Other Books, Same Authors

now finished: Other Voices, Other Rooms  by Truman Capote
now reading: Grant by William S. McFeely

Careful readers may recall my first post-War and Peace project on this little Lit Supp blog o' mine.  I suppose you'd have to be something like a careful reader just to even be reading this blog today after so long a hiatus on my part, but that's not the point.  In 2007, I embarked upon my long-contemplated A-to-Z Reading Project, in which I chose a book from one new-to-me author for each letter of the alphabet (apart from my sorry, sorry, I'm SORRY OK Gao Xingjian for 'X' issue). It took a little longer to complete than I had originally contemplated, what with the whole being-in-law-school thing and all, but I eventually finished and then chose my top half, thirteen of those authors that I would like to read again.

The winners were: A-C-D-E-F-I-L-R-S-U-V-W-Y  (runners-up: H & J). I have since read a second book from three of them. After starting with Martin Amis' The Information for the original project, I returned to him and read Money. I was  not that enthralled with Pico Iyer's Cuba and the Night during the project, but was happy to leave his novels behind and delve into his travel narratives with Video Night in Kathmandu -- this was the Pico Iyer I knew I loved from back in my days when we had him on The Savvy Traveler. And I read E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, which I found as pitch perfect on ever page as A Passage to India, my introduction to him.

Now, here in Phuket of all places, I have lain on a beach and in two days devoured Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms. I am surprised this book is not more famous than it is. I can see why the literary world must have been so excited to have him become one of its darlings a few decades ago. The writing is so good. It's just a marvel. He evokes people in a place and makes you ache for them. This book is also so bold and so saucy, in its way, and you might say a kind of wistful evocation of Capote himself. It's definitely something any of the millennials who think they discovered gender should read. But mostly it's just harsh yet subtle, breezy yet powerful, and naively wicked, much like many of its characters.

There were times I was doing something else during the day and wanted to get back to reading because I was truly worried about what was going to happen to Joel Knox (Samson). (I know, right? As if I could do anything about it by hurrying back to 'save' him - it's already there in the book. Duh. The mind does strange things.)  Capote evoked a sympathy in me that I haven't felt in a very long time. I also have an incredibly vivid picture in my mind of the house, garden, and surroundings of The Landing. Powerful, I tell you.

That's A, C, F, and I revisited. The plan is that after I read these 13 again, I will again whittle it down to a top half and choose six authors, then read a third book by them. Then a final round of three before I select a winner. It's definitely getting harder now to contemplate eliminating authors from the running!

Of course, I also have to alternate with my other reading project, the Prez Bios, in which I am on #18, Ulysses S. Grant. And that is what I am reading now, to be followed by my revisiting Philip K. Dick. 

Hangman game!

from tori amos:

"And if I die today, I'll be the happy phantom
And I'll go chasin' the nuns out in the yard
And I'll run naked through the streets without my mask on
And I will never need umbrellas in the rain
I'll wake up in the strawberry fields every day
And the atrocities of school I can forgive
The happy phantom has no right to bitch

Ooo-hoo, the time is getting closer
Ooo-hoo, time to be a ghost
Ooo-hoo, every day we're getting closer
The sun is getting dim
Will we pay
For who we've been?"

When I was in Korea, I had great moments, profound moments, sad moments, shitty moments...all kinds of moments. I'm thinking Perry Smith's time in Korea was filled with more of the sad and the shitty, what with him fighting in the war police action and all. I only hope he had some of the profound, too. I'm also thinking that in my time on Earth, I have been privy to more great moments, overall, then he had in his time on Earth.

"So if I die today, I'll be the happy phantom
And I'll go wearin' my naughties like a jewel
They'll be my ticket to the universal opera
There's Judy Garland taking Buddha by the hand
And then those seven little men get up to dance
They say Confucius does his crossword with a pen
I'm still the angel to a girl who hates to sin

Ooo-hoo, the time is getting closer
Ooo-hoo, time to be a ghost
Ooo-hoo, every day we're getting closer
The sun is getting dim
Will I pay
for who I've been?"

One thing I had in Korea, one thing that was more than a moment, was in fact a thing that filled my mornings, my thoughts, my evenings and occasional weekends (what with field trips and telephone teaching and graduation...), and in the end also filled my heart: this thing was pre-school. Ahhh, my pre-school. I love those little five-year-old nutcases. I might add that they were some of the sharpest tools in my Ding Ding Dang shed. I have chronicled many of our (mis)adventures, but today I recall a particular thing that delighted them.

They liked to play hangman. They liked it a lot. And I, in turn, liked to play hangman with them. Liked it a lot. Because it was easy, and ate up like fifteen minutes of the class, and it was in fact a great way to learn the language. Without exception, my older classes hated it. If I turned to the board and started drawing the little upside-down L-ish thing, they would chorus (here, imagine the tone of an eye-rolling teenager), "Ohhh, teacher. No hangman game!" But preschool? Quite a different story. As soon as my dry-erase marker had drawn that 90-degree angle, fifteen little voices, a couple of whom could ordinarily be counted on to speak about as much English as I spoke Korean, would cry in unfettered delight, "HANGMAN GAME!!!!!" And we would play.

(Don't forget the added benefit it had of helping them practice an important sentence structure: "Is there a D?" "No there is not a D" etc. Correcting the ones who said, "Is it an A?" and so forth)

I just finished reading In Cold Blood. First, some of their fellow inmates on death row, and then, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith themselves went to the gallows. It was pretty intense.

I was thinking about the game of hangman. I was thinking about how sometimes people admonish me and sometimes I admonish other people to be careful of their word choice, even in seemingly innocent instances of usage. For example, the other day I was irritated in Civil Procedure when my teacher spoke of an "astonishingly sexist article by a feminist professor," eliciting a laugh with his loaded words, which laugh I think he cultivated. Even if he was trying to prove an opposite point, he was playing into dangerous characterizations of the f-word, a word people willfully, obstinately refuse to understand. For another example, the other week I dashed off one of my law school "e-newsletters" to friends and family in which I self-deprecatingly referred to myself as "hippie-dippie," contrasting this state with the "just plain ignorant" state of some of my classmates. My friend Kim rightfully called me on it, urging me to be careful with my word choice, lest I bolster the negative perception of a certain free-spiritedness come to be known as hippie-dom. You can agree or disagree with me about hippies and feminists (I rather like being known as either of those things, actually, and I loathe most labels) and you can still understand my point.

Which is, how is it that I can have a room of five-year-olds ecstatic over the prospect of a hangman? A detached, literally disembodied, dangling "man" on a dry-erase board, his fate in the hands of some children who have no idea that they'll have better luck with R, S, T, L, N, E and should stop guessing Z, X, and Q right off the bat. And then, when either he is dead or they are triumphant, they whose fates are briefly intertwined with this hanging man, then the points are distributed to the winners and everyone cries, "Let's play again!"

"And if I die today
And if I die today
And if I die today
A-ha, chasing nuns out in the yard..."

---'happy phantom' - Tori Amos---

"The killer in me is the killer in you..."

Perry has this to say about the expected outcome of his trial: "Those prairiebillys, they'll vote to hang fast as pigs eat slop. Look at their eyes. I'll be damned if I'm the only killer in the courtroom." -- page 289

Later, his Army buddy who has come to Kansas to be a character witness questions whether Perry can really be as cold and lacking in contrition as he appears. Perry tells him, "Why? Soldiers don't lose much sleep. They murder, and get medals for doing it." - page 291

Oh, I like that last one quite a bit!

True, much of this is the posturing, to say nothing of the lashing out, that you get from a murderer on the verge of conviction. The in-your-face and yet I'm-not-that-bad writhings.

But it's interesting to contemplate nonetheless.

As are Smashing Pumpkins lyrics!

"Disarm you with a smile
And cut you like you want me to
Cut that little child
Inside of me and such a part of you
Oooh, the years burn
I used to be a little boy
So old in my shoes
And what I choose is my choice
What's a boy supposed to do?
The killer in me is the killer in you..."

-- from 'Disarm'

Perry, Perry, Perry...

I am so fascinated by Perry's little life in the "girls' cell" off of the undersheriff's kitchen. I am fascinated by the letter from his Army "buddy" he vaguely knew in Korea. I am fascinated by the two tomcats prowling courthouse square, and I am fascinated by the Garden City pastors' and reverends' and such-like folks' general opposition to the death penalty. This is the one thing I have always liked about some religious leaders, like, say, the Pope. Especially the recently deceased pope. I didn't agree with him on family planning, but I always appreciated his anti-death-penalty and anti-war stances. (I know historically popes have waged war. That's not the point. At least it's not mine.)

I am a bucket of fascination with regards to In Cold Blood. I love this book and I am so glad I chose to read it! I have just read the part where motion after motion was denied. The poor defense attorneys. Of course, I loved that chapter and related to it differently than I would have prior to coming to law school.

And, I LOVE what Capote did in the driving-across-the-Southwest-confession chapter. Did anyone else notice this? As they are bringing the prisoners back from Vegas to Kansas, in separate cars, they finally get Perry to start talking. And he writes the scene in present tense! The book has been telling the story in past tense, but this one part switches to present. It was so intense. So visceral. You're totally there in the car. Duntz says...he lights a cigarette...Dewey looks back...etc. What a brilliant writerly move.

I love this book.

Wow.

I'm off to go see how it ends...surely my appellate brief can wait a few hours more...

Holy CRAP!

ohmygodohmygodohmygod. This book is SO good!

Omaha, Kansas, hitchhikers, barns, bad checks, Miami, blond boy collecting bottles by the roadside while poor sickly Gramps shovels in the pancakes...it's all so amazing...and then, and then, and then...
---> hear the fever pitch to which I build <---
they've so got them! in Vegas! and they drop it, that word Clutter, and it elicits the desired shocking reaction, and then WHAT?!
"It was Perry...He killed them all"

Oh really, Mister Wild Dick Hickock?

I want to keep reading!!! How can a girl be expected to go to class at a time like this?!

"Open a map...point your finger--maybe that's it"

OK, now that we've got all that childhood reminiscence out of the way, and now that I've had my first official Law School Classmate In Cold Blood Encounter, in which she approached me in the library upon seeing my paperback on the table in front of me and we entered into a discussion about how this isn't really a true crime book ("I realized," she said, "that this is what all those other true crime writers are trying, and failing, to do"), yes, now that all that is done -- can we just talk about how awesome is the landlady of the Las Vegas rooming house?!

She is just fantastic. "Uh-huh. Came all the way from Kansas on a parole case. Well, I'm just a dizzy blonde. I believe you. But I wouldn't tell that tale to any brunettes." -- p. 176 I love it. She's so funny. She also, apparently, misjudged Perry. (Or did she?) She, even though she chugs her beer and gives it some thought, doesn't think whatever they want Perry for can be anything too big. She thought he was a little punk, is all.

So, did Dick corrupt him? Or what? I know, I'm not there yet. Then again, maybe I am. I don't know if we ever get to delve as deeply into Dick as we do into Perry. Also, I found myself impressed, almost like pleased, that the prisoner friend decided to inform. I picture him so vividly, lying there in his cell hearing the news reports, and knowing that the information he handed on to Dick about the Clutter family has in some way led to their deaths. I am aware that snitching is much to the dismay of hooligans everywhere. Alas, part of his fear was that he might be an accessory to the crime. Of course I look at that differently after taking Criminal Law last semester. The difference between knowing about a crime, as opposed to knowledge plus aid and purpose, which is to say, wanting it to succeed, can be a huge difference. Capote points out that the Kansas investigators would have soon made their way to this fellow anyway, as they tracked lead after lead after lead. Well, whatever. I was somehow proud of him. I wonder how it would have turned out differently had he not told?

Like - how would it have changed the encounter with my new favorite character, the skanky rooming house landlady in Vegas?! I think she's eclipsed Mrs. Myrtle Clare the postmistress, at least until we wend our way back to Holcomb and Garden City. But now, in the far western states, we're on our way to go see sister Barbara in California. Dear sister. Dear, dear sister of the not-quite-a-lecture letter.

It would seem that two of the characters in whom I most delight -- Myrtle and Ms Landlady Thang -- are kind of similar. Sassy, tough, middle-aged, seen a lot of shit pass them by in their day, laughed at most of it, remembered some fondly. But where does Perry fit in? Does everyone - or anyone - relate to him, too? Is it just me?

My kick-ass law library has a new thing: law-related feature films that we can check out! The other day, a cart appeared with a selection of DVDs, everything from Inherit the Wind to Erin Brockovich. And, guess what, In Cold Blood is among them. That is so fun! I love the law library. (Remember last semester when I rejoiced as they urged people to chill out for two seconds of their stressbag rising blood pressure legal lives?) I am excited to check out the movie, once I finish reading the book. This week, I checked out Regarding Henry instead. I applaud my law library. It's up there with Torts and the LIRR in contention for the Best Thing About Life Since Coming to Hofstra award. I really just want to go read In Cold Blood instead of, say, all the pages of Contracts and Property I should read for tomorrow...

What--I was supposed to be writing some appellate brief this week? You want me to think about school? With Al Dewey and Perry Smith and Dick Hickock galavanting about the nation variously chasing and escaping each other? And themselves?

God/murder clarification, plus geeks and freaks

Let me just note, in case my last post was unclear: I applaud my mother. I applaud her for introducing me to many things (traveling the entire country, good music, fabulous books and movies being just a few). I applaud the support for free speech, new ideas, and critical thinking that went into her letting me watch scary movies (but always the GOOD scary movies) when I was young. Rosemary's Baby. The Shining. Not insignificantly, she repeatedly denied my sister's and my requests to rent Faces of Death on our little sojourns to the video store. (Also she did NOT allow me to watch Platoon, which I really, really wanted to go see, for reasons of too many f-bombs, I think. Funny, to think about now, if you think about how prevalent that word is in my random conversation...)

I applaud her recognition, as well as my various teachers' recognition, that I was smart and had kind of moved beyond Beverly Cleary. (We basically skipped right over the whole Judy Blume debate. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret had nothing on Jaws, or Squeaky Fromme.) I find it hilarious that my sister and I would sit there prattling on acting out The Shining during the day and then I would be scared at night, and then the next day I'd act it out again like nothing had happened. And isn't that why we watch those movies, anyway? We want to be scared, even though we don't want to be. And now, since I've outgrown movie-induced anxiety, I no longer a)want to be scared b)get scared by movies. So I don't watch them. But I fondly remember when I did.

For a recent example, let's take The Ring. Not something stupid and random gore-ridden like Saw, but let's say The Ring, which came out and it was garnering critical praise and people were swearing it was "really, truly scary" and I was like - whatever. I just have no desire anymore. It's weird. I think it's funny. As a child, I would have been, like, ditching school to go see it I think. Mom would have taken me to see it and then we would have gone to lunch. Now, I haven't even bothered to rent it. Or The Blair Witch Project. Everyone but everyone was up in a snit about that movie. I would have been ecstatic at age twelve. But I saw it in my twenties. I thought it was stupid.

My elementary school best friend also has ended up here in New York. Not long ago we got together for lunch and were reminiscing about various childhood things, as we are wont to do, and I found it amusing that she remembered me being allowed to watch those movies and she remembered being jealous, too, even twenty years later. And by the way, she was the other smartest-girl-on-the-block type of thing, so it wasn't about that. It probably helped my case that I was the youngest in my family, and she was the oldest of six kids. She had good examples to set. Not me. I copied my sister in everything right as she did it and refused to ever accept the suggestion that I should "wait my turn" a couple years, and was often exposed to or involved in things ahead of my time, as it were.

And I almost forgot about The Amityville Horror! Who could forget that! The freaking flies! My sister was totally onto that one. In fact, I remember her actively trying to get me interested in that one, despite initial resistance on my part. How happy and nostalgic does it make me now, every time I'm at the station awaiting my train on the Long Island Rail Road, when the LIRR conductor calls out the train bound for Babylon, "making stops at...Massapequa, Massapequa Park, Amityville..." Someday I will ride that train to Amityville. Just to ride the train to Amityville. Maybe when my mom and sister come to visit?

But you know I was at best on the periphery of the cool kids circles, what with my being "comprehensively dorky" and all, and even at a tender age already roundly digusted by people I didn't consider smart. I would make friends at Girl Scouts or softball or wherever, but at some point I just didn't care about Care Bears/shopping/Michael Jackson and later boys/parties/trying pot, unless I was intellectually challenged as well. (This is why the thespian crowds of high school were sweet relief.) So sometimes if my sister didn't know a particular thing, then I had no hope. Like one time, that smart best friend and I came across the word "geek," scrawled in graffiti on a skateboard ramp. I think we were maybe eight. We immediately decided it was a cool word, and we started making up all sorts of uses for it. In the dictionary (clearly outdated?) we found only the definition of a circus performer who bites the heads off live animals. This, too, struck as cool. We even started some sort of club with Geek, as we conceived him, as our mascot. This all lasted until my older, daughter-of-the-hippie parents, far more worldly, other best friend (with whom I did things like discover in the gutter a discarded issue of Hustler magazine which we hid in her room and secretly looked at later) informed me that I was an idiot and a "geek" was someone totally nerdy and uncool. Duh. Touche.

My point? Did I have one? I hate censorship. So the whole notion of refusing outright to let your child read something makes my blood boil. Harry Potter, anyone? Although I personally have no interest whatsoever in the little wizard, I will passionately defend him when the book-burners start their rants.

My other point? I really did always wait for that projectile vomiting scene in The Exorcist. And now I hate vomiting. And spit. Shudder. Is there a connection? Who knows?

Still another point? Do we really know when our kids are ready for anything? When I was in Arizona over winter break on my "21 Days, 21Movies," quest, I was thinking of taking my three-year-old nephew to the theater, to see either Happy Feet or Charlotte's Web. (Since he owns Cars on DVD he had already inducted me into the world of Lightning McQueen.) Well, this necessitated discussion with my sister on whether either of those flicks would be appropriate for him. In the end, I ended up going to see Happy Feet without him, and while I don't think it would have been inappropriate, it might have just flat-out not held a 3-year-old's interest, because it packs such an "adult" moral/political punch. And p.s., I love it. The penguins rule.

As for Charlotte, my sister of course knows that story intimately (because we did also read the children's classics, before we moved on to Helter Skelter -- let's not forget that my parents had my sister and me reading by age two! I don't remember a time when I didn't know how to read) and she and my brother-in-law were worried about the ending. Was my nephew ready for death? Well, I didn't really press the point. I don't really care if nephew gets to see Charlotte's Web this year or in three years, and besides if I don't take him to the movies, that's just more popcorn for me. But I remember thinking, just sort of philosophically, how do we know? How do we know when he's ready? What does it mean to be ready? What about when someone dies in real life, and the fact that no one is ever READY for that?

Like in Holcomb, Kansas. Or Benedict Canyon and Los Feliz. And I was thinking about this as I read In Cold Blood some more in the last few days. First of all, I really, really like this book, OK. A lot. It's so good. I'm currently in the chapter where Perry is going through his belongings as they prepare to leave Mexico, and the letter from his father to the parole board as well as the letter from his sister to him made me nearly burst. It's so hard to explain the effect reading those words has. This book is so good. As I've been pondering these questions, such as why do we read about crime? and criminals? and why did I used to love to and now can't be bothered? and what is the point of the True Crime section? Well, I think it's kind of bizarre that I was several days into reading and blogging (you might say rambling) about this book before I realized it's about the humanity of the killers.

Like, I still relate to Perry, even as we learn more about how messed up he is. Maybe because we learn more about how messed up he is. He's a packrat, trying to get rid of his earthly possessions that he might travel on unfettered, but there are some things to which he simply must cling. And his guitar! I cried for him and the loss of his guitar! And sure, I might not believe in literal maps and chests filled with gold, but don't I really operate as if somewhere out there, on some level, a buried treasure lies just waiting for me to find it?

It's like the movie Downfall (Der Untergang), Oscar-nominated a couple years ago but bound to lose to The Sea Inside. Der Untergang is about the final days of Hitler, in the bunker, and I remember that as it garnered its slew of awards there was the usual (censoring? moral? "moral"?) outrage that someone could play Hitler as a human. When in fact, that was the point, as the actor said on several occasions. You would do well to remember that Hitler, and Osama bin Laden, and Perry and Dick, were/are humans. They're not machines, robots, or monsters. They are humans, and they are deeply, tragically flawed, and it is humans who do things we label evil, not random evildoers who are somehow not human. There but for the grace of God go...all of us?

And then--oh my god oh my god!!--Korea, and Worcester, and New York!!! So Perry was in the Korean war. He spent time in Korea. This, I know, affects a person. (See: historical origins of this blog, etc.) And then he's off trying to find his Army buddy in Worcester, and is this about the best description ever of a city or what: "a Massachusetts factory town of steep, up-and-down streets that even in the best of weathers seem cheerless and hostile." -- p. 137 That is SO Worcester. And Worcester is an intricate part of my family on the Napikoski side, so I'm totally allowed to say that.

And then it's New York, and his room at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue, in which neighborhood I have spent much quality time, wandering from Penn Station after I disembark from the Long Island railroad in pursuit of whatever thing I'm in pursuit of that day in Manhattan or beyond... Perry recalls:

"In over three months I practically never left the Broadway area. For one thing, I didn't have the right clothes. Just Western clothes--jeans and boots. But there on Forty-second Street nobody cares, it all rides--anything. My whole life, I never met so many freaks."
- p. 138

Perry's mother went alcoholic and left. She left on many levels, both before and after she physically left his father, and her family. Two of his siblings killed themselves. The one who remains alive and writes him the long, amazing letter while he is in prison, the letter he keeps with him and can't bear to discard, even if he's angry at it, the letter she's sorry (or is she?) has to pass through the hands of the censor -- well, that sibling is the one who ended up leading the "normal," married, picket-fence, devoted-to-children, baths/bedtime/clothing sizes, no-time-to-read-anymore-raising-a-family life. Do I see my sister in there? Do I still see myself in Perry? His prison friend Willie-Jay comments on the letter (in still another amazing passage) and urges Perry not to be too upset and to consider what it's like to be his sister, and what kind of dialogue they can really have with each other. She inhabits an utterly different world from Perry, even if she started out in the same one as him when they were young.

What happens to us? How do we make our choices and our life paths? Is there a freak, a geek, a murderer, a traveler, a parent, a censor, the potential for a horror show, the potential for redemption, lurking somewhere in all of us?

"I will hide and you will hide, and we shall hide together here, underneath the bunkers in the row. I have water, I have rum, wait for dawn and dawn shall come, underneath the bunkers in the row." -- R.E.M.

God and murders and things

I think that part of the reason I've never read In Cold Blood is that I don't really like reading about murder, really. Capote's masteful writing makes me want to keep reading this book, but it's so disturbing, on so many levels, what atrocities people are capable of. And I'm not even very far into it; they've just found the bodies and are in day two of the townspeople's reflections.

When we were young -- too young, some would say, for it to be healthy -- my sister and I developed what might be called a small obsession with the Manson murders. We pored over our mother's copy of the book Helter Skelter, although I definitely skipped most of the actual reading apart from the descriptions of the killings, and I just kept going back to the section in the middle of the fat paperback which had the crime scene photographs. Then there was the TV movie. It really is quite good, as TV movies go, and who could not love the Vincent Bugliosi character after the way he puts "Charlie" in his place? My sis and I could proudly recite the details of those August 1969 nights, including the victims' names, the places in the house where each body was found, how Linda Kasabian got immunity, who shaved and carved what into their heads...

Yeah, I know. Creepy. I was, like, ten. I also was, bizarrely, allowed to watch pretty much any horror movie I wanted. (But The Last Temptation of Christ and Fatal Attraction were out of the question.) I saw, admittedly at home under Mom's supervision, Nightmare on Elm Street...The Shining...The Exorcist...and boy, were some of my friends jealous. I think I have friends whose mothers STILL don't want them to watch The Exorcist. I grew up with that movie. I even remember the first few times; my sister (two and a half years older than me) was pretty into it but all I wanted was to watch the intense scenes with the priest and the head-spinning and, yes, the projectile vomiting, but my mom would be like, "Come on, get in here and pay attention to the movie" as I wandered about to, oh, I don't know -- maybe play with something more appropriate for a NINE-year-old?

The consequence of all this? I think there are two. One, I was pretty much constantly terrified at night during my pre-teen years. I was forever checking behind the shower curtain as I got ready for bed (Psycho, one of my mom's all-time favorites). During the light of day it was all well and good for my sister and me to imitate the twin girls in The Shining -- we'd stand at one end of our hallway and call to our mother to watch us do "Come and play with us, Danny! Forever. And ever. And ever." -- but at night I would lie in bed petrified, heart racing. If I wasn't healthy and in good shape from gymnastics, swimming, softball and the like, I might have catapulted myself right into heart failure. As an adolescent, desperate for independence, I had decidedly mixed feelings about staying home alone. None of this affected me during the day, but at night? I was a goner.

So that's the first consequence. The second is that I think I got them out of my system. Both the horror movies, and the murder fascination in particular. I can't remember the last time I went to a scary movie or even a creepy one in the theater. It must have been The Sixth Sense, or 8mm, I think. I liked the former, but the latter just disgusted me. And when I do watch them, which is rare, I don't get scared. I am 100% blase. I see now that you work yourself up into that anxiety; it's a conscious choice. I have no concept whatsoever of how adults can be scared by movies. It so seems part of childhood to me. I have no interest.

So here I am reading In Cold Blood and thinking -- wow. The writing is great, and I'm glad I've finally got around to reading it, but why didn't I read it when I was an adolescent? I remember my mother reading it. Maybe I got burned out after The Shining. I'd been watching that movie for years and when I was twelve I decided I was going to finally read the book, for my book report. We were all in the junior high library selecting books and I informed my teacher that nothing appealed to me and I was going to read a book I already had at home. When I told him which one, he insisted I get a note of permission from my mother. Which she happily provided. But of course I was up until forever late the night before the report was due, so not close to being finished. That was a long book! My pals selecting young adult fare like Cages of Glass, Flowers of Time may have been on to something!

So now I read and I just shudder. Creepy creepy creepy. Murder is creepy. The fact that the True Crime section exists is kind of weird. However, as I said, Capote is remarkable. And the book is not even that creepy yet. There's been hardly any description of anything disturbing at all. And that's what's almost more creepy of course, because you know these people were murdered, and you know vaguely how, and you're just floating along reading about this until-now-idyllic town in western Kansas, and you really get the sense of how it is for the townspeople, that this event is just so misplaced, so shocking, so wrong.

Quoting people's responses, a lot of the Holcomb and Garden City folk express their dismay and horror and shock that it was the Clutter family of all people. One schoolteacher says,

"But that family represented everything people hereabouts really value and respect, and that such a thing could happen to them--well, it's like being told there is no God. It makes life seem pointless. I don't think people are so much frightened as they are deeply depressed." -- p. 88

Now, of course, in my youthful, blood-and-gore watching, fearmongering, terrified, ghost story and Ouija board-loving, convinced-something-was-coming-to-get-me-in-the-night state, I happened to believe deeply that there was in fact a god, a God the Heavenly Father to be precise, and I also was pretty well convinced that his son Jesus was murdered and bled and died for us all. Is it a coincidence that both of those worldviews have disappeared from my life? Who's to say?

But I do think it's interesting that when I read that line, I knew exactly what that woman meant. Even if "no God" doesn't resonate with me as some sort of ultimate betrayal by the universe.

Also, I must say that I rather enjoy the postmistress Mrs. Myrtle Clare. She's all tough and sassy and weathered and thinks everyone is just working themselves into a needless frenzy.

But I wouldn't have related to Myrtle when I was ten.

"Oh, the dissatisfied with the satisfied..."

Is it scary that I relate a little bit to Perry at one point?

I mean, I find him sinister of course. I was just last night noting how masterful Capote is; he can describe without slanting his writing or passing any judgment, and he's already conveyed that Dick and Perry are sinister, while Nancy and Kenyon and the other Clutters are not. Such evocative writing. Astonishing. But in the letter Willie-Jay writes to Perry on the eve of the latter's departure from prison, he says:

"You exist in a half-world suspended between two superstructures, one self-expression and the other self-destruction. You are strong, but there is a flaw in your strength, and unless you learn to control it the flaw will prove stronger than your strength and defeat you. The flaw? Explosive emotional reaction out of all proportion to the occasion. Why? Why this unreasonable anger at the sight of others who are happy or content, this growing contempt for people and the desire to hurt them? All right, you think they're fools, you despise them because their morals, their happiness is the source of your frustration and resentment. But these are dreadful enemies you carry within yourself -- in time destructive as bullets." -- pp. 43-44

I mean, come on. I think people have said some of those exact words to me. Not the least of which people were a couple of my Borders general managers. Which, if you think about it, could be fitting because working at Borders was kind of like being in prison sometimes. And here I am at law school all the time regarding the fools around me with utter contempt.

Yet, I have decidedly mellowed on some levels. I still think "if you're not outraged you're not paying attention" and all that, but I'm also remarkably content on the whole emotionally, and I don't know that I would have described myself as remarkably emotionally content, say, ten years ago. Is it because I discovered mindfulness and meditation and yoga and other buddhist-tinged things along the way?

I took a lot of flack when the "morals" and "happiness" of the BYU Happy Valley people were the "source of [my] frustration and resentment." But I also think I changed things for the better by fighting back and standing up for our persecuted selves during my freshman year. AND changed myself for the better.

Can it be that this is a dangerous tendency, that toward passionate outrage? It often makes people uncomfortable, I'll grant that, but I always just think those people are secretly jealous that they don't stand up for what they believe. You know, another friend of mine was just blogging about this: why is it acceptable for people who don't care to tell the people who are outraged they're out of line, but it's not OK for the outraged to condemn the apathetic?

Back to Perry. Are we the same, and only the circumstances of our lives (or was that the whims of fate?) drove us to different results?

I see the other side of the coin, too. In my aforementioned remarkable contentness, I feel like people are often put off. Example, law school, where it's like a daily challenge to find someone who can actually relax and not take everything so seriously 24 hours a day. I feel like when I'm galvanting through the world road-tripping to Indigo Girls concerts and trying new things and moving to Asia and doing what I like and really believing that we can all change the world if we put our minds to it, people who are settled in their cozy homesteads behind their white picket fences are peering out at me and silently disapproving. Sometimes even not so silently.

I never wanted to hurt anyone though. Willie-Jay definitely calls Perry out on wanting to hurt people.

I think maybe I have more to say about this, but I first need to sort it out from its current state of total jumble inside my head.

But I think Perry and I both do give a damn, despite any indications to the contrary. And I think the same can be said for a lot of humans who do and who do not go astray.

Dude, where's my human hive?

On page 32, Capote describes Dick and Perry as "scrubbed, combed, and tidy as two dudes setting off on a double date..." This is interesting to me because of the use of the word "dude" and how it has evolved, about which some of you know I've long had a theory.

First of all, reading this today you might skip over the word "double" entirely as the notion of "two dudes" on a date is not that strange, if thinking of two men, although then you would say wait a minute, Capote so didn't write that then did he? Then you realize it's a double date they're setting off on, of course. With girls, presumably.

But also, "dude" is not just a guy here; it's that whole city-slickin' and primped connotation, right? I would be so fascinated to go back to the 1950s and early 1960s to hear that use of the word "dude."

Now, in the 80s, "dude" joined the Valley Girl-style speech. "Like, omigod, totally fer sure" etc. My generation will say the sentence, "Dude, that was amazing!" And we are nowhere in there referring to a male of any sort. It's just an exclamation. It's perfectly synonymous with "Wow, that was amazing." Or, in the 50s, maybe, "Gee, that was amazing!"

I discovered that we differ sharply from the previous generation in that respect --and I developed my theory -- back when I worked at Marketplace. One day I said, "Dude, something something" and my co-worker friend born in 1967 said, "Don't call me dude." Only, I so wasn't. And it was interesting to me that she would even hear it that way. I began to explore. I knew my sister (born 1972) used it the way "my" generation did. Where was the cut-off? I've since decided anyone born before 1970 lives in a different world vis-a-vis the word "dude" than those born during the great and glorious decade of bell-bottoms, shag carpet, and disco.

Also, I think the pendulum has swung back, though I think the early 80s kids still use it in that not-referring-to-any-person way. I hear, Hey! Where's my car?! while people around me hear Hey, buddy! Where's my car?

I'm reasonably certain this is endlessly fascinating to only me.

I also like the next two pages, wherein Capote describes sleepy little Holcomb, Kansas, which we all know is about to get not-so-sleepy, and the neighboring bigger town of Garden City, where despite citizens' denials class distinctions are in fact observed as clearly "as in any other human hive." Capote talks about people praising the good schools, friendly people, fresh air, and so forth of the community: "I came out here to practice law. A temporary thing, I never planned to stay. But when the chance came to move, I thought, Why go? What the hell for? Maybe it's not New York -- but who wants New York?"

I might venture to answer that. It's funny how often this has come up lately. I have such a major, vast appreciation for the wide open spaces and the small towns from which my family members hail and all that. But I do think, in the end, I could raise my hand and say, Me! Me! I want New York! I just don't need that so-called simple life that Capote is really evoking during these first few dozen pages. So many people want that. Are nostalgic for it even if they've never had it. I like visiting it, and then moving on.

East is East, and West is West

So far, reading In Cold Blood, I am struck by many things, not the least of which are Capote's excellent writing and how much reading this 50s/60s-evoking book reminds me of reading Peyton Place. But I am also struck by how vividly I picture the West and am so glad I have lived both in the West (all over it, in fact) and on the East Coast.

I have more to say. Don't worry. But, as my friend Maija's t-shirt said, "Don't mess with Kansas, either!"

Love it.

In Cold Blood, that's good enough for me!

When it came time to select a C author, I did consider a few. Colette, for starters. Always have meant to read something by Colette. And the big one, whom I consider the runner-up: Conrad, specifically Heart of Darkness. I have no idea why I've never read that. There are a lot of people in my life who have no idea why I've never read that. I have even owned it before -- and failed to read it. Suckage!

But really, as I perused the 'C' shelves, when my eyes fell upon Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, in that moment my decision was made. Everything else that was on the table was cleared off, in one fell swoop, like so many shattering dishes and clattering spoons.

And, well, there is the point to consider that In Cold Blood isn't really a novel. Well - oh well. It's such a literary book. It hangs out with novels. It's written by a writer of novels and just lots of other things too. (Funny, that's what I aspire to be.) I accept it for my literary A-Z blog quest.

My edition: a paperback, with ISBN 0679-745580