interesting glimpse of the lives of professional writers. I really enjoyed the casual mentions of passing the time marking up galley proofs, adapting snippets of their lives into scenarios for novels, having dinner at the homes of movie stars (Didion and her husband were screenwriters in the late 70s, when serious writers could still be screenwriters) and New York City publishing magnates. I also loved how Didion sublimated her grief in research and then worked it into the memoir. “Sigmund Freud had this to say about grief…” and so on. Other readers—particularly those on the readers’ forums I frequent—felt a bit put off by what they felt was Didion’s academic detachment, but I loved it for what it was: a (futile) attempt to intellectualize an emotional trauma.
What really compounds the tragedy is the knowledge that soon after Didion finished her book, her chronically-ill daughter Quintana died as well.
Review in brief: highly recommended (though not for the faint of heart)
(Didion, husband and daughter in happier times)
The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls
Let me start by saying that I did not hate this book. Most of what I’m going to say about it is negative, but I keep a list of the books that I read and rate them on a scale of 1 to 5 so I can look back and remember what I liked, and I settled on a 3 for this one. That would probably translate to “liked, but didn’t love”; or “liked well enough”. “Didn’t throw it away but probably wouldn’t save it in the event of a fire.”
The book is a memoir about the author’s experiences growing up under the “care” of her father, a shiftless alcoholic with the mind of an engineer, and her mother, an enormously self-involved artist. It was doubtlessly compelling, all the way through. I kept listening (it was an audiobook) through the whole thing, feeling depressed with the family’s disappointments. I’d say I rejoiced in their successes, but for two things: 1. they scarcely had any and 2. it was 99% their fault that they didn’t. The author paints her parents as brilliant eccentrics who couldn’t be constrained by their responsibilities, but the fact remains that (if she is writing the truth) they were two people who let their children starve, walk around dirty and shoeless, and live for eight years in a rickety house with no indoor plumbing, electricity, running water, refrigeration, or heat, and all because they couldn’t be bothered to have jobs or obey city laws or take pride in caring for the children they brought into the world. It was really difficult, as a sane and relatively productive member of society, to listen to those characters endorse their senseless philosophies and to witness them subjecting their children to them.
The book is not particularly well-written, either. So many of the experiences she describes are poignant and alarming, and yet they are often repetitive. Again and again, anecdotes reinforce that there wasn’t enough food, that their conditions were subpar, that her parents were neglectful but dazzlingly intelligent, that the family pulled together through the rough times, but that her father continually let her down, but that she loved him anyway and etc. etc. etc. and yet so much is missing. Memoir as a genre requires a certain degree of personal response to give it its reason for being. So many variations on “our life was really hard,” with nothing to the tune of “what it meant to me, what it did to me, what I took from it, what I want to tell you about it,” misses the entire point of the enterprise.
If I’m enduring through 10 audio discs (which translates to 288 pages, according to the ‘net), I’m looking for something a little more insightful than the chapter that closes out this book. After several years apart, the siblings and mother reunite for a family dinner, and someone wants to toast their dead father. Three hundred pages about this deeply flawed, charismatic man who left an indelible emotional mark on all of them, but especially Jeannette, and this is the toast we get? “Life with him was never boring!” In the words of Seth (and formerly Amy) on SNL’s Weekend Update: “Really?” That’s all we get? Really?
I’ve been Googling a little bit, as well as checking some book forums I frequent to see how people feel about this book, and even though some other people have had the same reaction as me (see, for example, Amazon’s 1-star reviews of the book) the vast majority of people found it touching and moving and a triumph of the human spirit and other various cliches. They’re also listing all the other memoirs they’ve enjoyed, which seem to be mostly of the “I survived a hardship” variety. Maybe this is just an interest I don’t share, but I don’t really want to read about people’s struggles with abusive childhoods or addiction or prostitution or bad haircuts unless I get something out of it besides a sensationalistic thrill. I especially want to avoid memoirs which are written by people who are overly eager to share their experiences with abuse and addiction and prostitution, and I can’t help but put Walls in that camp.
One interesting thread in The Glass Castle (which went nowhere, of course) is late in the book when Walls is ‘making it’ as a journalist with a column about the comings-and-goings of VIPs. She describes a lunch with one of these people wherein she carefully dodges questions about her upbringing and her parents. She remarks elsewhere about how she kept her family and her past secret from friends, colleagues, everybody. I would be interested to know at what point she decided she wanted to disclose everything. That’s a pretty significant emotional shift; was it brought on by a particular event? Over time, did she become more numb to the pain? Or perhaps less numb? It began to haunt her and she wrote the book for cathartic effect?
Maybe this is unfair, but my guess is that the moment of change occurred just as a publisher told her, “Write it, and I’ll get you seven figures.”