Stuff I’ve Been Reading

My schedule is a BEAR right now but I still have managed to go on a really pleasing reading tear this year, in the little spare time that I have. Since I moved apartments in February, my commute into Manhattan is pretty extensive (compared to the 20-minute commute at my old place). The commute also involves THREE kinds of public transportation, so a lot of disruption: on train, off train, walk to new station, on train, off train, walk 10 minutes to subway, on train … like, these are my mornings). It’s a pain in my ass, frankly, especially when I come home – like I did last night – at 1 o’clock in the morning. BRIGHT SIDE THOUGH: all that extra time has been spent reading. I find that short stories really work on the commute, since it’s interrupted three times by a change of train. I re-read all of Shirley Jackson’s short stories this year, for example. But I’m working on other books too, non-commute books. Huge tomes, as a matter of fact, and I read maybe 3 or 4 pages a day. Slow and steady. Here are some of the things I’ve been reading.

— The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, by Olivia Laing

In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Brick – the alcoholic son – refers to his drinking as a “trip to Echo Spring,” (Echo Spring being the label on one of the liquors he likes best.) Olivia Laing’s fascinating book is part-memoir (her childhood was affected by an alcoholic), part literary-analysis, part travelogue, and part psychological/emotional exploration. She “profiles” six writers: Tennessee Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, John Berryman: men famous for their writing, and famous for being raving alcoholics. What is the connection between drink and writing? How did alcohol play into their work? How do they deal with alcohol IN their work? Laing is British, and she takes a trip – via train – around America, visiting the haunts of these men. She is a gorgeous writer. It’s an extremely sad book. I kind of can’t believe, considering the “wakeful anguish” (thanks Keats) of the majority of my life, that I didn’t become an alcoholic. I still have no idea how I managed to dodge that bullet. Laing’s book is thought-provoking, empathetic, well-researched. I was sorry when it ended.

— Don’t Cry, a collection of short stories by Mary Gaitskill

I’ve been “with” Mary Gaitskill from her first shocking arrival into the literary world with the short story collection Bad Behavior: Stories, a book still almost too hot to touch, still startling, frightening even. The fact that it was common knowledge she had been a call girl once, a stripper, gave her a strange glamour, but also made the stories even more piercing. The sex in her stories … hoo boy. She’s not particularly prolific: three novels (Two Girls Fat and Thin, Veronica and The Mare) and now three short story collections: Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted to: Stories and Don’t Cry. I have had Don’t Cry on the shelf for a couple of years but honestly – like Katherine Dunn – I need to be in a particularly strong frame of mind to be able to “take” Mary Gaitskill. I can’t just pick it up and start reading. She opens cracks in the surface, revealing a darkness that goes to the center of the earth. So, you know. You have to be in the right mood. Her outlook is, how you say … intense. And sometimes pitch black. Not surprisingly, there’s so much good stuff in Don’t Cry, so many characters you remember, worry about, give up as a lost cause, invest in. Like the title of her first collection … nobody behaves particularly well. This ain’t the suburbs. As someone who was not particularly well-behaved – at least in my 20s – her stories of adventures bordering on the dangerous, of connections so hot that everyone gets burned, of living on an extreme edge … I groove to all of it. It’s naming something very important. It’s transgressive. It’s not polite. I write with (some) transparency here but there is shit I will never tell. Not because I’m ashamed. On the contrary. One needs to maintain SOME privacy. But Gaitskill is the brave one, and she tells it. Don’t Cry is a diverse collection (more diverse than Bad Behavior), showing different worlds, middle-aged worlds. There’s a really funny biting story about a journalist going to a book reading given by a noted feminist, there’s a sad and complex story about a widow accompanying her friend to Addis Ababa so the friend can adopt a child … There’s always one story I cannot shake in each of her collections. “The Blanket” was the one I couldn’t shake from Because They Wanted To and “Secretary” – haunts me to this day – from Bad Behavior. The story I can’t shake from Don’t Cry is “Mirror Ball.” I thought about it constantly for about 3 days. I kept going back to it in my mind. I was amazed at its clarity, at how right ON it was. It revealed some new things to me about my own life (and when does THAT happen?) I actually thought, “Huh. That really IS what was going on back then.” “Mirror Ball” is different from Gaitskill’s other stuff. There’s a “magical” element to it, a fantasy element. It’s not quite realistic. And yet, I have never read a story that gets to the heart of such an extremely specific but also pretty run-of-the-mill situation (a one-night stand) … The story dissects – or, rather, MANIFESTS what can be unleashed in a random hookup. I read it with a growing sense of recognition. I’ve written about the various men in my life here before. They are familiar “characters” to people who read me regularly. Michael. Love-at-first-sight guy. Window Boy. But there’s one man I’ve never written about. Not directly anyway. “Mirror Ball” (online in its entirety) captured a lot of what was going on with that guy, even though our relationship didn’t resemble the one in the story at all. Our thing went on for years. But we emerged like we were coming out of a foxhole, staggering away from each other. I had to freakin’ move to New York to at least start to get over him. We could not be in the same Time Zone. Like I said: “Mirror Ball” haunted me with its accuracy on what actually transpires between people – molecularly, spiritually – or … what is transferred – how we leave things behind, things we might never get back, things we will miss.

See? Mary Gaitskill really takes it out of you. I approach her stuff tentatively, battening down the hatches.

— The War Against the Jews: 1933-1945, by Lucy Dawidowicz

Earlier this year I read Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (his The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups is an all-time favorite), and the final chapter is devoted to Lucy Dawidowicz’s influential 1975 book. He got me really curious. I’m halfway through it now. I have so many books about WWII on the shelves, so many books about the Holocaust. This isn’t so much an interesting “take” as it is an analysis of anti-Semitism in Germany (long before Hitler came along), and the rise of propaganda that softened the populace for more extreme versions of the anti-Semitism that had come along. One of her real strengths is analyzing language, the language of the Nazis – what she calls “esoteric language” – where they say what they mean but in language that is vague and cloudy with deniability, and yet everyone in the room would know exactly what was being said. She also analyzes Hitler’s language as well and – separating her from many scholars who place Hitler’s decision to go into a “final solution” late – late 30s, early 40s, she places it a DECADE earlier. I recommend both Explaining Hitler AND War Against the Jews.

— Jean Renoir: A Biography – by Pascal Merigeau

I’m reading this book a little chunk at a time. It’s so dense, so well-researched, every page packed with so much information that I have to slow myself down to absorb it. This biography gives me the same feeling that Chernow’s biography of Hamilton gave. Kind of like: “Okay, well no one will ever have to write a biography about this person ever again. OR, if they DO, they will have to WRESTLE with this book’s majesty.” It’s also making me ache to see many of these films (I’ve seen all the big ones from Renoir, Rules of the Game, Grand Illusion, Bete Humaine, The River) – but there’s lots of earlier stuff I haven’t seen. A beautiful coincidence: just when I finished the chapter on The Crime of Monsieur Lange – I was aching to see the film immediately – and that same day I got my newsletter from the Film Forum, announcing that it’ll be playing at FF in November. KISMET. Amazing book about a really interesting man and a great artist.