I'm amused by how much this book could offend people...

And I imagine that Naked Lunch did in fact offend many people when it first burst onto the scene, as it were. I still find it so repetitive and random that it's tiresome to read at times, but occasionally I come across really wacky and hilarious passages. No need to explain who's speaking or what's happening in the story, because there aren't really characters or a plot per se in this book, so I'll just share the fun.

A random person randomly starts talking about religious figures. He's like, Christ? He should have been at a trashy carnival... "Step right up folks, the one and only Son of Man will cure your..." Well, and then he gets a little vulgar, which wouldn't be appropriate for my family blog, so I'll leave it to your imagination.

Next, he says Buddha is a "notorious metabolic junky" who is sitting there in the lotus position manufacturing his own junk in his cells to keep himself high, and getting away with it because he's declared himself to be a holy man, now, dig?

And then, "Mohammed? Are you kidding? He was dreamed up by the Mecca Chamber of Commerce." - p. 96

It's really funny. But maybe you had to be there. I don't see how that could possibly be the case though, as that would imply some semblance of continuity or sense in this book, both of which are decidedly lacking.

Good times.

What can you say about a maniac?

When I think about this book, I want to say things like, "Wow, Burroughs is a total freakin' maniac!" but then it's like, well, duh.

It's such a weird book. Its random, fragmented, crazy-vision, piecemeal approach to storytelling is so not what I'm in the mood for right now. I didn't realize that until I started reading this. So, once again in my little literary project I have found myself reading slowly. But it's not that I don't like the books I've selected. It seems like that, doesn't it? Oh, well. Things aren't always what they seem. As any of these psycho addicts(or all they are just Burroughs?) in the book would surely tell you.

Also I have learned the spelling, or at least a spelling, of slang words that I now realize I have only ever heard spoken and never seen/written. I would share, but this is a family blog. Although one could make a convincing case that by deciding on Burroughs as my B author all notions of family blogness basically went out the window.

Oh yeah, and sometimes the things he writes are just painfully cringe-gross. I'm talking not just violent sex acts but also all these maniacal doctors and surgeons pop up from time to time doing really weird things and they are rendered quite vividly. I have involuntarily made some intense faces on the bus and subway while reading. I have possibly even gasped. I have elicited looks.

I would love to comment on the plot, but I have yet to discern exactly what that is. I'll get back to you if I figure that out.

Spinning Heads

Some aspects of reading Naked Lunch are amusing.

But I still suspect it resonates better with people who've done crazy obscene amounts of drugs. Or who really want to.

Anyway, it's a little boring, nonsensical and repetitive, but it has randomly brilliant passages that pop up here and there. I imagine life with the Beats might have been like that.

"They didn't know the music was in my soul..."

Yeah. Well. Did I mention I haven't done enough drugs to catch all the endless references in this book?

I don't have much to say so far, thirty-something pages in. Except, at the risk of blaspheming all that is beatnik and holy and good, my initial reaction is a very Catcher-in-the-Rye-like "What's the big deal?"

The great thing about the above paragraph is that the only thing I could say here to offend more people than saying this "amazing vision" Naked Lunch is not all that great is reiterating my belief that J.D. Salinger just doesn't do it for me like he did it for previous generations. Oh, well. Onward!

"Did you do too many drugs
I did too many drugs
Did you do too many drugs, too
Baby
You were born too late
I was born too soon
But every time I look at that ugly moon
It reminds me of you..."

-- violent femmes, 'american music'

B is for Naked Lunch

All right ladies and gentlemen, if there be any among you. William S. Burroughs. I'm ashamed to say that until now I have actually not read anything by him. What indeed is up with that? And I call myself a Beat-lover. Let's see. If I were accused of being a Beat Generation devotee, would there be enough evidence to convict me?

• I read On the Road as any disillusioned 18-year-old should, while traveling across the country (specifically, from Washington D.C. to Flagstaff, Arizona)
• In Contemporary Poetry class sophomore year of college, I wrote my huge semester research paper/project on Allen Ginsberg and argued that he remained relevant (yes, I was a sophomore in college before he died) even if the beauty had faded...so to speak
• "Hey, Jack Kerouac" was in fact my favorite song on 10,000 Maniacs' In My Tribe
• I mourned when Allen died, even more than I'd mourned Jerry Garcia's death
  
• To this day, I subscribe to the "Beat News You Can Use" e-newsletter, wherein I keep up on all the goings on of the folks who run the Beat Museum in San Francisco and regularly take the Beat-Mobile out on tour
• I read Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters and even got my mother to read it
• I've participated and won prizes in poetry slams
  
• For god's sake, Douglas Brinkley's The Majic Bus and the likes of Ken Kesey are responsible for major life decisions of mine, and are the very reason I'm at Hofstra! Isn't that rather Beat-like of me?
• I do quite often like to think of the best minds of my generation as starving and hysterical, although some of them should probably keep their clothes on.

And yet somehow Burroughs has fallen through my cracks. Well, this shall now be remedied as I eagerly devour my Naked Lunch (ISBN: 0-8021-4018-1).

Here's one thing that interests me even before page one. You know how lots of books' initial pages are filled with excerpts from the best reviews, the more prominent the paper the better? Well, while this one does include quotes from The New York Times ("booty brought back from a nightmare") , Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times Book Review, it's somehow more impressive to me that I find quote after praise-laden quote from some of the brilliant (albeit in a genius/madness kind of way) minds of the twentieth century: Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, Anthony Burgess...

And I'll just say flat out, I'm not entirely sure I've done enough drugs to keep up with all the references in this book. Man, was Burroughs a fan of the opiates. This edition ("the restored text") includes additions by the author, including one "Letter From a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs" he wrote in 1956. It's a very straightforward analysis of different drugs and his experience with addiction to or withdrawal from them. It's quite informative, actually; I found myself oddly entranced as he matter-of-factly explains why alcohol and prolonged sedation are terrible for curing opiate addiction, while anti-histamines are a bit better.

In the past few years, I have observed very closely from the sidelines as in more than one area of my life a person very close to someone close to me has struggled with heroin addiction. I daresay it's actually kind of creepy how in a matter of a few years I was faced time and again with people figuring quite prominently in my life who had a heroin addict figuring quite prominently in their lives. I learned a few things, but still feel on the whole rather ill-equipped to deal with such a mind-boggling, intense addiction.

This book is already interesting food for thought, and I'm still perusing prologue and addenda!

"And then there is the information, which is nothing, and comes at night."

It has come to my attention that I have been reading this Martin Amis book at a pace that can be described a few ways. One of those is "slow." This has been pointed out by more than one acquaintance/friend/blog reader.

Well, listen people. I'm a busy woman! I was -- um -- busily doing nothing in Arizona! I had movies to watch. Enchiladas to eat. Trivia to conquer. (Do you think I'm still atop the rankings of Big Daddy's Grill?) Then I came back to New York where I have been exTREMEly busy. You know, settling into a new semester. Watching more movies. Getting reacquainted with my local bars.

No, I mean, a book is meant to savor, isn't it?

OK, you're right. I read The Information at a glacial pace. I bought it and came up with the vision for my quest and then promptly finished reading that silly Van Gogh mystery before I even dove into Amis. Then it was law school semester two, and I really do have reading to do for my classes, so I had to get my Contracts-Property-Civ Pro-Transnational-Appellate routine all sorted out. And it IS Oscar season, so how can I not attend to my waiting Netflix discs?

Or maybe I was just reading Martin Amis so slowly because I was trying to build an audience -- a following -- someone who cared whatsoever -- about my little blog project. Yeah.

But I finished it! I did! It's done. And now I am moving on to B. So I'm a week or two behind. I'll catch up. I am nothing if not a procrastinator, and procrastinators are good at one thing: getting crap done when the best time to do it has already passed. I'll be back on track before you know it.

So who's with me? Who's going to read the next selection? B is for Burroughs. Naked Lunch. My edition is ISBN: 0802140181.

Also, I have a lot more to say about Amis! For one thing, in general I thought The Information was very good indeed. In the end, it was cool that Gwyn had his own revenge going but he was just such a smarmy one, and I found myself really rooting for diabolical Richard. Boy, was Richard ever doomed.

And haven't we all known a book like Amelior, Gwyn's post-modern fairy tale about which the world suddenly, inexplicably goes nuts? (Tuesdays With the Harry Potter Code, anyone?) I was viciously amused and sad for Richard as if he were a real person when the profundity requital winner was revealed...

Oh, now I've done it. I've insulted Harry Potter. This may be grounds for getting struck by that stupid lightning bolt on his forehead or wherever. I'll just crawl off to start on Naked Lunch (classes? what classes?) and leave you with a few choice quotes from The Information. Maybe they are better when you read them in context. Maybe you should do that!

"So he really didn't want to be wallowing and languishing, with Gwyn, in that twenty-first-century nautilus, that regency spaceship of fish tanks and startling energy bills, where every room had three televisions and five telephones (American luxury having much to do with the irreducible proximity of televisions and telephones)..." - p. 238

"Phil's full name was Phil Smoker. Richard thought it might save a lot of trouble to be called Richard Smoker, particularly when you were in America." -- p. 352

"It seemed to him that all the time he used to spend writing he now spent dying. This was the truth. And it shocked him. It shocked him to see it, naked. Literature wasn't about living. Literature was about not dying.
Suddenly he knew that writing was about denial.
Suddenly he knew that denial was great. Denial was so great. Denial was the best thing. Denial was even better than smoking." - p. 337

"On the other hand, he was free to wonder why so many writers' women killed themselves, or went insane. And he concluded: because writers are nightmares. Writers are nightmares from which you cannot awake. Most alive when alone, they make living hard to do for those around them. He knew this now--now that he wasn't a writer. Now that he was just a nightmare." - p. 314

And if you do yourself no other favor today, stroll into your local bookstore and at least read pages 236-237, about junk novels and airports!

Thanks, Martin Amis. It was fun hanging out with you.

Writer, party of one.

Ah, but of course. Of course, in the end, Richard hits upon the perfect plan by which to sabotage his friend the writer. It's so obvious; why didn't I think of that?! I feel like I shouldn't say what the plan is, that I shouldn't "spoil" it. That would of course require someone for whom it is to be spoiled to be a)reading this blog b)reading the book c)caring one way or the other if the ending is ruined. Group A is so small in itself, and B might not even exist, necessarily making C non-existent as well.

Here's another thing about writers. OK, Amis (as Richard) is SO DARKLY FUNNY about poets in this book. Richard's wife went through a period before their marriage but after they two had initially been together in which she saw other writers. And by "saw" we of course mean knew. In the biblical sense. So he has this whole spectrum on which he places the writers and it's really cyncial and funny. Like, of course she's going to sleep with poets, but novelists? That hurts. And so on. And he relates it to a theory that the harder things are to write, the less the writer gets paid for them ("just ask the poet at the bus stop") ... and that particular continuum ends with screenplays on top. *smirk*

But he's even funny about poets besides that, earlier on. He says nothing happens to novelists: they're born, they get sick, they die... "They learn to drive, unlike poets (poets don't drive. Never trust a poet who can drive. Never trust a poet at the wheel. If he can drive, distrust the poems)." But then he adds, "Although they don't or can't drive, poets get around more." - p. 95

So it's really funny when he returns to this riff on poets and their other-ness later in the book. I definitely get a sense Amis could be a bit like me (and a million other writers, surely) who went through a poetry phase, or maybe never quite left it, but never really called ourselves a poet and nothing but a poet.

That word, poet, is one that's hard to take upon oneself. There certainly is a lot of pressure. I'm with you, Amis. Whither poetry, eh?

But don't forget, Amis is flat-out hilarious sometimes, like while they're on the U.S. tour:


"At Denver's Stapleton International Airport, at five o'clock in the morning, nobody wanted to work. So they had a robot doing it. A computer, with a robot voice: female. Richard thought that the robot, considering it was a robot and every inch a slave, didn't take any shit, always telling him to move on, to unload quickly and move on, to deposit bags quickly and move on." - p. 258

I so want Martin Amis to be my friend. He makes still another point, however, about writers: that in the end, they really are at their best when they're alone. He uses this point to illustrate that it therefore follows that they're hard to live with. But there are still larger implications.

It is perhaps these observations if nothing else that convince me I am in fact a writer.

And it's all I thought it would be

I am now officially loving The Information. Because Richard Tull's cynical observations about New York, D.C., Miami, Chicago, the United States, the obsession with the automobile that's slowly killing all of us, it's all just fantastic.

I now officially and delightedly recommend that you all read this book. In fact, I strongly urge it! Because it is genius. When you get to part three, it is all kicked up a notch.

*sighs contentedly*

Because, you see, here's the thing Richard. These observations you make? Wherein you really take Americans to task for their ridiculous behavior, while at the same time exhibiting a slightly wary or possibly even a bit jealous respect for all there is on offer? Well, some of us United States-ians feel that way, too.

But does he fold down pages?

Richard Tull does indeed do the U.S.A.! As it were. I am now in Part Three of The Information and I am happy to report that our hero has landed in New York (yay!) where he watches Gwyn (his writer friend of whom he is totally envious) be interviewed and make a prat of himself except the interviewers don't realize it because they're ridiculous too, and it's awesome so far.

But first...oh, first first first there was a scene about 200 pages into the book, a hangover scene, two pages of pure comic cynical self-deprecating genius. That hangover scene alone justifies you reading the book, I swear. I laughed out loud multiple times. I will not let the irony go unmentioned that coincidentally, the morning after I read that particular scene I had my own world-weary head to contend with in the a.m. Funny that. You know, I went through a period of several years in which I was quite diligent about hangover avoidance. I faithfully followed my three simple rules of water, bread, and painkiller before sleep. Copious amounts of water, that's the key. If there was no bread to be had, in dire situations some crackers or potatoes or whatever handy starchy thing was lying around would do. Lately I guess I've been slacking off and I'm not sure why. I can justify skipping the food once in a while, but not drinking the water is just unacceptable.

This morning I woke up with my bottle of Dasani next to me in bed. Still completely full. It just lay there, as if it were a peacefully slumbering significant other or something. Full, neglected bottle of water. Hello? Paved with good intentions, my friends.

It took me about an hour to convince myself that yes, I was, indeed, going to get up. It was another 45 minutes or so before I did so. I would like to point out in my defense that this particular massively dehydrated and fatigued state was worsened by the fact that I missed my Long Island Rail Road train last night at the transfer point in Queens by, like, ten seconds. I saw it pulling away as I stepped out of the elevator onto the platform. The next train came ONE HOUR and THIRTEEN MINUTES later. Outside platforms, there, at Jamaica Station. Yeah, cold, drunk, 3 a.m., pitiably tired... I wanted to cry. I really did. I talked to a fellow traveler who had just missed her train to Far Rockaway. She'd approached me asking where she could buy a snack for her hour-plus wait. Fat chance, I told her, in the wee hours of the night at Jamaica. I hoped she'd want to share a cab but we were going in vastly different directions and a solo cab would be way too expensive from there.

I sometimes feel like I spend my life transferring at Jamaica, and there are all kinds of trains going in all directions, but the 2:30-3:30 a.m. hour is just not a good time. And there is nothing but NOTHING in that sketchy ol' neighborhood. I think even the pizza slice place is closed at 3 a.m. I once popped into one bar around the corner, and while I had a great time chatting with all the men, locals, among whom I was a complete and total fish out of water but a bemused one, the beers were only $1.50. That made me suspicious it's a money-laundering front or something. Dollar-fifty beers? In New York? So I don't really hang out there. Anyway, it was also closed at 3 a.m. It was just me and Martin Amis, and a few other beleaguered souls.

Wow, do I digress. Back to Richard.

"He knew American fiction, and he knew that fiction, considered in aggregate, would not lie. For him, coming to America was like dying and going to hell or heaven and finding it all as advertised. " -- page 221

I love it. Not just for its insight into the U.S. (oh, yeah!) but its subtle and only partially sarcastic comment on literature as well. Truth can be found in fiction. This is a notion I often emphasize when discussing, say, the Bible with people. Of course literature and mythology and tales we tell reveal truths, even when they are not a representation of facts and nothing but the facts.

Also of note, on that same page, Richard says "he knew, the instant he arrived on its streets, that New York was the most violent thing that men had ever done to a stretch of land..."

Last night after I had died and gone to the Long Island Rail Road, I might have agreed. But I've been thinking about this a great deal lately, about what living in New York (the state, the proxmity to the city) is doing to my love for New York (the City). For starters, I have called Long Island a pit on not a few occasions. An armpit, even. I think and dream and ponder about living in Manhattan for my next two years of Hofstra -- if not now, when?, eh -- but then I try to convince myself it makes sense to live closer to campus and just play in The City.

But I'm getting off the subject of my blog. I just -- love Manhattan. The energy when you step on the sidewalk. I never would have thought to characterize it that way, as violence done to the island. But I folded down the page, because that made sense to me, too.

I'll be sad to see this book end. Although I'm a week behind in my quest, and I so need to get crackin' on my B author. (FYI, Borges, Burroughs, and Barth appear to be the finalists.) I have folded down a lot of pages. That means I like the quotes, the things Martin Amis has said, the way he puts them. I used to have these two other voracious reader best friends in L.A. and they would chide me and my page-folding habit. I don't do it with hardcovers, only paperbacks. That somehow makes sense to me. They couldn't bring themselves to do that damage to a paperback either.

New York, New York. And oh, the things Richard does.

TV and Information

Everyone keeps telling me (well, I say "everyone" -- but really, it's more like the all of three people or so who have had anything whatsoever to say about Martin Amis) that I've selected the wrong book of his to read. I really don't hate this book, though. I just want to find someone with whom I can talk about it. One person has even suggested I switch. I kind of like this book, though, and want to know what happens. And it isn't turning me off of Martin at all; I'll definitely want to read another of his...which I'm gathering should be Money.

I've recently read the part where the crazy criminal/entrepreneur guy enters Gwyn and Demi's house as a burglar. Among his ruminations about possessions in various houses, whether luxuriously fashioned or sparse, whether there are candles or couches or mahogany or plastic, he notes that rich or poor we all have this common denominator of the gray square, the television.

I like to remember the times when I actually didn't have one. Those times shocked people. They were basically -- when I lived in my studio apartment in Hollywood. Before my friend moved and gave me his old TV on his way out of state. I've had a recurring theme in my life of people giving me their old television sets. Oh! And our sophomore year of college, in that apartment with Mara, Ranj, and Kristen. We didn't have a TV. We were definitely the odd girls out. On many levels. I love that I had three whole roommates who also didn't need a television.

It's just - if it's there, you'll watch it, you know? But life without television is really fine. And of course, I use it now for watching DVDs. Quite often. (I'm all about the Netflix. All about.) Another ex-roommate, Renee from Boston, once questioned why I make such a distinction between watching movies (which I adore, recommend, and can't understand how anyone could NOT do) and watching TV shows (which I scorn, am picky about, and avoid).

See, my whole thing is that a film is a complete work of art, much as a book or a play. Or even when you read a magazine, if you read a magazine cover to cover. When it ends, you are finished. You've completed something. At that point you might stretch, stand up, go get something to drink, call someone, go out, go to school, go to work, go to bed, go jogging -- basically, you go and do something else. Television is the one that doesn't really work that way. When you sit there watching TV, a show ends and then you get sucked in to the next one, because before there's any settling, processing, or contented sigh it's "UP NEXT! DON'T GO AWAY!" and so on. Sucking you in. You're never satiated.

You don't really do that with something else. If you finish a book, you don't reach over and pick up the next one that very instant (except possibly in circumstances of extreme sickness). In the theater, you finish watching a play or a movie and then you go home. (Unless you're a rebellious teenager trying to sneak into another flick for free. I've found that just makes your ass hurt by the end of the day, really, if you watch too many.)

Note also that this is why I don't really like watching movies on commercial television, and I am generally OK with watching TV shows on DVD. (Have I mentioned that I love Netflix?)

Television strips away your ability to recognize when you should be finished. It is inherent in the medium. And that is how it wins. And is pernicious. And takes our money. And so on.

Renee was right -- there are some crap movies, and some quality entertainment on TV. It's just that the medium is the message, you know. (And if you think I made up that last, I shall further mourn for the general state of things.)

Please note: I look highly upon television's ability to bring us together for shared events, be it a prominent person's funeral, 9/11 coverage, etc. Also, the announcement of the Oscar nominations, brought to me live. (Although last year from Korea I watched them streamed live on MSNBC.com...)

More pain?

The more I read The Information, the more I think it is memoir-ical. (I just made up that word.) Not totally, in the "all-first-novels-are-thinly-veiled-memoirs" way (thanks, JSFoer) but in the sort of "oooh, that paragraph probably really happened to him" way.

And, I am still finding passages that are biting, sharp, funny but then also when you think about it quite sobering. Example:

"The target is driving along. Without a care in the world, as they say. Although of course no one old enough to drive is without a care in the world. No one old enough to drive a trike is without a care in the world. Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit. That was one of the reasons why it was so easy to hurt people: they were never ready. More pain? Nobody needed that. Nobody thought they could possibly have room for any more, until it came." -- p. 147

So, our buddy Martin Amis appears on the cover of Pages magazine this month. There's an interview in which I learned things about him, including that The Information apparently sold only about 40,000 copies. I sort of think that half or fewer of the people who buy a book ever get around to reading it, but even if it's more, plus factoring in libraries, used bookstores, and borrowing from friends, let's say 40,000-50,000 people have actually read this one. Could that be true? It's sort of mind-boggling to contemplate. Let's say I tack on a few more out of generosity and imagine 60,000 have read it. Let's say based on population of large English speaking countries that not quite half of those readers are in the U.S., so I'm down to 30,000. This puts me at fewer than 1,000 per state. Even though I've lived in California (biggest population) and Boston (uber-literary city) and New York (the best of both of those worlds) I'm suddenly less surprised that I don't know a soul who's read it.

Perhaps I should indeed have selected Money or The Rachel Papers...

But I like this one!

Richard Tull does America?

One of the most interesting parts about my experience teaching English in Korea had nothing really to do with Korea; it had to do with the expat scene, which consisted largely of Canadians, and had also quite a few English and Irish, a fair amount of Australian, and even some New Zealanders and the occasional South African. In other words, the English-speaking world converged, and it wasn't all Americans. I found this refreshing (except for that brief moment Thanksgiving week, 40 days in) and I also got used to it, so I forget that it's still a new and interesting concept to a lot of my acquaintances here in the United States when it comes up in conversation.

Besides the general goodness of getting a different perspective on one's country and my fun new friends from around the world, it was also fun that some of my friends jokingly made me an "honorary Canadian" at the end of my sojourn. In fact, the first thing one of my Korean co-workers said to me when I got to the school that first day was, "You don't look like an American." I was never entirely sure what that meant.

In The Information, Richard Tull is trying without success to burst the bubble of his friend Gwyn's success. Richard is insanely jealous of Gwyn, because Richard's writing career is beyond lackluster at this point. He decides to anonymously send Gwyn the Sunday New York Times with a note: "Something in here that might interest you." This, he thinks, will send Gwyn into paroxysms of desperate seraching for the thing that will stroke his ego and/or confirm his place as a bright start in the literary firmament. After having some trouble getting his hands on The New York Times in a timely fashion in London, he is in a shop with The Los Angeles Times and he's like Ah!! Even better! It's even bigger and fatter and more full of crap. So he wraps it and even checks the Book Review, Arts, Calendar, News, etc. sections to make sure there ISN'T really something about Gwyn in it. He sends it anonymously.

The next week he is playing chess at his friend's house and sees the newspaper spread across the coffee table and innocently asks, "What, do you take the Los Angeles Times?" And his friend is like, no, some bloke who doesn't even identify himself as more than "John" sent it... but get this. Of course. Gwyn has found the item; luckily, he says, his glance just fell upon it. He could have been looking all week.

And so of course, Richard has to then do exactly what he'd wished upon Gwyn, poring over the pages until he finds a listing in the classifieds: wanted, a first edition of Gwyn's first book.

It's all rather amusing, as is the way in which Martin Amis subtly comments on these two particular U.S. newspapers. He also comments not quite as subtly about the U.S. :

"Richard was struck by an unpleasant thought: what if there was something to interest Gwyn Barry in this particular issue of the Sunday Los Angeles Times? An eight-page symposium on his work, for example. Or a whole Gwyn Barry Section. As in the UK, Amelior had first been a flop, then a sleeper, and finally a smash in the United States...this fact inflicted a wound that still out-throbbed all the others: out-throbbed the gouges and gashes visited on him by the book's apparent popularity everywhere else on earth, which he got to hear about piecemeal, from Gwyn's offhand grumbles: this importunate Argentinian journalist, or camera crew, that interminable questionnaire from Taiwan. But America. Come on..." -- pp. 85-86

And, see, that in itself is hilarious and telling, but read further and in a mere two sentences you get this:

"Could it be that Gwyn had stumbled on the universal, that voice which speaks to and for the human soul? No. Gwyn had stumbled on the LCD." -- p. 86

I love this book. I love reading it. Now Richard is in talks with Gwyn's agent, who mostly represents people who are already famous for something else before they write their books, something such as cooking or being an athlete or politician. I love that comment on the so-called literary scene as well.

For various reasons, Richard is slated to go with Gwyn on his eight-city U.S. book tour for the new novel. I hope this happens. I read on, eager to find out.

Information

Well, here are my initial thoughts about Martin Amis: the man is clearly brilliant, he is sardonic as all get-out, and I think I would most enjoy spending some time with him over a few drinks. Or possibly many drinks.

As I mentioned in the original post, in which I launched my Project Read Through the Alphabet 2007, The Information is a novel about a novel writer. I love that. Here's an example of the hilariously morose cynicism with which it is filled:

"For an hour (it was the new system) he worked on his latest novel, deliberately but provisionally entitled Untitled...In the drawers of his desk or interleaved by now with the bills and summonses on the lower shelves on his bookcases, and even on the floor of the car...lay other novels, all of them firmly entitled Unpublished. And stacked against him in the future, he knew, were yet further novels, successively entitled Unfinished, Unwritten, Unattempted, and, eventually, Unconceived. " -- p. 5

And so we have our writer, Richard Tull, who watches his friend Gwyn meet with fame and success and in what is purported to be a gloriously happy marriage, while Richard himself is no longer getting even marginal critical acclaim and has not only cheated on his wife but is pretty sure she must have cheated on him by now too, just because their marriage (he) is such a wreck. It is said that his first two novels weren't exactly comprehensible, but no one could quite say they were awful either. Now, his lack of agent and publishing prospects certainly seem to be rendering a verdict. And so he slogs through his days hoping to make it to the next drug or other intoxicant offered up by his failing life.

A girl has to wonder how much of this Amis himself has felt! I mean, he certainly is still a darling of the edgy-intellectual-literary world, isn't he? He's also hilarious. But not in a David Sedaris or even a Christopher Moore or Calvin Trillin way. I don't laugh out loud as often on every page as in reading those others, but I laugh good and deep at Martin Amis. He's also brilliant. (This next part is going to sound really snotty so prepare.) I really like reading someone and just thinking, 'Shit, he is so brilliant. He's clearly so much smarter than me. Could I even hold a candle...? Would he still have a drink with me...?' because I really feel (these days?) that finding brilliant people about whom I think, 'Wow, he's decidedly smarter than me' happens less and less often. What's that about? Age? Prozac? As the Bush administration goes, so goes the nation? Too much time spent on Long Island? Or out of public radio?

Whatever. There are even words I swear I've never heard or seen before, and not just the British slang (of which there is also a good amount). Anyway, the plot is meandering along introducing us to some of Richard's bitter jealousy, and that he has hatched a plan to "bring down" Gwyn, although we don't really know what that plan is yet. But mostly so far I'm luxuriating in Amis/Richard's ruminations on his miserable writer life.


"Writers don't lead shapely lives. Shape they give to the lives of others: accountants, maniacs." - p. 48

Remember, that's The Information by Martin Amis. My edition ISBN: 0679735739. You can get it for 75 cents on Half.com! I love Half.com! And I am definitely starting to love Martin Amis.

New Year Reading LAUNCH!

I'm very excited! Today I decided to finally set in motion a literary plan I've had rattling around my head for a while. I have been very caught up in appreciation for new years, fresh starts, launching plans and projects, making resolutions, etc., so I decided to finally do this one.

Sometimes I get just flat out sad at how very many books there are out there that I want to read, and sometimes in my Borders wandering and shelving I would especially look at the fiction and think that even one such as I, who is ostensibly a writer and who has often been accused of "reading a lot," has still neglected to read many an author. I would think, 'Some day I am going to start with "A" and work my way through the fiction section, selecting one major author from each letter of the alphabet that I've always meant to read and never got around to reading, and read something by that author, then move on to the next letter...'

Friends, that "someday" is today! And what better day, seeing as this afternoon one of my favorite new friends called me "comprehensively dorky, but also practical."

I'm not sure if it was because I've been restless with reader's block lately, having commenced and left unfinished at least four books in the past few months and mostly reading The Economist, The Atlantic Monthly, and Poets & Writers of late...or if it was because I've been so assigned to within an inch of my reading life due to law school that I need to bring some structure to my leisure reading in order to get back into novels again...or if the inspiration of New Year's resolutions was the perfect time to launch said plan...or maybe because it was ultra-convenient that there was a Borders across from the movie theater where I had an hour to wait before seeing Notes on a Scandal (see my supporting actress rant)...I think it was a combination of all of these things.

But I am totally going to do it. I figure, two letters per month. Yes, I am aware that that makes only 24. Unless George W. declares an extra month in the year so he can be president usurper longer. And I am equally aware that there are 26 letters in the alphabet. (George may or may not be aware of this.) I figure I'll throw an extra letter in a month here and there...or just extend the party through January 2008. No big deal.

And the best part is that it can give this here literary supplement blog a bit of a focus again. You will recall that when I launched it a year ago I meant to blog unceasingly about War and Peace, but I ended up getting distracted by about a hundred other things right while I was reading The Book (friends, alcohol, the play, a life in Korea, life back home, whatnot). And since then it's just been random nonsense here and there. So I hereby resolve--law school notwithstanding--to read and blog through the alphabet this year, twenty-six authors I've always meant to read. And you can join the discussion! (This may be more appealing to some of you than reading War and Peace was.)

So here's how it works: I walk into (presumably) Borders (but it could be another store, I suppose. It was Borders today, at any rate, the one at Scottsdale Fashion Square) and stare at the appropriate letter in Fiction. Today I began with "A." The rules are:

1. It has to be an author of multiple books who has received some critical acclaim or is well-regarded in literary circles.
2. It has to be an author I've never read but have meant to read.
3. Then I look at the books by that author and select one to read. It doesn't have to be that author's most well-known work if another appeals to me more.

And then, it is hoped, some of y'all might also want to read along with me!

All right, I know you're breathlessly awaiting the announcement of our first book. (I'm a regular Oprah, with all this suspense I'm building around my book club choice, eh.) Just hang tight, we're almost there. Today in the "A"s there were many authors who ilustrate the level of acclaim to which I refer, but who were eliminated from the running because I've read one or more of their books already: Edward Abbey, Chinua Achebe, Richard Adams (Watership Down), Louisa May Alcott, Isabel Allende, Dorothy Allison, Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen.

So, with them out of the running, on to the contenders, all of whom I would be ashamed to say I've never read except this is not about shame! This is about taking steps to go forth and read and next year know way more authors than I do this year! systematically! Here are the contenders: Julia Alvarez, Rudolfo Anaya, Martin Amis, Paul Auster, Sherman Alexie, Jorge Amado.

Jeffrey Archer would have been a contender, except as it happens I have recently picked up (and not finished) his False Impression. I was intrigued because it's a mystery with a plot swirling around a painting by my boy Van Gogh, and if you've been reading this blog AT ALL since we finished War and Peace you'll know Vincent is my new inspiration about whom I have had a MAJOR artistic/creative madness epiphany of late. So technically I have read Archer, even though I'm not through with that book. Anyway, enough about him.

In the end it came down to Martin Amis or Julia Alvarez. I found it interesting that I was most drawn to Amis' The Information and Alvarez' !Yo!, both of which are those writers' novels about writers. This whole plunge-back-into-good-fiction-and-I-mean-business clearly is related to my New Year's and even old year's Artist's Way-driven getting-down-to-business about my writing and myself as a writer...

And in the end, while I did read the beginning of !Yo! and mentally note to return to it one day, the first member of Linda's Alphabet Stew Book Club is none other than Martin Amis! Congratulations!

The Information is about a novelist who is watching his friend become the darling of publishers, awards committees, TV interviewers, etc. as his own writing/self seems to be flailing. He is envious, and he wants to spoil his friend's success, but how? The book has been described as "blackly hilarious," "pleasantly wicked," and "funny and disturbing." Amis himself has been called "genius," "provocative" and "demonically alive."

I'm now on page 20. Join me! This weekend I shall start posting about the book in earnest. Also--anyone out there have any thoughts on Martin Amis you'd like to share?

The Information by Martin Amis ISBN: 0-679-73573-9

Just one mockingbird canvas

If you've read this blog at all this fall, you know I became obsessed with the tortured artist brilliance that is Van Gogh as I read Irving Stone's Lust for Life.

The one quote that spun me right round, as it were, was:

"If I had painted just one canvas like this, Vincent, I would consider my life justified. I spent the years curing people's pain but they died in the end, anyway, so what did it matter? These sunflowers of yours, they will cure the pain in people's hearts , they will bring people joy, for centuries and centuries--that's why your life is successful, that is why you should be a happy man."

Just one? Sometimes I ponder this. Really, just ONE canvas(/play/book/movie/work of art of some sort) could leave a mark on the world and justify a life? The thought cries out for a skeptical response. And everyone knows that Vincent painted more than one centuries-of-joy canvas, in the end.

But recently, I read a book called The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Mean the Most to Them edited by Roxanne Coady and Joy Johannessen. And no, it's not the "one canvas" to which I refer, but I was struck by a few things in reading this book. One thing was the variety of books selected--everything from children's poetry to Sherlock Holmes to the Bible. Another was the adoration that poured out for The Catcher in the Rye. I basically consider that book the most overrated book of the twentieth century. I read it, it's fine, it's good even, but good god, the fuss! That's my take on it. I am aware that it affected my parents' generation differently. Another thing that struck me was while some of my favorite writers were going ga-ga over Catcher..., writers I've snubbed persistently, such as Patricia Cornwell and others relegated to the "Genre Fiction" shelves, had quite impressive and deep thoughts and made interesting choices that made me want to read their work, even though I usually avoid mystery/romance/science fiction/fantasy.

But finally, and here's the part about the "one canvas" -- I was struck by the fact that multiple writers chose To Kill a Mockingbird. Now, you talk about your just one canvases. Ms. Harper Lee writes this brilliant work and then up and disappears. And it has wrought untold effects! I could totally understand why it would be THE book someone remembers. The very essays about it in this collection made me emotional, remembering my experiences with Mockingbird.

I might add that the film lives up to the book--and that one of recluse Harper Lee's rare emergences was at the request of Gregory Peck's widow to receive an award in 2005 at a literacy charity dinner, award presented by Brock Peters who played the man falsely accused of rape. So, the book and the movie acknowledge each other's truth. There is just so much going on in that story. It is moving, sweet, strong, beautiful, political, compelling, easy-to-read, profound, and a million other things. If you haven't read it -- I just don't know what to tell you other than you seriously should go do that right now.

I would say it proves Irving Stone/Dr. Gachet's point: just one canvas, Vincent, can justify a life.

Why, Insomnia, Why

Last night I couldn't sleep. That was terrible, because I had to get up for my Contracts final this morning, and I was totally afraid of oversleeping. But I used some of my "I-can't-sleep" hours to finish reading The Why Cafe. For those who are aghast at the very notion of my doing any leisure reading when I could/should be studying, let me just say -- go away! Also, this book is more like a pamphlet. Think Who Moved My Cheese? It doesn't actually take much time out of one's life to read it.

What it DOES do is present a fable written by a businessman who's not a particularly spectacular writer but who had an epiphany (again like WMMC?) and so decided to write a book that gives you some things to think about with regard to your life. Such as:

Why are you here?
Are you fulfilled?
Does doing what most people are doing help you to fulfill your purpose for existing?
And...one of my favorites...you can't be afraid of dying without having done something if you've already done it, or if you are doing it every day.

This book was a totally random find.

It also has a cute picture of coffee on the cover.

This morning on my way into the law school building for the Contracts final, I saw a classmate. We exchanged the usual knowing how-are-yous. Then he said, motioning to my DD cup in hand, well, if you're able to drink coffeee...! And he trailed off. Implying that others were perhaps too stressed/jittery/anxious to drink coffee.

Give up my morning coffee? For a FINAL? Are you kidding me? From my cold dead hands!!!

America runs on Dunkin', you know. That's what they tell me anyway. Korea does not RUN on Dunkin' but there is certainly enough of it there for it to do so if it so chose. I personally ran on Dunkin' while I was there during the week, and I ran on Starbucks on the weekends.

Pity to those of you in some western states and various international locales that aren't Korea and wherever else DD has spread who don't know what I'm talking about, who never get to experience the glories of the morning cup o' Dunkin!

(And by the way I don't like doughnuts.)

A time for peace, I swear it's not too late!

Today I emphasize once more this quote from Lust for Life:

He had known before that one could fracture one's legs and arms, and after that recover, but he was rather astonished that one could fracture the brain in one's head and recover after that, too. -- page 428

Go read this:
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?id=202

To indeed be a god!

I've long since finished reading Lust for Life but with law school finals coming ever closer who has time to read anything but textbooks? I'm averaging only about 1/2 page a day of leisure reading in Annals of the Former World. Come to think of it, maybe I'm just appropriately reading it at the pace of geological time. I just finished where he talks about how if the world's history were a calendar year, dinosaurs would appear mid-December and all of human history takes place on New Year's Eve. (You've heard this analogy before, yes?) Rocks and mountains and plates and things build a mighty earth, but it takes a while. Maybe that's what I'm up to.

But then there's Vincent, and Lust. Art. Creation. God-like notions. Right, it all ties together.

Vincent walks and talks with his friend, a self-professed simpler man. His friend, Roulin, expresses some dismay at the evil in the world, and why would a good god let it happen this way, and so on.

"'I know, Roulin, but I feel more and more that we must not judge God by this world. It's just a study that didn't come off. What can you do in a study that has gone wrong if you are fond of the artist? You do not find much to criticize; you hold your tongue. But you have a right to ask for somehing better.'
'Yes that's it,' exclaimed Roulin, 'something just a tiny bit better.'
'We should have to see some other works by the same hand before we judge him. This world was evidently botched up in a hurry on one of his bad days, when the artist did not have his wits about him.'
...
'Then you think there are other worlds besides this, Monsieur?'
'I don't know Roulin. I gave up thinking about that sort of thing when I became interested in my work. But this life seems so incomplete doesn't it? Sometimes I think that just as trains and carriages are means of locomotion to get us from one place to another on this earth, so typhoid and consumption are means of locomotion to get us from one world to another.'
'Ah, you think of things, you artists.'


-- Irving Stone's Lust for Life pp. 386 - 387

A meditation on revolution's infidelity, or: just one canvas!

I remind you here of page 476:

"If I had painted just one canvas like this, Vincent, I would consider my life justified. I spent the years curing people's pain - but they died in the end, anyway - so what did it matter? These sunflowers of yours - they will cure the pain in people's hearts - they will bring people joy - for centuries and centuries - that s why your life is successful - that is why you should be a happy man."

This passage seriously affected me. I've finished Lust for Life but I still think about this passage every day. I returned the book to the library but I carry the text of that paragraph around in my phone. "That is why your life is successful..." Amazing stuff.

Irving Stone based Lust for Life on Vincent's letters to his brother Theo. Stone said that every event in the book was true but the conversations he wrote were imagined. There really was a Dr. Gachet who was Vincent's last true friend. And he probably really did say something remarkably similar to those words above. But Stone deserves credit for making it so inspiring. It stopped me in my literary tracks.

I ramble through my days here at law school, extremely interested in the things I am learning and not interested whatsoever in becoming an attorney after I learn them. I came here for my own fulfillment, or something like it. And this semester has been a bizarre combination of legal learning, interpersonal mistakes-revelation-growth, artistic development, coloring pictures, shaking my head in disgust, wishing, drinking, running, hiding, emerging, and wondering. Sometimes I've held my head in my hands (literally and metaphorically) and other times I've stood with arms outstretched (again, both) overlooking the world, my world, the life I have created.

Grant Lee Buffalo has just popped into my head, of course. "It's the life you have created, it's the life, it's the life..." What an amazing song that is. Do yourself a favor and listen to it if you never have. Let this wondrous internet bring good things to your ears. Speaking of ears, and of the wonders of creation, what would ol' Vincent would have thought of the internet? It's so crazy to contemplate what that gang of artistic revolutionaries would have thought of our revolution. After all, when they fantasize about their little artists' commune Zola pontificates (on page 339), "Let's formulate our manifesto, gentlemen. First, we think all truth beautiful, no matter how hideous its face may seem." Well, that sounds like he could definitely have an appreciation for MySpace or YouTube, eh? But he goes on to say that pain is beautiful, because it is the most profound of all human emotions. That's a hard one to swallow, but it might be a hideous-faced truth.

I think about the life I have created and whether I'll "paint" even one "canvas" before I go.

You see, I joke a lot about procrastination on MySpace but in all sincerity I am just a deadline person as opposed to a start-the-assignment-early person, and that isn't necessarily a problem. In school, it's fine. The time eventually comes to hand things in, so they always get done somehow. But in the creative life? The one I'm more and more sure I'm trying to lead, despite all indications to the contrary? The one where you have no one to answer to and no one to mete out consequences except yourself? Whiling away the hours and not meeting my personal deadlines and watching another year go by without finishing the book -- well, these are indeed problems.

Vincent Van Gogh had an amazing thing. He had a monthly income from his beloved brother/best friend that enabled him to work as an artist before and until he could sell his paintings (which was basically not in his lifetime). But you know what? I have equally amazing things in my life. As I read Lust for Life this semester I was also wrapping up my journey through The Artist's Way, which I managed to elongate from a 12-week program into nearly 19 weeks. OK, so I had to repeat a few chapters. I had issues. Serious September issues. Maybe some October issues as well. We shall not get into them here. But the thing is, they weren't really just about law school or lies, although those things can definitely be a shock to the system.

No, it was back in August, on the bus to New York, when I sat doing Chapter 8 of The Artist's Way...

...where I cried and I cried
I knew I was trading on things that I didn't have
the things I didn't have
Now you come to me
with revolution's infidelity
with blacklisted friends and tupperware kin
and your big history...

--indigo girls, of course. that song's called 'cordova'.


I was ON THE BUS MOVING TO NEW YORK and there was my weekly Artist's Way assignment making me sketch out my dreams, and artistic ambitons I'd chosen to forget I had were bubbling up from within me and Connecticut was passing in the night and I was reaching out saying "Help me! Help me! It's all so scary!" and my friend, my good and true friend, was saying, "It's OK. Don't be scared. Why ever are you afraid, Linda? Because you should have been writing this whole time?"

But haven't I been writing this whole time?

What does it mean that I write and write and write bu I never finish my book, even as Fidel lies on his death bed?

If anyone thinks I'm saying I don't want to be in law school, au contraire! In fact, that's a major part of my point. I've always hated the notion that one has to choose between academia and creativity. I think people like Galileo and Da Vinci could be multi-faceted scientists/artists/ astronomers/painters/whatever they wanted and no one batted an eye but in this day and age we're "supposed" to "figure out" what we want to do with our lives, as if there's one thing.

If anyone thinks I'm saying I don't have amazing oodles of support from my family, au contraire again! I can't believe how much they've given and continue to give me. In that sense, I am like Vincent. I think he, too, felt frustrated and guilty, and always thisclose to being able to finally "make it"...surely the sketches and paintings must start selling someday.

I think it's easy for an aspiring creative such as myself to say "If only..." Well, if only I had a monthly stipend to do My Work. If only I had wealth and a room of my own. If only I had more time, more money, more reliable transportation, the list of excuses is endless. Instead of reading about Vincent and Theo in envious awe, it should have been more like recognition.

"For those who have a talent for poverty, poverty is eternal." -- page 407

Vincent discovered that; I think I've known it about myself for quite some time. Just as homework can expand to fill the time allotted for it, the amount of money I need to spend can magically grow until it equals the exact amount I have. The whole "I could be a full-time writer if I just had a means of supporting myself until my writing sells" is a crock of shit, frankly.

So what else? Law school, then? I believe I've made it clear that law school takes time -- but not all my time.

Korea? Actually, we started a writing group in Korea. I also participated in other ways in the full-blown Daegu expats' renaissance. Korea was good. It reminded me of other artistic parts of me, anyway. There are other parts, you know, besides the writer. Two other big ones.

After a long and tiring weekend, the other night I curled up in the cool gray dark of my room to watch one of my absolute favorite movies, The Hours, as I went to sleep. I knew I needed it. I love that movie so much. I've heard others call it depressing (and by "others" I mean "everyone else on the planet who's seen it") but I find it so enriching! So enlightening! So everything! Writers. Women. Life. Life's entanglements. Novels that take ten years to write. Trying to catch a moment's truth. Artists going mad. New York City. Love. A woman's whole life in a single day...

Throughout this roller-coaster of a semester -- or was it more like trekking in the Himalaya and going higher than I should without oxygen? -- I've recognized my occasional foolish behaviors and marveled at them and had many a philosophical chat about Life and Studies and Art and What It All Means but it's been almost like watching myself in a play, wondering what I'll do next. Somehow I think I get it.

"He had known before that one could fracture one's legs and arms and after that recover, but he was rather astonished that one could fracture the brain in one's head and recover after that, too." - page 428

Twentysomethings fascinate me right now. I mean, most people who know me remember that turning 30 was something I took very seriously. Not in a particularly depressed sense but in a "Wow I really need to get going on doing something meaningful" sense. And in fact I have begun checking off items on my life's things-to-do list, such as teaching English in Asia and going to law school. (Yes, I noticed that "finishing the Cuba book" has not yet been checked off.) It's funny. I had a million great experiences as a twentysomething, but I think all that time at Borders was the epitome of being a "shadow artist" as Julia Cameron calls it in the Way: spending time around books and writers instead of being a writer myself. She's seen others do it. Film critics who really want to direct. Band managers who should be making their own music. Shadow artists.

"Vincent had lashed himself into a fury. He had been working progressively at his craft for six years under the most heartbreaking conditions; now that everything was made easy for him, he was faced with a humiliating impotence." - page 341

But I reached my escape velocity from Borders, and I went and taught in Korea, and I got a scholarship to Hofstra, and I went to the mountain and learned many things. And then came back to the U.S. and I sold off a million earthlypossessions and I extricated myself from a messy joke of a disaster of an idea of a relationship and I finally completed The Artist's Way and sure, I rave endlessly about that book. (It's getting up to the level of Indigo Girls.) But seriously. It's a gem. It makes me realize things. And do things. And draw pretty pictures. And work out new arrangements on the guitar and the piano. It makes me have vivid dreams, by night and by day.

"Of course he's crazy. But what would you? All artists are crazy. That's the best thing about them. I love them that way. I sometimes wish I could be crazy myself! 'No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness!' Do you know who said that? Aristotle, that's who.'" - page 469

When Vincent first goes to the maison de sante (that would be an asylum) the other inmates basically sit around all day being quiet and trying not to have a fit. Finally, one of the patients freaks out in the night and Vincent tries to hold him down and calm him. He beseeches the others to help him and an old man does so. After the episode the man fills Vincent in:

"'The boy was studying for the bar,' he said. 'He overworked his brain. These attacks come on about every ten days. He never hurts anyone. Good night to you Monsieur.' The older man returned to his bed and promptly fell asleep. Vincent went once again to the window that overlooked the valley. It was still a long time before sunrise and nothing was visible but the morning star. He remembered the painting Daubigny had made of the morning star, expresssing all the vast peace and majesty of the universe . . . and all the feeling of heartbreak for the puny individual who stood below, gazing at it." - page 441

I've tried before to explain to people a sensation that comes over me from time to time. I've usually been laughed off. Here goes. Occasionally, I'll see a stranger on the bus, or in a store, or most recently walking down the law school hallway after an evening class let out, and I will be so suddenly profoundly overcome with a blend of pity and well wishes for that specific person that I actually have to catch my breath. I look at them and understand so clearly, just for a moment, that he or she is struggling, trying to do good things, trying to work through the difficulties life has thrown at him or her. I want to do something to help these people, whom I don't know and have never seen before. I want to reassure them; I want to tell them, "I understand." It's like I suddenly recognize in them our shared humanity. It is beautiful, and utterly heartbreaking.

Maybe Vincent first goes crazy long before there are any outward signs. He has a weird moment of gratification while painting a canvas, and imagines a conversation with a beautiful woman who says she loves him. She also tells him that "sometimes one has to be a fool in the beginning, to become wise in the end." - page 399

I guess there isn't much more one can ask, then. My god, I am lucky. I am a lucky, lucky person. But I have a haunting sensation this week. I feel I need to do something before it's too late. I also feel like I still have a long way to go.

"Is there no end to this, Theo? Must I go to school all my life? I'm thirty-three; when in God's name do I reach maturity?" -- page 304

Just one canvas, Vincent. Just one canvas.

Break on through

"You know, Doctor Gachet," said Vincent, "it did me good to go south. Now I see the north better. Look how much violet there is on the far river bank, where the sun hasn't struck the green yet." -- Lust for Life p. 470


I love revolutions.

Revolve on, my friends. Out with the elephants, in with the donkeys. The personal is political. Out with the jackasses, in with the ... ?

And, just a reminder:

"Man is not on this earth only to be happy, he is not there to be simply honest, he is there to realize great things for humanity, to attain nobility and to surpass the vulgarity in which the existence of almost all individuals drags on." - p. 219

Bricks. A ton of them.

I'll set the scene for you. I was on the Long Island Rail Road, returning from another day and evening in Queens. I spend a lot of time in Queens lately, but more on that later. It was around 11 p.m. I had been up since the crack of dawn and I had expended a lot of energy all day. Then I'd dined and had a drink with Lillian. Her friend was on his way to join us, but I was seriously SO TIRED from all the hard work -- some of it demanding physical labor -- that has been filling my hours and days of late that I could barely hold my head up. At 10:15 I was like, seriously, I'm turning into a pumpkin. I headed for the subway, waited at the station, then switched to my train to Hempstead, etc etc. Exhausted. Drained. Ready to fall into bed but still a few minutes from home. For various mysterious electrical reasons the train lights blinked out a few times during the ride; that happens sometimes and it's not worrisome but it makes reading difficult.

And reading I was. Thirteen pages from the end of Lust for Life. Vincent is speaking with Doctor Gachet, the last in his long line of doctors, and apparently one of his truest friends. And by the way, Irving Stone writes a thoughtful tone of voice for the doctor with " . . . " between some of his words and when I quote it like that below, I am not editing the text and replacing left out parts with ellipses; it's exactly as Stone wrote it. Anyway, Vincent and the doc are talking about why the doctor always has a look of heartbreak about him. He tells Vincent all he sees is pain. Vincent says he would exchange his calling for the doctor's. The doctor says he wanted to be an artist all his life, but could spare "only an hour here and there." Those paragraphs on page 476 should have been a warning, but forgive me. I was tired. I did not have my wits about me. I was blindsided:

"Doctor Gachet went on his knees and pulled a pile of canvases from under Vincent's bed. He held a glowing yellow sunflower before him.
'If I had painted just one canvas like this, Vincent, I would consider my life justified. I spent the years curing people's pain. . .but they died in the end, anyway . . . so what did it matter? These sunflowers of yours . . . they will cure the pain in people's hearts . . . they will bring people joy . . . for centuries and centuries . . . that s why your life is successful . . . that is why you should be a happy man."'

Oh mercy, what I won't give...

"Vincent pitched into his work once more. If only he could make a living, the very simplest living, out of his work. He asked for nothing more. He could be independent. He would not have to be a burden on anyone. And best of all there would be no hurry; he could let himself feel his way slowly and surely toward maturity and the expression he was seeking." -- Lust for Life page 171

I write. I am a writer. This is all I have ever wanted to do, really, for a career, and somewhere inside of me I know that. Somewhere out there, I think others know that, too. Is everything else getting in the way? Am I getting in my own way? These are some of the thoughts I thought while standing on the Woodside platform last night awaiting the Long Island Railroad train. It is an outside station. It was bloody cold! I was absolutely exhausted, but sated, after an evening with some fine friends. I stood there on the platform thinking "Good god, can I really have another 25 minutes to wait in this cold wind? I am so tired. Can I sleep for those 25 minutes? Am I going to die on this platform?" I paced back and forth willing my eyes to stay open and my heart to keep pumping warmth to my extremities and I just kept mulling over what an interesting day and evening I had had. And I thought - I know who I am. I really do.

Do I have a lust for life? Do you? I'm sort of starting to think I do.

I don't really know when it occurred to me that I'm happy with my life. Here's something I do remember. More than a dozen years ago, I for the first time saw Indigo Girls perform live. It was at Mesa Amphitheatre in Arizona. I had just that week begun classes at Arizona State University. I went to ASU for only one year. I had fled my first university after two years and returned to Phoenix, so there I was, chez Mom, without a clue as to what to do next. I registered at ASU because I knew I didn't actually want to quit school, and it was the local university (and, I might add, a place I never thought I'd end up). In my two disgruntled years at my first university that shall not be named, I'd vaguely settled on English Secondary Education as a major, having been more inspired by English teachers both in Dead Poets Society and in real life than by much else up to that point. (And having concluded I couldn't major in Theatre because I was a crappy actress and I couldn't actually become a veterinarian because I couldn't be bothered to attend/study for daily chemistry and biology classes.) So Secondary Education was what I declared to the powers that be at ASU.

But I still didn't really KNOW what I was doing. This, coupled with my newfound disillusionment with God/religion/churches/what humankind has done with notions of the divine, had brought me back to my parents. Dad helped me buy a car. Mom shared my fries with fry sauce and watched ridiculous television with me. I don't really remember the other details of that summer--I worked at Best Western, I probably read a lot, I drove to Tucson to see friends on my days off. I had come "home" to Phoenix, but nobody was there anymore. My sister lived in Utah at that time. My friends from high school had all left for college and they hadn't come back. And I had just chosen to leave behind all my new friends and what I had once thought was my new world. I was officially someone who needed to Find Myself.

Within days of my return to Phoenix in May 1994, the Indigo Girls released their album Swamp Ophelia. I remember lying on the living room carpet listening to it and thinking it was so dark and electric and unlike anything they'd ever done. I didn't know what it meant, but I hesitantly liked it, despite how uncomfortable its unfamiliarity made me. Like Vincent, when he arrives in Paris where his brother has been getting in with the newly forming Impressionists crowd. "He gazed at his canvases. God! but they were dark and dreary. God! but they were heavy, lifeless, dead. He had been painting in a long past century, and he had not known it..."- p. 295

I bought two tickets for the Indigo Girls concert the minute I heard about it, but that last week in August rolled around and I had no one to go with. I'm sure I asked my buddy from Best Western, and the one high school friend I had who went to ASU and still lived in Phoenix, and I'm sure they both were busy working or studying or just generally not caring about my favorite music group ever. I think I even asked my mom, as I got ready to leave. I remember talking to her about it. I believe she considered going just because either I or she was horrified at the prospect of me going to a concert alone. At any rate, off I went. And it was nothing short of miraculous.

First of all, there they were! Live! On stage in front of me! Indigo Girls! Look, it was really them! I've since seen them live about 28 times. (I say "about" because I can't remember if I saw them two or three summers in Hampton Beach, NH. I went to a few concerts around New England every summer.) Not all of those were actual concerts. In 2004 I saw "Shed Your Skin" twice, where they played live while the Atlanta Ballet performed to their music, and in 1995 I drove to Seattle (hi Amy! et. al.) to see them perform in Jesus Christ Superstar along with a slew of other Atlanta area musicians.

Secondly, I was remarkably content to be there alone, sitting on the grass surrounded by people who were friendly but also content to let me enjoy my solitude and bliss.

Most importantly, though, I had an epiphany. I was transformed that hot night under the stars. One of the songs from Swamp Ophelia that most resonated with me that soul-searching summer was "Language or the Kiss." Its narrative was one of bizarrely relevant personal significance, and that night I reveled anew in its notions:

...When we last talked we were lying on our backs
looking at the stars, looking through the ceiling
I used to lie like that alone out on the driveway,
trying to read the Greek upon the sky, the alphabet of feeling
Oh, I knew back then,
it was a calling that said if joy, then pain
The sound of your voice these years later is still the same

I am alone in a hotel room tonight
I squeeze the sky out but there's not a star appears
Begin my studies with this paper and this pencil
and I'm working through the grammar of my fears...

That night, I knew something for the first time. I knew that creativity was divine and beautiful. I watched Amy Ray and Emily Saliers peform an amazing concert and I was awestruck. I was grateful. But I was also galvanized. Galvanized.

I knew that creativity was the highest call.

Specifically, I knew that it was my calling.

I may have been actively running from talk of God by some severely misguided servants, but aren't they really speaking of a Creator above all else? All the notions of being a scientist, a linguist, a veterinarian, a French teacher, an English teacher, a drafter, whatever....they all melted away in that moment because I knew -- I KNEW, for the first time -- that what I needed to do was create.

And, what to do with this information, this revelation?

Well, I drove home in a stupor of thought. When I went to school I headed directly to the building where I could change my major from Secondary Education to just English. I thought -- I'm a writer. I'm a poet. I need to put my energies into that. Those are my people. People! Writer people! Here am I! Send me!

A lot of you know what happened next. Here's a hint. The best friends I made that year were a group found in my creative writing class whose favorite joke was: What's the difference between an alcoholic and a poet? A pen.

I also made radio friends, worked at a couple stations, and by the end of the school year had been accepted to the University of Southern California's broadcast journalism program. I transferred to USC in the fall of 1995 and spent the next seven years in Los Angeles. But I switched to print journalism around my second semester at USC, finding the broadcast world too much a world of evil television, and deciding the pen was mightier still than that particular sword. And I double majored in English of course.

Vincent himself bounced around a lot, trying to find his place in the world geographically and artistically. I love Lust for Life. I love that it makes me think about writing, art, and the creative life. I have never really given much thought at all to Vincent Van Gogh beyond the thought we all give to him in that he is utterly famous and renowned and unless you live under a rock you know at least one interesting fact about him. But in Irving Stone's novel I have found a guy I like. A creative person I want to hang out with. He -- and by "he" I mean the imagined Vincent who is Stone's creation/representation -- is so awesome. And so awesomely misunderstood.

He tried his hand at religous life first, but in the Borinage he was just stymied by the regulations that prevented him from actually helping the people. He wanted to do good and change the world, but his efforts failed. In the end, he changed the world through his art.

In Paris he hangs out with Gauguin, Seurat, Cezanne, and everybody and they are thisclose to starting an artist's commune together when Vincent suddenly realizes he can't do it. He can't stay. He has to back out.

"Paris had excited Vincent. He had drunk too many absinthes, smoked too many pipefuls of tobacco, engaged too much in external activities. His gorge was high. He felt a tremendous urge to get away somewhere by himself where it would be quiet, and he could pour his surging, nervous energy into his craft. He needed only a hot sun to bring him into fruition. He had the feeling that the climax of his life, the full creative power toward which he had been struggling thse eight long years, was not so very far off." - p. 368

Was that me in Phoenix? Daegu, Korea? Los Angeles?! Is Manhattan my Paris?

Perhaps it is interesting that that building where I changed my major also happens to be the one where I saw the poster with a picture of an old, African-American man and words to the effect of "this man had to overcome years of injustice, overturn laws, endure suffering and arrest, protest, walk so many miles, etc. etc. in order to be able to vote...all you had to do was turn 18." Perhaps not. Sometimes I see things that stick with me for years. Sometimes I feel like I'm on the verge of doing something. Sometimes I trust that I'm on the right path. Years ago, I questioned that every day. Lately, I don't. I also take risks. Risks need to be taken. I also hope in quiet moments that I'm not waiting until it's too late.

Three Thoughts

I'm still enjoying Lust for Life. It is making me think many profound thoughts about life, art, creation, and even friends and communism, for good measure. Today, I offer you three quotes from it, analysis-free. Ponder them or ignore them, as you see fit.

On page 197, Vincent says:
Millet was right: 'J'aimerais mieux ne rien dire que de m'exprimer faiblement.'

On page 255, Margot talks with Vincent.
'...I have been telling myself that if I did not love someone before I left my thirties, I should kill myself.'
'But it is easy to love, Margot.'
'Ah, you think so?'
'Yes. It's only being loved in return that is difficult.'

On page 260, Margot speaks again:
'She wasn't a prostitute; she was your wife. Your failure to save her was not your fault, any more than was your failure to save the Borains. One man can do very little against a whole civilization.'

Iggy!

OK, we need to address the issue of the phrase "lust for life."

(Well, I suppose we don't NEED to, but...)

Perhaps I will come to it later in the book, but as of now I don't understand where Irving Stone got it. Did he make it up? Is it a Vincent Van Gogh thing? Recall that I know nothing about art. I do know that Iggy Pop then used the phrase as the title/chorus of his heroin addiction song in the 70s. Was it the 70s? It must have been. Of course "Lust for Life" is also on the Trainspotting soundtrack, which is one of my all-time top three favorite movie soundtracks, but not particularly for that song. I digress. The fact that some cruise line uses the song in their ads has disturbed many people, apparently, because they're like, "Hello? That's about the junkie life, and you've co-opted it for your cruise vacation?" Me, I don't get all that bothered by that. I remember using snippets of songs with whatever random lyrics for stuff on The Savvy Traveler all the time. And every song has a million layers of meaning, etc.

But what I really want to know is -- did Iggy Pop borrow that phrase from the movie? Or, the book, whichever. And if so did he just borrow the phrase or is it a meaningful allusion? Is he actually saying something more about a crazed, totally messed up artist than just about a crazed, totally messed up junkie?

In the novel, Vincent Van Gogh's father, Theodorus, questions whether Vincent is really an artist if he has to draw things a hundred times to get them right.


"'Nature always begins by resisting the artist, Father,' he said, without putting down his pencil, 'but if I really take my work seriously, I won't allow myself to be led astray by that resistance. On the contrary, it will be a stimulus the more to fight for victory.'
'I don't see that,' said Theodorus. 'Good can never grow out of evil, nor can good work grow out of bad.'
'Perhaps not in theology. But it can in art. In fact, it must.'
'You're wrong, my boy. An artist's work is either good or bad. And if it's bad, he's no artist. He ought to have found that out for himself at the beginning and not have wasted all his time and effort.'
'But what if he has a happy life turning out bad art? What then?'
Theodorus searched his theological training, but he could find no answer to this question."
--- from Lust for Life pp. 116-117

Don't be alarmed by the fact that I'm in law school but somewhat hyper-focused on the emerging artist inside me. Rather, you should perhaps be alarmed that I just said "somewhat hyper-focused." Could that even be possible? Is that like "roughly simultaneously" or "very unique"... Anyway, I'm rather enjoying being creative and being in academia. I am all about debunking the false dichotomies, of which I've lately come to know that creativity/academia is one.

I mean, I'm not one to get too speculative...oh, who am I kidding? Of course I am. But seriously. There's Iggy Pop singing about his lust for life, and how he's been there done that with the flesh machine, the strip tease, the lotion. Then he says that he's "through with sleeping on the sidewalk" and no more beating his brain. Couldn't the song be about an artist finding himself? But still unsure and distraught, which is oh-so-Vincent. And then, here's where it's a reach, but stick with me:

"Well, I'm just a modern guy
Of course I've had it in my ear before..."

Now, I've always thought that was a reference to, shall we say, peculiar proclivities. But maybe it's an allusion! Tell me, who's done something crazy and famous with his ear? Vincent!

Anyone?

Love. Oh yeah, Iggy. It's just like hypnotizing chickens. I'm with you there.

Lust for Life

Now I'm reading two books at once. Actually, I'm reading a million things at once. That happens in law school. Even apart from assigned reading, I've got multiple books going on right now. I've just been in one of those restless phases, picking up things and getting into them but not having time to complete them. But I'm plowing through -- and, apparently, now posting about -- two books at once.

It was kind of random how Lust for Life happened. A couple weeks ago in my very philosophical (I LOVE IT!) Criminal Law textbook there was a mention of Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy, which I have always been interested in reading though it has yet to migrate to the top of my list. I thought now was as good a time as any to elevate it. I wandered over to the undergrad library and meandered through the fiction. No Irving Stone?! Oh, wait. Library of Congress. English and American literature are separate. Right. What's up with that, by the way? Annoying. Ahh, there's Irving Stone. Wait, no Agony/Ecstasy? Really? I somehow think of that as his most prominent novel. A perennial bestseller, that is my recollection from my bookselling days.

I still felt compelled to get a book of his on the spot, though. So I perused. I decided on Lust for Life because the idea of reading about Vincent Van Gogh's tortured life of love and searching for creativity and trying to change the world and do some good and being thwarted a lot, well, I just thought I might relate. I checked it out.

Then, sidenote, I wanted to request The Agony and the Ecstasy via interlibrary loan. Not only were the friendly but unhelpful undergrads at the circulation desk decidedly clueless about interlibrary loan and equally clueless about when the woman who could help, at the reference desk, might return, plus they were further mystified by where she might have got to...but everyone seemed sort of surprised in general to have a law student checking out a book. I was like a special guest star. It was fun. Eventually, the reference woman returned and she, too, reacted with shock and dismay when I dropped the 'L' word. "Oh, you've got to do that over at the law school," she said. "They have a different system for interlibrary loan." A few days later at my law library electronic resources orientation I learned that the law library feels pretty special about its own self, too, and doesn't care to associate with the riff-raff of those other campus libraries. "Please don't link to our search catalogues from their page, come directly to ours this way," we were admonished. Actually, I'm saying all this a bit facetiously, OK? I am in love with my law library. It even has a blog.

But I digress. And then some.

Irving Stone's specialty was biographical novels. He found his niche and ran with it. Go, him! I am all about finding a niche. In Lust for Life he brings to life Vincent Van Gogh. Young Vincent, starting out in life, hopping from city to city, falling in love with all the wrong women, selling art when he should be making it, thinking a life of religious service might be the answer but becoming woefully disillusioned by the focus on What We Should Do Because We've Always Done It rather than getting down and dirty with the common folk...I relate to this guy a lot, fictionalized as he may be. I haven't got to any ear-slicing yet. I have, however, reached passages such as this:

"At length he reached the saturation point in reading and could no longer pick up a book. During the weeks that followed his debacle, he had been too stunned and ill to feel anything emotionally. Later he had turned to literature to drown out his feelings, and had succeeded. Now he was almost completely well, and the flood of emotional suffering that had been stored up for months broke like a raging torrent and engulfed him in misery and despair. The mental perspective he had gained seemed to do him no good.
He had reached the low point in his life and he knew it.
He felt that there was some good in him, that he was not altogether a fool and a wastrel, and that there was a small contribution he could make to the world. But what was that contribution? He was not fitted for the routine of business and he had already tried everything else for which he might have had an aptitude. Was he always doomed to fail and suffer? Was life really over for him? The questions asked themselves, but they brought no answers. And so he drifted with the days that slurred into winter..." -- pp. 87-88

OK, for starters I hereby officially plan to adopt the moniker of "wastrel" for myself. It is much better sounding than wastoid, at any rate.

But here's the intriguing thing. The first half of that passage: me. Me, me, me. And questioning, yes, I still do that, too, of course. But all that talk of "low point" and "doom" and life being "over"? You know what? I so don't feel like that. Even though I have seen some dastardly doings in the last little while, my life has actually marched on quite forthrightly. Wastrelry notwithstanding. I guess what I'm saying is, I REMEMBER that feeling. I know that despair. I knew it as an angst-ridden teenager, and I daresay I knew it on several occasions in my twenties when I would just hold my head in my hands because I couldn't even be bothered to make a fist and shake it at the universe.

And I have several close friends who are currently embarked on the soul-searching ship, and I feel like we understand one another.

But I think I feel really, really grateful that at my low points I'm no longer so low that I've lost sight of the passion for life. Even when it's numbed -- and it has been numbed on many a recent occasion -- it hasn't been killed. Of course, we know it's lurking in Vincent, too, and is bound to resurface in artistic frenzy. But that comes later in the book.

Read with me! My library edition is a 1934 Random House hardcover with no ISBN!

"To stroll on wharves, and in alleys and markets, in waiting rooms and even saloons, that is not a pleasant pastime, except for an artist!" -- p. 204

Global Tectonics

"Like all writing, writing about geology is masochistic, mind-fracturing, self-enslaved labor--a description that intensifies when the medium is rock." -- John McPhee, Annals of the Former World

And yet, he does it quite well, and managed to snag a Pulitzer for his incredible tome about the slabs and basins and history-in-rock of this land of ours. I should say, "ours."

The book commences on the George Washington Bridge -- hey! my neck of the woods! I mean "my" of course -- with McPhee and the first of many geologist friends contemplating the Triassic period, "when New Jersey and Mauretania were of a piece." What a delightful notion. It kind of puts the whole Long Island - Jersey rivalry in perspective.

This book is everything I've hoped and always known it would be. I'm so glad I'm reading it. Who's with me??? Come on, now! What are you doing that's so all-fire important that you can't grab a copy of Annals...? My edition is ISBN: 0-374-51873-4. Peel your eyes away from YouTube for a minute and delight with me!

In this first bit he talks about how building roads, wielding interstate highways like weapons that cut swaths across the continent, has opened up the earth for geologists because suddenly in a roadcut history is revealed. But it's still a "knife wound," geologist Karen Kleinspehn tells him. She continues:

"One car. Coast to coast. People do it now without thinking much about it. Yet it's a most unusual kind of personal freedom--particular to this time span, the one we happen to be in. It's an amazing, temporary phenomenon that will end. We have the best highway system in the world. It lets us do what people in no other country can do. And it is also an ecological disaster."
-- from Annals of the Former World p. 25

Other highlights of yesterday's reading included a Brigham Young mention and a rumination on the geology professor's lot in life, getting through to the typical "Rocks for Jocks" class. Finding hidden in there the one or two who are called to this profession. Who will read the earth's history. Who will discover the hidden layers.

The Former World

I've started reading Annals of the Former World by John McPhee. Another delicious book to heft and carry with one (though surely it won't take me as long as War and Peace...will it??)

I've meant to read Annals... for some time and it fits in nicely with my Pulitzer-winning books obsession. And here's the thing, John McPhee is going to be speaking here at Hofstra! Right here at my very university! next week. I am so excited to be able to hear such a phenomenal writer speak. And it sort of spurred me into action to get crackin' on reading this book.

Naturally, I invite you all to join me.