When I get that oceanic feeling...

NOW FINISHED: Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

Did I mention I like being able to read books? And by that I mean complete books. In their entirety. Not hundreds of assigned pages from a casebook that totals more than a thousand pages. That just leaves me feeling incomplete and empty inside. I think I am going to finish ten books this summer -- maybe more.

In the end, Darkness at Noon is really good and I even recommend it. It's a great examination of why the revolution failed. It doesn't really matter which revolution -- although in this case it's basically about Russia without flat-out admitting it's about Russia -- because Koestler adequately points out how every revolution pretty much fails.

It's all about the relative maturity of the masses. As Rubashov nears his sentence and thus the end of his life, he reveals and wishes he had more time here on earth to contemplate this theory. Basically, people aren't ready for revolution - or any system - when it comes. So, for example, the steam engine came along and totally changed society, and this is a relatively new thing, so as Rubashov puts it (this being the first half of the twentieth century), "The people of Europe are still far from having mentally digested the consequences of the steam engine" (p. 172). Whereas in a politically mature time, when generations have become comfortable with a socio-political-economic system, the masses can better understand it.

This is all very interesting political theory, but I rather like thinking of it in terms of a certain political candidate and a certain way of mass communication/fundraising/social networking etc we have seen take off recently in our (global) society:

"In periods of maturity it is the duty and the function of the opposition to appeal to the masses. In periods of mental immaturity, only demagogues invoke the 'higher judgment of the people.'" (p. 173)

But enough about Obama. Onto Lost:

At the very end, while in his cell awaiting death, Rubashov talks about the "oceanic sense," a feeling of connectedness and oneness, a transcendental kind of state, of contemplation or ecstasy or both, in which "one's personality dissolved as a grain of salt in the sea; but at the same time the infinite sea seemed to be contained in the grain of salt" (p.260).

This immediately got me thinking about Lost and the "Oceanic Six." Koestler cites Freud, though not by name ("the greatest and soberest of modern psychologists," Rubashov muses) as the source of this term "oceanic sense." A quick check of Lostpedia shows they've picked up the Freud reference, from Civilization and its Discontents, but I think Darkness at Noon and Koestler's take on it deserve some attention from the Losties, too.

Oh yeah...

I think I forgot to ever tell you that my edition of Darkness at Noon is ISBN: 1-4165-4026-1. But it's not like I've been quoting much from its pages anyway. I hope to get back on the stick with 'L' -- which, by the way, is going to be D.H. Lawrence. Get stoked! But not until we're through with these revolutionaries gone awry!

The audacity of honor

NOW READING: Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

Man it's nice to not be in the thick of a terrible semester, and thus have lots of time to zip through my novels. I am already nearly finished with my 'K' author and just this evening picked up my 'L' author book because I'll probably start tomorrow. Zip-a-dee-doo-dah!

So, Darkness. I've hardly told you anything about it. Well, I'd always heard of it and never really knew what it was about. It's basically about what Koestler had to say about Russia and the Communist revolution gone wrong, and he throws in a few novel-like elements (a character or two, a setting, some names) to make it a story instead of just his random spewing of thoughts. He is yet another author who would have benefited by being able to blog, I think. But it would have left us with less, because people spew a lot into the blogosphere and we all take it for granted and then maybe some great books don't get written because the writers are all cybered out. (I'm looking at you, Self.)

Koestler is REALLY good at that ol' trick of following a theory/political idea through to its logical conclusion and showing how poorly that turns out. In fact, his main character, Rubashov, is kind of being forced to falsely confess for that very reason. He's basically admitting to crimes that his interrogators can logically deduce would happen based on what he believed.

This is all very interesting, and it's a pretty good read, especially the latter half. One interesting idea I've been pondering is the notion of why one prisoner might never be willing to confess to something he didn't do, will never feed the interrogators what they want, insists on dying with honor and integrity. Rubashov asks, what is honor, really? And isn't it the most vain thing of all to be so caught up in not smudging yourself, when the people and the revolution may require this sacrifice of you? It's really interesting.

It's also full of irony.

I think readers of The Prince would enjoy this book, as well as readers of 1984 and Brave New World. I think Machiavelli's work has some major overlooked sarcasm. This book puts it out there like that, too. Frankly, this whole country of Bushwashed and Obamified people could use a dose of this kind of political pondering as well, but they're probably too busy attending to all the important issues of the day to read a novel...

Wave bye-bye to the autocrat

NOW READING: Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

It has come to my attention that I have not really shared any of my positive thoughts about Infinite Jest. There were positive thoughts, of course. I really wish I had been blogging more as I went along. (Silly law school! Who said you could take over my brain?)

What DFW does is create this bizarre and bizarrely compelling world. Several worlds, actually, wrapped into one larger world, and while it is socio-political, it is also character driven, this world(s). The kids at the tennis academy are ten kinds of funny, although I just see Hal as an exaggerated version of DFW himself. Hal's family is really hard to explain. His father makes avant garde films, and one of these is largely the point of the book, but his filmography is the most hilarious skewing of post-modern art that takes itself too seriously in a world that doesn't take itself seriously enough that you are ever likely to see.

I often preferred the world of the halfway house down the street from the tennis academy. The conversations between Gately, who was still working on his recovery from drug addiction and trying every day to keep the strength to not go back Out There, and whatever random halfway house resident came to him that day, were absolutely hilarious. The most pitch-perfect skewering of AA while still knowing quite enough about it to show that DFW obviously had at least SOME use for 12-step recovery...

Did I mention the halfway house was called "Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House"? And how about the fans blowing U.S. waste into the Great Concavity, what used to be much of the Northeast, now ceded to Canada? Let alone the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed (U.H.I.D.), whose members don veils to hide and be united ... and Joelle, whom we know to be the Prettiest Girl of All Time (P.G.O.A.T.), wearing a veil for reasons we can only speculate...and Hal's brother, whom she used to date, who so loathes the cockroaches that invade his Tucson residence that he puts glasses over them, trapping them, where they suffocate until the glasses are fogged with their carbon dioxide output. A great creepy image, until you start questioning, do insects even breathe that way? That much? But of course, like everyone else this guy has his pathetic motives and a million weaknesses and quirks.

And that's how it all is. The whole book. Yes. The jest, it is infinite.

By comparison, Darkness at Noon now seems kind of frothy, actually, despite being about political prisoners facing the threat of torture and execution.

It's impossible for me to ruin the ending of Infinite Jest for you

NOW FINISHED: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
NOW READING: Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

Apologies for the hiatus! I was in Honduras. Which is not to say that I couldn't blog from Honduras, but I was kind of preoccupied with other things, like, you know, building a house and stuff. Recall, I finished Infinite Jest in a frenzy before leaving for Honduras and I've got to tell you, that was as much so I wouldn't have to lug the heavy thing on the plane with less than 100 pages left as it was any desire to oh-boy-I-want-to-finish-it and "see how it ends."

Because, by the way -- it doesn't end. I will go so far as to say it flat out doesn't have an ending. When you "finish" it you are sort of compelled to go back and start reading the first chapter again to figure out what happened. (Warning: even that doesn't really ever bring satisfaction or closure or anything.) And as I said that night I finished it, at midnight, packed and ready to take off for Honduras, I just didn't care. I went back and flipped through the first chapter, but I was mostly thinking, "Ugh."

Now, I'm sure there are those who will say "David Foster Wallace is brilliant! No one can write like him! He has mastered irony! The loop of Infinite Jest that makes people die because they succumb to the pleasurable entertainment is allegorical to us!" and so on. Well, that's mostly true. But it doesn't make Infinite Jest a Great Novel.

Is it a great book? I think it's a great something. A great work, a great endeavor. DFW is definitely a great writer. He's sick. Talented as the day is long, and mad skills of digression, humor, wordplay, all while being probably one of the smartest people alive. And self-aware. But is it a great book? I keep coming back to that question. Even if you take the novel question out of it (though I don't want to take the novel question out of it, because he chose to write a novel) you are still left looking for something. An ending? A point? A summing up? Would I have been equally disappointed with any summing up he could have done? Probably.

This NY Times review made several points I agreed with, including that the book really just seems like an excuse for DFW to show off his incredible writing skills. And, if you think about it, that's not really a criticism, or even a salient point. I mean, isn't that what books do - show off the writer's skills? And painting shows off the painter's skills, and gymnastics meets show off the gymnast's skills, and so on. So why does it strike us as a salient point when we read that line of the review?

Is it because of the smug factor?Because I do think DFW comes off as smug. In the book, the fact that he comes across at all could be considered smug. (Since it is, after all, "fiction.") And the single thing that pissed me off the most when I read it was the scene that made me put the book aside for almost two months, and that I still think at root was part of his twisted imagination and went with the flow of the book but was amplified or lengthened soley for shock value. It was when I saw him as writing for shock value that my respect for all his brilliance plummeted. Can it be that we don't want books we read to be "just an excuse" for the writer to show off her/his skills? That we want them to be something more?

I'm speaking of course as a blogger. It could be argued that I spew words out into the blogosphere that don't "need" to be there. Sure. But I can say sincerely that "showing off my skills" is, like, not on my mind when I blog. I become inspired to write things. I feel compelled. Why do I have this blog? I don't know. I like to write it. I like that some people read it. I like thinking about things. I like leaving a record. I would still blog if I had no readers. I used to write in a journal, after all.

I'm also speaking as a reader of War and Peace (the book that gave birth to this blog, remember). I keep somehow coming back to compare Jest to Tolstoy's tome. I don't know how Leo did it, but he wrote a garganutan, wonderful novel. I realize that DFW didn't have to do that, and might not have set out to do that, or actively didn't want to do that, or whatever. I realize also that Leo gave us far less psychosis, drug use, irony, post-modernism, and so on. But I just keep thinking somehow, if I were to read one of these "big books" again, which of those two would it be? And guess what - sorry DFW - I think it might be the big W & P.

Meanwhile, I am STILL looking for people (besides me and Brian) who have actually read Infinte Jest in its entirety and have a lot to say about it. I wonder what it's like to recall it years later. I wonder what it's like to read other works of DFW's after reading Jest. I find myself kind of wanting to read his first novel, The Broom of the System.

Timely political note: an essay from Wallace's Consider the Lobster about his time on the Straight Talk Express bus with John McCain in 2000 has been re-packaged as a stand-alone work (it is, after all, a 124-page essay) and has just been released as McCain's Promise, now that we've got 2008 going on. Crass commercialism or cunning political tool? As Infinite Jest reveals, you'll probably never really be able to tell the difference.

Infinity is in the eye of the beholder

NOW FINISHED: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Hmmm. I cannot for the life of me figure out what to say about this book. (Yet.) Except that I am surprised to maybe discover that DFW wanted his parting shot to be some sort of declaration of his love for A Clockwork Orange. Which, I might add, is a very, very short book. He could learn a thing or two from that, I'd say.

Was there an ending somewhere in there, among the 1000 pages, and I just missed it?

Actually, I can see where there are several things I am supposed to puzzle out, which may be a cheap shot from an author who babbled at us for nearly 1100 pages...

Maybe I can ponder this while I'm in Honduras. Yes, that's right, I'm leaving on a jet plane in the morn. So I had to finish the Jest tonight so as to be able to bring the next book I'm going to read and not also lug the heavy thing on the plane for the only 30 pages I had left. And so I finished it.

I'm feeling terribly unresolved.

Wing, Goodlove, Gately, and Incandenza, LLP

NOW FINISHED: Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
NOW ALSO FINISHED: the second year of law school!!!
NOW READING: believe it or not, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Hello everyone. What a luxurious thing it is to close the law books and pick up a NOVEL! Even when it isn't strictly a novel. Which, let's be honest, Fear of Flying isn't. You know that whole "All first novels are thinly veiled memoirs" thing Jonathan Safran Foer said to my delight (and which I often quote)? Yeah - I'm looking at you, Erica Jong.

Which is interesting, because it has made me consider some of the other novels ("novels") I've read in this here little literary blog project in that light. I would say Pico Iyer's Cuba and the Night was also a thinly veiled memoir -- and as someone writing my own thinly veiled memoir about time in Cuba, I should know. Also interestingly, that wasn't Iyer's first book, although it was his first novel. Martin Amis' The Information and Nadine Gordimer's None to Accompany Me are later novels by those authors, and they seem much less memoir-ish, despite obvious autobiographical elements.

For all my qualms with genre fiction, the genres give me the least to qualm about in this aspect. You don't really spend your reading of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said or The Maltese Falcon thinking that this is exactly what happened to PKD or Dashiell. Nor Umberto as you read The Name of the Rose...and I must say that book is probably my favorite novel on some level of the ones I've read so far for this project. And it definitely shows a great, literary imagination. A Passage to India is also fantastic -- but also with that true-life touch. In Cold Blood, of course, is a different thing altogether. (And I must admit that in hindsight I don't really think it should have qualified for this project, but oh well.)

So, Erica. Now that I don't believe for a second that "Isadora Wing" is an invented character, what do I think of the book? Even the imagined story isn't really novel-like, because it's filled with all her flashbacks that are more of recounting essays, than recollections of past events. But the things Erica Jong says are interesting, so it makes a good read. And you can see how it "changed women's literature" and all that jazz, too. I hail her as a trailblazer; I just think she had as many issues settling on a genre as I do. So, screw genres! Yeah!

Except I really want to read novels right now. I'm craving them, in fact. Law school will do that to you.

As for the other member of this household (and sometimes member of the literary blog project), Brian has done something awesome this week: he completed Infinite Jest. There we sat in the airport last weekend, me returning to my girl Erica and him Jesting it up. Then Monday I left for a full day's work in the clinic, and when I came home he had finished. (He also got terribly sick that night -- hmmm, coincidence?)

Well, you know what his completion of it has done? Made me recommit to finishing it, too. Yes - I am that competitive. And I'm OK with that. Even if that makes me a literary snob, or at least a literary keep-up-with-the-Joneses. Which is the definition of a literary snob to at least one person I know.

So now that my semester, exams, and work in the clinic are all completed (HURRAH!!!!!!) I, too, have returned to David Foster Wallace's tome. It pissed me off around March (was it March? I think so) and I cast it aside because there was a repulsive, cruel, totally despicable scene I was convinced he put in just for shock value, and it made me lose interest. Lately, however, I must say that reading Fear of Flying has made me think about Jest again because I'm convinced Erica and DFW would be great pot-smoking buddies and have lots to talk about.

That and my incredibly competitive desire to catch up with Brian. Here I go!

Literary Snobs

Long, long ago (before the 2nd year of law school started) in a galaxy far, far away (Medford) I asked most of the people I know who like to read and think what is their definition of a "literary snob." I did that because it was implied that I, alone among earthlings not being in the throes of Deathly Hallows, possibly was one. A literary snob, not a deathly hallow.

So, I asked all the peoples just what exactly they think a literary snob is. Then I began compiling the answers. Unfortunately I never got around to revealing all the answers and the consensus. But this weekend I've been cleaning out my email inbox (duh, I have finals approaching, it's the perfect procrastination) and I came across those old e-mails. So I decided in my effort to attain the "nirvana of the clean inbox" (I first heard that phrase from Brian) I'd better post about this whole literary snob thing.

Turns out I think I am one. At least if you abide by my friends' definitions. Some of them actually hastened to point out that I am totally not a literary snob, but others threw my own words and actions back at me.

For example, Mordena from my Cambridge writing group, said, "Someone who refuses to read genre fiction on principle." Gulp. Yes, I remember saying that one day at the Hi-Rise cafe. But I meant it sardonically, if not sarcastically. Of course I read some genre fiction. One of my favorite authors is Nelson DeMille. (Hofstra alum, p.s.!) Although I am aware how much that sounds like, "Some of my best friends are genre authors..." Oh dear.

And my high school best friend Marcia said, "Someone who refuses to read Harry Potter!" which was pretty much a direct hit. I liked Mo's (also an Arizona friend) one-liner, "Someone who outright refuses to buy their books from Rite-Aid." I noticed that a lot of friends compared literary snobs to film snobs and music snobs in their efforts to define.

But here's the main thing I noticed: it's not as if anyone disagreed on what people would be literary snobs about. (preposition used at sentence end for dramatic impact) In fact, around ten people named names or cited examples, and most of those named Harry Potter as one of the names. Like Kim D., an L.A. Borders musician friend, who said that like music snobs, lit snobs are educated and active in their field and then upon finding that their preparation is of no monetary value take out their bitterness by being critical of those who make money in the field, such as "Kenny G is no Steve Coleman" and "J.K. Rowling is no C.S. Lewis." (Although they do both have pretty famous initials; what is it with those Brits?)

So at the risk of further cementing myself in literary snobdom, I must say it's interesting that everyone recognized the dichotomy. They'd say that the snob reads Tolstoy but not Harlequin, or Tom Wolfe but not Danielle Steel, or Moby Dick but not the "little black dress" novels, or literary magazine poetry but not mass markets. My point is, maybe we all recognize, without wanting to admit it, that some books are better than others. That maybe we can't define literature, but we know it when we see it.

So basically, I don't really care if you relegate me to literary snob status. I like reading, and I think some books are crap. (Note I didn't say they shouldn't exist; I just said they're crap.) I totally read and enjoyed The Da Vinci Code, but I AM proud that I was the first on my block to read it (Borders got advanced reader copies, so I was alerted early to the next big thing, and even got to meet Dan Brown three days after it came out). I joke about my "bestseller backlash," but anyone who has worked at a behemoth bookstore and seen the blatant shove-it-in-your-face (often-with-Oprah's-help) factor of the bestseller lists knows what I mean.

And speaking of Oprah, I think she has chosen some great books, at least when she was still reading fiction. Admitted fiction, that is. I was the biggest champion of Elizabeth Berg ever - but yes, I am proud that I knew her before Oprah did. As for Harry P - I DID read the first half of the first book -- twice -- and I am just not interested. It's not because it's popular, it's because I'm not interested. So does it convert me into a snob when I also make fun of how popular it is? I mean, I saw Titanic in the theater and enjoyed it, but I can still make fun of the Celine Dion song or the "I'm the king of the world!" nonsense at the Oscars. Harry Potter's an easy target, as are some of his fans. What can I say? I might add that I think J.K. might just be full of crap in this lawsuit she's brought against one of 'em.

I make fun of snobs, too, though. I particularly enjoyed making fun of the Harvard guy when I showed Brian around Harvard Square and we sat next to a self-important grad-student type who was reading at the bar in Grendel's. (Are we snobs for enjoying the name of the bar? Or not any longer now that Angelina Jolie has had her way with Beowulf?) Brian and I still fondly recall that guy, who gave off a "Does it get any better than me?" vibe.

But the thing is, I can also make fun of myself. I love the cheese-tacular things I love but I self-deprecate with the best of them. And yeah, I generally don't go looking for new books in genre fiction, because they're not my personal preference. Neither is "Business Life" nor "Gardening Essays." But I adored The Orchid Thief, and I confidently make fun of Who Moved My Cheese?

Thus concludes the examination of my literary snobbery and/or lack thereof. (Unless you want to comment.) I will end with the words of wise John Frank, whom I worked with in L.A. when he was cafe manager at Borders:

"A literary snob, to me, is someone who won't read Stephen King, Anne Rice, Sidney Sheldon, Dean Koontz, Neil Simon, or any other big name writer who sells plenty of books the common folks like to read. However what they don't remember is that 500 years from now Neil Simon will be remembered as the Shakespeare of our time, Stephen King will be remembered as a master of his genre, etc. etc. etc..."

Zipless Jest

NOW FINISHED: El bosque de los pigmeos de Isabel Allende
NOW READING: Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
NOW NOT READING: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

I suppose I should also point out that my first final is in two weeks and two days and I am plunging headlong into all things review and studying. So it's not as if I'm reading much of Erica. Although I was pleased to see this in last week's New Yorker. Girl is still relevant. Woo hoo! I am rather enjoying the book. As with most things created before I was born, it doesn't strike me as partiuclarly scandalous; shock and awe just don't endure, I guess.

What I like about Fear of Flying isn't that Isadora/Erica is willing to "get real" about men, sex, marriage, affairs, orgasms, and the like -- or at least that's what she tells herself/us as she narrates this little European escapade and its frenzy of flashbacks -- but that it is so literary! There must be hundreds of literary allusions. In fact, I think there might be thousands and I am only getting hundreds. A girl can only be so well-read, you know. Especially if one's literary blog projects are so totally always on hold because of silly ol' LAW SCHOOL. That, or a thousand page Infinite Joke...or Jest...or something. Ha.

Thought: Erica Jong and David Foster Wallace having a few beers together (and/or sitting around taking hits from the bong), discussing literature and life. Hmmm...

Or did I actually mean to say "Finite"...

now reading: El bosque de los pigmeos de Isabel Allende
now not reading: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

I have missed Nadia and Alexander! aka Aguila y Jaguar. El Bosque de los Pigmeos is the third in Allende's young adult series in which these two have adventures all around the world. I've read the series en espanol but I urge you to read them even if you do all your reading in English. They are clever and creative and fun and heartwarming and have good messages about environmentalism, respect for other people and lands, judgment, spirituality, and so on. GOOD stuff. Plus some of the characters are super sardonic. I've had this one sitting around for a while and was really excited to start reading it the other day. In the first book they were deep in the Amazon, in the second an isolated kingdom in the Himalaya, and now Africa. ("Bosque" means forest, "pigmeos" is pygmies.) I adore these books.

What about Infinite Jest? Well, it's not over but let's just say we're taking a break. Yes, I do mean that the way it sounds (as in, relationship code for "it really might be over.") There may still be a chance, but David Foster Wallace has disappointed me greatly and it might be better if we just go our separate ways. I have some friends who are encouraging me not to give up, but I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do.

Don't forget all the Con Law reading I have to do, though, too! What a thrill that is.

i

now reading: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

I have just made a shocking discovery. Or at least what passes for one on MySpace. I have been using the illustrious social networking site to randomly peruse the profiles of people who list Infinite Jest in their "Books" category. Why? Just for fun and procrastination, mostly, and also to see what they have to say about it, if anything. OK, so when I did a search for "Infinite Jest" in books, I got 182 pages of results. Wow, right? Except it's pretty easy to skim through them, looking for people I might actually care to hear from, and ignoring the bands, the people who put fake ages (like 0, or 102), the people with pornographic profile pictures, the people who haven't logged in since 2004, etc. Still, 182 pages? Impressive.

Then I went and did some other things and then went back to peruse a bit more. Only this time I got only four pages of results. I looked to see if I had made sure to type "Infinite Jest" in the Books category search and not General Interest or something. I had - but then I saw that I'd typed it so quickly that I had left out the final 'i' and typed "Infinte Jest" and THAT had returned four pages of results. Can you imagine? I mean, I'm actually not all that surprised that a significant chunk of people leave/never notice typos in their profiles. But don't you think it's funny that there are that many people who made the same typo? FOUR PAGES of people who typed "Infinte." (By the way, I totally hear that in my head as a three-syllable word, like"infanty.") I think that's hilarious. And kind of less for what it says about careless profile-building then about the sheer number of people who like this book. Maybe I'll try leaving out other random letters, too, and see what happens. (No, I won't. But it was fun to ponder for a moment.)

Conquering Infinite-y

now reading: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

I am halfway through!

This news is definitely worthy of shouting that originates on a rooftop. It is a long book. And, I am a law student. This day might never have come...

Actually, on a total digression, sometimes I don't even feel like a law student. I feel like I am just doing my own thing and then sometimes I get really stressed out because I have to do a lot of the same things the law students have to do. Then, I think, 'Well, OK, maybe this is what a law student looks like!' Gloria Steinem would be proud.

Back to Jest. Recently I became annoyed with the fact that I had soooo much left to read in it. That to-read pile is growing larger. And I can't read for pleasure all the time these days anyway. And all that. It just seemed so cumbersome to have hundreds of pages left. Brian swore he was still relishing it. I missed the relish. But bringing it with me to read on my commute on Monday really made a difference, because I read sixty pages in one day. Usually I spend my commute to school reading for a class and my commute from school reading The New Yorker, but I really want to finish IJ* by March 10. WISH ME LUCK. (Alternatively, by March 17 is also allowed. I just want it to be by the 10th. But I am bound and determined to finish by the 17th. You hear me?)

*Did you know "IJ" also means "Immigration Judge" and I talk about those a lot this semester.

However, after tearing through 80 pages in the past 36 hours, I have now come to another annoying part, a random digression in first person about a recollection of a childhood mattress-moving incident and some psychotic parents.* It's Jim Incandenza, I surmise. As I plodded through it, wondering if its point/tangential relevance/amusement factor will soon be revealed, I got to a great part in which he recalls that as a boy he was terrified of the sound of vacuum cleaners. I love it! Me too! I still don't like them, but now that I am a rational adult I can deal with their sound, obviously. But I so too recall "hurrying to get some distance between myself and the vacuum cleaner, because the sound of vacuuming has always frightened me in the same irrational way..." (p. 501) (That's right, FIVE hundred. And halfway through. Yeah.)

*Then again, what parents in this book aren't pretty much psycho?

Don't get me wrong. This book isn't filled with annoying digressions. Most of it is wholly bad-ass. I was particularly delighted a few pages back to re-encounter Madame Psychosis. Only, she's gone. Basically, we re-encountered her absence. How sad for me.

Do any of you even, like, know anyone who has read it?

Avoiding Reality

NOW READING: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Have I mentioned that a lot of the plot of Infinite Jest takes place in the footnotes? It's not nearly as annoying as it sounds. Ordinarily, I do find it completely tiresome when reading something to be constantly referred to footnotes. Especially if it's because the author has incomplete thoughts and jumbled organization, or when they are an academic and so they like to write one narrative in the paper and another in the footnotes. UGH. What DFW does in Jest, however, is write the plot in both the main text and the footnotes. I kinda dig it.

Also, the footnotes are pretty good and even f-in' hilarious from time to time. Sometimes they go on for pages. Sometimes there are footnotes to the footnotes. I reiterate that none of this is as annoying as it sounds. Also, how can you get mad when one sequence of footnotes reads like this:

a. Don't ask.

b. Ibid.

That is pure genius!

Recently in a footnote he referred to the prorectors at the tennis academy having "that grad-schoolish sense of arrested adolescence and reality-avoidance about them." (p. 1003) That is a great way to put it. It also makes me think I was, like, destined to go to grad school. As much as I hemmed and hawed and put it off, I can avoid reality and/or dwell in adolescence with the best of them. But I'm intelligent and like to read. So it had to happen eventually, right?

Reality is overrated. I prefer the Oscars.

Oooh! I almost forgot the most important part. I totally want to read Infinite Jest all the time when I have so much to do for law school, so I'm totally conflicted and I never get to make any progress in the novel and then I get all mad and on my days off I just read it and don't read things for school. THAT'S what's* so great about it!

*I have a new fondness for/obsession with noticing when I happen to write two words in a row that might mystify a novice pronouncer of English because they look the same but sound different. Example: "That's what's..." Also earlier today I noticed it when elsewhere I wrote "come home."

Tennis, anyone?

NOW READING: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Those of you who have not read it may not know that Infinite Jest is largely about tennis. Much of the action ("action") takes place at a tennis academy boarding high school in the Boston area. So in reading the book, you actually get to read a lot about tennis as well. But it's not, like, breathtaking accounts of tennis matches. (Are those even possible? I may be cynical, but tennis is seriously up there on my list of sports that are FAR more fun to play than to watch. Maybe just behind golf and bowling.) Instead this book is a lot of description of what daily life would be like for these hard-core tennis teenagers among themselves.

This life generally involves the usual mixed emotions that come with being really successful at something, the struggles and pressure that come with being really successful at something, and the things all teens do to thwart authority figures whom they also follow in many ways. The book also contemplates the deeper meanings of competition, success, and what one does with one's life. Much of this is seen through the prism of the game of tennis, and a lot of it (at least in these first three hundred pages) subtly contrasts these tennis phenoms with the drug addicts, corrupt political types, pretentious arty/film types, and random weirdos that fill out the lesser ranks of life. So far, no pronouncements on who, if anyone, actually will be deemed in the end to have their shit together.

I don't even mind the footnotes. So far.

NOW READING: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Those of you who have not Infinitely Jested may wonder what this tome is all about. Three hundred pages in, many things remain mysterious, but I can at least tell you some of what I like about it:

• Much like Margaret Atwood and South Park, our boy David Foster Wallace skewers all manner of viewpoints by following them to their logical extended result. This, of course, has the effect of being both amusing and chilling.
  
• I love the way he writes long convoluted sentences that hold my interest, but also occasionally writes using a very casual form and the word "like" to great effect. In other words, proving that people can use that word as a random interjection and not sound insipid. Yeah!
• Making fun, but with just a hint of admiration, of the 12-step recovery scene, most prominently with the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol (sic) Recovery House. I love it. It's great, from the guy running around creating major social theory about everyone's tattoos to the bit I read today in which he demonstrates how a conversation goes between a platitude-spouting counselor and an educated person who joins the Program, who is not unwilling to engage in recovery but is questioning everything intellectually and trying to reason through the cliches about denial and the like. It was awesome. Kind of reminded me of some experiences I had back in the day, especially in L.A. where everyone had a therapist. (Myself included.)
  
• I love anyone who can discourse handily about the danger of black widows dropping onto your picnic blanket from their homes in the Arizona palm trees.
  

I'm trying to think if any of my friends have read this book. Have you? I think I mostly know OF people who've read it. And I definitely know people like myself who have felt for ten years that we SHOULD read it. Well, anyone? Who loves this book? And why? No spoilers, please. One avid reader friend said she hasn't read it, and her idea is that mostly guys like it. True? A cursory MySpace search for people who'd listed it among their favorites turned up some scary results, indeed...

Here's the story...

NOW READING: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
NOW DABBLING: Collected Poems by Edwin Arlington Robinson
NOW VOTING FOR: Hillary Rodham Clinton
(oh, just got carried away with the three-named folks there. but i am voting for her, of course, not sure why you wouldn't.)

I continue to like our friend David Foster Wallace here, and to relive my life as I read. (Have I mentioned the book takes place in Boston and Arizona? Well, when it can be located in anything so traditional as a geographical place, that is.) Today, it was The Brady Bunch. In one of his dropping-in-and-out-of-random-conversation scenes, he gives it a full paragraph amidst many mere one-line conversation fragments. But he doesn't even mention The Brady Bunch, just "Eve Plumb," "Henderson." "Alice" and so on. As it turns out, if you don't know about The Brady Bunch you wouldn't even know he was talking about The Brady Bunch. I have verified this with someone who doesn't know about The Brady Bunch. (Yes, I pity this person.)

It does beg the question how many things he's alluding to about which I have no earthy clue...

Howling, even. Huck would be impressed.

NOW READING: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

So here's a thing I really, really like about Infinite Jest, a thing which I bet approximately two other people on the planet would even notice, much less care about. But here it is. So there's this word, see, that leapt out of the pages of Huckleberry Finn at my my friend Marcia and me back when we read it in high school. (Huck Finn, you say? I thought we were infinitely jesting...well, stick with me here.) We loved it. Early in Huck's journey, while he and Jim stay on that little island in the river, there is a dead body and Huck, creeped the hell out, says, "It most give me the fantods."

Fantods. How could you not love it? I mean, who even (besides Mark Twain, apparently) ever even knew there was a synonym for heebie-jeebies? But they're not just heebie-jeebies. They are darker and more demonic. The word is just so perfect! Marcia and I used "fantods" as frequently as we could from that point forward. It may have been the best thing we took away from that book. (Discussing all the issues swirling around when/how our AP English class came to read Huckleberry Finn under the tutelage of Patti Patti is defnitely another story for another day...)

I can recall a moment in college, lying around with a dozen or so girls from the dorms after staying up way too late being silly, when I told some story and noted that whatever freak thing I described "totally gave me the fantods." I remember Heather -- smart, ever proper Heather -- asking, "Just what is a fantod?" And some of my other crazy best friends sort of rolling their eyes and saying, "Oh, Linda and her fantods..."

You can imagine my delight, then, when I first came across the word in Infinite Jest. It was all I could do not to shriek on the bus where I was reading it and cry aloud, "Fantods! He knows about fantods!"

But now, now, now here gloriously on page 189, it gets even better. First of all, I love Madame Psychosis and her radio show, and I love M.I.T. and its weirdness, and I love the random engineer because he is just like so many engineers I knew back in my radio day. But here is Mario, listening to the show and sitting up close to the speaker, because he has to have the sound low, "because Avril has some auditory thing about broadcast sound and gets the howling fantods from any voice that does not exit a living corporeal head..."

I. Love. It. I'd be happy enough just to see anyone using that word anywhere, period, but then he goes and does it repeatedly. And when you get right down to it, it IS a little creepy, isn't it, to think of voices emanating from something other than talking heads?

Just keep on sprinkling them through this story. Fantods. Wonderful, howling fantods.

That good ol' resilience of the human spirit and stuff

NOW FINISHED:
Lust, Caution by Eileen Chang
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
NOW READING: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

OK, so I'm done randomly picking up books upon which this awards season's films are based. I think. As previously mentioned both Lust, Caution and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly are tiny books, so reading them in, like, an hour each was no feat. And I do so like to read books before I see the movie! So now I have to go see those two movies.

We DID see yesterday -- at long last -- The Kite Runner. I found myself more and more looking forward to it as the day went on. It's one of those books that I still don't think is perfect or anything but taught me so much about Afghanistan (and, well, kites!) and really held my attention; as it settles in my memory I've grown more and more fond of the story. I thought the movie did a superb job of staying true to the book while leaving things out. I get angry at movies that do NOT stay true to the book when they leave things out. I'm not saying you can ever exactly reproduce a book on the screen but my point is exactly that: of course you cannot. The onus is on you to be faithful to it knowing it won't be the same. Some people seem to miss that point.

Anyhoo, I liked The Kite Runner film as well. The kids really were quite good. And by the way, I totally commend Paramount and all the effort that went into moving the four child actors from Afghanistan to the United Arab Emirates to keep them safe. I think Paramount did all they could/should do. I think it's pretty pathetic that the boys or their families would have to fear any sort of reprisal for making the film. In Afghanistan, the U.S., or anywhere, I wish religious and conservative people could just chill out and let others live their own lives. Who made you the judge, the punisher? Who said vengeance is OK? Then again, this very question is confronted in the book/film, in what I thought was hands down the most powerful scene while I was reading. I even had to stop and take a breather on the plane after I read it. I refer to the stadium scene of course. Anyway, kudos to Paramount and everyone who helped with that. (Here's an article about moving the boys, very interesting...)

So NOW, back to Infinite Jest! Have I mentioned that I really like it? I am on page 130. In a normal book, this would be a significant chunk, but Infinite Jest being so...infinite, it is a drop in the bucket. I have already spent time with loads of quirky characters in their bizarre situations. He does this amazing thing where he plunges you in and out of these various people's lives, and each time a new bit starts you don't know if you're going to revisit some athlete/druggie/spy you've already met or discover someone new, but you never feel lost. You do, however, feel very very amused.

No diving country for the infinite butterfly runner

NOW FINISHED: No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
NOW READING: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

OK, so I read another book that has recently become a movie. Interestingly (or is it?) I wasn't really going to read the whole thing; I just picked up No Country for Old Men to peruse it last Sunday afternoon because we were planning to see the film that night. And after seeing it (no spoilers) we were so confused about the events following the climax that I decided to read it just so I could figure out what happned.

I have also read a bit of Infinite Jest this week, in between seeing other movies. Today I just read the filmography in the footnotes. Those of you who have inifinitely jested will know what I'm talking about. Those who have not...well, it's a big 'un but if you feel like getting lost in a book, this is a funny and damn smart one in which to do just that. The filmography saw me laughing aloud several to many times, and reminded me how much I love reading it and how I will likely spend the entire remaining week of winter break doing just that.

But The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is so little...surely I could read that in just one sitting before seeing the film this week...ditto for Lust, Caution...and in an ironic twist we still haven't even seen The Kite Runner, which is the book I picked up immediately upon completion of my reading for finals and finished reading on the plane to Phoenix...

Sadness and jest

NOW FINISHED: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
NOW READING: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

At some point, there in the haze of it all, I finished this semester's finals. Once I no longer had any law-text-casebook-exam studying-law-law-law-law reading left, I picked up a novel. It was almost frenzied how I went about picking it up. And it was amazing how good it felt to plunge into it. I felt like I was escaping from a day of stress and collapsing back into the most luxurious, soft, silky, five-million-thread-count sheets bed, enveloped in relaxation.

But while buying it I felt law school stress-like fettered, desperate, where-is-it, needy desire to get my hands on it. The allegedly available copy at the Hofstra undergraduate library was missing; two librarians, an assistant, and I searched to no avail. I wandered over to the bookstore not really wanting to pay full price for a book, but really wanting to start reading it on the Long Island Rail Road on my way home from school. I had resigned myself to not being able this semester to getting around to reading any of the books before this year's crop of films (Charlie Wilson's War, Atonement, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, No Country for Old Men, etc.) (I've already long since read Beowulf and Into the Wild.) But then I just thought, well, maybe I have time to get through The Kite Runner...I really wanted to read that one before seeing the film...

Behold, in the university bookstore, it was buried in an under table stack but it was 30% off! I felt I had uncovered a treasure. I started reading it on my train ride home and read 100 pages that day. It goes pretty quickly; if you, like me, are imaging it as a very literary piece with difficult language and comlex sentences that move slowly, think again. It's more Hornby-paced than Roth-paced. Kind of like a male version of Elizabeth Berg, gone global. With Judy Blume's teenage precocious hidden wisdom and Maeve Binchy's melancholy accompanying him on the world tour.

OK, so I am not describing the tone that well. But I did enjoy the book, finishing it on the plane to Arizona for Christmas. However, in addition to finishing it on the plane, I also had to actually stop reading and take a breather on the plane, somewhere in the 200 pages, after one of the most good-yet-awful stop-you-in-your-tracks scenes in literature I've read in quite some time. If you've read the book, you will undoubtedly remember. You know, when he goes to the stadium, to make an appointment with the man in the sunglasses. If you haven't read it, I will never spoil it here. The book is good if not great, the writing is occasionally quite touching and occasionally so-so, but the last third is worth reading, and that scene alone should - must - be read by all thinking, feeling people. And perhaps by all unthinking, unfeeling people, that they might reconsider.

Now, I have moved on to my winter "big book," which Brian is also starting now: Infinite Jest. I remember when this came out. I was in L.A. What was that awesome bookstore in Los Feliz...small and independent...I remember they were all hopped up about it. So was one of the women for whom I house-sat. It was totally on my radar as one of those books philosophical, coffee-drinking, hipster-aspiring, college students and twentysomethings who still live like college students should know and love. Therefore it went on my mental to-read list, where it has stayed. To be retrieved now thanks to Brian's getting hopped up about it, and that thanks to Alex. (This paragraph reminds us that Borders is good for some things.)

So far, so good. But I'm thirty pages in out of how many hundreds? I'm not even worthy to comment on it yet.

Finality

NOW FINISHED: Cuba and the Night by Pico Iyer

That's right, I read it! Hurrah! I like the ending a lot, because (spoiler alert!)the narrator main character got his comeuppance. His betrayal of Lourdes was so not OK, and he totally got his just desserts for cheating, and I. LOVE. IT. Quite frankly, I am tired cheating, lies, betrayal. People tend to forget that when you are dishonest, you are also dishonest with yourself. I can't remember the last book I read where the cheater had to face the error of his ways. I am thrilled. This book was "just OK" all along, but the ending made me so happy that I will now officially include more Pico Iyer on my list of things to read.

But when will I read these things? Good question. For the next three weeks it is going to be law school finals and nothing but law school finals. And then, the winter break big book project is a detour from the literary blog project (and an essential one, seeing as I totally abandoned this year's spring/summer big book project halfway through)(that would be Don Q). Brian and I are going to read Infinite Jest. Yay! Merry wacko Christmas to us!

So, I am still only through the letter "I," and my one-year A to Z literary blog project is going to turn into a two-year. I'm so OK with that. It was bound to happen. Have I told you about this Constitutional Law book I have sitting next to me? It's 1,648 pages.

Venceremos!

The Almost literary blog

Wow, it has been almost a month since I have uttered a literary word here. And no, in that time I have not touched Pico's Cuba and the Night. Lest you think I have not been reading, I will in fact tell you what I have read. It's not all law school all the time. It is a lot of law school a lot of the time, but not all - all. Just some - some. The other reading has consisted of the following, all of which really ramped up mid-October:

1. Magazines.
a. The New Yorker subscription found its way to my new residence, so I dove back in to that with the usual glee that accompanies receiving The New Yorker in the mail. Among other fabulous articles in the last few weeks were Adam Gopnik's thoughts on shortening and extending works of art, the former by abridging books and the latter with DVD extras, notably director's cuts, and a piece on The Wire which has officially convinced me that I need to begin watching that show immediately if not sooner. (And catch up on the prior seasons, duh.)
b. The Economist always occupies a good amount of subway reading time, although I think I'm not going to renew this currently-ending subscription. I got it for kind of free last year, with frequent flier miles, but I don't really want to pay for it.
c. Entertainment Weekly has my undivided attention right now, as we are heading into Oscar season soon. They have even offered up a few early predictions. I will offer up a few early predictions/wishes of my own on my main blog tonight, too.

2. The Almost Moon. And I'll tell you what - I have a lovely bone to pick with Ms. Sebold Thang. I can honestly say there is nary another author whose first novel so made me unquestioningly pick up novel number two. There is nothing quite like The Lovely Bones. But here's the thing: after being blown away by the unique, luminous writing of that book I naturally went right out and read her non-fiction book, Lucky, and that was all kinds of disturbing because when you read it you realize that a lot of that detail of the violent rape in The Lovely Bones came from her real-life experience. (Minus the being murdered and narrating the story from heaven, of course.) And even when I heard that five years later she had another novel coming, I harbored the same fear I had when I first read her, that she would just be trying to up the ante now, trying and failing. Because, really, after The Lovely Bones, can you really just go back to writing a "normal" novel?

So I did, I began reading The Almost Moon the day it came out. And guess what? I was right. All she is doing is showing us that she has come up with something even more shocking and disturbing for a premise, but unfortunately the writing is nowhere near the same quality this time around. I won't say she's a one-hit wonder, as that implies some kind of emptiness or frivolity. I don't know if The Lovely Bones could even be considered a hit. It is just darkness, and every time I read another word of hers, it just sheds more darkness on her darkness. I got past 200 pages in The Almost Moon and then didn't care. I'm glad I borrowed it and didn't buy it. It's terrible. Read The Lovely Bones if you haven't, but don't even bother with The Almost Moon.

And you know what? It didn't have to be like this. I worried, as I said, that it WOULD be like this, but it didn't have to be. If she were a better writer, it would not be like this. And you know how I know that? Nabokov. Good ol' Vladimir is one of the best writers ever. Like, he's maybe in the top ten of the world. And I would say that if there's anything to which I can compare The Lovely Bones, that might have to be Lolita. A novel that flings dark and sadistic desire at an adolescent...a plot that shocks...imaginative, beautiful rendering of horrid things...etc. But after Lolita, Nabokov gave us even more brilliance, such as Pale Fire, and what made it so brilliant was utterly different from what came before. He didn't just pull a key change on us. You know, like in a pop song when they get to the third verse or chorus and can't figure out what to do and the energy is fading (because it's maybe just not that good of a song) so they throw in a key change, which is basically like, "I'm going to sing the exact same thing now, but higher! bigger! bolder!" and everyone falls for it.

That's what Alice Sebold did. She kept singing the same song, but just changed keys. No, thank you.

Flying through the symbols with the greatest of ease

NOW READING: Cuba and the Night by Pico Iyer

Cuba is like a cult. And not because they are both four-letter words that start with "cu." People who travel to Cuba in this day and age, and by that I mean the 80s-90s-00s, become part of this mysterious entity they themselves cannot understand but which they want to push on all their nearest and dearest anyway. In fact, it may be less like a cult and more like, say, Prozac. Only Cuba is real.

Of course one of the things I worry about on the imminent, soon-I-swear, no-really-any-day-now publication of my Cuba book is that it will really be my traveling-to-Cuba story that no one cares about. Like when you have to look at someone's vacation photos and you don't care. And as I've written it sometimes it 's been a novel and sometimes it's been non-fiction, and my writing group and others (rightly so) tell me to stop categorizing it and just finish writing the damn thing. Still I feel I need to understand what it is I'm trying to say, or else it will end up like Pico Iyer's Cuba and the Night.

For the most part I enjoy reading this "novel" of Iyer's, which is really a travel narrative, thinly veiled. But I can be honest with myself and say the audience for the first part of this book may be pretty small--consisting entirely of people who've had a clandestine moment in Cuba. I so want the audience for my book to be bigger.

On the other hand, while Iyer's work was tolerable and only Cuba-interesting for the first 150 pages or so, now in the latter half it's actually starting to get good. To the point where even plebes such as yourself who haven't been there might enjoy it. (ha, OK? don't take me so seriously) You really are starting to wonder what will become of our narrator and his relationship with Lourdes.

But man does he capture things about visiting that island that are hard to explain. Such as how you always find yourself taking up the position you argued against the day before, how you are keenly aware of the disastrous aspects of life there until someone points them out, at which point you find yourself defending the Revolucion.

My favorite bit came when Hugo asked him wasn't he going to take any pictures where they were staying because they would be perfect.

"'Too perfect,' I said, and it was true: that was the problem with the place sometimes. The symbols came too easily. Everything was just too ready-made...a girl on a balcony at dusk, looking forlorn...next to it, another sign, in neon, with some of the letters blinking on and off: XX Siglo - Twentieth Century. If I sent that to my editors, they'd think it was a setup. The ironies here were too much to believe..." --p. 174

I is for I've missed you, dear readers!

NOW READING: Cuba and the Night by Pico Iyer

Well hello my little literary chickadees of the blogosphere. Where have I been? Oh, you know, just all over the place. Looking for an apartment, attending classes, commuting, drinking, entertaining people, entertaining myself, reading law case books, learning, working...the usual. I have, however, embarked upon my 'I' author and read all of 78 pages so far. (Are you thinking this is going to turn into a two-year rather than a one year project? Yeah, me too.)

Let's talk about Pico Iyer. He is a bit of a different choice from some of my previous alphabet author choices, as he is not primarily a fiction writer but a travel writer. Then again, travel narratives are very novel-like, and Umberto Eco writes in many genres, and all that. I'm not being exclusive about it or anything. Anyway, the 'I' pickings were kind of slim, and my other main choice was Washington Irving's Sketch Book, which is also part travel narrative-like and part short story.

Speaking of previous authors, everyone who's anyone has surely already read this FABULOUS New Yorker article about my 'D' man Philip K. Dick. Trust me: whether or not you've read the PKD, this article is a gem. If you are a fan, so much the better. Go. Go read it. I'll be here when you come back.

So anyway, back to Pico. And by that I do not mean the street in Los Angeles. I first came to know about Pico Iyer when I worked for the now defunct public radio show The Savvy Traveler. He was one of the many thoughtful travel writers we interviewed and often invoked, and I had the pleasure of cutting the tape of his interview, in fact. He said many inspiring things, among them his noting that we just have an unexplainable affinity for certain places, the same way we have an inexplicable affinity for certain people. The one to which he referred at that moment was Japan. He grew up lots of places in the world, but when he showed up in Japan one day it just felt different and more a part of him in a way he had never known. I totally got what he was saying because I've felt it before about Cuba and New Orleans, for starters.

Pico Iyer was one of the things my fellow Savvy staffers, who were all older and wiser than was I, would go on and on about, showing just how intelligent/literary/NPR-like they were. Then they would cast sideways glances across the editorial meeting at me, the 22- or 23-year-old upstart who was like, "Uh, Video Night in Kathmandu? Never read it. Moscow? Never been there. Architectural Digest? Why the hell would I subscribe to that? Who? What? Where?" etc. They really knew how to make a lowly p.a. feel ... indoctrinated. Actually, I'm mostly joking. My two good friends, the producer and assistant producer, never made me feel bad about my naivete. Only a certain other staffer who shall not be named. But he secretly respected me, too, for at least having up and traveled to Cuba.

And that brings me back to the point: Cuba and the Night. This is Pico Iyer's novel. And by novel I mean thinly veiled travel narrative. Which, as you may know unless you live under a blogless, MySpace-free, text-message-lacking rock, is exactly what I've been writing (for years): a thinly veiled travel narrative about my time in Cuba that from time to time I call a novel. So you can imagine how much fun it is to read Pico Iyer's.

My edition is ISBN 0-679-76075-X.

A fine lot of lollipops

NOW FINISHED: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

Fun fun fun. I finished it a few days ago but being back in school and going to Boston and running a 5K have all taken time away from posting. I am excited to watch the movie. I just love to read the book and then watch the movies. That is a fun way to approach life.

Of course I love the ending. I love Sam Spade and I knew we could count on him. As for Ms Thang O'Shaughnessy, whom I just knew was not going to turn out to be as good as Effie Perine had said, I thought it was great when Sam basically said "peace out, lady" even though he would have loved to keep getting cozy with her and when he said "you haven't played square with me for half an hour at a stretch since I've known you." You go, Sam. Send her off to the gallows. Anyway, it's not as if there's any shortage of ladies in Sam's life, it would seem. And then he gives her crap for playing all the men, which is funny.

Also funny is how Joel Cairo is gay. Who knew? Were we supposed to figure that out at the begining because he spent his time going to the theater? Perhaps something in the clothes he wore. But it's fun how Dashiell Hammett has to describe his actions and suggest things between the lines to tell us he's gay without telling us he's gay. It reminded me of how Willa Cather in One of Ours told us that Enid refused to have sex with Claude on their wedding night or even thereafter without ever actually saying that. Deftly handled. I love it. Go, writers of the 1920s!

But in the end, does it get any better than this:

"Jesus God! is this the first thing you guys ever stole? You're a fine lot of lollipops!" -p. 188

"The falcon cannot hear the falconer..."

Well, you had to know I was going to ask this. It's the quintessential question to pose and thoughtfully consider, isn't it, when one is reading The Maltese Falcon? The question is: what is your price? What value would an object have to have for you to be willing to sacrifice everything to get your hands on it?

It seems so ridiculous. People getting murdered, everyone wanting to get their hands on this "priceless" historical object. Millions. A huge cut for Sam Spade even -- if they're not lying, if they really would keep him alive after he handed it over. It's all so ruthless and I just always wonder, how can you ever really get any value from something when everyone just wants to kill you for having it? That, to me, would make the value go down substantially.

Yes, I'd rather be alive and safe and poorer.

I suppose some of our so-called leaders are willing to slaughter at least as many people hourly for oil as have so far been slaughtered for this falcon. And the oil does bring them billions...

"Mere anarchy loosed upon the world," indeed.

(Thanks, W.B.!)

Sam Spade is destined to win

Everyone is a little bit sketchy, a little bit off, but no one can put one over on ol' Sam Spade. He just does his thing, gets out of scrapes, and seems to pretty much always get what he wants. I kind of think no one in the book besides him will end up actually being a good guy, with the possible exception of his little secretary type friend. I think they might even be wrong about Ms Thang of the three names, one of which is Brigid O'Shaughnessy.

Still don't exactly know what the Maltese falcon is, although I know more now. But why does everyone want this bird statue? Why is it so valuable? I had to put the book aside for this week as I was ever so slightly busy starting law school. But don't worry. Sam Spade and I are still going to spend some quality time together. And then I will watch the movie.

I love how ol' Dashiell describes people. He pegs them so well. I keep trying to see if I fit into his "She was the type of woman who..." descriptions. Most recently, I've read about Spade meeting with the fat man, who contributes this:

"I do like a man that tells you right out he's looking out for himself. Don't we all? I don't trust a man that says he's not. And the man that's telling the truth when he says he's not I distrust most of all, because he's an ass and an ass that's going contrary to the laws of nature." - pp. 106-107

That last bit kind of reminds me of law school.

Sam He Is!

NOW READING: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

Simply put, Sam Spade is the shit. He's so all-knowing, so understatedly feisty, so blithely unafraid. He also seems to have something going on with every female character so far introduced. (I'm a few chapters in.) My statement on the matter remains that I am glad to be finally reading a Dashiell Hammett book. Since mysteries aren't really my thing, it will be interesting to see whether I am inspired to read more upon completion of this one.

I'm sure a lot of people have seen the movie. I, however, have not, and am glad for this since I always do like to read the book first. (But you better believe it's in my Netflix queue.)

Sam Spade is so matter-of-fact about things that shock others: Oh, we didn't believe your story, you just paid us enough for that to be all right....that sort of thing. But I think my favorite line so far comes when he describes a man's sudden disappearance: "He went like that,' Spade said, 'like a fist when you open your hand.'''

Also, you know how some people devour mysteries and fancy themselves some kind of amateur sleuth and imagine themselves solving crimes with the greatest of ease? Yeah, that's so not me. But this book does make me reminisce about San Francisco; I haven't been there in years.

Cervantes, Wilson, & Hammett

Hmm, that doesn't really have a law firm ring to it, as so many last name last name ampersand last name groupings do. I am totally thinking about law school again, excitedly so, and I am also excited about being excited, so it's just a big ol' barrel of law school preparation fun 'round these parts, but I am still reading my summer books for the moment, and here's what I have to say about that.

Don Quixote: On Monday I received much validation from my friend Carrie, who has also read many good things in her day but finds herself unable to get through Don Q. We agreed that Cervanted needs an editor and that it is a one-joke book. Said joke is hilarious the first 100 or so pages, but 500 pages in I'm yawning way more than chuckling. Of course it's understandable if he didn't have an editor, what with it being "the first modern novel" and all. But I'm just saying.

Apart from the noncommittal murmurings of a few, I've received basically one strong vote for finishing the book and one strong vote against. So, no mandate. Oh, and I've also received the response from another friend (who loves her some Don Q), "You're reading the wrong translation!" That's kind of like the Ralph Nader vote. What to do, what to do.

The Able McLaughlins: Meanwhile, the other week as I waited for Brian to be ready to read Dashiell Hammett I picked up an old Pulitzer Prize-winner (love me some Pulitzer-winning books), The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson. I will probably take that with me to New York this week, along with the Q, and see how I feel.

Because the book I'm actually reading - today, tomorrow, and surely to finish this weekend - is The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. Hurrah! I am so excited to be reading this. It goes quickly and is not long. Sam Spade...you hear this name so much ambling through our society, but you may have never read him. As promised, so far the prose is clean and sparse and I can see where he's quite the hard-boiled detective fiction legend with his "That's the stuff" etc. Sam Spade himself so far seems complicated, despite his surface simplicity. Would he have really killed his partner so that he could marry his Iva? I'm doubting it. But we shall see how it all unfolds.

My edition of The Maltese Falcon: 0679-722645

Knight-errantry

OK, for those of you breathlessly awaiting an update (oh, it's so fun to tell myself that) I have in fact been sticking with Don Quixote, if by "sticking with" you mean "haven't thrown across the room but read fewer than a dozen pages a day and somehow suddenly discover a pressing need to read every unfinished issue of The Economist that has sat on the coffee table for weeks."

But the thing is, every time I talk about Don Q, then I find myself wanting to finish it. And, I might add, I find myself fitting into some of my friends' definitions of "literary snob" because I do kind of want to be able to say I stuck with it and didn't quit and I will fully confess that I like it when people look at the gigantic book and raise an eyebrow or two.

And yes, yes, I know I have yet to post my literary snob report. I have to do that, too.

And I really didn't want to be reading Don Q when law school year two starts. But it's apparently going to be that way.

Last night I was watching M*A*S*H Season 7 on DVD and when Hawkeye goes running off to the Panmunjeom peace talks Colonel Potter or BJ or someone refers to him as being "off playing Don Quixote."

Furthermore, there was a most intriguing bit in the book when they're hanging out with the Moor-who-wants-to-be-a-Christian lady where I see the origins of the term "Al Qaeda"...creepy. I'll post that next. I don't have the book with me at the moment. And I have to run to go catch the commuter rail.

Well, Don, I guess we're stuck together for a little while...

My friend Kim said the following. She did not post it here as a comment, but I believe that is because she forgot her Blogger password or something. Anyway, she said:

"1. It is the first modern Western novel - and by that I don't mean the genre put forth by Louis L'Amour. 2. It is the cornerstone of Spanish literature - which only matters if you're reading it in Spanish, I suppose...are you? Finish the fucker. Regards, Kim"

All righty then.
For what it's worth, I'm on page four hundred something, and it's getting a little better again.

Quixote Query

NOW FINISHED: Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain
ANNUAL BIG BOOK I'M NOW READING(!): Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
NEXT UP FOR A-TO-Z PROJECT(someday): The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

So I'm on page 368 of Don Quixote and here's the thing. I'm not really sure I like it. It's long, and long-winded. And, it's kind of a one-joke book. That joke was really, really funny for the first 90 or so pages. Laugh-out-loud-on-the-bus funny. But now it's really dragging along. This is true even when I read 125 pages in one day, such as yesterday while I worked my stupefyingly boring convention temp job.

I don't like giving up on a book before I finish it. I really don't. (Take that, Harry Potter!) But I'm kind of over it, and there's so much else I want to read. I always give a normal book at least 100 pages, so maybe with a monster such as this giving it 368 pages counts.

But what I really want to count is this: your votes. Should I keep reading it, or not?

And for those of you who like Don Q - without spoiling, just in case - why? And how long do I have to wait to love it?

Is he - one of us?

NOW FINISHED: One of Ours by Willa Cather
NEXT UP FOR A-TO-Z PROJECT: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
ANNUAL BIG BOOK I'M BLOWING OFF: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
BOOK I WILL READ NEXT, FURTHER PROLONGING THE BLOWING OFF OF DON Q: Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain

So I finished One of Ours, and I am happy to report that once I got past page 100 it started to get really good, so I am glad I stuck with it. Not that I could have done otherwise, because Pulitzer=I read it. However, it really was kind of blah-blah-blah on the prairie and got exciting only once Claude married his silly Prohibition-thumpin' prairie girlfriend and then set off for France to be a soldier in World War I. There was a lot of grappling with the meaning of life, death, war and the like. The end, though, was strange. So my overall report is that it's a great book from about pages 120-365. (out of 371)

And by the way, no, I'm not entirely sure the answer to "one of our" - what, exactly? Quick, somebody call Umberto!

Coming soon -- very soon: my Official Literary Snob Report!

Standings

NOW FINISHED: None To Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer
CURRENT PULITZER-WINNING INTERLOPER: One of Ours by Willa Cather
IN MIDST OF MY ANNUAL BIG BOOK: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
NEXT UP FOR A-TO-Z PROJECT: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

So, yes, I finished None To Accompany Me about a week ago but I didn't get around to posting my profound conclusions about it, especially as I spent the last few days in New York entirely distracted by a different book (that would be ...Deathly Hallows, what, you live under a rock?) and other fun things. Now I don't really remember what my profound conclusions were. Other than it was an OK book with exquisitely worded moments, I learned a bit about post-apartheid South Africa, and I have no sympathy for the cheating main character who comes to the end of her life and can't figure out why her personal accomplishments don't measure up to her political. Well, duh, maybe if you had some semblance of loyalty, commitment, and truth, you would have been able to have an amazing relationship with someone you found and loved. But no, you are too self-absorbed for that, at least in matters of the heart/bed, and your life went elsewhere and you lost your grip on it.

I'm pausing before moving on to 'H' in my A to Z Literary Blog Project, hence the throwing a Pulitzer winner in there this week. As Willa Cather goes, I'd have to say so far I like My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop better. I'm about 110 pages into One of Ours. I would never even consider not finishing it, hello, Pulitzer, but it's just OK so far. We'll see.

So, I thought this would be a good time to check in with the books I've read for my A to Z Literary Blog Project so far and see how they rank. In order from most liked to least liked, I'd say:

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
The Information by Martin Amis
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
None to Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

The top 4 are all pretty close. And far above the next two. And my Beat boy Burroughs is dead last. That book just did NOT do it for me.

Seriously, can I find a job where I just get paid to read books? Seriously? Please?

The personal is political

NOW READING: None To Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer

I remember the first time I heard that phrase bandied about, by self-professed intellectuals engaged in what we were certain was profound analysis in my life-altering Women's Literature class. Just to give you an idea, in that class we read the likes of Gloria Steinem, Toni Morrison, Laurie Colwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, Terry Tempest Williams. Some of what we read I found highly overrated if not outright dull: The Joy Luck Club, Like Water for Chocolate. At any rate, you can definitely see the idea of "the personal" being a political statement, if you like to phrase things that way, in that literary list.

But now here I am in Nobel Prize-winning Gordimer's book, and I see the deftly combined personal and political in a new light.

Of course one of the interesting things about this book is this woman's work as a social justice lawyer. I also find it interesting that when I initiated this little "literary blog project" (over winter break) I gravitated toward books about writers, whereas now I weirdly gravitate toward contemplating my lawyer self. (My other 'G' finalist was A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis.)

But after her husband leaves her, on the surface just out of the country for a little while staying with their son but really their relationship is coming to an end, she sits alone in the house drinking vodka and devouring news from newspapers, television, radio.

"The evidence of personal life was around her; but her sense was of the personal life as transitory, it is the political life that is transcendent, like art, for which, alas, she'd never had time after Bennet read wonderful poetry to her in the mountains...Politics affects and is evolved endlessly through future generations--the way people are going to live, the way they think further. She had no illusion about politics; about her part in it. People kill each other and the future looks back and asks, What for? We can see, from here, what the end would have been, anyway. And then they turn to kill each other for some other reason whose resolution could have been foreseen.
Yet there's purpose in the atempt to break the cycle? On the premise that the resolution is going to be justice? --even if it is renamed empowerment." - p. 305

How about four weddings for every funeral

NOW READING: None To Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer

Oupa, the young man who worked with Vera at the Foundation, has died. First he and Vera were both shot when attacked by the side of the road while out straying from their Foundation work although not straying like that. Oupa may be the one man in this book Vera hasn't slept with. OK, I exaggerate. Anyway, Oupa slept with someone else; he's the one who got the teenage daughter of the other couple pregnant. But now he dies from his wounds, after everyone thought they were both going to be OK.

Oupa had a wife and two children who live way out in the middle of nowhere with no phone or anything, and he never sees them as he is in the city working at the Foundation. So as Oupa lies in a coma in intensive care and Vera and other co-workers visit the hospital daily, his family members have no idea. Only when he dies does "the Soweto grape-vine" kick in and get the message to the wife. And his body is brought "home" for a funeral.

The other day my sister and I were talking about flying versus driving from Phoenix to Payson, Utah. Our mother always drives and never flies. My sister joked that my mom may never get on a plane again, that she would not even do so to go to my funeral. Well for starters, I don't think that's true. But it did make me start thinking about, among other things, how we all scramble and do what it takes to get to funerals. Example: I just went to my grandmother's wake and funeral in the middle of my first-year law school finals. Seriously? Sometimes I wonder why I did that. Wasn't the trip I made in April with my uncle, to visit my grandmother alive, actually the more important one?

I'll tell you another one. My grandfather died in the summer of 2002. It just so happened I was on a road trip from L.A. to Boston. The person with whom I road tripped and I attempted to drive from Boston out to see my grandparents in western Mass. and got lost amid a ferocious summer rain and didn't take the shortest route anyway and in the end never made it. Then a day or two later, the morning I was preparing to fly back from Boston to L.A., he died. And at that point I changed my flight home, called work, stayed an extra week in Massachusetts, and attended the funeral.

"She gets his body back. And that seems so important. The dead body?...But someone came specially--from her--to arrange the transport, the money for the funeral. All the things that distance and poverty and ---I don't know--acquiescence in the state of things? --couldn't manage before become possible when there's so little purpose left."
- p. 215

On top of my not being religious and not really needing my soul consecrated to some godlike thing, I often muse about the need for a funeral at all. I know that they are a great way for the family to gather together to comfort one another and you often see people you haven't seen in a while. But wouldn't even that be lovelier if done while we're all still alive?

"I'd have kept those beans, but our house was cursed..."

NOW READING: None To Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer

So the two couples in this book, for a grand total of four main characters, are troubled by their children. One couple's child revealed her lesbianism. The other couple's child at only 16 or 17 years old got pregnant by a slightly older married man and they made her get an abortion.

The main main character - the human rights lawyer woman who has tirelessly worked for the Foundation that has assisted the oppressed in their struggle against apartheid -- thinks it's her "fault" her daughter "became a lesbian." She thinks this because she, back in the day, cheated on her first and second husbands, and would come home from her adulterous lover to find this daughter as a teenager sitting at the table doing homework. The daughter remembers this and describes in the present day how her mother looked on those occasions in a colorful way ("f**ked out"). The mother, horrified, thinks she clearly put her daughter off of men.

Well, that's all as messed up as it sounds, but I like what this woman says about it as she discusses the situation(s) with her friend who is the father of the teenage pregnancy girl.

"I suppose we believe we're responsible for what we think has gone wrong with our children and in their judgment hasn't gone wrong at all." - p. 177

Again I say, it's lines like these that have kept me eagerly reading this book. What more can I add?

War? Fiddle-dee-dee!

NOW READING: None To Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer

If you're like me, reading this book will make you realize you know precious little about South Africa, and even less about what it's been like for people there to form a new post-apartheid society. For this reason alone, the book is worth reading. (But there's far more to it of course.) I used to hear a lot about South Africa in the news, when I was young. From CNN to U2, everyone who was anyone talked about it while we (we = the whole world, sort of) tried to end apartheid. But after that everyone kind of moved on. Although, not Hillary Clinton, I might add. Among the many places she traveled and acted diplomatically and helped people during her eight years as first lady was South Africa, where Chelsea and Nelson Mandela apparently became good friends. Love it.

Still, I would say that these days I can go for a couple years without thinking about South Africa. I'm pretty sure you do, too. Before this book, let's see, there were the handful of South African English teachers I met in the expat scene in Korea. Before that, apart from the occasional lamenting discussion when I volunteered at AIDS Action, probably had not given much thought to it since I watched Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony (A great film by the way. Netflix. Netflix. Netflix.)

One of the main characters in this Gordimer book spent time in exile and was an important underground figure in the Movement (to end apartheid). At one point he ended up as an interrogator in a prison camp where they took spies who had infiltrated the Movement on behalf of the apartheid government. So here you had these people fighting for justice and their freedom to exist in their homeland and they end up doing to these prisoner spies the exact evils that corrupt white government officers had done to them. This particular main character is trying to reconcile this, even though he is the good guy who spoke up against using torture, even on spies. But now, post-apartheid, they are back living in South Africa and his wife has a prominent elected position and this dark side of his time in exile mustn't be revealed.

"Ashamed, even though he'd finally got himself out of the place, refused to carry on there. Refused, yet understood why others could do the terrible things they did; she was a woman after all, she could understand revolution but she didn't understand war." - p. 129

Oh yes, I like that very much. This is why I like this book. The emotional flashing back and forth of the other main character (the main main character) among her various lovers is a little tiresome--will she find out who she is? blah blah blah. But passages like the one above, which come about frequently in this novel, stop me in my tracks. I do believe that's me--all set for a revolution, but I just don't understand war.

Academia

NOW READING: None To Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer

I didn't really know what to expect going in to this book. She is definitely an author of whom I had no real idea, no real feel for the work, beyond that she's revered and prize-winning. Well, the book is quite serious in tone and very emotional-novel-like, but it also throws in observations that reveal a kind of wit under her surface. Example:

"Bennet Stark carved wood and modelled clay but while recognition for his work in this vocation seemed long in coming had had to make use of a conventional degree he had earned when too young to know what he wanted to do. Bennet Stark was known, behind his back at the Department of English in the university where he worked, as Our Male Lead; as if he were responsible for his looks and the mixture of resentment and admiration these aroused. From the point of view of advancement in an academic community it's a bad sign to have some advantage that is simply a gift of nature, not earned and not attainable for others by any amount of hard work, lobbying or toadying." - p. 19

I love it. First of all, I empathize with the artist/academic debate. As I have amply pointed out in these here blog pages, why should we have to choose? Why can't we be creators and nerdy professors holed up reading and researching? Not that I want to spend my life researching, I'm realizing more each day. But say someone such as Bennet does want that. Why can't he be both? And more things besides? I like how she points out we earn our degrees when we're too young to know what we want to do (with them). Although, do we ever know that? I'd imagine not. Or if we do know, does it come to us suddenly, even a few years after earning a degree, in some fiery epiphanic burst? I'd even more imagine not.

Secondly, how funny about stuffy academia! How dare he be good-looking, eh!

Damn, I love me some non-traditional academics. And on that note, I must sleep now, as my research awaits me in the morning...

Solo journeys

NOW READING: None to Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer
ISBN: 014-025039-5

And I have lots and lots to say about it, only right now I'm tired and going to go to sleep instead. It's been a long (but fantastic!) week. Yes, I am aware that it is Monday, and those of you in traditional working lifestyles are probably thinking, "Um, hello, it's the beginning of a week." But I just meant the past seven days. That kind of week.

Nadine Gordimer. Nobel Prize winner. And I'm already on page 218 (out of 324) so I'm apparently not reading this one at the glacial pace I've read the last few. At first the book made me angry, because I thought it was asking me to sympathize with a cheater, but now I think it might not be asking me that. Anyway, I'm off to dream about it. I'll be back, with profound thoughts in tow.

The Waddling Apotheosis

NOW FINISHED: A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

For one thing about the waning pages of this book, if the final chapters' Krishna ceremonies, temples, scampering gods, and riverboat rides are rendered on film in the same dreamy and somewhat convoluted way they are in the book, then I shall wonder if said movie isn't best enjoyed while chemically enhanced? At any rate, the whole last section of the book, "Temple," is definitely denouement to the thoroughly enjoyable and terribly climactic resolution of "Caves." But you also find out good stuff in the end. And you get to spend a little time with Ralph, who strikes me as loopy but likable.

And in the very very end, I am rather impressed by the prescient E.M. Forster. Although he probably wasn't alone among British who had done India time in saying the English empire would simply have to go at some point. But it's oh-so-interesting to read his 1924 words on this inevitability.

It is further interesting to note (as is noted throughout the book) how "India" is a conglomeration of so many states, regions, religions, identities...

"Then he shouted: 'India shall be a nation! No foreigners of any sort! Hindu and Moslem and Sikh and all shall be one!...'
India a nation! What an apotheosis! Last comer to the drab nineteenth century sisterhood! Waddling in at this hour of the world to take her seat! She, whose only peer was the Holy Roman Empire..." - p. 361

Still, he holds out hope that we can all be friends.

I think my next project should be finding what E.M. Forster had to say 20-25 years later. Please tell me someone thought to ask him? And to write down his words?

Mishandled affairs

NOW READING (and nearly done!): A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

"Sir Gilbert, though not an enlightened man, held enlightened opinions." - p. 287

How brilliant is that quote! This guy basically waltzes in to the "decomposition of the Marabar" post-trial, post-mistakes, post-break-ups, as everyone attempts to move on. Whatever that means. After all, Aziz' life is ruined, but then again one could make a strong case that the occupying British had ruined his life either way. Not to mention the fact that his next action is to display a remarkable tenacity in clinging to the completely false notion that Fielding had ulterior motives or anything other than the jolly good Fielding motives we thought he had.

I really like the statement about Sir Gilbert, holding all the right opinions, waltzing in to wonder why we can't all just get along and "deplore racial prejudice" the way that he does. But before you start getting all up in a snit about "bleeding heart liberals" or some such nonsense, just think about the alternative. (Commuting Libby's sentence, anyone? I think I prefer at least the pretense of enlightenment.)