Forty Days of Lent: Day Twenty-Six

At the end of last September I went to Montauk, Long Island for a week's vacation.  I wanted an easy vacation - no ambitious travel or difficult logistics - and an inexpensive one.  Someone I worked with had been talking up Montauk for years as the "anti-Hamptons."  It was off season so prices were good and it's only a three hour train trip from Manhattan.

One afternoon I decided to rent a bike and ride out to the Montauk Lighthouse, an inescapable local attraction.  The lighthouse is featured on many of the tourist items for sale and on websites that aren't even affiliated with the lighthouse.  But I rode along Route 27, saw the lighthouse, did the loop that the highway takes at that end of the island before paddling back, returning the bike and going back to my hotel.

Once back at the hotel, I grabbed a towel and my current reading (Bleeding Edge) and headed to the pool.  I discovered that Maxine Tarnow, the main character in Pynchon's novel, normally Manhattan-based, was coincidentally heading to Montauk.

They continue out to the Montauk Point Lighthouse.  Everybody is supposed to love Montauk for avoiding everything that's wrong with the Hamptons.  Maxine came out here as a kid once or twice, climbed to the top of the lighthouse, stayed at Gurney's, ate a lot of seafood, fell asleep to the pulse of the ocean, what's not to like?        

Paranoia, odd coincidences and how people process them, seeing patterns or embracing that there are no patterns: these are themes in Pynchon's work.  So you can imagine how odd it felt that warm late September day to read a character in a book who was experiencing what I had just done an hour or two earlier.  I did consider Gurney's when looking for a hotel; I'm thankful I wasn't staying there.  That would have been too much.

But as they decelerate down the last stretch of Route 27...

As I did just a little while ago.

They park in the visitors' lot at the lighthouse.  Tourists and their kids all over the place, Maxine's innocent past....They drive our of the lot again, follow the loop around to Old Montauk Highway, presently hook a right inland on Coast Artillery Road.  

The connection to what I had been doing that day was eerie.  I didn't want to read further in case of...what?  It would describe Maxine sitting by a pool with a book?  Would she see me?  Happily the fiction took over again and her story continued on a different path from mine, which was a relief.

Forty Days of Lent: Day Twenty-One

The Green Man

Kingsley Amis

Maurice Allington, the owner of The Green Man, a hotel near London that coasts on its charm, has some problems.  Some mundane, some serious, though it’s doubtful if Maurice can tell the difference.  His teenage daughter is estranged from him.  His hotel guests are annoying.  He’s firmly in the middle of middle age.  He’s begun seeing things, apparitions around his hotel, brought on either by his alcoholism or ghosts, though it’s doubtful Maurice can tell the difference.  He’s actually most concerned with trying to convince his wife to have a threesome with him and his mistress.

I washed down two more pills with heavily watered Scotch and went straight to bed, having locked up the casket in the office.  I needed what sleep I could get, with a funeral and an orgy ahead, and no doubt, something more.    

Sex, death, drinking, unease.  These are the concerns of The Green Man, Kingsley Amis’ ghost story and study of middle age ennui. Its supernatural elements are more eerie than scary, the model seeming to be the British ghost story rather than American-style horror.  It is also very funny:

“Yes. Well.  There we are.  I must go and see the major,” said the man of God, so rapidly and decisively and so immediately before his actual departure that seeing the major (even though there was a retired one actually present) might have been a […] family euphemism for excretion. 

The Green Man is an examination of the difference between boorish bad behavior and real malice.  Maurice is merely selfish, there’s no real malevolence to him.  The difference is easy to miss until the reader and Maurice come face to face with real evil, real horror.  Yet because this is a comedy, albeit a grim one, such horror is recognized and vanquished and something of a happy ending is achieved.  A treat.  

Forty Days of Lent: Day Nineteen

Bleeding Edge 
Thomas Pynchon

Bleeding Edge is my least favorite Thomas Pynchon novel, though to put it in perspective, that’s like saying “my least favorite David Lynch film” or “my least favorite episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” If you’re keeping track, those would be, respectively, Wild At Heart and “The Golden Age of Ballooning.”  But there are great moments in those worst work of major artists.  Harry Dean Stanton’s death scene in Wild At Heart is supremely creepy; Sherilyn Fenn’s death scene in the same film is remarkably moving.  “The Golden Age of Ballooning” episode has one of my favorite Python non-sequiters when the Ronettes, a girl group straight out of Motown, enter the court of George III and begin singing his name over and over as the king falls to the ground and laments that “I’m not supposed to go mad until 1800!”  It’s one of the few times that Python had any reference to contemporary pop  culture.  This is one of the reasons why that series seems timeless whereas Saturday Night Live always seems dated come Monday morning.  So even the “least favorite” work can have something to recommend it.

References to contemporary culture and getting them right, playful anachronisms, material that can be supremely creepy and/or remarkably moving; Pynchon is skilled at all of these.  Bleeding Edge is set in New York City and begins after the early 2000’s dot com bust and ends shortly after the World Trade Center towers fell. Like his previous novel Inherent Vice, it is a detective story pitched at a smaller scale than his other work.  Inherent Vice had the advantage of being set in a time and place – Los Angeles at the end of the 1960’s – where the mores and the mindset have changed so much since then that that book might as well be a Margaret Mead anthropological study of a long vanished tribe (or “vanquished” if you want to bring politics into it).  Bleeding Edge is the first of his novels set in a time and place in which I actually lived. While reading it I kept thinking “Yeah, I know all this.  I was there.  I still am.”  New York hasn’t changed that much since 9/11, it’s only gotten more so: more expensive and more in thrall to money and power.  This sense of “having been there” might account for my resistance to the novel.  There’s a section early in the book in which characters discuss “The Rachel” haircut, named after Jennifer Anniston’s character on “Friends.”  Pynchon gets the scene right.  I’ve overheard or been part of similar conversations.  People did spend time, probably too much, talking about such things in the early 2000’s.  But I’m stuck now reading several pages of characters talking about hair.

The novel doesn't become compelling until perhaps halfway or maybe two thirds through, beginning with a party on Saturday, September 8, 2001 and continuing through the aftermath of 9/11.  Pynchon shows what it was like living in the city during those stunned days.  I was there.  I still am.  I thought I knew all this but it wasn’t until finishing the book that I remembered how much I had forgotten.  Pynchon avoids obvious dramatics – no major characters die in the attacks – but captures the feeling, the experience of living in the city then.  And now.  Greater than the change wrought by 9/11 (see above – there wasn’t much change) is the revolution afforded by the book’s true subject: the internet, the phantom that’s taken residence in all our lives.

The fact that Pynchon wrote this novel while in his mid-70’s is astonishing.  The writing has an energy and an awareness of things that writers half his age can’t muster.  It’s just my least favorite book by him and yet thinking and writing about it makes me want to read it again.    

Forty Days of Lent: Day Thirteen

What? I read last year!

Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogyam Trungpa
Turning the Mind Into an Ally by Sakyong Mipham
One For The Books by Joe Queenan
The Revolution Was Televised by Alan Sepinwall
High Rise by JG Ballard
The Magicians by Lev Grossman
That's Not Funny, That's Sick by Ellin Stein
Ten Tales Tall & True by Alasdair Gray
Three by Perec by Georges Perec
The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
Ruling Your World by Sakyong Mipham
Top of the Rock by Warren Littlefield
The Comics Journal Issue #302
Glittering Images by Camille Paglia
Gathering of the Tribe: Music and Heavy Conscious Creation by Mark Goodall
Now Wait For Last Year by Philip K. Dick
Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work
The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares
Present Shock by Douglas Rushkoff
The Annotated Alice by Lewis Carroll
The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky
My Lunches with Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles
The Alteration by Kingsley Amis
Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon
Too Much To Dream by Peter Bebergal
Life, Inc. by Douglas Rushkoff
In Other Words by John Crowley
The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch
The Green Man by Kingsley Amis
Otherwise Known As The Human Condition by Geoff Dyer

Looking at this list I think "Yeah, that's me: leftist, cultured, more interested in imagination than in realism, and even though I never use this word to describe myself, Buddhist."

"When the tides of history start to turn and an empire begins losing its power, the tough get going and order the tide to turn back while the more philosophical lower their expectations and try to go with the flow..." writes Ellin Stein in her forthcoming history of the National Lampoon entitled That's Not Funny, That's Sick.  Ms. Stein is referring to America's loss of the Vietnam War, but it can be applied to many different historical situations.

How do I react to such things?  Well, let's put it this way: this week I start my second set of Buddhist classes this year.  The classes are called "Contentment in Everyday Life."  Well see if it takes.

40 Days of Lent: Day Eleven

Fair Play
Tove Jansson

The first novel I read by Tove Jansson, The Summer Book, concerned the relationship between a woman and her granddaughter as they spent the season on a small island off the coast of Finland. Fair Play is also the story of two women, this time a couple, Mari and Jonna, who maintain separate apartments in the same building. As with the pair in The Summer Book, the relationship is primary but never supercedes who they are as individuals. What united Summer’s pair was a common loss, all but unspoken: the death of the woman who was daughter to one and mother to the other. Fair Play’s couple are bound by what they have: a life-long relationship, a history together with an often prickly insight into each other’s personalities. They sometimes bicker and argue and each one can be obstinate and obtuse as well as supportive and patient with the other. It’s a realistic rather than romanticized look at relationships and getting older.

As Mari is a writer and Jonna is an artist, there is an underlying theme about the decisions made in creative work being metaphoric for decisions made in life: what to edit out, what to build on and what to rearrange. The language of the book is spare, direct and fairly unadorned but as with an effective understatement, it hints at a great deal without spelling it out. It also evokes the nature of Mari and Jonna’s relationship. At this point in their lives some things don’t need to be said.

"Mari," said Jonna, "sometimes you're really a little too obvious."

"Do you think? But once in a while a person just needs to say what doesn't need to be said. Don't you think?"

And they went back to their reading.

Each chapter is self-contained so that it’s more like reading a collection of short stories than a novel. There is a pattern: introduce a third element, such as a person, act of nature, or unexpected event and then detail how Mari and Jonna react. Jansson is able to deftly sketch the various characters who try, with mixed results, to latch on to the old ladies. During a trip to the American southwest, a hotel maid decides to be their unrequested tour guide. One of Jonna’s students is seen as a threat by Mari. A visiting Russian poet manages to be both bewildering and overbearing, as does a woman who visits with a scrapbook dedicated to Mari’s mother. Sections vary from those dedicated to life’s little pleasures, like videotaping movies off of tv -- making sure to edit out the commercials -- and watching together later, to larger events, like their vacation in America, which inspires the book’s funniest line when a bartender in dive bar tells the locals “Give these ladies some room. They’re from Finland.”

In addition to novels, Jansson also wrote and drew comic strips and children’s books. Her ability to entertain in few words is evident here. While flipping through Fair Play to check one or two of my facts, I was surprised at how short the chapters are. Many are no more than six pages long. My eyes would fall on a sentence and the entirety of the story would return, along with a desire to reread itimmediately.

40 Days of Lent: Day Seven

Ella Minnow Pea
Mark Dunn

On New Year’s Day 2011, I was celebrating the holiday as I usually do, with a dinner with friends. I was expressing my fondness for George Perec’s A Void, as I’ll only discuss literature at the table after I’ve had a few drinks. Perec’s novel has much to recommend it but it is best known because no words containing the letter E appear in the book. As A Void might put it, it’s a book minus a most common part of our lingua franca, using synonyms and substitutions with a smooth skill to portray a story of haunting loss.

Our cute waitress chimed in that A Void sounded similar to Ella Minnow Pea and that I might like it, too. She gave a quick overview that sounded intriguing: the novel is a series of letters written by people who live in Nollop, a sovereign island nation not far off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop is named after Nevin Nollop, creator of the sentence “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” which is impressive in that it utilizes every letter of the alphabet with few repetitions. There is a statue of Nollop along with the alphabet and his phrase on the island. The respect for him is so strong that, when the letter Z falls off the statue pedestal, it is ruled as a sign and stricken from the language, with escalating punishments for its use. The edict is treated as a joke. How useful is Z, anyway? Who will miss it? But as other letters begin to fall off and are similarly ruled illegal to use, more and more people are punished for their slips of tongue and others try to find a way out of their predicament even as language becomes more and more restricted.

It’s a clever conceit and the book is consistently inventive. When the letter D is outlawed, all days of the week have to be renamed (“Sunshine” for “Sunday”) and people are forced to say things like “birth-anniversary” and completely give up the past tense. Still the language flows and the little jokes you catch don’t detract from the pull of the story. It’s as a depiction of totalitarianism that Ella Minnow Pea works best. I would say "satire" but I think it's a bit beyond that. It shares a the sense of dread found in Orwell’s Animal Farm. Characters are forced to live under what they know to be arbitrary and ridiculous rules but have little hope to change them. As letters continue to drop from the pedestal and from usage you start to realize that this can’t possibly end well.

Perec’s A Void was also about loss, but there the characters didn’t know what was missing, they could only sense something was gone. Everyone in Ella Minnow Pea is all too aware of what is being taken away from them. It’s profoundly unsettling to read these literate characters ultimately reduced to writing sentences like “no got to rummage” and “we eat together tonight, yes?” to avoid punishment.

I can’t imagine an American writing a better satire of what it’s like to live under totalitarianism. It’s an amusing, entertaining, and disturbing little book.


I’ve been back to the restaurant but haven’t seen the cute waitress again.

Forty Days of Lent: Day 32

Kauai, Hawaii

I'm at the airport waiting at the gate and while I strive to be charitable, I can't help but see the human race as an endless freak show. I see a girl with with a horrible dark scar across her face and instinctively look away. Upon sneaking a second glance I realize she just has her hair in her face. Perhaps I'm tired. I don't fly well.

I lose the bottle of water to airport security. I suspect the "no more than 3 ounces of a liquid may be taken on the plane" rule is more of a sop to airports and shops from which they get revenue. The first thing I see after getting through security is a store where you can re-buy anything taken away from you. In addition to replenishing my water, I buy what I think of as my "I hate to fly" kit, including ear plugs for the descent, hoping to God that maybe this time my eardrums will stay where they belong. Tylenol PM was recommended as a sleep aid by a coworker, but I can't find any.

"Can I help you?" the girl behind the counter asks.

No point in lying. "I need something to knock me out. I was looking for Tylenol PM, but you don't seem to have it."

"How about the Unisom Sleepgels? They're supposed to make you sleep."

They work, but only for a couple of hours and then I feel groggy and restless, which I wouldn't have thought possible.

But we land and are immediately focused on the logistics of getting the rental cars and deciding if we want to open a Costco membership and shop there even though it is about 45 minutes from where we will be staying. It's not until we stop at a beachside restaurant that I realize, as contentment overcomes me, that I am in Hawaii and it is beautiful and that there are chickens wandering around our table.



I've been reading Sarah Vowell's Unfamiliar Fishes, her history of how Hawaii became part of the United States. She focuses on the contrast between New England missionaries and while comparing creation myths writes:

...the fruit of knowledge poisons [people] with fancy ideas and so they are cast out of a garden bearing a striking resemblance to the island of Kauai. (Though having been to the pleasantly sleepy Kauai, I can see how after a few days of lollygagging amidst the foliage, a woman would bite into just about anything to scare up something to read.)

Whereas a few days of lollygagging amidst the foliage is exactly what I want. That and a margarita or two.

The Wave

The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean
Susan Casey

What's the matter, John? Blue Meanies?

Newer and bluer Meanies have been sighted within the vicinity of this theater. There's only one way to go out.

How's that?

Singing!

It’s a great ending to Yellow Submarine, and if you think of the “Blue Meanies” as the giant unpredictable waves becoming more and more prevalent in the oceans due to global warming, you can substitute “surfing!” for “singing!” and you’ll have an idea of half of Susan Casey’s book. As waves became bigger, surfers like Laird Hamilton have adapted, creating a new kind of surfing in order to ride 60 and 70 foot waves, which are too powerful and far from the shore to paddle to. Now a surfer is towed by a jet ski and positioned on the water to catch previously unobtainable waves. The risk is much greater that far from shore. Experienced surfers have drowned. The book contains a description of a particularly gruesome accident with a life-saving rescue by Hamilton, who hotwires a stalled jet ski with pair of iPod earphones and uses his wetsuit as a tourniquet.

In contrast to surfers with their spiritual quest to experience great waves, there are the other stars of Casey’s book, the scientists who try to understand the water and predict its behavior.

“Well, it’s not oceanographers looking at them anymore. It’s physicists! Because they’re discovered that these waves are behaving in a manner that is similar to light waves. They can suck the energy from both sides and concentrate it in one spot. And light waves are partially particles and partially wavelike. It’s moving [the study of waves] into a whole different dimension.”

The nature of light has been one of the conundrums of physics, because sometimes light acts like a wave and sometimes it acts like a particle. The idea that the water in the ocean may be the same way underscores a point made throughout the book: we really don’t know very much about the ocean. With global warming, the little we knew may no longer be true. For years sailors told stories of enormous monster waves in otherwise calm seas. Such tales were dismissed as physically impossible. Now it seems that they were happening and may become more of the norm.

A statistic is repeated several times in this book: on average, two large ships are lost at sea every week. The fact that this statistic is little known, let alone a source of widespread outrage, says a lot about how much we take for granted in a global marketplace. One of the effects of living in a technologically developed country is that you assume things are stable; in fact you come to depend on it. The chaos is kept far away; others have to deal with it. The people Casey interviews are all dealing with the chaos in various ways. Some try to understand it and others try to ride it, if for only a few moments.

On a slow day at work, slow because of a snowstorm the previous night (speaking of chaotic nature), I lent The Wave to our receptionist. At the end of the day, she returned it to me, saying that it was scaring the hell out of her but she couldn’t stop reading it and she was going to have to get her own copy. A perfectly succinct review.

Rat Girl

Rat Girl
Kristin Hersh

Everyone goes through hopefully brief periods of intense upheaval in their lives. I worked with a woman who, in the space of less than a year, started a new job, suffered the loss of a close family member, had to adopt the family member's young son, discovered she was pregnant (with twins!) and had to move from the United States to Australia. The fact that she was able to handle these seismic changes with fortitude, good humor and grace is a testament to her and a lesson to me for when I get upset that someone has taken the stapler from my desk and not put it back.

Rat Girl is musician Kristin Hersh's memoir of the tumultuous year she turned 19, during which her band Throwing Muses moved from playing in seedy clubs to recording their first album, she was diagnosed as bipolar and put on medication, and she found out she was pregnant. It's no roman a clef; Hersh would rather write about her love of swimming, which leads her to sometimes sneak into stranger's backyards to use their pools, than offer any information about the father of her baby. It's an impressionist memoir of her life almost 20 years ago, one that appears intimate but is actually rather removed. To paraphrase George Carlin, she's only telling you what she wants you to know.

However, what she is telling you is interesting and not just for her fans, though they will appreciate the book's inclusion of song lyrics where appropriate, as a way of underlining the lyric's inspiration. "Oh that's what that means. It makes sense now." The sections dealing with the band are memorable not because they tell you anything new about the band, but because they remind you of what it was like to be young and ride around in a junky car with too many friends, everyone sitting on each others' laps to make room. But it's Betty Hutton who steals the show, as she was wont to do.

Kristin Hersh and 1940s film star Betty Hutton being college friends is one of those unfathomable historical pairings, like Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones being college roommates, but their scenes together are Rat Girl's highlights. Whether smoking in a bathroom as Hutton's moods travel 360 degrees or recounting Hutton trying to teach showbiz style to Hersh, who affects a deer-in-headlights blank stare onstage, it is an affectionate portrait of someone who had once been one of America's biggest stars. After finishing the book, I wanted more Betty and began seeking out her movies on Turner Classic Movies. Her eagerness to entertain an audience is a revelation. I can't imagine a better tribute.

Pariah

Pariah
Bob Fingerman

Full disclosure: the author is a friend of mine.

The ability of people at a certain age to use their friends as a surrogate family, especially if they have friends of both genders with different enough personalities to serve various roles within the group, is something that has been noted more than once and not just on sitcoms. But in large cities, the dynamic is different as you have to spend much of your time in close proximity with people you, at best, are indifferent to or, at worst, actively dislike. Pariah is a novel about people who are forced by circumstances (read “zombies”) to depend on people they don’t like very much just to survive. It is an active demonstration of Satre’s idea that “Hell is other people.”

Trapped within an apartment building by streets full of the walking dead, the characters become parodies of urban dwellers who can’t make or do anything themselves because they assume they can always buy whatever they want from a store. Cut off from any stores, they have little else to do but slowly waste away and turn on each other with what little energy they have left. This state of dwindling entropy is eventually interrupted by an inversion of the archetypal modern urban horror story, the murder of Kitty Genovese. In 1964, Ms. Genovese was attacked and ultimately murdered after coming home from her job as a bar manager. It was reported that many of her neighbors heard her scream for help but did nothing because they did not want to get involved. The case became the perfect symbol of how callous and selfish people are in big cities. As is often the case, the truth was more complex and more interesting. One of Genovese’s neighbors did yell down and in fact frightened her attacker away for a while. Another neighbor phoned the police. Later sociological experiments inspired by the case indicated that the more people who are involved in a situation, the less responsibility or control any one individual feels. If something traumatic happens in front of you and no one else is around, you feel the full responsibility of the situation. But if the same event happened and you are part of a crowd, you are more likely to leave the responsibility to someone else. It’s not that “we don’t want to get involved” but “we don’t know what to do but hope someone else will take care of this.”

As mentioned, Pariah breaks the stasis of its trapped apartment dwellers wasting away by introducing Mona, who is the opposite of Kitty Genovese. Instead of being attacked while her neighbors watch, Mona is able to walk the streets without harm, surrounded by the zombies yet somehow repelling them. She is safer in the streets than the people are in their apartment building. It’s not long before she becomes their delivery person, at first picking up the bare necessities like food and water, but soon going on expeditions for items to pass the time and entertain. But once someone’s situation is no longer life-threatening, are they necessarily going to be a better person? How much of our actions are determined by our surroundings?

My only complaints with Pariah have to do with the pacing. The novel is made of three sections and I read it in three sittings, which probably accounts for my sense of impatience with the first third of the book, despite its merits. To wit: it’s hard to keep a situation of hopelessly trapped characters interesting for a length of time. Fingerman uses flashbacks, plot twists and comic scenes to get around this, but my enthusiasm for the book didn’t really begin until Mona’s appearance. I think the final third is the strongest section of the book, as Fingerman’s vision of hell as other people, both living and dead, comes to dominate.

Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell

Cloud Atlas is a collection of six stories, separated by genre, locale and time but linked by motifs, themes and perhaps a soul. As clouds move across the sky, so do people move across the expanse of time, similar yet unique. The novel is structured like a palindrome, sections running in the order A B C D E F E D C B A, as follows

A. the diary of an American notary sailing from Chatham Islands to San Francisco in the 1800s
B. letters from a young ne'er-do-well musician staying at the home of an aged, formerly great composer
C. a suspense thriller about a journalist investigating corruption at a nuclear power plant
D. first person account of a British publisher who runs afoul of gangsters
E. a science fiction story, an interview with a clone in a corporate-run future
F. a post-apocalypse story about a primitive society encountering someone from a more advanced civilization

Except for the post-apocalypse story, each story is split in two, with the first half ending with a cliffhanger resolved in the second. Each story is read (or experienced) by a character in the succeeding section, so that the diary in A is read by the letter writer in B, whose letters are in turn read by the main character in C., etc. As mentioned above, there are also recurring motifs and themes in each story and the novel presents a fairly bleak overview of human history. Yet reading it is anything but bleak. Mitchell is an entertainer; this is meant as a compliment. Each section is fueled by the primary narrative need: the desire to find out what happens next. I’m a fidgety reader by nature but this novel commanded my attention and I finished it much faster than normal. Mitchell is a master at elements of craft that are easily overlooked, such as pacing the flow of ideas, creating rounded characters and writing in different genres and forms. Reading Cloud Atlas is a pleasure. It’s after finishing the novel that frustration sets in.

A book exists in your mind in two forms: one while you are reading and the other in memory when you think about it after finishing. It was during the latter that my opinion of Cloud Atlas lessened a bit. The stories are linked but any attempt to create a coherent narrative for the novel as a whole based on these links and repeating motifs is inevitably frustrated by something within one of the stories. These contradictions don’t indicate the novel is deliberately ambiguous or slyly playful so much as it is without a larger design. The memory of the pleasure I experienced reading Cloud Atlas has been subsumed by the frustration I feel that there is no larger point beyond the presentation of six clever tales, enjoyable but ultimately as substantial as clouds.

Today's Reading

A nice refutation to those who criticize fiction for being too unlikely or unrealistic, this excerpt is from Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise, his history of 20th century classical music. It reads like something by Thomas Pynchon and best of all, it made me laugh out loud.

One day in 1948 or 1949, the Brentwood Country Mart, a shopping complex in an upscale neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, was the scene of a slight disturbance that carried overtones of the most spectacular upheaval in twentieth-century music. Marta Feuchtwanger, wife of the emigre novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, was examining grapefruit in the produce section when she heard a voice shouting in German from the far end of the aisle. She looked up to see Arnold Schoenberg, the pioneer of atonal music and the codifier of twelve-tone composition, bearing down on her, with his bald pate and burning eyes. Decades later, in conversation with the writer Lawrence Weschler, Feuchtwanger could recall every detail of the encounter, including the weight of the grapefruit in her hand. "Lies, Frau Marta, lies!" Schoenberg was yelling. "You have to know, I never had syphilis!"

The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains
Nicholas Carr

Ever since I’ve lost God, or rather misplaced Him, I’ve been looking for the prime cause a little lower; within my brain, to be exact. Once I stopped thinking of “my second favorite organ” (to quote Woody Allen) as a fixed operating system but instead as an ongoing work-in-progress, one that you could effect by your actions and that, in turn, would effect you, I’ve become interested in how the cauliflower inside our heads gets anything done. Neurology has replaced psychology and, as it is still a fresh field for me to explore, I am fascinated by the ideas that grow there.

One favorite idea is that technology changes us fundamentally because technology changes our consciousness. Our ancestors of long ago, who lived their entire lives without various tools, might as well be a different species. It’s a very Marshall McLuhan idea, though I was infected with it by David Cronenberg. The way that technology changes us, that it is never a passive tool free of consequences, is the underlying thesis of The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Carr moves from the anecdotal and personal (“I can’t seem to concentrate on reading anything for very long nowadays”) to trying to find the reasons why. It’s not just that concentration and deep reading are a bore or old fashioned in today’s infobyte culture. It’s because prolonged exposure to the internet and how we surf the web causes changes not just in habits or learned behavior but in the physical structure of the brain itself.

Like the internet, The Shallows contains multitudes. It is a history of books and reading and of the internet, including an overview of Google (the book grew out of the author’s article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”). It includes a demonstration on how technology changes consciousness. Clocks changed man’s perception of time (the first people to demand precise time measurement were monks in the middle ages who wanted to know exactly when to pray) and maps changed man’s perception of space. It is an accessible primer on the physiology of the human brain and how experience is transformed into memory and a demonstration of why human memory is nothing like computer memory. It is a warning of the consequences of individuals and cultures abandoning the concentration that comes with focusing on a text in favor of gorging on information in a short period of time.

In a digression, Carr himself admits the irony in the fact that he set out to write a book about the fact that he seems to be losing his ability to concentrate on anything for an extended period of time. To finish his book, he had to deliberately curtail his internet usage, but confesses that as the book neared completion, he found himself going online more and more.

I find myself with a slightly different problem. I’ve always been a fidgety reader, but once I get past the initial phase of looking around, looking at the cover of the book for the umpteenth time, flipping through its pages and re-reading paragraphs, then I am hooked. I can’t blame the internet for that. However, I now find it takes a great deal of effort to watch a movie. It is rare I watch a film in one sitting at home anymore. Inevitably I have to stop to make tea, check email, take a nap, or indulge in some other distraction. I suspect that this is internet related and that it is the similarity of the television screen to the computer monitor that makes me want to mentally “click” on to some other idea. This doesn’t happen when I watch television shows, probably due to the faster-paced storytelling.

Happily, I’ve become interested in reading in a way that I have not in years. An irony to add to Carr’s: I was completely hooked on his book about how books are losing their place as the prime purveyors of information, particularly to sections discussing how human brains work. Having finished The Shallows, I try to force myself to concentrate more, particularly while at my job, rather than get swept away in the tide of instant messages, emails, jumping online and indulging in all the other distractions. I can’t control the world around me, but I can try to exorcise some control over how it affects and if it changes me.

(And yes, I did look at the internet many times while writing this post).

40 Days of Lent: Day Twenty Five

Closing Time
Joe Queenan

Joe Queenan’s memoir Closing Time begins with what could be the start of an amusing affectionate anecdote about the time his father got stuck on the roof of their house and had to stay there all day. But because his father was a raging alcoholic who terrorized his children, the day is remembered as less humorous than peaceful, one of the few afternoons of peace the Queenan children got to experience.

I’ve read Queenan’s work before (he’s contributed to Spy, Esquire, and The Wall Street Journal among others) and while I can appreciate his wit, I don’t like the accompanying nastiness of his writing. Queenan sees this as part of his job as a satirist and while I certainly have a mean bone or two in my body, this tone has always kept me from being an enthusiast. In addition, his satire picks on easy prey and I disagree with his politics. On the other hand, I can’t be too hard on someone whose book of celebrity interviews is entitled If You’re Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be in Trouble. Full disclosure: He is also a supportive friend and mentor to one of my friends. I’ve met him a couple of times and he couldn’t have been nicer. The first time he mentioned he was working on a book about his father but it wasn’t easy. The book is Closing Time.

Queenan grew up poor in Philadelphia in the 1950s and 60s, the son of an alcoholic who could not hold a job for long and a woman who had children but didn’t have much interest in them.

…he had simply suffered through so many calamities that the only way he knew how to respond to adversity was to brutalize those closest to him. Happily, his preference for victims shorter than forty-eight inches kept my mother out of the line of fire. Like many Irish-Catholic men of his generation, he would never dream of raising his hand to his wife, not only because he feared that it would have brought down the curtain on their marriage, but because men like him had an unwholesome reverence for their spouses, viewing them as domestic stand-ins for the Virgin Mary, with the one notable difference that, unlike the Madonna, they also cooked and cleaned. My mother was not a Madonna; she was an emotionally inert woman who had injudiciously brought four children into the world with no clear idea of how henceforth to proceed. While my father was skinning us alive with his trusty old belt, she would entomb herself in her bedroom, surrounded by newspapers she never seem to learn anything from, pretending not to hear what was going on downstairs. But the walls were not thick and the sound must have carried, if not in her conscience, at least into her cochleae.

Understandably, Queenan was motivated by escape: from his father’s beatings, from his neighborhood, from his class. He doesn’t want to be rich, he simply wants to stop being poor. A combination of luck, self-determination and the influence of a few kind souls saves Queenan, but this memoir is neither self-aggrandizing nor sentimental. There is no reconciliation with the father, no forgiveness, no moment that puts all the abuse into perspective. The book is a meditation on urban entropy, poverty, class differences and how culture and education can, but not necessarily will, help. (“Marguerite, a product of the slums, knew that if you were standing in front of a Brancusi and the light hit it just right, you could briefly forget you were poor.”) It is also funny and compulsively readable. When looking for passages to include in this essay, I found myself reading pages at a time until forcing myself to stop. Queenan is a master of smart conversational prose that always pulls you forward because you want to see what the next sharp detail, funny line or larger insight will be, as in this section describing he and his sisters riding in the back of his father’s delivery truck:

If I was not careful, I could have easily tumbled out into the street and been flattened by oncoming cars. But I was careful – I was born careful – and these outings were rollicking good fun. Anyway, back in the Paleocene 1950s, when being fond of one’s children had not yet come into vogue, poor people didn’t seem to mind all that much if one of their offspring when flying out into traffic, as everyone had spares.

40 Days of Lent: Day Twenty One

Nazi Literature in the Americas
Roberto Bolano

Roberto's Bolano's experimental novel is a catalogue of imaginary extreme right wing literature that somehow took root in North and Latin America. In tone, it recalls Jorge Borges and Stanislaw Lem's imagined fictions along with the pieces Woody Allen wrote for The New Yorker in the early 1970's, such as "If Impressionists Were Dentists" which imagined the letters Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, but substituting dental procedures for art-making.

The central idea seems to be a play on the way that most people in the arts lean left or at are at least liberal. It is written in the same dry, deadpan language of most literary surveys. What if someone paid serious attention to more right-wing authors? It leads to laugh out-loud lines like these:

She took to drinking in dives and having affairs with some of the most unsavory individuals in Buenos Aires. Her well-known poem 'I Was Happy with Hitler,' misunderstood by the Right and Left alike, dates from this period.

In 1958 she fell in love again. This time the object of her affections was a twenty-five-year-old painter. He was blond, blue-eyed and disarmingly stupid.

As a young man Salcvatico advocated, among other things, the re-establishment of the Inquisition; corporal punishment in public; a permanent war against the Chlieans, the Paraguayans, or the Bolivians as a kind of gymnastics for the nation...
He was a soccer player and a flutist.

He is against monopolies, especially cultural monopolies. He believes in the family, but also in a man's "natural right to have a bit of fun on the side."

It is the pacing, the mix of the straightforward with the absurd, that recalls Woody Allen's influential early work.

But there is also something else here. All of Bolano's authors end up sad failures. Part of you wants to say "thank God" as they are horrible people and their beliefs are destructive. Yet there is also a remarkable melancholy that creeps in as you read yet another case study of someone whose passions and hard work ultimately lead to nothing. It reminds me of Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon, in which all the conspiracies of those in power (the Dutch East India Company, the Jesuits, the British Crown) ultimately came to nothing as those organizations passed into irrelevance. As one who lived through the Bush years, it can give you hope.

On a personal note, apropo of nothing, I have the nice surprise of realizing that the photo on the cover of Nazi Literature in the Americas, like many of Bolano's other early novels, was taken by my downstairs neighbor Allen. The cover seemed familiar without my ever realizing why. I like the idea that the book was in my apartment while the man who created the cover image was just one story down.

40 Days of Lent: Day Nineteen

The Summer Book
Tove Jansson

It was the cover of NYRB’s republication of The Summer Book that initially interested me. Like all their books, it is a simple, elegant design, using a pleasing mix of colors and an image that seems perfect. It was perfect: it was a watercolor of an island silhouetted against a light sky by author Tove Jansson used for the novel’s first edition. Unlike DVD companies that forgo a film’s original iconic poster in favor of a mundane picture of its stars when designing their discs, NYRB knew better than tamper with perfection. The DVD comparison isn’t far-fetched. NYRB reminds me of the Criterion Collection in the way they republish lost classics in handsome editions, usually with insightful introductions by contemporary authors. I have a number of their books; I haven’t read them all, but they are all beautiful objects.

Admiring the cover, I thought “Tove Jansson? I know that name – how do I know that name?” The explanation was on the back. Jansson was the creator of Moomin, a delightful comic strip that began publishing in the 1950’s. Finding out she also wrote books is like discovered an unknown novel by Charles Schulz or Walt Kelly.

The Summer Book is the story of Sophia, a young girl who bonds with her grandmother while they spend the summer together on a small island in the Gulf of Finland. Despite this set-up, the book is not sentimental or even overtly emotional. Sophia behaves much like a child, alternately charming and frustrating, and the grandmother can be moody, swinging from wise and sharing to irascible in the space of a few sentences. They’re two women, one young enough that she hasn’t fully learned how to “be nice” so people will like her and one who is old enough to gratefully let go of such social pretence. On this isolated island, they’re just themselves.

They’re themselves, surrounded by a natural world of old vegetation, unexpected storms, and debris that washes up on the beach. The vignettes of the book are described in a language that’s restrained but filled with a sly humor wise to the characters’ traits. Jansson’s description of a sometimes harsh landscape and the people who chose to live there reminds me of Annie Proulx and the episodic nature of the novel recalls comic strips. It is a sensuous book, passages written to appeal to the senses as to how things smell, feel, taste as well as look and sound. A passage I particularly like:

Grandmother snorted. “We sowed our own tents,” she said, remembering what they had looked like – huge, sturdy, grayish-brown. This was a toy, a bright yellow plaything for veranda guests, and not worth having.

“Isn’t it a Scout tent?” asked Sophia anxiously.

So her grandmother said maybe it was, after all, but a very modern one, and they crawled in and lay down side by side.

“Now you’re not allowed to go to sleep,” Sophia said. “You have to tell me what it was like to be a Scout and all the things you did.”

A very long time ago, Grandmother had wanted to tell about all the things they did, but no one had bothered to ask. And now she had lost the urge.

“We had campfires,” she answered briefly, and suddenly she felt sad.

“And what else?”

“There was a log that burned for a long time. We sat around the fire. It was cold out. We ate soup.”

That’s strange, Grandmother thought. I can’t describe things any more. I can’t find the words, or maybe it’s just that I’m not trying hard enough. It was such a long time ago. No one here was even born. And unless I tell it because I want to, it’s as if it never happened; it gets closed off and then it’s lost. She sat up and said, “Some days I can’t remember very well. But sometime you ought to try and sleep in a tent all night.”

40 Days of Lent: Day Seventeen

25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom
Alan Moore

I’m disappointed by 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom. Perhaps I should rephrase that. I was disappointed by Alan Moore’s book of that title. When I heard that writer Alan Moore was going to be writing a book about erotica and pornography, I expected a fresh perspective on these controversial topics. One thing that Moore’s work has never suffered from was a lack of ideas.

But while Abrams has done their customary exemplary job with the book’s design and production -- it is a handsome book to look through and the illustrations are well-chosen -- the essay within is a little lacking. The more sexually open a culture is, the better it is. There’s good pornography and bad pornography, aesthetically speaking, so we should strive to make good pornography. The social or political reasons people have against pornography are either repressive or disingenuous. Whether you agree with those statements or not, there’s not much here to argue with. The text is more manifesto than essay, so the reader is left with little more than what Mr. Moore thinks. Historical proof or logical arguments aren’t really part of this book. That’s a shame because I would be interested in reading a serious scholarly work that used historical precedence and logical arguments as a justification for erotica.

40 Days of Lent: Day Seven

Shop Class As Soulcraft
Matthew Crawford

Even though it was several years ago, it’s a conversation I remember well: talking with my friend Scott about how bored we with our office jobs (I had quit mine earlier that year) and how much we preferred making things with our hands. I was surprised how much I liked making stained glass windows and rudimentary furniture, particularly thinking my way around any unexpected problems. Scott grew up in a garage and built his own Volkswagon convertible in high school but had spent much of his adult life as a manager.

It’s a feeling Matthew Crawford knows well. After getting his Ph.D. in political philosophy, Crawford landed a high paying job at a Washington think tank…and quit ten months later to repair motorcycles. Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work is his explanation of why he quit and an examination of how the emphasis on white-collar jobs has affected people. It’s ultimately a contemplation of what makes work meaningful to the individual doing it.

Crawford argues that even as office jobs are being outsourced overseas, the work of mechanics and craftsman has to stay local. Things always break and you will need someone to fix them. If your car is broken, you’re not going to ship it to India to have it fixed.

I think the rise of office work had a lot to do with class snobbery. Middle-class people had jobs in which they didn’t get dirty. Lower class people got dirty. Working in an office with your mind was seen as more civilized, more dignified, than working on machines with your hands. Despite how our economy has changed and the decline in office work, it still seems uncommon for someone with an education to willingly chose blue collar work. But Crawford writes how thinking is involved in such work. It’s a different kind of thinking, more intuitive, more self-reliant.

When I was in school, we rotated between three different shop classes: woodshop, mechanical drawing, and print shop. I don’t recall getting much in the way of instruction in mechanical drawing. I think our teacher, an egg-shaped man, probably thought “why bother?” It was obvious our college-bound class (this was only eighth grade but the kids destined for college were already separated from those who were not) were never going to pursue mechanical drawing. The only thing for the teacher to do was the bare minimum until kids in class fulfilled their requirement, hit them when they got out of line and then never see them again. I didn’t have much aptitude for woodshop and I was convinced I was going to lose a finger in one of the machines. But it was in print shop that I finally understood the concept of having to work and being graded.

The assignment was to make notepads, a process that involved creating a design (which had to include “From The Desk Of,” your name, some sort of border and a picture, which could either be chosen from design books or made with a Photostat), making a metal plate of your design, then printing a number of pads. I made two pad designs: one had the Yellow Submarine on it (in black and white, of course) and the other had an Apple Bonker. Because thought what I was doing was so cool and because of what I was like at 13, I didn’t pay much (read “any”) attention to quality control. I made a pad with the Yellow Submarine on it! It was the only one like it in the world. No-one else had one. Our teacher graded our work surrounded by everyone in the class, not to humiliate but to demonstrate mistakes to watch out for. He took out a pen and mercilessly circled each imperfection, every mark made by a dirt on the metal plate, every flaw accentuated by the printing process. Each mark cost a third of a grade. If I remember correctly, I got a low B on the assignment. But as he ticked my grade down and down, I had, for the first time, the realization that I would have to work, that I wasn’t going to get a pass just because I had come up with the coolest thing. More than a mediocre grade on any test, those circles on my notepads demonstrated the idea of standards that I would have to measure up to or fail. It was the first time I “got” it; it was the first time I cared.

However, lowered grade because I didn’t understand work notwithstanding, I had made something unique in the world and was always proud that my father, who had the same name as I, used the pads in his classroom at school.

I initially began this paragraph with the sentence “It’s hard to think of anything I’ve done in my office job that has made me proud” but that’s not true. I’m proud of the annual reports that we’ve done. Not because they’re outstanding in any way (they're not) but because I spend a lot of time making sure they are free of mistakes, even if they’re mistakes other people would never notice. When we finally send them to print, I’m usually exhausted but feel a sense of accomplishment. This example is part of Crawford’s argument: that work has more meaning when you are creating a physical product, particularly if it is from start to finish. Dealing with products that exist to you only as theoretical concepts robs your job of meaning and introduces a certain nihilism, similar to my mechanical drawing teacher who couldn’t see the point of teaching students who existed only as names in his gradebook rather than as people who might be interested.

Last night I was reading the conclusion of Shop Class As Soulcraft while having dinner at a local bar. While I was there, the man who fixes their pinball machine came in and I got to watch him work, which was fascinating in the way that competence in a field you know nothing about always is. I had never seen the insides of a pinball machine before and loved its mix of the mechanical and the electronic. The man had trouble walking, even with a cane; it was as if his legs were at the wrong angle to his body. But he was able to move quickly around the pinball machine and had it fixed in less than twenty minutes. I’m aware he sounds like a fictional character and a clichéd one at that, but there he was. I asked how he had learned to fix pinball machines. He said that he just started playing around with them, trying to figure out how they worked, and began fixing them, so that now everyone calls him if there is a problem. Watching him figure out what was wrong with the machine, test his idea, repeat to make sure he was right, I saw someone who was less at work and more at play.

04:44 Ghost Story

Ghost Story
Peter Straub

There are two general rules I follow regarding reading. One, I rarely re-read books, even the ones I like. I don’t have enough time to read all the things I’m interested in, let alone re-read old stuff. This policy has saved me from being disappointed by old favorites. For example, I’ve been thinking of re-reading Catch-22, but part of me would prefer to remember it fondly rather than be disappointed by how it, or I, have changed.

My friends Ben and Cindy re-read; mystery novels mainly. Cindy has a good memory and can usually recall the solution, no matter how convoluted. On the other hand, Ben experiences a vague sense of déjà vu while re-reading, but the ending is always a surprise.

“Not enough time” lies at the root of my other rule: I don’t take part in book clubs. I can pick out my own reading material, thank you very much, and while I’m always interested in hearing what other people have to say about books, there’s something about the mandatory nature, the obligation, of book clubs I instinctively mistrust. They’re too much like homework.

However, a few months ago I broke both rules. The Onion’s AVClub (the satirical newspaper’s review section) began an online book club and Ghost Story by Peter Straub was one of their initial selections. The timing seemed fortuitous as I had been thinking of re-reading Ghost Story, which was one of my favorite horror novels of my teenage years, although “horror novels of my teenage years” is a bit redundant. I stopped reading horror,apart from the occasional short story, when I was in my early twenties. There was no conscious decision or reason at the time. I just read other things instead.

Each month, one of The Onion’s AVClub writers selects a novel. A few other writers read it and post essays about the book, and then readers of the website add their feedback on the novel, the essays or, this being the internet, anything at all. The book club started, as new projects often do, with a great deal of energy and enthusiasm. It probably helped that the first two books were Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, two utterly strange and fairly unique books. There’s not much in American letters that’s comparable to either novel. A tone of bewilderment pervaded the essays and comments as everyone tried to grapple with both the novels and their reactions. However, books chosen later drew much more mixed reactions, with naysayers slipping into bratty “this sucks” mode rather than arguing intelligently about why “this sucks.” (I am referring to those posting comments anonymously; the reviewers consistently wrote perceptive essays whether they liked the novel or not). Full disclosure: one of the later novels chosen was John Crowley’s Little, Big, a personal favorite, which made the obnoxiousness of some of the comments especially frustrating. I know, I know: anyone who cares what anonymous posters on the internet say is just asking to have their feelings hurt. But still…

So in October I re-read Ghost Story for a book club.

I should have stood by my two rules.

Ghost Story is about a vengeful spirit who returns to punish the men who had killed her many years before, and destroy the town where they live for good measure. Except she was already a ghost then, so they didn’t really kill her, but that, along with much else in the book, doesn’t make sense when examined closely.

The novel touches on several potentially interesting things: men’s fear of women, the purpose of storytelling in our lives, post-modern ideas that the characters are self-consciously aware that they are taking part in a story, the difference between horror in life and horror in entertainment. But Straub doesn’t have address any of these ideas.

Re-reading it, I was surprised at how stodgy it seemed. Why did I like this as a teenager? I think the answer lies in the fact that at that time, Ghost Story was considered the “classy, literary” horror novel, especially when compared to Stephen King. In the same way, as a teenager I preferred Michelob because I thought it was the classy beer. Its story of a small town slowly dying is deliberately patterned on King’s Salem’s Lot, but whereas King is not ashamed of his pulpy influences and has fun with them, Straub seems to be a bit of a snob and aims for respectability rather than scares. Much of Ghost Story reads less like a ghost story and more like a soap opera. It recalls those 1970s novels about middle-class college professors having affairs in the suburbs, the spawn of Updike and Cheever. It’s not the book’s language or ideas that made it seem literary, but the fact that Straub refers to Hawthorne and Henry James, Poe and Stephen Crane.

Worst of all, it’s not scary. Just as I want my comedy to be, you know, funny, I expect my horror to be scary. The lack of chills wasn’t due to my having read the book before, either. There was plenty my memory had wrong. It just seems hard to believe that once I read this book thinking that, supernatural elements aside, it was an accurate depiction of what adult life was like, whereas now I know better.