The Sheila Variations

"Last November a young woman tried to snatch my purse on the street. I punched her out until the cavalry arrived. Most fun I’ve had in years."

An excerpt from an interview with Katherine Dunn in The Paris Review. She has a new short story in this edition of The Paris Review, and if you follow Dunn's career, then you know this is a huge event. People have been Twittering and Facebook-ing about it for days. A short story! Light from the caves! We are members of a strange intense cult, Katherine Dunn fans. There's an excerpt of the story on the Paris Review site, but I refuse to read a word until I buy the issue and can read the whole thing.

Here is what I wrote, a while back, about Geek Love, her second novel, published in 1989, which brought her the fame that lasts till this day.

Geek Love - by Katherine Dunn

The less said about this book the better.

All I can do is tell you to read it. But don't ever say that I didn't warn you.

I read it years ago when I was living in Philadelphia and quietly having a nervous breakdown that didn't show to the outside world. I was sitting on my front porch when I finished Geek Love. We lived in Mt. Airy, surrounded by forest preserves and mountain bike trails, a lushness of green only twenty minutes outside the city proper. Trees overhung the porch, the trees pressed up against our house from all sides, the street was misty and quiet. I had a big mug of cold coffee next to me. The coffee had been hot when I came out onto the porch but I was near the end of the book and so I sat there reading, struck dumb and still by the ending, not taking one sip from the cup next to me. At the last sentence of the book, I burst into tears. That's only happened to me a couple of times at the end of a book. Sometimes I'll mist up ... get moved in an intellectual way ... but a bursting into sobs is something that has rarely happened. Geek Love pierced through the armor I had erected to shield me from how depressed I was, how sad, how lonely, and it wasn't just about me, and what I was going through ... it was about Olympia and Arturo and the unforgettable cast of characters in the book. To me, Geek Love is a book about love (obviously, with that title), but it's also about flaws, and freaks (literal and emotional), and emotional blackmail that can twist a soul already hardened by the world's rejection. Our outer surface so rarely reflect our inner worlds. What does it mean to be ugly? Empirically ugly? As in, you make your living as a freak in a freak show? What does love mean then? Inside we may be pure and clean. But outside we present a horrifying visage to the world. Beneath all of this, keens love. Love eternal, love good, love that burns so hot that it is indistinguishable from pain. My boyfriend came home from his run and found me lying on the wicker couch on the front porch, drenched in tears. I don't think I stopped crying, not really, for a good 2 days after finishing that book. I have never picked it up since.

It's like a strange little club - those of us who have read the book. It's a bit of a litmus test. If someone says, "I loved Geek Love" ... I am immediately drawn to that person, like a moth to the flame ... who are you, it says something about you that THAT would be your favorite ... One of the falling-in-love moments I had with the great love of my life was during a "what books do you love" conversation. I said, casually, "I don't think I've ever cried harder when a book ended than when I finished Geek Love." He looked at me as though I had struck him. He seriously did a double-take. But then didn't say anything for a while. He wasn't a big "let me share with you every thought that goes through my head" type of guy. He was a bit shyer than that. The conversation went on. I had noticed his response but didn't really "get" it ... and later, a couple of people came over and joined us, interrupting our tete a tete - and he said to me, privately, underneath the chatter of the other people, "I don't think I've ever met anyone who also has read that book."

It meant something to him that I had read it and loved it. It meant something about who I am.

It's that kind of book.

One of the most assaultive books I have ever read. With prose you could cut with a knife. A truly original voice.

I can't even bring myself to give a plot summary.

Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the book.

EXCERPT FROM Geek Love - by Katherine Dunn

Now Crystal Lil holds the phone receiver clenched against her long flat tit while she howls up the stairwell, "Forty-one!", meaning that the red-haired, zit-skinned, defrocked Benedictine in room Number 41 has another phone call and should come running down the three flights of stairs and take this intruding burden off Lil's confused mind. She puts a patented plastic amplifier against the earpiece when she answers the phone and turns the knob on her hearing aid to high and screams, "What! What!" into the mouthpiece until she gets a number back. That number she will shriek up the mildewed staircase until someone comes down or she gets tired.

I am never sure how deaf she is. She always hears the ring of the pay phone in the hall but she may pick up its vibration in her slipper heels. She is also blind. Her thick, pink plastic glasses project huge filmy eyes. The blurred red spurts across her whites like a bad egg.

Forty-one rattles down the stairs and grabs the receiver. He is in constant communication with acquaintances on the edge of the clergy, cultivating them in hopes of slinking back into his collar. His anxious muttering into the phone begins as Crystal Lil careens back into her room. She leaves the door open to the hallway.

Her window looks onto the sidewalk in front of the building. Her television is on with the volume high. She sits on the backless kitchen chair, feels around for the large magnifying glass until she finds it on top of the TV, and then leans close, her nose scant inches from the screen, pumping the lens in and out before her eyes in a constant struggle to focus an image around the dots. When i come through the hall I can see the grey light flickering through the lens onto the eager blindness of her face.

Being called "Manager" explains, for Crystal Lil, why no bills come to her, why her room is free, and why the small check arrives for her each month. She is adamant in her duties as rent collector and enfeebled watchdog. The phone is part of the deal.

When Crystal Lil howls, "Twenty-one!", which is my room number, I stop by my door to grab the goat wig from its nail and jam it onto my bald pate before I take the single flight of stairs in a series of one-legged hops that is hard on my knees and ankles but disguises my usual shuffle. I pitch my voice high and loud, an octave into the falsetto. "Thank you!" I shriek at her gaping mouth. Her gums are knnobby and a faintly iridescent green - shiny where the teeth were. I wear the same wig when I go out. I don't trust Lil's blindness or her deafness to disguise me completely. I am, after all, her daughter. She might harbor some decayed hormonal recognition of my rhythms that could penetrate even the wall of refusal her body has thrown up against the world.

When Lil calls, "Thirty-five!" up the stairwell, I wobble over to the door and stare one-eyed through the hole drilled next to the lock. When "Thirty-five" comes hurtling down the staircase, I get an instant glimpse of her long legs, sometimes flashing bare through the slits in her startling green kimono. I lean my head against the door and listen to her strong young voice shouting at Lil and then dropping to its normal urgency on the phone. Number Thirty-five is my daughter, Miranda. Miranda is a popular girl, tall and well shaped. She gets phone calls every evening before she leaves for work. Miranda does not try to disguise herself from her grandmother. She believes herself to be an orphan named Barker. And Crystal Lil herself must imagine that Miranda is just one more of the gaudy females who trail their sex like slug slime over the rooms for a month at a time before moving on. Perhaps the fact that Miranda has lived here in the big apartment for three years has never penetrated to Lil. How would she notice that the same "Thirty-five" always answers the call? They have no bridge to each other. I am the only link between them, and neither of them knows me. Miranda, though, has far less reason to remember me than the old woman does.

This is my selfish pleasure, to watch unseen. It wouldn't give them pleasure to know me for who I am. It could kill Lily, bringing back all the rot of the old pain. Or she might hate me for surviving when all her other treasures have sunk into mold. As for Miranda, I can't be sure what it would do to her to know her real mother. I imagine her bright spine cringing and slumping and staying that way. She makes a gallant orphan.

We are all three Binewskis, though only Lily claims the name. I am just "Number Twenty-one" to Crystal Lil. Or "McGurk, the cripple in Twenty-one". Miranda is more colorful. I've heard her whispering to friends as they pass my door, "The dwarf in Twenty-one," or "The old albino hunchback in Twenty-one."

I rarely need to speak to either of them. Lil puts the rent checks in a basket just inside her open door and I reach to get them. On Thursdays I take out the garbage and Lily thinks nothing of it.

Miranda says hello in the hall. I nod. Occasionally she tries to chat me up on the stairs. I am distant and brief and escape as quickly as possible with my heart pounding like a burglar's.

Lily chose to forget me and I choose not to remind her, but I am terrified of seeing shame or disgust in my daughter's face. It would kill me. So I stalk and tend them both secretly, like a midnight gardener.

The Shark-Infested Custard, by Charles Willeford

Jump suits, as leisure wear, have been around for several years, but it's only been the last couple of years that men have worn them on the street, or away from home or the beach. There's a reason. They are comfortable, and great to lounge around in - until you get a good profile look at yourself in the mirror. If you have any gut at all - even two inches more than you should have - a jump suit, which is basically a pair of fancied up coveralls, makes you look like you've got a pot-gut. I've got a short-sleeved blue terrycloth jump suit I wear around the pool once in a while but I would never wear it away from the apartment house. When I was on the force and weighed about 175, I could have worn it around town, but since I've been doing desk work at National, I've picked up more than twenty pounds. My waistline has gone from a 32 to a 36, and the jump suit makes me look like I've got a paunch. It's the way they are made.

That paragraph comes early on in the novel The Shark-Infested Custard, by Charles Willeford, and seems pretty benign on the face of it, right? The narrator, a man, obviously has a lot of thoughts and opinions about jump suits, and perhaps he goes on a bit too long about them, but there really isn't anything frightening about what he is saying, in terms of the thoughts and concepts being expressed. He's talking about jump suits and weight gain. Rather feminine of him, I would say, especially because he makes a big show of his macho qualities and his cocksmanship. However, there is nothing alarming about the paragraph in and of itself. But because it comes where it does, because he chooses to give us a discourse on jump suits in the middle of a night gone horribly horribly wrong, it becomes one of the most frightening passages in a book full of frightening passages. I remember how much it jarred me when I first read it. I am reading about these four guys who pick up a girl, and things start to tailspin, quick, and in the middle of it, our narrator gives us THAT paragraph? Something is wrong with the narrator. Because the first section is first-person, from his perspective, he doesn't tip his hands to us about who he is, because people in general don't talk that way about themselves. They just behave as seems normal to them. This is hard to get across in a narration, and Willeford does it brilliantly. To Larry Dolman, the violent events he finds himself in, are really no big deal - they just have to be handled, made to disappear. He has no adrenaline rush, no panic, and in the midst of it all, he notices that someone is wearing a jump suit, and he has a lot of thoughts about jump suits, so he shares them. No reason why he shouldn't.

It's chilling.

The Shark-Infested Custard tells the stories of four guys living in Miami. They have become friends because they all live in the same singles-only apartment complex. Proximity is their only bond. The book switches narration between the four guys, and because the book starts off with Larry, it sets the tone. Larry is an ex-cop. He now works security. He seems pretty normal, but the jump suit paragraph is the giveaway that something's not quite right with this guy. Hank is a representative for a drug company, selling pharmaceuticals to local doctors, and he's so good at what he does that he works very little to keep himself going. He is a ladies' man of a particularly brutal kind, and all of the other guys look up to him. He can find tail anywhere. Eddie is an airline pilot, and he is dating a widow, who maybe is not as young as he would like her to be. But he gets something out of the relationship. She is so devoted to him, always there for him. Maybe he does want out, maybe he can find something better, but he's not exactly searching. Then there is Don, a Catholic who is having problems in his marriage, and has moved out. He is a silverware salesman, he has a 10 year old daughter (and he seems to have no feelings about her whatsoever, except that he doesn't want his wife to "win" and get custody of her), and he can't get a divorce, because of his religious convictions. These mismatched gentleman hang out together, play pool, have cocktails, and their banter is so alienating that I could barely pay attention to it. I am biased against such men, with good reason. If you meet one in real life, your best bet is to just be kind, pleasant, smile and nod, and then walk away, soul and spirit intact. Such men have a scent, and women would do well to learn to recognize that scent and stay far far away from such individuals. It's not that they are in a state of arrested development, that's not it at all. It's not that they are boorish or openly violent. It's much worse than that. It's that they are narcissists, and other people don't actually seem quite real to them. They have gotten away with this for a long time, because they have developed very convincing acts of being "normal", but make no mistake: they are not.

I was first alerted to Charles Willeford's books in the comments section to this post, on psychopaths and morality, and ordered The Shark-Infested Custard immediately.

By switching points-of-view, Willeford keeps the reader guessing and on edge. I was afraid of Larry almost instantly because of his jump suit monologue. It's one of those things that an FBI profiler would have picked up on immediately, or a homicide detective, alert to the vagaries of psychology, and what is normal and what is not. Larry doesn't seem like a bad guy, not at all. He's just a bit flat, in his response to things, but I justified that FOR him, in my head, at first: "That's probably because he was a cop ... he's seen a lot ... he can't afford to get all worked up." This was merely a defense mechanism on my part. (I love that Willeford is able to create characters that I, as a reader, feel I must defend myself against. That's pretty powerful and rare.) So I tried to make excuses for Larry at first. Someone like Larry actually counts on responses like that one of mine. He counts on people to make excuses for him, it is a perfect smokescreen for the lackings in his emotional makeup. But again, and here is Willeford's strength: None of this is spelled out. First-person narration tosses you into someone else's point of view, relentlessly. You have to figure it out as you go.

The second section of the book, much longer, is from Hank's point of view. Now I had gotten to know Hank from the first section, seen him through Larry's eyes, and I found him to be rather scary and amoral. He picks up a girl who is clearly only about 13 years old at the drivein, merely to win a bet he had with the other guys. He seems to have no qualms about this illegal and despicable behavior. "So? She's a girl. I just picked her up. Pay up." He has no moral code, clearly. This is, at least, what I got about him from Larry's point of view. Like I mentioned, though, that "jump suit paragraph" was scarier than any of Hank's actual actions, and was a clue that if these guys were sociopaths of some kind, Larry was off-the-charts, Larry was the one who was beyond the pale. He didn't have to do anything wrong or bad to clue me in. Hank you could actually work with. Maybe. But Larry? If you ever meet a Larry? It would be best to just turn around and walk away, without looking back.

Hank's section of the book does not pick up where we left off with Larry. It takes an entirely different direction, and obviously takes place some time after the events of the first section, and Hank doesn't mention those events at all. He instead tells the story of his encounter with a woman named Jannaire, and how obsessed he was with her, and how it turns out she was married (at least she seems to be) and her husband is now trying to kill Hank. So. I kept WAITING, through the second section, for Hank to at least acknowledge the horrifying events described by Larry in the FIRST section, with the 13 year old girl, and the man in the jump suit, and all the rest ... but Hank doesn't bring it up at all.

Here, here, is where we can tell we are in the presence of a great writer. Charles Willeford very carefully crafts this multi-voiced crime novel so that the reader is placed in a constant state of imbalance and un-ease. It was a truly de-stabilizing experience. The lack of judgment (mentioned in the comment by Bruce, who recommended the book) is one of the key reasons why the book is so effective. By the end, I felt like I was in a belljar of amoral reality. No one spoke up and said, "This is wrong", or "God, we're douchebags, aren't we" and why would they? That wasn't true for them. They were all behaving according to their own codes. The one man in the group who has some semblance of normal human emotions such as regret, empathy, guilt - is clearly the worst off. You don't envy him. You don't think, "If only they could all be like him." When one operates in a world where the norms are skewed, then it is nearly impossible to keep your own compass pointing where you want it to point. This is one of the reasons why how you choose your friends, the boundaries you set with people, your understanding of what you can tolerate, and what you cannot, is so important. You have to know what you are letting into your life. Don, the only one of the group who seems to have normal responses to things, loses his bearings because of the company he keeps. Well, shame on Don. Part of being a grownup is knowing when to protect yourself from the corruption of others.

Hank says, in regards to Larry:

Larry had a literal mind, and although I knew him well enough by now to know that he would and did take many things literally, it was a characteristic that one never gets used to completely. His interpretation of movies, for example, was maddening. He was unable to grasp an abstract conception. When we discussed Last Tango in Paris, he claimed that the reason Brando's wife had purchased identical dressing gowns for her husband and her lover was because she got them on sale. This absurd, practical interpretation of the identical dressing gowns makes Larry seem almost feminine in his reasoning, but there was nothing effeminate about him. He was tough, or as the Cubans in Miami say, un hombre duro - a hard man.

This one paragraph made me realize how unreliable a narrator Larry was, at least in regards to himself, and suddenly the chilling jump suit paragraph made total sense.

I also wouldn't have pegged Hank as someone even capable of such a sensitive and perceptive analysis, but that just exacerbated my feeling that Larry was another kind of animal entirely, an "other", a true sociopath, walking out among the living.

Willeford's gift is in switching voices and narrative styles as the book goes on, and The Shark-Infested Custard starts with such a terrible event, something that would ruin the lives of anyone even semi-normal, and the mere fact that 200 pages go on without anyone ever mentioning it again tells you the creepy realm we are in here. But karma's a bitch, isn't it, and eventually "that night" does come up again, and the veil of agreed-upon silence is shattered, with terrible consequences. Reading the book, however, I didn't know that "that night" would come up again, and so I succumbed to their creepy view of the world, where something "like that" can happen, and make almost no dent on how you live your life, how you see yourself, how you consider your soul and spirit. There is no searching of conscience, no questioning: "If I am capable of that, then what does that mean about me ..."

Larry, Hank, Eddie and Don end up seeming like visions from out of a nightmare, the kind of guys you warn your daughters about, certainly, but also the kinds of men that you want to always be on guard for. Because they are out there. And when they look at you, they do not see you. They see a mirror. If it is a flattering reflection, they like you and flatter you back. (This is why such men can be addictive, because they throw themselves into that type of intimacy - but only if they are receiving a flattering reflection - Your job is to be their flattering mirror. Nothing else.) But if you do not play by their rules, and if you return to them an unflattering reflection, if you resolutely cannot be someone else's gleaming mirror of flattery, due to temperament or lack of interest, then look out. Such individuals can be brutal when they are forced to realize that their projected self hasn't "snowed" everyone. Look out. Run for cover.

As Robert Hare, one of the top researchers on psychopaths, explains in his groundbreaking book on the subject, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us:

Psychopaths are generally well satisfied with themselves and with their inner landscape, bleak as it may seem to outside observers. They see nothing wrong with themselves, experience little personal distress, and find their behavior rational, rewarding, and satisfying; they never look back with regret or forward with concern. They perceive themselves as superior beings in a hostile, dog-eat-dog world in which others are competitors for power and resources. Psychopaths feel it is legitimate to manipulate and deceive others in order to obtain their "rights," and their social interactions are planned to outmaneuver the malevolence they see in others.

The Shark-Infested Custard is 260 pages long, a streamlined book, no fat on it whatsoever, but the experience is harrowing, relentless, with no "hey wait a minute, guys, let's take a step back" voice anywhere in sight. These guys would laugh at such a voice. They wouldn't even get it. You know that such people exist on the planet. Maybe you've met one or two of them. I know I have. But to spend so much time with them here, in their airless belljar, where they do not question their own actions, because why would they? - where they don't seem to have any experience of other people as being "real", is like something out of a nightmare.

I was thrilled when the book ended, when I could put it down, and remind myself, thankfully, that I have a moral compass, that I believe in empathy, that I have good friends who can keep me on track if I lose my way.

Willeford is a master unbalancer.

Alice through the ages

A really fun and interesting post about Alice in Wonderland, and the fanfic it generates, and the different interpretations Lewis Carroll's book has engendered. I especially liked this bit:

The Tea Party Is Mad, Not the Hatter. Well, he might be crazy, it’s just that Lewis Carroll never called him the Mad Hatter, in all the pages of Alice in Wonderland, just the Hatter. The name of the chapter is The Mad Tea Party, but it’s popular usage that elided the “Mad” to oft-referred to character, with a back story of its own. “Mad as a hatter” is an old expression, derived from the mercury used to cure hatbands. It’s just not an association that is Carroll’s. The Disney movie posters got it wrong, but Woolverton had that detail right: Depp is only called “the Hatter.”

“Really, now you ask me, “ said Alice, very much confused, “l don’t think—“

“Then you shouldn’t talk,” said the Hatter.

“It’s the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life.”

Go read the whole thing.

Here's a piece I wrote about Johnny Depp as the Hatter.

Thanks to James Wolcott for the link.

Ex Libris

Alex Beam, a wonderful writer, writes about "the psychology of the bookplate" in Yale Alumni magazine. My father's collection of books had some very nice bookplates (I actually would love to get some custom-made bookplates, in line with my retro way of thinking), and he would explain what the bookplate represented, and who the people were. (The copy of Ulysses that he gave to me is a prime example, with an absolutely gorgeous bookplate.)

Yale has a big collection of bookplates, which you can see here in a slideshow. Wait til you see what Charles de Gaulle had made as a bookplate. Wow! I find this stuff very emotional. I love it because I love artifacts, things where you can actually sense the person who owned them (the whole point of a bookplate in the first place - you put that bookplate in there and say: This is MINE.) - and I also love it because it reminds me of my father. These bookplates now act as relics - of a bygone age, certainly - when books had more value as objects - but also of the people who lived in other times. If you click through that Yale slideshow, you see there are as many types of bookplates as there are people. Some are graphic masterpieces, they could be posters - others feature poems that warn against "stealing" the book - The bookplate acts as a marker, a claim of ownership, so look out, thieves!

When I was little, really little, maybe 4 years old, my parents gave me some bookplates for me to put in my books. I wouldn't even remember this, except that I have one of the books, with that bookplate still in it, and my attempt at writing my own name on the plate.

The book is Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter. It is a hard cover, and is literally falling apart. The cover is no longer attached to the rest, but I have somehow kept it together through all the years. It has been with me since I first left home, decades ago, and have kept track of it through my various treks around the country. It's been in all of my apartments.

The bookplate gives me a strange feeling, not altogether pleasant. I don't truck with nostalgia much these days, at least not as far as my former selves are concerned, and so I am sure there is some discomfort because of that. But I look at my handwriting, and I have to admit, I get a sort of vast sensation inside.

A sense of continuity. The hand that wrote that name in the bookplate is the hand that is typing right now. Again, not altogether pleasant, but certainly interesting and I would say - valuable. It's good to feel a sense of continuity through your life, all your different times and selves.

It's also good to know that some things never change. These days I write my name and the date of purchase in every single book I own. It's a ritual. I have been doing this for years, so I can glance at a book and see immediately "where I was at" when I bought it. But that impulse to leave my mark, to say "this is mine", was there from the beginning, of course encouraged by my father, who was the same way.

Thanks, Alex Beam, for the reminder.

Memoirs, Tennessee Williams

Published in 1975, Tennessee Williams's Memoirs created a bit of a scandal at the time, hard to imagine in this more liberated age. He spoke openly of his homosexuality, and the problems he encountered (crabs, for example), but not just this theme disturbed the literati. It's a stream-of-conscious memoir, flowing from past to present with no warning (that shouldn't be a surprise with the playwright of memory, as he is), and there was much criticism at the form the book took. I think Williams (as always) has had the last laugh. His Memoirs are (like so much of his work) ahead of their time - so ahead of their time that ultimately they seem timeless. The fragmented Proustian nature of the narrative is par for the course in memoirs today, as is the blatant honesty about perhaps the more unsavory elements in his life. His drug addiction, the lost decade of the 60s (he refers to it as "The Stoned Age"), and his romantic problems ... all are treated with an unashamed veracity that jarred at the time (this is the author of Streetcar? Glass Menagerie?), but seem rather tame today.

I wonder sometimes, how much of the cruising was for the pleasure of my cruising partner's companionship and for the sport of pursuit and how much was actually for the pretty repetitive and superficial satisfactions of the act itself. I know that I had yet to experience in the "gay world" the emotion of love, which transfigures the act into something beyond it. I have known many gays who live just for the act, that "rebellious hell" persisting into middle life and later, and it is graven in their faces and even refracted from their wolfish eyes. I think what saved me from that was my first commitment being always to work. Yes, even when love did come, work was still the primary concern.

Now I think that's kind of lovely. Really well put, with, as per usual with Williams, a really disturbing sense of alone-ness and isolation on the outskirts of his lyricism ("wolfish eyes", "graven in their faces"). The book is full of such passages, and I suppose if you have no desire to hear about the sex life of a famous person - let alone the gay sex life of a famous person - then the book may be rather tiresome. I don't feel that way. You can write a book that is one gay orgy after another, and if you write it well I'm in. It's not the experience that is important and unique - because it's not - but how someone puts it into words. As Fran Leibowitz so potently said once, "Being unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication." True, true. Williams, even when just dashing things down off the cuff in his journal, is strikingly eloquent, and poetic. He can't help himself. His writing is never twee, it has muscle behind it, real heart, real power.

Williams is honest in how difficult he finds it to talk about his work. He believed that the work speaks for itself (as indeed it does), but the brief snippets and glimpses he gives are vastly illuminating. His journals are filled with mini pep-talks he gives to himself. The main refrain is to "endure". Endurance, endurance. Williams battled nerves his entire life, and also believed, from a very early age, that something was wrong with his heart. It has never been determined that Williams had a cardiac condition, but he lived under the spectre of sudden heart failure from the time he was a college student (and maybe younger). He put it up to too much coffee. He would wake up in the middle of the night with his heart racing a mile a minute. The cards were stacked against this man. The key, for him, was endurance.

Williams wrote his memoirs knowing that he had long lost his "critical darling" status. He hadn't had a hit since the 1950s. Critics became increasingly savage towards his work. He couldn't do anything right. They wanted him to be the same playwright who had written Glass Menagerie, etc., but that discounts the fact that an artist, if he's lucky enough to live long, will grow and change. Williams gradually began to move away from realistic plays (although his first hit, Glass Mengaerie, with its narration and other elements, was far from "realistic"), and these plays (Camino Real and others) hold up VERY well. They seem contemporary and relevant today. But in the 50s, people were baffled. He would not be "allowed" to experiment. Williams wasn't experimenting for the hell of it. He had great integrity as an artist. Art saved his life. He took it very seriously. Art, for him, was worthless unless it was an attempt to describe how he experienced reality, and that, necessarily, changed, as he grew and changed. The pain of being rejected by the critical establishment who had once so embraced him vibrates through the pages of Memoirs. Williams has enough of an ego, however, to be angry at the rejection as well. And stubbornness. No matter what, he would never ever write "for" them. He hadn't written Glass Menagerie FOR them, and he wouldn't write anything else with the sole purpose of getting back into their good graces.

As a matter of fact, he states in Memoirs that the only thing he ever wrote for monetary reasons is the very memoir that he is in the process of writing. At the time of the writing, his play Small Craft Warnings (a play I love - excerpt here) had opened on Broadway and was not doing well. To boost ticket sales, he agreed to play "Doc" for five performances and give a series of QAs after the performances. His first time since college on the stage. A rather humiliating circumstance, especially in light of his reputation. One of the greatest American playwrights of the 20th century having to do a "trick" to boost ticket sales. Interspersed with his memories, are present-tense sections where he discusses the progress of Small Craft Warnings, as well as the stop-start progress of his play Out-Cry, a truly genius piece of work, also known as The Two Character Play (excerpt here). Neither play is going well. Williams's critics keep drumming it into his head: you've lost it, you've lost it, you've lost it ... but that old refrain "endurance" still works for him. He can only write what he can write.

Yesterday I was alarmed by a state of confusion at the New Theatre. Honest to God, I couldn't tell the interval from the end of the first show. I mean I came out of the men's dressing room when I heard the applause for the first act curtain. My "fluffs" were alarming, too. And if the back of the house had been filled - it wasn't for either performance - I doubt that I would have been audible much of the time.

The problem seems to be breath. I let the end of a sentence fall because the breath runs out.

And yet I got good hands. I guess there is something about me that is recognizable as something about "Doc" - regardless of whether all that I say is heard.

It is imperative that the show complete the summer. It must, it will. I think the production of Out Cry may hinge upon my demonstration to draw again and to keep a show that received "mixed reviews" running for five months, which is, I mean would be, quite a prestigious accomplishment and a help with the big one.

God, the pressure. "It must, it will."

You're never "done" in this life. You are never "all set". Especially not if you are an artist committed to whatever project you are doing in that moment, and not just repeating past successes. Of course, the productions of Glass Menagerie and Streetcar and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and all the others - round the world since the first productions - helped give Williams some financial stability. But financial stability isn't everything. If the critics, and the audience, continue to reject your new work - it is shattering. Williams was not a blushing flower, when it came to his work. His correspondence is fascinating to read, because you can see how FIRM he was, how he was willing to compromise up to a certain point, but then there was a point where no, he had to have the final say. Because he wrote the damn thing. The whole thing about the revisions to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof being the most notorious example, with a titanic fight between Kazan and Williams, and Kazan winning the battle (the production went with Kazan's version) but Williams winning the war (the published version having both Kazan's AND Williams's versions, with a long explanatory essay from Williams about how he still preferred his own version).

There is something a bit dashed-off about the book. I wonder if it was even edited. Or if he even looked at the pages before sending them off. He is open about his drug use. His brother had committed him to a hospital in the late 60s, and Williams still seems shaky here. The 60s were his bad decade. Frank Merlo, his partner of 7 years died of cancer.

As long as Frank was well, I was happy. He had a gift for creating a life and, when he ceased to be alive, I couldn't create a life for myself.

Frank Merlo had been a patient and easy-going guy, who was a companion for Williams, a lover, all that, but he also helped organize Williams, something Williams desperately needed. Merlo could handle it. He did it with little to no ego. Williams is always leaving typewriters in hotels, losing manuscripts in taxis, forgetting where he put his stash of money - every day is a comedy of errors with Williams. An absentminded man. With a tendency towards agoraphobia. Merlo took the edge off. He loved him, stayed with him, and also booked his plane tickets, made sure he packed properly, kept the bad friends away, managed Williams's sensitive personality. Williams's description of Merlo's last days are very upsetting. If you have watched someone die a slow death, then you know that restlessness that comes at the very end, so difficult to bear and witness. You want the loved one to have ease, comfort, peace, but the restlessness persists. The tide rolling in.

The morning after my return I visited Frankie at Memorial. He was now receiving oxygen from a bedside tank. I stayed on that day and it was a dreadful vigil for me to keep. He would not stay in his bed for more than a minute or two. He kept staggering out of it and sitting for a couple of minutes in the chair. Then staggering back to the bed.

"Frankie, try to lie still."

"I feel too restless today. The visitors tired me out."

"Frankie, do you want me to leave you now?"

"No, I'm used to you."

He had, during my vigil that day, been transferred from the ward to a private room - which he doubtless recognized as a room to which he was removed to die.

Frank Merlo

Along with these memories of his personal life, there are, of course, many anecdotes about the great actors and directors with whom he crossed paths. Williams's writing, while poetic, is not ornate. He does not mince words.

In Chicago the first night, no one knew how to take [Glass] Menagerie, it was something of an innovation in the theatre and even though Laurette [Taylor] gave an incredibly luminous, electrifying performance [as Amanda Wingfield], and people observed it. But people are people, and most of them went home afterward to take at least equal pleasure in their usual entertainments. It took that lovely lady, Claudia Cassidy, the drama critic of the Chicago Tribune, a lot of time to sell it to them to tell them it was special.

She said Laurette ranked with [Eleonora] Duse.

Eventually, though, Menagerie was a startling success, which success I attribute in large part to Laurette. She was, as I have said many times, a gallant performer; I still consider her the greatest artist of her profession that I have known. I wrote a tribute to her, on her death, in which I said that it is our immeasurable loss that Laurette's performances were not preserved on the modern screen. The same is true of Duse and [Sarah] Bernhardt, with whom Laurette's name belongs.

I also wrote that there are sometimes hints, during our lives, of something that lies outside the flesh and its mortality. I suppose these intuitions come to many people in their religious vocations, but I have sensed them equally clearly in the work of artists and most clearly of all in the art of Laurette. There was a radiance about her art which I can compare only to the greatest lines of poetry, and which gave me the same shock of revelation as if the air about us had been momentarily broken through by light from some clear space beyond us.

If there is a heaven, and if I can create my own heaven, then it will be a place where I can go back in time to that theatre in Chicago in the icy winter of 1944 and see that first production of Glass Menagerie.

Laurette Taylor as Amanda Wingfield

My sense of him in his Memoirs is of a man who knows he doesn't have much time left (he would be dead in 1983), and who is now desperate, desperate, to get back to his rightful position. But without having to compromise the type of writing he wants to do. His belief in his craft is stunning, when you think of the decade and a half of FLOPS he had been through. I don't even know if I would call it "belief", actually, which implies something intellectual. It's not that he believed in his work (although that is true). It is that for him there was no other choice.

That is courage.

To keep putting pencil to paper ... in the face of an overwhelming chorus of critical voices (and flagging box office sales) telling you, "No, no, no, we don't want THAT from you ... why don't you write something like you USED to write?"

I continue to believe that Williams, ultimately, will have the last laugh. It is a mind-boggling body of work, when looked at it as a whole. It continues to grow in stature, making more successful commercial playwrights of the same era look flaccid, and trite. William Inge was more timely, in many ways, a true voice of the 1950s, but his plays have dated badly (as wonderful as the writing usually is). Similar to Clifford Odets who I believe is one of the best writers of dialogue this country has ever known, but his plays cannot be transported out of the 1930s. That decade is their anchor, their context. Williams's plays are not as easily placed in a specific time, and therefore they don't feel married to a certain era. Not in the slightest. And the later plays? The ones that were flop after flop after flop? Well, there is some amazing stuff there, and perhaps during Williams's lifetime, with a success that playwrights can only dream of in the 40s and early 50s, such later plays, with a different voice and outlook - maybe they could never have survived. They suffered by comparison. But now, with the gift of perspective, and distance, they don't suffer as much. They stand on their own as excellent plays, difficult, challenging, recognizably Williams (I could pick a sentence written by him out of a lineup in a dark alley) - and it doesn't matter so much that they AREN'T Glass Menagerie, etc. Plays like The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (excerpt here), Kingdom of Earth (excerpt here), Small Craft Warnings, The Gnädiges Fräulein (excerpt here) ... I wouldn't call these "major" plays. They aren't Menagerie, or Streetcar, or Cat, but even saying that to me feels ungenerous and ridiculous. If a playwright could write just ONE play as great as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Williams's favorite of his plays, he considered it his best - Tommy Lee Jones, who played Brick, agrees with Williams) then that should be enough for one lifetime. But Williams just kept pumping them out, deep tormented funny plays with awesome characters that now live large in American culture forever. Stanley Kowalski. Big Daddy. Amanda Wingfield. Miss Alma. Blance Dubois. I mean, these were all in his head. So no, the later plays are not "major", but they are certainly nothing to sneeze at, and again, I think with perspective they start to take on their own form and shape, they don't cower so much in the shadow of those earlier masterpieces.

But at the time of the writing of the Memoirs, Williams could not know that. He could just continue to endure. And by "endure", he meant "work".

Work!! - the loveliest of all four-letter words, surpassing even the importance of love, most times.

I am inclined to agree with him.

His memories of his tragic sister Rose are truly terrible, and I wince through the reading of them. You can feel his pain. It seems to me that Williams, naturally a very shy man, expressed what he needed to about his life in his plays. They are the true documents, the only real autobiography. Now, of course, we have the amazingly edited volumes of his letters, the diaries, all of this extemporaneous material, which adds depth, shading, understanding ... but still: none of it EXPLAINS the work. The work stands alone. If you want to understand this man, you will not find the answers in his letters. You will find it when you read The Glass Menagerie. But what a gift it is, to also have his own words, in the same way that it would be such a gift to have, oh, Shakespeare's diary, or letters, or something. Nothing on this earth (heaven or earth, Horatio) could ever explain Hamlet or Macbeth, but how awesome would it be to hear the MAN speaking? Williams obviously found his sister Rose to be an almost unbearably painful topic. It is a wound that never healed. It is the wound from which he wrote. All plays begin and end with Rose. But let me not take away from his extraordinary powers of creation and imagination. I do not mean to say that his plays are disguised autobiographies - no. But what happened to his sister Rose, her madness, her lobotomy, her tragedy, is what made HIM possible. What a terrible thought. Williams was haunted, literally haunted by this. That he got out and she didn't. And not just that she didn't get out, but that she would be so completely destroyed. He writes in his Memoirs about something that had happened back in the 30s, when he and Rose were kids, both still living at home. This story comes from 40 years in the past, but the pain in this passage, the pain that remains:

Then there was the wild weekend Mother and Dad had gone to the Ozarks, I believe, and Rose and I were alone in the house on Pershing. That weekend I entertained my new group of young friends. One of them got very drunk - maybe all of them did - but this particular one got drunker than all of us put together and he went up on the landing, where the phone was, and began to make obscene phone calls to strangers.

When our parents returned from the Ozarks, Miss Rose told them of the wild party and the obscene phone calls and the drinking.

I was informed by Miss Edwina [Williams's mother] that no one of this group should ever again enter the house...

After she had tattled on my wild party ... I went down the stairs as Rose was coming up them. We passed each other on the landing and I turned upon her like a wildcat and I hissed at her:

"I hate the sight of your ugly old face!"

Wordless, stricken, and crouching, she stood there motionless in a corner of the landing as I rushed on out of the house.

This is the cruelest thing I have done in my life, I suspect, and one for which I can never properly atone.

Memoirs is a jagged read, moving from far past tense to present-tense within paragraphs at times, and you can feel his decline in capability. Many paragraphs end with ellipses, as though you can feel him trailing off, unsure what the point of writing the memoir is ... when his plays can't even get off the ground. I remember when Jack Nicholson got his Lifetime Achievement Award at the Oscars some years back and he joked at the beginning that there was something weird about the award, "because it has a feeling of the shroud about it." Williams seems to have that sense here, too. Writing a memoir is meaningless to him without plays that can be put up, without an audience that will appreciate, without critics that try to understand.

Haphazard as a lot of it is, it stands as a monument to the sheer willpower and pigheadedness of this great playwright, a man who made his success early (although he wasn't as young as Odets was, or Fitzgerald - he was in his 30s), and continued on ... continued on with his work ... even as his audience disappeared. Williams has almost no self-pity, it is one of his defining characteristics as a writer. He stated again and again that he had never written a "victim" in his life. He saw Blanche, Alma, as white-hot survivors, as characters who, through their sheer intensity of feeling, could teach the rest of us drabber souls a thing or two about living. He writes in Memoirs:

I realize how very old-fashioned I am as a dramatist to be so concerned with classic form but this does not embarrass me, since I feel that the absence of form is nearly always, if not always, as dissatisfying to an audience as it is to me. I persist in considering Cat my best work of the long plays because of its classic unities of time and placer and the kingly magnitude of Big Daddy. Yet I seem to contradict myself. I write so often of people with no magnitude, at least on the surface. I write of "little people". But are there "little people"? I sometimes think there are only little conceptions of people. Whatever is living and feeling with intensity is not little and, examined in depth, it would seem to me that most "little people" are living with that intensity that I can use as a writer.

Was Blanche a "little person"? Certainly not. She was a demonic creature, the size of her feeling was too great for her to contain without the escape of madness. And what about Miss Alma? Was she a "little person"? Certainly not.

When Williams complains, it comes across as angry, and determined, and also, at times, confused, hurt. But not self-pitying. He is a good companion, even here, when you can feel how reduced he is, how fragilely he clings to his position.

Memoirs also contains what may very well be the saddest line Tennessee Williams ever wrote:

You see, I was still capable of falling in love in the sixties.

That is classic Williams. A clear open statement, with that friendly little "You see" at the beginning, disarming you for the hari-kiri move that is coming. You wonder how he could bear it. And then I wonder how I can bear it. All I know is, if he could bear it, then I certainly can, and spending time with him helps me see that, over and over again.

Not to mention getting a glimpse into how he worked, how he thought about his work, and the openness of his struggles with his process.

Tennessee Williams fans, I highly recommend the Memoirs, messy as they are. As with so much else of his work, it has great reverb beyond his time. Born in 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi, his life almost spans the entire 20th century. It continues to reveal itself, unfold, it's a never-ending encounter, for which I will always be grateful.

First editions

I ate up this interview with Matthew Haley, a books and manuscript specialist, greedily, with a spoon! None of this is news to me. I grew up with a book collector father. He was highly knowledgeable, an expert in his chosen area of books, and I remember him opening a certain rare book to the copyright page, and showing me, in the random codes there (the descending numbers you see, for example), what that meant, and why it meant that this particular book was special. It's fascinating stuff to me. Does a signed copy mean it is worth more? Not necessarily. What's the difference between a first edition and a first printing? How does one put value on a book? What makes it valuable? Haley knows his stuff.

Here's Haley on inscriptions (one of my favorite topics), and how they can affect the value of a book:

Similarly, nearly all first editions are worth more if they’re signed, but this is probably less true of modern books. A lot of authors today do lengthy signing tours and appearances and that sort of thing, so the number of signed copies is not especially small.

Other authors are much less inclined to sign anything, so obviously their signatures are more sought after. Famously, Harper Lee, who wrote “To Kill a Mockingbird,” didn’t sign very much. The value of a signature may vary, but I can’t think of any situation in which an author’s signature has caused a book to be worth less.

Inscriptions can help or hurt the value of a first edition. I would say that “To Ben, Ray Bradbury” would perhaps be very slightly less desirable than just “Ray Bradbury.” But “To my dear friend Ben” is a little bit of an improvement, and “To my dear friend Ben, who inspired me to write this book” is much better!

Fascinating details on first editions of Harry Potter, and how J.K. Rowling's name was first listed as "Joanne Rowling", later adjusted, so that editions are considered more valuable. A really interesting section on Oscar Wilde, and why his plays are so sought after (when plays, in general, are not valuable, as objects). Having just read Oscar's Books, by Thomas Wright), I felt a familiarity with that topic: Wilde loved limited editions, numbered copies, so they are very rare, not to mention the fact that his books were always beautiful. He worked hard on the content, naturally, but he felt that the form (the colors, the typeset, the cover) was equally as important. He sent a note to an American publisher of one of his books:

The type seems crisp and clean. I suppose it is as black as one can get? Perhaps a shade thicker would be well.

In the same vein, he wrote another letter to an American publisher, which shows you, again, his attention to detail, and how much the details mattered to him. Even more than typos, it sometimes seems.

Why, oh! why did you not keep to my large margin - I assure you that there are subtle scientific relations between margin and style, and my stories read quite differently in your edition.

He was very sensitive to aesthetics - and for that reason, his books are often mini works of art, just in terms of the binding, the artwork, and the look and feel of it.

I was fascinated by Haley's comment on dust jackets. Again, this is well-trod ground for me, growing up with the father I had. Dust jackets, and the presence of them, can exponentially up the value of a book, in extraordinary ways. Haley gives a startling example:

That’s one thing we haven’t addressed, the value of dust jackets, which is huge. It makes a massive difference. In a recent sale here at Bonham’s, we had two copies of “The Great Gatsby,” one with a dust jacket which we sold for $180,000 and one without which we sold for $3,000. That tells you how much value is in the dust jacket.

In the early days, dust jackets were literally “dust jackets,” kept on books in bookstores to keep them from getting dusty. Originally dust jackets were just typography on dull-colored paper. When people took a book home, the jackets were often discarded.

From the 1920s on, as publishing houses started employing designers and artists to produce decorative dust jackets, they used the jacket to market their books. Some people began to embrace the idea of keeping dust jackets on their books, but old habits die hard, so many people continued to dispose of their books’ dust jackets. That’s one reason why they are so rare.

The Great Gatsby, first edition, is one of those Holy Grail books in book collecting, and the fact that a copy with the dust jacket went for literally a hundred thousand dollars plus more than a copy without the dust jacket is a perfect illustration of the situation.

Definitely go read the whole thing.

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., by Ron Chernow

In his introduction to his massive Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Ron Chernow discusses the difficulty of writing a biography of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., oil tycoon of the late 19th and early 20th century, because of the mounds of scholarship already written about him (most of it biased, a demonization of the highest order), and for the mere fact that John D. himself was a "sphinx", by design. Chernow writes:

How could one write about a man with such a fetish of secrecy? In the existing literature, he came across as a gifted automaton at best, a malevolent machine at worst. I couldn't tell whether he was a hollow man, deadened by the pursuit of money, or someone of great depth and force but with eerie self-control... Like many moguls of the Gilded Age, Rockefeller was either glorified by partisan biographers, who could see no wrong, or vilified by vitriolic critics, who could see no right. This one-sidedness has been especially harmful in the case of Rockefeller, who was such an implausible blend of sin and sanctity. I have tried to operate in the large space between polemics and apologetics, motivated by the belief that Rockefeller's life was of a piece and that the pious, Bible-thumping Rockefeller wasn's simly a cunning facade for the corporate pirate. The religious and acquisitive sides of his nature were intimately related. For this reason, I have stressed his evangelical Baptism as the passkey that unlocks many mysteries of his life.

In this, as in so much else in this great accomplishment, Chernow is successful. I knew very little about Rockefeller the man. I know something about his legacy, but I wasn't aware of the extent of it. I worked at 30 Rock, but I didn't know the full story behind it (and that was more his son's doing than his). I was unaware that the University of Chicago really came into being because of Rockefeller. His philanthropies are vast, all-encompassing, he appears to be everywhere, once you start to look into it, and that was a part of him I did not know about. The book was a revelation in many ways. Chernow is, naturally, a writer I love, his stupendous biography of Alexander Hamilton will be the benchmark through which all biographies of Hamilton now must filter themselves. It is too big to be ignored. Hamilton was long overdue for another look-see, after centuries of demonization, and I suppose there are some similarities there with Rockefeller, a similar case. Chernow does not burden his book with a partisan outlook, which would lessen its impact. If you are the partisan, and you are convinced that Hamilton was some kind of devil, then of course you will be dismayed to read that Chernow does not share your view. But his writing does not come off as defensive, it comes off as persuasive. He just has, flat out, thought about it in a deeper way. I am thinking now of Willard Sterne Randall's biography of Thomas Jefferson (he also wrote one on Hamilton). Randall didn't just believe that Jefferson did not have sex with Sally Hemings, he is determined to "rescue" Jefferson from all charges that he did, and the book really suffers from it, because it starts to feel like Randall is afraid of something, that there is something he does not want to face. He is a partisan. He has an opinion. It seems important to him that ONE thing be true over ANOTHER thing. So no matter what your opinion is, it becomes clear that Randall has a blind spot.

I like the biographer who can deal with all sides of his subject's personality. Good, bad, ugly, none of it needs to be defended, just do your best to describe and contextualize. The good thing about Chernow's book on Hamilton was its willingness to see Hamilton's "bad" side, the side that was already torching up his own life, that self-destructive streak that Hamilton had. He flourished when he was aware of his enemies. Chernow does not try to explain this away, or defend it, as though it's a playground brawl. But he does provide a deeper and more thorough context of Hamilton's background and influences, so that these actions may come into a clearer light. It's magnificent. It's a book that makes you think, because the author himself has thought so deeply, so widely, and he is not afraid of what he might find.

Chernow takes this approach again with John D. I learned a lot reading it, not just about Rockefeller, but about the time in which he lived, the economy, the religious revivals, the post Civil War speculative economic craziness, not to mention the rapacious form capitalism took at that time. Chernow, as he mentioned, takes Rockefeller's Baptist upbringing as the key, the "Rosebud", to John D. Rockefeller. Those hostile to religion in any form will balk at some of Chernow's conclusions, I suppose, and there will be those who cannot look past many of Rockefeller's sneaky (and, frankly, unethical) actions - and will only see his religious fervor as a hypocritical stance (pious with one hand, greedy with anotehr). Chernow, ever the philosopher, does not see it as two separate things. He dovetails them. There is a through-line here, a "key" to a personality. Chernow makes the point that most tycoons of that day, whatever their humble backgrounds, usually "upgraded" to an Anglican Church when they made their wealth, because those churches were for the rich. It was a status symbol to belong to them. Religious feeling was not as important as status, and this was true for most of them. Not so Rockefeller. He grew up a poor backwoods Baptist, and he kept going to the same Baptist church for 50 years, sometimes bankrolling their entire payroll for a year, or two, so that they could keep going. A jaundiced view of this would also be appropriate, but you would have to make as good a case for your side as Chernow does for his. He analyzes much of the preaching being done at that time in the Baptist church, and how there was no shame, inherently, in wealth. But the point of wealth was to give most of it away. If you hold onto it, you will be judged, you will be in a state of sin. Rockefeller, as his millions grew, couldn't give his money away fast enough, and it's fascinating, just fascinating, to watch the development of his philanthropies, and how they started out as one thing, ie: promoting his pet causes (spread the Baptist religion, education for blacks, the temperance movement) and ended up another: widespread non-denominational humanist causes, such as medical research, the creation of libraries, etc.

Chernow does not (as many biographers before him) see all of this "do-good" activitity as evidence of Rockefeller's guilty conscience for some of his business practicies. It is all of a piece with his Baptist upbringing. If you have wealth, give it away.

Chernow writes:

Though generally reserved, Rockefeller developed convivial habits in church that lingered for life, and it bothered him when people marched off right after the Sunday service. "There ought to be something that makes the church homelike," he insisted. "Friends should be glad to see each other and to greet strangers." Even in later years, when huge swarms of people congregated at the church door to glimpse the world's richest man, he would still clasp people's hands and bask in the glow of familial warmth. The handshake acquired symbolic meaning for him, for it was "the friendly hand extended to the man who doesn't know that he is wanted [that] brings many a one into the church. This early feeling about handshaking has stayed with me. All my life, I have enjoyed this thing that says: 'I am your friend.'"

Rockefeller was not ostentatious with his wealth, like so many of his contemporaries. I grew up in Rhode Island. Take a stroll down mansion row in Newport sometime, and take a gander at the "summer cottages" of the Gilded Age, places that practically dwarf Versailles (I had my prom at one of those monstrosities!), to get a look at how these people lived. Rockefeller was not one of them. He tended to buy property and then just move into the house that was already on it, sometimes not even buying new furniture, just taking the house "as is". Very strange and interesting.

Chernow is obviously adept at making economic realities of different times comprehensible to a lay reader like myself. Hamilton's creation of the first national bank is complicated stuff. I get it, though. Chernow's writing remains elegant, clear, and concise. These are not books for economists or experts. They are books written for you or me, and without dumbing-down all of the dizzyingly complicated forces that created the wealth that Rockefeller acquired, Chernow leaves no stone unturned.

The story of Rockefeller's father, a virtual con-man, one of those guys who drove around the wild countryside selling "elixirs" that would cure everything from gas to cancer, a polygamist as well, was fascinating! It goes a long way to explain Rockefeller's lifelong stance as a staunch family man, transparent in his love for his wife. He never sold his father down the river, and did quite a bit of retroactive storytelling, I am sure there was a lot of shame there as well, but much of his early years - the prodigy at the office, the meticulous keeping of personal accounts (which he passed on to his children), the careful choosing of an appropriate wife (pious, gentle, faithful) was certainly a reaction to the crazy-making atmosphere he grew up in, with a long-suffering mother and an absent philandering father. Fascinating stuff.

The story of Standard Oil, and how it came about, is of course well-known, but I knew none of it. I did not know that it was in refineries that Rockefeller made his fortune, and, through a perfect storm of current events, the domination of the railroads that really sealed the deal, in terms of his monopoly. These are well-trod-over events, but the book does not feel like a rehashing. It is an honest look at the free-for-all of the time, and how even very early on Rockefeller made enemies, by buying up companies to freeze the rivalry, to make his empire complete. This obviously eventually caught up with Rockefeller, in the great anti-trust cases of the early 20th century, but by that point Rockefeller's wealth was so diversified, so expansive, that nothing could touch it. Not really.

Chernow is also an insightful psychologist. He looks at the evidence, and makes up his own mind. His only preconceived notion about Rockefeller was that he was a "sphinx", as mentioned. He didn't come into the project with a bias either way. He doesn't take the stance that Rockefeller was misunderstood, and all good, or that he was as bad as everyone said he was. There is hostility towards capitalism itself that can feed into books such as this one, but Chernow, with his lifelong focus on economics (along with this one and the Hamilton masterpiece, he has written books on the "house of Morgan" and the Warburgs) doesn't look at wealth, and the acquisition of it, as something inherently suspicious. The Rockefeller book is stronger for it. He doesn't shy away from the controversies in which Rockefeller was embroiled (the key one being the "railroad rebates" situation, which would haunt Rockefeller the rest of his days), and I was amazed, as I read this massive book, that I was able to keep all of it straight in my head. This is to Chernow's credit. If I can be made to understand the "railroad rebates" situation, then Chernow has done his job.

A fascinating portrait of an American legend, surrounded by controversy and mystery. He was not a forthcoming man, he did not give interviews, he was completely blindsided by the "muckraking" journalism of the early 20th century, and his response was always to maintain his silence. He did not realize that the world had changed, and that transparency would eventually be required of CEOs, as much as possible. He did not understand the growth of a certain kind of business journalist, who expected to be kept informed on business decisions, and would leave no stone unturned trying to find out the truth. Rockefeller kept his "neither confirm nor deny" stance far past the point where it was healthy or good for his business. He was an old man by that point. Keeping his counsel had always worked before, when he dominated his corner of the world. But times changed. The silent sphinx who was literally never seen (was there a secret exit from his house in New York? Why was he never seen going to work? Journalists tormented themselves trying to just "see" the guy) had to accept the fact that in this new environment ... he could no longer play the sphinx. It would be his downfall.

I loved all of the characters who intersected with Rockefeller, not to mention his family, his children, their children. Chernow brings them to life. Nelson, of course, and John Jr. (a really fascinating guy, and I am in LOVE with his wife - Abby Aldrich - a Rhode Islander) - but even more so, all of Rockefeller's various business associates and partners - Frederick Gates, for example, in charge of dealing with Rockefeller's charities. But that is just one example.

A huge life, with many different aspects, and while the book is 700 pages long, I could not put it down. As with all good biographies, it is not just about its main subject. It is about the world that created that particular subject. It is a sweeping and detailed examination of post Civil War America, of the importance of double-entry bookkeeping, of the discovery of oil in Western Pennsylvania, of the various speculative booms and how from the start Rockefeller set up his business to be a LONG term venture, not a short term, the development of the mid-West (I always associate Rockefeller with New York City, since his name is so prominent here, but that was just my ignorance - he started in the mid-West, and always considered that his true home), the burgeoning technology of the time, in terms of railroads, oil drills, refineries (not to mention the invention of the automobile, which changed everything), and the economic realities of depressions, recessions, booms, and falls. It does not shy away from some of the horrible consequences of Rockefeller's actions (the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado being the main one), and it becomes clear that John Sr., in passing the torch to John Jr., had, in many ways, assured that the Rockefeller name would grow and change with the times. John Sr. was incapable of handling the Ludlow situation with the same grace (albeit hard-won) that John Jr. did. It was a terrible situation, a war, really, but the torch had been passed. John Jr. felt the weight of that. In many ways, he wanted to be an imitation of his father, but he didn't have the constitution for it. He had a lot to prove. He had an uphill battle.

In the final chapters of the book, when Rockefeller is now a doddering old man (he was determined to live until he was 100), his progeny take over, and their impact on the legacy of Rockefeller cannot be counted. One small example: Rockefeller, a strict Baptist, was never into art collecting, as so many of his contemporaries were. It seemed a decadent and worldly pursuit. However, his son, John D. Jr., carrying on the business, also had a passion for art (he bought a priceless collection of Japanese jade he fell in love with, and wrote an apologetic letter to his father about it, knowing his father would not approve) - and he was a great patron of the arts. BUT, John Jr. was contemptuous of modern art, completely disgusted by the whole thing. On the flipside, his wife, Abby, loved modern art, and it was a bone of contention between them. Reading about their arguments, I want to tell John Jr. to please chillax, but one of the fascinating byproducts of this argument is described here by Chernow. This was all news to me, which is embarrassing, since I live here, this is my home, I should know this stuff. But I am glad I know it now!

Chernow writes:

The greatest friction between Junior and Abby arose over the subject of modern art, which exposed fundamental differences in their personalities. Junior seemed to be unnerved by the outlaw, bohemian side of modern art, its free experimentation with form and content. While he was stubbornly mired in the past, as if escaping the strife associated with his father's career and the Ludlow Massacre, Abby embraced change and responded to the freedom and spontanaeity of the new European art. She was enamored of German Expressionist paintings, with their bold colors, grotesque themes, and nightmarish sensuality. When she began to collect such works, Junior found them raw and harshly unappealing... For once heedless of her husband's wishes, Abby joined with Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Sullivan in 1929 to found the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which provided an outlet for the talents of many wealthy New York women. It was a brave act at a time when most Americans still sneered at such artistic innovation. At first, the museum rented gallery space in the Heckscher Building before moving to a West Fifty-third Street house owned by the Rockefellers. Even as the museum grew in popularity, Junior kept up his deprecating tone. "I showed Papa the pictures and the gallery today," Abby wrote to Nelson, "and he thinks that they are terrible beyond words, so I am somewhat depressed tonight." Filling the breach left by his father, Nelson was named chairman of the museum's Junior Advisory Committee in 1930 - he was only twenty-two and still in his last semester at Dartmouth - and ended up as its president.

Notwithstanding his hatred of modern art, Junior became the museum's chief benefactor, donating a total of six million dollars in endowment grants and land. So considerable was the Rockefeller largesse behind MoMA that one historian has written that "since the beginning" it has "been a Rockefeller responsibility, a protectorate, one might almost say."

This is what wealth can do, if you're the kind of person who wants to give it away. You can create something like MoMA because YOU have a PERSONAL interest in the new-fangled modern art. I was fascinated by that aspect of the Rockefeller legacy.

Titan is a grand accomplishment. I am so glad I read it.

Beware of Pity, by Stefan Zweig

I have Joan Acocella to thank for me even hearing of this great book. Her essay, "Quicksand", on Stefan Zweig, was included in the compilation of her work that I read last year, Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints. Known mainly for her writing on dance for The New Yorker and other publications, the book is a delight, because her interests are so wide and vast. Writers, critics, saints, dancers ... but it was her various articles on writers that really got my attention. She doesn't write about the usual suspects. Her interest is in the modernist era, early 20th century, with a focus on Austrian writers right around the fall of the Hapsburgs and World War I. My thoughts on her here.

Stefan Zweig is a familiar name to me, mainly because of his intersections with Joyce. He is one of those writers who was famous during his lifetime (he had to hide from his fans in Austria, he was that big there), but I knew nothing about the man until I read Acocella's essay (which was actually the foreword of the latest edition of Beware of Pity, released just a couple of years ago). I was riveted. A Jew living in Austria, he loved the Austrian Empire in which he lived. He felt it gave him some protection, as a Jew, and he saw the polyglot nature of the Empire to be a real example of the best in humanity: those with differences living side by side. Naturally, he was in for an extremely rude awakening in the 1930s, with the rise of Hitler (not to mention the Fall of Empire which had already occurred), and he found himself a hunted exile. He and his wife fled to Brazil. Acocella explains what happened next:

In 1941 Zweig and Lotte emigrated to Brazil, where they (and Zweig's income) would be safe from harm. Zweig also thought that in multiethnic Brazil he would find a happy, supranational society like that of the Austro-Hungary of his imagination. At first he seemed to adjust fairly well. He and Lotte settled in Petropolis, in the mountains outside Rio. He started a biography of Montaigne. He acquired a little dog, who, he wrote to Friderike, had won second prize in a beauty contest. He and the dog took walks every day, and he gazed at the fabulous vistas. But they were not his vistas; those were in Europe, being overrun by killers. On the night of February 23, 1942, he wrote a note of thanks to the people of Brazil and a salute to his friends: "May it be granted them yet to see the dawn before the long night! I, all too impatient, go on before." Then he and Lotte took an overdose of barbiturates. The next morning, they were found dead, in their bed, holding hands.

Whether or not the Austro-Hungarian Empire really was what Zweig thought it was is, in the end, irrelevant. It was the fantasy for him, the safe zone, the place of his childhood, his identity. Having that disappear, and having something so monstrous rise all around him directly following, was shattering.

He was a journalist and essayist, primarily, and Beware of Pity is a remarkable foray into fiction. Published in 1938, it takes place in a couple of years leading up the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo. Zweig knows that he is now writing about a world that has disappeared forever (some may say "thank GOD", but that was not Zweig's view). The downfall of Empire is in it, although it is never explicitly mentioned. If you want a portrait, sleepy and full of meaningless ritual propping up an edifice that is already crumbling, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire right before its fall, Beware of Pity would be an amazing place to start. Although it is, essentially, a domestic tale, a kind of effed-up twisted drawing-room romance of horror (Jane Austen on crystal meth), surrounding it is the world at large, the military maneuvers and gleaming by-rote ritual that seems to give an order and continuity to a crazy world. Zweig knows what is coming, and so do we, which is what gives the book such a creepy pallor.

Beware of Pity has a framing device, which distances us from the immediacy of the narration (part of Zweig's brilliance here). The narrator in the first chapter informs us straightaway:

The following story was related to me almost entirely in the form in which I here present it.

This narrator tells us of how he met a certain Anton Hofmiller at a restaurant in Vienna in the year 1937. The narrator (unnamed) writes:

Future historians of our epoch will one day record that in the year 1937 almost every conversation in every country of this distracted Europe of ours was dominated by speculation as to the probability or improbability of a new world war. Wherever people met, this theme exercised an irresistible fascination, and one sometimes had a feeling that it was not the people themselves who were working off their fears in conjectures and hopes, but, so to speak, the very air, the storm-laden atmosphere of the times, which, charged with latent suspense, was endeavouring to unburden itself in speech.

Our narrator learns that this man Hofmiller "won the Order of Maria Theresa in the war". Hofmiller and the narrator end up walking home from the restaurant together, and Hofmiller ends up confiding in the narrator that he does not see himself as a hero, he is incapable of accepting that he is heroic in any way, because of one specific experience he had in his life. Hofmiller asks the narrator:

I wouldn't mind telling you the whole story straight here and now... Have you time? And it wouldn't bore you, would it?

The narrator accepts, and then informs us:

... we paced up and down the now deserted streets far into the night. I have only made a few changes in his narrative ... changing the names of people and places. But in no instance have I added anything essential of my own invention, and it is not I but the man who lived the story who now narrates it.

The next chapter begins in the voice of Hofmiller, as he "related" this tale, years after the fact. This is a 19th century device, certainly (although one also thinks of the framing devices that Shakespeare sometimes used, reminding the audience that what they were seeing was a play within a play), and it seems to highlight Zweig's passion for journalism (which would require one to interview people and relate their tale back to a reader), but it is the topic of Hofmiller's tale that belongs firmly in the 20th century, and makes Beware of Pity one of the most important books of its time (and ours). It is shocking that it is not more well-known, but Zweig's reputation has suffered since his death, and he has fallen into obscurity (which is almost total, here in the United States. He is much more well-known in Europe, where you can read his stuff in the original, and not wait for translations). Joan Acocella has done us all a great service of bringing this author to the forefront. Beware of Pity has some clunky plot elements, but it is not its plot. It is a psychological masterpiece, unlike anything else I have ever read.

Hofmiller's story begins with a desultory description of his life in a small garrison town.

In November, 1913, the year when my story opens, some order or other must have passed from one department to another, for before you could say Jack Robinson our squadron was transferred from Jaroslau to another small garrison town on the Hungarian frontier. It is of no importance whether I call the little town by its right name or not, for two buttons on a uniform could not more closely resemble each other than does one Austrian provincial garrison town another. In one as in the other the same military establishments: barracks, a riding-school, a parade-ground, an officers' mess, and in addition three hotels, two cafes, a patisserie, a wine-bar, a dingy music-hall with faded soubrettes who, as a side-line, most obligingly divide their attentions between the regular officers and the volunteers. Everywhere soldiering entails the same busily empty monotony; hour after hour is mapped out in accordance with inflexible, antediluvian regulations, and even one's leisure does not seem to offer much in the way of variety. In the officers' mess the same faces, the same conversation; at the cafe the same games of cards and billiards. Sometimes one is amazed that the good God should trouble to give the six or seven hundred roofs of a little town of this sort the background of a different sky and a different countryside.

He grew up in the military, went to military school, has never been outside of his regiment. He is invited to a party at a local rich man's house, which is a welcome break from routine. The Kekesfalva home is a giant monstrosity standing on acres and acres of land, with a turret at the top (which ends up factoring horribly in the story), where all can be seen for miles around should you stand up there. Hofmiller, a naive youth, having grown up in the cloister of the all-male military world, is in awe of the grand house, and quite disoriented at the fact that there are women present. He is especially aware of Ilona, Kekesfalva's beautiful niece, and trembles when he is close to her. There is such softness and suppleness in the female body, he doesn't know how to handle it. The evening moves on, and he relaxes a bit, and then realizes, with horror (he is a very correct young fellow, never wanting to commit a breach of etiquette), that he never asked Edith, Kekesfalva's teenage daughter, to dance. It seems to him like a horribly rude thing, so he immediately goes to rectify this. She is sitting on the edge of the room, and he walks over to her, bows, and asks her to dance. The response he gets is horrific:

So I bowed again, my spurs jingling softly as I said: 'May I have this dance, gnädiges fräulein'

What now happened was appalling. The bowed head and shoulders jerked backwards, as though to avoid a blow; the blood came rushing to the pale cheeks; the lips, parted the moment before, were pressed sharply together, and only the eyes stared fixedly at me with an expression of horror such as I had never before encountered in my whole life. The next moment a shudder passed through the whole convulsed body. With both hands she levered, heaved herself up by the table so that the bowl on it rocked and rattled; and as she did so some hard object, either of wood or metal, fell clattering to the ground from her chair. She continued to hold on with both hands to the swaying table, her body, light as a child's, still shaking all over; yet she did not run away, she clung more desperately than ever to the heavy table-top. And again and again that quivering, that trembling, ran through her frame, from the contorted, clutching hands to the roots of her hair. And suddenly there burst forth a storm of sobbing, wild, elemental, like a stifled scream.

Good grief, lady, if you don't want to dance with the guy, why don't you just say so?

Turns out, that, unbeknownst to poor Hofmiller, young Edith Kekesalva is crippled, with braces on her legs, and so by asking her to dance, he has committed an unpardonable gaffe. When he realizes his error, he is horrified. Horrified first of all that he has been so clumsy and idiotic, but later, the feeling of remorse is overwhelming, he cannot bear the thought that he, unknowingly, hurt somebody. He tries to rectify it the following day by sending Edith flowers.

Strange things start to stir in Hofmiller's heart in the days following the party at the Kekesalva's. He gallops his horse with his regiment, and suddenly becomes aware of the turret at the big house, and knowing that Edith sometimes goes up there to look around, feels suddenly, strangely guilty, at the fact that he is healthy, when she is not. How dare HE gallop by her house? How dare he hurt her even further?

Hofmiller is invited to come visit Edith, and he leaps at the chance. He can make it up to her.

Zweig is brilliant in the ways he makes Edith an annoying and querulous character, at times pathetic, at times aggressive. It plays on the reader's preconceptions about "invalids", and how invalids should be grateful and retiring. They should not "use" their illness as an excuse, they should not try to guilt us into things. But naturally, they do. Edith seems sweet and young, a true victim, but slowly, through Hofmiller's interactions with her, her other sides are seen. Tantrums, the way she artfully guilts people into doing her bidding, but all with tears in her eyes, so that she sits behind a cloud of plausible deniability. She says things like, "Don't you think I wish I could walk? Do you think I enjoy this?"

By the end of the book, the perverted truth is that Edith gets off on her invalid status, she needs it, otherwise she couldn't be the dominant force in the room. She wouldn't know what to do with herself if she were healthy. But all of this is presented in a sneakily creepy fashion, with Hofmiller getting more and more tied to this girl, and this household, through his own sense of pity for Edith. The title should give us a clue as to what Zweig thinks about pity.

Acocella writes:

In Beware of Pity, what feels true are the scenes in which we are shown the futility of pity. This is a horrible lesson; it is also what makes the book radical and modern.

Hofmiller has become a man (he believes), a man with a soul and a moral compass, for the first time in his life, because the pity he feels for Edith has brought him out of himself. It is a glorious sensation, debasing at times, but even the debasing provides a kind of swandive into deep feeling for others. He believes that the pity he feels is its own reward, and the fact that he can help Edith bear up under her illness, and give her some moments of forgetfulness through playing chess with her, making her laugh, he feels that that will be a good deed. He does not see the trap he has set for himself. He does not understand that Edith is not what she presents herself to be.

Slowly, she emerges as one of the most grotesque characters I can ever remember encountering. She plays on Hofmiller. She is smarter than everyone else. She knows she "has" them, because their pity enslaves them. She knows how to keep people on her side. She throws a tantrum, and then writes Hofmiller a pleading letter, begging him to understand how hard it is for her. Hofmiller is putty in her hands. He is not in love with her. He does not realize that he is playing with fire. He is too in love with his own ongoing experience of pity for another human being. He must get his fix. Zweig writes about his journey with an urgency that is in direct contrast to the complacent sleepy army boy in the first chapter. Gratitude is a drug. He feels that he has transformed the Kekeslava household. This is not delusional on his part. The family overwhelms him with gratitude, with how much he is "helping" poor Edith bear her horrible illness.

Slowly, inevitably, it starts to become smothering. Expectations are involved. Pity comes with a promise. If Hofmiller doesn't show up at their house at the appointed time, they send a messenger looking for him. The whole household gets involved. The chauffeur, the maid ... When Hofmiller arrives, his favorite cigarettes are laid out for him. He is an honored guest.

What he cannot see, at first, is how much HE is getting out of it. He feels selfless, for the first time, but he is actually doing all of this for selfish reasons, because of what it gives HIM. Zweig's view is deeply cynical, and puts all kinds of things like charity and do-gooders into sharp relief, making you see it in a potentially new and disturbing way. It is a relentless book, brutal, with events racing horribly to a disastrous conclusion. Hofmiller becomes insufferable. He feels that he holds the whole world, in its pain and misery, in his heart. He, alone, has feelings for others.

Hofmiller says:

All of a sudden, too, I found I could no longer stand the ribald jokes in the officers' mess at the expense of clumsy or awkward comrades; ever since I had realized in the person of the weak, defenceless Edith the torture of helplessness, I was revolted by any act of brutality and moved to pity by any form of helplessness. Countless trifling things that had hitherto escaped my attention I now noticed, ever since chance had squeezed into my eyes those first hot drops of sympathy; little, simple things, but each of them with the power to move and stir me deeply. It struck me, for instance, that the woman at the tobacconist's shop where I always bought my cigarettes held the coins that I handed to her remarkably close to the thick lenses of her spectacles, and I was immediately troubled by a suspicion that she might be suffering from cataract. The next day, I thought, I would ask her about it very tactfully and perhaps ask Goldbaum, our regimental doctor, to be so kind as to examine her. Or it occurred to me that the volunteers had of late been pointedly cutting that little red-haired chap K., and I remembered having seen in the newspaper (how could he help it, the poor lad?) that his uncle had been sent to prison for embezzlement; I made a point of sitting by him in the mess and entered into a lengthy conversation, immediately perceiving from his look of gratitude that he knew I was doing it simply to show the others how unsporting and caddish their behaviour was. Or I would put in a word for one of my troop whom the Colonel had ordered four hours' fatigue duty.

Again and again, day after day, I found fresh opportunities for indulging, trying out, this passion that had suddenly possessed me. And I said to myself: from now on, help anyone and everyone so far as in you lies. Cease to be apathetic, indifferent! Exalt yourself by devoting yourself to others, enrich yourself by making everyone's destiny your own, by enduring and understanding every facet of human suffering through your pity. And my heart, astonished at its own workings, quivered with gratitude towards the sick girl whom I had unwittingly hurt and who, through her suffering, had taught me the creative magic of pity.

The decay of Empire is in that passage. The downfall of certainty, which is why Zweig must be considered a modernist, although much of his perception is involved with looking back, longingly.

Edith's doctor, a Dr. Condor, arrives to examine his patient, and begins to perceive, almost immediately, that things are different, now that Hofmiller is in her life. He, however, sees it differently than the rest of the family, who think of it as a godsend. Edith seems so much better, doesn't she? Isn't it wonderful to hear her laugh, to see her look forward to things? Condor is a man whose own sense of compassion is so deep that he married a patient of his, a blind woman whom he had promised to regain her sight. When he failed, he could not live with it, and so married her instead. Yet, despite this, he sees the danger, where Hofmiller sees none. He offers Hofmiller this warning, in a private talk:

'[Pity] is a confoundedly two-edged business. Anyone who doesn't know how to deal with it should keep his hands, and, above all, his heat, off it. It is only at first that pity, like morphia, is a solace to the invalid, a remedy, a drug, but unless you know the correct dosage and when to stop, it becomes a virulent poison. The first few injections do good, they soothe, they deaden the pain. But the devil of it is that the organism, the body, just like the soul, has an uncanny capacity for adaptation. Just as the nervous system cries out for more and more morphia, so do the emotions cry out for more and more pity, in the end more than one can give. Inevitably there comes a moment when one has to say, "No", and then one must not mind the other person's hating one more for this ultimate refusal than if one had never helped him at all. Yes, my dear Lieutenant, one has got to keep one's pity properly in check, or it does far more harm than any amount of indifference - we doctors know that, and so do judges and myrmidons of the lawn and pawnbrokers; if they were all to give way to their pity, this world of ours would stand still - a dangerous thing, pity, a dangerous thing! You can see for yourself what your weakness has done ... You take on yourself a confounded amount of responsibility when you make a fool of another person with your pity. An adult person must consider, before getting himself mixed up in such a thing, how far he's prepared to go - there must be no fooling about with other people's feelings ... Pity - that's all right! But there are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another's unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one's own soul against the sufferings of another; and the other, the only kind that counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond. It is only when goes on to the end, to the extreme, bitter end, only when one has an inexhaustible fund of patience, that one can help one's fellows. Only when one is prepared to sacrifice oneself in doing so - and then only!'

Hofmiller resists this message.

Most people resist this message. I myself resisted when I first read it. I realized, as I read on, that my resistance (as so often happens) came from recognition. An awful recognition of self in those words. I could not deny it. I know that feelings. Like I said, gratitude is a drug. Drugs disorient. It is hard to understand what is happening when one is under the sway of pity and gratitude. Reading this book dovetailed in a startling way with my thoughts on generosity and reciprocity, which I have written about at length. Generosity without expectation of reciprocity is nothing but an empty gesture, hoping that you will be filled by the gratitude of others. This is why you see so many perpetually cranky people who work in the social services industry. Not all of them, let us not forget, but many of them. Generosity without expectation of reciprocity creates martyrs. Long-suffering "look how much I do for others" kind of people. The kind of people who are cranky, always, because people are not grateful ENOUGH. "Don't they see how much I do for them??"

Beware of Pity is allll about that.

Acocella writes:

That analysis of compassion is one of the book's foremost contributions, but any psychoanalyst could have done it. What only Zweig could have created are the scenes between Hofmiller and Edith: the concrete, subtle, and hair-raising enactments of ambivalence, hers as she vacillates between appealing to his pity and asking for his love, his as he is torn between solicitude and recoil. Late in the novel, during one of his visits, she finds his attentions insufficient. She starts to have one of her first, and to allay it, he places his hand on her arm ... [She] moves his hand to her heart and begins caressing it:

There was no avidity in this fervent stroking, only serene, awe-struck bliss at being allowed at last to take fleeting possession of some part of my body ... I enjoyed the rippling of her fingers over my skin, the tingling of my nerves - I let it happen, powerless, defenceless, yet subconsciously ashamed at the thought of being loved so infinitely, while for my part feeling nothing but shy confusion, an embarrassed thrill.

The image of Hofmiller standing there awkwardly as Edith fondles his captured hand, the sheer, no-exit suffocation of the situation: the great psychologists of love (Stendahl, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Turgenev) never went further than this. The scene combines their moral knowledge with a kind of neurotic, subdermal excitement reminiscent of Schnitzler, a friend of Zweig's and another legatee of Freud. Nothing in the book is more striking than its sustained, morbid tension: the nervous laughter, the drumming fingers, the moments of happiness that convert in an instant to fury and grief, with the cutlery suddenly thrown onto the plates. Like Hofmiller, the reader is dragged down, by the neck.

Indeed.

Neuroses have never been so clearly put out, so undefended, so selfish and self-involved, so damn blind that the cataclysm cannot be seen approaching.

One of the chilling results of the book is that Edith, a housebound tormented teenage girl, someone we should sympathize with, becomes, with the haunting "tap-tap-tap" of her cane coming down the hall (slowly we begin to dread hearing that sound), a ghoul out of a fairy tale. We want to tell Hofmiller, "Run for your life. Get out. So you hurt her feelings by asking her to dance. You apologized. That's it. You owe her NOTHING else." My heart grew colder and colder towards this woman as I read. I grew more and more impatient with her, until I actively despised her, and wanted to smack her across her entitled little whiny face.

The book brings out the ugly. It is like the skin has finally broken, the poison allowed to come to the surface. Considering the fact that Zweig wrote this in Vienna, in 1937-38, it is not difficult to see the metaphor at work here. The awfulness of it, the fever, the buildup, the tension ... Edith, a living girl in a garrison town, only comes alive when she knows she dominates others, through the powerful emotion of their pity.

Zweig acts like a scientist here, placing the human race, and this one aspect of it (its supposedly healing and good capacity for compassion and empath) under a microscope. He does not like what he sees.

Brilliant book. Brutal.

Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin

Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale works as a philosophical contemplation of hard-to-grasp ephemeral things as: time, winter, the growth of cities, love, death, progress, language, machines. It is also a story about New York, at the turn of two centuries (and the turn of one millennium). It is about the anxiety and upheaval of time, and how a culture may react, spontaneously, and as one, to such invisible mainly unfelt markers in a universal clock. And on the ground level, Winter's Tale gives us ranks of unforgettable characters, people I will never forget: Peter Lake, the orphan boy grown up to be a burglar in Belle Epoque-era New York City. Pearly Soames, the sociopathic leader of the Short Tails Gang, who steals things only because he is obsessed with colors: gold, peacock, gilded feathers, he is dazzled by them all. Beverly Penn, the consumptive teenage daughter of a newspaper mogul, who falls in love with Peter Lake, after catching him trying to rob their mansion. Mrs. Gamely, a homespun woman, a good cook, who also has an impenetrably complex vocabulary, who lives in a cottage in a mysterious frozen town called Lake of the Coheeries, north of New York City. The white horse, Athansor, whose episode of escaping from his stable in Brooklyn opens the book. Athansor is the key to it all. His connection is with Peter Lake, and through that connection, all are connected - no matter what era. There are evil political bosses, and cranky op-ed columnists and managing editors of the two rival papers in New York City, there is a mayoral race which ends up being definitive in terms of the future of the bright city, and meanwhile, the winters are apocalyptic, shutting everything down. Everyone wonders if it has to do with the mysterious whirling white cloud wall that surrounds the city. Nobody knows what the cloud wall is. It sometimes picks up the sun, glinting with gold, and the wall reaches up into the atmosphere. Sometimes it sweeps over New York City, and when that happens, chaos breaks loose. But for the most part, the white cloud wall surrounds the city, a barricade, and people often forget its existence. In the 20th century section of the book, people have become so accustomed to the cloud wall, that they don't "believe" in it anymore. Nobody even sees it. But maybe the cloud wall is a clue? To why the winters are so bad? To why the city is in turmoil?

Helprin writes in sometimes a lush prose about New York City, making it seem like a Never-Never-Land of beauty and possibility. His writing reminds me so much of Walt Whitman's, with its sweeping observations about things like crowds, and sunrise, and bridges. Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" has to be an enormous influence on Helprin, with not only its everyday images of commuters on the ferry, staring at the city, but also its vision of time and the future, Walt Whitman squinting into the space-time continuum for those who will follow him.

Closer yet I approach you,
What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you - I laid in my stores in advance,
I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.

Starting this book was a daunting experience. First of all, it is almost 800 pages long. Second of all, it comes so highly recommended by my friends Ted and Mitchell (and everyone who has read it also says stuff like, "It's one of my favorite books of all time") that it's intimidating to leap in. Thirdly, I have owned it for YEARS, so it's one of those "perpetually unread" books on my shelves that end up kind of haunting me, looking at me like, "So. You ever gonna deal with me or what?" And fourthly: I haven't read a novel since 2008. Fiction has been really challenging for me. Reading itself has been challenging for me, since my nervous breakdown last year. But fiction has seemed self-indulgent (for the first time in my life). It held no appeal. Well, thankfully, that is all over now. I'm back. Sheila's back!!

My taste in literature has always been towards the books that challenge. I've written about "beach reads" before, and how it is assumed that people want to read "easy" books on the beach, and while that may be true for the general population (it must be!), it is not true for me (and for many other people I know). When I have time (as I did in January on the Island), I gravitate towards the big, the difficult. Only the difficult truly engages me in a type of forgetfulness and fantasy that I look for in fiction. Winter's Tale is not challenging in the same way that, oh, Ulysses is, but it is challenging in the way that War and Peace is. It's big. It's comprehensive. It's deeply thoughtful. You cannot skim it. It demands things OF you. YOU must succumb to IT. There are probably a hundred main characters, and you leap around, from one to the other, and slowly, as each page turns, you start to feel the tapestry of the book, the interconnections, and it's one of the most exhilirating reads I have had in a long time, for that reason. It's rare that a book gives me actual goosebumps. This one did. It's similar to the last page of The Shipping News, which slayed me and left me in a puddle on the ground the first time I read it. I resisted even reading it, because I didn't want the book to end, and it's one of those moments in literature which is rare nowadays, when the style is much more ironic, with writers resisting the grand gesture. The scope of the book expanded, the scope of its emotional impact, Proulx did not let me off the hook, she forced me to go there. She forced me to realize what it was I had REALLY been reading, in that quirky weird story of Newfoundland and wind and misfits and miscreants. She forced me to see the theme. She was brave enough to state her theme, and to do so in the last page of the book? Balls. True balls.

Quoyle experienced moments in all colors, uttered brilliancies, paid attention to the rich sound of waves counting stones, he laughed and wept, noticed sunsets, heard music in rain, said I do. A row of shining hubcabs on sticks appeared in the front yard of the Burkes' house. A wedding present from the bride's father.

For if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.

That's an ending that you need to earn. Annie Proulx does.

Helprin does as well.

In the beginning chapters in the book, he tosses all of the balls into the air. It takes almost 800 pages for all of them to land. What ends up happening, as a reader, is that you get sucked in, here, there, you get captivated by the scenes you are presented with, and from time to time, you remember: "Oh yes. This is in reference to the gold carriers from chapter 3." "Oh yes. This is about the horse again." "Oh yes. Now we go back to the Penn family." Helprin doesn't miss a beat. There is no episode that drags, no character that jars. I was thinking a bit of Don Delillo's failed masterpiece Underworld, and how he must have been thinking (on some subconscious level perhaps) of Winter's Tale, and that that was the kind of story he wanted to tell. Multiple characters and times, huge span, and, underlying it, a deeply thought-out rumination on America, New York, and the time in which we live. There are times when Delillo is deeply successful, but overall the book did not work for me. The opening sequence, the baseball game, is as good as it gets, in terms of writing, and the book never quite lives up to that opening, which was a disappointment to me (I love Don Delillo). I believe he was going for the same effect as Helprin, and Delillo is an incredible writer, which just goes to show you how difficult the task Helprin set before him, and how 100% successful he is on every count. It is not self-indulgent, it does not overly complicate things, it does not go off on tangents: each episode dovetails back into the whole, and although the whirling white cloud wall may not be mentioned for pages at a time, you always feel its smothering presence. You never stop wondering about it. What is it?? And what might be out there, in the world, that is working on me, without me even realizing it? Don't we all have a whirling cloud wall, to some degree? Helprin makes the bold move of having it be an actual physical phemonenon, not some collective unconscious fantasy, but the real deal. There IS a cloud wall around Manhattan. There always has been. Sometimes it recedes, sometimes it surges forth (usually around the turn of centuries and millennia, apparently), but it is always there. Why?

What are we, as a culture, not paying attention to?

Winter's Tale examines those questions. To Mark Helprin, the universe is a place of wonder and pain, where things make sense. Not in a neat tied-up kind of way, but in Vaclav Havel's sense of it, when he said:

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

It is a redemptive view, but difficult. Everything happens for a reason, or so the idiots say, but what is the reason? Could it be bigger than anything we had ever imagined? Helprin believes that nothing goes away. In a classical sense, his is a conservative viewpoint (strip the current-day meaning of that word, if possible, although that means basically going back to Edmund Burke to get what I mean when I say that word). Things may be destroyed, and that is a shame, but nothing goes away. The fact that two forgotten people at the end of the 19th century met and fell in love is not nothing, even if nobody remembers them at the end of the 20th century. Such an emotion, such an experience, is like matter, which cannot be destroyed. It affects us today. Love cannot be destroyed. It exists, in between the molecules, in the atmosphere, adding to the collective experience of the human race. THIS is what Mark Helprin is about. In the same way that certain landscapes hold the memory of what happened there, wars, battles, fires, even if there is no record of the cataclysm, the human race holds the memory of all who have managed to love, connect, grow, live well, transcend, even in the midst of the worst horrors. It is not nothing. In Mark Helprin's world, these things, events, past history, don't just live in a metaphorical way, as in "she will live on forever in our hearts" - no, it is much more literal than that. They ACTUALLY live.

He takes as his canvas New York City, and one of the greatest gifts of the book is that it has made me see where I live in a new way. Now I am one of those people who loves history, and is always looking for evidence of the city that once was here, and now is no longer. I even remember some of it, because the changes have been so drastic in the last 20 years. I love the ghost-signs on the sides of old buildings, the old-fashioned signage which is quickly disappearing from the landscape, the beauty of the buildings built a century ago, and how our gleaming skyscrapers may be awe-inspiring, but they can't hold a candle to those old buildings, in their ornate glamour and poetry. There is a world running alongside the current world, even in New York where things are torn down and built up repeatedly, where you can get glimpses, where it is not just as though you are looking through a glass at another era, but where the other era seems to swim up from the depths towards you, and stands side by side with the modern world. Sorta like Kate & Leopold, if you will. Winter's Tale takes place in a space where such things are possible.

Like I mentioned, Helprin's vision of the world (at least in this book) is, ultimately, redemptive, but not without a price. The book was written in 1983, so the "1999" section was about the, at that time, near-future. It's not a futuristic book, it doesn't read that way, and much of the world in 1999 resembles the world in 1899, although the "towers" are mentioned (not by name). There are a couple of interesting moments when you realize, wow, 1983 ... For example: in one of the sections about the major newspaper rivalry going on in Manhattan, one of the papers is described as having offices in all of these major countries, including "The Soviet Union". Who could have predicted that a mere six years after Winter's Tale was written there would be no "Soviet Union" anymore? Additionally, the 1999 in Winter's Tale is curiously devoid of computers, although one is mentioned, except that it is more of a giant government-owned information database, and you have to drive to Connecticut to access it, and it costs millions of dollars to operate it. None of this anachronizes the book, however, because it all does seem to take place in a sort of time-out-of-time, or, more accurately, a river of time, where you dip into one era, dip into another, and it's not so important to recognize your own time, or what Helprin "got right" or "didn't", because that's not where the power of the book lies.

One of the best parts of Winter's Tale is that it gave me "scenes" unlike anything I have ever seen in any book, in life, in theatre, movies. So specific, so fantastical, that they could only have come from the expansive imagination of one man. Here are some of the things I have never seen before, but now I have, thanks to the magic of Mark Helprin's pen:

-- a white whirling cloud wall around Manhattan, with waves breaking against it
-- Peter Lake sleeping in a little compartment above the Grand Central Station green ceiling of stars
-- Meeting of thieves in the underground water tunnels of New York City
-- A white stallion galloping through a vaudeville burlesque theatre
-- Handmade human-catapult contraption made to vault two people over a raging river in Yellowstone
-- Train frozen in the snow
-- Drift of snow spanning the Hudson River, 1000 feet high. People have to climb up and over the drift, like an ice-climber on Everest, just to get through. On the top of the wall, New York can be seen in the distance
-- The Hudson River frozen over completely, with thousands, hundreds of thousands, of tents pitched across the ice
-- The Short Tails Gang, terrifying, murderous, all on ice skates, chasing Peter Lake, down the frozen Hudson River
-- Legions of consumptive people, all sleeping on their rooftops, trying to freeze the disease out of their lungs

These are just a few examples. Each section of the book had some indelible image to implant in my brain forevermore. I will never forget the "Lake of the Coheeries", the frozen (in terms of it being winter, and in terms of it being frozen in time) town north of New York. I will never forget the raucous "oyster bar", populated by thieves and prostitutes, in an underground cavern somewhere beneath the streets of Manhattan. I will never forget the image of the "machine display" in Madison Square Garden, the pistons and gears and mechanical motions that catapulted Peter Lake into the knowledge that he was a mechanic. I will never forget the stone bathtub at the Penn mansion where Peter Lake and Beverly would embrace and swim, before the fever overtook her and she was done for the night. I am forever grateful to Mark Helprin for showing me these things from his beautiful dreamspace, because now they are mine. Forever.

They are not nothing. Nothing goes away. Even things of the mind, the imagination, the dream, are important information to have as we try to navigate our way through the world.

There is more to say. The prophetic nature of the book, in terms of September 11th, has not really been addressed, and I don't remember it being mentioned in the wake of that awful day, at least not in the same way that E.B. White's essay was, repeatedly, with its dread-making phrases of vision and prophesy:

The city, for the first time, in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island of fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

E.B. White wrote those chilling words in 1948.

In the wake of September 11th, I heard them quoted again and again. He was right. He was right. Mark Helprin was right, too, in more ways than one (he got the destruction wrong by one year - he put it in 2000, not 2001), but I didn't see his book bandied about in the same way as E.B. White's essay. For whatever reason, his deeply beautiful and haunting poem to New York City escaped resurrrection.

But it remains indestructible.

As the city does. Which appears to me to be one of Helprin's messages. Burn it down, go ahead. You will not destroy what is here. You can destroy the buildings but ultimately New York, like all cities, is an idea before it is a place, and ideas, like matter, cannot be destroyed. As a New Yorker, as someone who loves this place, his book brought me to tears of love, which is a very strange thing, and a very beautiful thing. It is not every day that a writer comes along who reminds you to love your home. To look around and value not just what it is, but what it has been, what it started out as, and what it will always be.

Manhattan, a high narrow kingdom as hopeful as any that ever was, burst upon him full force, a great and imperfect steel-tressed palace of a hundred million chambers, many-tiered gardens, pools, passages, and ramparts above its rivers. Built upon an island from which bridges stretched to other islands and to the mainland, the palace of a thousand tall towers was undefended. It took in nearly all who wished to enter, being so much larger than anything else that it could not ever be conquered but only visited by force. Newcomers, invaders, and the inhabitants themselves were so confused by its multiplicity, variety, vanity, size, brutality, and grace, that they lost sight of what it was. It was, for some, one simple structure, busily divided, lovely and pleasing, an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built.

A masterpiece of the 20th century.

2009 Books Read

A pathetic showing when you consider how much I normally read (2008, 2007, 2006, 2005), but whatever, I did what I could. I did not read a book, not one word, from about March to August. Or, that's probably wrong - I am already remembering 2009 wrong. I know I didn't read at all from January until about March. Then I had a small burst, which abruptly fell off in around June and then months passed before I read again. It is very strange to not be reading. But here is my paltry tally for 2009.

1. Necessary Sins, by Lynn Darling. Don't miss it. Excerpts here, here, here, and here.

2. Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays (Vintage), by Joan Acocella. Loved every word. NOT TO BE MISSED. She brought me to Nureyev, and for that I am truly thankful. Excerpt here, here and here.

3. Vanity Fair's Tales of Hollywood: Rebels, Reds, and Graduates and the Wild Stories Behind the Making of 13 IconicFilms. Great stuff. And thank you, James Wolcott, for your continued support.

4. Cults in Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace, by Margaret Singer. I believe Siobhan gave this to me for Christmas. It's a brilliant and important book.

5. Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34, by Bryan Burroughs. Wonderful.

6. The Complete Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi. I know I'm behind the curve on this one, but this is definitely the best book I've read this year. Tears, guffawing out loud, outrage ... the book has it all. It's brilliant.

7. Young Stalin (Vintage), by Simon Sebag Montefiore. I can't get enough. Clearly.

8. Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry, by Leanne Shapton. Sent to me by dear cousin Mike to get me reading again ... it ended up being THE CONTEXT through which I went through the ridiculous white-hot-rage romantic situation I found myself in this year. EFF YOU, DOUCHE. Happy New Year. Post here. Thanks Mike for knowing just what I needed to hear.

10. Life with My Sister Madonna, by Christopher Ciccone. I read this while I was in LA. It is stupid and petty. Could not put it down.

11. 700 Sundays, by Billy Crystal. My dear friend Kate sent this to me. I have the best friends. A really emotional piece of work from Crystal, a true tribute to his parents. beautiful.

12. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, by Philip Zambardo. I am now obsessed with the Stanford Prison Experiment for all time. Great book.

13. Nureyev: The Life (Vintage), by Julie Kavanagh. READ IT. I DEMAND that you read it. A magnificent piece of work.

14. Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, by Robert Hare. A must-read for anyone interested in criminal psychology. MUST READ.

I was hoping to finish (or re-finish) Crime and Punishment this year, one of my favorite books, and a perfect jumping off point from Robert Hare's groundbreaking work. I have 40 pages to go and I just couldn't get it done. I've lost my mojo.

Crossing the Kalahari

I've written about Norman Rush's book Mating extensively. I will try not to repeat myself, and I'll just link to this post and call it a day, if you're interested to catch up. That pretty much covers my now decades-long relationship to this book. Recently, I pulled it out again, and I'm not sure why. But there's always a reason, with a book like this one. It's not like any other book, and it has provided context for me in tough times more than once. I have read it cover to cover maybe three full times now - not sure the exact number - and each time, I have clicked into it on a different wavelength. It doesn't appear to be the same book at all, each time I read it. Isn't that extraordinary when it happens?

I think the first time I read it, I was so upset by the ending (and I hesitate to say too much, because the book actually ends on a cliffhanger sentence - and up until that point, you have no idea which way it will go - and I wouldn't dream of ruining it) - but anyway, the first time I read it, the second to last section, called "Strife" - was so upsetting to me I don't think I even really processed what was happening. All I knew was that this relationship I had come to care so much about was being destroyed. It hurt to read. I wanted to shake Nelson Denoon out of his spell. I was totally on her side. I believe the second time I read the book, I had a similar response to the "Strife" section. I was still feeling that Denoon's remoteness, his conscious severing of their bond, seemed totally cruel, out of the blue, and man, what a waste. Couldn't he see what he was throwing away? But the third time I read it, ah, the third time, something else happened to me as I was reading that "Strife" section, and it seemed so new to me, that I couldn't believe I had actually read it before. Was this section even IN the book the last two times? How could I have MISSED what was REALLY going on? Suddenly, I could see what was happening (and it's funny - if I read the book again, I'm sure I'll have yet another response to this section - it's a crucial section, the key to the whole thing) - I was still upset that this relationship was crumbling, and in such an awful way - but ... I felt something larger, something more important, hovering on the outskirts of all the talk about the relationship. I wasn't sure what it was, but it seemed crucial. It seemed to actually have NOTHING to do with this one relationship, but a real struggle between man and his own mortality, and also man and God. And this, oh this, was NOT something that the narrator could stand. Fine, cheat on me, I don't care. Smack me upside the head. I'll deal with it. Shut me out of your heart, fine, that's fine. But have a religious experience that shows you the face of God in the middle of the desert? Oh no no NO, this cannot stand. She believes he has gone mad. He believes he has finally found his sanity. It is irreconcilable.

And of course, he would have this epiphany of eternity while stranded in the desert. The desert that he feels he knows, and has conquered to some degree. But suddenly, in my last reading, I saw that there was something lacking in her. In HER. She could not "go there" with him. She does not respect that which cannot be KNOWN. I mean, it's interesting from an anthropological standpoint, but to live with it? To live with the knowledge that there is so much that CANNOT be known? It's not just that she finds this intolerable, but that she also has contempt for it. She doesn't RESPECT it, and in my last reading of the book, that was ALL that I could see in the Strife section. I wanted to shake HER, and say, "Just let him have his epiphany, please! Why can't you just ACCEPT it? You're ruining EVERYTHING."

Now that is a great book that can give me two polar opposite responses in two separate readings.

"Strife", the section, reminds us - especially us cerebral types - that there is so much you cannot know. To some of us, this is intolerable.

Briefly some backstory: (and some of the details are lost to me): Nelson Denoon is a brilliant controversial anthropologist, who has created a "utopia" (look out) in the middle of the Kalahari Desert, in Botswana. He thinks that two things could free Africa from the poverty and disease it struggles under: solar energy, and the economic freedom of women. So he has created a solar-powered utopia, where women have all the power - and he presides over the whole thing like a benevolent dictator, advising, standing back, suggesting, organizing. Our unnamed female narrator (it's a first-person book) is an anthropologist as well, stranded in Africa, after her dissertation turned out to be a bust. She is sort of at odds, wondering what to do with her life, being vaguely promiscuous and hanging out in the capital of Gaborone, disgusted with her lack of purpose and drive. She feels cursed, academically. She feels mediocre. To make a long long story short, she encounters Nelson Denoon (a legend to her, already) at a party in Gaborone, and - on multiple levels she is drawn to him. Her soul reaches out to his, all that jazz - BUT it's more complicated than that. She feels somehow that he can help her. Help her with what? Her career? Yes, possibly. He is an anthropologist who is actually DOING something OUTSIDE of academia - she wants in. However, she is not allowed in. The project is for Africans only. Her presence would not be welcome there. Denoon disappears from the party, after haranguing a group of men in the back about socialism and solar power and economics - and the narrator can't stop thinking about him. She must get to him. She is not invited, remember. And nobody knows the way to this utopia (which is called Tsau). It's in the middle of a featureless desert. But where? There must be food drop-offs, right? Could she bribe someone in the World Food Program to drop her off with the maize and sorghum? She runs into dead-ends everywhere. What Denoon has created is on the edge of the law, and nobody wants to take responsibility for it. The government, the volunteers, even the missionaries - who basically know everything there is to know about what goes on in Botswana. She starts to become desperate. She MUST get to Tsau. She is now operating under instinct only. She has had one or two brief intense conversations with Denoon, an intimidating very busy guy. He has told her, point-blank, "No. I don't need your help at Tsau. It would be quite awkward if you came. The project is still in the beginning stages, and I really need to protect it from outside influence." Our narrator takes this in, fine, fine, I understand, but begins to make her plans to cross the desert anyway, to look for this mythical female utopia. It's so inappropriate! He doesn't WANT you there, hon!

She doesn't care. She NEEDS to be there. She needs to be there because
1. She has a huge crush on him, and something in her needs him - it's pheromonal
2. She wants to know how things work in this world, and she wants to get close to the sources of power - Denoon is a source of power, and also INFORMATION - she is all about INFORMATION
3. She's ready to actually up the ante in her own career. Enough with being marginal and safe. She wants a little danger.

Her trek across the desert gives her a little more than she bargained for, even with her strenuous planning. She puts together a map, based on her various conversations with people who have heard about Tsau and think they know where it is. She buys two donkeys. She is going to walk there, because there are no roads to Tsau, basically. She also needs to keep her expedition a secret. A foolhardy thing to do when you are about to set off on a dangerous mission. If she died out there, she would die without a trace, and no one would know where she had disappeared to. But she doesn't want her expedition to somehow be foiled by those in power who don't want her out there. There are "wells" that are marked throughout the desert, certain deserted outposts, where you can have pitstops and get water. She has marked those clearly. She is terrified of lions. She takes precautions. It is important to remember that this is not some silly indoor-girl heiress starting out blindly into the wild. Our narrator has just spent 18 months in the bush, by herself, working on her dissertation. She has lived in Africa now for a couple of years. She's not an idiot. She takes all the precautions you should take, and she is familiar with the risks. She is used to living outside, to camping, and she estimates that her journey will take her four days (if Tsau is where it is supposed to be, that is). It ends up taking her "six-plus or seven-plus days" - she begins to lose track of time, and a day or so is lost in her memory.

This is early on in the book. We know she is driven to see what the hell Nelson Denoon is up to out there in the desert. We also know that she is not quite sure what it is she is doing.

Her expedition is an entire section in the book. Norman Rush (very much like his narrator) doesn't skip over anything. Every moment of that terrible expedition is spelled out - her disintegrating mental capacity, the soul-destroying work she has to do to get a mere cupful of water out of this rusted well, her fears, her worries about going to the bathroom, her concerns for the donkeys she has bought, etc. But more than that: it is experiential. And Rush lets his writing be experiential too. I live that expedition with her.

It becomes a metaphor for love, without ever explicitly saying so. What are we willing to do for love? How far are we willing to go? If we know what it is that we NEED (not want, but NEED) - are we courageous enough to pursue it? To risk our lives for it?

At some point during her harrowing journey, she realizes, "This is the stupidest thing I have ever done, and if I die, no one will feel sorry for me, and rightly so." It's like people who die trying to climb Mount Everest. It's sad for their families, of course, but it's not a tragedy, because you have no business being up there in the first place. Be glad you died doing something you love! This is the life of an adventurer.

The most interesting part, now, about this whole expedition section, is that if she had really been paying attention, the fact that Nelson Denoon would have experienced a psychic crack after a week alone in the desert would not have surprised her. Because she experienced it too. It's just that she processed it differently, created a different narrative for HER experience. But it's there all along. Her capacity for understanding and connection is there - it's just that she gives it a different name.

And THAT is their tragedy.

Here are some excerpts from her expedition:

A Brief Mania

...
On the second day the terrain changed. There were long dips and rises. I let the boys graze liberally anytime they seemed inclined. Around noon I had my first phenomenological oddity, having to do with light. It came suddenly. There was a surplus of light. I felt I was getting too much light, despite the fact that I was wearing sunglasses that were practically black. The sky was cloudless. An irrational sign or proof that there was too much light was that I thought I could detect a barely visible flicker in the sky just above the horizon. I tried to push this whole subject out of my consciousness, but it persisted. I thought it might be low blood sugar speaking, so I ate some raisins. Peculiar ideation about light continued.

My sunglasses began to feel heavy and irritating. They were preventing something significant from happening. I developed the conviction that they were keeping me from seeing the real colors of the Kalahari and that this was hazardous for me. I would be in danger unless I recharged my sense of the real colors of things by taking my glasses off at some regular interval. I yielded to this notion, mainly in order to exhaust it, but each time I pushed my glasses up onto my forehead I had a stronger sense of some suppressed vibration going on in the landscape which I would be able to see clearly if I looked more intently and for a longer period the next time. This is brain chemistry, I said, and squatted down and hung my head between my knees. I got up, pulled the visor of my kepi down tight, put my glasses back on, and thought about the hunchbacks of Kang.

I was then all right for twenty minutes, until the mania came back reformulated as the proposition that if I actually got rid of my sunglasses, and only if, I would be able to see the true and fundamental color of nature. I was to understand that what we perceive as beautiful individual colors are only corruptions and distortions of the true color of reality, which is ravishing and ultimate and apprehensible only in extremely rare circumstances. This was not a question of hallucination. It was analogous to dream knowledge, but different: I knew that for some reason at some deep level I was doing this to myself. But still I was tempted to act. I said aloud things like This is about self-injury, This is about self-worth, What are we to ourselves? and other pop-psych trash. The experience was strange in every way. Was I trying to get myself to turn around and go back to Kang before it was too late, because navigating in the Kalahari without sunglasses is one thing for Bushmen who have presumably been adapting their vision to a surplus of light for millennia and another thing for a lakhoa already in a state of anxiety? On any trip like mine there's a point of no return. So was this some ideational response to the fact, which I was already having to fight to repress, that I was over my head? Had my brilliant unconscious chosen the one thing that if discarded would virtually disable me for making the long trip to Tsau but be manageable for a quick retreat back to Kang and safety? I think what broke the grip of this mania on me was firstly just hearing my own voice, whatever it was saying, and, secondly, remembering reading about someone who had been lost in the Kalahari and survived it reporting that he had had to get past a point when he experienced the desert as an organism or totality trying to get him to become part of it, as in surrender to it. This would make my sunglasses mania an analog of the feeling people lost in the Arctic get that they would be more comfortable if they took off their caps and mittens. The mania left, also suddenly, and we went on uneventfully.

That night I did everything right. I wore myself out collecting enough wood for a ring fire, got us all set up inside it, went into my tent, and closed my eyes, and immediately there were lions in the neighborhood. There may have been only one. I heard a roar like no other sound on earth. I felt it in my atoms. This is my reward for taking precautions, was my first thought.

I made myself emerge. I peered around. My boys were standing pressed together and shaking pathetically. I looked for glints from lion eyes out in the dark but saw nothing. Everything I did I managed to do with one hand on the flap of my tent.

Again I went through my lion lore. Lions roar only after they've eaten, for example. The paradox is that ultimately I slept better that night than I had the night before. I fell asleep clutching my bush knife.

In the morning I found it hard to eat. There was terror in me. I could die in this place, it was clear.

I dawdled breaking camp because I wanted to give any lions there were a head start at getting torpid. Lions are torpid during the day, was a key part of my lore package.

Music

Anyone who thinks crossing the Kalahari by yourself is boring is deluded. It's like being self-employed in a marginal enterprise: there's always something you should be doing if your little business is going to survive. For example, you should always be lashing a stick around of you through the thicker grass to warn snakes to get back. But this isn't enough, because there are adders, who pay no attention to noise and just flatten themselves when they hear you coming, the better for you to step on them: so you have to be persistent about watching where you walk. Then you have to be careful not to walk directly under tree limbs without looking keenly to see if there are mambas or boomslangs aloft. You also have to keep resetting your level of vigilance, because your forearm muscles, the extensors in particular, begin to burn, the lashing motion being one you're totally unaccustomed to. In addition to which there is the sun to be careful about. I was keeping myself smeared with something I bought for three pula at Botschem that was supposed to be a strong sunscreen, but I was turning red in strips and patches anyway. And you have to be watchful for ticks. In only one way was I in luck and that was in regard to dehydration. This was mid-April, that is to say mid-autumn, and perfect walking weather. In summer you could expect to lose about three pounds of water in a day of walking in the full sun.

You do need mental self-management, though, as I'd already partially learned, to get through solitudes like the Kalahari successfully. Fear itself is not enough to fully sustain and occupy you. On the whole I think I did well, which would have amazed certain lightweight women at the American embassy whose name for me, I learned much later, was Party Lights, based on their interpretation of my way of life - lifestyle to them, no doubt - in Gabs.

I was nervous and so were my animals, postlion. I stumbled on singing as a means of calming them down. I was singing for myself, initially, and then noticed that it seemed to help the boys too, especially Mmo. This is ridiculous, but they seemed to prefer complete songs to fragments of songs strung together with humming. I discovered how few songs I knew in full and how few songs of the ones I did know I knew more than one verse of. I think I must have a more complete sense of my total song inventory than anyone else has of theirs, except for professional singers. I know roughly which songs I know only the choruses of. I know which songs I know but discovered I couldn't stand to sing in the desert, You Are My Sunshine being a prime example of a song I loathed suddenly to which I had never had any objection previously. And there are other songs you have sung only halfheartedly in the past which in the desert suddenly give you peace and seem indispensable, like Die Gedanken Sind Frei. You are astonished at the number of separate songs that have gotten fused together in your mind in some manner that makes it impossible to separate them, a la What do you want for breakfast my good old man? What do you want for breakfast my honey my lamb? Even God is uneasy say the bells of Swansea. And what will you give me say the bells of Rhymney? And there were songs I knew in full and perfectly but which I had no recollection of ever paying attention to when they were popular, like Heart of Glass, now a favorite of mine forever. Songs help when you're under duress, which is undoubtedly why the Boer geniuses of cruelty forbid people in solitary confinement to sing.

I was singing so continuously that I began to find I disliked it when I stopped - I disliked that ambience. I was briefly an aide in a nursery school for neglected children, and the best-adapted, happiest, and smartest children in the place were three sisters who had been taken from a mother who kept them chained to a radiator so they would be safe while she was out circulating, and who when I asked them what they did all the time when they were alone said We sang. The inspiriting effect my singing had on my animals was not an illusion, and it reminds me now of the period when I was feeling depressed at how commonplace and rudimentary my dreams were compared to Denoon's. He claimed to dream infrequently, but when he did, his dreams were like something by Faberge or Kafka in their uniqueness. He would have noetic dreams, and when they were over he would be left in possession of some adage or precept that tells you something occult or fundamental about the world. One of these was the conviction he woke up with one morning that music was the remnant of a medium that had been employed in the depths of the past as a means of communication between men and animals - I assume man arrow animal and not ducks playing flutes to get their point across to man. Living with me made him more provisional about his dreams, especially after I compared one of his adages to a statement some famous surrealist was left with after dreaming, which he thought important enough to print up: Beat your mother while she's still young. I would always make Denoon at least try to reduce his insights to a sentence or two. The fact is I laugh at dreams. They seem to me to be some kind of gorgeous garbage. I have revenge dreams, mainly, in which I tell significant figures from my past things like You have the brains of a drum. On I sang.

Is it absurd to be proud of your dreams, or not? Denoon was.

Poetry let me down. I elided into poetry from time to time and discovered that I knew a lot of it. My attitude toward rhymed poetry changed utterly. Respect was born. Except for Dover Beach there was almost nothing unrhymed in my inventory. I know quite a lot of Kipling. I know some Vachel Lindsay. Finally one stanza of Elizabeth Bishop got hold of me and kept inserting itself between pieces of other poems, truculently. It maddened me both by its tenacity and by what it said: Far down the highway wet and black, I'll ride and ride and not come back. I'm going to go and take the bus, and find someone monogamous. I used opera to drive this way.

Serious Trouble

Serious trouble began on the fourth or fifth day out. It happened because I was doing a thing I had been warned not to do in the desert: I was reviewing my life.

Thinking of Quoyle

The National Book Award is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, and there's an awesome blog set up to commemorate this, with authors writing up reviews of the Award-winners for each year. It's such a treasure trove of content and I am making my way through it slowly, trying not to read too much in one sitting.

Annie Proulx's The Shipping News was, of course, the winner in 1993. I have written before about how that book had become omnipresent in my life even before I had read it, and after I had read it, forget about it. I actually have never gone back to read it again, because my first experience reading it was so specific, so special and memorable, I'm afraid that all of that will change. Besides, entire set-pieces from the book are preserved in my mind, almost word for word, not to mention the last paragraph which I still cannot think about without remembering my response the first time I read it. That book cracked me open like a walnut.

Here is the entry from the National Book Award blog on Shipping News, with two wonderful essays - one from Bob Shacochis (I love his memories of Proulx, of that crazy time in both of their lives), and one from Mark Sarvas of The Elegant Variation, one of my daily blog-reads.

Not to be missed.

I wonder if I will ever read it in its entirety again. It is so representative to me not only of a certain time in my life, a certain season, but also my family, and what it means to be a part of my particular family (my parents finally got so frustrated with my not reading The Shipping News that they sent me my own copy - subtle!), and how grateful I am, and happy, and sad at the same time, that my family is what it is. The Shipping News always makes me think of family. It also makes me think of a man I was in love with in the mid-90s, who also seemed determined that I MUST read The Shipping News, and by the time I did get around to reading it, the situation between us had fallen apart, and so the book is so full (for me) of my grief and sadness in the aftermath, and how much I wanted to talk to him about the book, and why he had wanted me to read it, but by that point it was too late to ask him. It's a theme..

Powerful. Some books are just like that. They act as a kind of converging point, where all aspects of life dovetail. A book that seems personal. Not only were you reading it at a time that you remember very well, but the book itself seemed to have something specific to say to you - to YOU, specifically!

And here, with a clarity I can barely be with right now, is a section from the first chapter of The Shipping News:

At the university he took courses he couldn't understand, humped back and forth without speaking to anyone, went home for weekends of excoriation. At last he dropped out of school and looked for a job, kept his hand over his chin.

Nothing was clear to lonesome Quoyle. His thoughts churned like the amorphous thing that ancient sailors, drifting into arctic half-light, called the Sea Lung; a heaving sludge of ice under fog where air blurred into water, where liquid was solid, where solids dissolved, where the sky froze and light and dark muddled.

God almighty. Nobody like Proulx. I would recognize her writing in a dark alley.

Make sure you read the two essays about Shipping News.

Tour of bookshelves: The bookshelf on the south wall

This one handled the spill-over of fiction, and then I went full-on to my favorite books in my collection: all of my movie books, and then also my young adult books. That takes up the majority of the space.

The bookshelf in its entirety.

Top shelf. The end of the fiction. W to Y.

My entertainment biographies. I love that Duse sits next to Eminem. Now there's a pairing.

My "making of" books, a quickly growing collection.

Two exquisite awesome books sent to me by Pioneer Woman.

My over-sized art and movie art books.

My movie books.

Up to the top of the next shelf. Now we begin my awesome extensive YA collection!

Memoirs

Letters/Journals

Travelogues

Film criticism

Tour of bookshelves: The barrister bookshelf

My really only antique piece of furniture, this exquisite barrister bookcase is my most prized possession. I would definitely not feel right filling this with battered Stephen King paperbacks. I "save" this bookshelf for either my nice books - gifts from my father, and his friend Barry, my ever-growing Library of America collection, reference books, and then other things - like all my Joan Didion books. Although they are just paperbacks, they are precious to me. They keep me moving, keep me working. I keep them separate. For their good juju.

There's a randomness to the collection here. But that is good and right.

Every book in this precious shelf is dear to me. Not just as a book, but as an OBJECT.

The barrister bookshelf.

Library of America.

My collection of the American Presidents Series. I love these books.

Anne Fadiman. Joan Didion. My idols.

Books from Dad.

My nice hardcovers that I have collected over the years.

A collector's item worth God knows how much. Given to me by Barry, Dad's best friend. It's an original lithograph of Tennessee Williams by Everett Raymond Kinstler - signed by Williams himself - with a note to Barry on the back from Mr. Kintsler. A precious item.

Poetry.

Letters/Journals of Tennessee Williams - exquisite books

Reference / Shakespeare

All my LM Montgomery journals.

Tour of bookshelves: The bookshelf on the east wall

This is my biggest bookshelf. I thought: Okay, let's just load it up with all of my nonfiction and fiction. The heavy-hitters. Let's not try to cram them into the smaller shelf on the south wall, where they would have to be separated out, due to lack of space.

We ready?

Here we go.

Here is the damn shelf in its entirety.

That slimmer middle shelf is for my DVDs, so we'll save that for another day. I decided to put the nonfiction on the left hand side, fiction on right hand side.

So let's begin.

Top shelf, left-hand side:

History (world)

Second shelf:

More world history. Robert Kaplan and Ryzsard Kapusinski side by side. That strikes me as beautifully right.

Third shelf:

More world history

Fourth shelf:

Biography

Fifth shelf:

Biography

Founding Fathers biographies

Sixth shelf:

American history

Last shelf:

I started with adult fiction here.

Now to the top of the next shelf. Adult fiction continuing on, shelf after shelf after shelf.

To be continued.

Tour of bookshelves: The kitchen bookshelf

I wanted my major collection to be in my study, easy access. So. What to do with the random orphan bookshelf in the kitchen?

Just to give you an idea of my thought process: My life may be a mess but my books are always organized.

The organization works for me, although it may be a bit OCD for others. It is important to choose the RIGHT PLACE for a book, because if I shelve it with the wrong genre - I might never remember where it is. For example: Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad. It's not a memoir. It's not fiction. It's not "personal essays". It's really a travelogue, and I do have a travelogue section. I love good travel writing. But ... would I remember that I had shelved it in that section? I honestly spent about 20 minutes considering this conundrum. I finally decided: Okay, I probably will not remember that it's there if it's in that section, so let's just shelve it with TWAIN in adult fiction, alongside Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer (although technically, those are kids books - but again, I had to make some decisions there. I decided to put Twain in with the adults - and I decided to shelve Innocents Abroad, a book I LOVE and reference often - with Twain in fiction). I had a lot of that going on. I had to make compromises like that.

But let's take a look at my organizational process. Maybe you book-lovers will relate. I am sure you will!

Here, roughly, are the "genres" I located in my vast collection:

-- History (world)
-- History (American) - I like to keep all that together
-- Biography
-- Entertainment biography - I like to keep these separate - so that Duse isn't next to Einstein. It just makes it easier to find stuff.
-- Founding Fathers biographies - they are a genre unto themselves
-- Adult fiction
-- Young adult fiction
-- Children's books (separated into picture books and kids books. So Giving Tree and When the Sky Is Like Lace are separated from Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing)
-- Picture books
-- Art books (photography, artists, movie posters)
-- what I call "making of" books. "The making of" Casablanca, "making of" Rebel Without a Cause, Cleopatra
-- Books on film directors. Not biographies. Analyses of the directors' body of work
-- Film criticism
-- Memoirs
-- Letters/Journals (I love reading people's letters - I keep these separate from "memoirs" since it's really not the same thing)
-- Erotica - Anais Nin, Story of O, collections (these, clearly, must not be on top shelves beyond reach)
-- Travel writing (there is some overlap here. Paul Theroux's books could also be shelved with "history" - so could Naipaul's books - but I decided to put them under "travel")
-- Essayists - Orwell, Fitzgerald, Joan Didion - I love essays
-- Poetry
-- Reference books (Bartlett's, dictionaries)
-- Shakespeare (he is his own genre)
-- True crime
-- Books about cults
-- Religion
-- Science (I always keep these next to my religious books - always have. Figure let the books battle it out on the shelves)
-- Sports
-- What I call "events". These don't qualify as world history, although many of these books describe events that have world historical impact. By "events" I mean: books about one specific event: Into Thin Air, When Bobby Fischer Went to War, Salt, my books on the bubonic plague, stuff like that. I love this section. It's very eclectic.
-- Politics (mainly Christopher Hitchens and P.J. O'Rourke)
-- Current American history - terrorism, 9/11
-- books about contemporary American culture (Malcolm Gladwell classifies)
-- totalitarian/fascist philosophy (something that some of the recent protesters would do well to familiarize themselves with, so they don't get CONFUSED about the actual definitions of these words)
-- history of theatre
-- acting technique books
-- plays, plays plays

I am probably missing some. But these are my main "genres".

So I decided to fill the kitchen bookshelf with the stuff I don't need to look at at all times. True crime, sports, science, religion, "events" ... It's a gorgeous bookshelf, 100% random, but these are books I hold dear.

The bookshelf:

Top shelf:
True crime/Cults/Mind control:

Science/Religion:

Contemporary American culture:

Sports

Hitchens/O'Rourke - a genre unto themselves

"Events":

My nightmare shelf

Theatre history:

Totalitarian/Fascist philosophy:

Plays:

Again, room to grow. Beauty.

Tour of bookshelves: The three-shelf in my hallway

I knew I didn't want this particular shelf to have books I wanted to look at all the time. I also wanted to avoid (however) a sense of RANDOM-ness. My thing now is organization, simplicity, and ease. So what should go into this bookshelf in my hallway?

It's important to remember where I came from. An apartment that was basically two rooms, and my books completely overwhelmed me. They were EVERYWHERE. It was a situation that became totally unmanageable. Not only do I have my library to contend with, but I have things like collector's editions of Life magazine (I always buy those), and favorite Vanity Fairs, and then my huge collection of Interview magazines, which I can't seem to get rid of. In my old apartment, I had no room to bascially REVEL in my collections. They were shoved into boxes in all of my closets. I never looked at them. EVER. I'm not an indiscriminate pack-rat. I'm not a hoarder, for example. I don't have a lot of random stuff lying around, things that don't mean anything to me that I keep for no apparent reason. That's not my thing. I live a spare life. Everything I own (and have kept) is tried and true. I have a small wardrobe, clothes I wear all the time. I do have a ton of shoes, but whatevs, I'm a girl, that's par for the course. But my books? Every one is part of a whole. It's a LIBRARY, for God's sake. And my collector's edition magazines, and my years of Interview mags is part of that library. It hurt me to live in a place where I basically couldn't enjoy my own meagre possessions.

The way Mike and David built this bookcase was perfect for what I wanted to do. There are two small top shelves, and then a really tall bottom shelf, where I could stack my magazines, and photo albums (another thing I didn't have room to display in my old place, where every surface space available was taken up by books).

So here is my organizational thought process:

Top shelf:
Random funny books that could be classified as "bathroom reading". For me, bathroom reading is my Latin vocabulary book. Don't judge. Also my zodiac books. Funny silly books that don't really fit in anywhere else.

I also put what I call my "political philosophy" books here. Leviathan, The Prince, Aristotle, Plato.

Second shelf:
I call this the "Samuel French" shelf. Best part is that there is room to grow.

Bottom shelf:
Photo albums, all of them.
My Interview magazines. BEAUTIFUL! I love old-school Interview, when it was huge and unwieldy, and I am so glad now that I didn't decide to throw them out in my old place when I had no room for them.

Top shelf:

Funny random books.

Political philosophy books:

Second shelf:

The Samuel French shelf.

Bottom shelf:

Photo albums. Interview magazines. Beauty.

Tour of bookshelves

I had a busy weekend. There was:
-- grocery shopping
-- a three-hour phone call with cousin Mike about my script
-- hours and hours of writing - I probably wrote for 8 hours, all told, over the weekend
-- then, somehow, miraculously, in the middle of all of this, I decided to organize my bookshelves

Since the party when my friends basically came over and set up the apartment of their debilitated friend, and everyone tackled the 30 boxes of books that had sat against the wall since I moved in on July 1, I have done nothing with the books. I am focusing on healing. Trying to keep moving forward. Cauterizing the wound. Not much time left over for homemaking. The first step was to get those books out of the damn boxes, and my awesome posse handled that at my party. People set up a chain, and passed the books up to Kerry, on a chair. I had decided to not worry about order at this point. The priority was to get those books unloaded. Poetry next to radical Islam, I didn't care. Lauren Bacall next to self-help. Didn't matter. So since then ...

Well. I am operating under a deficit of energy right now. There is an anvil on me. I don't walk up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed ready to tackle the day. It's hard for me. It's been hard for me. So my books have stayed in the random order from the barn-raising. Which isn't really a problem, right now, since I'm not reading.

But for whatever reason, I suddenly just STARTED on Saturday. What it required was EXTENSIVE, and I went at it methodically, slowly, tolerating the chaos, knowing that eventually it would be over. The good thing about it was there was a CLEAR point of no return, which I really need. It was a daunting task. I had to take ALL the books out of the shelves. Organize them into piles on the floor - because the books had been put away any which way, it was impossible to find anything, so I set them up on the floor in ever-growing piles, leaving the worrying about alphabetization and Dewey Decimal organization for later. For now, I had to locate ALL my true crime books and gather them together. I had to locate ALL my scripts and put them in the same area. Etc. The piles grew over the weekend, flowing out of the study into my kitchen. My kitchen was filled with piles of books. If anyone had looked at my apartment it would have looked INSANE, but it was crazily organized to my eyes. It just happened that the bookshelves were now empty and all the books were on the floor, but I knew where the biographies were, where the history was, where the young adult stuff was - I knew exactly what each pile signified. It's not like I could re-organize shelf by shelf, because there was NO organization, and I have over 3,000 books. Everything had to come out.

Because my shelves are now too high for me to reach the top two shelves (glorious) I had to give some thought to how I wanted to place my books. I didn't want, say, my founding fathers biographies on those top two shelves, because I dip into those all the time for my blog and my other writing, My entertainment biographies, too. They all had to be easy access.

So I came up with a plan, that - well, it may end up not working out - but it's too late now! I plotted it out, which books should go where, calculating what each shelf could hold, and the likelihood that I would need to look in said book on any kind of regular basis.

My mother bought me a little step ladder, so of course I can get any book I want, if necessary, but comfort and convenience is key.

That was Saturday. All the books came out.

I took breaks, to talk with Mike for hours, taking notes. Then I wrote until 3 in the morning. Woke up at 7 a.m. on Sunday, and wrote for another five hours. Surrounded by UTTER CHAOS, piles and piles of books, with thin corridors through them for me to walk through.

Oh, and I fell on Saturday. It was a cataclysmic event and I am sure I frightened my neighbors. I have bruises everywhere now. I had a stack of books in my hand, and I was headed to the corner where the "events" books were (I'll get to that in a minute - my genres are, shall we say, specific!) - there were tiny curving thin corridors between the books on the floor I needed to make my way through, through the precariously piled stacks of books. I lost my footing, and down I went. It was an event that could not be stopped. A chain reaction occurred. I could not recover. I tried to, but down I went. The stack of books I was holding went flying in a million directions, and of course wherever they landed, they knocked down an existing stack of books. And then there was my fall. I fell across Fiction and Biography, plowing into the stacks like an avalanche. Six piles of books were obliterated, Maud Gonne toppling into Margaret Atwood, and it took me an hour to undo the damage.

Hope has not recovered emotionally from the entire weekend.

I wrote all night in a fever on Saturday. Woke up, made coffee, wrote for hours more.

Then basically just STARTED and put all the books away. It took me hours.

But like I said, once I passed the point of no return ("I think we've just passed it"), there was no going back. Once I had piles of books filling two rooms completely (not exaggerating) I knew that this was an unlivable situation. I dug deep, and found the moral fortitude to complete my task.

So let's take a tour of my bookshelves, shall we?

Good God.

I'm not kidding when I say I felt light-headed with a mixture of anxiety and envy when I saw these photos of Neil Gaiman's bookshelves. It hurts. I love my new bookshelves, love love love, and I am still not used to their pristine beauty and the scope of them. But that? That is the ideal. Not to mention the coziest chair known to man and a happy kitty-cat. Heaven on earth.

Thanks, Peri, for the link!

Toooo many books

Other good moments from the barn-raising, all having to do with the unloading of my book collection:

-- David said, at one point, "Is this a really vulnerable moment for you? Everyone seeing all of your books?" It WAS. I have lived like a hermit for 10 years. To have people all in my stuff was strange ... but also beautiful.

-- Becca saw the Twilight books lined up. Becca is 10. She was only allowed to read the first two books. She has to "wait until I'm older" before she can read the others. I commiserated with her about that. "Is it okay that you have to wait until you're older?" I asked. She shrugged and smiled. "It's okay."

-- Liz stood by the bookshelves, dumping books onto the shelf - and pulled one out. "This is one of my favorite books!" she cried - holding it out. Prayer for Owen Meany.

-- Sheila, sitting in a chair, reaching down into a box at her feet and plopping books on the shelf. Pulled out one slim volume, and cried, "Oh, I LOVE Carl Dennis!!" Sheila's a poet. I love Carl Dennis too.

-- Kerry, standing on a chair, was unloading a bunch of books, and kept saying, "I need to come over here and you need to write down a list of books I have to read - There are so many here I want to just TAKE." She pulled out Colin Thubron's The Lost Heart of Asia (a book I looove) and read the back cover and then started flipping through it. I noticed her deep interest. "That's a wonderful book," I said. She said, already deeply engrossed, "I have to read it."

--I was standing unloading some books, Maria was standing nearby. I found my stack of V.C. Andrews books - and all I had to do was hold out If There Be Thorns to her for her head to explode. "OH MY GOD," she shouted, her whole life flashing before her eyes. Hahahahaha

-- Becca asked me sweetly if she could borrow the first Harry Potter book. Are you kidding? Little sweetie pie with glasses and red toenails asking me if she could borrow one of my books? I had to hold myself back from shoving the entire collection at her.

-- Later, all the books put away, we were sitting in the study, and Maria was glancing around at all the work we had done, and she said, slowly, "You know ... I guess I never realized ... just how many books you actually have." Me neither! I've never seen them all in one place! They've always been higgledy-piggledy shoved in every available space I have ... but to see two walls of books really brings it home, the collection we were dealing with.

-- Kerry, muttering to herself, standing on a chair, "I really want to keep all the LM Montgomery books together ..." I love these people.

-- Kerry, picking up my "fan book" of Quantum Leap. This was after she had unloaded my Quantum Leap DVDs in a neat row on a shelf. She said, "Okay, Sheila, this Quantum Leap thing is making me nervous ..." She doesn't know the half of it ...

-- David, shouting, holding a beer, "Where do I put the Bible?"

-- Liz, putting away stacks of Samuel French scripts - suddenly talking about all of the scripts she has at her house, and how she has no room for them anymore. She is thinking of donating them to a local high school or college, and I think that's a really good idea.

-- Emma, 12 years old, flipping through Emma, by Jane Austen. Maria (her mother) said to me, "We just saw that movie Becoming Jane and Emma has been wanting to read some Jane Austen." I said, dragging a box into the other room, "Do you want to borrow it, Emma?" I caught Emma throw her mother a glance, like, "Mom ... can I?" I don't know why, but remembering that glance still makes me well up with tears. Mothers and daughters.

-- Me, declaring, "I don't want any books in my bedroom. My bedroom is for sleep and moisturizing and loving. I'm sick of sleeping surrounded by 5,000 books." So my friends all silently trotted out, carrying the piles of books far away from my love den. So funny.

-- Kerry, standing on a chair, calling out to me, "Does it matter that the biography of George Washington is next to this book about Irish fairies?" "NO!" I shouted.

-- Carson, the other 12 year old, sitting seriously in a corner looking through I Am the Cheese. School starts in a week, and she had finished her summer reading, so she didn't want to take the book (although I offered) - her workload is about to kick in and she didn't want to add to it. But she wanted to know everything about it. "So it's like a spy thing? The government killed his parents?" she asked, her eyes wide and interested.

I live in a small un-social world. People haven't come over to my apartment because my apartments have been too small. My books are mine and mine alone. My dad always approved, and would give me suggestions on how to organize and how to handle my burgeoning collection. But I walk a narrow path, and nobody "comes over". It's partly because that's the way of the world, in an urban environment, where we're separated (in some cases by a river!) - and although it was a little bit anxiety-provoking to have my entire book collection (erotica and all) upended for my friends to see - it was also kind of effing glorious, I have to say.

My books seem different now. They've been handled, seen, pored over, commented on. My life opened up to the world. That is a good thing.

Book designs

Great piece about book designs - and how certain covers come to be, not to mention the runners-up for particular covers. I love the analysis included of the different designs, thoughts from the designers themselves, etc. It's all a process. Love this stuff. Mitchell - you'll note they discuss Ron's book!

One of the designers says (and I loved this):

“It’s a little like navel-gazing talking about killed work,” says freelance designer Paul Sahre. “It’s such a part of what you do that putting it out there and going, ‘See, look how great this was,’ or ‘Aren’t I a victim?’ is kind of terrible.’” Most of the time, he thinks, “you end up at some better place after something gets killed.”

Top 10 worst beach reads

And by "worst" I mean:

1. I haven't been to the beach all summer. Not really.
2. No matter what I read, it seems to become unbearable at some indefinable point. I keep trying to pick something benign, but right now there is no such thing
3. I still can't FINISH a book. Not possible. So I get through one chapter here, one chapter there, and am finally exhausted by how personal everything seems. I read the style section of the newspaper or a comic strip and it seems like a personal attack.
4. I realize that that is one of the definitions of insanity: you take the laugh track on sit coms personally, like people are laughing at YOU, etc. So yes, to the person who emailed me anonymously (although I know who it is) telling me that I should "stop being mysterious" because it makes me "sound crazy" - you're right! What an astute diagnosis. Thanks for your concern, and I hope if you ever have a rough time of it that someone is as kind to you as you have been to me. You don't TRY to be crazy. You try NOT to be crazy. I can't help it that my own book collection ambushes me.
5. I don't like the concept of "beach reads" anyway. The assumption that EVERYONE wants something light and fluffy in the summer. When I go on vacation I usually bring something big and heavy that I have been avoiding reading during the bustle of life and now can devote some time to. I get that a lot of people love more light reading in the summer, and yay for you, but I choose very carefully what I bring "to the beach" (even though I don't go to the beach these days) and it's usually something huge and classic and arduous - because I have more brainspace on vacation to devote to something like War and Peace or The Red and the Black or some huge detailed biography of De Toqueville or something. These are my "beach reads".

Thanks to cousin Mike for the idea for this post. And for everything else.

Top 10 Worst Beach Reads That You Don't Read at the Beach Because You Don't Even Go to the Beach and You Keep Trying to Not Be So Crazy But You Can't Help It Because Sometimes Life is Just Like That and Hopefully It's All a Phase But You're Not Holding Your Breath and Besides At Least You Can Still Read Your OWN Writing Which is the Most Important Thing Right now, In Terms of the Work That Needs To Be Done and You Tried To Read These Books But You Can't Seem To Finish Them and You Find It Alarming and Frankly Unfair That There Is An Ambush In a Book About Peter Lorre, Although You Do Want to Say That These Are All Obviously Fine Books

1. Cults in Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace, by Margaret Singer

2. Beware of Pity, by Stefan Zweig

3. A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, by Robert Phillip Kolker

4. The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

5. Young Stalin (Vintage), by Simon Sebag Montefiore

6. A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing

7. The 1928 Book of Common Prayer

8. Story of O, by Pauline Reage

9. The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre, Stephen D. Youngkin

10. Sestets: Poems, by Charles Wright

Faber & Faber: brilliant book covers for 80 years.

A beautiful slideshow. Two of my favorites here, but they're all startling.

Go click through the whole thing.

What a difference a week makes

I am now in a whole new landscape. Passing through a crucible. It will inevitably leave me "lesser than", I know that much from life, and it can't be helped. Can't be gone around, must be gone through. For now, all feels "flat, stale and unprofitable", which is a byproduct of losing magic and leaving the dreamspace - which only gets more wrenching the older I get - but this part too must be gone through, not skipped over.

Trying to read again. Not easy! I had to put down Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up - I had brought it with me to LA, and tried to read it, but it's too much for me right now. My mind kept skipping away from it.

My comment on "operating from scarcity" in this post brought forth a beautiful comment from "Mark" in this post which gave me goosebumps, and made me pull out Wind, Sand and Stars again, a book I last read in high school, when I was in my Richard Bach-airplane-writing-soulmate-search phase.

But now, it is as though I never read it. It is occurring to me as something totally new and fresh.

My attention span is not what it once was, but I'll stick it out and see how far I get. Still only in the first chapter, but I came across the following extraordinary passage:

And yet we have all known flights when of a sudden, each for himself, it has seemed to us that we have crossed the border of the world of reality; when, only a couple of hours from port, we have felt ourselves more distant from it than we should feel if we were in India; when there has come a premonition of an incursion into a forbidden world whence it was going to be infinitely difficult to return.

Thus, when Mermoz first crossed the South Atlantic in a hydroplane, as day was dying he ran foul of the Black Hole region, off Africa. Straight ahead of him were the tails of tornadoes rising minute by minute gradually higher, rising as a wall is built; and then the night came down upon these preliminaries and swallowed them up; and when, an hour later, he slipped under the clouds, he came out into a fantastic kingdom.

Great black waterspouts had reared themselves seemingly in the immobility of temple pillars. Swollen at their tops, they were supporting the squat and lowering arch of the tempest, but through the rifts in the arch there fell slabs of light and the full moon sent her radiant beams between the pillars down upon the frozen tiles of the sea. Through these uninhabited ruins Mermoz made his way, gliding slantwise from one channel of light to the next, circling round those giant pillars in which there must have rumbled the upsurge of the sea, flying for four hours through these corridors of moonlight toward the exit from the temple. And this spectacle was so overwhelming that only after he had got through the Black Hole did Mermoz awaken to the fact that he had not been afraid.

Wow.

More thoughts on narrative

I finished Lynn Darling's Necessary Sins.

And now I find myself thinking, yet again, about narrative.

I am not sure if essay writers and memoir-writers admit how competitive they may feel about laying claim to the narrative of their lives. I will have to look into that, it's a really interesting topic to me. Getting there first, saying, "No. THIS is how it happened." I would like to read more on the subject. Because while the writer writes in a subjective mode ("this is how it was for me"), what he or she is really doing is placing a flag in the ground, and saying, "This now is truth." And you may have your version, but I'm the one who wrote the damn thing down, didn't I?

Here's an example of what I mean from my own life.

Necessary Sins made me think of this, and so many other things, because Lynn Darling, in essence, stole another woman's husband. This is the guilt that lies at the heart of their relationship, the sense that any mess that befalls them afterwards is somehow just punishment for that first necessary sin. The ex-wife doesn't play into it much, except peripherally, and I am sure she has her version of the story, but again: Lynn Darling laid claim. Not to the whole thing, of course, but that is irrelevant. Once it is written down, it becomes the narrative, and anything that comes afterwards must either rebut that original story, agree with it, or ignore it altogether. The written-down story becomes the focal point. Darling doesn't write from that place, at least not consciously, her tone is regretful, fearful, and mostly panicked. Yet in the end it was the right thing - for her and her husband, anyway. The three children from his former marriage emerge as frightening adversaries in her goals for happiness, and some of the most touching parts of the book are the sections when she suddenly finds herself alone with the three of them, baffled at how to entertain them, how to even look them in the eye. It is a compelling story.

Additionally (and here is a spoiler, although I hesitate to call such a shattering life-event a spoiler - I just know it took my breath away when it came):

The youngest child from the first marriage is a boy named Adrien. He is about four years old when his parents' marriage breaks up, and Lynn Darling writes about him in a way that makes him leap off the page. He is an amazing character, that 4 year old boy, and much of it really moved me. His perceptions, his sensitivity, and yet also - his 4-year-old-ness. You know how little kids can cut right to the heart of the matter, they haven't learned how to filter. But Adrien, additionally, has an emotional maturity, which many little kids don't. He somehow understood, deep down, the complexity of the situation - everyone's side, not just one side - and he tried to "take care" of everyone.

3/4 of the way through the book, I learned that Adrien, at age 11, was killed in a car crash. I had not seen it coming, I did not know any of the story beforehand, and I had to put the book down for a while. It was too tragic, too awful.

But I have mixed feelings about the whole thing (which, I believe, is one of the strengths of the book, and why I highly recommend it). Adrien was not her son. Now obviously she ended up being his father's second wife, so naturally she would have to have some kind of relationship. She was the step-mom. She can lay claim to that. It was the "laying claim" to Adrien's death (merely by writing about it - just want to be clear) that made me suddenly wonder about that first wife, Adrien's mother, and how she felt about it. There is pretty much no talk about how the two sides of this shattered family ended up working things out (one of the flaws of the book, I might add. It's a big missing piece, and in a book that tells so much truth, I really think it needed to "go there" as well.) Now there are clues - Becky (the first wife) calls Lynn to tell her that Adrien has been hit by a car - and could Lynn please contact Lee? So there's that clue. There is obviously contact, and an admission of Lynn into Becky's radar. But other than that, not so much.

Writers are not ethical people. Not in that way, anyway. The desire to tell all, to tell the truth, and to put your voice out there - to be the one whose voice is heard - does not necessarily line up with nice-pretty-Norman-Rockwell sentiments. I get that. In a way, writers are like grave-robbers. "I'm gonna go in there and find out what's there and I am gonna be the one to write it."

I have been learning that myself over the past couple of years, working on my book. Truth above all else. Truth not just about what I see, but truth about myself. It's hard work. It really really helps to not worry about what "people will think", what "so-and-so will feel when she reads it", and all of those other civilized concerns.

These are the things that went through my mind as I read Lynn Darling's chapter on the death of her stepson Adrien.

Not only that but it's one of the things in the forefront now that I have finished the book. It is, essentially, a love story. Lee Lescaze has died, and his death was terrible, and painful, and long-drawn-out. It was difficult for me to finish the book. But I felt, during those last chapters, a strange peace and space opening up inside me ... like she was saying what I, so far, have been unable to.

I have not yet laid claim to my own narrative.

Yet I was somehow able to appreciate the fact that someone else, in her own life, got there before me and put it into words. That is the great power of writing and storytelling, in general.

But again, there is an uneasiness at the heart of the book (something that Darling acknowledges and brings up again and again) - due to how her relationship began. It is her narrative. That is the way it went for her.

I had a good conversation with Allison a while back about narrative, and I was getting pretty righteous in my views - MY narrative doesn't look like other people's, and for women there is a VERY set narrative and I fit into NONE of that ... Our narrative is biological as well ... and goddammit, I cant fit into THAT either ... but I loved Allison's response. This is what good friends are for. She said, "Sheila, everyone's narrative is different." There are times when I insist upon my own isolation, my own "difference" - this is merely indicative of old patterns, going back to - God, when I was a small small child - so much of it is kneejerk, and I need my good friends to slap me out of it.

The other thing that has been going on, which was brought up by Darling's book (as well as a lot of offline experiences I've been having recently) - is the weirdness I feel as I approach keeping a journal again. I am so out of practice, and I am not sure even why I am writing. At the same time, I feel a strange superstition about writing - because I don't know "the ending" yet to this particular tale. And I feel despair (before the fact) at investing any time at all to writing about it - if the ending is going to be just same ol' same ol'. On an even stranger level (and this is where it gets almost mentally ill): I feel like I must hold off on writing about this until I know "the ending". The uncertainty of it is too much. I mean, it's awesome in the moment - but it's nothing I want to capture. Funny thing is, if you know what you're looking for - then that is ALL my blog has been about recently. For months. I'm only writing about one thing. I've said it before: I dislike coyness - in myself and others - and I do not say this to be coy. I say it to be honest about where I am at, and my tentativeness in terms of narrative at this moment.

Perhaps other people don't worry about such things, and will read a post such as this and think, "Jesus, lady, just chill out and live your life."

Ah, but if you think that, then you are not me. You are also not a writer. I have been this intense and superstitious and analytical since before I was even really conscious.

I have kept much of this kind of commentary off my blog because it is quite revealing, and I have tried to protect myself from the mean stupid comments of the "Jesus, lady, chill out and get laid" brigade. But I have no more interest in protecting myself (from what? Jagoffs at their keyboard? Please.) - and it also seems less precarious than it has in the past. I am not invested in a certain persona so much anymore - I can feel that shedding away ... there is no time anymore for that kind of game.

However, on the flipside: Darling's book has called all kinds of things into question. How I feel about narrative, how I feel about my own and others and how we intersect - and what the hell is happening with this ongoing story, and how I can interpret it?

One of the things I am present to is that there is this part of me, like I mentioned in the beginning of the post, that gets competitive with the story. I will be the one to tell it. And so therefore, I get to own it. I have lost much in this life. I have loved men and had to let them go. I have grasped too hard and watched them disappear. That is my narrative. (My literary conceit, to quote David). And that is the story I have to tell. There is a part of me that has always felt that if I could just write it down, capture what happened, there would be a sense of freedom with the story itself. No longer would it trap me, or stifle me. But I would feel like: ahhh, I got that OUT and I am proud of it and now let's see if it can live out in the world and if other people would like to read it. That has happened with my essays before. I have had true transformations of how I have actually FELT about a particular story once I wrote it all down.

But what happens when you are mid-story? You can't own it yet. There is nothing to own. The sands shift beneath your feet. If you place a flag THERE, it will be relatively meaningless tomorrow. Alice and the fawn, remember? When you enter "the wood where things have no name", then there is nothing to claim, nothing to say, "This is mine". You are nameless. You don't even know the name for "wood", or yourself, or the fawn beside you.

Part of the stress that I feel (at times) is that I already want to own this story. I wonder how I will eventually tell it. I wonder what title I will give it. I even try out opening sentences. My cousin Mike gave me a potential title. But it is not time yet. Not time.

My blank journal pages tell me it is not time.

Lynn Darling wrote her book about her love affair when it was time. And the feelings of the first wife about this woman who stole her husband are unknown to me. Not to mention the feelings she may have about the memoir written by said woman, who now lays claim not just to her own narrative - but to the MAN himself. I know Lee Lescaze now through Lynn Darling's eyes. That is HERS. She gave it to me. She OWNS it.

That's the power of being a writer, and believe me when I say it can be daunting.

Do you want to own this?

Or do you want to live it?

Well. I'm a writer. I want to do both.

Big Joan, Little Joan

Yesterday was really rough. I feel like I made it home just in time before everything fell apart. Recovering today. This morning I read a little bit more of Necessary Sins by Lynn Darling. Again, I am amazed that I randomly felt the need to read this book, something that would never have appealed to me on the face of it.

At that point I hadn't found a way to reconcile the young woman I had been, with her delight in courting chance, and the mother I'd become, with her urge to preserve, to connect. More and more the past was something that embarrassed me, as if I had to disown the girl I'd been to ensure the reality of the woman I had become. There had been so many masquerades. Was this just another, the middle-aged mother: earthbound, rooted, the one who found heaven in her daughter's face? Which one was real?

The answer, as the painter Joan Mitchell knew well, was both.

Mitchell was a painter who thrived in the New York art scene of the fifties, one of the few women to hold her own among the crazy, wild, and brilliant men who dominated the world of Abstract Expressionism. She herself was a hell-raiser, a loud and argumentative woman, a scene maker, a passionate lover, a mean drunk. And yet her paintings are deeply meditative, thoughtful conversations between a questing soul and the mysteries of shape and color. About a year before she died, she was asked about her brash public persona and how it related to her work. "There are always two of me," she said. "There was big Joan and little Joan." Big Joan, she said, was the one who went out to knock down the doors and put up a fight. Little Joan was quiet and shy and liked to stay at home. "Big Joan took care of Little Joan. She made it safe for Little Joan to stay home and paint."

Joan Mitchell was sixty when she said this. It takes a long time to understand that the girl you once were, the one guaranteed to fuck up your life, was also the one who saved it.

Maybe she did know what she was doing. Last night I became convinced that the persona I have built up over the years has actually been the cause of my entire distress, and the losses I have suffered. I still have my doubts, but in the light of morning I can quote Joan Armatrading, "I am open to persuasion."

As Lynn Darling wrote in Necessary Sins:

He offered me the chance to connect the dots between my public and private selves, maybe even to find bedrock.

The thought is almost unthinkable for me. It's so foreign. Connect the dots? Sorry, I don't speak that language. In my life, men have fallen in love with either one persona or the other ... Big Sheila or Little Sheila, never both. Well, except for Michael, but boy's ego is big enough, don't you think? It may be too late to integrate the two, and maybe integration ain't all it's cracked up to be. And so I, too, need a man who can help me connect the dots. So perhaps Lynn Darling and Joan Mitchell had it right all along. That there will be side-by-side selves ... always ... hopefully not doing battle with one another, one side shaming the other, or one side trying to dominate the other ... but working together.

I'm working on it.

This is intense, man

Excerpt from Necessary Sins by Lynn Darling. Lee Lescaze has left his wife, his three children, and moved in with Lynn, his mistress. She has lost her position at the Washington Post. The two of them barely know each other, truth be told. He's the big-wig, she's the former "Style" writer. He's much older than she, there's a father-figure aspect to the whole thing, which makes her aware of her own immaturity, even though she's 30 years old. She lives in a tiny apartment, with ice cream in the freezer, and no proper cookware. She suddenly looks around wondering what the hell she has done. Work is unbearable, for both of them, although his position remains intact. They buy some second-hand furniture together. They buy a parrot. They drink martinis. They learn, for the first time, how to fight with each other. Things are awkward. Their relationship began in stolen passionate moments, now they are in the muck of the everyday, and pretty much everyone on the planet is annoyed with them.

Work made Lee tense, withdrawn. He was grumpy and hard to like. The time he spent with his children, whom I was not yet allowed to meet, was usually a disaster. He would come back angry and unwilling to admit it, which in turn angered me: I was sick of trying to guess his moods. "Great," he muttered, as he disappeared into the Sports section of the paper. "My children, my mistress, my boss, they all hate me."

One night Lee went out to a black-tie dinner, the fortieth birthday party of one of his closest friends at the paper. He came home very late and very drunk, so drunk he could barely walk, or talk for that matter. He needed to be undressed and put to bed, but I didn't understand that. Instead, I watched him coldly as he stood swaying in the doorway, a look of dopey curiosity on his face. His eyebrows arched the way they did when he was about to say something light and witty, but something short-circuited, and suddenly he fell, rather gracefully under the circumstances, flat on his face, his tuxedo starkly elegant against the scuffed planked wood of the floor.

The next day he slept late, and I left the house early, determined to find fresh sorrel leaves. I had recently bought a cookbook, my first, and in it I had come across a beautiful photograph of cream of sorrel soup, green and elegant in a gilt-edged cream-colored bowl. I had never even heard of sorrel. I can't explain it now - I couldn't explain it then - but I had this idea that if I could just make the perfect bowl of cream of sorrel soup, then I would be the kind of person who could fit in to this new life, I would be competent and know the things it was important for adults to know.

When Lee finally woke up, red-eyed and unshaven, I was in the kitchen struggling with a pot lid, a large domed thing that had long ago lost the little knob on top, making its removal from a hot skillet an operation for the nimble and the brave. He left the house without a word, which was all right, since I wasn't speaking to him.

But as soon as he was gone, I missed him. I had wanted to be revolted, to find in this sorry sodden mess of a man the wick to my indignation and regret. Instead I saw something else. I saw how hard this year had been, not for me, but for him, how much it had cost him, how terrible the bonfire that was burning all around him. Then I wanted him back, to hold him and comfort him, to apologize for not understanding. But I didn't know where he had gone.

He came back about twenty minutes later, with a small brown paper bag. Inside was a wooden knob and a screw, and before long he had fixed it to the pot lid. I was charmed; in my world, broken things stayed broken, until you threw them away.

That's when I knew that neither one of us was leaving, that we would fight and the walls would stand. I knew this, not in the way that you know you love someone, but in the way you learn, for the first time, that you are finally in a place from which you will not walk away.

It's been over twenty years since that morning in the kitchen. Everything has changed and most of it is gone. But I still have that lid, and the wooden knob still holds.

Happy birthday to "The Great Gatsby" - which came out today, in 1925

First edition of "The Great Gatsby"

1940 letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to editor Maxwell Perkins (who had edited The Great Gatsby):

Would the 25-cent press keep Gatsby in the public eye - or is the book unpopular? Has it had its chance? Would a popular reissue in that series with a preface not by me but by one of its admirers - I can maybe pick one - make it a favorite with classrooms, profs, lovers of English prose - anybody? But to die, so completely and unjustly after having given so much!

That letter brings tears to my eyes.

Fitzgerald died a couple of months after writing that letter. He would not see The Great Gatsby enter the canon, although we all know that it did. He would not see it become "a favorite with classrooms, profs, lovers of English prose" - and not just them, but "anybody" who reads the damn thing. As far as he was concerned, he died "unjustly after having given so much". His masterpiece had been forgotten.

The editing process of The Great Gatsby is legendary, a story in and of itself, with Maxwell Perkins ushering Fitzgerald through the process. One of the things I love about the letters back and forth between these two men is how much it shows the craftsman-side of Fitzgerald. How much of a real writer he was. I suppose this isn't much of a revelation, but when you get the backstage side of things - when you see how much he thought about it, and worked at it - things that seem so effortless in that slim perfect volume - it's extraordinary. Especially now when I am in an editing process myself. It's interesting: there's something magical about The Great Gatsby. It flows. It seduces. It has, perhaps, the most perfect opening in literature.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament.”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

Nothing needs to be added or subtracted. Nothing jars. We are in the presence of a master. We can relax.

To see the work that went into getting the thing right, the anxiety, the dread, the constant editing and parsing - how hard Fitzgerald was on himself, and yet how he didn't let that stop him ... He was an artist. And by that I mean, he had both sides of the coin (as all great artists must): He had transcendent creativity, high-flung, imaginative, but he also had a cool calculating eye and could look at his work objectively. Many artists have either one quality or the other ... but the artists who have both? Now nothing in life is a done deal, and I know many great artists who have both sensibilities in spades - and nobody has ever heard their name. There is no guarantee that you will find your audience. F. Scott Fitzgerald, after all, did not live to see The Great Gatsby become what it is today. He had published his first novel at the age of 23, and had become a phenom, a symbol of the zeitgeist, the jazz age ... and he wrote a wonderful essay about the dangers of early success, and what that can do to an artist. Anything that came afterwards (even his masterpiece) would be judged as Lesser Than. "Well, sure, Gatsby is good, but it's not ..."

But time passes, and things change.

The zeitgeist shifted, the Jazz Age passed, and Gatsby rose in stature. Sadly, Fitzgerald wasn't around to see that. He can join the ranks of many great writers, Melville for one, who did not live long enough to see their greatness acknowledged by the world at large.

Regardless: he was a highly intuitive and sensitive artist, in touch with the universal, a keen of sadness through the human experience, and he was also a cold-blooded editor of his own prose. Ruthless.

Example, here is part of a letter he wrote to Maxwell Perkins, during the editing process of Gatsby:

After six weeks of uninterrupted work the proof is finished and the last of it goes to you this afternoon. On the whole it's been very successful labor.

(1) I've brought Gatsby to life.
(2) I've accounted for his money.
(3) I've fixed up the two weak chapters (VI and VII).
(4) I've improved his first party.
(5) I've broken up his long narrative in Chapter VII.

Goosebumps. I am not saying that I am in the process of writing the next Great Gatsby, but I am saying that over the last couple of months, being forced to take a cold hard look at what I have created, there is an exhilaration of getting into that zone. The work zone. Where what you have created is precious, sure, and some things must not be mucked with ... but some things need to be clarified, adjusted, or gotten rid of altogether. This is hard work. Heartbreaking work at times.

Romulus Linney, playwright, gives advice to his writing students: "You must always be ready to kill your darlings."

A terrible thought, but one that every writer would do well to keep in mind.

If you find yourself holding onto something really really hard, there is a good chance that it is a "darling", and you need to let it go. There is no reason that the "darling" can't work elsewhere, in another piece ... but if it doesn't work with what you are doing right now, then you must be ready to kill it.

And you must be willing to hear, from a trusted editor, that that certain thing needs to go. (I am careful who I show my work to. That may sound odd to say, since I write every day here on the blog - but that is a different process.) Additionally, when I have written personal essays here and have gotten vicious responses - sure, they hurt sometimes - who wants to be called a "stupid cunt"? But I never EVER would edit my writing because of a comment like that from a random driveby stranger who seems to have a viscerally negative response to not just my writing, but who I am. I would never take those comments to heart. Never. I take my advice from people who understand my intent, and who understand my writing. I talk about the "ideal reader". I have a couple in mind. These are not people who love everything I do, these are people who can say, "Okay, I totally see what you're going for here - but I think you could say it in a paragraph, rather than two pages." Or "No, no, don't break up the narrative at this point - you have too much momentum right now, maybe move that explanation part earlier - so that when you get to the climax there's no interruption." These are helpful comments. Not, "Maybe you need to get laid" Or "Wow, enough with the TMI". Or "God, no wonder why you're single. Stupid bitch." Ahhh, blogging.

But to quote a friend, "If someone feels the need to take the energy to call you a 'stupid cunt', then you are obviously doing something very right."

Enough about me. Let's return to what is really important.

The Great Gatsby was published in 1925. Fitzgerald worked his ass off on this book - and was tormented throughout the process. He wrote, and re-wrote, and re-wrote - holding off his editor, Maxwell Perkins, as long as possible. It was a precious book to him, a deeply personal book, and he feared he had not succeeded.

Perkins' long letter back to Fitzgerald, after he finally received the manuscript, gives me chills. I won't print it in its entirety - it's too long - but it's an amazing insight into the book, and also ... into Fitzgerald the Writer. The guy had an innate gift, yes, but he also was a major craftsman.

Here are some excerpts from Perkins' initial letter:

I think you have every kind of right to be proud of this book. It is an extraordinary book, suggestive of all sorts of thoughts and moods. You adopted exactly the right method of telling it, that of employing a narrator who is more of a spectator than an actor: this puts the reader upon a point of observation on a higher level than that on which the characters stand and at a distance that gives perspective. In no other way could your irony have been so immensely effective, nor the reader have been enabled so strongly to feel at times the strangeness of human circumstance in a vast heedless universe. In the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg various readers will see different significances; but their presence gives a superb touch to the whole thing: great unblinking eyes, expressionless, looking down upon the human scene. It's magnificent!

I could go on praising the book and speculating on its various elements, and meanings, but points of criticism are more important now. I think you are right in feeling a certain slight sagging in chapters six and seven, and I don't know how to suggest a remedy. I hardly doubt that you will find one and I am only writing to say that I think it does need something to hold up here to the pace set, and ensuing.

He then goes on to list a couple of pages of specific criticisms. It's an amazing literary analysis.

One of the criticisms is this:

The other point is also about Gatsby: his career must remain mysterious, of course. But in the end you make it pretty clear that his wealth came through his connection with Wolfstein. You also suggest this much earlier. Now almost all readers numerically are going to be puzzled by his having all this wealth and are going to feel entitled to an explanation. To give a distinct and definite one would be, of course, utterly absurd. It did occur to me though, that you might here and there interpolate some phrases, and possibly incidents, little touches of various kinds, that would suggest that he was in some active way mysteriously engaged. You do have him called on the telephone, but couldn't he be seen once or twice consulting at his parties with people of some sort of mysterious significance, from the political, the gambling, the sporting world, or whatever it may be. I know I am floundering, but that fact may help you to see what I mean ... I wish you were here so I could talk about it to you for then I know I could at least make you understand what I mean. What Gatsby did ought never to be definitely imparted, even if it could be. Whether he was an innocent tool in the hands of somebody else, or to what degree he was this, ought not to be explained. But if some sort of business activity of his were simply adumbrated, it would lend further probability to that part of the story.

After a couple more paragraphs in this vein, Perkins writes:

The general brilliant quality of the book makes me ashamed to make even these criticisms. The amount of meaning you get into a sentence, the dimensions and intensity of the impression you make a paragraph carry, are most extraordinary. The manuscript is full of phrases which make a scene blaze with life. If one enjoyed a rapid railroad journey I would compare the number and vividness of pictures your living words suggest, to the living scenes disclosed in that way. It seems in reading a much shorter book than it is, but it carries the mind through a series of experiences that one would think would require a book of three times its length.

The presentation of Tom, his place, Daisy and Jordan, and the unfolding of their characters is unequalled so far as I know. The description of the valley of ashes adjacent to the lovely country, the conversation and the action in Myrtle's apartment, the marvelous catalogue of those who come to Gatsby's house -- these are such things as make a man famous. And all these things, the whole pathetic episode, you have given a place in time and space, for with the help of T.J. Eckleburg and by an occasional glance at the sky, or the sea, or the city, you have imparted a sort of sense of eternity. You once told me you were not a natural writer -- my God! You have plainly mastered the craft, of course; but you needed far more than craftsmanship for this.

Now that's the kind of letter you want from your editor.

The Great Gatsby was not the phenom that This Side of Paradise was. Reviews were mixed. Only posterity would put Gatsby in the canon.

Happy birthday to a great American novel. No, Scott. In 1940, your book hadn't "had its chance". Your time would come. I'm just sorry you weren't around to see it.

Not only does Gatsby have one of the most perfect openings in all of literature, it also has one of the most perfect endings.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

After so many readings, it still has the power to take my breath away.

Reunited

Opening couple of paragraphs of a certain book I just received in the mail.

It had rained every day since Grandma arrived in London. Every single day. Not the nice fat sort of rain that makes gentle plopping noises on your rainhat, or umbrella if you happened to have one, which Grandma hadn't as she'd left it on the overnight bus from Yorkshire, but the nasty thin sort of rain that runs down your nose and the tops of your Wellington boots and makes your hair stick out all over the place, especially if it's curly, which Grandma's was.

In fact it was the sort of weather you wouldn't turn a dog out in, if you liked dogs that is, which Grandma didn't anyway.

Grandma sighed deeply as she gazed out of the window. "Just think," she said gloomily, "if I hadn't done my ankle in at the Over 60's do, I would be visiting strange new places on the Cook's Coach and Paddle Boat Mystery Tour, instead of sitting here staring at this awful rain."

She handed a curler to Mother, who was trying to set Grandma's hair, which Father said stuck up like steel wool after Mother had cleaned the inside of the oven with it.

"And if daft Betty from the shop hadn't shoved half a box of soap flakes all over the dance floor, I wouldn't have slipped in the first place."

"Or if she'd kept you off the vicar's homemade wine," Father murmured.

Grandma ignored him.

If you've followed along on my site, you will recognize - from a few of the plot points - what book this is.

I have not read it since I was probably 10 years old, but I remembered that opening paragraph almost word for word. I used to love to read it out loud because obviously I understood it but there was enough about it that was different from my own life ("soap flakes", "vicar") that made it seem delightfully British, and I adored that. I have been looking through the book at the illustrations and most of them I remember well. Illustrations by Laurence Hutchins. Very funny caricaturish drawings - almost like Doonesbury.

Who knows why I get separation anxiety when I realize I do not have a certain book from my childhood in my possession, but I do, and thanks to Amazon, I can get these books for a penny a pop. It's brill. It's hardcover too - with the same cover I remember as a kid. Even better.

Ernest Hilbert: "Sixty Sonnets"

Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honours ...

-- William Wordsworth, "Scorn Not the Sonnet"

Believe me, Billy, I do not scorn the sonnet.

I have been a sonnet fan since I first discovered poetry in high school. There was something about the "rules" aspect of sonnets that I, in my OCD propensities, found comforting. Oh, you just have 8 lines first - and the rhyme scheme is abbaabba, easy - then you have 6 lines, and you can rhyme it cdcdcd, or a number of other schemes, and if you just follow the rules, you have a sonnet, right? Right, Sheila, right.

I share all of this basically to say that the sonnet, to me, was always the most interesting of poetry forms, and there was something in it - the strictness of it - that seemed to set poets (good ones, anyway) free. Some of my favorite poems of all time are sonnets: John Milton's "On his Blindness", first and foremost, "Ozymandias", by Shelley, too many to count by Shakespeare, and I also have a soft spot for Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnets.

The sonnet is perhaps seen as old-fashioned now, but I'm one of those weirdos who doesn't think "old-fashioned" is necessarily an epithet. It's wonderful to see what contemporary people can do with the old forms, and it is that which keeps something alive, fresh, tangible - as opposed to something in a dusty museum case.

Ernest Hilbert, well-known poet, and beloved editor of a poetry newsletter called E-verse Radio which I have been receiving since the late 1990s, has come out with his breathtaking first collection of poetry, called Sixty Sonnets, a collection I just read over the last four or five days.

Some of the poems made me laugh out loud. Some made me cringe in recognition - even down to the place-names. Astor Bar. Ouch! Bellevue! Ouch! The world he describes is one I have inhabited. And some brought tears to my eyes.

Here is what I think is special and remarkable about Hilbert's work: His vocabulary can be daunting, as can his various frames of reference. You wonder if there is anything this man doesn't know. You, as the reader, must be prepared to leap from ancient Greece to the East Village in one or two lines, and you had better be familiar with the Oresteia as well as Metallica ... otherwise you will be lost. But none of this comes off as too-clever, or coy. It is truly an expression of who Hilbert is, the breadth and depth of his curiosity and interests, and how his mind works. It is a quicksilver mind, generous and open and humorous and also somehow conservative, in its way, as well - with a respect for all that has passed, the voices that chorus around him, the history of literature. Even with the giants of the past, like Auden and Eliot, Hilbert can say, in one of the sonnets in the collection:

So thank God for gin, whiskey, and lager,
Publisher's parties. Let the critics rail.
Too much chat of gyres, grails, gods, Rose, or Rood
Will leave a young man questing for the door.

Another thing that has struck me about his poetry, since I first started reading it back in the late 90s, is how often it includes some kind of genuine sucker-punch. I can't tell you how many times I end up in sudden tears, reading his stuff. I get lulled into a rhythm, I am taken with the imagery (Hilbert's images are often arresting), and maybe one image reminds me of Moby Dick, so I think a little bit about that, another image makes me remember some bacchanalian night I had once at Astor Bar when I tripped down the steps in my sandals and couldn't find the bathroom ... and then, in the last stanza, he rips my heart out. I don't know how he does it, but it happens repeatedly.

If I had to analyze it (and apologies, I know how to review movies - but I feel a bit out of my depth here) I would say that what Hilbert pulls off here is what James Joyce pulls off in the astonishing last four paragraphs of The Dead. That's what it feels like: the consciousness going from microscopic to macroscopic, moving from detail to universality - and there is pain and loss and grief in the transfer, because it is in those moments that we become aware of our mortality. But, very important: there's not only loss being expressed. And that's one of the things I think is sometimes missing in the understanding of what Joyce does in those last four paragraphs, and I think is essential to understanding Hilbert's work, too: ultimately, it's about love. It's not a love that is cozy, or domestic. It's a love that is rather searing, almost unbearable, hopeless, really, because it comes out of acute self-awareness. Just like Gabriel, at the end of The Dead, has his tragic realization of how connected he is to all of mankind (even "the shades"), and this realization only comes about because he is face to face, for the first time, with how little he knows about his wife, so does Hilbert, after dragging us through the boozy alleys of New York, making us drink more pints than we want to, showing us the loneliness and noise that can infiltrate your head at 3 a.m., step back, at the end, and almost shake his head, humorously, about how much he loves it all.

My love, we know the universe must bend
Until it ends, entropy will labor
Until all is cold and flat, that stars close
Across icy gulfs, suns crash.

-- from Hilbert's sonnet "Love Poem"

It's the "My love" there that sets Hilbert apart from many of his contemporaries, who perhaps remain a bit cooler, aloof, embodying the too-cool-for-you energy of the day.

Hilbert's is a true voice, distinct, individual (and, full disclosure, I know Ernie, so I know what he sounds like - but that's not what I am referring to here), with something to tell us, something he needs to share, and maybe feels he should hold off on divulging, but by the end of each sonnet, he can't help it, and out it all comes. You just need to sit back and get out of the damn way.

Before long
I will try to remember what happened.
Memory is just a haunting of ghosts,
And the night is crushed below like eggshell.

-- from Hilbert's sonnet "Corned Beef Hash and Two Eggs Over Easy, Coffee"

Another thing great about this collection is the humor in it, the characters who emerge: the dude who falls off bar stools ("One second he's there, then he's gone from view"), the lonely single girl, looking back on her collection of dolls as a young girl ("Donny who pines for his lost Marie"), and many more. I love these people. I love the specificity in which they are drawn, how Hilbert tells us just one or two things about them, and, in a flash, an entire human being erects itself before our very eyes. It is my favorite kind of writing. Spare, elegant, and yet not at all afraid of the "ba-dum-ching" ending, or the absurd details that make up life sometimes.

Adam Kirsch, author of The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry is excerpted in a blurb at the beginning of Sixty Sonnets, and he writes:

Hilbert has an appetite for life equal to his taste in literature: a rare combination in an age of dissociated sensibility.

This, to me, expresses that "sucker punch" thing I described earlier, because Hilbert's stuff is the opposite of "dissociated", and perhaps I am used to the "dissociation" of our current crop of writers, and that is not my thing, it is not what I respond to, although I often can appreciate the cleverness of the devices. Hilbert comes from a classical background, his knowledge of poetry is encyclopedic, huge, and often that kind of knowledge comes off as either precocious or tiresome insider-information (if you look at, say, the earliest poems of Sylvia Plath, where she basically wants to show the reader how smart she is, and how much she knows about, well, everything). But in these sonnets, Hilbert incorporates it all, leaving out nothing, letting the Golden Fleece sit beside Suzanne Vega, and I just feel happy to be going along for the ride.

He raises a pint, not only to his crazy friends sitting at the Astor Bar with him, or suffering through their hangovers at a local diner the next morning, but to all of the poets who have gone before, Hilbert's emotional and intellectual history.

According to Wordsworth, Shakespeare "unlocked his heart" with the "key" of the sonnet.

So, too, has Ernie Hilbert.

Read more about Hilbert and Sixty Sonnets. You can also listen to Hilbert read some of his work here. Hilbert's bio here.

Purchase Sixty Sonnets here.

Books I have found, a book I still need to find

The invention of the Internet (thanks, Al Gore!) has changed my book-buying life. Once I figured out (and since I'm a Luddite it was relatively recently - my dad was way ahead of the curve on this one, as a book collector) that you could scan Amazon and other book sellers for out-of-print and hard-to-find books, through all of the used bookstores that also sell on Amazon ... well. My life has become a Trixie Belden novel, tracking down the books I once loved and ordering them. I'm a collector, too. I need to OWN these things. Which is why my bookshelf situation is so dire right now, but hey, some people collect cars, others collect shoes ... I collect books.

There are times when I'm bored and I'll suddenly start to think: "Okay, okay ... so what else ... what ELSE haven't I found ..." and I'll scan my memory as a child. Some pretty amazing books have emerged from my mind in this manner. Suddenly I'll remember - "Holy shit - Sarah and Katie - I LOVED that book!" With a couple of clicks through Amazon, and I find that SOMEONE is selling it. Amazing! Five days later, I have a battered paperback in my hand of a book I once adored, and barely remember.

Some of the books I have found:

Into the Dream - William Sleator (this is a good book - PERIOD)

The summer sleigh ride, - what is beautiful is that the copy I got here is an ex-library copy - and it is the exact same version that I remember reading as a kid. Hard cover, blue ... and the illustrations ... God, it just took me back. (excerpt here)

When the Sky is Like Lace - I wrote about my years-long search to find this book here. I was looking for the wrong title. But I was obsessed with finding it. Gorgeous illustrations. (excerpt here)

The mystery of Lonesome Manor - Another piece of good fortune - the copy I have is exactly the copy I remember as a kid. Hard cover, battered ... This book transported me, and I basically wanted to live in it, and have long blonde braids, and 11 brothers and sisters, and snowshoe home through the French Canadian night ... Marvelous mystery, great book. (excerpt here

Louly - by Carol Ryrie Brink. The only book of hers that you can still stroll into an actual store and find is Caddie Woodlawn, her most famous and beloved book. It's good, I loved Caddie Woodlawn, but it's nothing compared to Louly - the story of a group of kids in 1908, and the leader of the group is a girl named Louly ... who is on the cusp of being a teenager ... but not quite there yet. She wants to be an actress. I re-read this book a couple of years ago (once I finally tracked it down) and found it just as marvelous as I did when I was 11. (excerpt here)

Luvvy and the Girls. - by Natalie Savage Carlson. Who can say why some books seem to stand the test of time - like Caddie Woodlawn or Anne of Green Gables, and other books are forgotten. Luvvy and the Girls is almost completely forgotten (although I do get emails about it from time to time since I wrote about it) - and to me it feels like a classic. She's a marvelous writer - she really puts you there, she creates characters who live, breathe, behave in unexpected ways. The story of sisters at a boarding school ... It was one of my favorite books growing up, and it was one of those books that popped into my head over the last five years and I became determined to track it down. It's not in print now. It's completely forgotten. This does not reflect upon its merits as a book. Any young girl would be transported by this book. (excerpt here)

The aforementioned Sarah and Katie. - which I actually haven't re-read since I tracked it down, but I will, eventually. The story of two best friends, who have written a school play together, and suddenly there is a new girl in school, with long red hair, who has an air of glamour about her, and she gets the lead in the play co-written by Sarah and Katie - and somehow she starts to make trouble between the two long-standing friends. Sarah and Katie emerge as real girls - one more grumpy and impatient, one quiet and sweet but with real backbone ... and the prospect of this friendship breaking up is terrible. I don't remember much more of it, but I do remember the details: Sarah walks home to lunch every day from school (this amazed me as a young girl ... I didn't live close enough to home to do that) - and I remember that Katie had a long blonde braid, and I remember the culminating scene - which is the play being performed ... Anyway, I'll have to re-read it eventually. I took it out from the school library so much as a kid that the librarian probably just wanted to say to me, "Why don't you just take it for good?"

NOW.

There is one book I remember from my childhood, and I cannot remember the title, the author, or anything about it. I think there were illustrations, but I can't be sure. I believe, too, that I read other books by this same author. I can even see where it was at my local library, what shelf it was on ... but I can't remember, alphabetically, what that shelf was. I think it might have been early on in the alphabet ... like F or G ... but again, I can't be sure.

Maybe this will sound familiar to someone out there.

It tells the story of a wacky British family who all live in the same "townhouse" in London. There's a mother, father, some kids, and crazy relatives - all there together. When the book opens it is raining. Not such a big deal in England, but this rain just won't stop. It rains so much that the "townhouse" - with the entire wacky British family inside - lifts up from its foundation and floats off down the street. The "townhouse" ends up in the South Pacific ... and they have many adventures along the way, and I believe cannibals are involved at one point, as well as a desert island, and other craziness. I remember the book being very funny, with great characters - and the father being all proper and flustered, as his damn house floated away.

I have looked and looked for this book, but without a title or an author, I'm stuck. I have Googled crazy things like "children's book, British house, floating away ..." and come up with nada.

That's the main book I'd love to find right now.

Until another one comes up from out of the memory bank, and I focus on THAT.

I WILL find this book. I thought I would never find When the Sky is Like Lace, and the journey of remembering that book and finally owning that book was a years-long affair. I have patience. All of this may seem rather pathetic, but gimme a break. I only have a duck and five books, what more do you want from me.

But I do wonder if any of the voracious readers out there remember such a book.

Joan Acocella: "Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints"

Joan Acocella has been a staff writer for The New Yorker for I don't know how many years, and I am just now starting to pay attention to her. She writes mainly about dance (her dance columns are amazing - and I don't go to see much dance, but it's a testament to her writing that I always read her column anyway) - but on occasion covers other topics too. My first encounter with her was in 1998, when she wrote a massive piece on Mikhail Baryshnikov for The New Yorker called "The Soloist". It's one of the best personal profiles The New Yorker has ever run, and certainly one of the best profiles I've ever read, period. It was over 20 pages long. It was brilliant.

She's an amazing writer. Her stuff is quite eclectic, perhaps delicate, and so there isn't the mass appeal of someone writing about movie stars or something like that - but she can't be beat as an author. I don't know her background, she has mentioned that she was basically a dance fan - it wasn't her vocation at first, she was a writer, but she found her "niche", almost by accident and she's been writing about dance for years. It is obviously her calling.

Finally, a collection of her essays over the years has been released in a wonderful edition called Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays. I have been working my way through it, ever so slowly, unable to read more than 2 or 3 pages a day ... but a collection of essays seems to suit me right now. Anything longer is too much of a commitment.

It's been marvelous to get to know her better as a writer, first of all, and to realize the sheer DEPTH of her knowledge, not just about dance, but about many things. She is the kind of essayist and journalist I most admire. I can kind of get that her area of expertise is the early 20th century and the birth of modernism. She knows what she's talking about. The lives intersect - Joyce and Freud and Nijinsky and Stefan Zweig - and you get the sense that she is writing about a time that is still fully alive for her, a vibrant frightening time of upheaval for European artists. She's marvelous.

Many of the essays in the book, of course, focus on dance. There is a huge essay on Nijinsky. The Baryshnikov essay is included. She has essays on Suzanne Farrell, Balanchine, Lincoln Kerstein, all the giants of 20th century ballet. But also, delightfully (for me - who is just getting to know her) - she also has in-depth essays on authors of that period, too, some whose names I have heard of - but many whose work I don't know at all. Joseph Roth. Heard of him, knew nothing about him, never read him. I must rectify that immediately. Stefan Zweig. When I get back into fiction, Beware of Pity will be first on the list (Acocella wrote the foreword to the latest edition). She seems to have a fondness for Austrian writers of the early 20th century, the assimilated Jews who were big supporters and defenders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and watched, horrified, as it collapsed, leaving them stateless and unprotected. She has a magnificent essay on one of my favorites, Primo Levi, basically defending him against a psycho-pathological biography which annoyed her. Acocella is awesome when she gets annoyed. I find her very funny, too.

As I read some of the essays, I realized I had read one of them before as well - her review of a biography of Lucia Joyce, Joyce's daughter. I had referenced Acocella's article here, in my annoyed blog-post about it.

One of the themes that emerges, as I read her work all together, is her interest in the business of art, how artists do what they do, how they compromise and sacrifice, and what it takes, psychologically. For some it is easy, for others it is torment. There are no easy answers. Acocella wants to examine the process. She is fascinated by people's processes. Some are delighted by fame, others hounded by it. To say one is right and the other wrong is to place a highly simplistic value system on something that is quite complicated - the diversity of human personality. I love her perspective.

There's an entire essay on the phenomenon known as "writer's block", and she recounts some of the most well-known stories (Ralph Ellison, primarily - what a tragedy - but others, too - Fitzgerald, Eugenides - the terror of the "second novel"). I think a lot of my affinity for Acocella is that, obviously, I agree with her point of view. She is more interested in the work, than in the explanations or psychologizing placed on motivation, etc. Her essay on Nijinsky (which is, actually, a book review of a psychiatric history of the poor doomed dancer) is a masterpiece in this regard. I love her focus.

I also love her for making my reading list longer, for introducing me to huge gaps in my education, and I am always grateful when someone does that, and with such elegance and wit.

I can't even count the times I have put down the book and just let myself THINK about what she just wrote. There's something very satisfying about it. These are not just profile pieces, but intellectual analyses, and I find myself getting very worked up thinking about all of it.

Just a smattering of her startlingly eloquent and funny and moving paragraphs below:

From "A Fire in the Brain", her essay on Lucia Joyce, the mentally ill daughter of James Joyce:

Many people are brilliant, and from that you may get one novel, as Zelda Fitzgerald did. But to write five novels (Scott) or seventeen (Nabokov) - to make a career - you must have, with brilliance, a number of less glamorous virtues, for example, patience, resilience, and courage. Lucia Joyce encouraged obstacles and threw up her hands; James Joyce faced worse obstacles - for most of his writing life, publishers ran from him in droves - but he persisted. When the critics made fun of Zelda's novel, she stopped publishing; when Scott had setbacks - indeed, when he was a falling-down drunk - he went on hoping, and working.

From "Blocked", her essay on writer's block:

A story that haunts the halls of The New Yorker is that of Joseph Mitchell, who came on staff in 1938, wrote many brilliant pieces, and then, after the publication of his greatest piece, "Joe Gould's Secret," in 1964, came to the office almost every day for the next thirty-two years without filing another word. In a series of tributes published in The New Yorker upon Mitchell's death, in 1996, Calvin Trillin recalled hearing once that Mitchell was "writing away at a normal pace until some professor called him the greatest living master of the English declarative sentence and stopped him cold."

There are many other theories about Mitchell. (For one thing, "Joe Gould's Secret" was about a blocked writer.) It is nevertheless the case that, however much artists may want attention, getting it can put them off their feed, particularly when it comes at the beginning of their careers. That may have been the case with Dashiell Hammett.

From "True Confessions", her beautiful profile of Italian modernist Italo Svevo (whose life was changed from an encounter with James Joyce):

Svevo simply did not have enough certainty to join the ranks of Balzac and Zola. His world was not theirs, the world of causes - social, historical, economic - but something almost causeless, the mal du siecle, in its turn-of-the-century form: the crippling of action by thought, the erasure of the present by the future (fantasy) and the past (remorse). Bad as his circumstances are, Alfonso's main problem is internal. He cannot seem to do anything; he is too self-conscious, too busy watching himself. Like Joyce and Proust soon afterward, Svevo had discovered the subject of the twentieth-century novel, the self-imprisonment of the mind, but he didn't know how to write anything but a nineteenth-century novel.

From "Quicksand", her riveting portrait of Stefan Zweig:

Zweig, like many bold writers, posed himself problems that he could not always solve. In such cases, one has to ask oneself what feels true, what feels false, on the page. In Beware of Pity, what feels true are the scenes in which we are shown the futility of pity. This is a horrible lesson; it is also what makes the book radical and modern.

I knew very little about Zweig, although he does show up in Joyce biographies, because they met on a couple of occasions. His life was absolutely hair-raising, and Acocella has made me want to read everything this man ever wrote.

From "The Frog and the Crocodile", Acocella's review of the recent publication of letters between Simone de Beauvoir and Nelson Algren, a man who gave Beauvoir her first orgasm at 39 (take THAT, Sartre - I think my brother would agree), and who reduced the world's foremost feminist into a puddle of need and desire. Good on him. The hottie American proletariat and the prickly French intellectual. A tragic story, though - of missed connections and futile feelings - and when Beauvoir died in the 80s she was buried wearing a ring that Algren gave her in the 1950s, a ring she had never taken off. Pretty wild stuff. Here is the doomed pair, with another woman (who was also one of Sartre's mistresses):

But anyway, I love Acocella here.

When The Second Sex was published, in 1949, Frenchwomen had had the vote for only five years. If Beauvoir's mind, as her detractors claim, was swamped with "masculinist" ideas, those were the only ideas around at the time. If she omitted to tell her public about her lesbian experiences, to do otherwise would have been fatal to the reputation of any woman writer of that period. (Beauvoir's critics should also take another look at her defense of lesbianism - a whole chapter - in The Second Sex. For 1949, that was brave.) It is possible that the best writers on social injustice - certainly the most moving - are those who grew up when the injustice in question was not viewed as a problem, and who therefore say things that get them in trouble, later, with holders of more correct views, views that the earlier writers gave birth to. I am thinking of Abraham Lincoln's pre-Civil War statements on the inferiority of Negroes, so decried by recent historians. It is one thing to free a people whom you regard as equal. But what does it take to free a people whom you have been trained to regard as inferior, and who, by your standards, are inferior? It takes something else, a kind of imagination and courage that we do not understand.

In the recent flap over Beauvoir we see again what might now be called Philip Larkin syndrome: the insistence on the part of modern critics that celebrated authors' lives be as admirable as their books. In the case of Beauvoir one might answer, "Do as she said, not as she did." (That, in fact, is the title of an article that Deirdre Barr was oved to write for the Times Magazine in response to the outrage over the revelations in her biography and in the Letters to Sartre.) But even if we did as she did, we wouldn't be doing so badly. After all, she did not move to Chicago, and her reasons were not just Sartre but also her career, her place in the literary life of Paris. If that career was tied up with her servitude to Sartre, good writing has sprung from more humiliating conditions. And, of course, the relationship with Sartre helped to germinate The Second Sex. The affair with Algren, so sexual, and therefore so searing, may have released her knowledge of the condition of women, but, whatever her denials, the knowledge was certainly there before.

From "Becoming the Emperor", a wonderful essay on another writer I knew very little about, Marguerite Yourcenar, author of Memoirs of Hadrian:

Before she left Europe, Yourcenar had deposited a trunk in storage at a hotel in Lausanne. She had been trying for years to get it back, and one day in 1949 it arrived. Opening it, she looked first for some valuables, but they had vanished. All that was left was a bunch of old papers. She pulled her chair up to the fireplace and started pitching things in. Then she came upon the drafts of a novel about Hadrian that she had begun when she was twenty-one and had later put aside. At the sight of those pages, she said, her mind more or less exploded. It is hard to understand how she managed to produce Memoirs of Hadrian in two years. In a bibliographical note appended to the novel, it takes her seventeen pages to list the sources she consulted (mostly at Yale) in order to make her account factually correct: ancient texts by the score; histories in English, French, and German; treatises on archaeology, on numismatics. Then, there was the matter of writing the book, but she said that she composed it in a state of "controlled delirium". She recalled a train trip she took at the time:

Closed inside my compartment as if in a cubicle of some Egyptian tomb, I worked late into the night between New York and Chicago; then all the next day, in the restaurant of a Chicago station where I awaited a train blocked by storms and snow; then again until dawn, alone in the observation car of a Santa Fe Limited; surrounded by black spurs of the Colorado mountains, and by the eternal pattern of the stars. Thus were written at a single impulsion the passions on food, love, sleep, and the knowledge of men. I can hardly recall a day spent with more ardor, or more lucid nights.

Clearly, she was simply ready to write this novel, as she had not been at twenty-one. She herself said that the crux was time: "There are books which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty." She was forty-five when she went back to Hadrian.

From "A Hard Case", her essay on Primo Levi, an author I adore. She reviews a biography of Levi that she basically finds annoying, for reasons that I find a lot of biographies annoying. The essays should be read in its entirety, she obviously loves Levi - but here is a bit where she gets her Irish up:

As for his life, the position she [the biographer in question] takes is roughly that of a psychotherapist of the seventies. She's okay. We're okay. Why wasn't he okay? Why did he have to work all the time? Why didn't he take more vacations? And how about getting laid once in a while? She records that as a teenager he mooned over various girls, but whenever he got near one he blushed and fell silent. "What was this?" Angier asks. "Can anyone ever say?" I can say. Has Angier never heard of geeks? They are born every day, and they grow up to do much of the world's intellectual and artistic work. One wonders, at times, why Angier chose Levi as a subject - she seems to find him so peculiar. And does she imagine that if he had been more "normal" - less reserved, less scrupulous - he would have written those books she so admires?

From "European Dreams", her essay on Joseph Roth:

One of the remarkable things about Roth's early writing is its political foresight. He was the first person to inscribe the name of Adolf Hitler in European fiction, and that was in 1923, ten years before Hitler took over Germany. But what makes his portrait of the Nazi brand of anti-Semitism so interesting is that it was done before the Holocaust, which he did not live to see. His treatment of the Jews therefore lacks the pious edgelessness of most post-Holocaust writing on the subject. In one of his novels of the 1920s - the best one, Right and Left - which opens in a little German town, he says that in this place most jokes began, "There was once a Jew on a train," but on the same page he narrows his eyes at Jews who ignore such jokes. In an essay of 1929, he speculates comically on why God took such a special interest in the Jews: "There were so many others that were nice, malleable, and well trained: happy, balanced Greeks, adventurous Phoenicians, artful Egyptians, Assyrians with strange imaginations, northern tribes with beautiful, blond-haired, as it were, ethical primitiveness and refreshing forest smells. But none of the above! The weakest and far from loveliest of peoples was given the most dreadful curse and most dreadful blessing" - to be God's chosen people. As for German nationalism, he regarded it, at least in the twenties, mainly as a stink up the nose, a matter of lies and nature hikes and losers trying to gain power. He was frightened of it, but he also found it ridiculous.

And two excerpts from "After the Ball Was Over", her gorgeous essay on Vaslav Nijinsky:

What we need to know about Nijinsky is not what was on his mind but how he transformed this material into art - how this tongue-tied introvert managed to become not only a great, eloquent, and (by all accounts) surpassingly glamorous dancer but also the first modernist choreographer in the history of ballet. In other words, we need a psychology of creativity. And that is exactly what most psychobiographers do not concern themselves with. Creativity - the thing that actually distinguishes their subject from the rest of humankind and therefore needs explaining - is to them a given. They work backward from there, to libido and aggression, the things that in no way distinguish their subjects from the rest of humanity.

Amen, sister!

And:

Whatever Nijinsky was in reality, he is by now a legend, a major cultural fact, and not just because of his extraordinary story but because of the way that story ties in with certain critical issues in ballet. Ballet's relationship to time - the fact that the repertory, unanchored by text, is always vanishing, just as the dance image on the stage is always vanishing - forms a large part of the vividness and poignance of the art. We are always losing it, like life, and therefore we re-create it, mythologize it, in our minds. Nijinsky's life - his rapid self-extinction and the disappearance of his ballets - is like a parable of that truth. If dance is disappearance, he is the ultimate disappearing act. Accordingly, he is held that much dearer. If many people today still believe that he was the greatest dancer who has ever lived, that is partly because there are so few records of his dancing.

And finally, from her masterpiece essay on Baryshnikov, "The Soloist":

What has made Baryshnikov a paragon of late-twentieth-century dance is partly the purity of his ballet technique. In him the hidden meaning of ballet, and of classicism - that experience has order, that life can be understood - is clearer than in any other dancer on the stage today. Another part of his preeminence derives, of course, from his virtuosity, the lengths to which he was able to take ballet - the split leaps, the cyclonic pirouettes - without sacrificing purity. But what has made him an artist, and a popular artist, is the completeness of his performances: the level of concentration, the fullness of ambition, the sheer amount of detail, with the cast of the shoulder, the angle of the jaw, even the splay of the fingers, all deployed in the service of a single pressing act of imagination. In him there is simply more to see than in most other dancers.

She's a fine fine writer and I look forward to the rest of the collection.

One.

Hard to pick one answer for each. Got this from Ted.

One book you’re currently reading: I am only reading one. I cannot read fiction right now. I can barely read, if you want to know the truth, but I do what I can. I am now reading Nureyev: The Life, by Julie Kavanagh. Brilliant, engrossing.

One book that changed your life: Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh. Helped make me who I am today. Helped validate my compulsive need to put pen to paper as a small child. Helped me realize that prickly weird individual little girls like myself with strange intense obsessive qualities were actually pretty awesome. She also helped lead me to the sneakers I still wear today. One of my essays on that book here.

One book you’d want on a deserted island: My Riverside Shakespeare. I still haven't read the whole damn thing, although I've read the plays and sonnets, of course But the introductory notes alone would take me years to get through. I've had this book since I was 19 years old and it's one of my most prized possessions.

One book you’ve read more than once: Just one? I'll go with Mating, by Norman Rush. Here is one of the many essays I have written on this spectacular accomplishment.

One book you’ve never been able to finish: "Never"? I don't like that word. Most books I CHOOSE not to finish because they effing SUCK. Like that Nicholas Sparks book I tried to read in Ireland, whichever one it was. So far, I have "never" been able to finish War and Peace, but that's only because I had to put it down last September, due to extenuating circumstances, and have been unable to pick it up again. I can't think of a book I have tried multiple times to read and never been able to finish.

One book that made you laugh: Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh. One of the funniest books I have ever read in my life. One of my essays on the book here

One book that made you cry: Geek Love: A Novel by Katherine Dunn. My essay on the book here

One book you keep rereading: Helter Skelter, by Vincent Bugliosi. I'm actually not sure, at this point, how many times I have read this book. I read it, on average, once every two or three years. I see no reason that this trend won't continue.

One book you’ve been meaning to read: Villette, by Charlotte Bronte. I love Jane Eyre so much and I've always wanted to read it - just never got around to it.

One book you believe everyone should read: "Everyone"? I don't know about that. I'm not really that bossy. But I think if you haven't read Crime and Punishment you are missing out on so so much! My heart aches when I try to imagine NOT having read the book, and NOT having that book in my consciousness - so I'm just saying.

Grab the nearest book. Open it to page 56. Find the fifth sentence…

In many ways Rudolf was better suited at that time to the Bolshoi's broad bravado style, which has always lacked the Kirov's refinement.

Well, clearly.

Books.

The situation has reached critical mass. I have cleared out books I don't need or want anymore (two boxes full) to make room for new purchases, and it's now just a hopeless situation. No more re-org. No more clearing-out. Everywhere I look are stacks of books. It's better than stacks of laundry or stacks of garbage, I admit. Sometimes it's rather cozy and it's always a stimulating atmosphere. I've lived here for six years now and I still feel a little sigh of pleasure when I walk into my apartment. It's a perfect little space and I love it.

But the books have now taken over. Hope and I cower in the corner, outnumbered. And I am no longer willing to get rid of any to make space. No. The point is to get more space.

Nothing to do now but move. I'm working on it.

Gargoyles in Chicago

More Chicago pics - since I know so many of you out there are from there, or have lived there.

Photographs of the fantastical library downtown with the huge green gargoyles.

My dad had a long correspondence with a book collector in Ireland (well, he had many long correspondences with many book collectors in Ireland) - and this one guy had said that he had a collection of postcards of libraries in America. You can't say something like that to my dad without him running with it. This book collector said that to my father in 1981, and there was never a town that my father went to, after that time, that he didn't try to procure a postcard of the local library to send to this guy. We would laugh about this poor man in County Kerry, being like, "Jesus Mary and Joseph, enough with the postcards!" But I'm sure he loved them.

I never did get a postcard of the Chicago library - and just personal photographs would not do for the collector - they had to be postcards ... but I did give my dad these pictures nonetheless.

An amazing building.

Scanning Wednesday

My one bookshelf in 1995.

The book situation is so much more dire now.

2008 Books Read

... in the order in which I finished them, understanding that very often I read many books at the same time. I count re-read books, by the way. I'll include links to any posts or book excerpts I might have done for each book.

If you decide to buy one of these books, and you click on the link I provided - I get a referral payment from that click. So you know. Thanks in advance.

I got more into fiction this year than I have been in a long time. But I like to mix up my reading - although you can tell when I go on a particular tear ... the books stack up in certain sections, the Waugh period, or the Didion period. But I read a lot of NEW fiction this year, a real change for me (which really started last year - a new trend) - and I have really enjoyed it. I also went back and re-visited some old favorites.

1. Londonistan, by Melanie Phillips. I had no idea I started off the year on such a bleak note. An important book but really disturbing and upsetting.

2. The ABCs of Love, by Sarah Selway. A new writer I am very into. I loved this book. It manages to be funny, clever, and tragic, all on the same page at times.

Here is my essay on that book

3. Stalin: Breaker of Nations, by Robert Conquest, one of my idols. This was a re-read. You know me. Can't get enough of Stalin.

4. Zodiac, by Robert Graysmith. True crime, serial killers, forensic details, horror and gore. Sign me up.

5. We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson. One of the best books I read in 2008. I had never read it before. I beg of you, if you haven't read it: do yourself a favor ...

6. Thomas Jefferson: (The American Presidents Series), by Joyce Appleby. Part of the ongoing American Presidents Series which I am reading in order. This is a challenge, because they aren't being published in order - for example, Gerald Ford is out, but Abraham Lincoln is not. So I am learning patience as well as American history (although let's be honest, there isn't much more I can learn at this point - at least not from the period of 1781 to the mid 1860s). There are a wide variety of writers - historians and not - and the books are all about 150, 160 pages long. I adore the series. Even if it's just review for me, I love them. Oh, and another reason I love them: they focus mainly on the man's time as president. Biographical details are given, but the point of the series is to analyze each man's time in office. So THAT'S different, and I really appreciate that.

7. James Monroe (The American Presidents), by Gary Hart. Yes, that Gary Hart. I actually did not know all that much about Monroe's time in office - and so far, this book has been my favorite of the series. Well done, Mr. Hart.

Excerpt from the book here

8. John Quincy Adams: (The American Presidents Series), by Robert Remini. Good stuff. John Quincy Adams is someone I know a lot about - mainly because of the Massachusetts connection and the sense that the Adams family somehow has something to do with me, because of all the tours we took as kids of their houses and such. Adams was a rather morose man, troubled by depression, and was a major brainiac. His library in Quincy is a marvel. Go visit it if you are ever in the area.

9. Andrew Jackson, by Sean Wilentz. I am hard-pressed to think of a more fascinating President than Andrew Jackson. Your jaw just drops reading some of this crap.

10. American Presidents: Martin Van Buren, by Ted Widmer. Another man I didn't know much about, including his friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne. Again: the main strength of this series is that it dispenses with the pressure of writing mini-biographies of these men. The series is meant to be an analysis of the office of the President, and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that make up a man's time in office. Brilliant approach, I think. I consider these books to be indispensable additions to my burgeoning US Presidents library.

11. Post Captain, by Patrick O'Brian. Loved it. Have not finished the series yet - I'm taking a break - but I haven't been disappointed yet. They are phenomenal books - engaging not just on the visceral level, but intellectual as well. I adore those characters.

Here is my essay on the book

12. Christine Falls: A Novel, by Benjamin Black (aka John Banville). LOVED THIS BOOK. A noir set in 1950s Dublin. Great cast of characters, awesome atmosphere, and prose so good you want to scoop it up with a spoon.

I read it in one day when I was delayed for 10 hours at O'Hare.

More on the book here

13. H.M.S. Surprise, by Patrick O'Brian. More marvelous-ness.

My essay on the book here

More here

14. In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, by Nathaniel Philbrick. A fascinating book - not only about the true story of the Essex being rammed by a whale (used by Melville as the basis for Moby Dick) - but a history of the whaling industry in New England, especially Nantucket. Simple clear prose, and some absolutely horrifying images that have stuck with me

15. Salvador, by Joan Didion. It's been a very Didion-heavy year for me. I have read more books by her than anyone else, even Patrick O'Brian. There's something about her thought process that I find very soothing (if challenging and difficult) right now. Also: her writing! God. This book is not, in general, beloved by Didion fans, but I liked it. She went to El Salvador in the 80s and wrote this book on her experiences there.

16. The Mauritius Command, by Patrick O'Brian. Love it.

My essay on the book here

17. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy. No matter how hard I try, I will never, in all my life, forget The Judge. One of the most memorable and confronting characters in the history of literature. This book slayed me. A great American novel. No other country in the world could produce a Cormac McCarthy. He is quintessentially of here ... and the stories he tells are brutal. Relentless. I find him very difficult. He is so damn good, in every paragraph, that you almost feel like you are staring at the sun. I had to put this book down periodically, for a break, but I wouldn't wait too long to pick it up again, because I knew the danger of me deciding not to finish it at all was great. I find him to be a deeply unsettling writer. One of the greats.

My posts on the book here, here, and here

18. After Henry, by Joan Didion. A wonderful collection of essays. Not as mind-blowing as the Slouching Towards Bethlehem collection, but pretty close. A mix of personal, political, cultural ... she's my favorite.

19. The Sea, by John Banville. Very interesting to go from Benjamin Black to Banville. I highly recommend it. Same guy, but you would never know it. He won the Booker because of The Sea. It is more typical Banville stuff (albeit beautifully written), about a sad middle-aged man thinking about his memories.

My posts on the book here and here

20. The Pornographer, by John McGahern. How I love McGahern and how sad I am that we will have no more books from him. I treasure his books. I loved this one.

My post on the book here

21. Desolation Island, by Patrick O'Brian. So far my favorite in the series.

My post on the book here

22. A Sport and a Pastime: A Novel, by James Salter. This guy's writing is beyond belief, and I have yet to really describe WHY. You just have to experience his books. This was what put him on the map - a typical coming-of-age story with a love affair between an aimless American student and a French girl. Hard to describe the book's power, but all I can say is - he manages to capture a note of piercing sadness throughout the book, mixed with his acutely clear and accurate descriptions of, well, EVERYTHING: ice in a glass, kids on a soccer field, an empty bar. He is unbelievable.

My posts on the book here and here

23. That Night, by Alice McDermott. One of my favorite writers writing today. I adored Charming Billy (which won her the National Book Award some time back) but I think I might like this one even better. Yes, I love her because she (in my opinion) is THE voice of the Irish-American Northeast experience ... that's my family she is writing about. She just gets it so right. The grandparents with brogues, and the newer generation coming up around Vatican II and what all that means ... but she's not heavy-handed. She inhabits that world. She doesn't just describe it. It comes to life. That Night is haunting - with, I swear, one of the best openings of any book I have ever read, period.

Here is my essay on the beginning of that book.

24. The Fortune of War, by Patrick O'Brian. Perhaps it's now redundant to say, but I loved this book.

25. A Widow for One Year, by John Irving. OUCH. I have no idea how it happened, but this is what went down: I got caught up in the story, sure, I did. I fell in love with the characters. Of course I did. It's John Irving. There were parts of it that felt contrived, but in a book that is mainly about writers - and how they basically narrate their own lives, and find ways to insert themselves into narratives that might have nothing to do with them - the feelings of contrivance fit somehow. Of course these people would be a bit contrived. They're all artists. Writers. And then, with the last two pages of the book, I found myself bursting - yes, BURSTING - into sobs. How could I not have seen it coming? What am I, quarter-tard?? Even with the "contrived" feeling of the book, the ending sucker-punched me, and I cried for an hour, pacing around my apartment, having no idea what perfect storm had come over me, and why I was crying about my OWN life in the wake of reading the book. So that's what happened when I read Widow for One Year, and it has very quickly become one of my favorites of Irving's (and that's saying a lot).

I touch on Irving's book in my piece about Jeff Bridges

26. Then We Came to the End: A Novel, by Joshua Ferris. I have Siobhan to thank for making me read this book. I probably would not have picked it up otherwise, although I've honestly heard nothing but raves. It's a first novel, and I usually avoid those (although I will loop back to check out first novels once the author has proved himself with more) - but this?? How can I even DESCRIBE it? A comedy about an office. Yet there are moments as highly tragic as any you will find in any serious novel. But when I found myself wiping tears of laughter off my face as I turned the first damn page I felt my heart start to flutter with hope ... can he sustain this?? Yes, he can. I am gobsmacked by his talent. Here's one thing: the book is written with a PLURAL NARRATOR. "We". The entire thing takes place in an office, so ... it's hard to describe how perfect this 'we" device is, and at first it feels like a device - and then you totally forget about it, and it becomes absolutely right for this book. Bravo, Mr. Ferris. This is one of the best books I read this year.

My posts on this book here and here

READ IT

27. Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh. Along with Joan Didion and Patrick O'Brian, I had a big Evelyn Waugh year. This is his first novel, and I am basically madly in love with Evelyn Waugh. His books are manic, breathless, absurd ... and yet when you close each one, it stays with you ... These are deep books, insightful skewerings of the 20th century and its pretensions and delusions ... Awesome stuff. Decline and Fall is Waugh's spoof on the academic world, and education in general.

My posts on the book here and here

28. Enduring Love: A Novel, by Ian McEwan. This book really fucking upset me. I felt like I had been pressed through some horrible vice-like device by the end of it. Powerful stuff, but really unsettling.

My post on the book here

29. Nine Stories, by J.D. Salinger. Just because. This is, what, my 26th reading of it or something?

Some of my posts on the stories here, here, here, here, and here

30. The Surgeon's Mate, by Patrick O'Brian. And that's where I have stopped with the series ... haven't been able to read one since ... but I will get back to it. I love every stinking word. I love those people.

31. Falling Man: A Novel, by Don DeLillo. I hesitated for about a year to pick this book up. It's about September 11th, and ... not that I feel I own that event, but I certainly feel proprietary about it, and a bit anxious about reading it turned into fiction. However, it was Don Delillo, a writer I love (despite the problem I had with Underworld, it being, oh, about SEVEN HUNDRED PAGES TOO LONG) and he's serious enough I figured, what the hell. It's fantastic. It was difficult for me to read because he so absolutely captures what it felt like on that day, the disorientation, the panic, the sudden clarity about your own personal relationships ("I love you," came in the calls and emails ... that's what they all said ... "I love you ...") ... A wonderful book and I am very glad I read it.

32. The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon. I had a bit of trouble finishing this one - again, I felt it was about 150 pages too long - and Chabon's fantasy that he was writing hard-boiled Dashiell Hammett prose was more like a delusion. He couldn't write a simple sentence if he tried. I love Michael Chabon - he is one of my favorite writers writing today - but I did chuckle at what he SAID he was doing in the book, compared to my experience of it. Regardless: my brother told me to hang with it, and I am glad I did, because suddenly in the last 100 pages, the real heart and guts of the thing came pouring out, in a way that only Chabon could write. He is so so good with love and love lost and all of that. A master, really. Wasn't really wacky about the book, though. I'll read whatever he writes, so that's all settled, but this one wasn't my favorite.

33. Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend, by Barbara Oakley. What a title! This book felt like it was written FOR me - with my interest in cults and dictators and aberrations of personality and the question of evil in general. I loved it. Highly recommended.

34. The Loved One, by Evelyn Waugh. Another laugh-out-loud funny book that is about death and funeral homes and Hollywood. I am left in awe of his brilliance, but for the most part, reading his books, my stomach just hurts, due to the guffaws of laughter that embarrass me in public places.

35. The Writing Class, by Jincy Willett. She's one of my new favorites on the scene, and her books are so eagerly anticipated that I find I cannot wait until paperback (my preferred way). I buy her books the day they come out, in hardback. She's only written two novels, so this has only happened twice, but as I have said repeatedly: I am a fan, and once I am a fan to this degree, I am usually a fan for life. Even with someone like Margaret Atwood, and she hasn't written a book I actually liked in 15 years. No matter. I'm a fan. I'll keep investing, because that's what fans do. The Writing Class was so much fun that I never ever wanted it to end. Willett is one of those writers who is laugh-out-loud funny but she also can just NAIL a person's loneliness or pathetic nature or sadness in one or two perfect sentences. It's the story of a writing class at a community college ... and ... to say more would ruin it. I loved this book.

My post on the book here

36. Inglorious: A Novel, by Joanna Kavenna. This book was a totally upsetting experience, and I had a hard time not taking it personally. There were times I had to put it down, because it came too close to what I have been going through this past year ... and I felt a razor-edge there, something too close for comfort. It is the story of a woman who one day quits her job, spontaneously. She feels she needs to 'shake things up'. Her boyfriend of 11 years or something like that has suddenly left her, and is now married to a mutual friend. This is no heartwarming Oprah tale where the girl learns some lessons, and goes on an Eating, Praying, Loving journey towards self-actualization where everything works out in the end. No. The world is not that simple. Everything DOESN'T "happen for a reason". Leaving her job ends up being absolutely disastrous for her, a foolhardy ridiculous mistake, and she finds herself spiralling into a depression that is debilitating. Kavenna just GETS it. Depression is not sadness. It is a flatline of nothingness interrupted by jagged-edged moments of horror and agony. To say that Kavenna describes this well is to understate what she accomplishes in this wrenching book. I felt deeply uneasy reading this book. It is a serious work of fiction and I really look forward to whatever she does next, even if it brings me close to that razor-edge again. Kavenna is the real deal. An amazing book.

37. The World and Other Places: Stories, by Jeanette Winterson. A collection of short stories. I've read this one before. Winterson is another writer I am a fan of forever (and it has NOT been easy). I will have a lifelong relationship with this woman, even when she annoys me. If you write a book like The Passion you can count me "in" for life. I'll follow you. I do like these short stories. I like Winterson best when she writes fairy tales.

Some posts on these stories here and here

38. Tanglewreck, by Jeanette Winterson. Gee, Jeanette, how do you feel about global warming? I can't be sure from reading this book, I am still unclear on your opinion. Hmmm. This is a book Winterson wrote 'for kids', although it is hard to imagine a kid really getting into it. The kid audience Winterson writes for remains purely theoretical, and there are parts of this fantasy book that feel more like a political harangue, like she is trying to indoctrinate her young innocent readers, secretly, to her pet political causes. I was very annoyed by this book - especially when parts of it are SO MUCH FUN. Time tornadoes whipping through London leaving mastodons rampaging across the bridges? Marvelous!! Leave the pamphlets out of your books, Winterson. You're getting to be a bore. But again: DAMN YOU, I'll read whatever you put out.

My post on this book here

39. Miami, by Joan Didion. Didion excavates the culture and history of Miami. It makes me wish she would travel around America and do it for other cities, in a series. She's so good. I'm sure some people from Miami might be pissed off, but then others might feel vindicated. Who knows. As always, Didion writes what she wants to write, in chilly accurate prose that makes me see things in a different way. I can't say "I agree" or "I disagree" because ... well, that's the LEAST interesting response to anything, in my opinion. I mean, I have opinions, but they are not my entire context for my response to things. Whether or not I "agree" with Raskolnikov's behavior is immaterial. What I feel like when I read Didion's stuff is that here I am, in the presence of a writer, who likes to ponder things, who perceives things in a way that is against the grain at times - but who is, foremost, an individual. She is not in the pocket of any political party. Her background is Republican, Californian, and then East Coast - with her stint at Vogue, which launched her career. She was a member of the 60s generation, but the anarchy and drugs and free love was never for her. She is always somewhat separate from the themes of the day. It's what makes her so damn good.

40. Savage Grace: The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich and Famous American Family, by Natalie Robins. All I can say is: Ew. I wanted to take a shower, 10 showers, after reading this oral history of the Baekeland murder case. Disgusting people, all of them. But I COULD. NOT. PUT IT DOWN. Allison made me read it. We still can't stop talking about it. Unbelievable. On so many levels.

41. Where I Was From, by Joan Didion. Sick of her yet? I'm not. This is her book on California, her home state. Essays on politics, on water, on Hollywood ... a must-read. I am not sure why I had not read it before, but this was my first time. Brilliant.

42. Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime, by Jan Willem Honig and Norbert Both. I've read a couple of books about Srebenica, but not one as in-depth as this one. Horror. Still hard to comprehend.

43. Hollywood, by Garson Kanin. I know he's such a gossip-hound, but damn does he tell a great story. The Carole Lombard chapter is a classic.

44. Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, by Jeanette Winterson.
Essays on Virginia Woolf, mainly, but there are others. I enjoyed this book. She's very wacko, but that's the main reason I love her.

45. Heartless: The True Story of Neil Entwistle and the Cold Blooded Murder of his Wife and Child, by Michele McPhee. I bought this in the gift shop at Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston and mainly read it while sitting in the waiting room, or outside in the rain. I couldn't read anything else. It was stupid, poorly written, and all I could handle. Also, it was there. So that's what I read.

46. Conversations with Joan Crawford, by Roy Newquist. My cousin Mike sent me this book (and others). It is apparently what Newquist "remembers" from his conversations with Crawford, so take it all with a grain of salt, and yes, I did have a grain of salt - but I preferred not to use it - and just read the book up greedily, taking every damn word as true. Because that's how I roll. I LOVED this book. Crawford: such a professional, such a smart actress ... nobody's fool, and well-liked in the business. The only person who didn't like her, apparently, was her vicious daughter who has since destroyed Crawford's reputation with her vicious whiny book. Time to put those ghosts to rest, Christina. You have dominated the landscape long enough. Your mother was a bigger giant than you will ever be. Maybe she wasn't a good mother. Whatever. Get over it. I am more concerned about Crawford's reputation as an ACTRESS. Not just a campy classic sashaying around in shoulder pads. But an insightful smart courageous actress, as good as it gets. This book, with these "conversations", show that she was a conscious and intelligent performer. She worked damn hard at acting. She loved it.

47. A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968, by Paul Berman. Okay, so Berman is a recent discovery of mine (my bad) and he's an intellectual giant. I consider this book to be a must-read. MUST-READ. To have experienced it on the ground-level, to have been swept away by it himself ... but then to have the clarity later to sit down and right a history of that time ... with a jaundiced eye, and a big-picture point of view ... Unbelievable. I want to read more of his stuff.

No post on this book (it was too big and I was also deep in final draft of manuscript-mode at the time - no extra energy) - I did bring it with me on my writing retreat in the country.

48. Jimmy Stewart: A Biography, by Marc Eliot. A wonderful book, really insightful not just on the phases of Stewart's career, in terms of his acting roles - but an examination of the deals made, the economics of the studios, and how it was that Stewart joined the millionaire's club, a rare thing in those days of contract players. Cashel does a very good imitation of Jimmy Stewart.

My post on this book (which has a nice comment from the author himself in the comments section) here

49. The Way I Am, by Eminem. I rarely pre-order books, but I did with this one. As a matter of fact, I pre-ordered four of them. One for me, and one for each of my siblings for Christmas. First of all, the book is a work of art itself. The art direction is phenomenal. And the prose is not what you would expect. It is not angry or defensive. It's actually a very sad book, and reflective as well. I read it in three hours - but LOOKING at it, and soaking it in will take me years. Beautiful book.

50. Oscar Wilde, by Richard Ellmann. Not quite as towering an achievement as his Joyce biography, which I would count as one of the top 5 best biographies of the 20th century - but wonderful nonetheless. Mitchell is reading it now and I was so happy when he left me a voicemail message saying, "I am deeply in love with Oscar Wilde's mother." I mean, who isn't? Speranza! I ate this book UP. I have read all of Wilde's plays, of course, and also read Dorian Gray - and knew the bare bones of his life because it was so infamous and notorious. Who doesn't know that he was brought to trial for sodomy and imprisoned and then died a couple years later? But the details of that journey are all here ... and it was truly fascinating. It left me feeling rather tragic and sad.

Some thoughts on this book here

51. Carpe Diem: Put A Little Latin in Your Life, by Harry Mount. At times a very funny book (he's a lovely writer) - I bought it because I want to learn Latin again. It's one of my ongoing projects.

More thoughts on Latin here. Ibid.

52. The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Vol. 2: 1945-1957 - all I can say is: when is volume three coming out?? I have been working on Volume 2 for over a year now, dipping into it now and again, and I finally finished it. The breadth of his correspondence is enormous - the editing job here had to be unbelievable ... and his back-and-forth with Kazan over various playwriting issues and thematic issues should be required reading for all playwrights, and anyone in the theatre. What a life. What a mind!!

53. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital, by Lorrie Moore. Not as expansive as Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, this book covers the same territory, which makes it almost radioactive for me to read: friendships between girls at a certain time in their lives ... pre-puberty into puberty ... and the wreckage that come out during the changes in a girl's life. Lorrie Moore is one of the best writers writing today, and this book is so sad, so good (and also so funny). I can't think of another writer who combines comedy and tragedy so seamlessly.

Excerpt from the book here

54. Vile Bodies, by Evelyn Waugh. I'm not sure but I might consider this to be his most scary-brilliant book. It's always a sucker-punch with him. You are HOWLING with laughter for the majority of it (when the chick sleeps over what ends up being the Prime Minister's house and appears at breakfast still in her Hawaiian costume from the party the night before - I DIED laughing) ... and then, somehow, he sneaks up on you and the entire cataclysm that the world was wreching itself towards at that time becomes clear, horribly clear. It's not a war book, but World War II is in Vile Bodies. It's a sick and silly world he describes, and I guess I, the reader, am indicted by laughing so hard at it. He's so damn good.

Some thoughts on the book here

55. The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde. I'm not sure, I have to check my records, but I think that this might be the gay-est book I have ever read. You can see why it caused such a stir and was part of his undoing. It is a breathless act of courage, seen in the context of the time in which it was written. Wilde is not hiding his message. It is right there, in plain sight.

Excerpt from the book here

56. Anagrams, by Lorrie Moore. Dear Ms. Moore, I wanted to slit my wrists after reading this book. Thanks! I began to realize, in the last 30 pages, that this would not, as they say, "work out", and a feeling of dread started coming over me. I was not wrong. She's such a good writer, but this book was a bit too bleak for me right now, and I can already feel myself blocking it out.

57. Rumble Fish, by S.E. Hinton. The last time I read this book, I was 12 years old. Having just seen the movie again, I figured I'd pick it up. This is one of the great things about having a nice library (even in an apartment of my size), because I actually have a copy of Rumble Fish - the same one I had when I was 12, with the cheeseball cover (two hotties with dark hair playing pool) - so all I needed to do was reach out to my shelf and start reading. It's kind of a pretentious book and maybe it's just me being an adult - but why do people think Motorcycle Boy is crazy? Yes, he is deaf at times, and yes, he doesn't see colors ... but his energy is one of sanity and clarity. Why do people (like Steve) say to him, "Someone's gonna kill you someday"? It doesn't really make sense. Maybe it would if you were a teenager, feeling persecuted by adults and all that. As a kid, Rumble Fish was not my favorite of her books, although I read them all. I was strictly an Outsiders fan - and I also LOVED (and still do) Tex.

My post on the movie of Rumble Fish here

58. Cal, by Bernard McLaverty. I have seen the movie made of this book (with the wonderful John Lynch and a hot - when is she not - Helen Mirren - and remember well its dark and muddy look, the headlights through the trees, the feeling of doom and violence on the outskirts of that love affair) - but I had not read the book. It's a phenomenal piece of work - and it has the best last sentence of any book I have read in a long long time. It's shocking, actually - that last sentence. And although it shocked me, I realized: yes. Yes. That is exactly where this book needed to go. That is exactly what Cal had been looking for. Amazing.

A book that makes "the Troubles" in Northern Ireland palpably real. You can smell it, touch it, hear it.

I love Ted's recent post on the book (he's been on a McLaverty tear). He writes:

When Cal first works at the farm, he hides in a disused barn for several days to avoid returning to the city. He has no change of clothes and no shower or tub. MacLaverty writes of the condition of his clothes, how they feel against his skin, how he cleans his teeth with cooking salt and soot - with the kind of detail that made me able to smell it the combination of mildew and human sweat, to feel the chafing of damp dirty pants against my legs. They are happening to Cal, but his discomfort is mine. You might think it's silly to exemplify writing that deals with national struggles through description of banalities, but these are the things that turn a literary character into a human being for the time I am reading. The struggles of nations would not be important if they didn't effect the lives of individual people.

59. Twilight (The Twilight Saga, Book 1), by Stephenie Meyer. Yes, I have jumped on the bandwagon. And I have never looked back since. My only sadness is that I cannot get my hands on books 3 and 4 right now, for various and sundry reasons. I TORE through Twilight. I never wanted it to end. I raced out and bought book 2 when I was a mere 20 pages into Twilight, knowing already that I would HAVE to read on. It is basically an erotic novel. The vampire thing is there as a smokescreen, and yeah, it's interesting ... but mainly this is just about the delicious and awful and soul-crushing feeling of lust, as experienced through 16-year-old virgins. She just GETS it. She gets it. The plot is great, too, though ... and what can I say, I'm a total fangirl now. They are complete and utter BALDERDASH and I adore every word.

60. The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, by Steven Johnson. A fascinating story (I love stories of epidemics and the development of medicine and science) - but wow, I sure could have done without the 60-page condescending lecture from Johnson that ends the book, where he basically tells us all the importance of recycling and state-sponsored healthcare - as though that will somehow stop another cholera epidemic. I could feel it coming through the book - I knew that this guy could not WAIT to get up on his little privileged soapbox and tell us all what it all "means". It was insufferable. The story itself was AWESOME (how one pump caused all the problems, and how this one doctor and this one priest figured it out) - terrific stuff - but I also did not like (as a matter of fact, it enraged me) Johnson's condescension towards medicine back then. Yes, they didn't know everything. Yes, they put leeches on people and had no idea that water was the problem. That's because - DUH - they were men of THEIR time, not ours. But Johnson, sitting at his desk on the upper West Side where he lives, has the freedom and privilege to tut-tut and pooh-pooh about how barbaric medicine was back then. It was infuriating. And he had the gall to say at one point, about Florence Nightingale and one of her medical opinions, "A little humility would have been in order." He should take his own advice. I had to force myself to suffer through his undergraduate op-ed column at the end, just so I could say I finished the book. Just tell your story and stop telling me how to feel. And stop including me in your "we". "We all feel that ..." Oh, do we? Do "we" now? But don't let my rant dissuade you. If you can weed your way through his condescending attitude towards everyone who doesn't live in the 21st century - it's a really good story he has to tell.

61. New Moon (The Twilight Saga, Book 2), by Stephenie Meyer. MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE.

62. Political Fictions, by Joan Didion. I had read some of these essays before ("Clinton Agonistes") when they first came out. Here they all are together: her coverage of the political campaigns of Jesse Jackson, Dukakis, George W. Bush, Clinton, Gore - It's brilliant stuff. And not only the campaigns but the entire culture of Washington, and the political-insider class. I found this book very depressing.

63. Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11, by Joan Didion. Barely 100 pages long, this essay talks about her experiences on a book tour the week after 9/11, her experiences as a New Yorker, and her observations of what happened in the wake of 9/11. In general, it aligns with my own observations - but I read her to find out what SHE thinks, not to see a reflection of my own attitudes. Also, her way with language ... I know that she agonizes over every sentence. She is meticulous with her words. Each piece is wrestled through multiple overhauls and drafts. Yet it always feels like it flows (in the end). She is probalby one of those writers never fully satisfied with what she has created - and perhaps that is what gives her her tremendous vitality.

Can you tell she's a real idol of mine?

64. The Giver, by Lois Lowry. Jean gave me this book for Christmas last year (I think) and I finally got around to reading it just now. Jean is a great judge of books and this is one of her favorites. It starts slowly - you learn the rules of that weird world as you go, chapter by chapter - a world where all choice has been removed from the populace, all sense of danger or uncertainty ... and how a little boy named Jonas starts to ask questions, to see things beyond, to experience things like fear, pain, courage ... all because of his relationship with an old man called The Giver. A gorgeous book, and my eyes flooded with tears over the last three pages.

65. On The Pleasure of Hating, by William Hazlitt. I love Hazlitt. He's so cranky. His essay on hating and the pleasure of it is well-known to me but this is a collection of 7 of his essays, many of which were new to me. If you haven't read any Hazlitt, all I can say is - you really should check him out! He is much of a "hater" as Jonathan Swift, although not as well-known, perhaps. But you read his essay on monarchy, for example, and the rage just emanates off the page. His essay on the slave trade brought tears to my eyes. There is no prevarication here. No calm weighing of pros and cons. The system is "rotten to the core" as far as he is concerned. His opinions on religion, literature, friendship, sports - it's all here. But it is his essay on the very human love and need of "hatred" is what really takes my breath away, and the last couple of lines knock me on my ass. I don't want to believe it is true, but I know - I just KNOW - it IS true. He's marvelous.

66. Crush, by Ellen Conford. Has anyone in the history of literature ever gone from William Hazlitt to Ellen Conford? I am here to tell you that anything is possible. Ellen Conford was one of my favorite writers when I was about 14. She wrote a book called Hail Hail Camp Timperwood which I loved, and also a book called Seven Days to a Brand New Me which I also loved. But I read most of them. This one, however, is one I have NOT read - so I picked it up to polish it off in about two hours. It's 10 short stories about a group of kids in a high school, as the Sweetheart Stomp Valentine's Day dance approaches and each story has a different protagonist from the high school - they all know each other, they stroll in and out of each other's stories. Conford is funny, smart, and satisfying as a writer. She isn't sentimental, but she really likes kids of that age and treats their romances and problems with respect and humor. I still find her books funny. There's a great story where a girl at the school paper is interviewing Alexei, the Russian exchange student, and the whole thing is just a transcript of their conversation - he barely speaks English and she speaks no Russian, so it is an awkward comedy of errors. At one point, she over-explains something to Alexei and he snaps, "I am not moron." But at the end, it becomes clear that Alexei is in love with his interviewer and wants to take her to the Sweetheart Stomp. The whole transcript breaks off suddenly at the end, because you get the feeling that they are making out like wild animals. Fun.

End this fucking year on a bright note!

Best of the books I read this year:
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
Christine Falls, by Benjamin Black
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
Desolation Island, Patrick O'Brian
That Night, Alice McDermott
Then We Came To the End, Joshua Ferris
Inglorious, Joanna Kavenna
Oscar Wilde, Richard Ellmann
Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh
The Giver, Lois Lowry

2008 tally:

26 books by women
40 books by men
36 fiction books
30 non-fiction

From the cell phone camera: Memoir? Really?

I saw James Frey's Million Little Pieces a couple months ago on a table at Barnes & Noble labeled "Memoirs". Memoirs? But ... wasn't that what that whole brou-haha was about, Barnes & Noble? Shouldn't it be under "fiction"??

From the cell phone camera: O'Hare Day

Stranded in O'Hare for 10 straight hours. I read the entirety of Christine Falls that day. So I may have been sitting in an airport chair by my thwarted gate of departure, but I was really wandering through the misty streets of Dublin in the 1950s.

Lorrie Moore: Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

Reading Lorrie Moore's Who Will Run the Frog Hospital. I've written about how much I love Moore before. I have only read her short stories.

Never read this, one of her novels.

A magnificent excerpt:

We'd started working at Storyland in May, on the weekends, through the Memorial Day rush, until school let ou tin early June. Then we worked six days a week. Up until then we had met during the school week in the cemetery to smoke. Every day we would have what we called a "cemetery lunch". I would clamber up over the hill, past the blue meadow of veronica and flax, past the broken stick-arbor and the Seckel pear, down the gravel path, into the planked swamp and on up to the gravestones, where Sils would be waiting, having arrived from the other end. She lived on a small oaky street that dead-ended into the cemetery (next to which she lived). "Is this street symbolic or what?" Sils would say to anyone who visited. Especially the boys. The boys adored her. She was what my husband once archly referred to as "oh, probably a cool girl. Right? Right? One of those little hippettes from Whositville?" She could read music, knew a little about painting; she had older brothers in a rock band. She was the most sophisticated girl in Horsehearts, not a tough task, but you have to understand what that could do to a girl. What it could do to her life. And although I've lost track of her now, such a loss would have seemed inconceivable to me then. Still, I often surmise the themes in her, what she would be living out: the broken and ridiculous songs; the spent green box of Horsehearts; the sad, stuck, undelivering world.

Ouch.

7 weird reading facts about me

Got this from ricki.

1. I am very sensitive to typeface. I will NOT read a book if I find the typeface grating or unfriendly. I have bad eyes, too, so a good typeface is important. Penguin Classics USED to have terrible typeface, small, cramped and smudgey - so I would never buy their books. They have now gone through a redesign - and not only do they have some of the best cover art now (their covers used to be kind of stuffy and precious - but now? Brill!!) Some examples here:

I own a couple of those already - but based only on those gorgeous covers, I want to own Penguin's version!!

So not only have they recommitted themselves to eye-catching and evocative cover but their typeface has gone through an upgrade as well. I like it much better. It flows with the eye. Vintage International has consistently great typefaces. The Modern Library collection has great typeface - especially for long dense books like Middlemarch or Bleak House.

2. I will never leave a book open, face-down. The thought of it makes me shiver.

3. I can count on one hand the times I have been stranded without a book. Actually, there was one time the other night but that was only because I had finished the book I had in my bag earlier that day so when I had an hour to kill later that night, I was reduced to fiddling around with my blackberry and answering emails as the wind whipped across Houston Street, as opposed to losing myself in a book. I ALWAYS have a book on me.

4. I have certain books that are okay for my commute, others not so much. (I usually am reading multiple books at the same time). My commute involves me smashed into a tiny bus, surrounded by illegal immigrants wielding chickens and goats, with loud Spanish radio blaring in my ears. Strangely, I find that reading something difficult really works for me on the commute, something engaging and perhaps way out of the realm of my own life. Like the book I read about what's going on in Darfur. Perfect commute book. But I find that short stories or contemporary fiction is harder to get into in that environment, so it's usually rigorous non-fiction for the commute.

5. I write in pretty much every book I read. I underline passages (how do you think I can pull up quotes so easily for the blog? Because I've marked it for safe keeping!), keep lists of vocabulary in the back blank pages, leave exclamation points or asterisks in the margins next to passages I particularly love. It's compulsive - I don't feel right if I'm reading without also having a pen in my hand.

6. If the book has the following words in the title, or if it even just clear that the book is ABOUT these things, I will buy it sight unseen. My shelves are lined with books I haven't read yet which involve the following topics:
-- ancient silk road
-- Iran / Persia
-- the Caucasus
-- Balkans
-- Ireland
-- Mongolia
-- speculative stock market bubble
-- cults (Jonestown, Manson, Co$, The Family)
-- Alexander Hamilton

I also will buy any book written by the following people:
-- Margaret Atwood
-- John Irving
-- Michael Chabon
-- Lorrie Moore
-- Robert Kaplan
-- Jeanette Winterson
-- Madeleine L'Engle (well, THAT'S done ... boo hoo - but for YEARS before she died it was the case)
-- A.S. Byatt
-- Cormac McCarthy
-- Elinor Lipman

7. I like to read out loud to myself. I find it relaxing. But not just anything. Here are the things I always gravitate to when I feel like reading out loud for an hour or so:
-- Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters (excerpt here)
-- Jeanette Winterson's The Passion (excerpt here)
-- Nancy Lehman's Lives of the Saints (excerpt here)
-- Susan Daitch's The Colorist (excerpt here)
-- Madeleine L'Engle's Ring of Endless Light (excerpt here)
-- Joy Williams's State of Grace (excerpt here)
-- Margaret Atwood's Life Before Man (excerpt here)
-- Norman Rush's Mating (excerpt here)
These books feel good to read out loud. I also read Shakespeare's sonnets out loud, which almost becomes an act of meditation.

Hitler's marginalia (or, to quote Eddie Izzard: "I can't paint this tree right ... I must kill everyone in the world!!")

Marginalia is one of my favorite literary topics - and although when I buy a second-hand book, I make sure that nobody has marked it up beforehand (too distracting) - I do find studies of marginalia to be extremely interesting: the things that famous people underlined, or marked, or things written in the margins of books ... Thornton Wilder's marked-up copy of Finnegans Wake is a piece of art, as far as I'm concerned!!

I write in my books. It's kind of a compulsive habit, I usually read with a pen in my hand. I feel weird without it. It's part of my obsession with holding onto things, a barrier against the oblivion of forgetting. "I must remember this passage ... so I can find it again if I need it". Some books in my collection are more marked up than others. My Sylvia Plath Collected Poems is so marked up that I bought a clean copy - just to go alongside the marked-up one. I like to READ the clean copy, but my web of connections in the margins is also interesting to look at, and helpful when I want to write about Plath. References in her journal, references in Hughes' poems that dovetail with one of Plath's, early drafts of the poems, or alternate titles ...the margins are full of small notes to myself. (Example: In Sylvia Plath's Oct. 1962 poem "The Tour" the following line occurs: "The blue's a jewel. / It boils for forty hours a stretch." Beside that line, I wrote the following note, referencing one of Ted Hughes' poems from Birthday Letters: "Ted Hughes. Red. 'But the jewel you lost was blue.' " Okay, so that's an example of how these poems appear to speak to one another and I wanted to make sure I captured that connection so I could come back to it later, if I wanted to. I realize how OCD this makes me sound. I can own that.)

A small book has come out about Hitler's library, and analyzing his marginalia (which is, necessarily, a speculative enterprise - because who can know what is in someone's heart ... However, I mentioned before - in one of my soulmate essays - that my secondhand copy of Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull was owned by someone else and every line about 'soulmate' was underlined by this gentle soul - it's all in the same pen, and the same pen that wrote the inscription in the front. So obviously it wasn't the bits about flight or birds that touched this reader, but the possibility of finding a mate. This is my guess, anyway. ) The marginalia can speak. That's why I love it as a topic.

Very interesting what it could, potentially, reveal.

Here is a review of Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life.

Literary Couples

Got this question from Ted:

“Name a favorite literary couple and tell me why they are a favorite. If you cannot choose just one, that is okay too. Name as many as you like–sometimes narrowing down a list can be extremely difficult and painful. Or maybe that’s just me.”

I am not limiting myself to romantic couples. I am thinking in terms of pairs.

John and Alma Summer and Smoke, (excerpt here). The play itself has some problems, and it is certainly not as well-known as Tennessee Williams' more famous plays - but the love story of John and Alma burns right through me. It is his most tragic relationship ... because you know, if the universe were a FAIR one, these two would be together. And nothing at all can be right in the world as long as it didn't work out between the two of them. I can't read this play without weeping. I have lived it.

Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (excerpt here) Cousins. Comic book artists. At first Sam is resentful of this refugee cousin who has to now share his room in Brooklyn. But gradually, the relationship blossoms into friendship - and not only that, but colleagues. The last conversation in the book between the two cousins made me weep when I first read it. I felt such understated yet unbelievable love there ... And the added layer of Sam Clay being gay - and finally coming to know that about himself ... Killer. I invested in those two. I missed them when that book ended. I still do.

Max and Eleanor. Hopeful Monsters (excerpt here) A British boy, a German-Jewish girl, fighting across war-torn Europe to be together ... and they don't even know why ... they just know that the world is somehow balanced between them, they teeter on a tightrope wire over the abyss - and somehow ... whatever else happens, Europe being swallowed up by fascism and dictatorship ... their love must survive. Whatever form it takes. The form is irrelevant. Amazing relationship.

Nelson Denoon and unnamed narrator. Mating (excerpt here). I honestly can't go into it at this time. All I know is - these people live, and if it is life and death to THEM whether or not they get back together, then it is life and death to me too.

Beverly and Derek Life Without Friends (excerpt here) Please do not judge. This romance GETS to me ... and I re-read the book this summer, and although I am not 17 years old or however old I was when I first read it - it STILL gets to me. I love both of those people. And I love both of them together.

Aubrey & Maturin. The Master & Commander series (excerpt here) Their relationship spans so many books and it never gets old, never seems stale - or like it's schtick. These people were obviously very alive to Patrick O'Brian - I never feel him getting into a rote-mode with them, they are difficult complex men - polar opposites in some ways ... and as they get older, their differences just become more entrenched, rather than softening at the edges. Yet there is obviously something in each one that the other relies upon - and gets from him like no other. They are intellectually curious 19th century men, and their relationship is one I treasure. You want them never ever to stop talking to one another.

Jo and Laurie. Little Women (excerpt here). I don't know who Amy and her blond curls and her stolen limes thinks she is - but Laurie is JO'S MAN ... and the second half of the book always (still) throws me off when stupid German professor with his maudlin poetry enters the picture. Regardless - the first half of that book - when Jo and Laurie become friends ... FUGGEDABOUTIT. Doesn't get any better. I love those two people so much.

Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester. Jane Eyre (excerpt here) The weirdest creepiest literary romance I can think of, with a cross-dressing episode and a calling-across-the-space-time-continuum ending ... an unclassifiable book with two unclassifiable leads. I adore them.

Gillian and the djinn. "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" (excerpt here). I know it's obscure but the short story had me in its grip and I still dream and fantasize about it, it was that captivating. Gillian is an academic, a celibate middle-aged woman, who somehow lets a genie out of a paperweight that she bought at a bazaar in Turkey. The genie (or "djinn") is an enormous turban-swathed creature - who somehow - over the course of their evening together - reveals himself as someone with tremendous insight into Gillian, the uptight brainiac. I can't describe it without making it sound trite or silly, and maybe it is all that as well, but God, did I love these two characters. I want a whole book about them!

Johnny Wheelright and Owen Meany. A Prayer for Owen Meany (excerpt here). A cosmic relationship, showing the ultimate structure of the universe, basically. But grounded in the reality ... it's a dynamic that killed me when I first read it, and enraged me, and made me laugh out loud ... and those two people, and their frienship and what it led them to - stays with me to this day. I'm almost afraid to re-read this book.

Valancy and Barney. The Blue Castle (excerpt here). I think it is Lucy Maud Montgomery's finest romance - way better than Anne and Gilbert. Valancy is an uptight spinster, overridden by her family - who - after getting the diagnosis that she only has a year to live - goes INSANE. She bobs her hair. She eats hotdogs on the sidewalk. She moves out of her mother's house and goes to live with a local reprobate whose daughter is dying (after giving birth to a baby out of wedlock). Valancy sets herself up as a housekeeper and nursemaid and eventually meets Barney - a man who has a terrible reputation in town, all sorts of horrible rumors fly about him ... but they meet and connect. Because Valancy only has a year to live, she asks him to marry her. She wants to experience marriage and all that entails. Barney is startled and says, "You know I don't love you, right Valancy? But I have always thought you were sort of a dear." So he marries her. WORDS CANNOT EXPRESS HOW MUCH I LOVE THEIR ROMANCE. Valancy is head over heels, and she feels, because she only has a year left to live, that she can fully love and express that love - because why waste any time? It makes her free and abandoned. Barney knows about the diagnosis, and while he is a confirmed bachelor, accepts her as his wife - and ... well. You'll just have to read the book to see how it all ends. LOVE IT.

Romeo and Mercutio Romeo and Juliet. I always found the relationship between Romeo and Mercutio to be far more interesting than the one Romeo has with Juliet, which is pretty standard (albeit gorgeous) young-love stuff. But the friendship of those two men is one of the reallest in all of Shakespeare's canon, and I never read that play without feeling the loss of it, the sadness of losing such a friend. They're brothers.

ROMEO
I dream'd a dream to-night.

MERCUTIO
And so did I.

ROMEO
Well, what was yours?

MERCUTIO
That dreamers often lie.

ROMEO
In bed asleep, while they do dream things true.

MERCUTIO
O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spiders' legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider's web,
The collars of the moonshine's watery beams,
Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film,
Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a round little worm
Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love;
O'er courtiers' knees, that dream on court'sies straight,
O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees,
O'er ladies ' lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are:
Sometime she gallops o'er a courtier's nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig's tail
Tickling a parson's nose as a' lies asleep,
Then dreams, he of another benefice:
Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five-fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night,
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled, much misfortune bodes:
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage:
This is she--

ROMEO
Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace!
Thou talk'st of nothing.

MERCUTIO
True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air
And more inconstant than the wind, who wooes
Even now the frozen bosom of the north,
And, being anger'd, puffs away from thence,
Turning his face to the dew-dropping south.

I think Mercutio is the best part in that play.

Charlotte and Wilbur. Charlotte's Web Heartcrack. Charlotte's selfless support of Wilbur, her dedication to his LIFE, and Wilbur's growing love of her. They go through all the stages - dawning realization of kindred spirit, one friend the stronger than the other, Wilbur taking advantage of Charlotte, Charlotte sulking, but still doing what she needs to do - because she has this gift. This gift of language. And the last two lines of that book rival any in all of literature. I can barely type it out without tearing up:

It is not often someone comes along that's a true friend and good writer. Charlotte was both.

Nothing worse than "going out into the world without a single book"

A new biography of Oscar Wilde is coming out called Oscar's Books, by Thomas Wright - and I am frothing at the mouth to get my grubby little paws on it. Brenda Maddox reviews it in The Literary Review and the review brought me to tears. It's very resonant for me right now, for various reasons ... books ... and what they mean to my family ... and how books, and the reaching out for a book in a dark moment is sometimes all you have to hang onto ... and also: it is a good sign, a sign of health, of life ... If you can still read, you are still alive. Not just surviving but alive. It is tremendously important.

Maddox writes:

Among the humiliations Wilde suffered after being sent to prison were not only compulsory silence - prisoners were forbidden to speak to one another - but deprivation of books. All he had in his cell at Pentonville, apart from his bed (a plank laid across two trestles), were a Bible, a prayer book and a hymnal. When at last his sympathetic MP won him permission to have more books, Wilde nominated Pater's The Renaissance along with the works of Flaubert and some by Cardinal Newman. These were allowed, but only at the rate of one a week. Moved to Reading Gaol, he found himself under a more sympathetic prison governor. His book request lists after July 1896 show him developing an interest in more recently published titles, including novels by George Meredith and Thomas Hardy. Wilde later said that he also read Dante every day in prison and that Dante had saved his reason.

God.

2nd US President John Adams once wrote a letter to his son John Quincy, giving him a word of advice: "You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket", and - speaking from my own experience - it is true. I am never alone if there is a book somewhere near me.

So Wilde felt unhinged without his books. Where did they go? Who would he be without them?

Unbelievably moving to me.

To read a biography of Wilde focusing on his library is spectacularly exciting to me, and I wish it were out NOW.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
-- Oscar Wilde

Maddox writes:

When he was discharged in May 1897, he was not allowed to take his accumulated books with him and faced what he called the horror of 'going out into the world without a single book'. But friends rallied round. Entering the hotel room in Dieppe where he was to begin his exile, he found it full of books furnished by his friends and he broke down and wept.

I feel ya, dawg. I'm weeping right now just thinking about it.

Blankets, pillows, warm clothes? Pshaw. Canned goods? Leave 'em at the door.

If I go into exile, send me all my books, please.

Images of Moby Dick ...

Some are the famous Rockwell Kent illustrations (I have the copy of the book with those images in it - and more haunting images you will never see! He has created the looming leviathans of nightmares) ... others are from other versions of the book ... book covers, artist renditions, etc.

I love to see all of the different viewpoints of the artists. Everyone is trying to capture - or imagine themselves into - a single event. There's something beautiful about that. (Reminds me of this post I did way back when.)

War and Peace: An entire society ...

...described in one paragraph:

Part Four: Chapter III

On the 3rd of March all the rooms of the English Club were full of the hum of voices, and the members and guests of the club, in uniforms and frock-coats, some even in powder and Russian kaftans, were standing meeting, parting, and running to and fro like bees swarming in spring. Powdered footmen in livery, wearing slippers and stockings, stood at every door, anxiously trying to follow every movement of the guests and club members, so as to proffer their services. The majority of those present were elderly and respected persons, with broad, self-confident faces, fat fingers, and resolute gestures and voices. Guests and members of this class sat in certain habitual places, and met together in certain habitual circles. A small proportion of those present were casual guests - chiefly young men, among them Denisov, Rostov, and Dolohov, who was now an officer in the Semyonovsky regiment again. The faces of the younger men, especially the officers, wore that expression of condescending deference to their elders which seems to say to the older generation, "Respect and deference we are prepared to give you, but remember all the same the future is for us." Nevitsky, an old member of the club, was there too. Pierre, who at his wife's command had let his hair grow and left off spectacles, was walking about the rooms dressed in the height of the fashion, but looking melancholy and depressed. Here, as everywhere, he was surrounded by the atmosphere of people paying homage to his wealth, and he behaved to them with the careless, contemptuous air of sovereignty that had become habitual with him.

From War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.

The new Brideshead and the whole Waugh thing in general

Really interesting article about the so-far-unsuccessful attempts to bring Evelyn Waugh's various books to the screen (big and small). I remember the Brideshead miniseries - anyone who was alive at that time HAD to be aware of it - it was kind of like the Roots miniseries. Unless you were freakin' Amish, you were at least aware that it was going on.

I've been on a Waugh kick lately. Hadn't ever read anything by him, and now I am making my way through all of his stuff. Read Scoop, Decline and Fall and The Loved One. Next one I think will be Vile Bodies. I love him.

Now here is what I remember from the mini-series of Brideshead: Jeremy Irons slouching around in white linen. A melancholy. There was a homoerotic thing going on that I did not pick up on ... but I did get a sort of dissipated energy from everyone involved - showing the decay of that world, of course, and etc. I remember the settings - the white colonnades and the gardens and all that.

So THAT has been my impression of Evelyn Waugh. No wonder I never read him. I'm not saying the mini-series wasn't good - i watched every second of it and was mildly obsessed with the languid sulky-eyed Anthony Andrews ... but it seemed a bit, well, ponderous. Precious, in that very English way (Eddie Izzard makes fun of those kinds of movies. "What is it, Sebastian? I'm arranging matches." Etc.)

Imagine my surprise when I picked up Scoop (excerpt here), and found myself laughing so hard in public that I frightened other people on the bus. Imagine my surprise when I read Decline and Fall (excerpt here) and found myself MOPPING the tears of laughter off of my face at a couple points. And imagine my surprise when I read The Loved One and found myself in a satire of Hollywood as biting and ridiculous as anything that Fitzgerald ever wrote about show business.

I have not read Brideshead Revisited yet, and it is that image from the miniseries of dissipated white linen and tubercular love affairs that has kept me away, but now that I know the true character of Evelyn Waugh's prose, I will definitely read it.

I loved this observation from the article above:

The essence of Waugh is his economy of style. He is Hemingway bearing a bumbershoot. The writing may be far more Latinate, but it's every bit as efficient. "It is the cinema which has taught a new habit of narrative," Waugh wrote in 1948. Like Hemingway, he learned from the movies the value of the camera-eye view: the description that takes in without belaboring.

What makes the books either so relentlessly funny, acidly sharp, or both is a simple equation: the more outlandish the situation or personage, the more precise and lucid the writing. Waugh's true cinematic equivalent is Howard Hawks, not Merchant-Ivory. Each is a master of pace and control: moving things right along and never getting in the way of his material.

Yes!! Howard Hawks, not Merchant-Ivory. Howard Hawks could have filmed Scoop (and in a way, he did - with His Girl Friday and its frenetic insane observations about the newspaper business) - and could have not only reflected the PACE of the book (that's what really surprised me about Waugh - how fast his books move ... I guess because that mini-series from my childhood seemed to go on forever!) but the humor and the absolute absurdity of the situations the characters find themselves in. (Like Cary Grant bemoans in Bringing Up Baby: "How could so many things happen to one person??" That's very Evelyn Waugh-ish!)

Another very good observation about the film adaptations of Waugh's stuff which I think is quite perceptive:

Waugh's Hollywood sojourn exemplifies the basic problem with movie adaptations of his work. Without exception, Waugh's heroes are outsiders - as he was in California. Each novel's capacity for comedy or tragedy comes from its hero's being at variance - whether as a Catholic, innocent, or bounder - with the society around him.

The Waugh adaptations all plant themselves firmly on the inside, reveling in the dense social knowingness that comes of membership in an Oxford college, Pall Mall men's club, or aristocratic family. Ultimately, Waugh's books are about a search for redemption. Waugh adaptations are about decor.

It's that outsider thing that I've written about before, with Waugh (he, as a gay man, was the ultimate outsider) putting a total outsider smack-dab into the middle of a world whose rules he does not understand. It is not a full-immersion experience, his books ... because we always have one eye at how ABSURD these people are behaving. It's a subtle difference in tone and outlook, but it seems to me to be an extremely important element in how his books are filmed.

That's why the Howard Hawks suggestion is so superb, I think. (And, I don't know ... I've seen the previews, and the new Brideshead looks very drippy and British and all "Sebastian, I'm arranging matches ..." but I'll hold off until I see it.)

Here's the whole article.

Master and Margarita as graphic novel

Fantastic idea - and take a glimpse at the artwork by Andrzej Klimowski. WOW. Beautiful!

Here's my favorite image from that slideshow.

Just looking at it gives me the creeps, remembering that awful cat in the book and how much I wanted to kick him under the streetcar.

Some of my thoughts on this great great book here - but I definitely need to check out the graphic novel. I am intrigued.

(via Book Slut)

Books:

Bren: re-reading Kavalier and Clay

Jean: reading The End of the Affair, and also Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli

Dad: reading The Far Side of the World (he finished Treason's Harbor)

Siobhan: reading White Noise

Cashel: reading The Egypt Game (thank you, Lisa!!) ("I really relate to those kids!" raved Cash)

Me: finished The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh, finished Evil Genes by Barbara Oakley, finished The Writing Class by Jincy Willett - and now I am 250 pages in to War and Peace - trying to catch up with my cousin Liam!! It's such a huge book but it's really quite easy to read. The SIZE is daunting but once you start it's hard to put down. To imitate Cashel: I really relate to poor Princess Marya. Loving it.

Cashel on Frankenstein:

"I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and every other WORD was 'melancholy'. The melancholy sky, the melancholy smile ... EVERYTHING was 'melancholy'! And it was 200 pages before he built the monster!"

So, Mary, could you dial down the melancholy, please? A 10 year old in 2008 is bored by the repetition. Thanks.

The changeability of Manhattan: Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin

I'm reading Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin. Mitchell raved about it to me (before ABANDONING ME, that is), using the words fin de siecle and ancien regime in his ravings, which means 1. Mitchell is an asshole (but at least he's got company!) and 2. I felt I had to read it. And Ted has mentioned it to me numerous times. But ... but ... it's so BIG. I am overwhelmed. What is it ABOUT? I'm scared. Someone hold me.

I am so busy now with my own projects that I don't have much time for reading - I've got enough on my plate with family stuff, bridesmaid dresses, crying jags, writing marathons, Trinidadian caretaking involving frankincense, and emails/texts from my ex-boyfriends jostling for position in the Sheila Ex-Boyfriend Lexicon: "Is it ME that's the most important?" "Is it ME?" I am not even kidding. Important to remember that I love men with healthy egos. I have gotten these emails and texts independently of one another. These are not men in touch with one another. They don't even know each other. But I got two in the last week alone. I love those men. But honest to God. My plate is full, boys, without RANKING you in importance for my eventual autobiography, but I'll get to it. I promise.

But I started Winter's Tale and I'm not even going to begin to talk about it yet. I'm scared. Hold me. I'm only 3 chapters in. It is weaving a spell - there is some cloud wall around Manhattan - the marshes of Bayonne are populated with a strange kind of primitive man ... and there's a thief named Peter Lake - and a scene that blew my freakin' socks off that takes place in a huge reservoir tank - a den of thieves - I held my breath the entire time - BUT - I am not ready to talk about it yet - except to just mention that I'm reading it and ... and I'm really really excited. What is it ABOUT? No, wait, don't tell me. WHAT IS THAT WHIRLING CLOUD WALL? No, don't tell me!!!

I know a lot of what is reaching out to me in this book is the New York it depicts, and what it has to say about New York. This is my home. I am tied to my home. I love my home. Mark Helprin, in his majestic narrative, seems to capture some of the ... je ne sais quois ... of New York. Along with the fin de siecle. And the trompe l'oeil. And the aricoverts. As well as Leslie Caron.

Here is a brief paragraph. But it immediately made me think of something - my daily looking-right ritual - and if I have my camera on me, I capture it ... whatever it is that I see:

The next morning, Peter Lake saw the city through different eyes, as he would from then on whenever he awoke. It was never the same from one day to the next. Dark, close, smoky afternoons; oceans of rain; autumn days clearer than crystal paperweights; sunshine and shadow - no one city existed.

You got that right.

Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh

Decline and Fall is Evelyn Waugh's first novel. I'm reading it right now. I had so much fun last year reading Scoop, his hilarious spoof on foreign journalism, particularly war journalists - that I am moving on to his other stuff. I've mentioned before that, like Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh was just someone I "missed" in my education. Never read him before. I remember the Brideshead Revisited PBS mini-series VERY well, but never read any Waugh. It was Christopher Hitchens' book review of Scoop in The Atlantic that made me pick it up. I mean, when the book review makes you laugh out loud - you know the book will be funny.

Decline and Fall takes the same absurdist manic tone as Scoop, skewering everything in sight. Everyone in the book is absolutely RIDICULOUS. Their names are preposterous. There is a character named "Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington", for example. In Scoop, it was the foreign press - in Decline and Fall Waugh takes aim at education (and, indirectly, class issues in England - public school vs. private, accents, all that complicated hierarchical stuff). First we meet Paul Pennyfeather, who is studying at Oxford, and is basically expelled for "indecent behavior" - but it's totally not fair because it was only the appearance of indecent behavior. He truly was an innocent victim of circumstances! He wasn't running across the Quad "without his trousers on" as a prank- he truly had lost his pants! But no matter. Off he goes with a blemish on his record. He gets a job teaching German and music at a Welsh boarding school (despite the fact that he cannot speak German and he cannot play music) and finds himself immersed in the manic ridiculous life of an all-boys boarding school. The other teachers are all insane in one way or another, fallen priests and compulsive womanizers - the headmaster is a lunatic with enormous prejudices against the Welsh - and Paul, surprisingly enough, finds that he doesn't need to know German or music in order to teach those subjects. Waugh, as always, with all of his humor, is quite a social critic - some of his observations come close to the anger of Swift, although Waugh always seems to take a more absurd tone, making everyone in the world (except for Paul Pennyfeather) seem on the verge of some sort of hilarious mental collapse, but it's okay, because the world keeps on turning! Don't worry so much, chaps!

Waugh has a "what's the use" fatalism to much of his work - very typical, I suppose, to his generation at that time and the crowd he ran with - so beneath Paul Pennyfeather's experiences is a vaguely sad and baffled attitude ... like: what on earth is the use? What on earth can the use of ANY of this be?

To repeat what Cecil Beaton said of Evelyn Waugh: "His abiding complex and the source of much of his misery was that he was not a 6 foot tall, extremely handsome and rich duke." Waugh's books are so funny that people will look at you strangely if you read them in public because you will be unable to control your laughter. But they are not in any way, shape, or form - "light", or "shallow". There is this undercurrent of unease in them ... I suppose that's much of what an "absurdist" sensibility is all about (at least that is true in the theatre, and I imagine so in literature). Waugh sees things.

Here is a description of Paul Pennyfeather's first day teaching class at the boarding school:

Dumb with terror, he went into his own class room.

Ten boys sat before him, their hands folded, their eyes bright with expectation.

"Good morning, sir," said the one nearest him.

"Good morning," said Paul.

"Good morning, sir," said the next.

"Good morning," said Paul.

"Good morning, sir," said the next.

"Oh, shut up," said Paul.

At this the boy took out a handkerchief and began to cry quietly.

"Oh, sir," came a chorus of reproach, "you've hurt his feelings. He's very sensitive; it's his Welsh blood, you know; it makes people very emotional. Say 'Good morning' to him, sir, or he won't be happy all day. After all, it is a good morning, isn't it, sir?"

"Silence!" shouted Paul above the uproar, and for a few moments things were quieter.

"Please, sir," said a small voice - Paul turned and saw a grave-looking youth holding up his hand - "please, sir, perhaps he's been smoking cigars and doesn't feel well."

"Silence!" said Paul again.

The ten boys stopped talking and sat perfectly still, staring at him. He felt himself get hot and red under this scrutiny.

"I suppose the first thing I ought to do is to get your names clear. What is your name?" he asked, turning to the first boy.

"Tangent, sir."

"And yours?"

"Tangent, sir," said the next boy. Paul's heart sank.

"But you can't both be called Tangent."

"No, sir, I'm Tangent. He's just trying to be funny."

"I like that. Me trying to be funny! Please, sir, I'm Tangent, sir; really I am."

"If it comes to that," said Clutterbuck from the back of the room, "there is only one Tangent here, and that is me. Any one else can jolly well go to blazes."

Paul felt desperate.

"Well, is there any one who isn't a Tangent?"

Four or five voices instantly arose.

"I'm not, sir; I'm not Tangent. I wouldn't be called Tangent, not on the edge of a barge pole."

In a few seconds the room had become divided into two parties: those who were Tangent and those who were not. Blows were already being exchanged, when the door opened and Grimes came in. There was a slight hush.

"I thought you might want this," he said, handing Paul a walking stick. "And if you take my advice, you'll set them something to do."

He went out; and Paul, firmly grasping the walking stick, faced his form.

"Listen," he said. "I don't care a damn what any of you are called, but if there's another word from any one I shall keep you all in this afternoon."

"You can't keep me in," said Clutterbuck; "I'm going for a walk with Captain Grimes."

"Then I shall very nearly kill you with this stick. Meanwhile you will all write an essay on 'Self-indulgence.' There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit."

From then onward all was silence until break. Paul, still holding the stick, gazed despondently out of the window. Now and then there rose from below the shrill of the servants scolding each other in Welsh. By the time the bell rang Clutterbuck had covered sixteen pages, and was awarded the half crown.

To me, Evelyn Waugh has perfect pitch.

And then there is the aforementioned monologue by Dr. Fagan, headmaster of the Welsh boarding school. I just think it's so hysterical that he harbors such contempt for the Welsh people despite his surroundings - and he is unashamed yet a part of him must realize how inappropriate it is because he wanted to publish "a little monograph" on his feelings about the Welsh but he was afraid it might make him "unpopular in the village". hahahaha Yeah - ya think?? Anyway, listen to Dr. Fagan go on and on and on to poor Paul Pennyfeather who cannot get awy.

"I often think," he continued, "that we can trace almost all the disasters of English history to the influence of Wales. Think of Edward of Carnarvon, the first Prince of Wales, a perverse life, Pennyfeather, and an unseemly death, then the Tudors and the dissolution of the Church, then Lloyd George, the temperance movement, Non-conformity and lust stalking hand in hand through the country, wasting and ravaging. But perhaps you think I exaggerate? I have a certain rhetorical tendency, I admit."

"No, no," said Paul.

"The Welsh," said the Doctor, "are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing," he said with disgust," sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver. They are deceitful because they cannot discern truth from falsehood, depraved because they cannot discern the consequences of their indulgence. Let us consider," he continued, "the etymological derivations of the Welsh language...."

But here he was interrupted by a breathless little boy who panted down the drive to meet them. "Please, sir, Lord and Lady Circumference have arrived, sir. They're in the library with Miss Florence. She asked me to tell you."

"The sports will start in ten minutes," said the Doctor. "Run and tell the other boys to change and go at once to the playing fields. I will talk to you about the Welsh again. It is a matter to which I have given some thought, and I can see that you are sincerely interested. Come in with me and see the Circumferences."

What??

The poor Doctor. This is the man who, in a moment of joy and hopefulness, goes off on a huge monologue about how he "doesn't understand his own emotions". Like - hope enters his heart, anticipation of something pleasant, sheer simple enjoyment of the sunshine and the grass and being alive, and he literally cannot understand what the feeling actually is.

I am in love with Evelyn Waugh. So glad I'm playing catch-up now.

And this is a first novel? Damn him.

Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris

I finished Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris yesterday. It blew me away. At one point, I found myself wiping tears off of my face. And then at other times I was laughing so hard that I made my seat-mate on the bus nervous. It's an amazing accomplishment, not to mention right on in its observations of the hollow-ness and ferociously gossipy atmosphere of most offices. It's just perfect that way. You spend more time with your co-workers than you do with your own family, and in a way it's like you're a great big family - you get to know everyone's quirks, and some are more annoying than others ... but you can't just say, "Please go away, you're annoying me ..." You have to put a lid on your hotter passions when you are in the office and do your best to get along. And then there comes a moment when you realize that that person sitting in the cube next to yours - you may overheard the person's phone conversations, and know that she has a bikini wax scheduled for Tuesday, or her douchebag boyfriend won't call her back ... but protocol says you can't ask about these things - and you may know so much about someone, through osmosis, that it comes as a shock when you realize you actually don't know anything at all. Then We Came To The End is all about those moments. Gossip feels real. And vital. It also feels irresistible. It's difficult to turn it down, it's difficult to not succumb. And the one guy in the office (Joe Pope, a GREAT character) who does not gossip is looked at with suspicion and loathing. There is a total group dynamic at work here ... which becomes even more intense once the layoffs start. Who will be next? The book is just so accurate in observations about office life, but also about humanity - and the gap between who we are at work, and who we are at home. This is especially true of the higher-ups, the boss - who is separated from the masses below, because of her salary, her job title ... She is intimidating, good at what she does - and nobody knows anything about her. When we do learn what is going on with her, it is shattering. At least I found it shattering. The SPLIT in psyches ... the fact that work, with its necessary evasions and polite ignoring of tensions, becomes the place where you can hide ... especially if you are a person of power. Because nobody is going to stroll up to you and say, "Hey - what the hell are you doing at work at 10 pm on a Friday night? Come on - go home!" No. Because she is the boss. I'm serious - as we got glimpses into what was happening with her (her moment in the dressing room in the department store especially) I found myself in tears. As funny as the book is, it's a "big" book - with big themes, and I really admire a writer who can pull that off. It's rare in the current literary climate. Joshua Ferris has figured out a way to comment on today's economic atmosphere, and he does so in a way that is funny, accurate, heartfelt ... These characters - I KNOW these people. I know Tom Mota, I know Marcia Dwyer (I love her so much!!), and Benny ... Siobhan texted me the other day when I told her I was 8 pages in to Then We Came to the End and I had already laughed out loud 5 times ... she texted me: "I love Benny!" And oh my God, so do I. He's not Mr. Rochester, he's not Sydney Carton ... he's just a guy who seemingly loves to gossip, loves his job, has an unrequited crush on Marcia ... but as the book goes on, what you realize is: Benny is the glue. Benny is one of those people. We NEED Bennies. Their generosity is so often taken advantage of. Fantastic character. He killed me.

And I'm still gobsmacked by the plural narrator and how perfect it is.

Here's an excerpt.

Marcia Dwyer became famous for sending an e-mail to Genevieve Latko-Devine. Marcia often wrote to Genevieve after meetings. "It is really irritating to work with irritating people," she once wrote. There she ended it and waited for Genevieve's response. Usually when she got Genevieve's e-mail, instead of writing back, which would take too long - Marcia was an art director, not a writer - she would head down to Genevieve's office, close the door, and the two women would talk. The only thing bearable about the irritating event involving the irritating person was the thought of telling it all to Genevieve, who would understand better than anyone else. Marcia could have called her mother, her mother would have listened. She could have called one of her four brothers, any one of those South Side pipe-ends would have been more than happy to beat up the irritating person. But they would not have understood. They would have sympathized, but that was not the same thing. Genevieve would hardly need to nod for Marcia to know she was getting through. Did we not all understand the essential need for someone to understand? But the e-mail Marcia got back was not from Genevieve. It was from Jim Jackers. "Are you talking about me?" he wrote. Amber Ludwig wrote, "I'm not Genevieve." Benny Shassburger wrote, "I think you goofed." Tom Mota wrote, "Ha!" Marcia was mortified. She got sixty-five emails in two minutes. One from HR cautioned her against sending personal e-mails. Jim wrote a second time. "Can you please tell me - is it me, Marcia? Am I the irritating person you're talking about?"

Marcia wanted to eat Jim's heart because some mornings he shuffled up to the elevators and greeted us by saying, "What up, my niggas?" He meant it ironically in an effort to be funny, but he was just not the man to pull it off. It made us cringe, especially Marcia, especially if Hank was present.

In those days it wasn't rare for someone to push someone else down the hall really fast in a swivel chair. Games aside, we spent most of our time inside long silent pauses as we bent over our individual desks, working on some task at hand, lost to it - until Benny, bored, came and stood in the doorway. "What are you up to?" he'd ask.

It could have been any of us. "Working" was the usual reply.

Then Benny would tap his topaz class ring on the doorway and drift away.

How we hated our coffee mugs! our mouse pads, our desk clocks, our daily calendars, the contents of our desk drawers. Even the photos of our loved ones taped to our computer monitors for uplift and support turned into cloying reminders of time served. But when we got a new office, a bigger office, and we brought everything with us into the new office, how we loved everything all over again, and thought hard about where to place things, and looked with satisfaction at the end of the day at how well our old things looked in this new, improved, important space. There was no doubt in our minds just then that we had made all the right decisions, whereas most days we were men and women of two minds. Everywhere you looked, in the hallways and bathrooms, the coffee bar and cafeteria, the lobbies and the print stations, there we were with our two minds.

There seemed to be only the one electric pencil sharpener in the whole damn place.

We didn't have much patience for cynics. Everyone was a cynic at one point or another but it did us little good to bemoan our unbelievable fortunes. At the national level things had worked out pretty well in our favor and entrepreneurial cash was easy to come by. Cars available for domestic purchase, cars that could barely fit in our driveways, had a martial appeal, a promise that, once inside them, no harm would come to our children. It was IPO this and IPO that. Everyone knew a banker, too. And how lovely it was, a bike ride around the forest preserve on a Sunday in May with our mountain bikes, water bottles, and safety helmets. Crime was at an all-time low and we heard accounts of former welfare recipients holding steady jobs. New hair products were being introduced into the marketplace every day and the glass shelves of our stylists were stocked with tidy rows of them, which we eyed in the mirror as we made small talk, each of us certain, there's one up there just for me. Still, some of us had a hard time finding boyfriends. Some of us had a hard time fucking our wives.

Some days we met in the kitchen on sixty to eat lunch. There was only room for eight at the table. If all the seats were full, Jim Jackers would have to eat his sandwich from the sink and try to engage from over in that direction. It was fortunate for us in that he could pass us a spoon or a packet of salt if we needed it.

"It is really irritating," Tom Mota said to the table, "to work with irritating people."

"Screw you, Tom," Marcia replied.

The book packed an unexpected punch. I was surprised at how moved I was "when I came to the end".

Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris

I'm reading Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris right now - thanks to my sister Siobhan and also to Elegant Variation, who put the book on my radar almost immediately. If you work in an office now, if you have ever worked in an office, you will wince and cringe and laugh out loud reading this book. Within the first two pages I wasn't just chuckling, at the observations - I was guffawing, and had to put the book down to get myself together. It reminds me quite a bit of Catch-22(excerpt here), with its realistic and yet vaguely manic way of talking about something that is totally absurd. I have not finished it yet - so please do not spoil it ... but so far, it's one of my favorite new books I've read in the last year. And it's a first novel, which I am usually prejudiced against. Any book that makes me laugh so loud on the subway that the person next to me starts to shift uncomfortably because they are seated next to a lunatic is a book that has won my heart. The most amazing thing about the book is that it is a plural narrator. "We". At first I wondered, nervously, "Will he be able to sustain this? Will I miss a more conventional story?" Well, I'm 200 pages in and yes. He is able to sustain it. And no. I do not miss a more conventional narrator. Because if you've worked in an office, you know how it is all about the group ... people say "We think" and "We feel" with total freedom, and when you really examine it - or stop to think about it - it is totally insane! Gossip runs the world. Without it, offices would not function. Without the group "we", office politics would fall apart. So I'm really impressed with the "we" narrator, and now I barely think about it - I have totally accepted it. It's not a gimmick, or a trick. It really expresses what office life is like. But there's so much else that (so far) is wonderful about this book. I've mentioned the humor. The observations are so right on that I suddenly find myself thinking, 'Why on earth did I not see that before?" But the book does not sacrifice heart, the abyss that is at the center of so many people's lives. It's not condescending either - as in: hahaha, let's laugh at the poor drones who have to work in cubicles, haha. Oh God, no. Joshua Ferris KNOWS this world, and he has observed how it operates - and he just "gets" it. Office life. It's making me laugh so hard I cry. Some excerpts later, perhaps, but for now - I just have to go on record that this is a fantastic book.

Culture snapshots and emotional snapshots

-- I'm reading A Widow for One Year by John Irving and also The Fortune of War by Patrick O'Brian. Awesome counterpoint. Both superb writers in their own way.

-- Thank you, dear Siobhan, for introducing me to the amazing pleasures of L.E.O. - I cannot get enough of them right now. (Website here) Mike Viola and the Candybutchers are pretty much a required course if you are an O'Malley - kinda like the Foo Fighters - you at least have to give them a chance ... otherwise we won't take you seriously. It's kind of non-negotiable. Sorry. Anyway, L.E.O. is sheer liquid joy floating through the atmosphere. The song "Make Me" is my current fave. (Explanation of what L.E.O. is here)

-- Thinking a lot about Jeff Bridges these days. More later.

-- Went to a screening last week of Mongol, the sweeping Russian epic about Genghis Khan. Big plush press screening room on 57th Street, it was great. Everyone (myself included) blackberrying throughout the film, stepping outside to take a phone call, whatever ... and also scribbling on notepads throughout ... totally different atmosphere from seeing a movie out in the real world, but fun and interesting. My review will be on House Next Door eventually - I'll point you that way when it launches.

-- Totally consumed by something I'm working on now. It's causing me a lot of stress, there are not enough hours in the day, but I find a deadline ultimately very freeing.

-- Oh, guess who I heard from randomly (God bless Facebook) ... the guy I gave a photograph of my eyeball to for Valentine's Day 'lo those many years ago. Hysterical. It was good to catch up. I didn't bring up the eyeball. It's still too embarrassing.

-- I miss all of my friends right now.

-- Cashel wears a fedora to school now. He calls it his "trademark".

-- Allison's going to Italy for 10 days with her aunt to take a vacation in Tuscany on a horse farm. She's going to be riding horses the entire time. I'm so happy for her, although I will miss her.

-- Thank you, Hitachi. From the bottom of my heart: THANK. YOU.

-- Oh, and I'm also reading Patricia Neal's autobiography (thank you, cousin Mike!) and damn it's making me fucking SAD. She had one love. Gary Cooper. And she never recovered from the loss. Never. And Roald Dahl was a son of a bitch. But what a life, what a career, what strength ... but she ends the book with thoughts of Gary. She never got over it.

-- I crossed 2 or 3 pretty major things off my To Do list which have been haunting me. I actually cried when I crossed the last one off. It had been tormenting my mind, and giving me stress dreams.

-- Watched Stranger Than Fiction last night for, oh, the 10th time, and had to mop the tears off my face at the end. Slowly it's becoming one of my all-time favorite movies. ("You're never too old for space camp, dude.")

-- Last week I said the following sentence to Patrick, "My fallopian tubes are unfurling." Patrick still has not recovered.

-- My entire consciousness is now consumed by the bridesmaid dress I will wear in September.

-- I find office supplies immensely relaxing.

That Night, by Alice McDermott: The beginning

I'm now reading That Night, by Alice McDermott - author of the wonderful and National Book Award-winning Charming Billy (my post about it here).

McDermott often writes from the point of view of an innocent bystander, usually a member of a huge sprawling family of the Irish Catholic variety - so even if you were not a first-hand witness to an event, it doesn't matter. You tell the story of Uncle Jimmy driving the car over the wall as though you were there. Stories are passed down, hardening into narrative. She's so so good at getting that feeling of Boston Irish Catholic diaspora. I can't think of anyone who comes close to "getting it right" - without being twee, or annoying, or full of "oh, I long for the leprechauns of the auld country" like so many Irish-American writers succumb to. It's nauseating. McDermott writes about families who still have the breath of turf around them, they're one generation removed, grandmothers have brogues, etc. I think she's full of truth. That Night takes place in what would seem to be a stultifying suburb atmosphere, early 60s, cusp of Vatican II 60s, and kids roam the streets (the book is told in retrospect by a little girl, now a grown woman, who was truly peripheral to the main events) - and the mothers chat over the fences, and the fathers come home smelling of cigarettes, with slicked down hair. (I love the fathers. Man, does Alice McDermott "get" that kind of father. It's hard to describe. You just know it when you see it. I recognize my entire family, the Buddy Holly glasses, the cigarettes, the little kids leaping through sprinklers, all the Polaroids from my childhood, yes - even this one - in her descriptions of fathers. It's poignant.)

But a while back (and I cannot find the comment even though I looked) I was writing about something - it must have had to do with "openings" of books, as in - how they start, and how challenging they are to write. And Jon, a friend of mine, made a comment that a while back, in a writing class, a teacher had given That Night as an example of a first-rate beginning. I'm halfway through the book right now, but I did want to share the opening - because, man, Jon's teacher was right.

I highly recommend That Night (and all of McDermott's stuff).

Hard to NOT keep reading after something like this. It is a stunner of a beginning. Goosebumps.

EXCERPT FROM That Night, by Alice McDermott - The beginning:

That night when he came to claim her, he stood on the short lawn before her house, his knees bent, his fists driven into his thighs, and bellowed her name with such passion that even the friends who surrounded him, who had come to support him, to drag her from the house, to murder her family if they had to, let the chains they carried go limp in their hands. Even the men from our neighborhood, in Bermuda shorts or chinos, white T-shirts and gray suit-pants, with baseball bats and snow shovels held before them like rifles, even they paused in their rush to protect her: the good and the bad - the black-jacketed boys and the fathers in their light summer clothes - startled for that one moment before the fighting began by the terrible, piercing sound of his call.

This is serious, my own father remembered thinking at that moment. This is insane.

I remember only that my ten-year-old heart was stopped by the beauty of it all.

Sheryl was her name, but he cried, "Sherry," drawing out the word, keening it, his voice both strong and desperate. There was a history of dark nights in the sound, something lovely, something dangerous.

One of the children had already begun to cry.

It was high summer, the early 1960s. The sky was a bright navy above the pitched roofs and the thick suburban trees. I hesitate to say that only Venus was bright, but there it was. I had noticed it earlier, when the three cars that were now in Sheryl's driveway and up on her lawn had made their first pass through our neighborhood. Add a thin, rising moon if the symbolism troubles you: Venus was there.

Across the street, a sprinkler shot weak sprays of water, white in the growing darkness. Behind the idling motors of the boys' cars you could still hear the collective gurgle of filters in backyard pools. Sheryl's mother had already been pulled from the house, and she crouched on the grass by the front steps saying over and over again, "She's not here. She's gone." The odor of their engines was like a gash across the ordinary summer air.

He called her again, doubled over now, crying, I think. Then he pitched forward, his boot slipping on the grass, so it seemed for a second he'd be frustrated even in this, and once again ran toward the house. Sheryl's mother cowered. The men and the boys met awkwardly on the square lawn.

Until then, I had thought all violence was swift and sure-footed, somehow sleek, even elegant. I was surprised to see how poor it really was, how laborious and hulking. I saw one of the men bend under the blow of what seemed a slow-moving chain, and then, just as gracelessly, swing his son's baseball bat into a teenager's ear. I saw the men and the boys leap on one another like obese, short-legged children, sliding and falling, raising chains that seemed to crumble backward onto their shoulders, moving bats and hoes and wide rakes that seemed as unwieldy as trees. There were no clever D'Artagnan mid-air meetings of chain and snow-shovel, no eye-to-eye throat grippings, no witty retorts and well-timed dodges, no winners. Only, in the growing darkness, a hundred dumb, unrhythmical movements, only blow after artless blow.

I was standing in the road before our neighbor's house, frozen, as were all the other children scattered across the road and the sidewalk and the curbs as if in some wide-ranging game of statues. I was certain, as were all the others, that my father would die.

Behind us, one of the mothers began to call her husband's name, and then the others, touching their throats or their thighs, one by one began to follow. Their thin voices were plaintive, even angry, as if this clumsy battle were the last disappointment they would bear, or as if, it seems to me now, they had begun to echo, even take up, that lovesick boy's bitter cry.

A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter

It's been years since I read this classic novel, but it's been on my radar again - ever since Larry wrote an evocative post about reading James Salter's memoir (I mention Larry's post here - sadly, the link to his site no longer works). Anyway. Haven't written much (at all) about James Salter - I came to him late, and I didn't come to him through A Sport and a Pastime, his most well-known book. The first of his I read was Light Years and I was very young when I read it, early 20s - and it sounded some kind of chord in me that made me DEEPLY uneasy. It's definitely a middle-aged kind of book - with all its resignations and disappointments and echoey silences- and I think I'm hesitant to pick it up now. But I will never forget my first reading of the book. I felt literally uneasy.

It's hard to describe what he does as a writer, and why it is so good and so singular ... maybe I'll look around for some reviews to see if I can clarify it, if someone else managed to say it perfectly. Even to say "he's a good writer" is absurd. It would be like saying, "Cormac McCarthy can write, bro!" Well, yeah. But ... Methinks we need to create a different definition of "writer" for guys like McCarthy and Salter. Comparing the two may seem rather insane - because there is really nothing similar about them ... McCarthy catapults us into the genocidal American past, and Salter evokes a gentle dying world in the present. Where events happen that form us - but so quickly that they are gone in a second ... leaving us marked, but also somewhat dazed ... did that really happen? But I feel now like I would recognize a Cormac McCarthy sentence if I bumped into it in a dark alley - and the same with Salter's language. I read Salter and there are times when I get that same feeling I got when I was reading Blood Meridian: Oh God ... this is too deep, too deep ... I can't slow down enough to really contemplate it ... must keep moving ...

And then by the end of the book you find yourself flattened. LIKE A BUG. SMUSH. Never to recover 100%. Writers like that sneak up on you. They work their magic subtly. It's not that they do not want to be noticed: their writing is nothing if not startlingly attention-getting. It's that they do not want to be congratulated. Their concentration lies somewhere else entirely.

I read Light Years a million years ago (uhm, light years ago) - and immediately picked up A Sport and a Pastime which is another book that made me almost uneasy. They're quiet books, no noise or chaos ... but there is something at the heart of them that is unbearably sad. I think it was the sense of looking back on a time when you were most alive ... looking back from a more dim drab present ... the sense of loss ... of unrecoverable vitality ... I'm making him sound bleak, and that's about right, but the language is so beautiful, and so simple - so simple - that the bleakness almost feels like a betrayal when it comes. He describes a snowfall so perfectly that you are transported into its beauty and then he jujitsus you with some bleak empty sentiment. Never too proud of himself, never elaborating, always simple and clear. That's the key to his genius. Most of his sentences are short.

My friend Jon wrote in the comments section of my blog:

First of all, "Light Years" is probably one of the best books I've read in the past five years--and is certainly on my "Top Something" list. I was a wreck after reading that. The scene where Ned comes back to his empty house after seeing Ibsen's "The Master Builder?" I think I had a slight heart attack while reading that. Unbelievably powerful. That whole book is like a column of light, each sentence almost literally like a tiny, multi-faceted diamond, shining such focused rays in eternal directions. And I've been meaning to read more of him ever since--can't believe how long I've gone without actually doing it. Onward.

And I responded:

I am so thrilled to read you were as blown over by Light Years as I was. There were quiet moments in the book (like at the end, with the turtle in the woods) where I felt so ... Basically what I want to say is: the book stunned me, and sometimes it was a barely pleasant sensation ... Like, it affected me PERSONALLY. I'm almost afraid to read it again. He is SUCH a good writer.

So I decided to go back and re-read A Sport and a Pastime (I still don't feel ready to look at Light Years again, especially now when my equilibrium is hanging by a thread on a moment-to-moment basis - but if you're reading me, and you like book recs, etc. - all I can say is: READ Light Years. My God!!)

And I come across passages of such simplicity and beauty that I want to grab Salter by the collar and say, "DIVULGE YOUR SECRETS." I wish I could write like this.

A Sport and a Pastime takes place in provincial France ("the real France" as the main character keeps saying) in the 1960s. A Yale dropout hooks up with a French girl. That's it. No big plot machinations. But the imagery, the language ... Again, I can feel myself skimming the surface of it ... it's almost TOO good ... too good to absorb in one sitting. He's deceptively simple. In almost the manner of Hemingway. If you just skim the surface, you'll miss most of it. But Hemingway doesn't let you off the hook, and divulge the subtext ... or when he does? You'll know it. Salter is the same way. He's describing a soccer stadium here. That seems to be all that is going on. But no no no. The deeps he sounds in his writing ...

Four in the afternoon. The trees along the street, the upper branches, are catching the last, full light. The stadium is quiet, some bicycles leaning against the outer wall. I read the schedule once again and then go in, turning down towards the stands which are almost empty. Far away, the players are streaming across the soft grass. There seem to be no cries, no shouting, only the faint thud of kicks.

It is the emptiness which pleases me, the blue dimensions of this life. Beyond the game, as far as one can see, are the fields, the trees of the countryside. Above us, provincial sky, a little cloudy. Once in a while the sun breaks out, vague as a smile. I sit alone. There are the glances of some young boys, nothing more. There's no scoreboard. The game drifts back and forth. It seems to take a long, long time. Someone sends a little boy to the far side to chase the ball when it goes out of bounds. I watch him slowly circle the field. He passes behind the goal. He trots a while, then he walks. He seems lost in the journey. Finally he is over there, small and isolated on the sideline. After a while I can see him kicking at stones.

I am at the center of emptiness. Every act seems purer for it, easier to define. The sounds separate themselves. The details all appear. I stop at the Cafe St. Louis. It's like an old school room. The varnish is worn from the curve of the chairs. The finish is gone from the floor. It's one large, yellowing room, huge mirrors on the wall, the same size and position as windows, generous, imperfect. Glass doors along the street. Wherever one looks, it seems possible to see out. They're playing billiards. I listen without watching. The soft click of the balls is like a concert. The players stand around, talking in hoarse voices. The rich odor of their cigarettes ... They're never there in the daytime. It's very different with the morning light upon it, this cafe. Stale. The billiard table seems less dark. The wood is drawing apart at the corners. It's quite old, at least a hundred years I should think, judging from the elaborate legs. Beneath the pale green cloth which is always thrown over it, the felt is worn, like the sleeves of an old suit.

"Monsieur?"

It's the old woman who runs the place. False teeth, white as buttons. Belonged to her husband probably. I can hear them clattering in her mouth.

"Monsieur?" she insists.

Exquisite. Just perfect.

And then there's this bit of observational genius:

The three or four gilded youths of the town, too, slouched on the divans. I know them by sight. One is an angel, at least for betrayal. Beautiful face. Soft, dark hair. A mouth like spoiled fruit. Nothing amuses them - they don't talk until somebody leaves, and then they begin little laughing cuts, sometimes calling over to the barman. The rest of the time they sit in boredom, polishing the gestures of contempt. The angel is taller than the rest. He has an expensive suit and a tie knotted loosely at the neck. Sometimes a sweater. Soft cuffs. I've seen him on the street. He's about seventeen, and he seems less dangerous in the daylight, merely a bad student or a boy already notorious for his vices. He's ready to start seductions. Perhaps he even says it's easy, and that women are simple to get. To believe is to make real, they say. A chill passes through me. I recognize in him a clear strain of assurance which has nothing to imitate, which springs forth intact. It feeds on its own reflection. He looks carefully at himself in the mirror, combing his hair. He inspects his teeth. The maid has let him undress her. She hates him, but she cannot make him go. I try to think of what he's said. He has an instinct for it. He is here to hunt them down, to discover the weaklings. I don't know what he feels - the assassin's joy.

The less said about such writing the better, I think. To analyze it or point out elements that work would be to ruin it. It's perfect, as is. And I'm thinking: A chill ran through you?? A chill runs through me, Mr. Salter, every time I pick up one of your damn books!

It's been almost 20 years since I read this book and I'm still just stunned by it.

The Pornographer, by John McGahern

I'm tearing through The Pornographer, a novel by John McGahern. I posted about it yesterday. I am mortified by the book. Not the frank sex scenes, which I love - he writes them quite well (not to mention the interesting subtle differences between the "real life" sex scenes and the erotic stories written by our narrator ... You know, the difference between sex as performed by gymnasts and sex as performed by regular people with issues and problems and inhibitions, etc.) - but the character of Josephine - the woman Michael becomes involved with (pretty much against his will) is pushing ALL MY BUTTONS. Josephine! My God! The thing is is that I know she is pushing my buttons because I see myself in her, a dark mirror ... and I do not like what I see. I would never ever behave like Josephine behaves, I have far too much coldness and steel in me - and I would rather walk away from a situation than debase myself by asking for what I need (you can see the dysfunction - this is why pride is a sin, people) ... but the desire to behave like Josephine behaves, my experience of rejection (and not even rejection - but potential rejection) - is all out in the open with this woman, and it is excruciating to read. Excruciating!! I find myself siding with Michael repeatedly. I am as cold as he is. Cut this lady loose, Michael. Cut her loose. You were honest with her, and she chose not to listen. So she's an idiot. Get rid of her. Do it quick, like ripping off a Bandaid. Because Michael, lemme tell you, the woman is a nightmare. RUN FOR THE HILLS.

But it is not that simple, of course it isn't. And my response to Josephine, and Michael's response to her ... perhaps might be indicative of our own personal truths, our own sense of boundaries, etc ... but I imagine that McGahern is going for a deeper point here. About intimacy and the inability to connect. Sex feels like connection, and it actually is connection. But when two people are having two separate experiences -during the act of making love - then that's a problem. Actually to call it "making love" is a misnomer. If one person is "making love" and the other person is "having sex" you're gonna have some issues. Josephine is 38 years old, and a virgin. She is highly competent at her job, and she loves it. Michael writes porn stories for a magazine, and hides that fact from everyone. When she discovers the truth, at first she is intrigued. But as they get deeper involved, and he starts pushing her away, she becomes convinced that it is the writing of the porn that has ruined his soul for love. He needs to give it up. And looking at Michael's coldness, his ability to detach - regardless of the consequences - I don't know, maybe Josephine has a point. Michael doesn't sit back and write his porn stories with detachment, they work him up ... as they are meant to work the reader up. But what is he ultimately left with? McGahern does not take a judgmental stance towards porn, or those who love it. He is quite egalitarian, which I like. He's a male writer who can write about women (not all of them can, many of the great male writers suck at trying to write women) ... Women are not monolithic to McGahern, they are not "other" (that's my main beef with a lot of male writers and how they write about women - I'm looking at YOU, Don DeLillo) ... they may be mysterious to the gentlemen involved with them, but they are not so completely beyond the pale in terms of their life experience. Josephine is a nightmare to read - the story, after all, is totally from Michael's point of view. We only feel his increasing sense of entrapment (and this chick sets her sights on him instantly ... I guess that's what happens when you take a 38 year old virgin's virginity ...)

She's pushy. She's demanding. She is immediately in love with him. Michael senses the danger, he senses that Josephine's power 'comes from outside' - meaning: there is a hollowness there, and when he rejects her, as he WILL do, she will be destroyed, because she has built him up as her only reason for being. Michael can sense, from afar, how Josephine is creating a relationship with him out of wholecloth - even though he only wants to take her to pubs, and go back to his place. Doing "date" things, like going to the movies, or doing things during the day ... he's not into that. She keeps pushing him. I ache for her. I ache with embarrassment for her. I want to tell her to back off. She mentions her two friends, two American girls, and Michael can sense the HOURS of girl-talk that has been devoted to him. Michael's no dummy. He knows how women operate. He knows how they make shit up because they want it to be true.

But he got more than he bargained for with Josephine, who will not disappear so easily. This isn't a Fatal Attraction story. She doesn't go off the rails (at least not yet) ... but it's hypnotic, in the fact that I can't wait for her to disappear, I can't wait for Michael to go back to his real life, which consists of doing nothing but writing porn, wandering the streets aimlessly on his days off, picking up girls, having sex, moving on ... Like: why do I want him to go back to that? And yet - I certainly couldn't "approve" of him accepting Josephine - it couldn't work! His coldness amazes even me, and I actually think it's something to be proud of. He does not lead her on. He says straight off, "I am attracted to you, and I want to have sex with you. That's not love." She doesn't understand that at ALL. He reiterates the point. He knows he has to break it off. She gets all excited when she's with him, she can't stand it when he needs "a day off" - like, she wants to be with him all the time. Meanwhile, Michael is in the middle of a family crisis - with his beloved aunt dying, and all of that stuff going on ... he needs SPACE. "I'll see you this weekend," he says to Josephine, after their date on Tuesday. She is dismayed. "All that time without seeing you?"

Frankly, I want to slap her upside the head.

But let me be clear: I want to slap her upside the head because I'm embarrassed, yes, and I want her to protect herself more, play it cool, not be so openly needy ... but then I look at my life, where I have played it cool to such an extent that I am alone, I have hidden my neediness from men so well that they think I don't need them or even really like them, frankly. So who is better? Should Josephine go MY way? Why, cause it's been such a ringing success for me?? Honestly.

What button is being pushed by reading about a woman actually saying, "I love you. I want to be with you. I want to be IN your life ... i don't want to just be the girl you get a drink with and then go home and screw ... I want to be part of your life ..." ?

I don't know, but SOME button is being pushed.

At the same time, I think Michael has been perfectly clear with her - and if any guy ever says to me, "I think we need to take a break" I will know what that means, and I will walk away, and never look back. But that's not Josephine. She will not give up so easy. She fights for it. She is annoying, yes, and we see her through Michael's eyes - which is a distortion ... but I admire the fight.

Be careful what you wish for? Yes, but also the maxim could be: Be careful who you sleep with ... you might awaken a monster. I said that to the doppelganger, lo, those many years ago, in the horrible 2002 aftermath: "Guess you just flirted with the wrong girl, huh. Lesson learned." He gave me the weirdest look, almost like I had slapped him, and nodded and said, "Yeah. I guess so."

And yet I never lose sight of Michael's journey, too - in the book. I yearn for his freedom, I yearn for her to just ... go away. Life (and love) is never that simple.

Bravo, Mr. McGahern.

Here's a killer excerpt. The last paragraph knocked me on my ass. I still haven't gotten up.

"We only know each other a few weeks, and things are happening far too fast for me. I'm fond of you," I could hear the lie slithering on the surface of thin ice. "But I'm not in love with you. I want us to call a halt, for a time anyhow, to these regular meetings."

"I see you have it all worked out, just like one of your plots."

"I haven't it all worked out, but I want to give it a rest. We'll drop it for a month or so and see how we feel then. And for that time both of us are free."

"But I love you ...."

"If you love me, then surely you can do that much for a month."

"You're letting nothing through and you can really swing them."

"Swing what?"

"Reasons. Figures. You have it all figured out, haven't you? There's hardly need to even talk."

"I want to rest it for a month," I said doggedly.

"It'll be no different in a month."

"We'll see."

"I feel I have enough love for the both of us to begin with. It's that horrible stuff you're writing that has you all twisted and unnatural. I'd care so much for you. There's so many other decent natural things you could do."

"I suppose I could run a health food shop or a launch on the Shannon River," I said angrily.

"You don't understand. I love you. I only want the best for you."

'Well then, the best for me is that we agree not to see one another for a month."

"I don't suppose there's any use suggesting that we go back to your place and talk about it."

"No. There's no use. You know what that'll lead to, and we'll be only deeper and deeper in."

"There was a time when you were anxious enough for that," it was her turn to be angry.

"We both were. I'll get a taxi for you or I'll walk you home. Whichever you prefer."

"Walk me home," she said.

"I'm grateful, even flattered by your love. But you can't do the loving for the both of us," I said to her at the gate.

"O boy," she said bitterly. "I waited long enough to sure pick a winner," and I shook her hand and left before she began to cry.

I too had stood mutilated by another gate, believing that I could not live without my love; but we endure, as the first creature leaving water endured, having first tried to turn back from the empty land. Having drunk from the infernal glass we call love and knowing we have lived our death, we turn to love another way, in the ordered calm of each thing counted and loved for its impending loss. We learn to smile.

The Pornographer, by John McGahern

I'm reading The Pornographer, a novel by John McGahern. I read his By the Lake last year (excerpt here), and his Amongst Women is one of my favorite books (excerpt here) - so I decided to go back and fill in the blanks in the McGahern canon, including his memoir All Will Be Well.

Here's an interesting post about McGahern, thoughts about who he was as a writer, and what he meant.

Anne Enright, winner of the Booker Prize last year for The Gathering said about McGahern, and Irish writers in general:

I find being Irish quite a wearing thing. It takes so much work because it is a social construction. People think you are going to be this, this, and this. I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true. John McGahern was an immensely angry, dangerous, and subversive writer. But he was domesticated by the Irish academy incredibly fast. There's the idea of the "authentic Irish" that he keys into.

Subversive not like peep-show subversive. But subversive as in revolutionary. He said what nobody wanted him to say. Which was the truth, as he saw it, about life on the ground in Ireland. He was sacked from his job. His first novel was banned in Ireland. Eventually, they came around - and he was more famous in Ireland than he ever was abroad (although, in the wake of his death, that has much changed). He is one of Ireland's greatest all-time writers. His stuff is haunting. He uses a gentle pen - nothing firebrand-ish about him. You lose track of where you are when you are reading his books, the atmosphere is so all-encompassing. And for the most part, it seems like he is just describing what happened ... The depths of his books are not immediately apparent. He does not make a big obvious deal about his themes. But they are there, and they resonate in the reader long long after you finish the book. I mean, the silence of that house in Amongst Women was deafening - and it seems like I can hear it still. And the characters he creates leave an indelible mark. He's one of the best. And yes, you might miss how angry he is, and how courageous. Nobody thanked him at the time, for just telling the truth, as he saw it, about the Church, and sex, and politics in Ireland. He was pilloried. I guess he could take comfort that he was in good company (ie: Joyce, another writer who was run out of town on a rail after telling the truth about Dublin and Dubliners). He has the last laugh, I suppose - any list of great Irish novelists usually has him in the top 5, and small wonder. He is a very local writer - which I wonder is one of the reasons why his fame did not spread much further outside Ireland? But his very local-ness reminds me of two quotes:

Thomas Hardy, who was also accused of being "provincial" - and writing about the same 10 square miles of ground - had this to say:

"A certain provincialism of feeling is invaluable. It is the essence of individuality, and is largely made up of that crude enthusiasm without which no great thoughts are thought, no great deeds done."

And then a quote from photographer Henri Cartier Bresson, who had this to say about photographing Marilyn Monroe:

She's American and it's very clear that she is - she's very good that way - one has to be very local to be universal.

Both of these quotes seem to me to be applicable to John McGahern, and his particular and specific power as a writer. He is Irish. His books could not take place anywhere else. You can hear the brogues in his language (much more than you can in, say, Banville's stuff). McGahern writes in a brogue. And yet by being "very local" he has become "universal". And his stuff, which has a "certain provincialism" also becomes "the essence of individuality". You cannot remove his people into other lands, and have them retain the same sense of truth. Ireland is a character in his books, although it is rarely mentioned. LIke I said, he does not dwell, he does not use a giant hammer to make his points ... and in that way, he is the most subversive writer of them all. Because it is hard to pinpoint exactly what it is he is doing or saying - and so he drove the officals mad! "We KNOW this is subversive, dammit ... but we don't know WHY!! He's up to no good, that's clear!"

I mean, sometimes it is obvious why - he was very open about sex and writing about sex - and just look at the title of this book!! Hugely confrontational! The Pornographer? In 1970s Ireland? What are you, nuts? You can't say that!!

But he does.

In The Pornographer we meet Michael, a quiet man who makes his living writing erotic stories for an underground magazine. He writes trash. He is given the names of the characters by the editor of the mag - "Okay, so this one will be about The Colonel and a little tart named Mavis ..." and off he goes. He doesn't even have to worry about plot - that is given to him as well. But the sex is all his to write. It's graphic stuff. "Fuck me fuck me O Jesus fuck me" cries poor Mavis as she humps the Colonel in Majorca. Michael lives a rather aimless life, it seems (I'm early on in the book) - and is, at the moment, taken with caring for his aunt, who is dying in a nearby hospital. Her husband won't come to visit her. The book opens with Michael taking his uncle (his aunt's brother) to see his sister in the hospital. His uncle is a country man, a working man - a true McGahern type, rural, rough, nobody's fool, and highly practical. He makes appointments with a couple of different distributors in Dublin, to get machinery parts, while he's there. There's this absolute stunner of a sentence:

My uncle saw his own state as the ideal, and it should be the goal of others to strive to reach its perfect height. For me to disturb its geometry with any different perspective would be a failure of understanding and affection.

Wow.

Michael tells no one what he does for a living. It's vague. He's a "writer". He had a failed love affair which seems to have made an impact. He asked her to marry him, she said no. And now he is left in the lonely quiet aftermath.

Here's an excerpt - a connection being made between the ritual of the mass and the ritual of sitting down to write. Of course, sitting down to write porn. Ah, McGahern. I love your subversive self.

There was no sound when I opened the door of the house and let it close. Nor was there sound other than the creaking of the old stairs as I climbed to the landing. I paused before going into the room but the house seemed to be completely still. I closed the door and stood in the room. Always the room was still.

The long velvet curtain that was drawn on the half-open window stirred only faintly. A coal fire was set ready to light in the grate. The bed with damaged brass bells stood in the corner and shelves of books lined the walls. Books as well were piled untidily on the white mantel above the coal grate, on the bare dressing table. Beside the wardrobe a table lamp made out of a Chianti bottle lit the marble tabletop that had been a washstand once, lit the typewriter that rested on a page of old newspaper on the marble, lit an untouched ream of white pages beside it. I reflected as I always did with some satisfaction after an absence that the poor light of day hardly ever got into this room.

I washed and changed, combed my hair, and washed my hands again a last time before going over to the typewriter on the marble, and started to leaf through what I had written.

We used to robe in scarlet and white how many years before. Through the small window of the sacristy the sanded footpath lay empty and still between the laurels and back wall of the church, above us the plain tongued boards of the ceiling. It seemed always hushed there, motors and voices and the scrape-drag of feet muffled by the church and tall graveyard trees. Kneelers were no longer being let down on the flagstones. The wine and water and hand linen had been taken out onto the altar. The incessant coughing told that the church was full. The robed priest stood still in front of the covered chalice on the table, and we formed into line at the door as the last bell began to ring. When it ceased the priest lifted the chalice, and we bowed together to the cross, our hearts beating. And then the sacristy door opened on to the side of the altar and all the faces grew out of a dark mass of cloth out beyond the rail. We began to walk, the priest with the covered chalice following behind.

Among what rank weeds are ceremonies remembered, are continued. I read what I had written, to take it up. My characters were not even people. They were athletes. I did not even give them names. Maloney, who was paying me to write, effectively named them. "Above all the imagination requires distance," he declared. "It can't function close up. We'd risk turning our readers off if there was a hint that it might be a favourite uncle or niece they imagined doing these godawful things with"; and so Colonel Grimshaw got his name and his young partner on the high wire joined him as Mavis Carmichael.

This weekend the Colonel and Mavis were away to Majorca.

"Write it like a story. Write it like a life, but with none of life's unseemly infirmities," Maloney was fond of declaring. "Write it like two ball players crunching into the tackle. Only feather it a little with down and lace."

I am not sure what is to come - I'm really looking forward to the book.

The Sea, by John Banville

Another excerpt from The Sea, by John Banville. I am beginning to realize the essential bleakness at the heart of the book. I think I resisted it, although it was apparent that it would not be a laugh-riot. This is a man grieving for his dead wife, and also haunted by some event in his childhood - that, frankly, it is taking him forever to reveal. I'm on page 145 with only 50 pages to go and I still don't know what it was that happened back then that had such an impact. I know it's coming ... but he's only giving it to me in drips and drabs. He had a crush on Mrs. Grace ... and then transferred his love to the daughter, Chloe. They were 11 years old and were "going out". Nothing earth-shattering ... but you can tell that, on some level, time stopped for Max Morden - NOT when his wife died, but long long ago, in childhood. As he says in the first paragraph of the book "They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide." The Grace kids were "the gods". They had the same chaotic power of the Gods of old, the same dominating aspects ... the same mix of benevolence and cruelty. So I don't know what happened back there - the book goes back and forth (sometimes 3 times in one sentence) between Max now - who has moved to the town where he holidayed as a young kid, the scene of whatever it was that happened with the Graces ... He has moved back here because he is at a loss at what to do after the death of his wife. But he also needs peace and quiet to work - and it is inconceivable that he could get anything done at his home, where he lived so long with his wife. But it is also apparent that he has moved back here to come to terms with ... whatever happened back then. The day the gods departed. He is bombarded by sensations - the past as he remembers it bucking up against the reality before him (there was a kitchen here in this house back then? I have no memory of that ...) ... He is also, without saying it, achingly lonely for his wife. He doesn't seem to have been terribly in love with her - as a matter of fact, he seemed a bit afraid of her, there was something in her that was cold and clear and beyond him ... but without her he is a mess. He is a hypochondriac, and an insomniac - two things which have been made worse tenfold by the death of his wife. He stays in a boarding house in the summer town - the house where the Graces used to live. It is changed now. It is run by a woman named Miss Vavasour (great name) - and there are only two people living there - Max, and an old Colonel. The Colonel has been living there forever, and is ancient. He is obsessed with his own bodily functions, which is understandable - since he is so old. He kind of resents Max's presence, and there's a bit of jostling for position between them, but Max doesn't have energy for a fight. He tries to settle in ... but there is something ultimately unbearable about his life. I mean, he bears it, but it is unbearable nonetheless.

The following excerpt made me say "Wow" out loud when I finished it. Wow.

After dinner Miss Vavasour clears the table in a few broad fanciful passes - she is altogether too good for this kind of menial chore - while the Colonel and I sit in vague distress listening to our systems doing their best to deal with the insults with which they have just been served. Then Miss V. in stately fashion leads the way to the television room. This is a cheerless, ill-lit chamber which has a somehow subterranean atmosphere, and is always dank and cold. The furnishings too have an underground look to them, like things that subsided here over the years from some brighter place above. A chintz-covered sofa sprawls as if aghast, its two arms flung wide and cushions sagging. There is an armchair upholstered in plaid, and a small three-legged table with a dusty potted plant which I believe is a genuine aspidistra, the like of which I have not seen since since I do not know when, if ever. Miss Vavasour's upright piano, its lid shut, stands against the back wall as if in tight-lipped resentment of its gaudy rival opposite, a mighty, gunmetal-grey Pixilate Panoramic which its owner regards with a mixture of pride and slightly shamed misgiving. On this set we watch the comedy shows, favouring the gentle ones repeated from twenty or thirty years ago. We sit in silence, the canned audiences doing our laughing for us. The jittering coloured light from the screen plays over our faces. We are rapt, as mindless as children. Tonight there was a programme on a place in Africa, the Serengeti Plain, I think it was, and its great elephant herds. What amazing beasts they are, a direct link surely to a time long before our time, when behemoths even bigger than they roared and rampaged through forest and swamp. In manner they are melancholy and yet seem covertly amused, at us, apparently. They lumber along placidly in single file, the trunk-tip of one daintily furled around the laughable piggy tail of its cousin in front. The young, hairier than their elders, trot contentedly between their mothers' legs. If one set out to seek among our fellow-creatures, the land-bound ones, at least, for our very opposite, one would surely need look no further than the elephants. How is it we have allowed them to survive so long? Those sad little knowing eyes seem to invite one to pick up a blunderbuss. Yes, put a big bullet through there, or into one of those huge absurd flappy ears. Yes, yes, exterminate all the brutes, lop away at the tree of life until only the stump is left standing, then lovingly take the cleaver to that, too. Finish it all off.

You cunt, you fucking cunt, how could you go and leave me like this, floundering in my own foulness, with no one to save me from myself. How could you.

"A chintz-covered sofa sprawls as if aghast" ...

Wow.

My other post about The Sea is here.

UPDATE: I just finished the book. I didn't see the Miss Vavasour connection coming AT ALL. Has anyone else read the book? Did you guess? I literally said, "Oh my God" out loud when the information was revealed.

And then there is the mystery of what was going on with the twins, on the "day the gods departed". Minor spoilers here: Did they say anything to one another while sitting for a moment together on the beach? Banville doesn't say. It appears that they just sit quietly, and then stand up and walk into the ocean. Why? What happened? Do they truly believe they are "gods" - not of this earth?

But it was the Rose thing that really knocked me on my ass.

Sad. Sad book. Not just because of Chloe and Myles but because of what eventually will become of Max. And the nasty undertones to his relationship with his daughter ... I had thought that that was maybe just a man being honest about his daughter's failings. But no. He sensed the threat. He knew that eventually it would be her or him. Someone had to win.

Sheesh. Sad.

The perfect library

110 best books ...

Of course the thing with these lists is people get uppity and pissed, either by what is left off (My first uppity question is: "where the hell is Harriet the Spy??") or by the bias shown by the list-maker ("He's such a snob!" - Or - "what the hell is such-and-such doing on that list?? THAT INVALIDATES THE WHOLE LIST.") Etc. You know, people go apeshit. But it's really just because they want us to know who THEY are, and the books THEY would choose. And they express themselves in a defensive manner. They get angry at the elitism in lists, they get angry at what they feel is the lack of respect for their perfect library. I get annoyed with such people, mainly because I get annoyed when people get angry for no reason. Don't get so pissed off: Tell me YOUR perfect library then, but without the chip on your shoulder, how 'bout? I understand you want to be heard. And seen. I get that. We all want to be known. And to book lovers, it IS by our books that we are known. Some lists are ridiculous and snotty, and some do reveal the bias of the list-maker, and all that - but I still think they are interesting jumping-off points for conversation. I mean looking at that list, I can honestly say that The Beauty Myth did not change MY world - as a matter of fact I have some pretty strong negative feelings about Naomi Wolf (Ahem) - and so that shows the bias of the list-maker, but I choose not to discount the list entire because of stuff like that. Bias is interesting. So apparently - to that list-maker, it was a book that changed his/her world ... how fascinating. I wouldn't have it on my list, but it's interesting to see it there nonetheless. I have many of the books on the list, naturally - many I do not have and feel I should get - I had forgotten all about The Railway Children - I LOVED that book when I was little, loved loved loved it ... and now I realize I have been separated from it for FAR too long!

Some view of my library - which is far from perfect, but which gives me great pleasure:

The list - which is supposed to make up a "perfect library" reminds me of two things - a letter Charlotte Bronte wrote, where she recommended books to a friend (a female friend) - and also a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote, where he listed, exhaustively, the books every gentleman should have in his library. It's worth printing both of these in full:

CHARLOTTE BRONTE:

"You ask me to recommend you some books for your perusal. I will do so in as few words as I can. If you like poetry, let it be first-rate; Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson, Goldsmith, Pope (if you will, though I don't admire him), Scott, Byron, Campbell, Wordsworth, and Southey. Now don't be startled at the names of Shakespeare and Byron. Both these were great men, and their works are like themselves. You will know how to choose the good, and to avoid the evil; the finest passages are always the purest, the bad are invariably revolting; you will never wish to read them over twice. Omit the comedies of Shakespeare and the Don Juan, perhaps the Cain, of Byron, though the latter is a magnificent poem, and read the rest fearlessly; that must indeed be a depraved mind which can gather evil from Henry VIII, from Richard III, from Macbeth, and Hamlet, and Julius Caesar. Scott's sweet, wild, romantic poetry can do you no harm. Nor can Wordsworth's, nor Campbell's, nor Southey's -- the greatest part at least of his; some is certainly objectionable. For history, read Hume, Rollin, and the Universal History, if you can; I never did. For fiction, read Scott alone; all novels after his are worthless. For biography, read Johnson's Lives of the Poets, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Southey's Life of Nelson, Lockhart's Life of Burns, Moore's Life of Sheridan, Moore's Life of Byron, Wolfe's Remains. For natural history, read Bewick and Audobon, and Goldsmith, and White's History of Selborne. For divinity, your brother will advise you there. I can only say, adhere to standard authors, and avoid novelty."

I mean, honestly.

And are you ready for Thomas Jefferson's "gentleman's library"? I never look at this without feeling bad about myself, and woefully uneducated.

Thomas Jefferson to Robert Skip with a List of Books, Aug. 3, 1771

I sat down with a design of executing your request to form a catalogue of books to the amount of about 50 lib. sterl. But could by no means satisfy myself with any partial choice I could make. Thinking therefore it might be as agreeable to you I have framed such a general collection as I think you would wish and might in time find convenient to procure. Out of this you will chuse for yourself to the amount you mentioned for the present year and may hereafter as shall be convenient proceed in completing the whole. A view of the second column in this catalogue would I suppose extort a smile from the face of gravity. Peace to its wisdom! Let me not awaken it. A little attention however to the nature of the human mind evinces that the entertainments of fiction are useful as well as pleasant. That they are pleasant when well written every person feels who reads. But wherein is its utility asks the reverend sage, big with the notion that nothing can be useful but the learned lumber of Greek and Roman reading with which his head is stored?

I answer, everything is useful which contributes to fix in the principles and practices of virtue. When any original act of charity or of gratitude, for instance, is presented either to our sight or imagination, we are deeply impressed with its beauty and feel a strong desire in ourselves of doing charitable and grateful acts also. On the contrary when we see or read of any atrocious deed, we are disgusted with it's deformity, and conceive an abhorence of vice. Now every emotion of this kind is an exercise of our virtuous dispositions, and dispositions of the mind, like limbs of the body acquire strength by exercise. But exercise produces habit, and in the instance of which we speak the exercise being of the moral feelings produces a habit of thinking and acting virtuously. We never reflect whether the story we read be truth or fiction. If the painting be lively, and a tolerable picture of nature, we are thrown into a reverie, from which if we awaken it is the fault of the writer. I appeal to every reader of feeling and sentiment whether the fictitious murther of Duncan by Macbeth in Shakespeare does not excite in him as great a horror of villany, as the real one of Henry IV. by Ravaillac as related by Davila? And whether the fidelity of Nelson and generosity of Blandford in Marmontel do not dilate his breast and elevate his sentiments as much as any similar incident which real history can furnish? Does he not in fact feel himself a better man while reading them, and privately covenant to copy the fair example? We neither know nor care whether Lawrence Sterne really went to France, whether he was there accosted by the Franciscan, at first rebuked him unkindly, and then gave him a peace offering: or whether the whole be not fiction. In either case we equally are sorrowful at the rebuke, and secretly resolve we will never do so: we are pleased with the subsequent atonement, and view with emulation a soul candidly acknowleging it's fault and making a just reparation. Considering history as a moral exercise, her lessons would be too infrequent if confined to real life. Of those recorded by historians few incidents have been attended with such circumstances as to excite in any high degree this sympathetic emotion of virtue. We are therefore wisely framed to be as warmly interested for a fictitious as for a real personage. The field of imagination is thus laid open to our use and lessons may be formed to illustrate and carry home to the heart every moral rule of life. Thus a lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics, and divinity that ever were written. This is my idea of well written Romance, of Tragedy, Comedy and Epic poetry. -- If you are fond of speculation the books under the head of Criticism will afford you much pleasure. Of Politics and Trade I have given you a few only of the best books, as you would probably chuse to be not unacquainted with those commercial principles which bring wealth into our country, and the constitutional security we have for the enjoiment ofthat wealth. In Law I mention a few systematical books, as a knowledge of the minutiae of that science is not neces-sary for a private gentleman. In Religion, History, Natural philosophy, I have followed the same plan in general, -- But whence the necessity of this collection? Come to the new Rowanty, from which you may reach your hand to a library formed on a more extensive plan. Separated from each other but a few paces the possessions of each would be open to the other. A spring centrically situated might be the scene of every evening's joy. There we should talk over the lessons of the day, or lose them in music, chess or the merriments of our family companions. The heart thus lightened our pillows would be soft, and health and long life would attend the happy scene. Come then and bring our dear Tibby with you, the first in your affections, and second in mine. Offer prayers for me too at that shrine to which tho' absent I pray continual devotions. In every scheme of happiness she is placed in the foreground of the picture, as the princi-pal figure. Take that away, and it is no picture for me. Bear my affections to Wintipock clothed in the warmest expressions of sincerity; and to yourself be every human felicity.

Adieu.

FINE ARTS.

Observations on gardening. Payne. 5/
Webb's essay on painting. 12mo 3/
Pope's Iliad. 18/
------- Odyssey. 15/
Dryden's Virgil. 12mo. 12/
Milton's works. 2 v. 8vo. Donaldson. Edinburgh 1762. 10/
Hoole's Tasso. 12mo. 5/
Ossian with Blair's criticisms. 2 v. 8vo. 10/
Telemachus by Dodsley. 6/
Capell's Shakespear. 12mo. 30/
Dryden's plays. 6v. 12mo. 18/
Addison's plays. 12mo. 3/
Otway's plays. 3 v. 12mo. 9/
Rowe's works. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Thompson's works. 4 v. 12mo. 12/
Young's works. 4 v. 12mo. 12/
Home's plays. 12mo. 3/
Mallet's works. 3 v. 12mo. 9/
Mason's poetical works. 5/
Terence. Eng. 3/
Moliere. Eng. 15/
Farquhar's plays. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Vanbrugh's plays. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Steele's plays. 3/
Congreve's works. 3 v. 12mo. 9/
Garric's dramatic works. 2 v. 8vo. 10/
Foote's dramatic works. 2 v. 8vo. 10/
Rousseau's Eloisa. Eng. 4 v. 12mo. 12/
----- Emilius and Sophia. Eng. 4 v. 12mo. 12/
Marmontel's moral tales. Eng. 2 v. 12mo. 12/
Gil Blas. by Smollett. 6/
Don Quixot. by Smollett 4 v. 12mo. 12/
David Simple. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Roderic Random. 2 v. 12mo. 6/ these are written by Smollett
Peregrine Pickle. 4 v. 12mo. 12/
Launcelot Graves. 6/
Adventures of a guinea. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Pamela. 4 v. 12mo. 12/ these are by Richardson.
Clarissa. 8 v. 12mo. 24/
Grandison. 7 v. 12mo. 9/
Fool of quality. 3 v. 12mo. 9/
Feilding's works. 12 v. 12mo. pound 1.16
Constantia. 2 v. 12mo. 6/ by Langhorne.
Solyman and Almena. 12mo. 3/
Belle assemblee. 4 v. 12mo. 12/
Vicar of Wakefeild. 2 v. 12mo. 6/. by Dr. Goldsmith
Sidney Bidulph. 5 v. 12mo. 15/
Lady Julia Mandeville. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Almoran and Hamet. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Tristam Shandy. 9 v. 12mo. pound 1.7
Sentimental journey. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Fragments of antient poetry. Edinburgh. 2/
Percy's Runic poems. 3/
Percy's reliques of antient English poetry. 3 v. 12mo. 9/
Percy's Han Kiou Chouan. 4 v. 12mo. 12/
Percy's Miscellaneous Chinese peices. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Chaucer. 10/
Spencer. 6 v. 12mo. 15/
Waller's poems. 12mo. 3/
Dodsley's collection of poems. 6 v. 12mo. 18/
Pearch's collection of poems. 4 v. 12mo. 12/
Gray's works. 5/
Ogilvie's poems. 5/
Prior's poems. 2 v. 12mo. Foulis. 6/
Gay's works. 12mo. Foulis. 3/
Shenstone's works. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Dryden's works. 4 v. 12mo. Foulis. 12/
Pope's works. by Warburton. 12mo. pound 1.4
Churchill's poems. 4 v. 12mo. 12/
Hudibrass. 3/
Swift's works. 21 v. small 8vo. pound 3.3
Swift's literary correspondence. 3 v. 9/
Spectator. 9 v. 12mo. pound 1.7
Tatler. 5 v. 12mo. 15/
Guardian. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Freeholder. 12mo. 3/
Ld. Lyttleton's Persian letters. 12mo. 3/

CRITICISM ON THE FINE ARTS.

Ld. Kaim's elements of criticism. 2 v. 8vo. 10/
Burke on the sublime and beautiful. 8vo. 5/
Hogarth's analysis of beauty. 4to. pound 1.1
Reid on the human mind. 8vo. 5/
Smith's theory of moral sentiments. 8vo. 5/
Johnson's dictionary. 2 v. fol. pound 3
Capell's prolusions. 12mo. 3/

POLITICKS, TRADE.

Montesquieu's spirit of the laws. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Locke on government. 8vo. 5/
Sidney on government. 4to. 15/
Marmontel's Belisarius. 12mo. Eng. 3/
Ld. Bolingbroke's political works. 5 v. 8vo. pound 1.5
Montesquieu's rise & fall of the Roman governmt. 12mo. 3/
Steuart's Political oeconomy. 2 v. 4to. pound 1.10
Petty's Political arithmetic. 8vo. 5/

RELIGION.

Locke's conduct of the mind in search of truth. 12mo. 3/
Xenophon's memoirs of Socrates. by Feilding. 8vo. 5/
Epictetus. by Mrs. Carter. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Antoninus by Collins. 3/
Seneca. by L'Estrange. 8vo. 5/
Cicero's Offices. by Guthrie. 8vo. 5/
Cicero's Tusculan questions. Eng. 3/
Ld. Bolingbroke's Philosophical works. 5 v. 8vo. pound 1.5
Hume's essays. 4 v. 12mo. 12/
Ld. Kaim's Natural religion. 8vo. 6/
Philosophical survey of Nature. 3/
Oeconomy of human life. 2/
Sterne's sermons. 7 v. 12mo. pound 1.1
Sherlock on death. 8vo. 5/
Sherlock on a future state. 5/

LAW.

Ld. Kaim's Principles of equity. fol. pound 1.1
Blackstone's Commentaries. 4 v. 4to. pound 4.4
Cuningham's Law dictionary. 2 v. fol. pound 3

HISTORY. ANTIENT.

Bible. 6/
Rollin's Antient history. Eng. 13 v. 12mo. pound 1.19
Stanyan's Graecian history. 2 v. 8vo. 10/
Livy. (the late translation). 12/
Sallust by Gordon. 12mo. 12/
Tacitus by Gordon. 12mo. 15/
Caesar by Bladen. 8vo. 5/
Josephus. Eng. 1.0
Vertot's Revolutions of Rome. Eng. 9/
Plutarch's lives. by Langhorne. 6 v. 8vo. pound 1.10
Bayle's Dictionary. 5 v. fol. pound 7.10.
Jeffery's Historical & Chronological chart. 15/

HISTORY. MODERN.

Robertson's History of Charles the Vth. 3 v. 4to. pound 3.3
Bossuet's history of France. 4 v. 12mo. 12/
Davila. by Farneworth. 2 v. 4to. pound 1.10.
Hume's history of England. 8 v. 8vo. pound 2.8.
Clarendon's history of the rebellion. 6 v. 8vo. pound 1.10.
Robertson's history of Scotland. 2 v. 8vo. 12/
Keith's history of Virginia. 4to. 12/
Stith's history of Virginia. 6/

NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. NATURAL HISTORY &c.

Nature displayed. Eng. 7 v. 12mo.
Franklin on Electricity. 4to. 10/
Macqueer's elements of Chemistry. 2 v. 8vo. 10/
Home's principles of agriculture. 8vo. 5/
Tull's horse-hoeing husbandry. 8vo. 5/
Duhamel's husbandry. 4to. 15/
Millar's Gardener's diet. fol. pound 2.10.
Buffon's natural history. Eng. pound 2.10.
A compendium of Physic & Surgery. Nourse. 12mo. 1765. 3/
Addison's travels. 12mo. 3/
Anson's voiage. 8vo. 6/
Thompson's travels. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Lady M. W. Montague's letters. 3 v. 12mo. 9/

MISCELLANEOUS.

Ld. Lyttleton's dialogues of the dead. 8vo. 5/
Fenelon's dialogues of the dead. Eng. 12mo. 3/
Voltaire's works. Eng. pound 4.
Locke on Education. 12mo. 3/
Owen's Dict. of arts & sciences 4 v. 8vo. pound 2.

The Sea, by John Banville

It was difficult to decide what to read after the sweeping majesty and horror of Blood Meridian: - but I decided to pick up The Sea, by the great John Banville. It won the Booker, causing much brou-haha in literary circles (some of his comments in re: the Booker are almost laugh-out-loud funny) - and of course I just finished Christine Falls - the noir crime novel by John Banville (writing under the name Benjamin Black - post about that here). I have been hearing about Banville for years, since he is one of my father's favorite writers - but I am (as usual) late to the party. I own all of his books, but they have been sitting on the shelves forever. And now I am ready. I'm in a fiction mode these days - it's been a couple of years since my interest lay in that direction ... and it's been a lot of fun. I'm on a roll now. I've only just begun The Sea, and there have been moments, already, where I almost put it down. It's hitting too close to the bone. I think: Do I really want to go there right now? I think maybe I should pick up the next book in the Master & Commander series - books which transport and elevate and make me think ... but certainly don't dive right into the heart of what I am experiencing at this moment in time. But I am going to stick with it. The Sea is the story of Max Morden, a 50-something man whose wife has just died. In the year following her death, he decides to move back to a town where he used to go on holiday, when he was a little boy. And something obviously happened way back then, in his childhood, that was definitive. Something having to do with the Grace family, who also were there on summer vacation - mother father, kids ... I am not sure yet what happened but I have a feeling it wasn't good. So Max, dealing with the loneliness in the wake of becoming a widow, is now regressing, reverting ... although Banville makes the point that Max has always had those tendencies ... he has always looked for comfort, warmth, coziness ... and so going back to childhood is a natural escape - even if horrible things happened back there.

It's interesting. Blood Meridian made such an impact (post about it here, here and here). It made an enormous crater in my brain, and the language of that book still buzzes through me, in its awful bloody omniscence, and mythic enormity.

But here, in The Sea, we are in more traditional territory. Wonderfully written, acute, sensitive, perceptive - he's SUCH a good writer ... but I have had to adjust to the fact that I am now in the world of minutia, of objects, of what things smell like, look like, sensory moments that transport you back ... the typical business of writers. Now a bad writer will make such moments (seeing something that reminds you of something else) insufferable. Banville is a master. He is nothing less than absolutely specific. And he is skirting on the edges of some big stuff here: mortality, death, loss ... but also, you can feel that the book will also be about loss of innocence. Something was lost, back there in his childhood ... and the 50 something years in between have been just him marking time. Now that's an eerie thought, one that has kept me up at night in my white-knuckle moments. But I have had to let Blood Meridian go in order to get into this book. It makes me realize, again, just how dominant Cormac McCarthy really is, just how much he has taken over the landscape. Extraordinary.

Max has a daughter, Claire. There is something about how Banville writes about her that really touches me. Also, in very few words, he sketches an entire life ... seen through the eyes of her father, of course (the book is first-person). I "get" Claire. Banville is so so good in this arena. Listen:

Claire, my daughter, has written to ask how I am faring. Not well, I regret to say, bright Clarinda, not well at all. She does not telephone because I have warned her I will take no calls, even from her. Not that there are any calls, since I told no one save her where I was going. What age is she now, twenty-something, I am not sure. She is very bright, quite the blue-stocking. Not beautiful, however, I admitted that to myself long ago. I cannot pretend this is not a disappointment, for I had hoped that she would be another Anna. She is too tall and stark, her rusty hair is coarse and untameable and stands out around her freckled face in an unbecoming manner, and when she smiles she shows her upper gums, glistening and whitely pink. With those spindly legs and big bum, that hair, the long neck especially - that is something at least she has of her mother - she always makes me think, shamefacedly, of Tenniel's drawing of Alice when she has taken a nibble from the magic mushroom. Yet she is brave and makes the best of herself and of the world. She has the rueful, grimly humorous, clomping way to her that is common to so many ungainly girls. If she were to arrive here now she would come sweeping in and plump herself down on my sofa and thrust her clasped hands so far down between her knees the knuckles would almost touch the floor, and purse her lips and inflate her cheeks and say Poh! and launch into a litany of the comic mishaps she has suffered since last we saw each other. Dear Claire, my sweet girl.

That is heartbreakingly good. It's difficult, to hear a father talk about his daughter like that, but Banville is nothing if not unafraid to say difficult things.

And then of course there is the opening paragraph of the book, which is a stunner:

They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under a milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of heights, the small waves creeping over parched sand that for years had known no wetting save for rain and lapping the very bases of the dunes. The rusted hulk of the freighter that had run aground at the far end of the bay longer ago than any of us could remember must have thought it was being granted a relaunch. I would not swim again, after that day. The seabirds mewled and swooped, unnerved, it seemed, by the spectacle of that vast bowl of water bulging like a blister, lead-blue and malignantly agleam. They looked unnaturally white, that day, those birds. The waves were depositing a fringe of soiled yellow foam along the waterline. No sail marred the high horizon. I would not swim, no, not ever again.

Sometimes has just walked over my grave. Someone.

Blood Meridian - The Judge

I finished Blood Meridian last night. My only regret is that someone wasn't there to hold me when it was all over.

I didn't know what to do with myself. I couldn't just sit there, living in the implications of the book, all by myself. So I had a glass of wine and watched Blue Crush, which is how I normally deal with existential anxiety, gloomy ruminations of mortality, and contemplations of the nature of evil.

Ahhhhh .. I feel better, and more innocent, just looking at that!

The last 50 pages of Blood Meridian read like a bat out of hell. The rest of the book, with its startling sudden rushes of violence, and its long long sections of journeying, of weather, of food and water, and horses hooves, and campfires, and mirages ... works like a hypnotic drug. It's like you are also lulled into the rhythm of the journey, the jostling mules, the constant hunger and thirst ... and then when violence comes, it feels out of nowhere, and you no longer have the reserves to deal with it, or be ready for it - but that doesn't matter - because here it comes anyway ... and after the slaughter, everything slows down again, and the men move on. The individuality of the participants is not the main focus. For the most part (with notable exceptions), they all blend together. The book starts with following in the footsteps of "the kid", a 16 year old sharpshooter who joins up with the mission ... but soon "the kid" falls away. The narration is more of a Biblical ominiscence - than a personal journey. But, by the end, we realize that all of that omniscence has just been a respite. A very long bloody genocidal respite. And we realize, by the end, that it is the Kid who has been leading us all along. It is the kid who is the key to the entire story. He seems indistinct for most of it. Other characters (like Jackson, the black man - and the expriest, and Glanton - and, of course, the Judge) have more vibrancy and specificity. We remember them. We forget that it is through the kid's eyes we are seeing them.

The similarity to Moby Dick here is intense. Ishmael begins that book, openly first-person - "Call me Ishmael." (Which is fascinating in and of itself. It's a simple sentence, but it contains worlds of mystery. Call you Ishmael? Is that not your real name?) It is his journey, his thoughts and feelings and responses that get us into that story. We don't just meet Queequeg, we meet Ishmael's version of Queequeg ... Ishmael's impression of him. We don't see anything that Ishmael doesn't see (at first). But then, once on the ship, once the land recedes - all of that changes. Ishmael fades into the background, and Captain Ahab emerges. Captain Ahab rarely comes on deck. He's not a Jack Aubrey type of Captain, omnipresent, working alongside his men. No. Captain Ahab stays in his cabin, brooding over his revenge. So there is no way that Ishmael would know about Ahab's private moments - his nighttime walking on the deck ... and yet we hear about it anyway, as though we are privy to the inner workings of Ahab's mind. Ishmael has disappeared. He does reappear from time to time, and he wrenches the narration back into his voice ... but it's intermittent now. It's not "his" story.

We meet "the judge" in Blood Meridian very early on. The kid goes to a revival meeting, before he joins up with the mission. And suddenly this man busts into the tent and begins to harangue everyone who is there - that the preacher is not a real preacher, he's a con-man, a schister - wanted in 3 states, whatever ... and all hell breaks loose. It is "the judge". We don't realize how important he will be later, although we know that McCarthy is working on something with this character. He is described in detail. His big bald head, his lash-less eyes ... It's an attention-getting debut, to say the least.

The judge shows up later ... he always shows up. He remains a mystery, to some degree (in the same way that Captain Ahab remains a mystery - madness has gotten him. He has no personality - he is just a desire. He is just a need, a want).

If you haven't read the book and you plan on doing so, then stop reading now! The slow illumination of the judge's character, and who he is - is one of the great thrulines of the book ... and to know ahead of time what's going on with him, and the role he will play - would ruin the book for a newcomer. I can only speak for myself. All David said to me was, "The judge! Holy shit!!" And so as I read the book, as I participated in the genocide, and followed the men westward ... my experience of the judge, and how I put him together (because Cormac McCarthy doesn't show his hand, not until the very end ... although we do get clues along the way) - was the main conduit of dread and hope that, for me, makes up Blood Meridian. And, in the end, it is my OWN response that I want to talk about here ... because I think it's interesting. It's not just the book - it's what the book did to me that I really want to discuss right now. So the following is only for those who have read the book.

The judge. He seems to have a moral center. His first entrance into the book speaks to a sense of honesty and outrage that I latched onto. He recognizes hypocrisy in the preacher and he is unafraid to put a stop to it. In such a brutal amoral world, such honesty is refreshing. You can be lulled into a sense of complacency. You feel that perhaps the judge will protect the innocent. Ha. That is only my own failure of imagination and privileged 21st century life that would make me think such a thing. That's what I mean when I say it is my own response that most interests me at this moment. I don't think of myself as a shallow person or as a person who needs happy endings. And I obviously was not "looking for" a happy ending in Blood Meridian. But I did find myself looking for hope. For meaning. For reassurance that human beings didn't just deserve to be wiped off the face of the planet. There's got to be SOMEONE who "gets it" - who sees the insanity of what is going on ... and has the foresight to say, "We should stop this." And so I looked to the judge. Slowly, I began to realize my grave error. I had put my trust in this man. And he is a monster. But not an anomaly. It's not like he's so much badder than anyone else, or more violent, or more bloodthirsty ... why he is truly a monster is that he intellectually "gets it" ... He knows what he is doing, he knows what the human race is doing, and he understands the reasons why. He seems, at first, like a reasonable man - educated, curious, interested in ritual and narrative - telling stories around the campfire. Quite different from the toothless illiterate drunken bunch of rapists who make up the rest of the group. And so I gravitated towards the judge. From the first moment. Anyone who busts up a phony preacher's con-game is okay by me. It was only later that I slowly realized how wrong I was. How I had lulled myself into a state of complacency - even in the midst of the horror. I was sure that someone, somewhere, knew that what was happening was terrible and wrong. I assumed it was the judge.

It is not until the last 50 pages of the book that you realize: No. It was the kid.

And the judge saw that in the kid. Even though we, the reader, are not privy to it. The judge saw the kid's soul - he didn't even need to have an overt action of rebellion on the part of the kid ... he saw into the kid's soul, and saw something there that must be killed.

And you gotta wonder: he has a brief encounter with "the kid" at the revival meeting. Was it "the kid" driving the judge along all along? McCarthy doesn't say, at least not right away. Did the judge sense something in the kid that made him track him down, follow his footsteps ... keep the kid always in his sights? The thought is chilling, when you think of the end of the book. But the judge is like Captain Ahab. In his mind exists worlds of connections and recognitions ... he forgets nothing. He puts things together in his mind into a grand and terrible conspiracy of connections. You realize, at the end of the book, that the judge sensed a "clemency" in the kid (and there is nothing in the book that overtly suggests this - this is McCarthy's genius. The kid doesn't refuse to shoot someone, he doesn't turn down a mission, he has receded into the group - they act as one ...) But the judge, as has been established, has better eyes than anybody else. He looks at you, and he sees. He sees your soul in all its weakness and frailty. He knows his way "in" - with everyone he meets. That is a great power. I have had acting teachers and mentors who have such a power of seeing - only they use it for good, and for help. The judge? He is on another plane. In a way, he is the greatest source of truth in the book, and that is why he is so terrifying. McCarthy doesn't let us off the hook. Not for one second does he let us off the hook. You know why? Because that would be a lie. The judge knows it's a lie. He knows that man is a monster. And that killing is what he does.

BUT. The character of the judge is revealed slowly, inevitably, over hundreds of pages. At first we just see what he does. We see him taking out a sketchbook and doing little drawings of the bugs and small animals and flowers and grass that he sees. He appears to be a curious man. Someone who looks at the remnants of the ancient Indian culture all around them and has some curiosity about it. Great cities were once on the plain, inhabited by sophisticated people ... all gone now. The rest of the men in the company have no interest in any of that. They are mercenaries. They are in this for the money. They are beyond the pale of regular society, and they know that. What they are good for is killing. They don't look around at the world and find beauty in it. But the judge seems to. He sits at the campfire at night, and expansively tells stories - parables ... and discussions ensue. The judge is self-contained. He does not grapple for position. He doesn't need to. Even in his singularity, he is the most alpha male of the group. And everyone defers. He's not the most macho. Glanton, their commander, is that. And he has killed so much that he has gone mad. The judge has killed, too. But he has not gone mad. And why not? How can someone experience what those men experienced and come out unscathed? Well, that is not possible. McCarthy shows us that again and again - it almost becomes monotonous. The riders move into a town, and their bodies are draped in necklaces of scalps and human ears ... and they take over the town, like the bloodied savages that they are. They shoot up the place, they rape young girls, they shoot dogs because they bark wrong ... Look, these men have been living in the wilderness for months on end, massacring whatever is in their way. How are they then supposed to put on a tie and go to a governor's dinner and dance a minuet with a pretty little lady with curls down the side of her head? They have X-ed themselves from the world. They have been paid by the government, yes ... so they are legitimate ... but they do not fit anymore in civilization. The kid knows this. His journey at the end of the book shows us that clearly. I was so moved by the section near the end where he sits, no longer a teenager - in his late 20s - watching a herd of sheep being jostled by on the plain. And some of the young cowboy types comes up to talk to him. The time of genocide is already passing. The Kid wears his necklace of human ears, and the young cowboys ask him questions about it - and you already feel the savagery of that world is passing. The kid is beyond the pale. He knows it.

And he also knows ... that he is just biding his time. Until the judge appears again. Because now he knows that of course the judge will find him. There is unfinished business, and with someone like the judge - that cannot stand. Captain Ahab can't say to himself, "Ah, whatever ... the white whale took my leg ... it sucks ... but let me move on with my life." No. Revenge becomes his over-arching purpose. He has no other inner life. It all circles around this one vortex. There are those people who cannot allow "unfinished business" to stand. Stalin comes to mind. Stalin had, like the judge has, two qualities - when put together are the most dangerous of all: patience, and ruthlessness. Most dictators only have the ruthlessness. They are impatient, and their impatience brings about their downfall. Stalin was a slow-moving rather lazy man, who was able to tolerate long long periods of inaction, of nothing much happening, of him being on the sidelines. The point for him was not to take credit for things (which is what most dictators want - which leads to their impulsiveness - their grabbing for too much too soon) ... Stalin just wanted to be the last man standing. And so he was. He stands to this day. Look at Central Asia and the craziness that exists. That's Stalin's handiwork. But he moved stealthily, slowly - he set up grandiose complex structures of plausible deniability ... he was the invisible puppeteer. And he could tolerate silence, stillness, and waiting. Patience + ruthlessness? Look out.

The judge is finally revealed, in all his horrifying glory, as the most ruthless and the most patient. And he has "seen" the kid. And the kid knows he has been seen. And so the 10, 15 years that pass ... after the judge moves out of his life ... seem unreal. The kid knows he's just waiting. Waiting for the judge to show up again. Because it is an inevitability. Stalin was able to wait sometimes 10 years to exact his revenge. This is unheard of in a dictator. But Stalin was able to do it. And there is a deep eternal mystery at the heart of such a creature.

Because the judge seems to have more recognizable humanity than the other fellows in the group ... I found myself hoping. Maybe he's just interested in bugs and flowers! Maybe he sees himself as a chronicler. He knows he is living in extraordinary times and he wants to capture it. I lulled myself into thinking - perhaps he's one of those "what a work of art is man" types ... and who knows why he would choose to be a killer - but money does strange things to us all. Maybe he needs the money. But there he is, sketching the cave drawings they come upon - sometimes prying a piece of rock off of the cliff wall - so that he can have the drawing. He presses flowers in the pages of his journal. He sits off to the side of the group, sitting on a rock, sketching. Who is he? Why is he here? Is he just amazed at all he is seeing? The thunder, the desert, the constellations? He has traveled farther than most men who lived at his time. He has seen a lot.

But then comes the moment of reveal.

To me, it's one of the most frightening moments of the book. Even with all the slaughter, and blood, and horror. THIS scares me the most. It scares me not just because it's a scary sentiment, and if you ever met someone in real life who harbors such feelings, your best bet would be to run in the other direction as quickly as possible. It also scares me because I realized how much I had been looking to the judge for answers. He seemed like he knew something. He seemed like he had held on to some essence in the midst of all of that. He was nobody's fool. He saw the preacher's hypocrisy and called it out. I liked that in him. I had hopes. I had hopes for the judge. And then comes this:

He pressed the leaves of trees and plants into his book and he stalked tiptoe the mountain butterflies with his shirt outheld in both hands, speaking to them in a low whisper, no curious study himself. Toadvine sat watching him as he made his notations in the ledger, holding the book toward the fire for the light, and he asked him what was his purpose in all this.

The judge's quill ceased its scratching. He looked at Toadvine. Then he continued to write again.

Toadvine spat into the fire.

The judge wrote on and then he folded the ledger shut and laid it to one side and pressed his hands together and passed them down over his nose and mouth and placed them palm down on his knees.

Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.

What's a suzerain?

A keeper. A keeper or overlord.

Why not say keeper then?

Because he is a special kind of keeper. A suzerain rules even where there are other rulers. His authority countermands local judgements.

Toadvine spat.

The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.

Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can aquaint himself with everything on this earth, he said.

The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

I don't see what that has to do with catchin birds.

The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos.

That would be a hell of a zoo.

The judge smiled. Yes, he said. Even so.

And so. He is revealed. For the first time. On page 198.

The veil was ripped from my eyes, and I realized I had been putting my hope in a moral monster (but not a rare monster ... no, no ... it's just that he is conscious of what he is doing. Very few people on this earth are conscious of what they are doing. But he is.) I had been hoping he was a true herbalist (I know, I'm so naive) - an amateur scientist - a man whose curiosity about the natural earth contradicted and also informed his pursuit of the Indians. Yes, he was paid to kill as many as possible. But oh, what a grand people they once were ... No. That's not what is going on with him at all. Anything that exists without his knowledge exists without his consent.

And so he looks at the kid. And he sees something there that exists without his consent.

He will "capture" that thing - and smush it between the pages of his sketchbook, if it is the last thing he does.

In the final standoff between the judge and the kid, in the sanddunes, the judge says:

There's a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know? You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen.

The judge's devotion to his actions are so much more intense than those of the mercenaries, who are in it for the money, or who are so war-crazed that war is all they can do. The judge is beyond everyone - we realize that now.

Only too late. I had gotten caught up in the judge - I had invested in him, and had been duped by him ... and found myself trying, desperately, to extricate myself for the remaining 200 pages of the book. No, no, no, get away from me ... you monster ... you scare me! But he already had trapped me. I was like the kid. I had harbored some corner of clemency and the judge could see me too.

The judge says, near the very end of the book, when he finally meets up with the kid again:

One could well argue that there are not categories of no ceremony but only ceremonies of greater or lesser degree and deferring to this argument we will say that this is a ceremony of a certain magnitude perhaps more commonly called a ritual. A ritual includes the letting of blood. Rituals which fail in this requirement are but mock rituals. Here every man knows the false at once. Never doubt it. That feeling in the breast the evokes a child's memory of loneliness such as when the others have gone and only the game is left with its solitary participant. A solitary game, without opponent. Where only the rules are at hazard. Don't look away. We are not speaking in mysteries. You of all men are no stranger to that feeling, the emptiness and the despair. It is that which we take arms against, is it not? Is not blood the tempering agent in the mortar which bonds? The judge leaned closer. What do you think death is, man? Of whom do we speak when we speak of a man who was and is not? Are these blind riddles or are they not some part of every man's jurisdiction? What is death if not an agency? And whom does he intend toward?

Reading the last chapter of the book made me feel an increasing sense of entrapment. My rationality kept wanting to intervene, to say, "Judge, look ... just chill ... " and wanting to tell the kid, "Either run for your life, or shoot the motherfucker."

But McCarthy is getting at something deeper here, obviously. And my response, my yearning for things to make sense in the midst of chaos, is part of it - a huge part of it. The Judge would understand that completely. He would see it.

The judge says:

That man there. See him. That man hatless. You know his opinion of the world. You can read it in his face, in his stance. Yet his complaint that a man's life is no bargain masks the actual case with him. Which is that men will not do as he wishes them to. Have never done, never will do. That's the way of things with him, and his life is so balked about by difficulty and become so altered of its intended architecture that he is little more than a walking hovel hardly fit to house the human spirit at all. Can he say, such a man, that there is no malign thing set against him? That there is no power and no force and no cause? What manner of heretic could doubt agency and claimant alike? Can he believe that the wreckage of his existence is unentailed? No liens, no creditors? That gods of vengeance and of compassion alike lie sleeping in their crypt and whether our cries are for an accounting or for the destruction of the ledgers altogether they must evoke only the same silence and that it is this silence which will prevail?

Mr. McCarthy, I bow before you.

The final exchange between the judge and the kid is chilling. As I read it, I felt I was encountering a great and awful truth. I wanted to hide from it, and talk it away, and maybe argue with it a bit. Instead, it just sat there with me. And it's sitting here with me still.

I tell you this. As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior's right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be?

You ain't nothin.

You speak truer than you know. But I will tell you. Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance.

Even a dumb animal can dance.

The judge set the bottle on the bar. Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps. Bears that dance, bears that dont.

I will never forget the judge. I wish I could, but I can't. No amount of watching Blue Crush will erase him from my memory.

It's going to take me some time to shake off Blood Meridian.

The writing of "Blood Meridian":

It speaks for itself. But Jesusmaryandjoseph, I don't even know how to process it. It comes so quickly at you, the reader ... and you have to either put the book down and just think HARD about it (which I have been doing periodically) - or just keep going, letting it wash over you, through you ... or, also - go back and re-read sentences, twice, three times ... questioning: "Okay, is that as profound as it first seems?" And yes. It IS as profound. But it's almost disorienting to read. The prose reflects the disorienting nature of the landscape - the endlessness of the plain, the lack of verticals altogether, the flatness, the sameness of it all ... the shimmering mirages ... I mean, how does a man know who he is without context, without surroundings? We know who we are by association. That's one of the reasons why, for me, the images in 2001 Space Odyssey - or an astronaut unmoored from the ship, floating off into the void - are so nightmarish. Nothing to hold onto, nothing, there is no ground, there is no air ... You are still alive, of course ... but who are you, with no surrounding context? No grips? No hooks? The men in Blood Meridian are in a similar situation. The brutality of the landscape is relentless. One mess-up and you will die. Not to mention the genocidal mission they're all on. The judge is emerging. I don't even want to talk about him yet. I'm not sure what to say. He's unbelievably compelling.

The expriest turned and looked at the kid. And that was the judge the first ever I saw him. Aye. He's a thing to study.

The kid looked at Tobin. What's he a judge of? he said.

What's he a judge of?

What's he a judge of.

Tobin glanced off across the fire. Ah lad, he said. Hush now. The man will hear ye. He's ears like a fox.

What's he a judge of?

Who knew that such a simple sentence could send such a chill down my spine.

Like I said earlier, I don't know how to talk about McCarthy's writing here. It is so majestic, so profound ... Speaking of John Banville, he reviewed the book for The Independent and is quoted on the back cover: "The book reads like a conflation of the Inferno, the Iliad, and Moby Dick ... an extraordinary breathtaking achievement." I think that's about right. I know I find it hard to talk in any rational way about Moby Dick (although I gave it my best shot here)- it is so ITSELF, it is so singular ... it is hard to even "get in there" with the book, and try to pick it apart to look at its mechanisms. Blood Meridian has that almost forbidding quality. Pick it apart at your peril.

Here are some excerpts that show what I mean:

Page 65

They descended the mountain, going down over the rocks with their hands outheld before them and their shadows contorted on the broken terrain like creatures seeking their own forms.

Page 75:

All lightly shimmering in the heat, these lifeforms, like wonders much reduced. Rough likenesses thrown up at hearsay after the things themselves had faded in men's minds.

Page 86:

The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning.

Page 88:

They did not noon nor did they siesta and the cotton eye of the moon squatted at broad day in the throat of the mountains to the east and they were still riding when it overtook them at its midnight meridian sketching on the plain below a blue cameo of such dread pilgrims clanking north.

"the throat of the mountains"??? Can't you just SEE that? It is perfection. A bafflingly perfect image.

Page 96:

Someone snatched the old woman's blindfold from her and she and the juggler were clouted away and when the company turned in to sleep and the low fire was roaring in the blast like a thing alive these four yet crouched at the edge of the firelight among their strange chattels and watched how the ragged flames fled down the wind as if sucked by some maelstrom out there in the void, some vortex in that waste apposite to which man's transit and his reckonings alike lay abrogate. As if beyond will or fate he and his beasts and his trappings moved both in card and in substance under consignment to some third and other destiny.

Page 105:

The sun to the west lay in a holocaust where there rose a steady column of small desert bats and to the north along the trembling perimeter of the world dust was blowing down the void like the smoke of distant armies. The crumpled butcherpaper mountains lay in sharp shadowfold under the long blue dusk and in the middle distance the glazed bed of a dry lake lay shimmering like the mare imbrium and herds of deer were moving north in the last of the twilight, harried over the plain by wolves who were themselves the color of the desert floor.

"crumpled butcherpaper mountains". Wow.

Page 106:

Here beyond men's judgements all covenants were brittle.

And then this spectacular bit of imagery - I couldn't believe it AS I was reading it:

By the time the animals were secured and they had thrown themselves on the ground under the creosote bushes with their weapons readied the riders were beginning to appear far out on the lake bed, a thin frieze of mounted archers that trembled and veered in the rising heat. They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and slurred together and separated again and they augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear above them in the dawn-broached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks riding huge and inverted and the horses' legs incredibly elongate trampling down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwarriors pendant from their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren pan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below.

Page 119:

At dusk they halted and built a fire and roasted the deer. The night was much enclosed about them and there were no stars. To the north they could see other fires that burned red and sullen along the invisible ridges. They ate and moved on, leaving the fire on the ground behind them, and as they rode up into the mountains this fire seemed to become altered of its location, now here, now there, drawing away, or shifting unaccountably along the flank of their movement. Like some ignis fatuus belated upon the road behind them which all could see and of which none spoke. For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.

Un-real. That writing is UNREAL.

Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy

I'm not even 100 pages in to Blood Meridian and I already feel backed up with information, impulse, response ... there's so much going on, and the writing is so off the charts ... that I find myself feeling almost anxious. It's like I want to slow it all down, so I can savor it ... but that's not possible. I must just keep going. And not try to hang onto this experience, or prolong it, but let it go ... as it is happening. The book itself is brutal, one of the most brutal I have ever read. It's casually brutal. This is not a world that is fair, or just, or clear. When something terrible happens, there is no preparation. Cormac McCarthy does not ease you into the horror. Because that's not how it goes sometimes. Horror begins, and leaves you - the participant - in a frenzied state of playing catch-up, trying to interpret, organize, make sense ... But life doesn't give you that time.

For some reason it makes me think of one of my favorite small moments in the movie True Romance. Patricia Arquette's character, Alabama, comes back to the motel room to find Jim Gandolfini, the murderer, waiting for her. The fight doesn't break out right away. Alabama knows she is going to be killed. Jim Gandolfini knows he will kill her, so he's relaxed. He chats with her, reminiscing about murders he has committed, in an almost calm fond manner, totally psychotic. She giggles, trying to stall for time. Finally, the fight breaks out. And when it comes, it is horrifying. Sweepingly so. She gives as good as she gets. She's just a girl in a jiggly bra and skintight leopard pants but she wants to live. She fights hard for her life. At one point, Gandolfini throws her into the tub and she crashes through the glass shower door. She falls into the tub, covered in broken glass, bloody - and with a roar he comes at her - and Arquette is so brilliant in this next moment - Instead of screaming, "No" or "Stop" ... she screams at him, "WAIT." Wait. (Clip here) Wait for me to get myself together so we can keep fighting. I'm too bloody, I'm all a mess, I can't see, my eye is swollen closed, I need a second to regroup ... just WAIT. She hopes for a fair fight. I so relate to her in that moment. It makes no sense. Why should he "wait" for you to get yourself together, clean yourself up, before attacking again? But of course she is on another plane, not a logical plane - but a truthful plane nonetheless. It is her life force, her determination to LIVE - even if it means killing him - that makes her scream, "WAIT!" Violence happens suddenly. A car crash comes with no warning. You are chatting, or listening to music - and suddenly you are flying off a bridge. There is no "wait" - and yet as humans, we want it to "wait", so we have a fighting chance. It's desperate. It makes total sense, despite its illogicality. And so Blood Meridian reminds me of that moment of Patricia Arquette, bloody and cut up in the shower, her nose broken, screaming, "WAIT" up at her brutal killer.

At times I feel brutalized reading Blood Meridian, and feel frightened that I wasn't given time to prepare. And I scream "Wait" up at Cormac McCarthy, but by then it's too late. The attack has already begun. And I just have to endure it, the best I can. But that's the way life is sometimes. The moments of kindness (like the cavalry guys giving the kid a blanket, and some food) are few and far between - and end up making even less sense than the moments of violence. Kindness doesn't add up. It's nice, sure ... but it has very little resonance. Not up against the violence of that world - its people and the landscape. So there's that level of reader experience ... which actually works on two separate planes: the writing is so fucking good that I am having a hard time even processing it. It's not clever or verbose or ... it doesn't even feel literary, although it is indeed literature, of the highest order. The words on the page thrum through me, like a drum heard in the distance. I read Michael Chabon and think, My God, I wish I could use words like that!! Cormac McCarthy doesn't bring up that response in me ... it's something else entirely. It's like being confronted with something grand and eternal and terrible ... and having to somehow process it, or try to understand it ... before just giving up, surrendering to the mystery. Throwing up your hands and saying, "What the hell. I have no idea how to process this." It's language that doesn't even feel written to me.

And so - in a similar way that the characters are confronted, on a visceral level, by the landscape - the desert, the mountains, the lack of life anywhere - the way it makes them feel small, and yet also highly visible - frighteningly visible - I am confronted by the book. I have no words for it, I can only speak in metaphors about it. Plot seems secondary, although I am already aware of events moving into place with a terrible inevitability. I am only 100 pages in. It leaves me wanting to cry out, "Wait". I had a similar sensation when reading The Road (excerpt here). I do not know how he does what he does, and I find it difficult to even talk about, or try to describe. It is an experience. It comes through the senses - it's an overwhelmingly sensory experience - which is why I sometimes find it hard to process any of it. Sensory overload. I can feel that major themes are coming up. That this book is Biblical in its scope and intent. But meanwhile, I am blinded by the sun, and I can feel the parched dehydration, and I am dazzled by the endless plain in front of me. Hard to focus. Hard to hone in on what is going on. Fantastic. And then there's the moments of violence which surge forward, take over with no warning, and then dissolve - as we all move on. The Comanche attack is one of those moments ... and you realize that McCarthy has been building up to it in the chapter before, with the endless trek through the lifeless plain ... the landscape itself takes on a malevolent aspect. Like it is out to get them. Or like it is trying to communicate something to them ... but they don't know how to listen. All they know is that everyone has a really bad feeling. So when the Comanches appear, as one, out of the dust - too late to flee, too late to mount an attack - you feel a dread, overwhelming ... and then before you have a chance to prepare, you're in the thick of it. And it feels like McCarthy writes the attack in one continuous sentence - although I went back and re-read it, and no ... there are many sentences. It's written in a normal grammatically correct way, with commas and periods. But it feels like one unbroken flow of terror, events hurtling forward at breakneck speed, horrors witnessed and endured, horrors upon horrors. You scream "Wait" ... but no one hears. Or if they do, they certainly don't give a fuck that you need more time to prepare for it.

Here's an excerpt. It's lengthy. It's from the section before the Comanche attack, that I mentioned above. I read it in probably 5 minutes my first time through - and I could feel the depth of it, the bottomless pit of it, I could feel the sheer mastery of this writing - almost invisible in its skill - it feels like a first-hand experience, but my God, it is not - it is writing. And as I read it, I found myself thinking - "Okay. Gonna need to re-read this. I can't take it all in right now." Had to just keep moving, keep going, don't stop, don't look back ... let it wash through, over, under ... don't interpret. Because interpretation is laughable in such a universe as the one McCarthy describes.

EXCERPT FROM Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy:

In two days they began to come upon bones and cast-off apparel. They saw halfburied skeletons of mules with the bones so white and polished they seemed incandescent even in that blazing heat and they saw panniers and packsaddles and the bones of men and they saw a mule entire, the dried and blackened carcass hard as iron. They rode on. The white noon saw them through the waste like a ghost army, so pale they were with dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board. The wolves loped paler yet and grouped and skittered and lifted their lean snouts on the air. At night the horses were fed by hand from sacks of meal and watered from buckets. There was no more sickness. The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night. They moved on and the iron of the wagon-tired grew polished bright as chrome in the pumice. To the south the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake and there were no wolves now.

They took to riding by night, silent jornadas save for the trundling of the wagons and the wheeze of the animals. Under the moonlight a strange party of elders with the white dust thick on their moustaches and their eyebrows. They moved on and the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack mountains. They came to know the nightskies well. Western eyes that read more geometric constructions than those names given by the ancients. Tethered to the polestar they rode the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite. The sand lay blue in the moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes and the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a myriad of eyes winking across the desert floor. They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.

All night the wind blew and the fine dust set their teeth on edge. Sand in everything, grit in all they ate. In the morning a urinecolored sun rose blearily through panes of dust on a dim world and without feature. The animals were failing. They halted and made a dry camp without wood or water and the wretched ponies huddled and whimpered like dogs.

That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses' trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlighning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunder-heads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream.

HMS Surprise

I'm almost done with the third novel in the Aubrey-Maturin series - haven't been writing much about my journey with the series -but I will. I've just been busy surviving, and recuperating from my week in Chicago. It's not been an easy adjustment.

I finished Post Captain last Saturday, on my almost 10-hour wait to get onto a flight - ANY flight - at O'Hare. Thank goodness I had another book to start right away - Chrstine Falls by Benjamin Black (aka John Banville) - little did I know that my wait at the airport would be so long that I finished Christine Falls - a dense novel, over 300 pages long - that day! I still hadn't boarded the plane when I finished Christine Falls! Fantastic book, by the way. I'll write about it sometime. Dublin, 1950s. Magdalen laundries. Morgues. Intrigue. Catholic Church. Awesome characters. A real noir. I loved it.

When I got home, I decided to pick up HMS Surprise - because I'm into the series now, I have to keep going! They are the best possible kinds of books I could read at this point in my life. Escape. But not drivel. Deep. But not off-puttingly so. Intellectually arduous - they make me think, I do not find the books "easy" - I have to concentrate. This is good.

Anyway, my experience of the series made me think of the piece David Mamet wrote in The New York Times, an elegy for Patrick O'Brian when he died in 2000. I remember reading it back then - I think I read it in the actual newspaper, not the website - and it brought tears to my eyes, even though I had not read any Patrick O'Brian by that point. It was just a tribute - from one artist to another - and it really really moved me. I have never forgotten it. Just tracked it down - it is, thankfully, available online:

The Humble Genre Novel, Sometimes Full Of Genius, by David Mamet

Book questions!

I got this from Ted!

Which book do you irrationally cringe away from reading, despite seeing only positive reviews?

Strangely enough, I cringed from reading Harry Potter. Chalk it up to my contrarian nature. If there is a unanimous clarion call about anything, I usually get suspicious ... and many times it is warranted. Tuesdays with Morrie is the most obvious and infuriating example. But I finally caved, and read Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone (a couple years after it came out) and immediately went out and bought the rest of the series, and read it all the way thru. Loved it.

Oh, and I still haven't read any of Zadie Smith's books, despite the universally awesome reviews. I have been told repeatedly by literally everyone on the planet that I HAVE to read them, and I suppose I will - but on my own good time, thankyouverymuch. Not because there was a 2 page spread in every newspaper from here to Timbuktu, featuring her gorgeous mug. I know I'm being unfair, but that's the nature of the question, which uses the word "irrational".

And weirdly (and this one gives me a shiver, at the thought of not reading it) - everyone and their mother, including Jesus Christ our Lord, begged me to read The Shipping News when it first came out. My mom and dad would barely ask me, "How are you?" on our weekly phone calls (I was living in Chicago at the time) - before demanding feverishly, "Have you read The Shipping News yet???" They were not the only ones. People who knew me seemed to have a vested interest in me reading that book. So I, contrarian, refused. It got to be almost comedic when Great Lost Love told me the book he had read on his vacation: The Shipping News. We were in a dingy hallway in the basement of some club, and he couldn't stop talking about the book. "Have you read it?" I was already annoyed. "No," I said, flatly. And by this point, we were, frankly, telepathic, so we said the following two sentences at the same time. I said, mockingly, "I know! I have to read it!!!" as he said, "You have to read it!!" That shut him up a bit, he got nervous, and then said awkwardly, "Well. You do. It really reminds me of you. But I won't tell you why. I sat on the beach in Florida thru my whole vacation reading that book, thinking of you." Well, now I'm REALLY not going to read it!! The saddest thing was - when everything fell apart between us - that was the first book I turned to. I needed to know ... why did he think of me when he read it? Would it somehow illuminate why this had gone so spectacularly wrong? Of course it didn't. And I cried the entire way thru the book. My copy still has crinkly pages (I am not exaggerating) from where my tears fell. It is now one of my favorite books ever written. A book that belongs to my HEART.

And I still don't know why it reminded him of me. By the time I read it, it was too late to ask.

If you could bring three characters to life for a social event (afternoon tea, a night of clubbing, perhaps a world cruise), who would they be and what would the event be?

There may be some problems with the following event, due to inviting three alpha males, but I will take my chances:

I would like to sit in a quiet pub with Nelson Denoon (from Mating), Claude Collier (from Lives of the Saints) and Sydney Carton (from Tale of Two Cities) and talk like maniacs - about history, sex, philosophy, politics ... Nelson and Sydney, I believe, would be awesome in this regard. Claude Collier probably couldn't care less - and would busy himself trying to feel me up under the table and feeding quarters into the jukebox. He would spill his drink in Carton's lap and apologize profusely for the rest of the night. He would smoke 2 packs of cigarettes. Nelson and Sydney would busy themselves with conversation, and I would participate FULLY ... yet still I would enjoy Claude trying to hold my hand under the table, or him nuzzling my neck as I make some important point about socialism to the other two.

And I would probably end up sleeping with all three. They;'re all so alpha, they wouldn't have a problem with that. Or maybe they would LATER, but they wouldn't have any passive-aggressive whiny-boy nonsense in the moment.

(Borrowing shamelessly from the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde): you are told you can’t die until you read the most boring novel on the planet. While this immortality is great for awhile, eventually you realise it’s past time to die. Which book would you expect to get you a nice grave?

I'd pick up any book by Nicholas Sparks, read one paragraph, and immediately keel over. Dead.

Come on, we’ve all been there. Which book have you pretended, or at least hinted, that you’ve read, when in fact you’ve been nowhere near it?

I was in an argument once, and yes, I was drunk, so? But I didn't just "hint" that I had read Das Kapital, I stated it FIRMLY. And I totally won the argument. Yes, flying under false colors, but who cares when you need to WIN?

As an addition to the last question, has there been a book that you really thought you had read, only to realise when you read a review about it/go to ‘reread’ it that you haven’t? Which book?

For 20 years, I knew I had read Moby Dick because I remember it being assigned for summer reading before my sophomore years. But nothing stuck. I re-read it in 2003, had remembered almost none of it - and now it's one of my favorite books of all time.

But that's not really the question. I actually can't think of a situation where I THOUGHT I had read a book when I actually hadn't. I keep copious notes on what I read, you know.

You’re interviewing for the post of Official Book Advisor to some VIP (who’s not a big reader). What’s the first book you’d recommend and why? (if you feel like you’d have to know the person, go ahead of personalise the VIP)
The World According to Garp. No question.

A good fairy comes and grants you one wish: you will have perfect reading comprehension in the foreign language of your choice. Which language do you go with?

This is very hard. My first choice is Russian, for many reasons. Many of my favorite books are by Russian authors, but I can only read them in translation.

But second choice would have to be Arabic. I learned a little bit of Arabic for a play I was involved in - I played Gertrude Bell - I took some of my lines to my local deli in midtown - run by guys from Lebanon - they knew me, they knew how I liked my coffee, and they liked me. I showed them my lines in Arabic - and they taught it to me. I put them on tape. It was brilliant. Morning rush-hour, everyone jostling to get their breakfast sandwich - and I have Ahmed in the back corner, having him read me my script, in Arabic, into my tape recorder. I love those guys! It's a very weird language, and has no relationship to anything even coming CLOSE to a "romance language" - and it's like you have to develop another muscle to even speak it ... but I loved it. There is great poetry in Arabic, and I would love to read many of their great works of literature in the original.

Third choice would be Farsi. I love Persian poetry dearly ... but again, I know I'm not getting the full effect reading it in translation. I went to a Persian poetry reading once at the Bowery Poetry Club - one of my favorite nights I've ever had in this fair city - and all of these people were leaping up and declaiming their favorite poems - BY HEART - in Farsi, and the responses of the crowd, the unanimous applause - sometimes the entire crowd (I was the only non-Iranian there - a bunch of my Iranian friends brought me) would start to chant out the words together. It reminded me of Bloomsday celebrations I've gone to where readings from Ulysses are done - and the last "paragraph" of Molly's monologue is known by heart by every Irishman/woman there - and they all start to shout it out, together.

A mischievious fairy comes and says that you must choose one book that you will reread one a year for the rest of your life (you can read other books as well). Which book would you pick?

Probably Hopeful Monsters, by Nicholas Mosley. I will never. EVER. get to the bottom of that book. God help me when I reach it in my daily book excerpt series. I don't even know what to say about that book.

I know that the book blogging community, and its various challenges, have pushed my reading borders. What’s one bookish thing you ‘discovered’ from book blogging (maybe a new genre, or author, or new appreciation for cover art-anything)?

In the last week, I have finally (FINALLY) picked up Shirley Jacksons We Have Always Lived In The Castle - thanks, mainly, to Annie at Superfast Reader. I had heard much about this before - but the only Jackson I have read is the one we all have read "The Lottery" - and I am not kidding: within one paragraph of We Have Always Lived In the Castle I experienced something which is quite familiar to me when I start to read something absolutely awesome: I start to get nervous. I spoke out loud (and I was on the bus): "Oh God. This is so good." It was Annie's numerous mentions of this book (and Jackson) which made me pick it up.

That good fairy is back for one final visit. Now, she’s granting you your dream library! Describe it. Is everything leatherbound? Is it full of first edition hardcovers? Pristine trade paperbacks? Perhaps a few favourite authors have inscribed their works? Go ahead-let your imagination run free.

First of all: the bookshelves are in the walls themselves. That is very important. It is ALREADY a library - just from the structure of the room. Not one I have had to make myself. And there is more than enough space for all my books. I have room to spare. It's not overly neat - I'm not into that - I like a bit of clutter: books piled up on tables, etc. It's cozy. There is a fireplace. There is an enormous upholstered chair, cozy and huge, where I can curl up, my feet under me. There is a huge wooden table - NOT a desk - but a table like you would find in a French country-house - or in a monastery - plain and wide and long - where I can spread out all my books, if I'm working on something. Nothing to impede me, no barriers to where I can go. Long heavy velvet curtains on the window. NO television. And the main thing is: the shelves go to the ceiling - I need a stepladder to reach the top ... and all of the shelves are dark wood, and are built into the walls. Books everywhere you look.

Consider yourselves tagged (but with absolutely no pressure):
Annie
Lisa
Marisa
Tracey
Ricki
Jonathan - maybe on one of your non-film blogs?? But again: no pressure.
Cara

"It was as if every one of us in the audience had been plugged into one another."

Excerpt from The ABCs of Love, by Sarah Salway. I read this novel in its entirety last night when I couldn't sleep - and just loved it. I picked it up because of Ted's post on her 2nd novel Tell Me Everything - which sparked my interest - I loved the writing. The ABCs of Love is written in snippets - and it's done alphabetically. We have "entries", like a dictionary or a thesaurus - multiple entries per letter of the alphabet - and over the entirety of the book, a story emerges. This might seem like a gimmick, and it is - to some degree - but her writing is so interesting and clear that I found myself swept away by it. I also laughed out loud at a couple of points - and that's always good, in my book. I'm eager to read her second novel now.

Here's an excerpt - from the "H" section of the book (oh, and after each entry she cross-references with other entries, like an index - and sometimes they are touching, other times hilarious - like the beginning of a relationship is cross-referenced with the entry titled "Endings", etc.)

Excerpt:

horror movies

The only horror movie I have ever enjoyed was one that I went to with Sally. When we first started earning money, we'd go up to London to spend the day shopping and sometimes fit in an early film. One day, I wanted to go and see a rerun of The Sound of Music in Leicester Square, but somehow Sally got the wrong tickets and we ended up in the cinema next door.

Sally wouldn't let me leave straightaway, although she promised I could if I really, really hated the film, but I'd have to go home on my own. She also said she'd hold my hand if I got scared. The heroine was a beautiful female photographer who saw death through her camera lens. Eventually, the murderer she watched came after her in real life.

Something funny happened in the cinema that night. It was as if every one of us in the audience had been plugged into one another. The film can't have been that scary, but we all screamed as one, clung to complete strangers, and at the end, when the murderer was climbing up the stairs to kill the photographer, we all started shouting at her to "Turn around and get the gun" at the top of our voices. It was exhilarating. When the film finally ended, all of us were laughing in our seats, none of us seemed to have the energy to move, and the cinema bars were full with people who wanted to talk about what had just happened.

Sally and I giggled for the whole of the train journey home, and when I woke up the next morning, I knew that something wonderful had happened. I'd been part of something. I felt a deep sense of anticlimax for a long time afterward.

See also Danger; God; Sculpture; Why?

Snippets from Master & Commander:

Master & Commander is so rich with psychological detail (not to mention shipping and warfare detail) that I kept a running list of phrases that I loved - I call them "jewels", in my head. There's a "jewel" on almost every page of Master & Commander which is why I whipped through it so quickly. I was surprised at how exciting the battle scenes actually were - very hard to make that stuff leap off the page, I think - at one point, two boats swoop out from behind another boat - where they were hidden - and their appearance made me gasp aloud in fright. Literally!! This is all kudos to Patrick O'Brian, because this stuff doesn't really interest me - in and of itself. It interests me historically, of course - as anyone who reads my blog should realize ... but to be in the thick of a fictional battle, with the sound of the sails whipping down, and the clatter of feet on deck, etc. etc. ... It is hard to make that come alive, and boy - does O'Brian do so!! But for me, the "jewels" were not just in the battle scenes, which have the feeling almost of an old painting come to life - they don't feel like a movie, they're grander than that. A painting on a wall of a ship at sea, a bazillion sails fluttering in the wind ... suddenly come to life, heaving up, heaving down, the sound of the orders being thrown about emanating from within the frame ... Love it. To me, the "jewels" come from the psychological. O'Brian's observations, first of all, about how different people operate. He's a psychiatrist of the highest order. But also - the long meandering conversations between James Dillon and Stephen Maturin - or Maturin and Aubrey ... where you get the distinct sensation of two different personalities ... talking about this, talking about that ... disagreements, humor ... God, I could read such conversations all day long. A feast for the mind and soul. Also, his observations on authority - and its potential to corrupt a man - seems to be a running theme. Jack Aubrey feels the isolation of his authority - knows it must be that way - but at times it is lonely. Maturin is more critical of authority - observes that it ruins men.

Anyway, here are random "jewels" I pulled from the book. I kept a running tally.

Page 36:

The tramontana had freshened and now it was blowing a two-reef topsail breeze, rattling the fronds of the palms; the sky was clear from rim to rim; a short, choppy sea was getting up outside the harbour, and now there was an edge to the hot air like salt or wine. He tapped his hat firmly on his head, filled his lungs and said aloud, 'Dear God, how good it is to be alive.'

Page 42:

'I have not eaten so well for many a day, nor' -- with a bow -- 'in such pleasant company, upon my word,' said Stephen Maturin. 'Might it not be that the difficulty arose from your own particular care - from your explaining in Spanish, in Castilian Spanish?'

'Why,' said Jack, filling their glasses and smiling through his wine at the sun, 'it seemed to me that in speaking to Spaniards, it was reasonable to use what Spanish I could muster.'

'You were forgetting, of course, that Catalan is the language they speak in these islands.'

'What is Catalan?'

'Why, the language of Catalonia - of the islands, of the whole of the Mediterranean coast down to Alicante and beyond. Or Barcelona. Of Lerida. All the richest parts of the peninsula.'

'You astonish me. I had no notion of it. Another language, sir? But I dare say it is much the same thing - a putain, as they say in France?'

'Oh no, nothing of the kind - not like at all. A far finer language. More learned, more literary. Much nearer the Latin. And by the by, I believe the word is patois, sir, if you will allow me.'

'Patois -- just so. Yet I swear the other is a word. I learnt it somewhere,' said Jack. 'But I must not play the scholar with you, sir, I find. Pray, is it very different to the ear, the unlearned ear?'

'As different as Italian and Portugese. Mutually incomprehensible - they sound entirelly unalike. The intonation of each is in an utterly different key. As unlike as Gluck and Mozart.'

Page 130:

'You know Lord Nelson, sir?'

'I had the honour of serving under him at the Nile,' said Jack, 'and of dining in his company twice.' His face broke into a smile at the recollection.

'May I beg you to tell me what kind of a man he is?'

'Oh, you would take to him directly, I am sure. He is very slight - frail - I could pick him up (I mean no disrespect) with one hand. But you know he is a very great man directly. There is something in philosophy called an electrical particle, is there not? A charged atom, if you follow me. He spoke to me on each occasion. The first time it was to say, "May I trouble you for the salt, sir?" -- I have always said it as close as I can to his way ever since - you may have noticed it. But the second time I was trying to make my neighbour, a soldier, understand our naval tactics - weather gage, breaking the line, and so on - and in a pause he leant over with such a smile and said, "Never mind manoeuvres, always go at them." I shall never forget it: never mind manoeuvres, always go at 'em. And at the same time dinner he was telling us all how someone had offered him a boat-cloak on a cold night and he had said no, he was quite warm - his zeal for his King and country kept him warm. It sounds absurd, as I tell it, does it not? And was it another man, any other man, you would cry out "oh, what pitiful stuff" and dismiss it as mere enthusiasm, but with him you feel your bosom glow, and - now what in the devil's name is it, Mr Richards? Come in or not, there's a good fellow. Don't stand in the door like a God-damned Lenten cock.'

Page 167:

Dinner was rather a stiff, formal entertainment to begin with, although it was lit by a splendid Byzantine silver hanging lamp, taken by Dillon out of a Turkish galley, and although it was lubricated by uncommonly good wine, for Dillon was well-to-do, even wealthy, by naval standards. Everyone was unnaturally well behaved: Jack was to give the tone, as he knew very well - it was expected of him, and it was his privilege. But this kind of deference, this attentive listening to every remark of his, required the words he uttered to be worth the attention they excited - a wearing state of affairs for a man accustomed to ordinary human conversation, with its perpetual interruption, contradiction and plain disregard. Here everything he said was right; and presently his spirits began to sink under the burden.

Page 169:

'Or take me,' said Jack. 'I am called captain, but really I am only a master and commander.'

'Or the place where the men sleep, just for'ard,' said the purser, pointing. 'Rightly speaking, and official, 'tis the gun-deck, though there's never a gun on it. We call it the spar-deck - though there's no spars, neither - but some say the gun-deck still, and call the right gun-deck the upper-deck. Or take this brig, which is no true brig at all, not with her square mainsail, but rather a sorts of snow, or a hermaphrodite.'

'No, no, my dear sir,' said James Dillon, 'never let a mere word grieve your heart. We have nominal captain's servants who are, in fact, midshipmen; we have nominal able seamen on our books who are scarcely breeched - they are a thousand miles away and still at school; we swear we have not shifted any backstays, when we shift them continually; and we take many other oaths that nobody believes - no, no, you may call yourself what you please, so long as you do your duty. The Navy speaks in symbols, and you may suit what meaning you choose to the words.'

Page 172:

Ditto weather: but the sun sank towards a livid, purple, tumescent cloud-bank piled deep on the western horizon, and it was clear to every seaman aboard that it was not going to remain ditto much longer. The seamen, sprawling abroad on the fo'c'sle and combing out their long hair or plaiting it up again for one another, kindly explained to the landmen that this long swell from the south and east, this strange sticky heat that came both from the sky and the glassy surface of the heaving sea, and this horribly threatening appearance of the sun, meant that there was to be a coming dissolution of all natural bonds, an apocalyptic upheaval, a right dirty night ahead.

Page 198:

'There are times when I am not altogether just,' said James, reaching for his glass. 'I am too touchy, I know; but sometimes, when you are surrounded with Proddies and you hear their silly underbred cant, you fly out. And since you cannot fly out in one direction, you fly out in another. It is a continual tension, as you ought to know, if anyone.'

Stephen looked at him very attentively, but said nothing.

'You knew I was a Catholic?' said James.

'No,' said Stephen. 'I was aware that some of your family were, of course; but as for you ... Do you not find it puts you in a difficult position?' he asked, hesitantly. 'With that oath ... the penal laws ...?'

'Not in the least,' said James. 'My mind is perfectly at ease, as far as that is concerned.'

'That is what you think, my poor friend,' said Stephen to himself, pouring out another glass to hide his expression.

Page 202 (Stephen writes in his diary):

It has often seemed to me that towards this period (in which we all three lie, more or less) men strike out their permanent characters; or have those characters struck iunto them. Merriment, roaring high spirits before this: then some chance concatenation, or some hidden predilection (or rather inherent bias) working through, and the man is in the road he cannot leave but must go on, making it deeper and deeper (a groove, or a channel), until he is lost in his mere character - persona - no longer human, but an accretion of qualities, belonging to this character. James Dillon was a delightful being. Now he is closing in. It is odd -= will I say heart-breaking? - how cheerfulness goes: gaiety of mind, natural free-springing joy. Authority is its great enemy - the assumption of authority. I know few men over fifty that seem to me entirely human: virtually none who has long exercised authority.

Page 257:

'No. What is commonly called discipline is quite strict with us. What I mean is something else - the intermediate terms, they might be called. A commander is obeyed by his officers because he is himself obeying; the thing is not in its essence personal, and so down. If he does not obey, the chain weakens. How grave I am, for all love. It was that poor unlucky soldier at Mahon I was thinking of brought all this morality into my mind. Do you not find it happens very often, that you are gay as Garrick at dinner and then by supper-time you wonder why God made the world?'

Page 276 (this might be my favorite jewel):

'Mr Babbington,' he said, suddenly stopping in his up and down. 'Take your hands out of your pockets. When did you last write home?'

Mr Babbington was at an age when almost any question evokes a guilty response, and this was, in fact a valid accusation. He reddened and said, 'I don't know, sir.'.

Page 278:

'That,' he said, a little greasy from bacon, 'that was a point that exercised my mind a good deal during your absence. Would my loblolly boy pay the men back in their own coin? Would they return to their persecution of him? How quickly could he come by a new identity?'

'Identity?' said Jack, comfortably pouring out more coffee. 'Is not identity something you are born with?'

'The identity I am thinking of is something that hovers between a man and the rest of the world: a mid-point between his view of himself and theirs of him - for each, of course, affects the other continually. A reciprocal fluxion, sir. There is nothing absolute about this identity of mine. Were you, you personally, to spend some days in Spain at present you would find yours change, you know, because of the general opinion there that you are a false harsh brutal murdering villain, an odious man.'

'I dare say they are vexed,' said Jack, smiling. 'And I dare say they call me Beelzebub. But that don't make me Beelzebub.'

'Does it not? Does it not? Ah?'

Page 284, Stephen's thought process again:

'However, I shall oblige him to take a black draught this evening - that at least I can do - and some comfortable mandragora; and in my diary I shall write "JD, required to play Iscariot either with his right hand or with his left, and hating the necessity (the absolute necessity), concentrates all this hatred upon poor JA, which is a remarkable instance of the human process; for, in fact, JD does not dislike JA at all - far from it.'

Page 286:

He would very much have liked to ask Stephen Maturin the reasons for this failure; he would very much have liked to talk to him on indifferent subjects and to have played a little music; but he knew that an invitation to the captain's cabin was very like an order, if only because the refusing of it was so extraordinary - that had been borne in upon him very strongly the other morning, when he had been so amazed by Dillon's refusal. Where there was no equality there was no companionship: when a man was obliged to say 'Yes, sir', his agreement was of no worth even if it happened to be true. He had known these things all his service life; they were perfectly evident; but he had never thought they would apply so fully, and to him.

Page 287:

... that dormouse, lovebed age that so clings to its warm hammock ...

(I love that, God I love that)

Page 306:

'The man whose name I forget, the money-man, was an eminently curious study,' said Stephen.

'Oh, him,' said Jack, with an utter want of interest. 'What do you expect, when a fellow sits thinking about money all day long? And they can never hold their wine, those sorts of people. Harte must be very much in his debt to have him in the house.'

'Oh, he was a dull ignorant superficial darting foolish prating creature in himself, to be sure, but I found him truly fascinating. The pure bourgeois in a state of social ferment. There was that typical costive, haemorrhoidal facies, the knock-knees, the drooping shoulders, the flat feet splayed out, the ill breath, the large staring eyes, the meek complacency; and, of course, you noticed that womanly insistence upon authority and beating once he was thoroughly drunk? I would wager that he is very nearly impotent: that would account for the woman's restless garrulity, her desire for predominance, absurdly combined with those girlish ways, and her thinning hair - she will be bald in a year or so.'

'It might be just as well if everybody were impotent,' said Jack sombrely. 'It would save a world of trouble.'

Page 310:

Days and nights of unbelievable purity. Nights when the steady Ionian breeze rounded the square mainsail - not a brace to be touched, watch relieving watch - and he and Jack on deck, sawing away, sawing away, lost in their music, until the falling dew untuned their strings. And days when the perfection of dawn was so great, the emptiness so entire, that men were almost afraid to speak.

Page 343:

The meal continued with considerations on the art of war, the relative merits of Mahon cheese and Cheshire, and the surprising depth of the Mediterranean only a short way off the land; and once again Stephen noticed the curious skill (the outcome, no doubt, of many years at sea and the tradition of generations of tight-packed mariners) with which even so gross a man as the purser helped to keep the conversation going, smoothing over the dislikes and tensions - with platitudes, quite often, but with flow enough to make the dinner not only easy, but even mildly enjoyable.

Page 367:

Yet within its confusion the Sophie's deck showed a beautiful pattern of movement - the powder passing up from the magazine and the shot, the gun-crews with their steady heave-crash-heave, a wounded man, a dead man carrying below, his place instantly taken without a word, every man intent, threading the dense smoke - no collisions, no jostling, almost no order at all.

Page 398:

He tucked the fiddle under his chin, tightening his mouth and raising his head as he did so: and the tightening of his mouth was enough to release a flood of emotion. His face reddened, his breath heaved deep, his eyes grew larger and, because of the extreme contraction of their pupils, bluer: his mouth tightened still further, and with it his right hand. Pupils contract symmetrically to a diameter of about a tenth part of an inch, noted Stephen on a corner of a page. There was a loud, decided crack, a melancholy confused twanging, and with a ludicrous expression of doubt and wonder and distress, Jack held out his violin, all dislocated and unnatural with its broken neck. 'It snapped,' he cried. 'It snapped.' He fitted the broken ends together with infinite care and held them in place. 'I would not have had it happen for the world,' he said in a low voice. 'I have known this fiddle, man and boy, since I was breeched.'

Page 423:

'I have been contemplating on emotion.'

'Emotion,' said Dr Ramis.

'Yes,' said Stephen. 'Emotion, and the expression of emotion. Now, in your fifth book, and in part of the sixth, you treat of emotion as it is shown by the cat, for example, the bull, the spider - I, too, have remarked the singular intermittent brilliance in the eyes of lycosida: have you ever detected a glow in those of the mantis?'

'Never, my dear colleague: though Busbequius speaks of it,' replied Dr Ramis with great complacency.

'But it seems to me that emotion and its expression are almost the same thing. Let us take your cat: now suppose we shave her tail, so that it cannot shall I say perscopate or bristle; suppose we attach at board to her back, so that it cannot arch; suppose we then exhibit a displeasing sight - a sportive dog, for instance. Now, she cannot express her emotions fully: Quaere: will she feel them fully? She will feel them, to be sure, since we have suppressed only the grossest manifestations; but will she feel them fully? Is not the arch, the bottle-brush, an integral part and not merely a potent reinforcement - though it is that too?'

Dr Ramis inclined his head to one side, narrowed his eyes and lips, and said, 'How can it be measured? It cannot be meaasured. It is a notion, a most valuable notion, I am sure; but, my dear sir, where is your measurement? It cannot be measured. Science is measurement - no knowledge without measurement.'

'Indeed it can,' cried Stephen eagerly.

Page 452:

The moment the next gun sounded the master-at-arms took the chaplain away, and there was a pause, one of those great lapses of time that presently come to have no flow at all, but grow stagnant or even circular in motion.

2007 Books Read

(in the order in which I finished them, understanding that very often I read many books at the same time). I count re-read books, by the way. I'll include links to any posts or book excerpts I might have done for each book. I'll keep the commentary to a minimum. (And for those book-freaks interested - here's my list from 2006 and also 2005)

First book read - a favorite of mine since I was in high school:

1. Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
One of my favorite books of all time.

On re-reading the book

Book excerpt

2. Spielberg, Truffaut and Me: An Actor's Diary , by Bob Balaban

Post about it here

3. Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift

Excerpt here

Big post about the book here

4. Imperial Grunts, by Robert Kaplan

(I just got his new one, too - his continuing series on the US military - haven't read that new one yet, though). I'm a Robert Kaplan fan from way back when - before it was COOL to read him. I read The Arabists, for God's sake.

5. Blue Blood, by Edward Conlon.

Written by a New York cop. A memoir, I guess - he's an IrishAmerican New York cop - early 30s. It's about his family, all cops - but also it's really just about the JOB itself. I consider this book a must-read even though it's about 4 chapters too long. He's a fantastic writer, and the whole thing is totally eye-opening. Oh, and let me say this: If you do read it, and find it lagging a bit near the end - make sure you do not miss his chapter on September 11 and what it was like for him. Not to be missed. I mention it briefly here.

6. Mediterranean Winter - by Robert Kaplan.

Have I mentioned that I'm a big Robert Kaplan fan? Here he reminisces about his travels as a young man (and at other times in his life) thru the Mediterranean. A travelogue.

7. The Soul of Iran, by Afshin Molavi.

Wonderful book. I'm kind of an Iran addict. I have more books about Iran on my shelves than any other country. Molavi is American - of Iranian descent ... and he went back to Iran a couple times in the last years to see what's going on there. Not just a political book, but a beautifully rendered piece of memoir-writing, a look at a deep and vibrant culture. He visits Internet cafes, goes to bootleg-booze parties, talks to people, visits Mossadeq's shrine, chats up people - talks about poetry, and websites, and music ... it's a chatty book. I loved it.

8. Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation , by Lynne Truss.

First of all, she is a woman after my heart. I adore her. Who knew that a book about commas would make me guffaw like a hyena in public places?? READ IT.

9. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh.

I had to put it down and wipe tears of laughter from my eyes. I could no longer continue. A spoof on journalism, particularly foreign journalists ... I haven't done any big posts on it yet - but I will. What a joy. Within 10 pages I thought, Wow. Okay. This book might be the funniest book I have ever read in my life.

I mention it briefly here

10. Darfur: A Short History of a Long War, by Julie Flint and Alex de Waal.

Good times, good times.

11. Dead Father's Club, by Matt Haig.

Emily sent me this book and I am forever grateful to her. I have since sent it on to my sister Jean. It's one of the best books I read this year.

Post about it here

12. The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands , by Aidan Hartley.

A journalist who grew up in Africa. It's a book about Africa - which is why I bought it - but more than that, it's a book about being a reporter. Horror stories (literally - he was in Somalia) - revolutions, the life of a foreign journalist ... He's a wonderful writer. Part memoir, part reportage. Highly recommended - very glad I picked it up.

13. Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, by Ian Baruma.

Again, good times, good times.

14. George Washington, by James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn.
The first in the American Presidents Series - which I am now collecting. They haven't even completed the series yet - but I'm buying them up in order. This was the first one. (Well, duh. It's about George Washington, of course it's the first one.)

15. The Carpet Wars: From Kabul to Baghdad: A Ten-Year Journey Along Ancient Trade Routes, by Christopher Kremmer
I can't say enough good things about this book. It's my kind of book, that's all. I eat this crap up. Central Asia? The Silk Road? Trade routes? The Khyber Pass? Please. Where do I sign up.

I excerpt it here in this big post about Rumi, the Sufi poet

16. Five Days in London: May 1940 by John Lucaks

When England hung in the balance. When, nay, all of Western civilization hung in the balance! For five days in 1940! Quick read, good book. Isn't quite as awesome and ground-breaking as Lucaks thinks it is, though.

17. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick

FINALLY I read this book. Well worth the wait.

Excerpt here (and great discussion in the comments)

18. 1776, by David McCullough

Great.

19. The Rage and the Pride, Orianna Falacci

I love her. A fire-breathing dragon. Rest in peace. You deserve it.

20. We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

(or, as Allison referred to it: Kevin's Got Issues.) A truly terrifying novel about the mother of a kid who murders a bunch of people at his school. COULD NOT PUT IT DOWN.

I mention it briefly here

21. Self-Help, by Lorrie Moore

A modern master of the short story. Words can't express how much I love her writing.

22. Glimpses of the Devil : A Psychiatrist's Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism, and Redemption by M. Scott Peck

Scott Peck goes off the deep end, using his brilliant People of the Lie as his launching-pad. He performs exorcisms, and writes about it. It's kind of wacko. He frankly sounds insane. But it's interesting nonetheless.

23. Orson Welles: Volume 1: Road to Xanadu by Simon Callow

Brilliant. In-depth. Well-written. It's a must-read for Welles fans. Can't WAIT for part 3!

24. The Final Solution: A Story of Detection by Michael Chabon

Excerpt here

25. Sugar and Other Stories by AS Byatt (which launched me into a massive Byatt BINGE, as you will see)

A short-story collection, her first. Deep, rich, wonderful - she's one of my favorite writers.

Here's an excerpt from one of the stories - my favorite in the collection

26. Elements: Stories of Fire and Ice, by AS Byatt

Another short story collection. Terrific. Each story (duh) has to do with either fire or ice. And each story also has, as its inspiration, a work of art - a painting, an artifact, what have you. She's so creative, I love her.

An excerpt from I think my favorite story in the collection

27. The Matisse Stories, by AS Byatt

Each one of these stories uses a painting from Matisse as its launching pad. More wonderful-ness.

Excerpt from one of the stories - the one that packed the biggest punch for me

28. The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, by AS Byatt

One of Byatt's main influences is Arabian Nights, and these fantastical fairy-tales show that.

Excerpt from the title story - perhaps my favorite short story she has ever written

29. Little Black Book of Stories by AS Byatt

Her most recent collection, if I'm not mistaken. Creepy excellent stories.

Excerpt from the eerily frightening and bizarre opening story

30. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

A novel that haunted me for days after I put it down.

Posted about it here

Book excerpt here

Here was my response to it AS I was reading it

31. Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill

A novel by Mary Gaitskill, her latest - she's one of my favorite writers. A bleak tale about a fashion model who befriends a woman dying of AIDS. But it's about so much more. Gaitskill, never a happy writer, doesn't pull her punches. I think she's better at short stories - she seriously has a skill in that type of story that is beyond reproach - there's nobody better. But still: you'd be hard pressed to find writing that's as good as in Veronica.

Book excerpt here

Here was my original post after I read it

A huge post I wrote on Gaitskill

32. The Pursuit of Alice Thrift by Elinor Lipman

Lipman's a wonderful author, I read all her books. She's highly under-rated and I think the book designs she is given, in all their chick-lit shorthand, doesn't serve her. She's very successful, though - so I guess I don't have to worry about her. I just know that people would probably be turned off by the book design - and all I can say is: she's a funny, insightful, weird, original, wonderful writer. I'm a huge fan. Just gave And Then She Found Me, by Lipman, to Siobhan for Christmas.

33. Billy Budd, by Herman Melville

I HAD to re-read it - because I despised it so much in high school I felt the need to re-visit it. Love Moby Dick. Still not wacky about Billy Budd. It's too black and white. And Billy Budd isn't an interesting character at all. The "bad guy" is the most interesting and he's not in it enough. A morality tale, of course, sure I get it. Whatever. Yawn.

Post about Melville, the poet

A post that includes some words on Moby Dick

My post on re-reading Billy Budd, and discovering that it is actually written like an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. For the gays.

34. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

Cried when I first read it as a kid. Cry every time I re-read it. Cried this last time. Unbelievable book.

35. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by JK Rowling

Read it in 5 days. Guess it left me a bit disappointed. Didn't like the ending AT ALL. Lots about it was great, of course. But I didn't like how she put all the exposition into one chapter at the very end, where all was explained - over the course of 5 pages. It just didn't satisfy me. Still love the whole series, though. But whatever. My favorite of the series is Order of the Phoenix.

36. The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene

Blew me away. If you haven't read it, all I can say is: do yourself a favor. Read the damn thing.

Excerpt here

37. Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Published posthumously. A memoir. Sort of. But you know Kapuscinski - or if you've read him you know - you couldn't ever really pin him down. He wasn't really about the facts. He was about the experience underneath the facts - and if the facts got muddled or lost, who cares? I think I've made my feelings about him as a writer perfectly clear - he's got his own category after all - his books rank among my all-time favorites ... but I have to say, Travels with Herodotus really lagged. Perhaps he was ill when he was writing it. Every time he went back to Herodotus I almost groaned out loud. No, I don't want Herodotus - I want more of YOU! But oh well, that wasn't the book he wanted to write. Rest in peace, you complex, brilliant, contradictory, wonderful writer.

38. Leopold and Loeb: Trial of the Century, by Hal Higdon.

Now we're moving into the beginning of the Dean Stockwell mania. I had just seen Compulsion (post about the movie here). Needed to know more. Good book. Not as good as Compulsion, though, which I read soon after.

39. Nature Boy: Unauthorized Biography of Dean Stockwell, by M. L. Zambrana

Obsession reaching its height. It must have been - because this book sucked. Nevertheless, I read it. Of course I did!

40. Compulsion, by Meyer Levin

The fictionalized account of the Leopold and Loeb murders that the film was based on. A superior book. Psychologically astute, gripping ... unafraid to delve into the relationship between the two boys, and how it manifested ... wonderful character studies ... Good stuff.

41. Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports, by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams

Couldn't put it down. Read it in 24 hours.

42. Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star: And Don't Have Sex or Take the Car by Dick Moore

I read this book long ago, because I basically wanted to be Margaret O'Brien or a kid actor in the studio system. I yearned to be Shirley Temple. Found this book in the library and I have had it ever since. Naturally I had to re-read it because Dean Stockwell figures quite large in the book. Dickie Moore (child star) goes back and interviews as many child actors he could find about their experiences. It's a wonderful book, actually - gives a great 3-dimensional picture of it. Some of them loved it, some hated it.

Some excerpts from the book involving Dean Stockwell and Errol Flynn

43. The Force of Reason by Oriana Fallaci

See comments about her above. Read this book in, like, 2 hours. You can't put it down.

44. Orson Welles: Vol 2: Hello Americans by Simon Callow

Volume 2 of his unbelievable biography of Orson Welles. One more volume to go - it has yet to be published. I cannot express how amazing these books are. I'd consider them definitive.

45. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens

Holy Mary Mother of God. It took me about 3 months to finish this book. But boy, was it worth it. I haven't even begun to process that novel. Stunning.

And now, when I think of Bleak House, I'll always think of that woman in the beret

46. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

I still can't really think about this book. I mention it briefly here but it's still not really a book I want to discuss or linger over.

47. The Gathering by Anne Enright

Posted about it here

48. Born Standing Up, by Steve Martin

This is definitely one of my favorite books of the year. It's his memoir of his years as a stand-up comedian. Not-to-be-missed. It's also definitely one of the best actor autobiographies I've ever read.

49. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, by Hannah Arendt

Good times, good times.

It's also very important to read this book on the Eichmann trial with the accompanying strains of Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys as background music.

50. By the Lake, by John McGahern

Posted about it here

Excerpt here

Excerpt here

51. Rereadings: Seventeen writers revisit books they love, edited by Anne Fadiman

Wonderful. A great book for any big reader.

52. Dubliners, by James Joyce

In the daily book excerpt thing, I ended up reading the whole collection again. Stunning, as always. It always seems like a new book, no matter how many times I read it. It grows WITH me. Or I grow with it. Who knows.

Here's my post on The Dead.

53. The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul, and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles by Donald Wolfe

What can I say. Color me obsessed. I find it pretty convincing - way more convincing than Hodel's book from a couple years ago which stated that his father was the killer.

54. Stargirl, by Jerry Spinelli

Jean gave this to me for Christmas. She's been talking about it for a while now - because she loves teaching it to her class. It's a young adult novel. I read it in a day, and totally fell in love with it - texting Jean all the way thru. And I gasped (literally! Out loud!) at the last sentence. Wonderful book.

55. John Adams, by John Patrick Diggins.

Second in the American Presidents Series. (Duh. Cause John Adams was the 2nd president). Despite Diggins' penchant for using modern terms such as "racial profiling" and things like that (a true pet peeve of mine)- this was a terrific book, and focused intensely on what were really the political differences between Adams, Jefferson and Hamilton - in-depth. Some of the differences were actual, others imagined. Diggins really digs into this stuff. Other books do, too - but since these are such small books, condensed really - I enjoyed the format. It was very focused.

And ...

DRUMROLL PLEASE

As of 11:25 pm on Dec. 31:

56. Master & Commander, by Patrick O'Brian

I can't even begin to respond to the book now - I'm delirious from having read over 300 pages in 24 hours. But I loved it - loved every single stinkin' page. Now I have to read the whole series.

Happy new year. My fingers are going to fall off from typing.

2007 Year in Pictures

Breakfast at a local diner.

2007 Year in Pictures

Books, corner of bulletin board in my apartment.

The real question is:

... can I finish Master & Commander by tomorrow night, midnight - in order to "get it in" to my Books Read This Year list, which, naturally, I will post in full, cause I'm geeky like that. I'm 110 pages into Master & Commander ... and I know I am the last person on the planet, to the far end of the world, who has NOT read these books ... and I feel like a drug addict right now. I not only will read this book - but I will read ALL of the aubrey-maturin books and I will join the vast Patrick O'Brian Fanatic Family. Amazing!!! But still. Can I read 300 pages by tomorrow? And also go see Charlie Wilson's War tonight and have a margarita? And also put the finishing touches (FINALLY) on my long-delayed Quantum Leap recap post, episode 3? I'm also not feeling well, and slept most of the day so far - very unusual for me. And I'd also been working on my review of Daisy Kenyon which I saw before Christmas at a screening - in preparation for the upcoming Otto Preminger retrospective - the review should go up next week, I'll provide a link. I've been busy. So I'm already "behind" with Master & Commander. Love love loving it, though! Will it or will it not make it onto the 2007 list? How will we all deal with the unbelievable suspense?? At least I don't have 4 books to go - like Ted does - you can do it, Ted!! Keep it up! I have already surpassed my numerical goal I put for myself - one book a week ... and I managed to read that much even with Bleak House which took me 3 months to complete. So wish me luck. Master & Commander. 300 pages to go. But need to make time for Charlie Wilson's War. And alcohol. And Quantum Leap. I can do it!

Happy birthday to:

Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was published on this day in France in 1973. He had won the Nobel Prize in 1970. Arrest followed the publicaiton of Gulag Archipelago, and years of exile ... and eventual triumph and vindication ... but still. So many horrors. Ted and I recently had a conversation about this book. I think it's on his list to-be-read this next year. We both are a bit insane right now - trying to read SHORT books as the end of the year approaches - so that we can add books to our have-read-list for the year. Meaningless competition - but fun. Anyway, I read Gulag Archipelago years ago, every damn word of it. It's huge, obviously - a huge book - but once you pick it up, it's hard to put down. The prose is compulsively read-able. Once you start, you cannot stop. You cannot believe the detail he goes into. The intellect on this guy. (Here's more information on him.) The years and years of imprisonment ... honing his skills of observation to such a devastating degree that he is able to lay out the entire system, brick by brick by brick ... how it actually worked, not just physically - but psychologically. It's a truly stunning achievement, one of the most important books of the 20th century, certainly - if not ever. You want to know how things work? Even if it seems insane from the outside? This is the book to read. Here's an excerpt and some of my blather on the book. And my observations here are relevant too, I think. Where there is silence ... there is horror. Untold, unspoken, unshared. But the silence is louder than a scream. Solzhenitsyn spoke out of the silence, the institutional silence - the silence of exile and imprisonment - of hidden wars and famines, while the world looked the other way. Silence. Czeslaw Milosz, Polish poet who grew up under Communism - and eventually won the Nobel Prize - said during his Nobel Prize speech: "In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot." Solzhenitsyn was that pistol shot. His accomplishment with Gulag Archipelago still cannot be touched.

The Shining: book to film comparison

An excellent analysis.

I'm a huge Stephen King fan - but to my taste, the best adaptations of his books are:

The Dead Zone, Stand By Me (adapted from Stephen King's novella "The Body") and The Shawshank Redemption (adapted from his novella "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption)

I love all of King's stuff (well, maybe not Rose Madder) - but I think there are problems adapting his more terrifying stuff to the screen. The book It is one of my favorite books of all time - literally, ever - and I couldn't bear to watch the mini-series. I was too scared that it would LIMIT the book (a sensation that Jonathan covers in his post). How could the monster "It" ever be more frightening than what I saw in my own mind? The book lives in my memory banks in such vivid completeness that I didn't want to muck with it by seeing a director's interpretation of it - and the special effects just couldn't measure up to what lived, horrifyingly, in my mind. Same with The Stand, another masterpiece.

Anyway: go check out Jonathan's great post!

Christmas Day In the Morning - by Pearl S. Buck

(Amazon link to beautiful illustrated copy of this story. And merry Christmas, everyone.)

Christmas Day in the Morning - by Pearl S. Buck

He waked suddenly and completely. It was four o'clock, the hour at which his father had always called him to get up and help with the milking. Strange how the habits of his youth clung to him still. Fifty years ago, and his father had been dead for thirty years, and yet he waked at four o'clock in the morning. He had trained himself to turn over and go to sleep, but this morning, because it was Christmas, he did not try to sleep.

He slipped back in time, as he did so easily nowadays. He was 15 years old and still on his father's farm. He loved his father. He had not known it until one day a few days before Christmas, when he overheard what his father was saying to his mother.

"Mary, I hate to call Rob in the mornings. He's growing so fast and he needs his sleep. If you could see how he sleeps when I go in to wake him up! I wish I could manage alone."

"Well, you can't, Adam." His mother's voice was brisk. "Besides, he isn't a child anymore. It's time he took his turn."

"Yes," his father said slowly. "But I sure do hate to wake him."

When he heard these words, something in him woke: his father loved him! He had never thought of it before, taking for granted the tie of their blood. Neither his father nor his mother talked about loving their children - they had no time for such things. There was always so much to do on a farm.

Now that he knew his father loved him, there would be no more loitering in the mornings and having to be called again. He got up after that, stumbling with sleep, and pulled on his clothes, his eyes tight shut, but he got up.

And then on the night before Christmas, that year when he was 15, he lay for a few minutes thinking about the next day. They were poor, and most of the excitement was in the turkey they had raised themselves and in the mince pies his mother made. His sisters sewed presents and his mother and father always bought something he needed, not only a warm jacket, maybe, but something more, such as a book. And he saved and bought them each something too.

He wished, that Christmas when he was 15, he had a better present for his father. As usual, he had gone to the ten-cent store and bought a tie. It had seemed nice enough until he lay thinking the night before Christmas, and then he wished that he had heard his father and mother talking in time for him to save for something better.

He lay on his side, his head supported by his elbow, and looked out of his attic window. The stars were bright, much brighter than he ever remembered seeing them, and one was so bright he wondered if it were really the star of Bethlehem.

"Dad," he had once asked when he was a little boy, "what is a stable?"

"It's just a barn," his father had replied, "like ours."

Then Jesus had been born in a barn, and to a barn the shepherds and the Wise Men had come, bringing their Christmas gifts!

The thought stuck him like a silver dagger. Why should he not give his father a special gift, too, out there in the barn?

He could get up early, earlier than four o'clock, and he could creep into the barn and get all the milking done. He'd do it alone, milk and clean up, and then when his father went in to start the milking, he'd see it all done. And he would know who had done it.

At a quarter to three, he got up and put on his clothes. He crept downstairs, careful of the creaky boards, and let himself out. The big star hung lower over the barn roof, a reddish gold. The cows looked at him, sleepy and surprised.

"So, boss," he whispered. They accepted him placidly, and he fetched some hay for each cow and then got the milking pail and big milk cans.

He had never milked alone before, but it seemed almost easy. He kept thinking about his father's surprise. His father would come in and call him, saying that he would get things started while Rob was getting dressed. He'd go to the barn, open the door, and then he'd go to get the two big empty milk cans. But they wouldn't be waiting or empty; they'd be standing in the milk house, filled.

The task went more easily than he had ever known it to before. Milking for once was not a chore. It was something else, a gift to his father who loved him. He finished, the two milk cans were full, and he covered them and closed the milk-house door carefully, making sure of the latch. He put the stool in its place by the door and hung up the clean milk pail. Then he went out of the barn and barred the door behind him.

Back in his room, he had only a minute to pull off his clothes in the darkness and jump into bed, for he heard his father up. He put the covers over his head to silence his quick breathing. The door opened.

"Rob!" his father called. "We have to get up, son, even if it is Christmas."

"Aw-right," he said sleepily.

"I'll go on out," his father said. "I'll get things started."

The door closed and he lay still, laughing to himself. In just a few minutes his father would know. His dancing heart was ready to jump from his body.

The minutes were endless - ten, fifteen, he did not know how many - and he heard his father's footsteps again. The door opened and he lay still.

"Rob!"

"Yes, Dad--"

His father was laughing, a queer sobbing sort of a laugh. "Thought you'd fool me, did you?" His father was standing beside his bed, feeling for him, pulling away the covers.

"It's Christmas, Dad!"

He found his father and clutched him in a great hug. He felt his father's arms go around him. It was dark, and they could not see each other's faces.

"Son, I thank you. Nobody ever did a nicer thing--"

"Oh, Dad, I want you to know -- I do want to be good!" The words broke from him of their own will. He did not know what to say. His heart was bursting with love.

"Well, I reckon I can go back to bed and sleep," his father said after a moment. "No, hark-- The little ones are waked up. Come to think of it, son, I've never seen you children when you first saw the Christmas tree. I was always in the barn."

He got up and pulled on his clothes again, and they went down to the Christmas tree, and soon the sun was creeping up to where the star had been.

Oh, what a Christmas, and how his heart had nearly burst again with shyness and pride as his father told his mother and made the younger children listen about how he, Rob, had got up all by himself.

"The best Christmas gift I ever had, and I'll remember it, son, every year on Christmas morning, so long as I live."

They had both remembered it, and now that his father was dead he remembered it alone, that blessed Christmas dawn when, alone with the cows in the barn, he had made his first gift of true love.

By the Lake (or: That They May Face the Rising Sun) - by John McGahern

John McGahern will probably be most remembered for Amongst Women, a novel that ranks up there with one of the best books I have ever read. He died last year (here's what I wrote about him then), and his last novel is called (at least in the States) By the Lake. The rhythm of it is slow, pre-modern almost. There's a mention of a television in one scene, and I felt a jolt - having forgotten about the existence of television for a bit while reading it. McGahern was always known as a rural writer. His landscape was rural Ireland, and the quiet lives lived there. Quiet, but intense. There is no real story in By the Lake, no plot, no big finishes, no climactic moments. It is the story of a group of people in a town in Ireland, who live around a lake. They are mostly in their 50s, 60s - approaching retirement. It's a rural community, many of the folks are still primarily farmers - but the modern world impinges. Some of them have freelance writing jobs, and have to fly to London for interviews. All of them have children who have moved on, who live in cities elsewhere. We meet them, we gossip with them, we watch the seasons change. It's a slow story (with sudden searing moments of realization), it's a slow stroll around the shores of the lake ... through summer, fall, winter, spring. Things happen. John Quinn gets married. His wife leaves him after one day. Brou-haha ensues. The Shah (a fascinating character - excerpt here) decides to finally sell his very successful business to his silent partner, Frank Dolan. A sign that perhaps mortality approaches. Everyone wonders how the Shah will feel - when he is not in charge?? Jimmy Joe McKiernan is the resident political in the town. He did time in Long Kesh, was on hunger strike. He passes out copies of An Phoblacht to townsfolk. He owns a bar, and 2 detectives sit outside it - all day, every day. Just in case. The violence of the North seems so far removed from the simple quiet life lived on these farms, and Ruttledge - who is probably the main character, if there has to be a main character - does not approve of violence, and does not approve of the aims of the IRA, the Provisionals or anyone else. In another book there would be perhaps a confrontation, a big one, between these two Irelands. The ones in the South who think, "Look, the North has to work out their own problems ... leave us out of it." And the ones in the South who think, "As long as our brethren up there are not free, then none of us are free." These are two very real currents in Irish life, and it's brushed upon in the book - but gently, easily ... as just another bit of the picture. It's not the main event. It's the main event to Jimmy Joe McKiernan, but not to Ruttledge. When the two men find themselves alone together near the end of the book - their conversation, as it is rendered by McGahern, is a masterpiece. I wish I could write that well.

Other things happen. Jamesie, the town gossip, and his wife Mary - worry about their aimless son Johnny - who has moved to London and appears to have become a bum. They get so nervous on his visits home that they barely enjoy seeing him. Patrick Ryan, the sleek almost malevolent handyman - travels around the country, job to job, leaving his farm at home to go to riot. He offers to help build a shed for Ruttledge, and it has stood half unfinished for a year now, maybe more. They keep saying they're going to get to it. And etc.

There is so much more - details, stories told, you get to know the rhythms of the auctions - how the cattle is sold, the competition between neighbors in regards to their livestock, how contemptuous the dealers are when they realize Jamesie's sheep have not just been raised for slaughter, but pampered and loved. It makes their job harder if the sheep have expectations of KINDNESS. "Fuckin' pets," growl the dealers.

I knew going into the book that it was plot-less. My dad had raved about it to me - he's a huge McGahern fan. McGahern spent most of his life, as a writer, very little known outside of his native Ireland- although he's a huge favorite there, and any book compiled by Irish newspapers surveying Irish people about their favorite authors - John McGahern always tops the list. Amongst Women was an international success (my God, what a book) - and By the Lake was as well. He began to be known on a wider scale just at the end of his life. Here's a post I wrote about him - with some good links, and good excerpts from other people about him.

Since I knew going in not to expect any big plot or story - I didn't spend the book waiting for something to happen. Just relax. Relax. Get into the time-span of these people. Leave your own. I love it that Jamesie and Mary's house are filled with clocks that all tell the wrong time, and are always bonging out the time at the incorrect hour. At the end of the book, after they have both suffered a grievous loss - they get the clocks fixed. There's a marvelous scene with a clockmaker - a guy in crutches, who sounds like he has cerebral palsy - who obviously takes great pride in his work, in a gentle specfic way - recognizes that the clocks they own are antiques, works of art ... and promises them he will get them all in sync. Jamesie, Mary, Ruttledge and Kate sit in the kitchen and listen, quietly, as all the clocks go off at the same time. Because of how McGahern has slowly set up this world, and has slowed US down - as audience members ... it is a truly profound moment.

By the Lake was originally published in Great Britain with the name That They May Face the Rising Sun, a superior title if you ask me. By the Lake could be anything although it also fits the book... The lake is another character in the novel, its moods, how it informs the characters, how they love it, feel trapped by it ... whatever. But That They May Face the Rising Sun is a goosebump worthy title. By the Lake is descriptive. That They May Face the Rising Sun is majestic, poetic, and speaks to a more universal truth. It cuts deeper into the heart of what McGahern was writing about, and it doesn't become clear until the last 30 pages why that is the title. So McGahern makes you wait, for clarity. He makes you wait to realize why the book is called that. And it comes out in one sentence. One sentence. Spoken over a freshly dug grave by Patrick Ryan. "That they may face the rising sun."

Magnificent.

I understand titles are often changed, for different audiences and sensibilities. It makes sense, I don't have an opinion about it one way or the other.

But in this particular case, I hope the American publishers will not mind if I join the readers across the pond, and call it That They May Face the Rising Sun. It elevates the book, transcends it ... after pages of farming and carpentry and glasses of whiskey after Mass and time passing and things happening or not happening ... life is passing, life is passing, that is all ... after all of that: Resurrection.

Because the rest of the book is so down to earth - (and isn't so much of our lives down to earth? We do laundry, we have drinks with friends, we shovel snow) - so prosaic and realistic ... such a sudden vision of transcendence slices right through you. Like the ending of Our Town when Emily realizes her life has passed ... and it is only now that it is over that she can really love it.

Wonderful book. I will miss reading it. My life has been intense this past month, with outside events and crises - I feel ragged, forgetful, am prone to crying jags, and have started oversleeping (a truly bizarre development, and can only be attributed to anxiety) ... With all of that going on, I have loved visiting That They May Face the Rising Sun every day, even in its saddest moments. I have loved slowing my steps down to match the pace of that world John McGahern so beautifully described.

From "By the Lake" - by John McGahern

... which I am loving. I got sidetracked by Hannah Arendt for a bit - but I finished that last night, and now I'm back. Here's an excerpt from this slow beautifully rendered elegiac book:

They were discussing the sale and transfer of the business. As he listened to the two voices he was so attached to and thought back to the afternoon, the striking of the clocks, the easy, pleasant company, the walk round the shore, with a rush of feeling he felt that this must be happiness. As soon as the thought came to him, he fought it back, blaming the whiskey. The very idea was as dangerous as presumptive speech: happiness could not be sought or worried into being, or even fully grasped; it should be allowed its own slow pace so that it passes unnoticed, if it ever comes at all.

A typical Sheila story

Sitting on the bus yesterday. It was the first really cold night we've had. My packages surrounding me: tea lights, oil fragrances for my diffuser thingie that I am addicted to, also a car fragrance thing for my car (Yankee Candle: Lemon Lavendar scent).

iPod playing Backstreet Boys. BLARING Backstreet Boys. "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)", to be specific. I can barely hold myself back from leaping up and dancing in the aisles. You know ... that cockatoo bird was moved to dance to the song ... and so am I.

Nose in a book: Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

I can listen to Backstreet Boys as I read about the Holocaust. I see no problem here.

I curled up in bed last night and watched Notting Hill for, oh, the 5000th time. It never pales. I don't know why. It's a simple pleasure for me. It's a tossup between Notting Hill and About a Boy (another favorite). They just satisfy. They do not challenge ... they satisfy. Most of the time I'm in the mood for a challenge. But when I'm not? Let's watch Notting Hill or About a Boy. True, Dean Stockwell is not in either of these films ... but that's a forgivable lapse in judgment on the part of the directors.

After finishing Notting Hill, I read some more of Hannah Arendt's book ... while listening to Britney Spears' "In the Zone" (I think that "Toxic" is pretty much the highpoint of what is now, obviously, her sadly short career. Great song). Again. Britney Spears. Holocaust. Makes perfect sense.

Woke up to the first snow.

The Gathering - Anne Enright

I finished The Gathering this weekend (my mother did, too) - and while I am truly inspired by her writing (she's the kind of writer that makes me BURN to pick up my pencil, and try again) - I found the book almost unbearably depressing. I liked her take on Ireland now - we've had enough of twee Ireland thankyouverymuch - she's writing from the midst of the Celtic Tiger (although her book isn't strictly about that) - but the main character, with her Saab and her charcoal and slate interior design - is obviously reaping the benefits of Ireland's new wealth. But the memories of the characters are from the bleaker more rigid 60s and 70s - and I'm not against sad books, for God's sake, no ... but I found myself 3/4s of the way through looking forward to the end. It was too much for me. I did not experience that with, say, Atonement, which is probably the saddest mo-f**in' book I have ever read. But with The Gathering I twitched with impatience to be done with it. This has nothing to do with her writing - which I love. I love it so much I want to EAT it. I want to cut it with a knife like a big fat piece of cheesecake. It is so so good. Her bits about the Irish blue eyes, the Hegarty eyes - she just gets Ireland, or at least a portion of it. The tormented part of it. The pious surface, and the sexual underbelly. And even now - with wealth and "things" (see: Seamus) - Ireland must be dealt with on its own terms. Its past is huge. The sins done to that country - by their own clergy, by the very nature of Catholicism - must still be handled and faced. None of it is pretty. My great-aunt, who is a nun, has told me stories about working in Ireland in the early and late 60s, awesome stories (my great-aunt is one of the most amazing women I have ever known, a true idol to me) - but her funny and ridiculous stories are so so revealing about what was going on in Ireland, especially during the upheaval of Vatican II. There is a sense that reality itself cannot be looked at, in Ireland. Joyce said he wanted to hold up a looking-glass to his country and if they didn't like what they saw, then whose fault is that? This is what her book is about. I can see it might have cut too close to the bone. My mother and I talked about it a bit. Ireland has grown and changed. Shackles flung off. I suppose family issues are family issues anywhere, and in any generation. It doesn't matter that Ireland is now some Celtic Tiger. There are ghosts, demons, nightmares. Enright's territory is family, the suffocation of a large poor family in Ireland. Too many kids, too many obligations, exhausted mother, absent father ... too many relationships to manage ... an extended state of childhood, where your SIBLINGS continue to carry such weight in your mind. Other cultures do not have this. Or if they do - certainly not to the same mythological level that Ireland reaches. Enright writes about a family with 12 children (and 7 miscarriages, let's not forget) - and the chaotic raw upbringing that such a family would demand. No care-taking of souls, or development of personality and mind - it's just about being dragged up, each fighting for his own piece of turf. And they're all just messed UP! I was exhausted by the Hegartys. This is my terrain, so maybe it just pushed a button - a button I honestly don't want pushed. But her writing is so wonderful, so weird and angry and ... itself - it truly feels like an original voice - an "Enright" voice - in the same way that Annie Proulx seems completely original to me, someone who is just herself ... and reading such stuff always inspires me. To do better, work harder, go deeper ... be more myself. And hang the consequences. There will be those who will not like what I write. But I cannot worry about those people. I am not writing for them. The point is to express, to work hard, to hone my skills, and to be myself. Because there's only one me. And I am not reinventing the wheel, obviously, but I can only be the best Sheila-writer I can be. There WILL be an audience for such things. Those who are nit-picky, or offended, or who take me defensively - and always need to set themselves up in opposition to me ... are not the ones I am writing for. Anne Enright's book has helped me to see that.

But damn, I'm glad it's over. The tragedy of the Irish (for me) must be taken in small doses. Now I'm moving on to John McGahern's last novel - By the Lake - a portrait of a small rural community in the west of Ireland - and it has its own ghosts, echoes, problems - problems of a strictly Irish nature ... but it's not so unremittingly bleak.

I feel like I need to qualify all of this. Enright's writing (as you will see in the excerpt below) is not bleak, in and of itself. It's actually quite lively. She rollicks along, it feels rather conversational - and there are funny spot-on observations that make me nod in recognition - she's so good that way - it's just that I found it all too sad. And I wanted it to be over.

Here's a wonderful example of her writing. Veronica is describing one of her first loves - Michael Weiss, an American exchange student at UCD.

From The Gathering by Anne Enright:

I fell in love, I am beginning to realise, in my early twenties, when I met and slept with a guy from Brooklyn called Michael Weiss. He was in Dublin for an MA in Irish studies or Celtic studies, or what have you - we despised those courses, they were just something the college did to get rich Americans, and so I was surprised to find myself in love with Michael Weiss; surprised too because he was not a tall American with big prairie bones, but an average-sized guy who smoked rollups and talked with a Brooklyn pebble in his mouth, part slur and part contemplation.

Sleeping with him was very sweet, the way he would prop himself up to look at you and talk. He loved to chat while he was touching you, he loved even to smoke in this endless lazy foreplay that was all foreign to me then. I was twenty years old. I wasn't used to sex that was so aimless and unspecific. I wasn't used to sex that was sober, I suppose, and all this talking just made me uncomfortable: I thought he didn't fancy me. I watched his face move and wished he would just get on with it - the astonishing bit, the thing we were both here for.

I think, in his ironic, slow way Michael Weiss knew that he couldn't hold on to me, and all he was doing in those drowsy afternoons was trying to talk me down, like a cat in a tree, or an air hostess in charge of the plain. 'You see that leh-ver to your right? I want you to ease that leh-ver down to forty-five degrees.'

And though we got through a surprising amount of it - sex, that is - all I can remember is my madness at the time, watching the day outside his window shift to dusk in jolts and patches. It was, perhaps, an adolescent thing; standing naked on the nylon carpet of his student bedsit and feeling the change of light to be impossible; like my skin was being stripped off, as the day gave way, in tics and lunges, to dark.

Michael's father was an artist and his mother was something else. I wasn't used to that either - most of the parents I knew were just parents - but he had this semi-famous father and this mother who made appointments and met people and dressed up to go out, and so he had all of that dragging behind him. It was hard for him to know what he was going to do when he grew up, because he had been grown up, at a guess, since he was ten years old. He wrote some poems, and they were probably quite good poems, but the idea of getting anywhere was a problem for him. There was money - not a lot of money, but some - and he had decided I think, even then, just to exist, and see what came his way.

So now he is just existing, as I am, though probably somewhere more interesting than Booterstown, Dublin 4. He is in Manhattan, say, or the canyons of LA, and he is taking his son to saxophone lessons, he is turning up to his daughter's dance showcase on a Thursday afternoon, and finding all of that an important and amusing thing to do.

I went out with Michael Weiss for two years, on and off; driven crazy by his languor - made inadequate by it, and impatient for the world ahead of us, that was full of things to do. I was not sure what these things were, but they would be better than just hanging around all afternoon, kissing and smoking, talking about - what? - whether Dirk Bogarde was actually good-looking, and how, or how not to be, a Jew.

Now, of course, my afternoons are spent not watching the television, so I was undoubtedly right to distrust and finally leave Michael Weiss for a better, faster life, the one I have now, cooking for a man who doesn't show up before nine and for two girls who will shortly stop showing up too. Having tear-streaked sex, once in a blue moon, with my middle-aged husband; not knowing whether to hit him or kiss him.

Switch on the light, I want to say. Switch on the light.

But it is not just the sex, or remembered sex, that makes me think I love Michael Weiss from Brooklyn, now, seventeen years too late. It is the way he refused to own me, no matter how much I tried to be owned. It was the way he would not take me, he would only meet me, and that only ever halfway.

I think I am ready for that now. I think I am ready to be met.

Description of the character known as "the Shah"

From By the Lake, by the late John McGahern (the book I am reading right now):

When it was raining or there was little to be done, he was content to sit in the house. Often he sat in silence. His silences were never oppressive and he never spoke unless to respond to something that had been said or to say something that he wanted to say. Throughout, he was intensely aware of every other presence, exercising his imagination on their behalf as well as on his own, seeing himself as he might be seen and as he saw others. Since he was a boy he had been in business of some kind but had never learned to read or write. He had to rely on pure instinct to know the people he could trust. This silence and listening were more useful than speech and his instinct was radar-sharp. His manners had once been gentle and hidden with everybody but to some extent the gentleness had been discarded as he grew in wealth and independence. With people he disliked he could be rough. People or places that made him ill at ease or uncomfortable he went to great lengths to avoid. When caught in such situations his manners would turn atrocious, like a clear-sighted person going momentarily blind. Where he blossomed was in the familiar and habitual, which he never left willingly. The one aberration of his imaginative shrewdness was a sneaking regard for delinquents, or even old villains like John Quinn, whose activities excited and amused him, as they tested and gave two fingers to the moral world.

Speaking of reading:

-- finished Bleak House yesterday morning. My God! What a book!

-- started and finished The Road yesterday. Could not put it down. What a horrifying story. Scary, too: there were 2 moments in particular when I literally gasped out loud in terror.

-- had very bad dreams last night. I blame Cormac McCarthy. Michael was a big part of one of the dreams. I'm kind of haunted by the whole thing, and very haunted by him in particular. Not on an everyday basis, but just after a dream like that. I love him, and I miss him and he feels very far away to me right now. The Road made me feel almost unbearably lonely.

-- I think I'm going to move on to Anne Enright's The Gathering next. (Allison and I, on Saturday, went to the bookstore across from her apartment - one of my favorites in the city. We both bought 3 books - it's been a while since I bought a new book! I bought The Road which I read in one day, in one sitting, practically. Also the Schickel critical biography of Elia Kazan which I'm psyched about (Schickel is great - he wrote the critical study of Cary Grant that I have quoted from on the blog ad nauseum). And then I bought The Gathering which just won the Booker. I've been mentioning her here and there as well, she fascinates me. I don't know - The Road was so intense and so depressing that I am hesitating to pick up The Gathering at this moment in time.

-- Oh, and I saw The Hoax last night - the movie about Clifford Irving, the dude who wrote the "authorized autobiography of Howard Hughes" without ever having met Hughes - he hoaxed everybody. FASCINATING. Richard Gere was fantastic - perfect part for him, and I'll write more about that later. I really recommend the movie. I want to read Irving's book now - not the one about Howard Hughes (which was never actually published, I don't think - although they did do a print run of it) - but the one Irving wrote about how he made up the whole thing. Fascinating!!

Culture Notes

-- Today is finally here. I thought it would never arrive. Britney's new album is now out. I am DYING to hear it. I am not even kidding.

-- Still working on Bleak House. I adore it, and actually shed tears over it a couple days ago. A touching reunion scene between Esther and her you-know-who. I have also laughed so loud in public while reading it that I scared passersby. Loving the book.

-- Thoughts on The Darjeeling Limited to come. I felt alone in my deep love for it - faced against the entire planet who did not like it - until I talked to Siobhan - she loved it, too.

-- Speaking of The Darjeeling Limited, I cannot get enough (literally) of the song that plays over the end credits: "Les Champs Elysees" - by Joe Dassin. A happier song you've never heard. It has the same effect on me that "Fields of Joy" by Lenny Kravitz has. I just feel little bursts of pure happiness throughout - why??? I don't know. I am now in the autistic phase of playing "Les Champs Elysees" over ... and over ... and over ... and over ...

-- Dear Simon Callow: when is volume 3 of your Orson Welles biography coming out?? Soon? I beg of you? You're a marvelous writer -volume 2 ends in 1948 - so we have quite a ways to go until "we will sell no wine before its time." GREAT accomplishment, Mr. Callow - it's stunning. More, please, more!!

-- Here's some photos of Dean Stockwell's collages and dice sculptures from his current show in Taos, New Mexico. He also has created (Stevie and I drooled over them) an entire Tarot card pack - original collages for each card - I think the whole set (arcana) was 1200 bucks - and they were fantastic!!!

-- Kate left me a message the other night. "So ... I am calling you from the ancien regime ..."

-- AHHHHHH!!!!!!

-- George Washington read the 101st Psalm? A series of awesome posts tracking down the source of the anecdote:
George Washington read the 101st Psalm
Another Version of Andrew Leavitt's Story
The Little Lady Who Started the Anecdote?
Meanwhile, Back in October 1775
Rev. Waldo and Gen. Washington
Another Washington's Psalm Legend

An unbelievable blog ... seriously!!

Email from Allison

She writes:

"Okay, so I finished Kevin's Got Issues ..."

You mean ... We Need to Talk About Kevin, Allison??

Allison and I go WAY BACK with mutilated book titles ... I cannot stop laughing about Kevin's Got Issues. The entire time Allison was reading it, she would keep me posted on her progress - and she NEVER called it by its correct name. The titles she came up with were hilarious, but I have to say that Kevin's Got Issues is my absolute favorite.

No book left behind

This article made me laugh: what are the most left-behind books in hotel rooms?

[Alastair Campbell's] memoir, which has sold over 55,000 copies since its publication in June, may be "the most compelling and revealing account of contemporary politics you will ever read" according his publishers, Hutchinson, but it appears not to be compelling enough for readers to want to hang on to it. A new survey compiled by the hotel chain Travelodge has The Blair Years topping the list of literary works most often left behind in hotel rooms.

I love that there was a survey about this - and that a book actually won!! The books on the list are not surprising - mostly light fare, holiday reading, celebrity biography, etc. - books people will bring with them as they travel. Hysterical!!

Reminds me of an old Diary Friday ... and a book I left behind in the most memorable youth hostel in the most random town on the west of Ireland ...

My sister Jean and myself. On a mission to get to the Aran Islands. We had a bit of an issue finding a B&B and in the process of driving around ripped the bumper off our car. We ended up staying in a youth hostel in a one-road town outside of Galway - right on the ocean.

It's such a memorable night. Anyway, here's the diary entry. I hope the next traveler who stayed in that insane freezing room staring out at some nuclear waste dump enjoyed the discarded book more than I did!!

November, Ireland
The Stella Maris Hostel: One of the guys talking to me about the ferry [to the Aran Islands] from Galway-- thick brogue-- He saw the look on my face, stopped himself, grinned: "Can ya' understand me?"

At first they put us in this room that would have to be seen to be believed. Light blue stained walls, awful overhead lights, FILTHY -- and about four random bunk beds strewn about. No sheets. Ripped-up mattresses. Jean was still in a glowering mood [because we had accidentally ripped the bumper off of our rent-a-car], so she threw her bag down, and sat on one of the bottom bunks. "Fine. This is fine." Totally resigned to fate.

The entire place smelled of cabbage.

It was only 7 or 7:30. We had hours to go before bedtime. I had about three books in my bag. All visions of a cozy B&B with a bedside lamp, and a big puf-a-puf bed vanished. Now all we had was stripped bunk beds (four of them), dirty overhead lights with dead bugs trapped inside, and cabbage. I couldn't read in this room!

And we were no longer sure that we would even make it to Rossaveal in the morning. The guys downstairs made it sound like a journey up Everest's north face.

They had pity on us and moved us into another room -- just a little bit better. Outside: a round tourist-info building up against the sea wall. But from our view, it looked like a vat of some kind of nuclear waste.

Finally, the bumper debacle dissipated and what took its place? The giggles. Every time we looked at the nuclear waste dump outside we would lose it again. Jean and I thrashed about in our freezing room, laughing like maniacs. We couldn't stand to stay in the room.

We asked the guys downstairs for a wake-up call. What were we thinking?

We took a walk along the sea. Looking out into the darkness. Out there in the cold-- out there somewhere -- were the Aran Islands. People living their lives out there ... as we speak. Makes me feel homesick. The smell of the salt air. Jean and me walking along, wolfing down crackers, putting off going back to that bleak room.

Finally we came back to the Stella Maris -- got our books -- and went down to the pub next door. It was only 9or so, maybe earlier. Jean had In the Time of Butterflies, and I had one of my airport books: The Notebook, which a friend had raved about to me. That's the last time I read a book HE recommends. It SUCKED. I could not even bear it.

The pub was dingy, like an old living room. Dusty rug, crackling fire, smoky air, couches, the bartender playing cards with someone. A bunch of rowdy giggly short-skirted Galway girls huddled over by the fire, celebrating a birthday, drinking, smoking, making constant cell phone calls.

Jean and I sat drinking, and reading. Communing peacefully. It's such a different bar scene than in the States. Mellow. Like you're in your own house. Then the Galway girls left, we took their seats by the fire, and it was just us four people in the pub. For hours. The TV on with no sound. Jean and I reading, drinking Guinness, Jean having an enraptured reading experience, and I, to put it bluntly, was NOT having an enraptured reading experience. When we left the next morning, I left the book in a drawer in the room, with a note: "Warning: This book is AWFUL."

Added to the graffiti in the bathroom: "Sheila and Avram, Nov. 19**"

Why did I do this? Sort of as a joke. Sometimes it comes to my mind, that across the ocean that graffiti still exists. For some reason -- it makes me want to giggle. Those random words written by ME in the Stella Maris Pub, Salt Hill, County Galway, Ireland ... I mean, it's comical, on some level ... in a sort of bitter way. Making a joke out of my own life (or lack of life).

Finally -- past midnight -- up to our dreadful room. It was so freezing that we climbed into the lumpy double bed with all of our clothes on, and socks, and mittens, and hats.

Jean read to me, and then we both fell asleep.

We woke up two hours past the time we had asked for a "wake-up call". I bolted upright like a lunatic.

"Jean? What time is it?"

Something felt wrong. Too much traffic outside, too much light.

We lay in stunned paralysis for a moment, trying to comprehend the turn of events. It was twenty to 9. The ferry from Rossaveal left at ten. And everyone had made us afraid about the difficulty of the drive. Would we ever get to the Aran Islands?

Then came the turning point moment.

Jean: "Sheila. I think we can make it. If we get up and go NOW."

And that's what we did.

The Tazmanian Devil O'Malley sisters, tossing our shit into bags, shoving hats down on our sleepy hair, racing down the stairs ... Those guys were SO not around. Jean called out, through the sleeping hostel lobby: "Thanks a lot for the wake-up call, guys!!"

And ... we MADE it. Even with stopping to tape up the bumper, and the damn wheel hub fiasco -- turning around to go get it -- me running across the street to grab it. And the road was SO not bad. The guys at the Stella Maris made it sound like it would be a dirt road, and that we would need 4-wheel drive. We certainly were out in the middle of nowhere, bleak, all Gaelic signs, but the roads themselves were fine. "Fields" on one side, filled with rocks. More rocks than dirt. Brown and grey chopped-up rocky land as far as the eye can see. Grey ocean crashing to our left.

And then -- an hour behind schedule -- we made it. We were on the ferry to the Aran Islands. We could hardly believe that we had MADE it. We DID it.

"The Mist"

I've read most of Stephen King and he's given me some pretty horrible moments - you know, fear and all that. The monster in It (let's not even GO THERE, people). Certain parts of The Stand - the whole Lincoln Tunnel section is one of the most vivid pieces of post-apocalypse writing I've ever read - and it took on even more reality for me after September 11 ... because you couldn't stop your brain from imagining such things. It was terrifying (not to mention a masterpiece, as far as I'm concerned - talk about needing to be counted as a great book PERIOD, not a great "horror" book!) ... and then there's all the others ... scary (some more than others) - his imagination which knows no bounds, blah blah blah.

But - to date - (and like I've said, i've read most of his books) - I have never (and I mean NEVER) been as frightened as I was when I read his short story "The Mist".

I was living at home for the summer - I was in between my junior and senior year in college - I remember this because that was the summer I fell in love for the first time, and he fell in love with me, and we had picnics and cavorted thru Newport, and blah blah ... most exciting summer of my life up until that point. Yay! Love! And I was living with my parents - and I was reading the collection of short stories by Stephen King - and i was working 2 jobs, I remember - at the pizza parlor by the beach, and I was also running lights and sound for the big Freshman Orientation shows they were putting on on campus. I know this is a long-ass story full of extraneous details, but whatevs, I'm busy writing Quantum Leap fanfic right now and cannot be bothered. So I was VERY busy, what with 2 jobs and my first boyfriend courting me and all that. And I picked up "The Mist", having no idea what I was getting into. I thought I knew what scared was. I thought I had already experienced the full throttle of the King imagination of horror. But no. Oh no.

That was, hands down, the scariest mo-f'in thing I have ever read in my life - I lay in bed, tense as a BOARD ... and I had to wake up at 6 am to get to the theatre by 7 am - to set up the light board ... but I couldn't put the book down. Not just because it was so good ... but because I WAS AFRAID TO TURN THE LIGHTS OFF. I was afraid of what dreams may come.

We were "cat sitting" that summer for my friend Jackie - it was a small mischievous ball of grey fur - who would attack his own reflections in the mirror, and pounce on my dad's head from behind. He was adorable but a terror. And he snuck into my room, as I lay there - reading - it's, like, 3 in the morning - I didn't see him come in - and he skulked towards the bed and in one fell swoop leapt up onto the bed, claws digging into my arm ... and I

FLIPPED

OUT

That poor cat. His prank worked better than he could ever have imagined. I threw him off the bed, screaming and thrashing and panting ... and then ... because I had to ... a force beyond my control was leading me ... picked up the damn book again.

I finished it that night and didn't sleep a wink.

I haven't read it since but I remember some paragraphs of it with what feels like word-for-word accuracy - I'd have to go back and check. But that book emanates a dark horrific glow ... I am still afraid of that stupid book.

Great stuff!

Anyway - just found out via this site that they're turning it into a movie.

Fingers crossed. It would make a great movie, I think! A classic war of the worlds type situation. Horrifying. Absolutely horrifying. I am also pleased to see that Thomas Jane is the lead. He was in one of my Faces I love, don't ya know!

I have never forgotten the horrible night I stayed up and read that stupid story!

Book questionnaire

I got this from my good friend Ted.

What are you reading right now?

Bleak House by Charles Dickens.

It is making me laugh out loud.

Do you have any idea what you’ll read when you’re done with that?

I'm not sure. I've been meaning to read Villette finally - so maybe that one.

What magazines do you have in your bathroom right now?

None. I do have Wired by Bob Woodward stashed beside the toilet. Just in case.

What’s the worst thing you were ever forced to read?

Billy Budd in high school. My entire soul rebelled against that book. I hated it.

I just re-read it a month ago and actually enjoyed it - although there are parts of it I still find unbelievably trite. Naturally, my favorite character is the "bad guy". He's far more interesting than Billy Budd.

What’s the one book you always recommend to just about everyone?

It depends who I'm talking to. My favorite books - Possession, Goldbug Variations, Hopeful Monsters have not really gone over well with most people I've recommended them to. However, my friend Ted and I have VERY similar tastes - so we are the co-presidents of the Richard Powers/Nicholas Mosley fan club.

Allison and I are huge on sharing book recs, too - we share mainly biographies.

Kate and I also have very similar tastes ... we've shared lots of titles with each other. I love talking with her about books.

Admit it, the librarians at your library know you on a first name basis, don’t they?

Nope. I'm a book buyer, not a book renter.

Is there a book you absolutely love, but for some reason, people never think it sounds interesting, or maybe they read it and don’t like it at all?

I've recommended Possession to a couple of people who couldn't finish it. And Hopeful Monsters too - which is, perhaps, my favorite book ever. Ted read it - and loves it - so at least I have SOMEONE to talk to about it.

Do you read books while you eat? While you bathe? While you watch movies or TV? While you listen to music? While you’re on the computer? While you’re having sex? While you’re driving?

Yes, to all of the above, except for the sex part and the driving part.

When you were little, did other children tease you about your reading habits?

No. Most of my friends were readers, too. Weirdly, it was when I got to college - and lived in an all-girl's dorm my freshman year - that I started getting teased about my intellectual interests. Those girls were ruthless. Mean girls, all of them. Sorry, chickadees, I don't want to be date-raped by some drunken frat boy and call it love. I'd rather read. They would mock me behind my back (I caught them at it a couple of times.) Bitches.

What’s the last thing you stayed up half the night reading because it was so good you couldn’t put it down?

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

UPDATE: Of course everyone who reads me who has a blog can consider themselves tagged!! I love to read about people's reading habits.

Here is Tommy's!

And here's Nina's!

Here's Ricki's!

Here is the newly married man's answers! (His opening paragraph involving my continuing fascination with all things Stockwell made me laugh out loud.)

Here are Lisa's answers

I just find this whole reading-habits thing so interesting.

5 books!!

Got a cool mee-mee from 50 Books:

Five most recent books you've bought for yourself:

Grover Cleveland (The American Presidents Series) - by Henry Graff

Then She Found Me - by Elinor Lipman - I used to have this book - no idea what happened to it. I love it, so I just bought it again

The Inmost Heart: 800 Years of Women's Letters - edited by Olga Kenyon (thanks to Letters of the Day for this one)

Triangle: A Novel - by Katherine Weber

Travels with Herodotus - by Ryszard Kapuscinski (at last.)

Five books you've most recently given other people:

Baseball Writing Anthology - Library of America - sent to Dad, and also to David and Maria

We Need to talk about Kevin - by Lionel Shriver - sent to Beth

Spielberg, Truffaut & Me: An Actor's Diary - by Bob Balaban- sent to Emily

I can't think of anything else.

Five most recent books you've loaned other people, and their status:

I very rarely lend people books. I very rarely borrow books either - I like to own, and be able to dip in and out of it at my own time. But more than that: I'm not a lender. Buy your own.

Last five kids' books you bought:

Ooh, I just went on a binge this morning! I am always in the process of acquiring books I loved as a kid! Here is what I bought a mere 2 hours ago (before I even read these mee-mee!):

Ella of All-of-a-Kind Family by Sidney Taylor. Words cannot express how much I love that whole series - but I love Ella, in particular. A WWI story. And I have a vivid recollection of the illustrations in the book ... I'll have to see if they are what I remember.

The Trumpet of the Swan by EB White. I LOVE Louis, I LOVE the father swan - I love the boy ... and I remember the last paragraph almost word for word.

Midnight is a Place - by Joan Aiken - This book was read to us in the 5th grade - by my worst teacher ever (ROT IN HELL, BITCH.) But I sure remember this book. It takes place in the early dirty days of the industrial revolution in London - at least I think it does - and I know it involves a mystery, and a big gloomy house, and orphans, and a terrifying old man and little kids who have to work in factories for long hours - and sometimes die, because they get squished by the dyeing machine or whatever (the details are lost in my mind). But I know we, as a class, really looked forward to reading hour every day - we wanted to know what would happen!

James and the Giant Peach - by Roald Dahl Hooray!

Seventeenth Summer - by Maureen Daly Okay, there is a long story behind this book and myself. I must have checked it out of the library in high school - I don't know. It was written by a girl who was actually 17 years old - she had won a story contest or something. It takes place in the 1950s - and it was written in the 50s too, I think - so it's not nostalgic 1950s, it's not kitsch 1950s - it's actual 1950s. And it's a teenage romance in a small town - and I remember it being WONDERFUL. I'll have to re-read it someday and see if it holds up.

Last five books you looked at on Amazon/Chapters/Powell's/etc.:

God Is Not Great - by Christopher Hitchens

The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver

The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel by Michael Chabon

Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939 - by Katie Roiphe

Ava Gardner: "Love Is Nothing" by Lee Server

Top five books on your "to read" pile:

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

Orson Welles: Hello Americans! by Simon Callow

By the Lake by John McGahern - they re-named the book when it was re-issued in the states. But the actual title? The Irish title? They May Face the Setting Sun. God DAMnit that's a far superior title. By the Lake? What the heck is that? A Sandra Bullock movie? At any rate, John McGahern is one of the all-time greats, his Amongst Women is a great novel - so By the Lake is definitely on the list.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel by Michael Chabon. I'd read a grocery list if it was written by Chabon.

Bottom five books on your "to read" pile

These are books I've had around forever, and don't see myself throwing them out - but I feel no urgency to read them immediately.

America's Constitution: A Biography by Akhil Reed Amar - I have it, it looks great - I'll read it eventually!

Elia Kazan: A Biography by Richard Schickel (Schickel, of course, is the dude who wrote an entire book about the development of Cary Grant's acting style, going from film to film to film meticulously - not focusing on biography, but on talent, and development. I LOVE that book - and wrote about Schickel here). So I will definitely be reading his biography of Kazan - and very much look forward to it - just not any time soon.

Only Revolution by Mark Danielewski - I wrote just a tiny bit about his freak-out book House of Leaves here - I'll cover it more when I get to it in the Dailiy Book Excerpt thing, but I don't even know what to say - hooly shit, and I've heard this new one is a bit of a let-down, but whatever, I will certainly read it. Eventually.

Grover Cleveland - by Henry Graff. I'm basically collecting the entire series (they haven't published all the books yet) - but I can't imagine I'll get to Grover Cleveland any time soon. However: when I am ready for him, he will be there!! Thank goodness.

Saturday - by Ian McEwan. Eventually I will read it, I've had it since it came out - just not in the mood for McEwan these days. Since he tore my heart out with Atonement, uhm - 4 years ago?? I've stayed far away from him! But I will eventually read it.

Macho macho man

I rarely say I "hate" anything (unless it's applesauce and coconut - damn you, Tom, daaaaamn you!) but I have a vivid memory of haaating "Billy Budd" in high school. I had to read a lot of "hard" books in high school - Scarlet Letter, Tess of the D'Urbevilles - and while they were hard to get through sometimes, i didn't despise them. But I despised Billy Budd. I have no idea why, though. I remember this - I remember thinking Billy (the character) was boringly good - unambiguously good - a goody two-shoes, actually - and I had contempt for him because of that. I still have contempt for goody two-shoes. So that's no surprise. And that's all I remember. Billy Budd was no Sydney Carton, is what I'm saying. Now THERE'S a character I want to read about it - and I felt the same way at 15. But Billy Budd? You want to put a frog in his bed just to see him freak out. And then point and laugh at him.

Uhm, yeah. Don't think that was Melville's intent.

So over the past 5 or 6 years, I gave myself the task to go back and read my entire high school reading list (not all at once, of course, but eventually). And thank God I did. Tess! Moby Dick! Love 'em all.

But my hatred-memory of Billy Budd remained.

So finally, I decided to bite the bullet - and put Billy Budd on my Summer Reading Challenge. I don't enjoy random free-floating hate. It's my least favorite emotion.

I've finished 2 of the books on my challenge (Never Let Me Go - by Kazuo Ishiguro - post here and here - and Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill - post here) - and so what the hell - Billy Budd is 90 pages long. Just DO it, Sheila. Even if you hate it again, what do you care? It's 90 pages!

So I'm 2 chapters in.

Imagine my surprise to find that it is actually a homoerotic novel full of hard bodies, bronzed muscles, physical descriptions of men hanging off of masts - descriptions that go on for (no lie) an entire page, words like "specimen" and "Greek" sprinkled throughout. It's one of the gay-est things I've ever read. Like: OPENLY gay. Like showtunes night at Sidetrax gay. Gay gay gay.

It makes sense when you know a bit about Melville - but I'm actually surprised how OBVIOUS it is. At the 3rd reference in 2 paragraphs to ideal Greek statues, and bronzed brows - I'm thinking, "Uhm, was this book ghost-written by Jean Genet or something?"

I'll report more when I'm more than 2 chapters in - but so far so good. I'm putting the Billy Budd hate to rest! I'm enjoying it. I still wish Billy Budd was more human - but it's certainly not AGONY to read like it was way back when. I love it when that happens.

Veronica - by Mary Gaitskill

I've finished my second book on my Summer Reading Challenge - Veronica, by the great Mary Gaitskill. (Voila.)

Here are some of the many posts I've written about her, marvelous writer:

Commonplace

Mary Gaitskill

Happiness (and the comments to that post are great, Gaitskill fans!)

A birthday post

Veronica is a novel - it's about two women - Alison (the narrator), who was a teenage runaway turned high-fashion model - and her friend Veronica - a blowsy fierce middle-aged woman, whose boyfriend is bisexual - who eventually gives Veronica AIDS. I first encountered Gaitskill with her knock-one-out-of-the-park debut - the short story collection Bad Behavior. Her firts novel is called Two Girls Fat and Thin - and I read it, and honestly remember almost nothing about it - while I can remember certain scenes from stories in Bad Behavior word for word. I should go back and read Two Girls Fat and Thin. I then read, last year, Gaitskill's second short story collection Because they wanted to - and ate up every word. Some of her stories (especially "The Blanket") move me to tears. But there was something in Veronica that left me cold - and I would imagine that a couple years from now I wouldn't remember a bit of it - just like I don't remember a bit of Two Girls Fat and Thin. It makes me wonder if short stories are Gaitskill's true milieu. Like I believe is the case with Lorrie Moore - one of the greatest short story writers ever. I haven't read any of Moore's novels - I think there are two - so I may be wrong in this. I'm just saying that I have rarely read anything more perfect than Moore's collection Birds of America. She is a MASTER. And Gaitskill is a master too. But, to me, there was something lacking in Veronica. I have to think a bit more upon it.

One of the things that occurred to me is this:

Gaitskill is at her best (meaning: better than anybody else) when she hones in on the specific. The people she writes about - from the beginning - are very often nasty selfish weird little people. You don't LIKE her characters. That's not the point. Reminds me of Tommy Lee Jones' point about playing villains - and whether or not an actor needs to LIKE the character he plays. Jones says, "You don't need to like the character. But you do need to want to WATCH the character." I can't look away from Gaitskill's people. Some of it does read like a traffic accident, and I'm rubber-necking by. She's an entryway into a world peripheral to mine, a world that has occasionally touched my own - a world of sex clubs and strippers and whores - not whores meaning "promiscuous" - but whores meaning "sex for money". She writes about girls who strip as they go through art school. She writes about S&M - people who get off on pain, who yearn to go to their limits of endurance ... and yet why? Is it loneliness? Love? What are these people looking for as they beg strangers to whip them, or piss on them - or whatever. The movie Secretary is based on one of Gaitskill's stories - and while it was domesticated up a bit (hard to believe - but not if you've read Gaitskill's actual stuff) - and made into a kind of touching love story ... the grain of truth remains. The lead character accepts the spankings ... for the first time in her life, it gives her purpose, makes her feel needed, necessary. The point is not to find oneself for these people. The point is to LOSE oneself. Anyway, I could go on and on. Gaitskill knows what she's talking about here - this is her topic. I don't know much about her life story, and I won't make any guesses, just because I have read her work. I do know she was a teenage runaway, and did work as a prostitute for a while. There is a strong sense of authenticity in her work - but more than that: this woman is a kick-ass writer, fearless - It takes your breath away. There are no tidy endings, no morals ... But what she does do is she LOOKS, she sees, and she TELLS. She's so very good in the details.

My issue with Veronica is not with the writing. But it seems to me that she was going for something universal here, and I just don't think that that is Gaitskill's particular gift. Not that I don't relate to some of her characters - I always do - it's not a freak show, after all. These people - the addicts and runaways and whores and wanderers - all have something in them that connects them to the human race. I cannot look at them and say, "That, is YOU, over there, and has nothing to do with ME." But she remains honed in on the specifics, the details - what their apartments look like, how they eat, how they talk, what they say when they do talk ... She doesn't worry so much about a message, or about being universal. And I felt a certain drive in her in Veronica to push upward, into some kind of universal truth. For the majority of the book, Alison - who is now a sad middle-aged woman, with Hepatitis C, her beauty gone ... takes a walk in a redwood forest - and ponders the past. We go back and forth in time. And I felt that the past sections were far more vivid - the present-day sections involved Alison looking at the moss, and the trees, and the running streams ... and I felt that Gaitskill was going for something here, something that did not quite work, for me. However, my point here reminds me of the quote I linked to above, from a review of Bad Behavior, a quote I love so much:

In "The Wrong Thing", the novella that concludes the collection, Ms. Gaitskill seems to be striving toward an uncertain goal, and (like her narrator, Susan) she isn't entirely successful. She's slightly out of her depth -- which is exactly where she needs to be; it's the only place she's going to make the discoveries that will take her up to the next level and the levels beyond. Once an artist of her command relinquishes enough control to let her brilliance lead her where it wants to, anything is possible.

YES. She is not "entirely successful" in Veronica either - a bit "out of her depth" - at least in the meandering "look at the moss on the trees and ponder the universe" sections. But I agree with that reviewer that this, on the edge, and not entirely successful, is "exactly where she needs to be". She is a writer who takes risks. Not just for the sake of taking risks. Not for the sake of being shocking, although some of her stories are shocking. She is not in it for the shock. Having known people who live in the world she describes - the underworld, I guess you'd say - I can say that she gets it right. Much in this world would shock the comfortable middle class. Gaitskill lives on the sidelines, her characters do not participate in society in that full and open way ... they are shadow people, tunnel people, forgotten - and many times, have no concept whatsoever of the things many others take for granted. There's a moment in Vernonica where a boyfriend of Alison's breaks up with her - because he has met someone else. He wants to be fair to Alison, so he comes clean. Gaitskill's description of this conversation is brief, stark - and the main thing you come away with is the realization that Alison does not understand his sense of honor. She recognizes that he is behaving honorably - but instead of appreciating it, it embarrasses and shocks her. This is a corrupt world, full of corrupt people. Alison would love to participate in a full life - where things like love, and kindness, and honor are expected, and also understood. She is not so completely gone that she SCORNS such things ... but she certainly knows that she is left out. And that her boyfriend is better off without her. But then - much later in the book - Gaitskill pulls one of her jujitsu moves - and there is a moment of pure and fierce love ... and it was enough to bring tears to my eyes. Gaitskill is not cynical - that's what makes her so fascinating as a writer. You would think she would be, what with her topic - and what she has seen. She is not. But it is an intense and bleak view of the world, pared down, raw. Hard to take.

And for me - all of that is clear when she stays in the details. The "universal" is not for her. At least not when it is gone at directly. Some writers can do that - it is their sensibility, how they see things. Gaitskill's gift is most clear when she is in the muck, describing what she sees.

Example from Veronica:

Because we sold flowers outside bars and go-go clubs, prostitutes were some of our best customers; the nice ones bossed their johns into buying from us. Most of them weren't beautiful girls, but they had a special luster, like something you could barely see shining at the bottom of a deep well. They treated us like sisters, and we were tempted to join them when men came around looking for "models" - which everybody knew meant stripper or whore. Mostly, we would indignantly say no, but sometimes somebody would say yes. I said yes a couple of times. Why I picked those times to say yes, I don't know. One was an old fat man with a spotted face and pale, aggrieved eyes. He ran some kind of business, maybe postcards or comic books. He leaned on a counter in the back room of his store and blinked his pale eyes while I took off my clothes. When I was naked, he looked awhile and then asked if he could look at me from behind. I said okay; he walked around me in a circle and then went back behind the counter again. "You have beautiful hips and legs," he said. "Beautiful shoulders, too. But your breasts are small and they're not that good." He talked to me about the kind of work I might do while I put my clothes back on.

"You mean porn?"

"Sure, we do some porn. There's more money for the girls that way. But we do seminude art, as well." His eyes became more aggrieved. "Do you care what the other girls do?"

I shrugged. Outside the window, electric music corkscrewed through the air. If he hadn't insulted my boobs, I might have tried it out. But I just said bye and left.

Like a cat in the dark, your whisker touched something the wrong way and you backed out. Except sometimes it was a trap baited with something so enticing, you pushed your face in anyway. Once when I was out with my basket, a short man with a square torso said, "Hey, hot shit - you should come work for me." He bounced a rubber ball on the pavement, caught it, and bounced it again. "I'm a pimp." His face was like lava turned into cold rock. But inside him, it was still running hot; you could smell it: pride, rage, and shame boiling and ready to spill out his cock and scald you. I stared in fear. He just laughed and bounced his ball; he knew that for somebody what he had was the perfect enticement.

And then there's this - one of the many sections of the book that describes the world of high fashion, and this image really really struck me:

At a magazine party, I sat at a table with the most famous model of the year, a seventeen-year-old whose laughing face was a fleshy description of pleasure, satiety and engagement that engaged at one decibel again and again. Photographers pitilessly filled her with their radiant needles until she was riddled with invisible holes and joyfully pouring radiance out each one. As an afterthought, a photographer turned and photographed me. My picture would appear later in a magazine society page. In the photo, I ws sitting next to the young writer who had briefly occupied the chair next to me when it was vacated by a columnist. He sat down to ask me if I'd ever seen Modigliani's paintings. "Because you're lilke a beautiful Modigliani painting," he said. "You should go see the exhibit at the Metropolitan." I waited for him to ask me to go with him, but he didn't. He had intense eyebrows and hazel eyes with bright changeable streaks glowing emberlike through the solid color. His name was Patrick. He gave the impression of a fast current that you might ride on, laughing. We talked about nothing and then he got up and left. I waited a very pleasant moment before getting up, too. Six months later his friends woud ignore me and sting me with weapons made of the finest jealousy and gossamer contempt. A woman writing a book on the history of troll dolls would look at me and talk loudly about the trivial nature of beauty and fashion. A short actress would turn her back on me while I was speaking and put her arms around Patrick. I would break a wineglass in a hostess's bathroom and walk on it until the splinters were unseeable. I would change my mind and guiltily mop the glass with a wet towel. "Alison?" Patrick would pound on the door. But that night, he proudly introduced me. That night, I said, "I'm a model," and it came out shy and shining at the same time. People smiled and parted, and allowed me to enter the social grid.

Or this section, when Alison leaves a party with Jamie, a guy she just met. I love how Gaitskill, in 2 or 3 words - can call up an entire personality.

We left the party and went for a walk. On the bottoms of his severely pointed shoes, Jamie wore cleats, which clicked loudly on the pavement. The only people I'd ever known to wear cleats were middle-school boys, who wore them so they could kick hard and make a lot of noise when they walked. I asked Jamie why he wore them, and he said, "I just like them." His words were modest, but they whirred with secret importance. He said everything that way. The British monarchy was very important; Prince Charles's recent marriage was particularly so. Ornette Coleman was the only good jazz musician. He approved of men's shoes on women. He approved of Buckminster Fuller and Malcolm McLaren. He approved of Bow Wow Wow.

His opinions were frivolous, fierce, and exact. He worked in a smal graphics plant that made logos and labels for sundry products. But he was as proud and particular as any Parisian playboy. His favoirte logo was the brand name of a line of white paper sacks commonly used by small grocers; I had never noticed, but TORNADO was printed in brown letters with a vibrant round T at the top of each bag. "It's so elegant," he said, and it was.

Brilliant. So clear. You can't argue with such clarity. It just IS. And the last 3 words of that excerpt - the "and it was" - is typical Gaitskill. It's what makes her so wonderful. You may be lulled into a false sense of superiority towards Jamie, you may think: God what an ass, how pretentious ... You may hate his type. But Gaitskill will never go there with you, in your judgment, she is more interested in being on the inside of the experience. Jamie may be an ass, I mean - he's wearing cleats to a party ... but then he raves about a logo he likes ... and Alison realizes how right he is. That his eye is, in fact, good. And of such small moments are connections made at 2 o'clock in the morning in this dirty lonely city. I've been there. That's just how it is.

The book loses much in the present-day sections, although I can see what she is going for. It is elegiac - and you do feel, by the end, that Alison has lost much ... her past is far more vivid than her present ... Yet the writing is less DETAILED in the present-day sections. It doesn't have that spark of danger, which is one of the reasons i find Gaitskill so compelling. Her work feels on the edge. There is something dangerous about life, and it shows in her writing.

"Never Let Me Go" - part deux

This was the post that made me buy the book immediately. The good thing about the post is that there are no spoilers - none at all. And good discussion in the comments section (all of which I avoided first time I read it - because I feared there would be spoilers).

I am mostly struck (at this moment - I'm still processing the book) by Kath's voice. The narrator's voice. The chatty, detailed, almost mundane voice - it reminded me a bit of the voice in Prep (which is one of the most distinctive and compelling first-person voices I've heard in a long time - I wouldn't say the writing itself was great, but the voice!! And the story! Could not put the book down. Yo) Anyway, Kath's voice reminded me a bit of the voice in Prep - except there's this overlay of portentousness and doom in Never Let Me Go. Like: for all intents and purposes (or: "for all intensive purposes") - it's just your regular old kids-at-boarding-school novel. It's a novel of adolescent angst, a three-dimensional portrait of school, life, romance, teen sex, classes, authority figures, etc. But you still get this creepy sense of how much you don't know ... and you know that when you find out, it's going to be horrible ... but we are never "in" on the secret before Kath is ... We just have to listen to her babble on about her teenage romances and her love triangles, and I kept just getting a kind of gruesome feeling in the pit of my stomach, as I read on. Like: who are they? What are they? Are they old? Deformed? What is it?? It was awful. The narrator's voice (like I said before) is totally convincing - although I have to think about it a bit more.

There's one essential part of the book that didn't quiiiiite ring true for me - but it was alllllmost there.

Sort of spoilers below ... I hint at things that should not be hinted at, if you plan on reading the book.

Only those who have read it follow me!!

So ... there was a false note, for me, in the whole bit about the artwork taken from the kids - and what the students all believe happened to it. How rumors fly, and what they all settle on as the logical explanation.

I need to be careful here, because I'm treading into real Spoiler Land. I feel like the explanation they came up with (the students I mean) ... I guess, if it wasn't so fairy tale-ish, so: "They need our artwork because of THIS!" - I guess I just didn't believe that the STUDENTS would believe that fairy tale explanation. I realize they were sheltered, and in many ways naive - but ... I guess I felt like it was too "and they lived happily ever after".... It did add to the ominous feeling of that part of the book, because you KNEW something bad was coming ... But I still think it might have been more powerful if I, the reader, hadn't been so skeptical. If I, too, had thought; "Maybe that IS why they took the artwork!!"

But I didn't believe it for a second. Perhaps this just tells you that I'm a cynical person who's gotten my heart broke one too many times to believe in that crap anymore. This is highly possible.

I do think Ishiguro is smarter than that, though - and was going for an unbalancing effect, a sort of dreamlike: "what is real, what isn't real" feeling ... and that one thing pulled me out of it. Only momentarily, though. It was like a semi-bad actor showing up in a movie with great actors. You have to just forgive it, and go, "Okay, so I didn't quite believe that ... but oh well ... here comes the next moment! Moving on!"

And when the real explanation comes ... and what the artwork really was for ... and how it was kind of close to their imagining about it ... it was quite chilling. Horrible, really. Makes me want to puke. To be honest, the whole book makes me want to puke.

Am I insane to say that I think it could have made me want to puke more?

I have to think more on it (obviously) ... but I just want to say that I had the same response as Stefanie above, this morning. I read the last 10 pages, and I truly believe if my bed had spontaneously combusted I would have been hesitant to leave the book behind - I was that engrossed, that sucked in - awful, it had an awful inevitability to it, once you truly understood what was going on ... and because of that inevitability (which can take on almost Greek proportions) - there was a coldness to my response to the final 10 pages. Like, the veil was lifted, all was clear ... no escape ... one must trudge with the characters to their fates ... but, like Stefanie, at the last paragraph, I found myself welling up with tears.

And the ending of the book has stayed with me all day.

It reminds me of that one sentence in the last section of Remains of the Day. Anyone who has read the book will know the moment I mean. Something like, "To be truthful, my heart was breaking." No more, no less. No description, nothing but that ... and since the rest of the book was this elegant precise prose ... My God, to suddenly be punched forward into this man's heart like that ... It hit me like a ton of bricks.

The ending of Never Let Me Go, even with its inevitability, hit me like a ton of bricks.

"Never Let Me Go" - by Kazuo Ishiguro

I finished the first book on my Summer Reading Challenge - Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I read it in a day and a half. I was really chilled by it. Scared. Very sad. And I am GLAD nobody leaked to me what it was really about ... I went into it pure. The revelations that came came slowly, and were that much more horrible. I actually was going to finish it last night - it was only about 10 pm but I was exhausted - due to the Bloomsday marathon the day before. I lay in bed, and was nearly done with it - and I suddenly got this creepy feeling, uneasy - like: I need to go to sleep now. If I finish this book now, I might have nightmares - or I will not be able to sleep ... and more than anything else right now - I need SLEEP.

So I reluctantly put the book down with 20 pages to go. Very unlike me.

Slept like a baby. Woke up with a sore neck though - I can't move my head. Typical. Made a cup of coffee, and finished the last 20 pages.

I was right to put it off. Now it's the light of day, the sun is shining - and I can shake off the effect of the book a bit easier.

More later.

Tooooo many books

Got this meme (Mere - BWAHAHAHA) from my dear friend Ted - who just started blogging - go, Ted. (Here's a Diary Friday, by the way, which describes the night Ted and I became friends. We had known each other for a couple of months - but it was on this night that we realized: Uhm ... kindred spirit???)

A book that made you cry: Atonement. I was a freakin' wreck at the end of that book. The rest of the book was a chilling and almost still experience - I didn't cry all the way through reading it. But that last paragraph. I cried so intensely that I scared the dude I was dating at the time. I have been unable to pick up that book ever since - even though I sometimes do yearn to re-read it, it was so good. But nope. Too painful.

A book that scared you: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Uhm ... I've never written a post about this book. I will when I get to it. This book was a mind-freak. I actually had nightmares reading it. It tapped into a deep core of utter terror that I guess I walk around with at all times. Fear of dark, fear of claustrophobia, fear of ... reaching out to find the wall in the darkness and having it not be there ... This book is out of this world. Has anyone else read it? I'll get into more detail during my book excerpt thing - but I was blown away. Not just by the look of the book (you sometimes have to turn it upside down, you have to hold it up to the mirror sometimes) ... but also by his writing, which is startlingly good. I was terrified by this damn book. I felt like a little kid reading it. I didn't want to turn off my light because I knew I would have a bad dream. I read it a couple years ago. Great GREAT read. Scared the shit out of me.

A book that made you laugh: Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh I read it in a recent Book Blogger Classics Challenge - and it made me laugh so hard that I embarrassed myself during public commutes. One of the funniest books I have ever read in my life.

A book that disgusted you: Less than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis. Those people have no redeeming qualities.

A book you loved in elementary school: Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh I mean ... LOOK at Harriet. I STILL dress like Harriet. Coincidence? I think not. She's why I started putting my thoughts down on paper when I was 10 years old.

A book you loved in middle school: The Pigman by Paul Zindel - this is still one of my all-time favorite books. Ever. I still read it, on average, once a year - and have ever since middle school.

A book you loved in high school: The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath The book does not hold up. The poetry, however, just gets better and better ... but the book is juvenile, and doesn't holdup. Still some well-written sections - I latched onto this book in high school. I loved it. Thank goodness it was a phase. Her POETRY is where it's really at.

A book you hated in high school:Billy Budd, by Herman Melville. I still have feelings of revulsion when i think of how much I hated reading that book.

A book you loved in college: Cider House Rules, by John Irving. Still one of my favorite books.

A book that challenged your identity: Diary of Anne Frank. I was 11 when I read it. I realized, for the first time in my innocent life, how much God has to answer for. It was devastating to me. Shattering, really. I remember kneeling by my bed and screaming at God so loudly that I was scared I would be struck by lightning. That book completely re-worked how I thought about the universe, fate, fairness, free will ... It was a horrible experience. I never fully recovered, I guess - and for that I am truly grateful.

A series that you love: The "Emily" books by LM Montgomery
All the Madeleine L'Engle series

Your favorite horror book: It, by Stephen King. A masterwork, as far as I'm concerned.

Your favorite science fiction book: Wrinkle in Time, I suppose is my answer.

Your favorite fantasy: The Narnia books.

Your favorite mystery: I must honor my younger self and say that the first 10 books in the Trixie Belden mega-series are pretty damn great. I should re-read them. I DEVOURED them when I was a kid. Nancy Drew Shmancy Drew. Give me Trixie.

Your favorite biography: Oh God, I'm with Ted. Only one?? I'm a biography freak. Let's see. Chernow's Alexander Hamilton, McCullough's John Adams, the two-part biography of Orson Welles by Simon Callow (oh my God), Joseph Ellis' books on Jefferson and Washington, A. Scott Berg's book on Lindbergh - the Joe Papp biography - Leverich's book Tom about Tennessee Williams (and he died before he could finish Volume 2! Tragedy!), Gerald Clarke's Capote is a masterpiece of the genre - and Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte. Yes, it's gossipy - yes, it's biased - and mythologizes the sisters -but listen - the book has not ever been out of print since it was first published. GIVE IT THE PROPS it deserves. Biographies go out of style so quickly - as new "theories" come up and go down ... but that kind of staying power is notable. I love Mrs. Gaskell's gossipy "I knew Charlotte Bronte" book ... and I know I'm reading a myth, but it's a damn good book anyway. Richard Ellmann's James Joyce is spectacular.

I can't stop. There are even more I need to add.

Your favorite �coming of age� book: Probably Tiger Eyes, by Judy Blume. Awesome book. I still love it. Wrote about it here.

Your favorite classic: Why must I choose. Why.

The first thing that comes to mind is Jane Eyre.

But I also have to say Tale of Two Cities, Brothers K, Crime and Punishment - Pride and Prejudice, Huckleberry Finn. Great Expectations. These are the main ones.

Oh shit, and how could I forget - Moby Dick. Hated it in high school - re-read it in 2003 ... and felt it was one of the most EXCITING books I've ever read. Love it. Love love love it.

Your favorite romance book: Flowers in the Attic by VC Andrews.

JUST KIDDING.

I suppose I would have to say Jane Eyre is the best romance ever. Although ... sigh. I want to add Possession to the list - as well as Life without Friends, a young adult book. Best romance I've ever read. It STILL gets to me.

Your favorite book not on this list:

Hopeful Monsters, by Nicholas Mosley.

Characters

I got this from Super Fast Reader:

Name up to three characters . . .

1. You wish were real so you could meet them:

Nelson Denoon, from Mating
Harriet, from Harriet the Spy
Ilse, from the Emily series, by LM Montgomery - I'd love to meet Emily, too - but Ilse is really the one I'd love to check out in person
Claude Collier, from Lives of the Saints
Owen Meany, and also Hester the Molester, from Prayer for Owen Meany
Mr. Rochester, from Jane Eyre
Molly Bloom, from Ulysses
Sydney Carton, from Tale of Two Cities
Charles Wallace, from Wrinkle in Time

2. You would like to be:

Polly - from the "time" series of Madeleine L'Engle - I especially would like to be her in House Like a Lotus (excerpt here)

Petrova from Ballet Shoes

I'd like to be one of the kids who attends Hogwarts - I don't care which one

I'd like to be Jo March (but then again - who doesn't)

I'd also like to be Queequeg

3. Who scare you:

First and foremost: Cathy from East of Eden (wrote about that monster here)

And I'm gonna go along with what Annie said: Cordelia from Cat's Eye (shivers)

Miss Havisham scares the shit out of me. I never want to go into that room.

Mr. Charrington, from 1984 - I've had nightmares about that guy

Montage ...

... of books. Throughout my tiny apartment.

I like this one because it is so random. EM Forster and Fisher Price. And a wolf-carved stone that I bought at some new agey shop. Why these objects all together? No reason. No reason whatsoever.

Where we are at now ... in the daily book excerpt:

Just looking at this makes me feel like all is right with the world.

The Geek Shelf.

Only one more book will be added to this collection - when it is published in May. And then forevermore there will be silence. It makes me sad.

And of course I want to end with:

Ten Books I couldn't live without

Okay, so I got this dreadfully difficult question from Heather . But it originated here at Kaliana's - and the real fun is to click through and see what books show up on people's lists.

And just for ease's sake ... I am NOT going to include plays in this list.

This is HARD. But here goes.

1. Possession - by A.S. Byatt. Like Heather I have read this book probably 4 or 5 times - I just finished it yet again, and every time I come to it - I see different things, I relate to different aspects. As my life changes, as I grow older ... the book appears to take on deeper meanings - I fluctuate between sympathy for Roland, for Christabel, for Val, for poor Ellen Ash, for Maud ... depending on my mood, or where I am at in my life. Also, and this is a deeper comment: This is a book about intellectuals having love affairs. The cerebral mixed with the primal. This is something that strikes a very intense chord in me ... a problem that has come up in my life repeatedly, because of who I am, and because of my emotional makeup - a fiery mix of brains and passion. Tough for anybody to handle. How will it work? How will I find my way, find peace? My intellectual side is rigid, hard-working, and can be very inflexible. I will not "tone it down" to make others feel comfortable around me. I've been asked (outright, and also subliminally) to "tone it down" and the price (for me) is too great. It's too much of a betrayal. And yet I do not lack feelings, I am not cold ... Maud's struggle in the book with "letting her hair down", her resistance to love, her fear of having her boundaries melded with somebody else's, is my eternal struggle. I have never ever read a better prolonged study of the issues a woman like myself has when she falls in love. It's very specific. There isn't anything generic about a love affair - and yet most books do not tackle it from Byatt's angle. Not only did I love the story, but I felt validated and vindicated by it. It's something I go to again and again, sometimes searchingly, sometimes just with the knowledge that I will be able to lose myself in it ... and sometimes with trepidation. The truths revealed in this book are only live-able to me when I am in a good head-space, and dealing with myself openly. If I'm trying to "hide" (in the same way that Maud hides) - then the book rebukes me. I can't think of too many other books that maintain such a vibrant presence in my life. It cannot be replaced.

2. Ring of Endless Light - by Madeleine L'Engle I love all of her books but for some reason - if I had to choose? If I HAD to? This is the one I feel I would "need". That's the word that comes up. I need this book. I needed it from the first moment I read it - years ago. It has been there for me in really dark times. I have looked to it still, for inspiration, strength. I first read it when I was 19, 20 ... And it's funny ... but I still feel the same way about it. Extraordinary.

3. Lives of the Saints - by Nancy Lemann Who can say why some books get into our psyche and others do not? This is a slim novel, a first novel ... it is about nothing except an aimless post-college girl living in her home town of New Orleans, having wacky adventures, and loving a man who is gin-soaked and hilarious and tragic. I must get going with my 'daily book excerpt' thing again so that I can get into my adult fiction, which will be a lot of fun - damn that Lucy Maud for writing so much! Since I first read Lives of the Saints (and I remember picking it out, at random) - I have read her other books (and there aren't many) - and while I adore Sportsman's Paradise and Fiery Pantheon (not too wacky about Malaise) ... my heart belongs to Lives of the Saints. Why do I love it? God, let me see. First of all, it is laugh out loud funny. For a good summer after I read Lives of the Saints I found myself writing like her, imitating her. I love her style. It is eccentric, witty ... i remember reading it out loud to my boyfriend at the time and he would just GUFFAW. But then it turns around and stabs you in the heart, with sentimentality, sudden pain, loss so intense it takes your breath away. A true Southern novel - with that air of eccentricity and hilarity. GREAT characters, so so funny. Claude Collier - the main guy in the book - was the context through which I saw M., that first crazy summer I met him. M. was just as nuts as Claude, just as hard to pin down ... I could see a more conventionally minded girl being driven out of her cotton-pickin' mind by M. - and somehow ... Claude, and the spectacle of Claude, helped me deal with M. But all of this is just words. I love the books of Nancy Lemann and this one is one I go back to over and over and over. I love her sensibility. And more importantly: she is the type of writer who inspires me to keep writing. Here's an excerpt.

4. Moby Dick - by Herman Melville I wrote a little bit about what it was like to re-read Moby Dick on my own - as opposed to being forced to read it in high school - here. This book makes my heart pound faster. Every damn word is good. It's an overwhelming experience ... it's gluttonous ... because Melville is so spectacular, sentence after sentence after sentence ... You want him to take a break and be MEDIOCRE for just a page or two so that you, the reader, can not feel so inadequate. I read the book in high school but I didn't really READ it until 2001 - and my experience of reading that book was excitement. And also: growth. The chapter about "The Blanket" touched me on such a profound level that I can honestly say my mind-set slightly shifted after reading it. How would I approach life, how would I protect myself and yet also remain open and alive ... these were questions I was truly grappling with in the early months of 2001, a generally terrible time for me. And I read that chapter - and it landed within me so hard that I felt like I plummeted through the floor with the impact. A book that can do that is a book I want to have around.

5. The Dead - by James Joyce. Now this was a really tough choice. But if I look deep in my heart, I realize that the thought of never being able to read the short story "The Dead" again actually causes me pain.

6. Hopeful Monsters - by Nicholas Mosley Crap, I keep saying I'm going to write about this book but it feels too huge. This book, when I read it, explained me to myself. It felt like my own system of beliefs - which are erratic, and yet make perfect sense to me - had been written down. It's an intellectual feast, a 20th century romp through politics and science ... I honestly don't know how to write about this book coherently. If my soul could take the form of a book - it would be Hopeful Monsters - which is really funny because "soul" sounds like such a mushy rainbow-y girlie word - and this book is stringently intellectual, full of piercing questions with no answers - pondering contemplative intellectual hypotheses, cameos by Heisenberg and Einstein and others ... so it's a funny book to attach the word "soul" to. But that's part of Mosley's point. One of my favorite books ever written. Can't live without it.

7. Catch 22 - by Joseph Heller One of the greatest books ever. Talk about having every sentence be brilliant and funny ... seriously, how can one author sustain a ba-dum-ching energy through that long of a book? I came to it late, despite the insistence of pretty much my entire family - all of whom are Catch-22 FREAKS OF NATURE. And within the first 2 pages I was hooked. This book is like crack. Not that I do crack. But if I did, I bet it would feel a little bit like reading Catch 22. I mean, come on. Chief White Halfoat? Is there a funnier character? Major Major Major Major? I love them all. Crack.

8. The Pigman - by Paul Zindel. I'm not sure, and don't quote me on this - but this might be my favorite book ever written. It's certainly in the eternal top 5 ... in the same way that Empire Strikes Back is, on my movie list. It might not always be number 1 - but it NEVER falls far from it. I first read this book at age 13. I still read it about once a year today. It's strangely connected, in my mind, now, with Sept. 11 - in a way that moves me profoundly. Strange what one remembers, the connections one makes. It's in my life - always. I babble about this book here.

9. Mating - by Norman Rush. Like Possession, like Goldbug variations, like Hopeful Monsters - this is a book that takes as its topic the intellectual component of falling in love. This is something that resonates with me ... and also is something that is rarely discussed, or talked about in books. Mating is all about that. I can't really add to my feelings about the book. I love it fiercely. And the section about Victoria Falls is something I refer to, over and over and over again. I never EVER get tired of it. I remember when I first read that section, thinking: "Okay. I'm hooked. I love this book now." Put a fork in Sheila. She's done. I've actually started to re-read it again. Every time I read it, I see something new, I get something new out of it. This, to me, is the mark of a true classic. I can re-visit it and it seems like the BOOK has changed - only no, it's just me.

10. Emily Climbs - by L.M. Montgomery I know, strange ... it's the second book in the series - but there's just something about it. Every part of it - the journal entries, the different episodes that have become almost mythic to me: Emily being trapped in the church, Ruth Dutton, Emily and Ilse sleeping in the haystack, Emily's second sight, Emily walking home to New Moon in a rage ... I think Lucy Maud is truly at her best in this book. I just lose myself in it every time I pick it up. Like I said at the beginning of this post, it is HARD to choose ... How can I leave off Tangled Web? Or Anne of the Island?? But for now - right in this moment - I feel that I cannot bear to be parted from Emily Climbs.

The Dead Fathers Club

Emily sent me a copy of the novel The Dead Fathers Club. I started it yesterday and am already a quarter of the way through. I dare anyone to pick up this book, read the first chapter, and then put the book down without finding out what happens. NOT POSSIBLE. Or if you do put the book down, there is something seriously wrong with you.

It's so good!! I love so-called Young Adult novels anyway - it's my favorite genre (if they're well-written).

This book is written from the perspective of an 11 year old British boy named Philip. Philip's father just died in a car crash, and the book opens with Philip seeing his Dad's Ghost at the funeral. The Dad, unlike other book-ghosts, is not benevolent, loving, nostalgic. No. He is sad, tormented, and needs his son to know that the car accident was actually NOT an accident. And he needs his son to take revenge. His 11 year old boy. There's a Hamlet-ish feel to all of this ... and I have no idea what is going to happen - but I already can't put it down. Naturally, Philip's school starts to get worried about him - because he sometimes is seen talking to nobody (he's actually talking to his Dad's Ghost) - and he's put into counseling - and he's furious at his uncle who appears to already be making the moves on his mother ...

Here's an excerpt. I am just in love with the voice of this book. It's perfect. Philip and his class go on a field trip, a sleep-over field trip ... and Philip's Dad's Ghost follows along. The shit has already started to hit the fan. Philip threw his dinner across the room because he was in such a rage at the encroachment of his uncle. And now the whole school knows about it, and how he broke a window ... and all the kids start teasing him, etc.

I love when he chooses to use all-caps. It's awesome. Like "POT" below.

Excerpt from The Dead Fathers Club, by Matt Haig

Mr. Rosen is a nice Teacher with hairy hands and a good watch but he is strict. He sometimes shouts an dgets a big neck like the Incredible Hulk but his neck goes red and a bit blue but not green and when he shouts little bits of spit jump out of his mouth like they are scared of his voice.

But he was being very nice to me and saying There is no shame in walking in your sleep Philip.

He told me about when he was my age and he walked in his sleep into his sisters bedroom and picked up a book and waited by her bed. He said I was dreaming I was in a library.

I laughed but I knew really it wasn't as bad as smashing a window and I think he knew as well.

And then Mr Rosen went quiet and I looked out of the window and there were drops of rain on the glass like little worlds and outside there was grass and rocks and sheep and it was all hills and I wondered if Dads Ghost was here he would be able to see all the ghosts of murdered Romans. And I wondered if Emperor Hadrian was murdered and if he ever comes back to see what is left of the wall and if he gets sad when he sees just lumps of stone in the ground with grass growing over them and a few people walking with maps and looking at them and wanting to go home.

We went to a place with other Roman buildings and they were built in 130 AD which was eight years after when they started building Hadrians Wall which was 122 AD.

We had plans of the buildings and there were kitchens and toilets and bedrooms but you couldnt tell that from the stones in the ground only from the plans. And Mrs Fell and Mr Rosen were talking all about it but I wasn't really listening I was feeling weird like my body was just air and nothing was real and my heart wasn't beating like normal. It wasn't going beatbeat beat-beat beatbeat it was going beat beatbeat beat beatbeatbeat for a little bit which made me think I was going to die but then it stopped doing it so I didn't tell anyone.

At the meal there was black beefburgers which were thin and chewy like shoes and more mashed potatoes from the big POT.

And then there was a disco which was really just Mrs Fells CD player she had brought from home. She played some music and it was Beyonce and all the girls danced but none of the boys danced except where there was rapping. And Mr Rosen danced like Dad used to which was like a bird which couldnt fly but Mrs Fell could dance well and she was wearing Make Up and green round her eyes which sounds weird but it was nice. I must have been looking a long time because she saw me looking and she waved her arms for me to come and dance and she was dancing with Charlotte Ward and a circle of girls and Mr Rosen so I didnt want to come. But Mrs Fell never stops so she came over and took my hand and pulled me up to dance and Jordan was giggling at me and the giggle spread out like fire to Dominic and even Siraj who used to be my friend before Dad died.

Mrs Fell said Come on Philip. Come and dance.

I said I I I

Mrs Fell said Come on.

And then all the boys were laughing but Mrs Fell couldn't hear and she took me to the circle of girls dancing and my heart started going funny again. I danced but I didnt want to because it was a girl song about boys and all the boys were staring and nudging and my face was burning HOT.

Mrs Fell was only being nice because she thought I was on my own but sometimes being nice is as bad as being horrible. And so I danced without moving very much just my arms a little bit and it was bad and I just kept seeing the faces of everyone and Mr Rosen was flapping his wings and smiling at me and I wished he was cross with me and didnt give me special treatment.

Mr Rosen said All right Philip?

I said Yes.

And after 100 minutes the song ended and I sat down near the boys but not with them. A song came on which I used to like before Dad died and it sounded horrible and stupid now like robots. And when it was on Dominic and Jamie Western and Jordan did a press up competition and Dominic won.

I looked at Mrs Fell and I think I had upset her because she was dancing the same but not smiling now and I felt bad for upsetting her.

"Word came today"

This post made me cry - it's a swept-away and yet articulate response to Richard Powers' Goldbug Variations It brought me back to my own experience reading that extraordinary book ... and how blown away I was (and still am) by it. I've never written about Goldbug Variations because ... I find the prospect daunting, I guess. Where to start?? The same with Hopeful Monsters - a book that means more to me almost than any other. I can't seem to bring myself to write about it. The last big book on my personal-fave list (and I always think of these three together) is Mating - and that one I DID manage to write about. In a frenzy. I find some books hard to talk about. Because not only are they a good story, a good book - but they are sometimes like angels, come into my life at the perfect reason, to help me struggle with a certain issue ... the books show up - These 3 books were like that. There was no reason for me to read them. I picked up Hopeful Monsters because I liked the cover art and the description of the plot on the back. I picked up Mating because the description of the plot on the back spoke to me. Nobody recommended it. I read it a couple years after it won the National Book Award. And I picked up Goldbug Variations for ... I have no idea why. But these three books - together - ended up being woven together into a rope, a strong rope - for me to hold onto - until the bad-ness passed. This was in the late 90s. Each book is dog-eared from re-readings. I love them as BOOKS, but I also love them as saviors. Goldbug Variations came at a time when I was ricocheting around in my own loss, and I had been for about a year. Everything was cold, I was always walking into the wind. Goldbug it was challenging, a real feat, it takes concentration - and it's an intellectual battle. But (as it so often is for me) - the intellect is PART of the passion. It's not either/or. I don't separate. And an intellectual love affair ... hmmmm ... what would that be like? I know exactly what it would be like, and it is the only kind of relationship possible for me. There is a hopelessness in that. A swoon of necessity, of self-knowledge. And in these 3 books I list here - I've seen such a relationship described, dissected, analyzed. (Possession is another one, actually).

But alongside of (or woven into) the intellectual rigor of Goldbug Variations is this keening note of mourning, longing, bittersweet love ... Oh, how I know that. I know it better than anything else.

He feels a strange euphoria, an overwhelming sense of inevitability. The thing about to make its grand entrance surprises him by its uncanny familiarity.

-- Richard Powers, Goldbug Variations

"Are you waiting for someone?" he asked. It was the first time he had spoken to me, ever.
I didn't say what I wanted to say, which was, "Yeah. You." Instead, I smiled up at him, strange how familiar he seemed, uncanny familiarity, and said merely, "Yeah."

I still haven't written about Goldbug Variations. I still don't feel ready.

Here's the link again to the post that started off my brain a-spiralling. Thinking about that book makes my heart pound faster.

Overwhelming book deliveries

The Amazon logo smiling at me repeatedly. Something about unwrapping books makes my heartbeat quicken. I just don't even know where to begin.

I finished Blue Blood - the book by Edward Conlon, NYC detective and Harvard graduate. Dude can write. Thought the book was about 3 chapters too long. At the end, we have his experience at the landfill on Staten Island, post 9/11 - which was one of the more horrifying and disgusting things I have ever read - but riveting - so glad I read it - it's just that there were maybe 3 extraneous chapters floating around BEFORE that. But still. LOVE his writing and I will definitely keep an eye out for more of his work.

I also finally finished Imperial Grunts by Robert Kaplan - a book I had started about a year ago, put down - and now finished, in a frenzy, staying up late to polish it off. He's great. I look forward to the other books in the series he's planning and working on now.

But now books are arriving - either as gifts (thank you!!) or from stuff I bought in a fit of celebration last week - having come out of a brief rough spot - thankfully brief .... but harsh nonetheless. I needed books to get me through. Or - not even the books themselves - just the prospects of the books. And Rocky, of course. Rocky helped get me through. But that's a given at this point. I had forgotten, though, that I had had a book-buying binge, even though it was only a couple weeks ago. A lot of times I don't remember much of what goes on during the "rough spots" and this was no exception. Even 2 days later, the awfulness started to fade and mist into memory.

But now they are arriving.

Fun!!!

First of all - Tennessee Williams' notebooks. Holy freakin' crap - it's gotta be 1000 pages long - brand-new published - and ... I flipped through it last night, astonished first of all at how gorgeous the book itself is - but also how beautifully it is put together. On the right hand side of the page - we have the entries in Williams' notebooks - and on the left hadn side - we have corresponding notes. So that means you don't have to flip back and forth endlessly for the footnotes. It's amazing - we see his postcards, his photos ... I haven't even started reading it yet, and just looking at it is giving me a heart attack.

I got 3 more Library of America books ... I already have many (American Poetry, Willa Cather, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner - those are all from my dad) - and I also have Jefferson: Writings. But over the last 3 days more have arrived: Hamilton: Writings (there will, naturally, be some redundancy with the rest of my Hamilton collection, but that's okay) - the speeches of Abraham Lincoln (2nd volume - from 1859 - 1865 - and also the Library of America collection of writings during the Constitutional Congress of 1787. Letters written home, minutes kept, speeches ...

I feel actually a little nauseous thinking about how much I already love these books.

I have also been slowly but surely collecting each book in the American Presidents Series, edited by the late Arthur Schlesinger - and they're quite wonderful - written by all different people - I've very much enjoyed the ones I've already read. They're cheap, and usually about 150 pages long, maybe less - a quick read - and it focuses purely on the presidency of the individual. You get maybe 2 chapters of lead-in - but the rest is all about what went on during the presidency. So far I've read the one on James Madison and Thomas Jefferson - and over the past week I received 3 more to add to my collection: George Washington and John Adams and John Quincy Adams. But I will someday have them all - see if I won't!!

I also received the book Final Cut which I have always wanted to read - it's one of my favorite kinds of books: how certain films become notorious disasters. It's interesting to read books like "The Making of Casablanca" - to hear how things become hits - but sometimes it's more interesting to learn from the debacles. Like Devil's Candy - about the making of Bonfire of the Vanities which is one of the best books about Hollywood I've ever read. Anyway, I've wanted to read Final Cut for a while - it tells the story of Heaven's Gate - a movie directed by Michael Cimino which - like the words "Ishtar" or "Waterworld" has come to be shorthand for: 'HUGE FUCKING MESS'. Heaven's Gate is often seen as the granddaddy of all messes - and this book is written by one of the producers on the film. I can't wait to read it. Which, judging from my To be Read pile, will be sometime around 2015.

Oh, and also I got the "baseball anthology" in the Library of America - and I am almost more excited about that one than all the others. Classic American baseball writing since the beginning of the sport? Please count me in. Now.

I received a MASSIVE biography of Alexis de Toqueville - from an absent friend across the Atlantic (I miss you!!) - like seriously - it is HUGE - and gorgeous, beautiful typeface, very readable - and it's a guy I know almost nothing about, although I have read his book about America. So I'm very excited to read that, too. In 2023, which is when I will get to it.

Let's see. What else.

Oh yeah - a book about Theo Van Gogh - and also the novel Perfume: Story of a Murderer - which I've been dying to read, but just keep forgetting about. So now it has arrived.

I know there's more.

Some people go shoe-shopping when they get the blues. (Although what I had could not be called the blues. It was more like a crisis.) Shoes don't do it for me, although I love them as well. Books bring on the adrenaline, the pheromones, the energy, the pulse quickening. They bring life. Life to the spirit, yet again.

Childhood books!!

List 5 books that played an important role in your childhood and explain why

Dan tagged me! Eons ago and I'm just getting it now because my trackback functionality basically doesn't exist. And to everyone out there - consider yourself tagged, if you want to play along. I always LOVE to hear about people's favorite childhood books. I love to see how we (at least people in my generation) overlap ... but then it's cool also to see the ones that span generations ... and also to encounter titles I've never heard of, but which mean a lot to somebody else. I love it. I love Dan's memories about his books. Very cool.

My first response to the "meme" is - only 5??

List 5 books that played an important role in your childhood and explain why

Harriet the Spy - by Louise Fitzhugh. This is probably my most favorite book ever written. Period. I love it because of the long-lasting impact it had on me - but I also just love it because it's so damn good, and she's such a good writer - and all of those characters literally live on in my brain. I wrote a whole post about Harriet. (And also here's an excerpt from it)

Charlotte's Web - by EB White. I cannot discuss this book rationally or with any distance. I read it to tatters. I think it was read to our class in 3rd grade, and from the very first sentence (which I still can recite from memory - anyone else know it?? Come on. Give it up if you know it.) And then there's the last paragraph of the book which I cannot even think about without getting tears in my eyes. One of the best books ever written.

Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfield - and part of a series of books with different heroines (Theatre Shoes, Dancing Shoes, etc.) They were all books about little girls who ended up being very good at something - ballet, tennis, etc. They were always English, and for the most part - the environment of the books was grim either pre-World War II or post-war England. (Ballet Shoes was published in 1937, a grim time indeed). And that atmosphere is in the books, although the focus is on the ballet school. It's a dark time, hard times, penny-pinching times. This sounds so pedantic and so stupid but these books are really quite wonderful - Ballet Shoes, in particular. It was made into a Masterpiece Theatre mini-series which (holy crap) I just found on Netflix and ordered! It won an Emmy at the time and I remember loving the series - I approved of their adaptation of my favorite book, basically. Haha, I was 9 years old, saying ponderously, "Yup. That's okay by me."

Ballet Shoes is about three orphan girls - unrelated - Pauline, Petrova, and Posy - who were adopted - not by a married couple but by an unmarried woman who takes them in. Times are so tough, and money is so short - that it is suggested that perhaps the girls should be enrolled in the school of dramatic arts in London - get their "licenses" and start working as child actors - to make a bit of money. Posy ends up being what they would call a genius ballerina at the age of 9 years old. A Margot Fonteyn in the making. This book was not just a book to me, though. It was a guide-book. It was instructions to me, at age whatever, of how I wanted to live my life. This was going to be my life. It was a serious business. It is a craft to be studied - and there are options. Meaning: if you want to do this, you can. I was going to devote my life to my art. Just like Pauline, Petrova and Posy. I still own this book. Streatfield's a very good writer, too. I have probably made the book sound rather silly - but it's really about these 3 girls, and their anxieties about making money, about not being a "burden" on their adopted parent, about how to scrimp and save for audition dresses ... Meanwhile, it was a whole different world being presented to me as a kid. Galoshes, "macks", the Cromwell Road, streetcars, and organdy dresses ... not to mention the entire business of Theatre. I read Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird at age 10 because of Ballet Shoes. The girls were in a production of it. Marvelous world created. This is the best of the series. (Excerpt here)

A Wrinkle in Time - by Madeleine L'Engle L'Engle is one of my personal idols, and this book started it all. What a vision of the universe. I still can't live that truth on a day to day basis ... although dammit, I do my best. It is the goal, it is what I struggle to do. What a healing vision of what makes the whole operation tick, and how it works. The power of love. The strength of love. Evil exists, and it throws a black cloud over all of us ... but never underestimate how much love really matters. It is never irrelevant or meaningless. I share many of her views on tough topics - not all of them - but many of them (when she gets overly pious, I roll my eyes - because her writing gets yawningly boring then. I kind of get into it here - with her whole "sodomy" thing - where I feel she was, frankly, WAY out of her depth, as an author - and I rarely feel that about her.) By tough topics I mean, essentially, that I can't not believe in the goodness of people. And I won't let anyone take that from me - and they try! You have to WORK to remain optimistic, and faith-full, and to maintain a belief in redemption. You have to hold onto that shit because it drives people lnuts and they want to take it from you. I am not cynical. I hear all the weary "oh what is the world coming to" drivel from people, or "Oh, people are so much worse now than they were back in the golden days of my youth" and I seriously find that crap spiritually grating to listen to. Or not just grating - but almost dangerous. Like I need to protect my hope, my belief in people's goodness (thank you, Anne Frank) and that sort of weary hopeless cynicism goes against my core beliefs, and how I want to live my life. L'Engle has helped show me the way. Read her book about going back to the time of Noah (Many Waters - wonderful book). And all of those Biblical-era people come to life in that book- with the same loves and hopes and fears and biases and stubbornness as people now. It's a beautiful vision of a continuum of humanity.

And so I always read what she has to say, because I can guarantee - even if I disagree with it - it will be better written than most anything else out there. Her religious books are actually awesome - her Genesis trilogy is something I go to time and time again - but then she wrote a book about Christian art and I found the whole thing not just tiresome but also disgusting. I was disgusted by her views. Madeleine! My idol! Yup. However I read every repulsive word. That's a rare author.

Wrinkle in Time - her big "break" - isn't, I don't think, my favorite of her books. I would probably choose Ring of Endless Light as my favorite of all of her books - but Wrinkle in Time was my introduction to this marvelous thought-provoking creative author. This woman who really thinks about things, ponders them, feels them, goes there. Nothing about her is facile or easy. She is tough, and I love love love her for that. God, she's good. I cling to her work, at times. The vision that she articulates ... the grief and hope living side by side - the possibility of redemption, even here on earth - how you must never ever ever think that your love doesn't matter ... I find her stuff very very healing. I was only 10 when I read that book, but it made a lasting impression on how I see the world. (Excerpt here)

From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler - by EL Konigsburg. MAGIC. This was another one of those great books that feature kids with very little adult supervision, like Harriet. I loved that. They run away, and they camp out in the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan (those illustrations!), hiding in the bathrooms until the janitorial staff leaves, and then they have the run of the entire place. They take baths in the fountain, and gather up the pennies dropped at the bottom, so that they have funds. Another one of those books that really challenged me as a kid. Remember the narrative voice of that book? That older woman, slyly knowing, with occasional asides to Saxonburg? The voice of this book suggested a whole other world. It did not pander to me because I was 9 years old. It figured I could handle it. And you know what? I could. Not only could I handle it - but I re-read this book recently and remembered certain passages almost word for word. (Excerpt here)

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Okay - I was young enough when I first read this book that I remember reading it out loud to my mother - or maybe to somebody else, and my mother overheard me - and Meg, at one point, says this line: "But I am afraid I don't!" And this was my first experience of a contraction, believe it or not. Or maybe I had seen one - but had never put it together - and I pronounced it wrong. I didn't get it. I didn't know what "don't" was, at least not written down - so I said "don't" as though it were "dahnt". I didn't get that it was "do not" shortened. That that's what that looked like. So I had to be very young. I remember my mother saying, "That should be 'don't' - which is really two words shortened into one. It's really saying 'do not'." And I completely remember this almost exhilarating shiver going over me ... it seemed so cool, like a secret password to another level of language, a trick, a key to some sort of code. "Don't" really means "do not". Wow! And you say it "doh-nt" not "dah-nt". Revelation. So I am thinking I had to be 7 or 8 when I read this book.

I can't even say I read Little Women. I lived it. I read it and read it and read it ... and then when I read it as a teenager of course I understood so much more, all the romantic nuances, etc. I will NEVER be reconciled to the stupid stuttering German - I always wanted her to be with Laurie - I believe we have covered this - and I know the arguments, I know that Laurie isn't really right for Jo ... but it was only later when I learned that Alcott was pressured to marry Jo, that SHE wanted Jo to be a "bachelor" - like Alcott was - but oh no no, that would not do. Jo must be domesticated! Knowing what Alcott's true desire was, in terms of that character, makes a lot of sense to me. I can't even count how many times I have read this book. And what's amazing about it is that the same scenes get me ... every single time. Waiting for Marmee to return when Beth is sick - and Laurie gives Jo wine to calm her down. When Beth is given the piano. (See? I have goosebumps just writing this down). When Amy falls through the ice - but more than that: when Jo sits by her sick bed afterwards, and torments herself about her terrible temper. I had a terrible temper as a child, and I still struggle with it. It's like I get tunnel vision in those moments, the feeling of threat is so huge, the feeling of rage so enormous. Marmee's advice to Jo in that one scene is advice I took to heart, too. When Jo bursts out crying after selling her hair and Meg, of course, Meg is the sister who would "get it". Meg knows. Meg has her little vanities, her girlishness ... and she doesn't think Jo is silly for mourning her hair. I love love love Meg in that scene. I can't even say what the book gave me, or why it's important. It just LIVES, and continues to do so. (Great conversation here about Louisa May Alcott. I love talking about these shared beloved books with others who love them. It's such a huge pleasure.)

The Diamond in the Window - by Jane Langton. What a book. It's about a brother and sister - Eleanor and Eddy, who live in Concord Massachusetts, with their crazy uncle and weary aunt (who are also brother and sister - neither of them married). The uncle is an Emerson freak - who has kind of lost his mind, he can no longer live by himself, and he kind of believes he IS Emerson. The aunt is the responsible one, giving piano lessons, worrying about money, and not living her own life, even though she is a young woman. One day, when looking up at their house, Eleanor and Eddy notice a window shaped like a keyhole up in the roof. A window they have never seen before even though they have always lived in that house. They do a bit of exploring and discover a secret room in the attic, filled with old treasures and a toy chest and 2 small single beds - but no one will explain what it means. It is an unmentionable topic. Something unspeakable occurred in the past, apparently ... and Eleanor and Eddy need to be shielded from it. Both of them start having dreams - dreams which become increasingly real (for example - Eleanor falls out of a tree in one of the dreams, and wakes up to find that she has a big bloody scratch on her arm). All of the famous characters of Concord show up in these dreams - as guideposts, clues, messages .... Emerson is there. Thoreau is a character. Louisa May Alcott comes into a dream as well. It is an extraordinary book. I loved it so much it almost made me nervous. It doesn't talk DOWN to kids. I LEARNED stuff when reading this book. The whole transcendentalist movement is mentioned extensively in the book - because Uncle Freddy wants to bring it back - to honor his heroes of days gone by. Fantastic. (Excerpt here.)

Crap. That's already more than 5.

Gluttonous ...

I feel gluttonous just LOOKING at this list of lists. Eventually I must do them all. Of course.

I'll do a quick pass-thru - but I definitely need to go into more detail. Some of these list ideas are SO fun.

Worst Books Ever, or Five Hours of My Life I'll Never Get Back

Definitely The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks. I didn't even last 5 hours. What a piece of shit.

Books I Have Lied About Reading

I once told someone I had read Cannery Row when I hadn't.

Books I Have Lied About Liking

Women Who Run with the Wolves. It just seemed easier to agree, rather than not. Grease the wheels of life, baby. Be nice.

Book-to-Movie Adaptations Where, Frankly, the Movie Was Better

Ordinary People (although the book is great, too)

I'll think more about this ...

Books I Used to Love, of Which I Am Now Ashamed

Hm. I'll have to think about that. I'm not ashamed of much.

Best Book Titles of All Time

I think Wrinkle in Time is one of the greatest book titles ever.

I'll have to really go into this one.

Books That I Expected to Be Dirtier

All DH Lawrence.

My Real Guilty-Pleasure Reads, and Not the Decoys I Talk About Openly

The Story of O.

Also all of Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty books.

See? I'm not ashamed of much.

Books You Must Read Before You Die, but Would Rather Die Than Read

Remembrance of Things Past

Books I Refused to Read for a Long Time Because too Many (or the Wrong) People Recommended Them

The Shipping News comes to mind. Once I read it, I realized: Oh. THAT'S why everyone told me I had to read it.

Books I Read Only After Seeing the Movie

will come back to this ...

Books I Most Often Try to Persuade Other People to Read

I don't really do that anymore. Probably Ryzsard Kapuscinski's stuff.

But a couple of other recommendations come to mind. I recommend specific books to specific people. Like recommending the Lindbergh biography to Allison. It's huge, it's exhaustive - I knew she would LOVE it. But I wouldn't recommend that to everyone. So it's not general

Authors I Wish Had Written More Books Already

Ryzsard Kapucinsky. sniff sniff

And, believe it or not, Madeleine L'Engle. She's written like 80 books but I still want more.

I'll come back to this one.

Overused Plot Points That Drive Me Nuts

needs more thought

Books in Which I Liked the Secondary Characters Better Than the Main Character, or Books in Which I Wanted to Beat the Main Character Senseless with a Tire Iron

hahahaha This is a great question. I'll come back to it

Books I Lied About Reading and Then Wrote an A+ Term Paper On

Genius. Well, the whole Country Wife nonsense in college comes to mind ... a story which I have yet to tell on this blog.

Books I Lied About Reading/Liking Solely to Look Smart/Pretentious

I don't really do that.

Books I Wish I Hadn't Finished, or Worst. Ending. Ever.

Hmm. Not sure I understand this one. I'll think more upon it.

Books I Read after Oprah Recommended Them

I don't really do that.

Books I Will Never Read Precisely Because Oprah Recommends Them

Ha. Nope, I don't do that either. She's chosen some great books.

Literary Characters I've Developed Crushes On

Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice

Claude Collier (from Lives of the Saints - pitter PAT!

Cal from East of Eden

John from The Pigman

Books I Only Read to Impress Other People

I don't really do that.

Best Books Not to Read from Start to Finish, or Best Bathroom Books

David Thomson's Encyclopedia of Film. Best bathroom book ever.

Books I Shouldn't Admit Made Me Cry Like a Baby

I rarely cry reading books. The ones that have made me cry I freely admit. No shame.

Books I Only Read for the Title

good question. I will come back to it.

Books I Re-Read When I Have Nothing Else to Read

Possession. I'm re-reading that right now.

I also re-read Margaret Atwood's short stories.

I read Robert Kaplan when I've got nothing else to read.

And all Nancy Lemann books

Books People Keep Recommending That, Frankly, Sucked Ass

I read Nicholas Sparks' The Notebook on a recommendation (from a good friend) and I am serious when I say: I NEVER took a book recommendation from him again. I also didn't tell him how I felt about it - because why do that?

Books My Teacher Made Me Read That I Really, Really Liked

Tale of 2 Cities - in high school
Also The Pigman in 8th grade - and all of Robert Cormier's stuff. I still love those books.

Books My Teacher Made Me read That Made Me Question the Value of My Education

awesome one. I'll come back to that.

Books That Made Me Want to Have Sex with at Least One Character

I definitely would like to have sex with Mr. Darcy

Also Bud White in LA Confidential

What was the name of the young man in Atonement? Robbie? I should put him on the list too, probably.

Books I Actually Read but Got a Poorer Grade on the Paper I Wrote on the Subject Than My Best Friend Who Did Not Read the Book

Oh God, I have so many of these. It used to drive me INSANE. I'll come up with some examples.

Books I Read Because the Author Looked Hot

Huh?

Books I've Read Aloud

I read aloud a lot. Possession is a great read-out-loud book due to all of the different voices and poets and excerpts - I find that really fun. But I read out loud all the time ... it relaxes me.

Books I Love Even Though the Last Twenty Pages Made No Damn Sense

Books I Have Written a Prequel/Sequel to in My Own Head

Beautiful question ... i'll come back to it

Books I Keep Meaning to Read, but Then I See Something Shiny

well, that was the point of the whole From the Stacks challenge - which I completed in December! Stop getting distyracted! Read those books you already have on the stacks!

Books I Will Go to the Mattresses for, Even Though I Hate the Writer

I'll go to the mattress for a lot of things. I'll go to the mattress against censorship, against whiny anti-intellectual commentary (usually incorporating the word "latte" as though that is some kind of shorthand that we all can understand. Here's a hint: You look lazy when you use it too much. You look like an asshole. What the hell is wrong with "latte"? Unless you want to live in an echo chamber where everybody nods, and snickers about "latte" - and who knows, maybe you do - then you need to realize that that big huge CHIP you have on your shoulder about a certain kind of coffee drink makes me tune you out.) And maybe you don't care about having people listen to you. So be it. Just tellin' ya what it looks like over here. So writers who are attacked for THESE types of reasons ... as opposed to their books? I don't care WHAT they wrote. I'm sticking up for them.

Books You Must Read Because You Must Mock

I don't do that. Waste of time

Worst How-To Books Ever

I can't answer that on the grounds that I will incriminate myself

Books That Were on the 'To Be Read' List the Longest

War and Peace has been on my "to be read" list since the late 1980s.

Books I Hated Having to Read in School, But Love Now

Oh, I adore this question. Moby Dick is the first one. Tess of the D'urbevilles is another.

Books Whose References Have Worked Their Way into My Household Lexicon

Lives of the Saints by Nancy Lemann has definitely influenced how I talk. I should write more about that.

Books I've Never Read But Have Read the Cliffnotes Version

Oh. The Country Wife. That's a play. It's also a story I have never told on this blog. But I will someday.

Books I've Read Because I Liked Their Cover Design/Font

Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley - which is so scary because it is now one of my favorite books ever ... and I picked it up cause I liked the COVER DESIGN. Horrible to imagine not encountering that book.

Books Which, When It Comes Right Down to It, I Would Have No Problem Burning

Ha! Well - I have principles, you know. I stand by them. I despise Fred Phelps, but I wouldn't burn his books. If he wrote one. Which I highly doubt. I boycott publications, that's how I deal with it. I boycott magazines and online publications who publish the people I hate. And for me this is some sacrifice because ... well, a lot of them are good magazines. I don't BURN the magazines who publish these people. I just refuse to support them, with clicks, page views, or my hard-earned money.

Books Which I Read Only for the Sex Scenes

I think we covered this above.

Actually, too, there's a Ken Follett novel - and I'm not even sure what book it is - or why I read it ... but there's a sex scene in it which, I think, is one of the best ones I've ever read. Not for being sexy or anything - but for being REAL, and poignant ... It certainly sticks in my mind, whatever book it is. I'll check the title when I get home, I think I have it somewhere.

Books I Pretend to Like So People Won't Think I'm a Snob, or Books I Pretend to Like So I Won't Hurt Your Feelings

Now I never pretended to like The Notebook to make my friend feel better. I didn't say to him, "You LIKED that?" I would never do that. I was polite. I thanked him for the recommendation and left it at that. Actually, David and I were just laughing about this the other night. People (on the blog, not in my life) sometimes get defensive or kind of confrontational with me. I know it's out of insecurity, but whatever, it's tiresome. So someone will give a dig, like: "So do you not think Tom Clancy is a valid writer then?" They project a snobby attitude onto me ... for whatever reason that has nothing to do with me. Look. Here's the dealio. You don't make me read Nicholas Sparks and I won't force you to read Ulysses. But don't project your bullshit onto me. We got a deal? I read what I read because my tastes lead me that way.

Oh, and I think it's so hysterical that people think I'm a snob when two posts below this one I'm raving about how I can't wait to see Rhinestone.

Books with Covers So Embarrassing You Can't Read Them in Public

My friend Liz and I were laughing about this. She and I were talking about this book and dammit, now I can't remember the title ... it had something to do with "the domestic and the erotic" - it was a self-help book - but it sounded very VERY interesting - and Liz thought it was great, but she showed me the cover which had a fishnetted leg on it ... and it was very sexy looking ... and said she just could not read it on the train. She had to hide what she was reading. I actually want to read that book (whatever it was) but I would feel a bit embarrassed about just reading it openly on the subway.

Books You Are Sorry You Didn't Read Decades Ago

I'll think more on that.

See what I mean ... gluttonous. I can't even answer the questions properly.

More lists over here.

Book questionnaire ...

Long hard FUN book meme - I got this from Carl V. (Oh, and I forgot to link to his wonderful Friday Favorites from last week. Magical!!)

I am WAY out of my league here but here we go!

Science Fiction, Fantasy or Horror?

Horror. Not a huge sci-fi fan. And fantasy? Does Madeleine L'Engle count? She's one of my favorite authors ever.

Hardback or Trade Paperback or Mass Market Paperback?

I'm a mass market paperback girl. Also - if I start a "collection" with one type of book then i want all the rest to be that same type. Like all my AS Byatts. The Vintage copies of her books are all beautiful - beautiful cover designs - and ... they just look so nice all together. So I wait, most often, for the paperback to come out ... instead of immediately buying the hardcover - because I just love the look of all the books together. I am also rather picky about typeface - I'm weird that way - I enjoy the Modern Library typeface, and the Vintage book typeface - but there's a copy of War and Peace that I hesitate to pick up because the typeface just ... it's too small and daunting. Weird. My copy of Ulysses is your basic Vintage edition - but I love the feel of the pages, the look of the type ... It was a very welcoming typeface. Barnes & Noble Classics is bad news, in general.

1. The typeface is ... muddy and ... blah. I don't like it.

2. I read their edition of Middlemarch and I stopped counting the typos there were so many.

ANNOYING. I will never buy another one of their books.

Heinlein or Asimov?

I'm not sure. I imagine Asimov but this ain't my genre. I got no street cred here so I won't fake it.

Amazon or Brick and Mortar?

I use Amazon.

Barnes & Noble or Borders?

Barnes & Noble is more convenient. I like Border's selection better. But in general I shop at Barnes & Noble. I have the membership card and stuff.

Hitchhiker or Discworld?

I am assuming that first one is Hitchhiker's Guide? I love that series. I don't know what Discworld is - so this is an easy choice. I first read the Hitchhiker books in high school - and I've read them repeatedly ever since. They're a blast.

Bookmark or Dogear?

Neither. Although I am VERY against turning the page down to show where you left off. DON'T do it if I lend you a book. It turns my stomach. (Anne Fadiman has a VERY funny essay in Ex Libris about people who leave the book turned down and open on the table, to save their spot. hahahahaha Same type of horror) I usually just close the book - and when I pick it up again I know exactly, to the sentence, where I've left off. If it's a good book, that is.

Magazine: Asimov?s Science Fiction or Fantasy & Science Fiction?

No idea.

Alphabetize by author Alphabetize by title or random?

I alphabetize by author, for the most part - but I keep my "genres" separate. And then if I have (for example) 500 Madeleine L'Engle books I will (as Ann Marie will attest) organize those books by publication date. So on my history bookshelf I go by author.

Who would alphabetize by title? How would you find anything that way?? Title-alphabetizers, please divulge the method behind your madness. I love hearing about how (and why) people organize their book collections.

Keep, Throw Away or Sell?

I keep a lot of books (obviously). I enjoy having a library. Where I can think: "Hm. What was that speech that so and so gave in 1776?" and I can go look up the speech in my "history of the US in speeches" book. I like having reference books around. And if I'm a fan of an author - then I need to have all their books - even if I dislike the books themselves. It haunts me. The fact that I am missing a couple of Margaret Atwoods haunts me ... they all need to be together.

But I do also sell my books. Not often - but there's a great second-hand bookstore in Hoboken where I sell them.

Year?s Best Science Fiction series (edited by Gardner Dozois) or Years Best SF series (edited by David G. Hartwell)?

No comprende. Any sci-fi fans want to answer??

Keep dustjacket or toss it?

Since I'm a paperback girl - the dustjacket is usually not an issue. However - I always keep the dustjacket of hardcovers. It only seems polite. And sometimes the covers are really cool.

Read with dustjacket or remove it?

Sometimes a dust jacket is annoying. So then I'll take it off. But for the most part, I'm cool with leaving the damn thing on.

Short story or novel?

I don't understand. Why choose? Silly.

Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket?

I love both. I cannot choose. Well, I suppose I should choose Harry Potter even though - in my opinion - the Lemony Snicket books, with their darkness and bleakness are way more in line with my actual temperament. But seriously - I am counting the days until the next Harry comes out. I can barely wait.

Stop reading when tired or at chapter breaks?

I'm with Carl. I read everywhere. I am accustomed to stopping whenever, wherever. When the bank teller is ready for me. When it's my bus stop. If I'm reading at home, though - I can't read lying down (I believe I wrote about that before) - because it's like my body immediately goes: SLEEP. when my body is horizontal.

?It was a dark and stormy night? or ?Once upon a time??

It was a dark and stormy night? because that's how Madeleine L'Engle opened Wrinkle in Time one of my favorite books ever.

Buy or Borrow?

Buy. No question.

Buying choice: Book Reviews, Recommendation or Browse?

Mostly book reviews and browsing. There are a couple of people I will take recommendations from - my sisters, my brother, Allison, Kate - a couple others ... but mostly it's from my own taste ("Ooh, a book is coming out called Who Killed Kirov??? Have to get THAT!" or "A new Jeanette Winterson is coming out ... have to get it.") - or browsing. I've found some awesome books by browsing. Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley is one of my favorite books EVER - and I picked that up because 1. I liked the description of the plotline but also 2. I loved the book cover (which is different than the one in the link there).

I shiver to think of not picking up that book. It was a total accident that I chose it. I think Mosley, with his fascination with accidents and coincidence, would be pleased.

Lewis or Tolkien?

CS Lewis. Love Tolkien, but not like Lewis.

Hard SF or Space Opera?

No idea!

Collection (short stories by the same author) or Anthology (short stories by different authors)?

Not really into anthologies. I do like to have short story collections of authors I love.

Hugo or Nebula?

To those of you out there who follow all of this - answer me: Will you read a book just because it won one of these awards? Is that enough to make you pick it up?

For example, I read every book that wins the Booker Prize. I've read some real stinkers that way - but man, I've read some really awesome books (The Bone People) that I never would have picked up otherwise.

Golden Age SF or New Wave SF?

Out of my depth. Buh-bye.

Tidy ending or Cliffhanger?

Well. Tidy. Atonement has a "tidy" ending - meaning it seems inevitable and right when you land upon it - but it is the most unhappy last paragraph of a book I have ever read. But it certainly is "tidy".

Possession (a book I love) has a perfectly "tidy" ending ... but, like Atonement, it leaves you with a gasp of pain ... of things not said ... things left undone ... and yet you know that there would be no other way to end that book. I love an ending like that, even if it's painful.

So I guess I'll go with "tidy".

Morning reading, Afternoon reading or Nighttime reading?

All of the above.

Standalone or Series?

I'm into stand alone books. I assume that this question is geared more towards sci-fi or fantasy fans - where series are much more of a common part of the genre itself - but from the books I like, I think that it is very hard to sustain a really meaningful series. The ones I love (L'Engle's "time series" - Harry Potter - the Narnia books) are the anomalies. I wish L'Engle would live forever so that she could keep writing about the Murry family. I have never once gotten sick of ANY of those people. Same with Harry Potter. That's rare - and it's a good writer who can keep that up. Let the characters grow ... but also have that recognition factor ... like you get to know these people. You are invested in them.

But in general - I must prefer "standalone" books. The Shipping News. Atonement. Michael Chabon's books. These are singular masterpieces. No need for sequels.

Urban fantasy or high fantasy?

I am not sure if Narnia counts here, or the Tolkien books. I guess I haven't read any "urban fantasy". So I can't write about it.

New or used?

I'm with Carl. I prefer new but I certainly buy used.

Favorite book of which nobody else has heard?

Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley.

Some day ... some day ... I will write a post about this book. And why I love it. And what I learn from it. And how many times I've read it. It's overwhelming to think about, though. This book really has brought me through a lot of tremendously rough moments. It's profound. It's fun. It's stimulating. I adore it.

I made my dad read it so HE'S heard of it.

The rest of the questions are all about "genre books" and I really have no way to answer any of them - but Carl is all OVER this stuff!

Gulliver's Travels

This was the third book I read in my "classics challenge". Here's the main page of the challenge - it's really fun to look through and see what everybody else is reading. Of course there is lots of overlap. The two books I have already read on my list of 5 were Frankenstein and Tale of 2 Cities.

I am pretty sure I read Gulliver's Travels in high school. I know I read A Modest Proposal. And over the last 5 years or so, I've gotten very into Swift's poetry (I put up some of it here in his birthday post - but there's a lot more out there, of course, if you're interested.) But I had never re-visited Gulliver's Travels until now. It's a lot of fun, ridiculous satire - (and like I said to Rob at one point - I wish the footnotes in my version of the book were more detailed about the political and social intricacies of the time - what Swift was satirizing and who. It was very topical. He does everything but name names. And you can tell he's speaking of somebody very specific - but my notes did not explain who/what/why. Kind of a disappointment). But besides the satire - it's just a great story, at times hysterically funny. I also think that Gulliver is a bit of a puff-puff. Meaning, he's kind of a snooty know it all. I love how he is constantly reminding us of his credentials. Paraphrasing: "I speak 10 languages so I was well equipped to converse with the natives." "I am highly skilled in all levels of surgery so the procedure was not difficult at all for one such as myself." It's kind of his version of the "I fancy myself" game I used to play with my boyfriend in days of yore. "I fancy myself something of a botanist and a linguist." "I fancy myself a bit of a tailor and a tinker." Like - Gulliver. You're a human being. It's okay if you don't know everything. Obviously this is all deliberate on Swift's part. It's TYPES that seem to enrage him. Officious hierarchical TYPES and institutions. The human race as a group? Sucks.

In 1725 Swift wrote in a letter to his friend (and fellow poet) Alexander Pope:

I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals: for instance, I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love Counsellor Such-a-one and Judge Such-a-one: so with physicians - I will not speak of my own trade - soldiers, English, Scotch, French, and the rest. But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. This is the system upon which I have governed myself many years, but do not tell, and so I shall go on till I have done with them. I have got materials toward a treatise, proving the falsity of that definition animal rationale, and to show it would be only rationis capax. Upon this great foundation of misanthropy, though not in Timon's manner, the whole building of my Travels is erected; and I never will have peace of mind till all honest men are of my opinion. By consequence you are to embrace it immediately, and procure that all who deserve my esteem may do so too. The matter is so clear that it will admit of no dispute; nay, I will hold a hundred pounds that you and I agree in the point.

"Men are cruel, but man is kind" and all that.

Gulliver's Travels - in 4 parts - builds slowly to the last part -Gulliver's sojourns among the Yahoos and Houyhnhnms - where Swift really lets out all the hatred towards his own race. It's brutal - the most brutal of all of the parts of the book. Gulliver, after his time with the horse Houyhnhnms - and the human Yahoos (whom he finds abhorrent and disgusting) - comes home forever changed. The ending of the book suggests that Gulliver did not bounce back from this particular trip. He walks into his house - and instead of seeing his dear wife and kids - he instead sees disgusting Yahoos. He can't stand the sight or smell of them. He refuses to let them touch him, so gross does he find them. This is how the book ends. He throws in his lot with the horses, basically - seeing the rest of the human race as just another version of the nasty Yahoos (who he seems to describe as almost hyena-like - vultures - cackling horrible creatures who have never created anything, done anything of worth, who fight over trifles, who display their anuses - I'm tellin' ya - I have never read a book outside of erotic stories or books where the word "anus" appears so frequently!) Swift has been hiding his cards a bit up until that last part. He still seems to see the race as perhaps redeemable. The giants of the land of Brobdingnag are kind with him (although they do trot him out as a freak show attraction which bums him out, and the giant ladies make him lie down on their naked bosoms which completely grosses him out) - there are the people on the Flying Island - contemplative mathematicians - the least practical people in the world - and yet benign, not menacing, not selfish at ALL. But it is the last journey, when he is forced to explain to the master Houyhnhnm who puts him up - how the human race (at least England) comports itself - when he fully realizes how disgusting people are.

And from that one journey, Gulliver does not fully return. The change is irrevocable. He turns his back on his own kind, because he finally sees them for what they are. He loses his puff-puff "I am a learned great person" attitude - and cringes at the fact that he is, in essence, a Yahoo. And for that he must forever hang his head in shame.

Swift (in the voice of Gulliver) writes:

My reconcilement to the Yahoo-kind in general might not be so difficult, if they would be content with those vices and follies only which nature hath entitled them to. I am not in the least provoked at the sight of a lawyer, a pickpocket, a colonel, a fool, a lord, a gamester, a politician, a whore-master, a physician, an evidence, a suborner, an attorney, a traitor, or the like; this is all according to the due course of things; but when I behold a lump of deformity and diseases both in body and mind, smitten with pride, it immediately breaks all the measures of my patience; neither shall I be ever able to comprehend how such an animal and such a vice could tally together.

Compare this to one of his many descriptions of the Lilliputians (who win his admiration even though they keep him tied up for ages!):

The reader may please to observe, that in the last article for the recovery of my liberty the Emperor stipulates to allow me a quantity of meat and drink sufficient for the support of 1728 Lilliputians. Some time after, asking a friend at court how they came to fix on that determinate number, he told me that his Majesty's mathematicians, having taken the height of my body by the help of a quadrant, and finding it to exceed theirs in the proportion of twelve to one, they concluded from the similarity of their bodies, that mine must contain at least 1728 of theirs, and consequently would require as much food as was necessary to support that number of Lilliputians. By which the reader may conceive an idea of the ingenuity of that people, as well as the prudent and exact economy of so great a prince.

And here is the infamous urination scene - which ends up causing Gulliver so many problems later. He is banished from Lilliput - not JUST because of this, there are foreign policy issues as well with Blefescu (probably France, I would guess) - and they think Gulliver might be a spy or a traitor. When all he did was wade across the Channel and cut loose their boats! But anyway, later - when the Lilliputians have untied Gulliver (they still only allow him to take walks at certain times - mainly because the entire populace must be warned to stay indoors because an enormous giant will be walking about, and he might inadvertently crush them) - a fire breaks out in the Lilliputian Queen's apartments.

... I made a shift to get to the Palace without trampling on any of the people. I found they had already applied ladders to the walls of the apartment, and were well provided with buckets, but the water was at some distance. These buckets were about the size of a large thimble, and the poor people supplied me with them as fast as they could; but the flame was so violent that they did little good. I might easily have stifled it with my coat, which I unfortunately left behind me for haste, and came away only in my leathern jerkin. The case seemed wholly desperate and deplorable; and this magnificent palace would have infallibly been burnt to the ground, if, by a presence of mind, unusual to me, I had not suddenly thought of an expedient. I had the evening before drunk plentifully of a most delicious wine, called glimigrim (the Blefuscudians call it flunec, but ours is esteemed the better sort) which is very diuretic. By the luckiest chance in the world, I had not discharged myself of any part of it. The heat I had contracted by coming very near the flames, and by labouring to quench them, made the white wine begin to operate by urine; which I voided in such a quantity, and applied so well to the proper places, that in three minutes the fire was wholly extinguished, and the rest of that noble pile, which had cost so many ages in erecting, preserved from destruction.

Ew.

But more than "ew" - of all of the angry passages in the book (openly angry, I mean, more obviously angry) - this one, to me, seems the angriest. It's not even angry. It's raging.

For me, I like it when the book gets angry. I do like all of his adventures, and I love Swift's imagination - but I'm in it for the satire, I'm in it for the rage.

Of all of his travels, I most enjoyed Gulliver's sojourn on the Flying Island (Laputa) with all of the contemplative moony-eyed astronomers - who are so distracted by celestial thoughts and calculations that they cannot carry on their end of a conversation and so need to have servants bop them on the head on occasion, in order to signal, "Your turn to speak!" It is such a common problem - this total distraction of the residents - that there are actually gadgets designed just for this bopping-on-head purpose!

I observed here and there many in the habit of servants, with a blown bladder fastened like a flail to the end of a short stick, which they carried in their hands. In each bladder was a small quantity of dried pease, or little pebbles (as I was afterwards informed). With these bladders they now and then flapped the mouths and ears of those who stood near them, of which practice I could not then conceive the meaning; it seems the minds of these people are so taken up with intense speculations, that they neither can speak, nor attend to the discourses of others, without being roused by some external taction upon the organs of speech and hearing; for which reason those persons who are able to afford it always keep a flapper (the original term is climenole) in their family, as one of their domestics, nor ever walk abroad or make visits without him.

I love how eventually Gulliver becomes so used to this whole flapping thing that he mentions it quite casually. It's hysterical.

I also loved Swift's description of the huge magnet in the bottom of the flying island, and how it was used as a steering device. It was fantastical - and yet so well described that I knew exactly what he was talking about.

But when Swift takes the gloves off - that's when I get excited. I love anger. I love subversive literature. I love those who despise the status quo, those who are uppity trouble-makers. There's a lot of trouble to be made. There are a lot of things which are just assumed to be true by the majority of people ... and anyone who comes out and says, "I HATE this" is held in suspicion. Swift was one of those people (even though in many ways he was part of the establishment). But he couldn't help but see, with his laser eye, how horrible politics were, how stupid everybody was (for the most part), and really how awful people were - just look at how we treat each other. It is indefensible. Swift does not defend that which is indefensible. Love that about him.

One of the centerpieces of the book is when Gulliver sits down with the King of the giants - and tries to answer all of the King's questions about law/politics/society of the rest of the world. Swift is brilliant here. His pen is a sword. But it's swift, sure, and cunning. Sometimes you can't even tell that he IS cutting something. His enemy might never have known he has mortally wounded until his arm fell off - the slicing is that smooth and perfect. Swift often uses terms of praise and approbation - but in a way where you can tell he means the exact opposite. It's brutal.

For example:

When I had put an end to these long discourses, his Majesty in a sixth audience, consulting his notes, proposed many doubts, queries and objections, upon every article. He asked what methods were used to cultivate the minds and bodies of our young nobility, and in what kind of business they commonly spent the first and teachable part of their lives. What course was taken to supply that assembly when any noble family became extinct. What qualifications were necessary in those who were to be created new lords. Whether the humour of the prince, a sum of money to a court lady, or a prime minister, or a design of strengthening a party opposite to the public interest, ever happened to be motives in those advancements. What share of knowledge these lords had in the laws of their country, and how they came by it, so as to enable them to decide what properties of their fellow-subjects in the last resort. Whether they were always so free from avarice, partialities, or want, that a bribe, or some other sinister view, could have no place among them. Whether those holy lords I spoke of were always promoted to that rank upon account of their knowledge in religious matters, and the sanctity of their lives, had never been compliers with the time while they were common priests, or slavish prostitute chaplains to some nobleman, whose opinions they continued servilely to follow after they were admitted into that assembly.

Heh heh. Swift shows the absurdity of all of this by putting it all into the questions from the King. One can imagine contemporaries of Swift howling with laughter at the thought of trying to answer those questions in the affirmative ("Were those holy lords I spoke of were always promoted to that rank upon account of their knowledge in religious matters?" "HELL NO!" etc.) ... and through that now-you-see-it now-you-don't literary maneuver, Swift stabs his opponent in the heart. The thing is: you could hear some pompous blowhard (who had been pricked, naturally, by the implications of the satire) try to defend himself - and say, 'Well, but yes, it is always more complicated than you would think ..." and it is THAT kind of person that Swift finds most disgusting. The ones with pride. The ones who have something to lose, the ones who choose to defend the indefensible. The rot goes to the deepest levels of society. If you try to deny it, you are Swift's enemy.

More from the observant (and yet baffled - that's Swift's genius here - the bafflement) giant king:

He was perfectly astonished with the historical account I gave him of our affairs during the last century, protesting it was only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice or ambition could produce.

hahahaha He puts it all into the mouth of the king. Not Gulliver. Perfect.

And I loved this bit:

He said, he knew no reason, why those who entertain opinions prejudicial to the public, should be obliged to change, or should not be obliged to conceal them. And as it was tyranny in any government to require the first, so it was weakness not to enforce the second: for a man may be allowed to keep poisons in his closet, but not to vend them about for cordials.

Really fun book. A feast for the mind, you know? That's how it felt. Also, funny funny funny.

How to read when you're an itsy-bitsy midget

... and the books are huge:

From Gulliver's Travels:

They have had the art of printing, as well as the Chinese, time out of mind. But their libraries are not very large; for that of the King's, which is reckoned the biggest, doth not amount to above a thousand volumes, placed in a gallery of twelve hundred foot long, from whence I had the liberty to borrow what books I pleased. The Queen's joiner had contrived in one of Glumdalclitch's rooms a kind of wooden machine five and twenty foot high, formed like a standing ladder; the steps were each fifty foot long. It was indeed a moveable pair of stairs, the lowest end placed at ten foot distance from the wall of the chamber. The book I had a mind to read was put up leaning against the wall. I first mounted to the upper step of the ladder, and turning my face towards the book, began at the top of the page, and so walking to the right and left about eight or ten paces, according to the length of the lines, till I had gotten a little below the level of my eyes, and then descending gradually till I came to the bottom; after which I mounted again, and began the other page in the same manner, and so turned over the leaf, which I could easily do with both my hands, for it was as thick and stiff as a pasteboard, and in the largest folios not above eighteen or twenty foot long.

I can just so picture that.

I'm having so much fun reading this book right now. I'll post more excerpts when I'm done. The chapters where Gulliver describes the government of his own country to the giant King - and the King shows absolute horror at how barbaric they are - especially in regards to politics - and Gulliver has actually felt, in his life, that his own kingdom of England is the most enlightened on the planet ... well, you can see what Swift is getting at there. The chapters are vicious. Vicious satire.

Gulliver has almost escaped from Brobdingnag now. His floating box in the ocean has been rescued by a ship.

Then I'll be on to his third voyage, in Part III of the book.

Books!!

I got this from the wonderful Stefanie.

Books you�ve been planning to read for ages

War and Peace

Les Miserables

a biography of Queen Elizabeth (you know, as in the Virgin Queen). I don't care which one but I need it to be good (Lisa?? Recommendations?). I have been meaning to read a biography on her since ... 1991? i don't know - forever - I just have never gotten around to it.

Books you�ve been hunting for years without success

I tracked down Summer Sleigh Ride and that is probably the most obscure book from my past that I wanted to find, and did. Yay!

Recently I just tracked down 2 other old favorites - I remembered nothing of one of them except the title: Sarah and Katie. 2 good friends. They're in 5th grade. Something bad happens that drives them apart. It's awful. They get back together. I do not know what it was that I so loved about this book - there's something about a school play ... but I have never ever forgotten how I adored that book - and I just tracked down a used copy for 20 cents on Amazon. I can't wait for it to arrive!!

The other perennial favorite of mine is a MARVELOUS book called Into the Dream - with which my brother and I were absolutely obsessed when we were kids. (Read some of those reader reviews. So many of them say: "This book got me started reading." Or "I was totally obsessed with this book." Or "20 years after reading the book, I still remember it vividly.") I HIGHLY recommend it to this day. Great book - for kids and adults. Anyway, I just bought my own copy. I thought I had one, but apparently I do not - Brendan has one, I know that.

Oh - and it was my mission for many years to track down all of Max Shulman's books. (This was before I really discovered or even freakin' knew how to use Amazon. I'm behind the times.) I write about my love for Max Shulman here. I now have them all (thanks, Dad!) But when I was bound to look for books only in bookstores - I just despaired of the lack of Max Shulman, I despaired that he had gone out of print.

Books dealing with something you�re working on at the moment

Hm. Working on? I'm not really working on the French revolution - but it seems to be where my interests are leading me now. Marie Antoinette, Thomas Carlyle, Tale of 2 Cities ... it appears to be a theme.

I'm not really working on Shakespeare currently either - however I have given myself a course of study for 2007, which I am hoping will serve me later this year. I just bought this - on the strength of the introduction - so fun, so ... NON scholarly - It's a fan's reading of Shakespeare - so anyway, I'm gonna read every play (I've already read them all - but now it's going to be all together) ... in "chronological" order (estimated, anyway) and - follow along with my new Shakespeare book (each play has its own chapter). Anyhoo, this is my plan for 2007. I have already begun! But that's the general syllabus.

Books you want to own so they�ll be handy just in case

Hmm. I'll copy Stefanie. The OED.

Books you could put aside maybe to read this summer

Hm. Should I read Les Miserables this summer? To go along with my French Revolution theme? I am overwhelmed by the thought - but maybe that's what I should read this summer.

I also need to read John Irving's latest. I've been putting that one off - too much else to do.

Books you need to go with other books on your shelves

I'm a collector. Not really of NICE books or first editions (at least not yet) - but if I'm into an author I need to have all of the books. I am haunted by my missing Virgin in the Garden in my Byatt collection. I've got them all but for some reason I lost my copy of that book (and I love that book). Every time I peruse all my Byatt titles, I think: Hm. Need to get Virgin in the Garden. They all need to be together.

Books that fill you with a sudden, inexplicable curiosity, not easily justified

Any book that has to do with:

-- Charles Manson
-- mass murderers
-- cults
-- Central Asia

Books read long ago that it�s now time to re-read

I'm kinda in the process of doing that right now. Just re-read Tale of 2 Cities. And now I've started Gulliver's Travels as well. I adore the first chapter of that book - where he finds himself tied up by the teeny people. You kinda just can't stop reading that book once you start.

Books that if you had more than one life you�d certainly read but unfortunately your days are numbered

I hate to contemplate this. There is so much I haven't read.

I somehow fear I may never get to Proust's major opus - which I certainly feel like I MUST read. Not just because I "should" but because I think I would love it.

Oh - and any multi-volume biography of anyone. Or any of the collected letters and papers of all of those guys I adore. I know that there are volumes of Jefferson's papers out there - volumes of John Adams' papers - and I just ... I can't read them all. I can read SOME and I already have ... but I can't commit to an 8 volume biography of anyone.

Re-reading Tale of 2 Cities

A gorgeous essay on The Great Gatsby - by Jonathan Yardley. I love every word.

Here's a post I wrote a couple years ago about revisiting Great Gatsby for the first time since high school and what that was like. (Elegant Variation is re-reading Gatsby right now as well )

I loved reading Yardley's piece because of his passion, the sense that he got swept away ... and also - there's something about Yardley's writing that makes me want to read whatever he's reading. I think: Oh yes, THAT'S why Gatsby is so ... I don't even know what to say. Singular?

I'm also interested right now in the whole re-reading thing - or, more, the re-VISITING thing - because I am about 20 pages away from finishing Tale of 2 Cities - a book I last read when I was 15 years old.

I can't even talk about it yet. I'll write more when I get my head together but right now - it's just a whirl of hot emotion, and a love for Sydney Carton that just pierces my heart. It's killing me. The book is killing me.

Unlike some other books I was forced to read in high school - and despised - (Moby Dick - although I have now completely changed my tune on that score, but the first time around I was PISSED that I was being forced to read such a long and boring book) Tale of 2 Cities really appealed to me in high school. It's a page-turner, first of all. There aren't endless chapters about whale blubber and spermaceti. Tale of 2 Cities has a serious PLOT and each chapter moves you forward. There's never a dull moment. So that helped. And I guess I remember from my initial reading it on a summer reading list is that there was just something about Madame Defarge that totally got under my surface. My friend J. and I would sit around and talk about Madame Defarge, and we would kind of laugh about her, she struck us both the same way - as a delightfully evil caricature - and do our imitations of what she must look like, knitting all the time, knitting names of enemies of the State into her woolen scarves ... we found her to be so funny. Also horrifying, of course ... but there was something in the characterization that really pleased us. She's so memorable. Somehow J. and I picked up on the great-ness of that character, even in the midst of high school, and HAVING to read the book. We "got it".

But I'm seeing so much more right now - in the same way that when I read Gatsby as an adult, I suddenly saw the whole thing through Gatsby's eyes - something that would have been impossible as a teenager.

Sydney Carton. Sydney Carton. Sharon will know what I'm talking about. As she so often does.

His journey, and his character, did not really make an impression on me as a teenager - although that last scene blew me away, and all that. Or - he made an impression, but not like Madame Defarge did. J. and I were big diary keepers, and we would make jokes about the two of us being Madame Defarges. Like, we were always writing in our notebooks, any free moment when we were alone, out would come the diaries and we'd start scribbling away. The joke became, though, that we were evilly scribbling down the names of our enemies, keeping them in mind, scowling over at the popular table in the cafeteria, and grimly making lists. We found this very funny. But what Sydney Carton DID and who Sydney Carton IS didn't really get in there into my consciousness at the time.

But now ... as a grown-up ... I suddenly feel like I have never loved a fictional character as much as I love Sydney Carton. It actually hurts. There's one scene with Mr. Lorry near the end of the book that ... Bah, I have to think more on it - I just got to that scene this morning and I suddenly found myself weeping.

Good lord. It's like a whole new book to me.

I have a lot more I want to say and I know that this is all just babbling right now ... but it's really been on my mind.

2006 Books

Books read this year. I actually may end up adding a couple more to the list - since I am bed-ridden at the moment and could finish 2 more books by the time the damn ball drops across the river. This list is in chronological order. Some I have discussed on the blog and when that is the case I'll provide a link. But many have gone un-commented-upon by moi. Oh, and many of these are re-reads. I will make note of that when applicable. It's funny - I look at some of these books (like the 2 Annie Proulx short story collections) and remember exactly where I was when I was reading them (on Alex's couch, during my vacation in LA).

Next year I'd like to read more fiction. That's one goal, anyway.

2006 Books

1. Now I Can Die in Peace: How ESPN's Sports Guy Found Salvation, with a Little Help from Nomar, Pedro, Shawshank, and the 2004 Red Sox by Bill Simmons

Sheer liquid joy. Every word. I think I read this book in 2 days. I had given a copy to every member of my immediate family for Christmas - and then had to buy one myself. At one point, day after Christmas, I looked around the living room - and nobody was speaking - everyone was reading the book - occasionally guffawing with laughter.

2. Marlon Brando by Patricia Bosworth

A short book, a quick read. Bosworth wrote what I consider to be one of the best entertainment biographies of its kind - her biography of Montgomery Clift - and she's a member of the Actors Studio - so her writing on actors is, in general, knowledgeable and precise. She understands the importance of certain elements of the craft, and knows how to write about them. Some entertainment biographies treat the art of acting as a mystery (the most recent Cary Grant bio is a good example) - but Bosworth knows what she's talking about. I've read other Brando biographies, so much of the anecdotal stuff here is not new to me - but still - it was a good read. She's a good writer.

3. Close Range: Wyoming Stories , by Annie Proulx

Annie Proulx is one of my favorite writers. I had never read this whole collection before - the only story I had read was "Brokeback Mountain" but I read that when it first came out in The New Yorker. This collection of short stories cannot be overpraised, in my opinion. They are magnificent.

4. Bad Dirt : Wyoming Stories 2 by Annie Proulx

I had brought both short story collections to LA with me. I was on an Annie Proulx kick. Close Range, the first of the collection, is much more bleak. There is almost a pre-apocalyptic feel to some of them. Bad Dirt is a much more lighthearted collection. It's humorous - absurd (the one story of people falling into the hole, etc.) - and I guess I wasn't in the mood for lighthearted absurdity. Especially not after just reading the transcendent bleak brilliance of Close Range. But Annie Proulx's a favorite. I'd read a grocery list if it were written by her.

5. The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

I can't believe I had never read this book before. It's terrific. Laugh out loud funny.

6. Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

I'm a huge fan of Didion's non-fiction and had never read her novel. Finally picked it up, and boy am I glad I did. I read it in 2 days, I think, it's not very long. But it has that cold clear relentless quality that is so recognizably Didion. She scares me. I love her.

7. At Swim-two-birds, by Flann O'Brien

I had read this before (it is practically a requirement if you belong to the O'Malley clan) but I felt like reading it again. It is a nonsensical ridiculous at times hilarious book ... that somehow has something to do with Mad King Sweeney, and Finn MacCool, and also with a loser college student who lies around in his room all day planning his perfect novel. This book is a lot of fun. It's totally imitated now - Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace, all of those experimental meta-esque writers now owe a huge debt to Flann O'Brien.For example - he writes characters who are aware that they are characters in a novel - etc. It's a literary experiment. Much fun.

8. His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph Ellis

I love Joseph Ellis. Wonderful writer. He doesn't really write typical biographies. They're more like musings on the character of the man in question. Contemplative, open-minded, thought-provoking. I was excited to read this one, after having read Ellis' books on Jefferson and Adams - and I was not disappointed.

9. Stalin: The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives by Edvard Radzinsky

An emotional book written by one of Russia's premiere playwrights. I posted about it here and here

10. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

I had never read the book when it first came out - I'm just not a best seller kinda gal ... but I was in Philadelphia for a week for an acting job - and I had time to kill at night in my hotel room - and I bought the book in the train station. I needed something completely distracting and not taxing - because I would be working my ass off all day long. Da Vinci Code totally fit the bill. I finished it in 3 days. It is HORRIBLY written. I mean, you can feel that from the first page. What - was he paid extra for the number of exclamation points? Did he get extra money for italicized words? Yes, it is a piece of crap, but I could not put it down!!!!!!! (to imitate Dan Brown's writing style).

11. The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind

VERY interesting. Made me feel like I wanted to take a shower after reading it. Highly recommended.

12. Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens

I consider this a must-read. I'm an Orwell fan anyway, so Hitchens is preaching to the choir as far as I'm concerned (not to mention the fact that I will read anything that Hitchens writes). But still. Must-read.

13. The Language of the Third Reich: LTI -- Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook by Victor Klemperer

Linguistic observations jotted down by a German Jew living in Dresden in the 30s and 40s. Anyone at all interested in totalitarian thinking, and thought control - will not want to miss this book. Klemperer wrote it in the midst of his own oppression - at times it was the only thing keeping him going, the thought of his LTI ... he jots down notes about newspaper articles, ads, the way words are twisted and stand in for something else - words like "father" and "land" and "work" - all end up having sinister meanings under the Third Reich. Klemperer looks at this language control systematically. Terrifying and fascinating book.

14. The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History by Robert Conquest

I love Conquest but to be honest I can't remember anything about this book.

15. Shopgirl by Steve Martin

I don't know why I picked this book up, but I am so glad I did. I hadn't even seen the movie - so I'm not sure what the draw was. It's a wonderful little book, and it actually struck a very deep chord within me. I felt named by this book. And the movie ended up slaughtering me in a completely unexpected way when I did get around to seeing it - but the book is just a lovely little piece of writing. It really is. I'll read it again.

16. The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Expanded and Updated by David Thomson

This book is, what, 1500 pages long? I think I started reading it way last year - it's alphabetical - the entries are long and detailed (or, some of them are) and I decided to read through it alphabetically. This meant it took forever. It also meant that I became acquainted with some names I have never heard of before. I kept a running list of movies I haven't seen that I need to see because of this book. It's massive. A GREAT reference tool. Indispensable. (It has already shown itself to be indispensable to me.)

17. Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland.

I made fun of this book here.

18. Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson

Winterson deserves her own post. I have a complicated ongoing relationship with her as an author - it's a funny thing. Her novel The Passion is one of my favorite novels ever written ... but I've felt that she has lost her way in the last decade. Or - no, not lost her way. But the way she has chosen to go does not interest me. Kinda like me and Tori Amos. I'll always love Tori ... I'll keep buying those albums, my dear, but ... I like the OLD Tori! It's a rare artist whom I will follow thru their experimental stages - but Winterson is one of them. FASCINATING. I find her writing captivating. Lighthousekeeping is, in a way, Winterson coming back to form ... but not really. It does have some of the old whimsy though - her arresting images (the vertical house where you have to anchor down the cups so they won't fall, etc.) - and her mixture of fairy tale logic witih reality. She's fantastic. LOVE her. Reading Lighthousekeeping made me go on a rampage of re-reading - as you will see.

19. The PowerBook by Jeanette Winterson

I had read this book when it first came out but quickly tired of it. I found it much better the second time around. The narrator (we do not know the gender, typical Winterson) touts him/herself as a deliverer of fantasies. The narrator, through the Internet, can make people's fantasies come true - identity becomes fluid, permeable - the narrator learns what your fantasy is and then, like a true storyteller, writes it out - and the reader can be transported into another time. So we go back in time to Turkey, to the Dutch tulip bulb frenzy, we travel to Capri ... I'm not sure what it all MEANS but I know it has something to do with the yearning of many of us to resist classification. To resist labeling, or pinning down. Even down to something as seemingly elemental as gender. The thing I like best about Winterson is probably the thing that annoys her critics: her joy in her own creative capabilities. I love that about her. And sometimes it does get the better of her (uhm Art & Lies, Jeanette? What the hell was that?) - but still: if you take risks, you're bound to fail sometimes. I appreciate the fact that she is willing to fail.

20. The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm

I consider this a must-read. I remember the controversy that erupted when this piece first came out (in a shorter form, of course) in The New Yorker. In a way, that controversy still rages. This book is the reference point for many conversations about journalistic integrity. Malcolm is relentless in her critique.

21. In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made by Norman Cantor

I believe I referred to this book as I was reading it as The Black Death for Dummies. I think I need to read something a little more advanced next time.

22. Like Life by Lorrie Moore

One of the best fiction writers out there. Period. This is her most recent collection of short stories. She is so so so good.

23. Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles by Jeanette Winterson

This is part of a really cool series where modern-day authors take on re-telling certain myths. Winterson was asked to do Atlas - this is her most recent book - and I LOVED it. She is totally in her prime here.

24. The Rasputin File by Edvard Radzinsky

This book was criticized when it first came out for being out of control, incoherent ... and I guess I can see where the critics are coming from, but whatever, I had a great time reading it. Couldn't put it down, in fact.

25. Goldie: A Lotus Grows in the Mud by Goldie Hawn

I know, who else goes from Rasputin to Goldie Hawn. I had had this book for a while - and hadn't picked it up (I buy pretty much any new entertainment biography or autobiography that comes out - I will get to all of them eventually) - and then it was Annika's ongoing Goldie Hawn series (first part here) that made me finally pick it up. It's one of my favorite books I've read this year. Annika and I exchanged a couple emails about it, it was good to talk with someone who loves Goldie and loved the book. It's not greatly written or anything - but there was just something about it. First of all: you could tell it was all her. There was no ghost writing going on here. Second of all: it wasn't a strict linear biography. She was more interested in sharing what she felt she learned in her life, rather than just listing her resume. And there were times the book made me cry. I love her anyway, always have ... but I ADORED her book and I highly recommend it. It's not just a "ooh, here was my triumph HERE, and here was my triumph THERE" ... she talks about her struggles, her views on men and marriage, on being a working mother, on losing her privacy when she became famous, on how to keep herself from having a big head (she credits a lot of that to her father, but also to her rigorous dancing training) ... I loved every word of this book.

26. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

I'm a huge Gladwell fan. HUGE. I didn't like this book as much as The Tipping Point but still: worth a read.

27. Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art by Gene Wilder

A fun read by an all-time favorite of mine. Posted an excerpt here.

28. Kate Remembered by Scott Berg

This came out right after Hepburn died. Scott Berg had been sitting on the manuscript for a couple of years - Hepburn had asked that he not publish it until she died, and also that his be the first. Hepburn fans: you don't want to miss this. It's not a typical biography. Berg and Hepburn were friends, of a sort ... and this is a book of his remembrance of her, his impression of her. If you're fascinated by this hard-to-pin-down woman, Berg's biography will captivate you. Tons of fantastic anecdotes.

29. Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays by Joan Didion

This is a re-read. "Goodbye to All That", one of my favorite essays ever written, is in this collection.

30. The White Album by Joan Didion

More essays from Joan Didion. This one was a re-read too - but Slouching Towards Bethlehem made me want more. Didion can be like a drug for me. She spoils other writers.

31. Vintage Didion by Joan Didion

A compilation of Didion's stuff. Awesome essay about California and Patty Hearst. Truly, I think Joan Didion is one of my favorite writers. She takes my breath away.

32. A Collection of Essays by George Orwell

I had been working on this collection, off and on, for some time. Many of them I had already read (his political essays, certainly) but a lot of this was new to me. His massive essay on Charles Dickens was thrilling to read. Excerpt here and here. I love Orwell.

33. Cooper's Women, by Jane Ellen Wayne

Horrible. Wonderful. More here.

34. The Cleopatra Papers: A private correspondence by Jack Brodsky and Nathan Weiss

Probably only a real movie buff would like this book. I actually had been keeping my eye open for this book for years - it's referenced often in other books - and finally I found a used copy on Amazon, ordered it, and read it in an afternoon. It's a private correspondence between two publicists working on Cleopatra - being filmed in Rome and in England. Amazing to imagine working on a film without emails, or cell phones, or blackberries. It really is. These guys had to cram in all the information into a letter - and then sometimes they would telegram later with urgent stuff. Cleopatra is one of the most notorious movie shoots in cinematic history and I just ate this book UP. Because it's an unedited version of the correspondence between 2 guys who were trying to put out the fire, trying to calm down the PR nightmare that the film was becoming ... It was the death blow to the studio system, and these guys were ground-level witnesses to it. FASCINATING. Corporate politics, star power, paparazzi (already going strong), board meetings, creative control, art and commerce - this book has it all.

35. Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams by Nick Tosches

Wow, is all I can say. There's a reason why this book is a reference point for other books in the same genre. It doesn't even really classify as a biography. It's a poetic contemplation, it's an act of ventriloquism, it's arrogant, it's deep, it's emotional ... I could not put this book down. I had heard people praise it. David Thomson, critic extraordinaire, used the word "magesterial" when describing it - and I remember thinking to myself, before I read it, "How good could it be? It's a biography of Dean Martin, how good could it be?" It's that good. Within the first paragraph I knew I was reading a different kind of biography altogether. It's controversial, yes, and some people hate it. I loved it.

36. The Men Who Made the Movies by Richard Schickel

Schickel was one of the guys on my list so when I saw this book I had to get it. Interviews from the 1970s with Howard Hawks, John Ford, Raoul Walsh, Vincente Minelli ... and I forget who else. 2 or 3 more. Great stuff. I love books like this. Great backstage anecdotes, funny stories, how they managed to film this or that ... Love it.

37. Because They Wanted to by Mary Gaitskill

Another one of my favorite writers. Short story collection. She's piercing. She's a hard writer for me to read. It's almost too raw at times. Here's an excerpt.

38. Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Posted about it here.

39. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

I went on a new fiction kick which I'm not normally into. Figured I'd see what the fuss was about with some of these. I think the fuss was a wee bit over-the-top in this case (especially the monumental advance she got) - but still I will say this: I could not put it down. It is a helluva book. I posted about it here and here.

40. Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

Great read. Just a great great read. It's quite a debut. Posted about it here.

41. The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov

Holy shit, is basically all I have to say. I posted about it here.

42. The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell

This was a re-read. Why on earth would I re-read this biography of the 6 Mitford sisters? You got me. No - it all came about because Decca Mitford's letters were just published - and I heard about that - and wrote this post about the Mitford family and that got me all worked up all over again. I re-read the book in a weekend. I recommend it.

43. Isaac Newton by James Gleick

I VERY much enjoyed this book. Learned a lot. Posted about it here.

44. Snapping: America's Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change by Flo Conway, Jim Siegelman

Before I even finished this book I had to send a copy of it to Emily. I knew that she, above all people, would get this book. Brainwashing. Cults. It's amazing. Terrifying. It's really about what goes on in the BRAIN during the cult's recruitment efforts ... and what happens when someone snaps. Very important book.

45. The Making of the Misfits by James Goode

Like The Cleopatra Papers - another first-hand in-the-present recounting of one of the most harrowing film shoots in film-making history. I had been wanting to read this book for a long time as well - tracked down a copy on Amazon for, like, 2 cents and read it. Posted about it here.

46. Stalin and the Kirov Murder by Robert Conquest.

Incredible book - even more incredible when you realize that Conquest wrote it when very little of any of this was in the public record. He had to rely on second-hand sources, samizdat literature, dissident memoirs, etc. Conquest amazes me. I posted about it here.

47. Young Patriots: The Remarkable Story of Two Men. Their Impossible Plan and The Revolution That Created The Constitution by Charles Cerami

I changed my tune by the end of the book. I liked it in the beginning (I'll read anything about that period, I don't care) ... but by the end, I thought; Hmm. What does this book offer that other books don't? Uhm ... not much. It's a bit shallow. I think I might have liked the IDEA of the book better than the actual book - it doesn't really do what it says it's gonna do - hone in on Madison and Hamilton. You can get that story just fine in the Chernow biography of Hamilton which covers that period in depth - I don't know, I was a bit disappointed. Posted on it here, here, and here.

48. James Madison: (The American Presidents Series) by Garry Wills.

I do love the American Presidents Series and hope to collect them all eventually. Madison's Presidency is not often focused on - mainly because it wasn't all that spectacular - but also because his work with the constitution tends to overshadow everything else. And probably rightly so. Madison- the serious little thinker, covertly moving behind the scenes ... qualities that made him a superb legislator and organizer but maybe not so good a president. Good book. Highly recommend it.

49. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

What a read.

50. Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser

Chuck sent this to me as a Christmas present which I received just as I was leaving town last week. I, of course, had other books on me - other books to read - but I had a disastrous commute back up to my parents (uhm - it took me 9 hours to get to Rhode Island. Normally it takes 3 and a half. It still wasn't as bad as this infamous trip, however.) So I was stuck on busses, sitting around in terminals waiting, blah blah ... so I took out my brand new book and started flipping through it. 4 days later, I had finished it. Once I started it I could not put it down. Wow. I learned a LOT.

51. Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the Week by Peter Bogdanovich

Miker sent this to me for my birthday, I think - and I've been reading it here and there ever since and I just finished it. Bogdanovich started it as a column for the New York Observer, I think. The editor asked him if he would do a weekly column on classic movies that would be shown that week on television - and Bogdanovich said yes. The columns were a huge success - and eventually Bogdanovich came out with a book, only these were HIS favorite movies, not just ones that happened to be showing that week. Bogdanovich chooses a movie a week - so we get 52 reviews - and he writes with such an immediacy and an accessibility that it makes me excited to rush right out and see the ones I haven't seen. He knows a helluva lot about film - I mean, he's encyclopedic - and sometimes it's daunting when I realize how much I still have to learn - but he's a great guide. An excited happy guide, psyched to show you the treasures he has.

52. They Call Me Naughty Lola: Personal Ads from the London Review of Books by David Rose (Editor)

I love a book that I cannot read on the bus or the train because my wild guffaws would disturb other commuters. OH, how I love a book like that. I tried to read it on the bus once - and that was it. Never again. Snorting, guffawing, wild barks of laughter ... it was too much holding all that noise back. I'll post some of my favorites at some point, but seriously, this book is a HOWLER. I LOVE THOSE PEOPLE.

A gentleman's library

I have always loved this letter of Thomas Jefferson to Robert Skipwith - from 1777 - where Jefferson gives a list of his book recommendations for a personal library. Of course you couldn't buy all these books at once, Jefferson realizes that .. but this is the list of books that you eventually SHOULD have.

Monticello, Aug. 3, 1771

I sit down with a design of executing your request to form a catalogue of books to the amount of about 50 lib. sterl. But could by no means satisfy myself with any partial choice I could make. Thinking therefore it might be as agreeable to you I have framed such a general collection as i think you would wish and might in time find convenient to procure. Out of this you will chuse for yourself to the amount you mentioned for the present year and may hereafter as shall be convenient proceed in completing the whole. A view of the second column in this catalogue would I suppose extort a smile from the face of gravity. Peace to its wisdom Let me not awaken it. A little attention however to the nature of the human mind evinces that the entertainments of fiction are useful as well as pleasant. That they are pleasant when well written every person feels who reads. But wherein is its utility asks the reverend sage, big with the notion that nothing can be useful but the learned lumber of Greek and Roman reading with which his head is stored?

I answer, everything is useful which contributes to fix in the principles and practices of virtue. When any original act of charity or of gratitude, for instance, is presented either to our sight or imagination, we are deeply impressed with its beauty and feel a strong desire in ourselves of doing charitable and grateful acts also. On the contrary when we see or read of any atrocious deed, we are disgusted with it's deformity, and conceive an abhorrence of vice. Now every emotion of this kind is an exercise of our virtuous dispositions, and dispositions of the mind, like limbs of the body acquire strength by exercise. But exercise produces habit, and in the instance of which we speak the exercise being of the moral feelings produces a habit of thinking and acting virtuously. We never reflect whether the story we read be truth or fiction. If the painting be lilvely, and a tolerable picture of nature, we are thrown into a reverie, from which if we awaken it is the fault of the writer. I appeal to every reader of feeling and sentiment whether the fictitious murther of Duncan by Macbeth in Shakespeare does not excite in him as great a horror of villainy, as the real one of Henry IV, by Ravaillac as related by Davila? And whether the fidelity of Nelson and generosity of Blandford in Marmontel do not dilate his breast and elevate his sentiments as much as any similar incident which real history can furnish? Does he not in fact feel himself a better man while reading them, and privately covenant to copy the fair example? We neither know nor care whether Lawrence Sterne really went to France, whether he was there accosted by the Franciscan, at first rebuked him unkindly, and then gave him a peace offering: or whether the whole be not fiction. In either case we equally are sorrowful in the rebuke, and secretly resolve we will never do so: we are pleased with the subsequent atonement, and view with emulation a soul candidly acknowledging it's fault and making a just reparation. Considering history as a moral exercise, her lessons would be too infrequent if confined to real life. Of those recorded by historians few incidents have been attended with such circumstances as to excite in any high degree this sympathetic emotion of virtue. We are therefore wisely framed to be as warmly interested for a fictitious as for a real personage. The field of imagination is thus laid open to our use and lessons may be formed to illustrate and carry home to the heart every moral rule of life. Thus a lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics, and divinity that were ever written. This is my idea of well written Romance, of Tragedy, or Comedy and Epic poetry.

-- If you are fond of speculation the books under the head of Criticism will afford you much pleasure. Of Politics and Trade I ahve given you a few only of the best books, as you would probably chuse to be not unacquainted with those commercial principles which bring wealth into our country, and the constitutional security we have for the enjoiment of that wealth. In Law I mention a few systematical books, as a knowledge of the minutiae of that science is not necessary for a private gentleman. In Religion, History, Natural philosophy, I have followed the same plan in general, -- But whence the necessity of this collection? Come to the new Rowanty, from which you may reach your hand to a library formed on a more extensive plan. Separated from each other but a few paces the possessions of each would be open to the other. A spring centrically situated might be the scene of every evening's joy. There we should talk over the lessons of the day, or lose them in music, chess or the merriments of our family companions. The heart thus lightened our pillows would be soft, and health and long life would attend the happy scene. Come then and bring our dear Tibby with you, the first in your affections, and second in mine. Offer prayers for me too at that shrine to which tho' absent I pray continual devotions. In every scheme of happiness she is placed in the foreground of the picture, as the principal figure. Take that away, and it is no picture for me. Bear my affections to Wintipock clothed in the warmest expressions of sincerity; and to yourself be every human felicity. Adieu.

FINE ARTS

Observations on gardening. Payne
Webb's essay on painting.
Pope's Iliad.
------ Odyssey.
Dryden's Virgil.
Milton's works. 2 v. Donaldson. Edinburgh 1762.
Hoole's Tasso.
Ossian with Blair's critcisms.
Telemachus by Dodsley
Capell's Shakespeare.
Dryden's pl;ays. 6 v.
Addison's plays.
Orway's plays. 3 v.
Rowe's works. 2 v.
Thompson's works. 4 v.
Young's works. 4 v.
Home's plays.
Mallet's works. 3 v.
Mason's poetical works.
Terence. Eng.
Moliere. Eng.
Farquhar's plays. 2 v.
Varbrugh's plays. 2 v.
Steele's plays.
Congreve's works. 3 v.
Garric's dramatic works. 2 v.
Foote's dramatic works. 2 v.
Rousseau's Eloisa. Eng. 4 v.
------- Emilius and Sophia. Eng. 4 v.
Marmontel's moral tales. Eng. 2 v.
Gil Blas. by Smollett.
Don Quixot. by Smollett 4 v.
David Simple. 2 v.
Roderic Random. by Smollett. 2 v.
Peregrine Pickle. by Smollett. 4 v.
Launcelot Graves. by Smollett
Adventures of a guinea. by Smollett. 2 v.
Pamela. by Richardson. 4 v.
Clarissa. by Richardson. 8 v.
Grandison. by Richardson. 7 v.
Fool of quality. by Richardson. 3 v.
Feilding's works. 12 v.
Constantia. by Langhorne. 2 v.
Solyman and Almena. by Langhorne.
Belle assemblee. 4 v.
Vicar of Wakefield. 2 v. by Dr. Goldsmith.
Sidney Bidulph. 5 v.
Lady Julia Mandeville. 2 v.
Almoran and Hamet. 2 v.
Tristam Shandy. 9 v.
Sentimental journey. 2 v.
Fragments of antient poetry. Edinburgh.
Percy's Runic poems.
Percy's reliques of antient English poetry. 3 v.
Percy's Han Kiou Chouan. 4 v.
Percy's Miscellaneopus Chinese peices. 2 v.
Chaucer.
Spencer. 6 v.
Waller's poems.
Dodsley's collection of poems. 6 v.
Pearch's collection of poems. 4 v.
Gray's works.
Ogilvie's poems.
Prior's poems. 2 v. Foulis.
Gay's works. Foulis.
Shenstones works. 2 v.
Dryden's works. 4 v. Foulis.
Pope's works. by Warburton.
Churchill's poems. 4 v.
Hudibrass.
Swift's works. 21 v.
Swift's literary correspondence. 3 v.
Spectator. 9 v.
Tatler. 5 v.
Guardian. 2 v.
Freeholder.
Ld. Lyttleton's Persian letters.

CRITICISM OF THE FINE ARTS

Ld. Kaim's elements of criticism. 2 v.
Burke on the sublime and beautiful.
Hogarth's analysis of beatuy.
Reid on the human mind.
Smith's theory of moral sentiments.
Johnson's dictionary. 2 v.
Capell's proclusions.

POLITICKS, TRADE.

Montesquieu's spirit of the laws. 2 v.
Locke on government.
Sidney on gonvernment.
Marmontel's Belisarius. Eng.
Ld. Bolingbroke's political works. 5 v.
Montesquieu's rise & fall of the Roman government.
Steuart's Political oeconomy. 2 v.
Petty's Political arithmetic.

RELIGION.

Locke's conduct of the mind in search of truth.
Xenophon's memoirs of Socrates, by Feilding.
Epictetus. by Mrs. Carter. 2 v.
Antoninus by Collins.
Seneca. by L'Estrange.
Cicero's Offices. by Guthrie.
Cicero's Tusculan questions. Eng.
Ld. Bolingbroke's Philosophical works. 5 v.
Hume's essays. 4 v.
Ld. Kaim's Natural religion.
Philosophical survey of Nature.
Oeconomy of human life.
Sterne's sermons. 7 v.
Sherlock on death.
Sherlock on a future state.

LAW.

Ld. Kaim's Principles of equity. fol.
Blackstones Commentaries. 4 v.
Cuningham's Law Dictionary. 2 v.

HISTORY. ANTIENT.

Bible.
Rollin's Antient history. Eng. 13 v.
Stanyan's Graecian history. 2 v.
Livy (the late translation)
Sallust by Gordon.
Tacitus by Gordon.
Caesar by Bladen.
Josephus. Eng.
Vertot's Revolution of Rome. Eng.
Plutarch's Lives by Langhorne. 6 v.
Bayle's Dictionary. 5 v.
Jeffrey's Historical & Chronological Chart.

HISTORY. MODERN.

Robertson's History of Charles the Vth. 3 v.
Bossuet's history of France. 4 v.
Davila. by Fameworth. 2 v.
Hume's history of England. 8 v.
Clarendon's history of the rebellion. 6 v.
Robertson's history of Scotland. 2 v.
Keith's history of Virginia.
Stith's history of Virginia.

NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. NATURAL HISTORY ETC.

Nature displayed. Eng. 7 v.
Franklin on Electricity.
Macqueer's elements of Chemistry. 2 v.
Home's principles of agriculture.
Tull's horse-hoeing husbandry.
Duhamel's husbandry.
Millar's Gardener's diet.
Buffon's natural history. Eng.
A compendium of Physic & Surgery. Nourse.
Addison's travels. 2 v.
Anson's voiage.
Thompson's travels. 2 v.
Lady M. W. Montague's letters. 3 v.

MISCELLANEOUS

Ld. Lyttleton's dialogues of the dead.
Fenelon's dialogues of the dead. Eng.
Voltaire's works. Eng.
Locke on Education.
Owen's Dict. of arts & sciences. 4 v.

Heart-achey beauty of libraries

This is for my father, and for all library-lovers everywhere.

Theology Room at St. Deiniol's library, North Wales

Herzog August Bibliothek, Germany

Austrian National Library (the Prunksaal)

Strahov Monastery - the 1st library, Prague, Czechoslovakia

Another one of Strahov Monastery Library -Prague, Czechoslovakia

Strahov Monastery - Theological Library, Prague, Czechoslovakia

Bodleian Library, Oxford University, England

National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg, Russia

National Library of Russia - the manuscript department, St. Petersburg, Russia

The Cathedral Library, Freising, Germany

The New Library of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh

The Abbey Library, St. Gallen, Switzerland - I had to post 2 images of this spectacular interior

El Escorial Library, San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Spain

Melk Monastery Library, Melk, Austria

Trinity College Library, Cambridge, UK

Trinity College - the Long Room, Dublin, Ireland

"this glorious presence-chamber of imperial nature"

From Frankenstein (which I read over this past week - being pretty much unable to put it down):

I spent the following day roaming through the valley. I stood beside the sources of the Arveiron, which take their rise in a glacier, that with slow pace is advancing down from the summit of the hills to barricade the valley. The abrupt sides of vast mountains were before me; the icy wall of the glaceir overhung me; a few shattered pines were scattered around; and the solemn silence of this glorious presence-chamber of imperial nature was broken only by the brawling waves or the fall of some vast fragment, the thunder sound of the avalanche or the cracking, reverberated along the mountains, of the accumulated ice, which, through the silence working of immutable laws, was ever and anon rent and torn, as if it had been but a plaything in their hands. these sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable of receiving. They elevated me from all littleness of feeling, and although they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquillized it. In some degree, also, they diverted my mind from the thoughts over which it had brooded for the last month. I retired to rest at night; my slumbers, as it were, waited on and ministered to by the assemblance of grand shapes which I had contemplated during the day. They congregated round me; the unstained snowy mountaintop, the glittering pinnacle, the pine woods, and ragged bare ravine, the eagle, soaring amidst the clouds - they all gathered round me and bade me be at peace.

Where had they fled when the next morning I awoke? All of soul-inspiriting fled with sleep, and dark melancholy clouded every thought. the rain was pouring in torrents, and thick mists hid the summits of the mountains, so that I even saw not the faces of those mighty friends. Still I would penetrate their misty veil and seek in them their cloudy retreats. What were rain and storm to me? My mule was brought to the door, and I resolved to ascend to the summit of Montanvert. I remembered the effect that the view of the tremendous and ever-moving glacier had produced upon my mind when I first saw it. It had then filled me with a sublime ecstasy that gave wings to the soul and allowed it to soar from the obscure world to light and joy. The sight of the awful and the majestic in nature had indeed always the effect of solemnizing my mind and causing me to forget the passing cares of life. I determined to go without a guide, for I was well acquainted with the path, and the presence of another would destroy the solitary grandeur of the scene.

Young Patriots

I finished my 4th book in the From the Stacks challenge: Young Patriots: The Remarkable Story of Two Men. Their Impossible Plan and The Revolution That Created The Constitution .

I guess I would say that if you want to know about that convention, then you really can't do any better than Miracle at Philadelphia. I enjoyed Young Patriots - but the overall impression was that this was a rather shallow book. If you want to know about Hamilton's role in this convention, and also his role in ratification - then go for the Chernow biography, go for any biography of the dude. And James Madison as well.

Nothing new here. I did appreciate the entire chapter on Rhode Island's role (or lack thereof) in the 1787 convention - and what was going on there - this is all well-trodden ground for me, naturally, it's my home state - so it was kind of nice to read an in-depth explanation of the situation in RI at that time.

But still. I'd say: Best book about that convention is Miracle at Philadelphia. That's the one. Detailed descriptions of Hamilton's personal journey with all of it ... you can get in biographies, and it will be a much more satisfying read than Young Patriots.

I think, as a whole, what I got from this book is that the whole Revolutionary War topic is so hot right now - books are sellin' like hot cakes, I tell ya - the American President series, new books come out almost every week now! - and you need to have a "gimmick" if you want your book to stand out.

The History of Dental Surgery at the time of the American Revolution.

Dolley Madison: Muse or Metaphor? Gender Roles in Colonial America

John Adams: A Farmer's Perspective.

Luther Martin: Unsung Hero of 1787

May 14 - May 17, 1782: 4 Days That Changed Human History

Books focus on one battle. Or one year. They hone in on a specific aspect rather than do an overview.

A flat out history of the convention won't do now, because it's already been done. And better. So you have to say that by focusing on Madison and Hamilton you will be giving the reader something they can't get elsewhere.

Not so.

Still. I enjoyed it because I would enjoy reading anything about that convention - there's always a nugget or two that I have not yet encountered, and that's always fun.

Next up? Last book to be read in the "From the Stacks" challenge:

Secret Life of Bees!!

The classics challenge

Okay, I'm in. I shall participate in the 2007 Classics Challenge.

Here's the challenge: Read 5 classics in the month of January and February. I've been meaning to get on this anyway, so this'll be fun. It's great to look at the books everybody is choosing, too. I found about this challenge here, by the way.

I still have a couple other books going right now (still working on the From the Stacks challenge - almost done!!) - but the classics I will read will be (and some of these are re-reads - I haven't read Frankenstein since ... I have no idea when. I think I was 16 when I last read it - and I interpret classics my own way - if you look at everybody's list - there are some constants, but also some surprises - so "classics" is what it means to you, I guess):

1. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
2. Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift
3. Villette, by Charlotte Bronte (which I've never read - check out Roo's post about what this book means to her - I can't wait to read it!)
4. Tale of 2 Cities, by Charles Dickens (I started to re-read this book recently and then got sidetracked. Let's do it right this time, Sheila!! I love this book - but I haven't read it since high school)
5. Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh (I read Christopher Hitchens' essay on this book and it made me totally impatient to read it)

VERY excited.

The Master and Margarita

The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov.

This was my first book on the "From the Stacks" challenge. I have been meaning to read this book for over a year now. John gave it to me - bless him. He has always been encouraging towards my "Stalin's Terror" obsession. I, of course, had heard of Master and Margarita - and Mikhail Bulgakov - just in terms of his playwriting - but I had never read the novel, and actually knew almost ZERO about it. That was part of the fun of reading this book, for me. It came with almost no preconceptions. The only preconceptions I had had to do with my knowledge of what it was like for writers and artists and - uhm - THE INDIVIDUAL - in Soviet Russia at that time (early 1930s). John told me a little bit about Bulgakov's story (amazing - makes you want to cry, seriously) - and he also gave me another novel which I read promptly called Children of the Arbat - and it has to be experienced to be believed. My own words would pale in comparison to what it is like to read that magnificent book. It deserves a post in and of itself - or a week of excerpts - but I have to say this: To any history buffs I have out there (and I know I have many) - this novel is indispensable to understanding the early Soviet terror, and the thinking behind it. It takes place in the years before the murder of Kirov - which were horrifying years in and of themselves - but the murder of Kirov was the launching pad for something even worse.

As the great Robert Conquest writes:

This killing [the murder of Kirov] has every right to be called the crime of the century. Over the next four years, hundreds of Soviet citizens, including the most prominent political leaders of the Revolution, were shot for direct responsibility for the assassination, and literally millions of others went to their deaths for complicity in one or another part of the vast conspiracy which allegedly lay behind it. Kirov's death, in fact, was the keystone of the entire edifice of terror and suffering by which Stalin secured his grip on the Soviet peoples.

The more that period of history is studied, the more that Conquest's statement cannot be denied. Kirov. Kirov is the key. Children of the Arbat has Kirov as a character - as well as Stalin (John made me read it - ha! - because he said to me, the Stalin freak, that this was, all in all, the best portrayal of the man's thought processes that he knew of. This is no joke. The mystery of Stalin cannot be contained in or explained by factual documents - because he left almost no trace. But what made him tick? If you're as fascinated by this question as I am, then you will not want to miss Children of the Arbat.) The inexorable moving towards the killing of Kirov is the movement of the novel - yet it is also the story of a group of young people who live in the Arbat section of Moscow, a bohemian area, full of artists, students - and what happened to all of these different characters during this crucial time in Soviet history.)

Mikhail Bulgakov comes into the story of The Children of the Arbat peripherally because he had written a play which Stalin had actually approved of. But Bulgakov was no believer. He was an artist and quite disgusted by the Soviet system. (Read more about his extraordinary life here.) As the 1920s moved along, and life became more and more unbearable for him - he finally wrote what was to be a famous letter to Stalin - saying that if the new Russia could not use his talents as a writer, and if satire was no longer welcome in his country - then could he please emigrate? Would Stalin allow him to leave?? Unbelievable, right? Satire, as we all know (and as we certainly experience in our culture now, with its stifling political correctness - from the left AND the right) suffers under any kind of repression - and yet it also flourishes only when it has something to satirize. Times of great power struggles bring about the best satire - but if a culture becomes too entranced with the LITERAL - then satire is not welcome, and even feared. It seems like the satirist is chuckling at things that the majority find sacred. (Well, fuck the majority, is what I say.) Satire is a response to the absurdity of authority. Satire is a way of letting the air out a bit. Taking those in power down a peg. They deserve it. Don't get too big for your britches, mkay? Those who flatter themselves that they are truly important make it their business to try to repress a talented satirist. And when humor itself becomes suspect - when there is seen to be a correct way to not just speak, but THINK (and this is where we're getting to in this culture - Powers that be, anti-art powers from all sides, are trying to regulate how we are even allowed to THINK) - then the satirist becomes even MORE threatening (and yet - to those who give a crap about freedom of speech - and freedom of thought - even more necessary). Bulgakov, as a biting critic of the totalitarian structures being erected all around him, found it more and more difficult to get work. (There are some great sections in Master and Margarita where he satirizes how easy the unionized "correct" Soviet writers had it - but only by basically selling their souls to the regime. They were pampered, with weekend dachas, perks, all that ... Bulgakov is ruthless towards these "writers".)

Stalin, amazingly, did save Bulgakov's ass - but only because of that one play Stalin had seen that he liked. Or who knows what his motives were - but he wrote a letter to Bulgakov, telling him that no he could not leave - but he would make sure that Bulgakov worked at the Moscow Art Theatre. This period of Bulgakov's life did not really work out that well, despite Stalin's patronage. Bulgakov could not write anything that would get by the censors. His sensibility - romantic, biting, intelligent, funny - was far too much for the bastions of Soviet realism. So, essentially, he could get nothing published. His life was ruined. He only lived until 1940.

But he had begun a novel about the devil coming to Moscow. The premise should put a chill down your spine. If only because of its piercing genius. An entire culture - a very religious culture - declares that it is now an atheist culture. No more God. As we know, this was not as easy as it sounded - but that was the declaration. So Bulgakov, using that as his launching pad, decided to fantasize about how the Soviet Union would react if the devil showed up in their midst. How, if they were atheists, would they interpret him? How would they make sense of the devil without God? The thing that brings tears to my eyes is that Bulgakov knew that this novel could never ever be published. It was a direct criticism of the entire system. No way would it ever get by anybody. But he wrote it anyway. And - here's the most amazing part (besides the book itself, I mean): he wrote an early draft of the book in the early 1930s. It soon became clear, as 1932, 1933, 1934 - those dreadful years - crawled by - with millions dying - that it was dangerous to even have the manuscript around. So he burned it, page by page.

And then - when it became clear that he would never get any work anyway - that his career was over - and also that he was dying (he died in 1940) - he rewrote the entire thing from memory.

I can't even imagine.

I just can't even imagine.

The courage of this man. The saving power of his art. I mean, it didn't save him, and it didn't save the millions killed by Stalin ... but it was a voice. A voice. A voice that did survive the terror - and can speak to us now. It's redemptive. How, in dark moments, dark moments of the human soul, something can be expressed which may be uttered too soon - which may not see the light of day for 80 years more - but the fact that it exists at all is reason for hope. Anne Frank's diary is the most obvious example but there are countless other stories. Books hidden away. People persecuted for pursuing their art. And yet pursuing it anyway. Pursuiing it in secret. Hiding meanings wihtin meanings in their texts. It cannot be killed. That kind of expression cannot be killed. Even though those in power have a vested interest in killing it. In creating an environment where such things can't flourish. And yet - they do. They do ANYway.

There's a line in the book which has since become famous, a catch-phrase in Russia to this day: "Manuscripts don't burn." There are multiple levels of meaning to this statement. First of all: they obviously DO burn, since Bulgakov burned one himself. And the Master, the hero of the book, also burned a manuscript - the book he had been writing about Pontius Pilate - only the book had not burned up completely - because Margarita, his lover and greatest believer, saved the pages from the flames. And yet, on that deeper level, the human level - there is the meaning: that no, even if a manuscript is burned, it has NOT burned. It existed. The statements therein, with all their belief in humanity, in SANITY, existed. Bulgakov might not have written such a book in easier times. The price he paid, obviously, is way too high. Nobody should be completely deprived of their livelihood. But by reconstructing his manuscript - there is proof that no. Manuscripts do not burn. He died leaving the book nearly finished. Some of it is reconstructed from his notes, and there are certain errors which have not been corrected (a dude was thrown out the window, and yet later - he is seen running down the stairs - stuff like that, stuff that Bulgakov would obviously have corrected if he hadn't died).

In terms of the scope of this one particular book, let me quote from the Afterword of my copy (indispensable reading - this book is written in a kind of code. You probably could enjoy it without any background in Soviet history - but you wouldn't really get it. You wouldn't really get how important and just how subversive this book really is. The Afterword, and all of the notes in the back of the text - were my guide. They were HUGELY helpful.) But here is a bit from the Afterword, about Bulgakov in terms of a literary continuum - not just in Russia - but in the trend at that time:

Like the writers literary history has come to label modernists, Bulgakov is writing in the post-Einsteinean universe, and in many ways he fits the general profile of Anglo-American modernism. Because he is usually discussed as a Soviet writer, albeit an aberrant one, he is rarely placed in this context. Like the modernists, Bulgakov was inclined to parody the forms of the earlier masters, and in this novel he certainly uses myth to impose order of sort - only then to explode the myth itself. Like T.S. Eliot, Bulgakov had no desire to subvert traditional humanism - to the contrary, he longed to reestablish it in a country where it was held in contempt. But his art actually reveals the typical concerns of modernism, so it is not surprising that irony and ambiguity of motivation are central to The Master and Margarita. To some degree these approaches are present in earlier Russian writers, especially Dostoevsky and Gogol, but Bulgakov adds truly modern anxiety: the knowledge that there is no stable society against which to rebel, there is only entropy, visible everywhere.

And there is also a meta kind of thing going on here. Throughout the entire book, we get to read the chapters of the Master's book on Pontius Pilate. These are extraordinary pieces of ventriloquism here - truly amazing - and at first it seems like they come out of nowhere (the 2nd chapter launches us, suddenly, into Pontius Pilate's inner monologue) - and it feels like the story itself is being left behind, the story started in Chapter 1 - but once you keep reading, and you keep reading the Pontius Pilate stories interspersed with the main narrative - you realize how intertwined the stories are, how they mirror one another. It also becomes proof of the startling statement (startling in terms of the year this book was written): "Manuscripts don't burn." So Master may have tried to burn his book. And yet here we are reading it.

The book is a fantasy. People fly out of windows. There is a massive ball, headed by Satan, with a guest-list of famous murderers and poisoners throughout history. Cars fly.

I found a good reader-review on Amazon which I'll quote here in full - it says it quite well:

Bulgakov was one of the first generation of Soviet writers who flourished in the 20s, during the short lived Soviet Experimental movement, and then suffered horribly after the stregnthening of Stalin's regime. Bugakov was primarily a man of the Theater, and something of a theatrical quality hangs on to this book. The chapters have an almost tableaux style construction. When the Stalinist purges began, Bulgakov was began work on Master and Margarita, pretty much to please himself. He knew that he would never live to see it published.

The novel itself is nearly impossible to describe. It consists of three separate plots. On the surface is the visit to Moscow, of the Devil in the guise of a professor named Woland, and his henchmen, two grotesque disfigured men, a naked woman and a cat who plays chess among other things. The group proceeds to essentially terrorize the city's intellectual community, mostly by exposing each character's inner hypocracy. The satire of communist society in this section is quite biting, and uproariously funny. Embedded in this story is a "novel within a novel" ...the story of Pontius Pilate and his encounter with the itinerant spiritual man, Yeshua. Finally, there is the story of the separated lovers, the Master and Margarita, who interweave between the other two stories. They live in the present day Moscow, but the Master ostensibly wrote the manuscript which told the story of Pontius Pilate.

This rich and complicated stew of a book works on so many different levels. At it's most obvious, it is a scathing attack on communism and the cultural elite's complicity with the evils of the system. It is also rather pitiless in it's exposure of the greed, corruption and mendacity of human nature. But Bulgakov is not a conventional moralist. The Devil as Woland is an evil figure...sometimes a terrifying figure, and yet he ends up as the instrument of the redemption of both the Master and Margarita. There is a deep spiritual viewpoint at work here...Early in the novel, Yeshua tells Pilate that, "all men are good", to Pilate's incredulity. In the context of the novel, Yeshua seems hopelessly naive, but by the end of the novel, you wonder if this may actually not be the author's central point. Even the devil is capable of some good here.

This book contains a whole world. Characters change in dizzying fasion and events go by with lightening speed. And yet, by the last pages there is a haunting beauty, an almost incandescent light that shines over the prose. Some of these final images stay etched in my brain even now, several weeks after finishing.

I highly recommend that anyone read this book. It may be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. It certainly is the greatest Russian novel of the last 100 years!

Speaking of the devil (and it is true that he is not the conventional evil stereotype - he's a mischief-maker, kind of like a Poltergeist for the entire nation):

You can't even count how many times the word "devil" is used. "The devil knows why!" "The devil knows where he is going." And yet the word "Christ" is only used once. It is startlingly obvious. In the Pontius Pilate chapters - we do meet the prisoner who is going to be crucified that day - but he seems more like a baffled and kindly regular man (albeit with strange powers of perception - he intuits that Pontius Pilate suffers from migraines - and that he loves his dog - a dog that is not even present during the interrogation.) But Bulgakov never calls him "Christ". He is referred to as "Ha-Notsri", or "the prisoner" or "Yeshua". Pilate senses something about this prisoner. Not that he is a prophet. Not that he is the son of God. But ... that there is something wrong about executing him ... something dreadfully wrong. His migraine is described so vividly that I almost felt it banging in my own temples as I read it. Pontius interviews Ha-Notsri, and battles with the piercing sunlight, battles with these random thoughts of immortality that come from out of nowhere, seemingly ... his own thoughts confuse him. Pilate thinks he is going mad. He just has a feeling that he should not execute this man. He is tormented.

But then we come back to Moscow. And we follow around a cast of characters - who all have encounters with this odd gentleman who appears from literally out of nowhere in Moscow, during one day in an unspecified year. The footnotes are indispensable because you are clued into certain things that explain some of the satire. Certain buildings, what the puns would be in Russian, what the fire really means, what Bulgakov was getting at here or there. It reminded me a bit of reading Ulysses. The book has a very Joycean feel to me. First of all, it just emanates personal exorcism. It really does. I don't know who Bulgakov was - but I do know that he put his heart and soul into this book. It's just THAT kind of prose. Powerful. Personal. And fearless. It also has a meandering feel of reality - in the same way that Joyce said that if Dublin ever burned to the ground, he would like to believe that it could be built back up again, by using the road-maps in his books. Bulgakov creates Moscow to that degree of specificity. And apparently - just like on Bloomsday when people wander around Dublin, following the path of Leopold Bloom ... an entire Bulgakov tour-of-Moscow industry now exists. Bulgakov was not a literalist (obviously) - he could not afford to be - and much of Moscow he did not describe literally. He was more interested in the REAL truth of a landscape, which often does not sync up with what is really there. Literal truth did not interest him. People who are only interested in literal truth are despots in training. Either political despots, or social despots. I've had a couple of those who read this blog (although they usually don't last long) - and I'm sure you all can think of people like that in your own life. They're the ones who never get the joke, they're the ones who can't not nitpick, who can't go with the flow, they're the ones who think "playing devil's advocate" is the HEIGHT of intelligence... We all know people like this. Now, nothing against facts. Please, don't misunderstand. Facts are all well and good - but I have always maintained (because I live it) that there is another kind of truth. A deeper kind of truth that has nothing to do with being literal. Is the Moscow that Bulgakov describes LITERALLY Moscow? No. Even though some of the building numbers are the same - and any Russian who lived at that time would immediatley recognize most of this - it is Bulgakov's Moscow. It is the Moscow of a fantastical moment in time - when the devil suddenly shows up. We are not in reality. We are not in an A equals B world, and we rarely are when we're talking about great art. Is it effective as art? If it is - then I believe that it is BETTER than what is literally true.

Another quote from the afterword of my copy of the book:

In an early draft of The Master and Margarita Bulgakov planned to have a major scholarly character write a work about the "secularization of ethics". This was an essential concern of Bulgakov's generation, including those who were committed Marxists. Bulgakov's much-loved stepfather was an atheist, who demonstrated that such beliefs were not incompatible with the highest ethics. To Bulgakov's mind, however, the Soviet era seemed to abound in disturbing examples of what happens when ethics are divorced from the religious impulse and attached to the vagaries of political expediency. Pilate, as he struggles with his conscience and his fear, solidly based in what he knows awaits him if he allows a man who talked against the emperor to go free, in this way seemed quite contemporary. Bulgakov's entire novel is in a sense a polemic with the dominant force of his time, the belief in enlightened rationalism which in his country ended in a totalitarian structure.

What happens when an enlightened rationalist comes face to face with the devil?

This is Bulgakov's story.

It also helps to have some background in the Bible - and also it really helps to have some familiarity with Goethe's Faust - since the parallels are everywhere. The footnotes, again, help lead you through the coded language. It's incredible, an incredible read. Sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, other times truly terrifying, sometimes very very sad - the scenes in the mental hospital are very sad - because you realize that the only sane people in the entire book are locked up in the mental institution ... and slowly but surely, they have the sanity knocked out of them. It's like Catch 22. What does it mean to be sane in an utterly insane world? How can you even call yourself sane if you submit the INSANE rules of society? What is being sane? If everything is crazy?

Read the opening of the first chapter. Without ever saying what he is actually doing - Bulgakov creates such a sense of menace, and quiet, and trepidation. No, not just trepidation. Dread. Once you know what Bulgakov is criticizing, all you can see in these opening paragraphs, is an overpowering sense of dread.

One hot spring evening, just as the sun was going down, two men appeared at Patriarch's Ponds. One of them - fortyish, wearing a gray summer suit - was short, dark-haired, bald on top, paunchy, and held his proper fedora in his hand; black horn-rimmed glasses of supernatural proportions adorned his well-shaven face. The other one - a broad-shouldered, reddish-haired, shaggy young man with a checked cap cocked on the back of his head - was wearing a cowboy shirt, crumpled white trousers, and black sneakers.

The first man was none other than Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, editor of a literary magazine and chairman of the board of one of Moscow's largest literary associations, known by its acronym, MASSOLIT, and his young companion was the poet Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyryov, who wrote under the pen name Bezdomny.

After readhing the shade of the newly budding linden trees, the writers made a beeline for the colorfully painted refreshment stand bearing the sign: BEER AND COLD DRINKS.

And here it is wroth noting the first strange thing about that terrible May evening. Absolutely no one was to be seen, not only by the refreshment stand, but all along the tree-lined path that ran parallel to Malaya Bronnaya Street. At a time when no one, it seemed, had the strength to breathe, when the sun had left Moscow scorched to a crisp and was collapsing in a dry haze somewhere behind the Sadovoye Ring, no one came out to walk under the lindens, or to sit down on a bench, and the path was deserted.

"Give me some Narzan water," said Berlioz.

"There isn't any," replied the woman at the refreshment stand, taking umbrage for some reason.

"Got any beer?" inquired Bezdomny in a hoarse voice.

"The beer will be delivered later," the woman answered.

"So what have you got?" asked Berlioz.

"Apricot juice, only it's warm," said the woman.

"Wel, give us that then!..."

The apricot juice generated an abundance of yellow foam, and the air started smelling like a barbershop. The writers drank it down and immediately began iccuping, paid their money, and went over and sat down on a bench facing the pond, with their backs to Bronnaya Street.

Here the second strange thing happened, which affected Berlioz alone. He suddenly stopped hiccuping, his heart pounded and stopped beating for a second, then started up again, but with a blunt needle lodged inside it. Besides that, Berlioz was seized with a groundless fear so intense that he wanted to run away from Patriarch's Pond that very minute without looking back.

Berlioz looked around miserably, not knowing what had frightened him. He turned pale, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, and thought, "What's wrong with me? This has never happened before ... my heart's playing tricks on me ... I'm overtired. Maybe it's time to throw everything to the devil and go off to Kislovdsk ..."

And then the hot air congealed in front of him, and out of it materialized a transparent man of most bizarre appearance. A small head with a jockey cap, a skimpy little checked jacket that was made out of air ... The man was seven feet tall, but very narrow in the shoulders, incredibly thin, and his face, please note, had a jarring look about it.

Berlioz's life was so arranged that he was unaccustomed to unusual happenings. He turned even paler, opened his eyes wide, and in a state of confusion thought, "This can't be! ..."

But, alas, it was, and the tall transparent man swayed from left to right in front of him, without touching the ground.

At this point Berlioz was so overcome with terror that he shut his eyes. And when he opened them, he saw that it was all over, the mirage had evaporated, the man in checks had vanished, and the blunt needle had dislodged itself from his heart.

"What the devil!" exclaimed the editor. "You know, Ivan, I think I almost had a sunstroke just then! Maybe even something like a hallucination." He tried to smile, but alarm still flickered in his eyes and his hands were shaking. Gradually, however, he calmed down, fanned himself with his handkerchief, managed a fairly cheerful "Well then ..." and returned to the conversation that had been interrupted by the apricot juice.

The devil has appeared in Moscow.

Read the book and see what happens next.

It takes my breath away on multiple levels.

The courage of the pen. The brilliance of the satire. The ruthlessness of Bulgakov's eye. The humor that he still was able to see in this insanity. And the hopelessness of the author himself, knowing this would never see the light of day during his lifetime ...

The Master and Margarita was not published until 1966 - almost 30 years after Bulgakov's death - and then, in highly censored form. It was still too hot to touch. And I would say, in many ways, it still is. It is a rebuke to authoritarian attitudes everywhere, anytime, wherever they crop up.

The book is now considered the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century, and it sure isn't hard to see why.

Bookie Bookie!

Book Meme!! I got it from Heather. I love her answers - it's always fun to see what other people were into, if they're big readers.

1. How old were you when you learned to read and who taught you?

My parents will have to confirm this. I was probably 3. I don't remember being taught - but my parents read to me all the time. So I guess I just picked it up - but I believe the story goes that I had learned to read without them even realizing it. The story is: I was in my car seat in the back seat of the car. They were driving to the Cape. Anyone who knows the Cape - knows about the big rotary that you have to go through to get onto the Cape. There is a huge A-frame liquor store on that rotary - where everybody stops to get booze before going out onto the Cape (I mean, I know that NOW - I didn't know it then.) The liquor store has a huge sign above the A-frame: LIQUOR. But anyway - my parents were circling the rotary, I was 3 years old in the back - maybe even younger - and I suddenly announced:

"LICK-WAR."

It took my parents some time to decipher this. What did she say? What is "lick-war"? Is she trying to tell us something? They finally realized that I had actually been READING. I read the sign on top of the A-frame.

2. Did you own any books as a child? If so, what�s the first one that you remember owning? If not, do you recall any of the first titles that you borrowed from the library?

We were very big on going to the library (naturally) - but I do remember that we owned some books. My sister Jean will probably remember better than I can. In terms of borrowing books - here were the favorites (and I'm sticking with books for much younger kids - once I get to about 7, 8 - we're into Anne of Green Gables land, and Narnia, and Beezus and Ramona ... but before that??)

I loved this book (with which I have now been reunited ). I could not get enough of it. The illustrations were addictive.

Other favorites which I remember we took out of the library:

Harold and the Purple Crayon Perfect book.

The Frog and Toad books (adored those)

The Frances books - oh man, I loved these!!! I especially liked Bedtime for Frances when she kept seeing monsteres in the corner, etc. I loved the badgers. Oh, and I loved the one about her little tea set.

Anything and everything by Ezra Jack Keats. I STILL love those books - and have since bought all of them - just because I need to have them. Snowy Day is sheer magic - but my favorite, my absolute favorite, was A Letter to Amy.

The Madeline books were huge favorites - and my favorite, in particular, (big surprise) was the one where Madeline and Pepito are kidnapped by circus folk. I just lost myself in that one.

If this is the book I think it is - then we loved loved loved this one. I still, when occasion warrants, say the words, " 'Soon,' said Mother'" - when asked WHEN something will begin. "Sheila, when does the movie start tonight?" "Soon, said Mother." That's from that old old book that we all loved - I can still see the illustrations in my head.

Oh, and despite his creepy photo on the back of all of his books: Shel Silverstein. Anything and everything Shel. My dad used to read us The Giving Tree. I have that book now and I can still hear those words in my dad's voice.

Rosemary Wells is a HUGE O'Malley favorite. Max? PLEASE. Who is funnier than Max? And his big sister Ruby (only we called her "Rubby"). We loooooved this one as well. And I can still recite long sections of Noisy Nora. "Nora," said her sister. "Why are you so dumb?" Also - at that point in my reading career - Noisy Nora was the book that had the word with the most syllables ("monumental") - well, that and Peter Rabbit with the even BETTER word "soporific") - and I remember feeling really proud when I read the word "monumental" out loud. It was a big word!!

3. What�s the first book that you bought with your own money?

I have no idea.

4. Were you a re-reader as a child? If so, which book did you re-read most often?

Oh my God - YES. Compulsively. Every single book above was totally pawed over and read a BAZILLION times.

As I got older - my reading list expanded - it's all here. Oh and here too!! And I read all of those books 100 times apiece.

5. What�s the first adult book that captured your interest and how old were you when you read it?

Well, I was always very advanced in terms of language comprehension (uhm - lick-war?). I guess Oliver Twist counts as an adult book and I read the entire thing when I was 10 years old. I remember carrying it around with me. That's probably the biggest leap - in terms of how young I was and how advanced the book was.

6. Are there children�s books that you passed by as a child that you have learned to love as an adult? Which ones?

Hmmm. Bridge to Terabitha ... That's the first one that comes to mind. For some reason - I did not read that book as a little girl - but then my friend Betsy basically made me read it when she found out I had never read it - I was in college when I finally tackled Bridge to Terabitha. It's phenomenal. Movie coming out soon!! Terrific book - I have no idea why I didn't read it originally.

Oh - and also - The Witch of Blackbird Pond - although that is a wee bit older than the other books I'm talking about here, in terms of reading comprehension- I think most people read that one in 5th grade, 6th grade - but for whatever reason, I just didn't read it as a kid. My dear friend Ann Marie leant me her copy - I read that book in my 20s. It's wonderful.

Bonus Question: Are there books you remember reading as a child that you either can�t find now or can�t remember the title?

Well - the bimulous night book was the biggest mystery - but as I mentioned earlier - I did end up finding it. I had been looking for it under the wrong title for, oh, 20 years? 25 years??? It's called When the sky is like lace - and I had been keeping my eye open for Bimulous Night.

I can't think of too many more lost books.

I even tracked down Summer Sleigh Ride, for God's sake. How much I loved that book I cannot even describe!! Good to own it again after - oh - 30 freakin' years.

14

I just found this ... a Friday Fourteen: "There are several books on my shelves that I adored so much that I have really been itching to read them again. So, here, without further ado, books I want to reread."

I re-read books I love all the time ... so for the fun of it - here goes.

Books I either WANT to re-read - or books I HAVE re-read (I'll stick to fiction):

1. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - by Michael Chabon - I have only read this one once - but it was one of the best novels I've read in, oh, the last 20 years. Every word of it. The topic, the era, the specificity, the characters ... it is SO good. I've been eyeing it longingly recently - wanting to pick it up again ... so I probably will cave soon.

2. Sportsman's Paradise - by Nancy Lemann. Oh, how I love this dear, funny, touching book. I've only read it once - but I often pick it up and leaf through the pages, reacquainting myself with it. I'll re-read it someday.

3. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - by Jimmy J. I've already read it probably 5 times completely? So I'll never be done with it, I don't think. I always pick up something new each time I read it, too. It's one of those books that changes with you, the reader, as you go through your life.

4. Lady Oracle - by Margaret Atwood - I have had a hankering to re-read this one again. I've only read it once - years and years ago - and I remember actually laughing out loud a couple of times - which, you know, is rare for Atwood. I remember laughing out loud during the whole section describing the pretentious ridiculous Weather UNderground type group she gets involved with ... but I can't remember why it's so funny. On the list for re-reading.

5. Two Girls Fat and Thin - by Mary Gaitskill - I talked about that a bit here. I wasn't too wacky about the book - I found it disturbing and upsetting ... but I think it might just have been me. Regardless, I need to go back and investigate. See what I think.

6. Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather - by Jincy Willett This is the kind of book that I HAVE to recommend to friends I know will love it. Mitchell?? You would LOVE this book. RTG already read it. I begged her to. But it's just SUCH a delightfully weird funny dark little book. Laugh out loud funny at times ... and man, do I value an author who can do that! Also, it takes place in Rhode Island, and she just GETS it. She gets the Rhode Island thing perfectly. I enjoyed it so much I need to read it again.

7. Crime and Punishment - by Fyodor Dostoevsky. One of the best books ever. I've only read it once. This is a definite must-read-again book.

8. Jane Eyre - by Charlotte Bronte. You know. I just keep reading that book, and I'll never stop prob'ly.

9. Breaking and Entering - by Joy Williams. I was obsessed with this book when I first read it. I even had to read some of it outloud to myself. I loved the characters. It's been years since I've read it.

10. A Prayer for Owen Meany - by John Irving You know I've only read this book once - and it was YEARS ago - I was just out of college, or maybe still in college ... and I remember certain scenes almost word for word. The Christmas pageant lives on in my mind as one of the funniest things I have ever read in my life. I remember my boyfriend and I were reading it at the same time - racing through the book at almost the same speed - and we were at the beach, and he had surged ahead of me in the book and started in reading the whole pageant scene - and he was seriously SNORTING with laughter. I was dying because I hadn't gotten to it yet ... but then 2 pages later ... I start to SNORT with laughter too - and we both just read, and guffawed ... at the same time. Great book - need to read it again.

11. Time Traveler's Wife - by Audrey Niffenegger I just really liked this book. I thought it was quite good, and I'd like to read it again.

12. Moby Dick - by Herman Melville. If I re-read it - that will make it the third time. And it's daunting - I need to gear up for it ... but I am certainly not DONE with that book. I will re-read it again someday.

13. Wrinkle in Time - by Madeleine L'Engle. Always. I've read it a bazillion times. I'll read it a bazillion more.

14. Possession - by AS Byatt ... I've already read it probably 3 times completely? I am sure I will be drawn to read it again. It's just one of those books for me. I never get sick of it.

Winter Book Challenge

Forgot to mention that I am going to join the "From the Stacks" challenge I've seen about the blog-world. Sounds fun - and I've actually already begun.

Here's what it is:

If you are anything like me your stack of purchased to-be-read books is teetering over. So for this challenge we would be reading 5 books that we have already purchased, have been meaning to get to, have been sitting on the nightstand and haven't read before. No going out and buying new books. No getting sidetracked by the lure of the holiday bookstore displays.

So. To read 5 books I already own between Nov. 1 and Jan. 30. Fun!!

Here is what I will read (and also write about):

1. The Master and Margarita - by Mikhail Bulgakov (I have already begun that one)

2. The Secret Life of Bees - by Sue Monk Kidd

3. Young Patriots: The Remarkable Story of Two Men. Their Impossible Plan and The Revolution That Created The Constitution - by Charles A. Cerami

4. Isaac Newton - by James Gleick

5. The Making of The Misfits - by James Goode

This will be good for me. Tackle that "to read" pile a mile high.

Prep

I am now reading Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld, which is one of those books that has been hard to miss lately. Member what I said about "buzz" a couple posts below? Prep had BUZZ. It was everywhere. It was on display in every bookstore, every newspaper had articles about it, etc. Prep, Prep, Prep, that's all I ever hear. Sometimes I find buzz annoying because I feel like the people in charge (publishers, whoever) are trying to shove it down my throat. Like: let me decide, mkay? Is it a good book or not? Get off my back. I'll read it if I feel like it! But a couple people I admire recommended Prep - I've seen it mentioned on a couple of the book blogs I read - (Erin at Critical Mass is one, and I think Anne mentioned it as well??) - bloggers who have similar tastes as mine in terms of literature ... we speak the same language ... so I finally picked it up.

The fact that I am reading so much recently published fiction is way out of character ... but it's where I'm at right now ... and I had heard so much about Prep that I bought it a couple weeks ago and started reading it yesterday (now that I have The Historian and Life of Pi out of the way).

If I didn't have, you know, a LIFE ... I probably would finish it by tomorrow or the next day.

In it, there is such a specific ache of adolescence, particularly the adolescence of girls ... it's so specific - and yet I feel a breathless recognition from time to time reading it ...

I'm not even sure if it's really well-written or not. There are moments when I think it is. But what is really superb about it is its story. The story-telling aspects of it, the EVENTS - (like the whole game of Assassin - and what that brings about in our narrator ... the whole haircutting phenomenon ... ) the observations about human behavior - especially behavior of teenagers - and the events created - their specificity - their underlying sadness - I'm finding it kind of a sad book, nostalgic, melancholy ... We make mistakes during our teenage years (well, we keep making mistakes, we're human) ... but there's something REALLY poignant about the ones made during those years, because we don't really know better, we are struggling to form ourselves, we are trying to break away from our parents, yet we still desperately need them ... we look to our PEERS for validation ... and groups of teenage girls can be such a snakepit. It wasn't in my experience - I had great friends, who are still my friends - but I certainly saw that snakepit all around me. The viciousness, the TRICKINESS of girls. And to put our hearts in the hands of teenage boys? What?? You want to say: No! Don't!! But of course we do, because that's what you do when you're a teenager. I gave my heart to DW - a boy I had 2 classes with - never went on a date with - but extrapolated everything I needed to know about his personality from my brief interactions with him. I LOVED him. And when I asked him to go to my prom and his response was (in a very kind voice, not mean at all -and that was even WORSE): "I don't think I know you well enough." I mean ... it was unthinkable. It was so painful. Don't KNOW you well enough?? What? It's like that last scene in Summer and Smoke - although it's the teenage version. John says to Alma, "In the 2 or 3 times we've been together ..." and Alma says, "Only 2 or 3 times?" He says, gently, "Yes, it's only been 2 or 3 times that we have ever been alone together, Alma" ... and she says something like, "I felt that we even breathed together." Ouch.

Prep is all about that stuff. An unrequited crush. On a guy who seems hopelessly cool.

There are certain sections where Sittenfeld just NAILS a moment. She describes it with such simple perfection that I think: "God, I so know what she is talking about there. I've never put it into words ... but yes, I know just what she is talking about." It's quite remarkable. I've read a lot of books about teenagers ... i continue to enjoy the whole YA "genre" of books ... and I don't think this qualifies as YA, it's really a book for adults ... but I think this is a great evocation of adolescence. Especially female adolescence. It's kinda perfect. The narrator - Lee - is so consumed with how she is coming across, with how she is being perceived ... that it actually manifests itself as cruelty, from time to time. She hurts people's feelings because ... she is so awkward and insecure. Like her interactions with Dave Bardo - the guy on the kitchen staff. She has no sense of self. She is consumed with self-consciousness - which, eventually, just seems like - self-absorption. Can you look outside yourself for just ONE second? Can you perceive that the entire world does not revolve around you, Lee? Can you see that nobody gives a crap that you're from the Midwest - and if they do, then they're assholes, and who cares about them?? But of course, Lee is only 15, 16 ... she can't yet. She has to make her mistakes. She has to hurt Dave Bardo. She has to hurt others. She has to go through all of that herself.

When Lee is a freshman at Ault (the prep school of the title) - she is obsessed with the seniors. They seem so carefree, so THEMSELVES ... Lee pores over old yearbooks, looking thru the pictures, putting together the stories - Oh, so she dated him ... then they broke up ... but there they are as Homecoming king and queen, etc. ... It's such a specific sensation - but I so used to do that. As a freshman. The seniors seemed like ADULTS to me. They were not 17. They were ... nearly grown-ups. They had relationships. They drove around in their cars, and had open campus. They didn't even go to the dances anymore, because they were so beyond it. I was in awe of them. Curtis Sittenfeld remembers that moment with perfect clarity.

And then there's an excerpt like this ... which describes something kind of crazy, a sensation that doesn't make all that much sense, and yet which I so understand and actually share. It's a bizarre thing, I had never put it into words before:

I believed then that if you had a good encounter with a person, it was best not to see them again for as long as possible lest you taint the previous interaction. Say it was Wednesday and there was an after-dinner lecture and you and your roommate struck up some unexpectedly fun conversation with the boys sitting next to you. Say the lecture turned out to be boring and so throughout it you whispered and made faces at one another, and then it ended and you all left the schoolhouse. And then forty minutes later, you, alone now, without the buffer of a roommate, were by the card catalog in the library and passed one of these boys, also without his friend - then what were you to do? To simply acknowledge each other by n odding would be, probably, unfriendly, it would be confirmation of the anomaly of your having shared something during the lecture, and already you'd be receding into your usual roles. But it would probably be worse to stop and talk. You'd be compelled to try prolonging the earlier jollity, yet now there would be no lecturer to make fun of, it would just be the two of you, overly smiley, both wanting to provide the quip onw hich the conversation could satisfactorily conclude. And what if, in the stacks, you ran into each other again? It would be awful!

This anxiety meant that I spent a lot of time hiding, usually in my room, after any pleasant exchange with another person. And there were rules to the anxiety, practically mathematical in their consistency: The less well you knew the person, the greater the pressure the second time around to be special or charming, if that's what you thought you'd been the first time; mostly it was about reinforcement. Also: The shorter the time that elapsed from your first encounter to your second, the greater the pressure; hence the lecture-to-library agony. And finally: The better the original interaction, the greater the pressure. Often, my anxiety would set in prior to the end of the interaction - I'd just want it to be over while we all still liked each other, before things turned.

And then this, about her friendship with Martha - this really struck a chord in me as well - I have great friends still from high school ... and something about this really resonates:

And as for Martha - I never understood when I was at Ault why she liked me as much as I liked her. Even now, I'm still not sure. I couldn't give back half of what she gave me, and that fact should have knocked off the balance between us, but it didn't, and I don't know why not. Later, after Ault, I reinvented myself - not overnight but little by little. Ault had taught me everything I needed to know about attracting and alienating people, what the exact measurements ought to be of confidence and self-deprecation, humor, disclosure, inquisitiveness; even, finally, of enthusiasm. Also, Ault had been the toughest audience I'd ever encounter, to the extent that sometimes afterward, I found winning people over disappointingly easy. If Martha and I had met when we were, say, twenty-two, it wouldn't have been hard for me to believe she'd like me. But she had liked me before I became likable; that was the confusing part.

"she had liked me before I became likable". Very astute.

And this might be my favorite passage in the book so far. I felt a chill reading it. I had a moment identical to this one. Identical.

"Where are you gonna go?" he said. "Harvard?"

"Yeah, right."

"I bet you're smart. Get all As."

"I'll probably go somewhere like --" I stopped. When Martha or I thought we'd done badly on a test, we'd say I might as well just apply right now to UMass, but invoking UMass as a last resort would, clearly, be a bad idea. "--to dog school," I said brightly.

"What?" Dave looked across the seat at me.

"Like obedience school," I said.

"You have a dog?"

"No, no, I'm the dog."

He looked at me again, and it was a look I always remembered, long after that night and after I'd left Ault. He was confused and was registering a new piece of information and this was what it was: that I was a girl who would, even in jest, utter the sentence, I'm the dog. It was a good lesson for me. It was a while before I stopped insulting myself so promiscuously, and I never stopped completely, but still -- it was a good lesson.

There's something in her writing I really like.

Life of Pi

Speaking of good books - I read that book this week as well. Started it on Wednesday and finished it yesterday. My sister Jean had given it to me for my birthday last year - and I'm just now getting to it. Or - no. I'm just now getting in a fiction mood again, after being out of that mood for, uhm, years?

Life of Pi. Holy crap.

I actually shed tears about that zebra. I sat reading the book and tears started rolling down my face. So dammit, the book works. It works without seeming like it's TRYING to work. It is the opposite of sentimental. It just tells its story. And yet ... there's a sense to it ... that ... maybe this is a fabrication? And does it matter? There's this whole thing about what is "the better story" - he introduces that thought early on ... and it comes back like gangbusters at the end.

I prefer to believe "the better story" - and I guess I always have. I create narratives out of my own life. I assign roles. I look at some disaster train-wreck that has occurred in my life and eventually ... it is turned into a story. You can read some of them on this here blog. This is how I get through life. Or one of the ways. This is how I try to survive, or manage, or ... make sense of the things that happen. I'm not a realist. I am very PRACTICAL - sometimes TOO practical - but I am not a realist. I am always looking for "the better story".

You can choose a story that will empower you. Or you can choose a story that will weaken you.

It's up to you.

I'm not sure if Yann Martel meant for me to have such thoughts as I read this tale - especially the end of it .. but that's what came up. The role of STORY in life. And NARRATIVE. And how we navigate events. How do we re-tell the stories of our lives to ourselves? What words do we use?

I have a lot more thoughts about it - and - notably, it really made me re-think my position on zoos - and I thought that was one of my rock-hard positions - I don't have too many, but I thought that was one of them - and Pi Patel talks about zoos in such a way that it made me think: Huh. Need to look at this opinion of mine again. A miracle! Jean and I were talking about that on the phone on Tuesday when I started to read the book and I said, "I may have to re-think zoos!" Jean said, "I know!! Me too!"

It's a quick read - another one that I could not put down. I read it on the treadmill, and on the bus. It's fast (unlike The Historian).

And I love the writing. I love the whole God aspect of it. It's presented with no sanctimony, no preaching. It is a description of this character's journey, and how he sees God, and how he came to be a practicing Christian, Hindu AND Muslim. His parents are like, 'Uhm ... it's great that you want to know God ... but you have to CHOOSE ONE." Meanwhile, his parents are totally secular. They don't get it at all. But Pi doesn't choose. To him, it's all about praising God, and about love. It's all about love.

Heart crack.

Those animals. Richard Parker.

I love that animal. I love his descriptions of its behavior. I love the whole psychology of it - wild animals and man ... alpha males ...

And then the whole survivor castaway aspect of the story ... It has a lot to say about sheer grit, and determination. I found myself utterly wrapped up in this tale ... horrified at certain parts of it - the storm, the zebra (couldn't believe I actually cried for the zebra, but I did) - horrified at just the THOUGHT of floating in a raft (with a Bengal tiger) for 227 days. Oh - and that freakin' algae island he comes upon near the end ... Now THAT was something out of a nightmare. Horrifying. Just horrifying.

I need to pick out some excerpts to post. Some of it was so deep and meaningful to me it seemed to speak directly into some of the experiences I am having right now in my life. It was one of those things when - reading along - with tears in my eyes - I thought, "This is exactly what I need to be reading at this moment." Hang on. Hang on. It is not the strongest who survive. It is those who are most attached to life. The sections where Pi realizes his own ferocity in terms of hanging on to life - even though he is barely alive - and huddled in the middle of the Pacific Ocean - terrified - but life. Life is all we have. Some people surrender it. Pi will not.

And Richard Parker.

Who knew. Who knew that a Bengal tiger could seem so ... know-able. I felt like I knew him. He was not anthropomorphized - that was one of the best parts of this book - Richard Parker was not a cuddly creature who happened to be a tiger - he was not described as though his emotions were like human emotions. No. He was a freakin' tiger, on a raft in the Pacific. But still ... animals experience things such as fear, or uncertainty, or relaxation. They know when things are wrong. They also fight for their lives. They fight to live. Richard Parker is one of the most in-depth characters I have met in a book in a long time.

I loved it. So so glad I read it.

The Historian

I stayed up until 3 am to finish it. I knew I would regret it today and I kinda do ... I just woke up, and I hate waking up when, you know, it's PM and not AM - but I just could not put the book down. I even fell asleep briefly at one point - with candles blazing all over my apartment - here, there, in the kitchen, the hallway, my room ... Lovely. I could have burned up in my sleep. But I woke up maybe 20 minutes later - and slogged myself back to the book. It was unthinkable that I would put the book down with only 50 pages to go. So I kept going. My back cramped, I hunched over it, sitting up in my bed ... and finally finished it. Naturally, when I went to sleep after that - I had a dream that I cut someone's throat. Lovely. I KNEW that too as I kept reading. It got very scary at the end and I thought, "I'm gonna regret this ..." But I finished it.

It's quite a book. It's terrifying, and actually - very sad. It ends up being about loss. Dealing with loss. Letting people go. If someone you loved was - you know - bit by a vampire - and you knew that they were now "undead" ... how would you let them go? How would you deal with this? The postcards from Helen to her daughter were, for me, some of the saddest parts of the book. Her feeling unclean, not clean enough to be near her daughter. She would contaminate her child and so she left. But what a sacrifice.

And believe it or not (Rob?? You're my buddy, the only person I know who's read it) ... I did NOT see the ending coming. The one in the Epilogue. I had a feeling this wouldn't be a "happily ever after" book - and I went back and looked at the prologue and saw that the very first sentence was something like, "After a shocking event, I have found myself wanting to tell this story ..." I had forgotten that. So ... in our narrator's present-day life - and we know that she is now in her 50s ... there has been a "shocking event"? What could that be?

When the librarian in Philadelphia came running out after her, saying, "You left these behind on the table ..." I STILL didn't see it coming.

And once I read what she had left on the table - once it was revealed ... I thought: Of course. Of course. This is how it MUST end. There is no other way for this book to end.

Sad. I found the book to be very sad. Not in a page-by-page way (not like Atonement is sad - where the entire book is suffused with absolute tragedy) ... in a page-by-page way, the book is a thriller. A horror story, a literary detective story, a romp through Eastern Europe chasing down leads ... It has no introspection, almost no subtext. But added up all together ... when I closed the book ... I felt sad. Sad about loss. Losing people. Having to let people change. Having to let people go. Not just when they die ... but when they have life events that change them, or alter them ... Things do not stay the same. We cannot get attached to things remaining unchanged. We have to just keep ... letting ... go ... It is one of the hardest things in the world.

Wonderful book - really excellent read - I highly recommend it.

The Legion of the Archangel Michael

Reading The Historian it is pleasing to me to discover that my own library is kind of a reference library for me. I have had that sensation before (tracked down a post I wrote about it) - but it doesn't happen often. Normally, they are just my books, background, sitting around my apartment like watching sentinels. I barely notice them. But then ... when I need something? There they are. I know where to go. I know WHAT I have, and I know in what book ... or sometimes I know only: Hmmm, I know I have read more information about this topic ... not sure in WHICH book, though. But I am my father's daughter and with a bit of searching (usually no more than a couple of minutes) - I can locate, to the exact passage, what I am looking for. I'm kind of autistic that way. All of my books on the Balkans, and the Ottoman Empire, and Byzantium has made much of the subject matter in The Historian old hat to me. I'm like, "Oh yeah, Carol II, sure, yeah, that guy ...Whatever ..." "Wallachia, awesome, yup, know all about THAT ..." etc. I feel like quite an expert, however ridiculous that may be, and it's a lot of fun. The Historian is not well written, I don't think, but it's the kind of thing where you can't put it down. I cannot. put. it. down. I am tearing through it - and the damn thing is 9,001 pages long. So it's taking me a while. You just have to turn the page. You just MUST! So ... to write a page turner that is 9,001 pages long is quite a feat. So hats off, Ms. Kostova, hats off.

I often have Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts lying beside me as I read The Historian - so I can look up to see what HE said about this or that. More books as well. I love cross-referencing. It doesn't matter what the topic. Ann Marie and I, years ago, when we discovered our shared love for all things Lucy Maud, had a brief idea of creating a database for every single character that shows up in every single Lucy Maud book ... because many of them are interconnected ... many show up in different books ... Kind of a 6 degrees of separation database for the Lucy Maud world. Also, you could look up: "Okay, so in what other story does SHE show up??" Because some of the short stories contain character that show up in the novels ... etc. This kind of stuff is FUN for me. And from the insane GLEAM in Ann Marie's eyes, as we planned our database, I knew I had found, in the words of Anne Shirley, a kindred spirit.

From The Historian:

We had reached a clearing in the woods, and it was, astoundingly, full of men. They stood two rings deep around a bright bonfire, facing it and chanting. One, apparently their leader, stood near the fire, and whenever their chant rose to a crescendo each of them lifted a stiff arm in a salute, putting his other hand on the shoulder of the next man. Their faces, weirdly orange in the firelight, were stiff and unsmiling, and their eyes glittered. They wore a uniform of some sort, dark jackets over green shirts and black ties. "What is this?" I murmured to Georgescu. "What are they saying?"

"All for the Fatherland!" he hissed in my ear. "Stay very quiet or we are dead. I think this is the Legion of the Archangel Michael."

"What is that?"

Oh yes. Legion of the Archangel Michael. Oh yes, of course. THOSE guys. Hmmm, I have read about them before. Where is that passage ...

From Balkan Ghosts, by Robert Kaplan:

It was 10:30 a.m., November 30, 1940. Snow was beginning to fall in Bucharest. Inside the Church of Ilie Gorgani, built in the seventeenth century to honor a Romanian general who fought the Turks, hundreds of candles illumined the red-robed Christ in the dome. Coffins, draped in green flags with gold embroidery, lined the sides of the nave. Altar boys carried in trays of coliva (colored sugar bread) for the dead. Fourteen members of the Legion of the Archangel Michael - the fascist "Iron Guard" - including the organization's leader, Corneliu Zelea Codreaunu, were about to be buried and canonized as "national saints" by priests of the Romanian Orthodox Church, who had been chanting and swinging censers all night.

Two years earlier, in 1938, King Carol II's police had strangled the fourteen men, stripped the bodies naked, and doused them with sulfuric acid in a common ditch to hasten their decomposition. But in late 1940, Carol fled and Romania fell under an Iron Guard regime. The victims' remains, little more than heaps of earth, were dug up and placed in fourteen coffins for reburial. At the end of the funeral service, the worshipers heard a voice recording of the dead Legionnaire leader, Codreanu. "You must await the day to avenge our martyrs," he shrieked.

A few weeks later, revenge was taken. On the night of January 22, 1941, the Legionnaires of the Archangel Michael - after singing Orthodox hymns, putting packets of Romanian soil around their necks, drinking each other's blood, and anointing themselves with holy water - abducted 200 men, women, and children from their homes. The Legionnaires packed the victims into trucks and drove them to the municipal slaughterhouse, a group of red brick buildings in the southern part of Bucharest near the Dimbovitsa River. They made the victims, all Jews, strip naked in the freezing dark and get down on all fours on the conveyor ramp. Whining in terror, the Jews were driven through all the automated stages of slaughter. Blood gushing from decapitated and limbless torsos, the Legionnaires thrust each on a hook and stamped it: "fit for human consumption." The trunk of a five-year-old girl they hung upside down, "smeared with blood ... like a calf," according to an eyewitness the next morning.

Good times, good times. Those Legionnaires sound like a barrel of laughs, huh?

Hmm, back to The Historian, although I am still pondering the Legion ... and I read:

"Who are they?"

He tossed his match into the fire. "Criminals," he said shortly. "They are also called the Iron Guard. They are sweeping through the villages in this part of the country, picking up young men and coverting them to hatred. They hate the Jews, in particular, and want to rid the world of them." He drew fiercely on his pipe. "We Gypsies know that where Jews are killed, Gypsies are always murthered, too. And then a lot of other people, usually."

I described the strange figure I'd seen outside the circle.

"Oh, to be sure," Georgescu muttered. "They attract all kinds of strange admirers. It won't be long till every shepherd in the mountains is deciding to join them."

Huh. I need to know more.

I knew there was more in my book. I dug through Balkan Ghosts. Found what I was looking for.

In 1938, Carol had abolished all political parties and declared a royal dictatorship. After bankrolling the fascist Legion of the Archangel Michael for years, that anti-Semitic organization turned against him on account of his liaison with the Jewish Lupescu. So Carol had the Legionnaire leaders murdered. This angered Hitler, whom Carol for a time ignored. But after the Nazi conquest of France, Carol formed his own fascist party, which passed a series of anti-Semitic laws, forcing Romania's 800,000 Jews to live virtually an underground existence. When Stalin, in the summer of 1940, demanded that Carol cede him Bessarabia, Carol appealed to Hitler for help. Hitler answered Carol by forcing him to yield the northern part of Transylvania to the pro-Nazi regime in Hungary.

The population felt these territorial losses like hammer blows. Roars of "abdica [abdicate]" rose from the crowds assembled in the square by the Athenee Palace. Carol "had been too clever," in his dealings with Hitler and Stalin, writes Manning in The Balkan Trilogy. "He had played a double game and lost."

Carol and Lupescu left Romania in the dead of night in late 1940, in a nine-car railway train filled with the country's gold and art treasures. The fascist Legion got wind of the couple's departure and tried stopping the train, but to no avail.

Again: good times, good times.

Carol II. What a guy.

But I knew there was more on the Legion itself. So I found it, with a distinct feeling of "A-ha ... here it is ..."

In 1927, the twenty-eight-year-old [Corneliu Zelea] Codreanu heard the voice of God calling him from an icon of the Archangel Michael, a fighting saint that Balkan peasants associated with the struggle against the Muslim Turks. Codreanu, an educated peasant influenced by the anti-Semitic teachings of his university professors in Jassy, heeded this voice and formed the Legion of the Archangel Michael, whose military wing would later by known as the Iron Guard. In Codreanu's view, the Legion was "a religious order" uniting all Romanians "dedicated to a heroic existence": those alive, those not yet born, and those already dead. He organized the Legion around cuibs ("nests") of thirteen members each. To join a cuib, an initiate had to suck the blood from self-imposed slashes in the arm of every other member of the nest, and then write an oath in his own blood, vowing to commit murder whenever ordered to do so. Before setting out to kill, each man had to let an ounch of his blood flow into a common goblet, out of which all would drink, thus uniting the entire nest in death. Members were also obliged to wear crosses and packets of Romanian soil around their necks. Romanian fascism, like Romanian Communism, was by no means standard-issue.

Tall and handsome, Codreanu had riveting eyes and the chiseled features of a Roman statue. His followers called him Capitanul ("the Captain"). He liked to dress completely in white and ride a white horse through the Carpathian villages. There, he was worshiped as a peasant-god - the Archangel Michael's envoy on earth. When Codreaunu married, 90,000 people formed a bridal procession.

King Carol II saw Cordreanu as a dangerous rival, especially after Hitler told Carol to his face, during a 1938 meeting in Berchtesgarten, that he preferred Codreanu to the 'dictator of Romania". Carol, perhaps because of his overweaning arrogance, was no coward. He answered the Fuhrer by having Codreanu and thirteen other Legionnaires strangled to death in November, 1938, and then spread rumors that Codreaunu had "sold out to the Jews" (exactly what Codreanu had accused Carol of doing, on account of the King's liaison with Lupescu).

But the Romanians could never believe that their "Captain" had sold out to the Jews. To the peasant masses, Codreanu was still very much alive: "a tribune who stood in the imagination of the Rumanians as both martyr and prophet," writes Countess Waldeck. Many peasants claimed that they had seen "the Captain" riding his white horse through the forests at night, in the weeks and months following his supposed execution. Later, the Romanian Orthodox Church proclaimed Codreanu a "national saint".

Ah yes. God told you to chop up 5 year old Jewish girls, "Captain"? Rot in hell.

And of course, there is MUCH more on the Legion in my books ... horrible stories, all of 'em, I mean - they're all horrible - Carol is horrible, eveyrone is horrible - but that was the bit I had been looking for. To provide a little bit more depth, a little bit of the history, the context, if you will ... and then back to the novel.

More on Codreanu and his murderous Iron Guard here.

I have been reading the entire book in this back-and-forth manner. Which is why it is taking me forever, by the way.

Fiction ....

Which fictional character frightens you the most?

Cathy from East of Eden. She haunts me. I've written about her multiple times - usually in other contexts (here - in a post about Leslie van Houten. And here. That one started with a discussion about Scott Peck's People of the Lie) My fascination with Cathy is akin to my fascination with Stalin. It's hard to look away from people like those two.

Which fictional parents do you most wish you had?

Maybe Mr. and Mrs. Murry in Wrinkle in Time. Or - to go further down in that family: Meg and Calvin in the rest of the books. They seemed like pretty cool parents.

Which fictional character has the most balls?

I guess Captain Ahab is coming to mind.

To which fictional character?s house would you most like to be invited for dinner?

The Professor's house in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

If you could invite 3 fictional couples to your home for dinner, who would they be?

Leopold and Molly Bloom - now THAT would be interesting

Samuel Klayman and Josef Kavalier from The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - I know they're not a couple - but they go together in my mind ... maybe they would bring along Rosa ... The three of them, actually, qualify as a "couple" - 3 of my favorite characters of all time

Nelson Denoon and ... nameless woman (uhm - more on them here)

Which fictional character could probably entice you into his/her bed?

Yossarian. Probably?

Which fictional character would most likely have broken your heart?

Nelson Denoon

Mr. Darcy too. Of course.

In which fictional character?s home would you most like to live?

Lake Mistawis - Barney Snaith's house on the island in The Blue Castle

Close second: Kerewin's tower on the beach in The Bone People

I got this fun meme here!

Thursday 13

13 classic books I would like read in 2007.

1. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
2. Adam Bede, by George Eliot
3. David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
4. The Idiot, by Dostoevsky
5. Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot
6. Persuasion, by Jane Austen
7. The Red and the Black, by Stendahl
8. Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo
9. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens
10. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
11. Complete plays of William Shakespeare
12. Hard Times, by Charles Dickens
13. The complete short stories of Anton Chekhov

(Some of these would be re-reads - but I'm counting them anyway. Obviously I have read all of Shakespeare's plays, in some cases multiple times - but I have been wanting to revisit them again - preferably in the order they were written - as close as can be guessed. Also it's been years since I read Frankenstein - and I love that book, want to read it again.)

(I got this idea here!)

beddy bye books

My post titles are so lame. I don't care.

Okay, so I keep wanting to get into this - just cause it's fun and I check in with the site every Thursday!! So here goes:

Booking Through Thursday

1. Do you read in bed? For how long? Do you fall asleep reading? Will a good book keep you up all night?

   I wish I could read in bed. I can only read in bed if I am sitting up. But I am unable, apparently, to put my head down on a pillow - even if it's 11 am - without falling into deep REM. It's actually kind of frustrating. I can't lie in bed and watch TV, and I have to sit upright to read. Bed is only for sleeping apparently.

   And I hate hate HATE falling asleep reading. I am so against it. Reading is something I do when I am alert, wide-awake - and I hate having to re-read stuff because of sleep interrupting my consciousness and my ability to, you know, understand what I was reading.

   Oh, and I have most definitely stayed up all night before with a good book. Darkness at Noon comes to mind. I could not leave that book unfinished. Other books I stayed up all night reading (just one more chapter, one more chapter): The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - that was one I was just unable to put down. Stephen King's It - I was afraid to stop reading at certain points because those freakin' monsters in the sewers would come into my dreams. Keep going, keep going. Also Moby Dick. I stayed up all night reading that one. I was living in Hoboken - in this horrible apartment - the one I lived in right before Sept. 11 ... and I decided to re-read Moby Dick - which I had been FORCED to read in grade school - and frankly, re-reading that book was one of the most exciting literary experiences of my life. I don't even know how to talk about it, and I've rarely posted on it - it's too hard to talk about. Kate understands - she re-read it at around the same time - and we had many INSANE conversations on the phone, where we both were saying, "How about 'The Whiteness of the Whale'????" "HOLY SHIT, THE WHITENESS OF THE WHALE." We would read passages out loud to each other. We would sit in silence, contemplating Pip's fate, and what happened to him. What happened to him ... Dudes. Seriously. I've never had a reading experience like that, before or since.

2. Where do you keep your nighttime reading? Do you have a special table next to the bed? Are there many books there? Do you keep books there that you aren't reading (finished or unread)?

   Well, I'm not really a nighttime reader, really. (See comment above. I cannot crawl into bed with a book. I'll be out like a light even if I have just woken up. It's a huge bummer.) I'm more of a morning reader, or an early afternoon reader. No, scratch that: I read anywhere, anytime. Woody Allen said once something about always needing a book on him, because - what if the line at the bank is long - meaning he has to wait 2 minutes - or what if the elevator doesn't come in 3.7 seconds? He has a book. I am like that too. Right now I am reading the Dino book, in elevators, on busses, on subways, as I walk down the street, in line at the deli ... etc.

   Back to the question. I do have a table next to my bed - but since I don't read in bed I don't keep my current books there. No. Those books are usually just sitting in my bookbag, from their day walking around with me - or they are strewn about the floor. I do, though, have books next to the bed. Just little books I like to have nearby. Book of Common Prayer. Bible. And a wonderful book of inspirational quotes that I really love - you get one a day. It's my morning ritual.

In praise of Laurie

From Little Women. Yeah. I had a crush on him too.

It just seemed like he and Jo were so ... so ... RIGHT for each other ... When I first read the book, I was 10 years old, 11* - and oh my GOD how I resented Jo falling for the stupid tender-eyed German professor with his dumb-ass poetry and his boring umbrella. And I just hated the thought of Laurie - wild, sensitive Laurie - being with Amy - who, even though she learned her lesson with the stolen apples and getting whipped at school - and even though I did cry a tear or two during the chapter when she fell through the ice --- still and all: Amy wasn't Jo!! It was Jo and Laurie who needed to hook up!!!!

I suppose that was quite an adolescent attitude. Maybe Jo and Laurie were too alike. Maybe Laurie needed a conventional woman, a housewife type - and he knew it. I also know the story of how Louisa May Alcott felt pressured by her publisher to "marry Jo off". She wanted Jo to remain a bachelor - like herself.

Which is why, I believe, stupid teary-eyed German dumb-bum annoyed me so much as a kid.

Get outta here, Kraut, you're an afterthought!! I also despised the illustrations of the German in the copy of the book I had. He had a full flowing beard - coming down over his chest. Words cannot express how much this disgusted me. I almost had to stop reading the book.

I love the scene when Jo and Laurie meet up at the ball - and Jo is so embarrassed about her burnt dress that she hides in the hall so no one will see the burn marks on the back of the skirt. And she and Laurie end up talking, and then dancing - by themselves - out in the big empty hallway.

Come on. Romantic.

I am not at ALL wacky about Laurie's name, and I never was. Not too keen on the androgyny of it. Maybe that was the point. Dont' know. But Laurie's personality was appealing enough to me to overcome these difficulties.

I will go to my grave wondering: But ... but ... what would it have been like if Jo and Laurie had just ... given it a shot???

But then again. I'm a romantic. A romantic who has lost much. A romantic who has been severely disciplined by the universe just for being a romantic. So I stand on the sidelines. And I wonder about the alternate paths of fictional characters.

Either Jo and Laurie should have hooked up - or Jo should have stayed single.

German crumb-bum doesn't work. For me. It didn't work for me when I was 10 and it doesn't work now. Put your umbrella away, dude. It's not wanted here.

* weird memory: However old I was when I first read this book - I remember it was the book where I first really understood the concept of contractions. Maybe I had learned them in school - no idea - but Meg has a line in the first chapter where she says, "But I'm afraid I don't!" And I was reading it out loud - maybe to my mom - and I said the word "don't" like "dahn" - almost as though it were in the word "orthoDONtist". I didn't understand what I was saying. And I was corrected by my mom - "No - that's 'don't' - which actually means 'do not'." And I totally remember that moment of LIGHT breaking thru. Ohhhhh! "Don't" means "do NOT' - wow - cool!!!!

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

Not a nasty, dirty wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

-- first paragraph of "The Hobbit", by JRR Tolkien

On this day in history, 1937, The Hobbit was published.

Just for fun, and to celebrate (if you have, er, 10 hours to read all that crap) - here are some of the long-ass book excerpts and posts I have written about Tolkien:

"It is no bedtime story"

"Of course, The Lord of the Rings does not belong to me"

Frodo and free will

"That noble northern spirit"

"The failure of Frodo"

"I am not Gandalf..."

Happy birthday, Bilbo!!

Two book memes

1. First book to leave a lasting impression?
Charlotte's Web. That was the first book that made my heart HURT after finishing it. But that hurt also had some joy in it .... I mean, the last paragraph of that book:

Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.

I ... I ... Here I am, many many years later, feeling that same mix of hurt and joy at those words. Tears. Extraordinary book. And that was the first one.

2. Which author would you most like to be?
I'm thinking maybe Madeleine L'Engle. She seemed like she has had a really nice life with a good balance between art and love and duty and pleasure. She also made a shitload of money. But most writers don't have it so good, and most of them have miserable poverty-struck lives. So let me not play it safe and let me then say: In terms of what she actually WROTE? I'd like to be Charlotte Bronte. Because, seriously. I would love to be inside her head for just an hour or so, see what was going on in there.