Alcohol and ancient Greeks

now reading: Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron

And don't those two things go so well together?

Well, there is no shortage of alcohol in this book as one of our main characters, Milton Loftis, is totally lost in whiskey and his drinking pretty much ruins his family. Well, that and his betrayal and his just general inability to be good and/or deal with reality. But I really relate to him sometimes on the alcohol.

"At the age of fifty he was beginning to discover, with a sense of panic, that his whole life had been in the nature of a hangover, with faintly unpleasant pleasures being atoned for by the dull unalleviated pain of guilt. Had he the solace of knowing that he was an alcoholic, things would have been brighter, because he had read somewhere that alcoholism was a disease; but he was not, he assured himself, alcoholic, only self-indulgent, and his disease, whatever it was, resided in shadier corners of his soul -- where decisions were reached not through reason but by rationalization, and where a thin membranous growth of selfishness always seemed to prevent his decent motives from becoming happy actions." -- pp. 152-153

Of course that obviously doesn't describe me, right? Everybody knows I'm not fifty.

Also interesting to consider is that Styron later wrote a memoir about his descent into depression. And we all know about how many of us self-medicate with alcohol, etc. Not that I think that's any worse than big-pharma-medicating, but I digress. I still don't really care for the memoir genre, but the fact that Styron is a good writer, that he wrote Darkness Visible late in an accomplished life and actually had something to remember in his memoir, plus now the idea that it might contain some insight into grappling with our good friend Al(cohol), make me want to maybe check out that book, too.

This also makes thinks about the whole creative genius/madness issue again, and makes me sad to again think about other writers who haven't been able to write about and/or work through their depression, notably in the last year David Foster Wallace, who hanged himself.

Meanwhile, speaking of writers who allude to all kinds of obscure things, Styron totally busts out this reference, in the middle of talking about Milton's wife's counseling sessions with Carey, their minister:

"Then at times they would talk of Milton, of the sad vanishing of love and passion, and why, Carey explained, using Diotima's discourse as a point of departure, it was necessary, after the falling away of years and the dissolution of the object of love on earth, to search for the lasting, the greater, the eternal love." --p.142

I mean, really? "Oh, you know, just talking to the minister about love, marital strife, and Diotima's infinite wisdom." Hello, had to look that one up. Sometimes I feel woefully ignorant about my ancient Greeks. And then I am sad.

So what this has all taught me is that I clearly need to spend less time fretting about law school and more time reading great novels such as Styron's, studying my classics, and pondering alcohol. Which I will now go do at the bar where we are watching Michigan State in the National Championship game. Hmmm, and I just read the chapter where Loftis really screws up by getting all sloppy drunk and going to the big, exciting Virginia football game in search of his daughter/a friend/elusive happiness while his other, handicapped daughter is dying in the hospital down the street ... what are you trying to say, Styron?

Southity South

now reading: Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron

This book has spoken to me no fewer than two times. To begin, we have the experience of leaving home. This is something I ponder a lot, particularly now that I've been away from Arizona almost as long as I was there. There are still days, such as today in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden as we walked into the desert display, when I get kind of gobsmacked by how much more sense my desert home makes to me than other places. Like New York. Then again, it's spring, and the Northeast never makes sense to me in the bi-polar springtime. I yearn for the Southwest in the spring more than any other season. However, I do know that the South is nice in spring, which brings me back to my point: Styron, the South, the sense of place and who we are.

"You go North -- you become expatriated, exiled. You reach out for the first symbol that completes your apostasy -- you become a Communist or a social worker or you marry a Jew. In all good faith, too, yearning to repudiate the wrong you've grown up with, only to find that embracing these things you become doubly exiled. Two losts don't make a found." -- p. 74

So William Styron gets it. Clearly. He's a great writer, and he has a sensibility that I really like. Next, how about divinity?

"...she thought of God -- painfully -- it was beyond reflection, like trying to picture your remotest ancestor. Who is He?" -- p. 140

That's fun, too. I just like how he puts things like that. I also like being plunged into his story and his Southern setting, replete with mimosas, sycamores, mosquitoes, country club dances, and sultry nights. But I really like the way he grasps what happens to you when you go to a new place.

Ready to 'T' off

now reading: Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron

While I am still cruising along in my 'S' author, it IS spring break and I do have a a lot of time to read seeing as we're too broke to go anywhere. That means I will probably finish 'S' shortly, and I'm having some trouble selecting a 'T' author! The usual rules apply: I'm reading a novel by an author whose works I have not previously read (eliminating, among others, Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Amy Tan whom I wouldn't want to read again anyway), and I prefer the author to be at least as famous as his/her book(s) and not have just one mega-famous book (I'm using that to eliminate Thackeray's Vanity Fair, just like Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was out).

Therefore, I do believe my choices have been narrowed to:

Hunter S. Thompson -- and if so, The Rum Diary or the more obvious Fear and Loathing..., which I've been meaning to read for years?
Anthony Trollope -- and if so, which one?
Ivan Turgenev -- I do love me some Russian literature. Did you know Fathers and Sons is actually literally Fathers and Children in Russian? I just learned that today.

Help!

Thanks.

Darkness

now finished: An Essay on Crimes and Punishments by Cesare Beccaria
now reading: Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron

So, I read a random book between 'R' and 'S' and while it may sound like a law school thing it actually wasn't. I first became inspired to read Beccaria's important little treatise (it's not long, really) when I read the excellent Voltaire in Exile a few years ago, back in Cambridge, Mass. Voltaire, as pretty much anyone knows who has ever been near me while I think a literary thought, is one of my all-time favorite people and his Candide is my favorite book: the perfect blend of sarcasm, humor, intelligence, zaniness, and deep thought. Anyway, reading all about Voltaire during his time in exile and his epiphany about human rights I discovered that he is not only a literary and philosophical hero but a humanitarian thinking human rightsy hero, too ("Ecrasez l'infame!") The Italian Beccaria's widely published and praised essay influenced Voltaire, and some editions of it were published with an intro by Voltaire or apparently even with Voltaire's name on it when they didn't know at first who the anonymous author was. (Beccaria kept it on the down low at first that it was his work because of his aristocratic family and whatnot, but it turned out the government liked his treatise so it was okay in the end.)

What the essay/short book does is deliver a page or two of thoughts on many, many topics related to criminal justice such as laws, confessions, the death penalty, sanctuary, torture. Frankly, I want to quote his entire torture chapter word for word for all to see; he logically proves why it's no good. I knew I would be very interested to read this ever since I bought it a few years ago, and I'm glad I finally read it. It also has the uncanny effect of making me wonder (AGAIN) if I shouldn't have done a two-year master's in philosophy or history or something instead of law school. But I recall that there weren't a lot of M.A. options for Philosophy, when I looked into it during those aimless twentysomething years of mine; you pretty much had to get a PhD. Hmmm...

Anyway, now it's back to the literary blog project. By the way, I am so senioritised about school it's not even funny. I have stopped caring about whether I "should be" reading something else, and I am considering school and all its attendant work a three-days-a-week job, with the rest of my time available for reading novels if I so choose -- plus figuring out what to do with my life.

So, 'S.' William Styron. I've always been intrigued and I chose to go with his first novel instead of his Pulitzer-winning The Confessions of Nat Turner because I will read that anyway (since it won a Pulitzer) and I had a feeling I'll want to read more than one of his. (Although I took the same approach to Normam Mailer and was really not that impressed with The Naked and the Dead...or at least, not as impressed as I wanted to be.) I also opted to not read Sophie's Choice just yet, partly because I've seen the film. And even as I type that I know it's so terrible. Poor authors whose books get made into films.

Lie Down in Darkness is so far so good. He's obviously a very talented writer and about 100 pages in I am getting caught up in this Southern family, the various characters, the plush country club, the shacks on the edge of the town, the train, the hearse, the servants, and a lot of repressed emotion amidst it all. It isn't luxurious slow moving epic, just a really novel-y novel, taking its time to introduce you to the characters but doing so through both flashbacks and their interactions with one another. So far I like it.

I am also rather intrigued that his late-in-life memoir about depression was called Darkness Visible. Darkness can so clearly be so many things.

Rush, die

NOW FINISHED: The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Salman's last name is made up of two verbs. That's fun. So, I finished his book and I still feel pretty much the same way about it as I have this whole time: he's a good writer, it's basically interesting, it's weird, fanciful things happen, and I'm certain these allusions and wordplay and characters would mean more to me if I knew/cared anything about Islam, etc.

For all the hullabaloo about this book's blasphemy, it's not particularly anti- anything, although once in a while somebody calls out religion, like near the end when Sisodia says, "Fact is...religious faith, which encodes the highest aspirations of human race, is now, in our country, the servant of lowest instincts, and God is the creature of evil." That's certainly appropriate for the U.S., too. (note: that chracter stutters, but I wrote the quote from page 533 normally, instead of "cococountry" etc.)

Then again, I guess the pilgrimage to Mecca via the sea, which they expect to part and which most believe to have parted, even though bodies wash up ashore when they drown because the sea has not in fact parted, is supposed to be making fun of religious zealots a bit ... but, duh. I guess you just have to be a devout believer in some dumb crap to get your feathers ruffled when people make fun of devout believers in dumb crap.

I think the line that has most stuck with me of this entire book is what Alicja says to her daughter Alleluia Cone:

"Alicja at first offered little more than world-weariness. 'So a woman's life-plans are being smothered by a man's,' she said, not unkindly. 'So welcome to your gender.'" -- p. 358

That was funny/true. I guess a lot of the book is funny/true. The end was riveting: I definitely wanted to power through the last 100 or so pages and see what was going to happen. All in all it's worth a read and totally not worth a fatwa.

Everyone jump upon the L train

I'm still waiting for someone to say something to me as I read The Satanic Verses on the subway or bus in New York City. I look around at the diverse crowds to see if they notice me reading it -- because I always spy on what other passengers are reading -- and only half-jokingly wonder if anyone wants to say something to me about it. So far all I've had were a couple people across from me on the L train into Manhattan once who started talking to each other about it, instead of me. I heard the 30-ish girl tell her twentysomething guy friend, "No, and Cat Stevens like totally said, 'He should die,' like, he completely said he should die because of the fatwa."

She refers, of course, to when the artist formerly still known to me as Cat Stevens was widely, famously quoted as "supporting" the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for writing the book. Having now read a bit more about it, I think I understand what Cat Stevens, fairly new to Islam at the time, was trying to say: that blasphemy is, under Islamic law, a sin punishable by death. I think he was trying to qualify his statement a lot that if he were in an Islamic state bound by that law in that court then he would be bound to carry out the sentence, but it still didn't (doesn't) sit well, particularly with those of us who thought Cat Stevens would be on the side of goodness and non-violence in all things. He probably shouldn't have said anything at all; I think he still gets asked about it and tries to say it was a media-induced frenzy.

Frankly, the worst fallout for me personally was that after that happened 10,000 Maniacs removed their cover of "Peace Train" from their album In My Tribe and from then on it was sold with one less track and then when I wanted to replace my In My Tribe cassette with a CD it took forever to find online an old copy that included "Peace Train," and I had to pay like $40 for the CD (hello, this was 1995, pre-Napster, even), and so, yeah. Plus Natalie Merchant has since refused to sing it in concert. Good for her, but bad for those of us who'd love to hear it. It's certainly more sensible than Indigo Girls refusing to ever again play "Nashville" live, though. At least Nashville didn't advocate killing anybody. Unless you count all the God-told-me-to-go-to-war-in-Iraq nonsense songs in popular country these last few years. Which, ugh.

ANYWAY. About the book. I'm on page 433, closing in on an ending. It's such a mish-mash of peoples, although at least all the little bits are interesting. I'm not particularly moved or wowed, but it's solid. Worth a read -- particularly if you want to show off to your literary friends. (Joke, okay.) I don't suppose you can really start any trouble by reading it, as long as you're not in a mosque or Iran, although I guess back in the day you couldn't have it in, like, Malaysia or somewhere either so any hipster backpackers carrying it under one arm with Lonely Planet tucked under the other could have been majorly screwed.

My favorite part of the last couple dozen pages was a rumination on how Machiavelli is misunderstood. Saladin Chamcha, the sometimes devil character, reminds himself there are lessons to be learned from Niccolo Machiavelli:

"...a wronged man, his name...a synonym for evil; whereas in fact his staunch republicanism had earned him the rack, upon which he survived, was it three turns of the wheel?...if Niccolo could survive such tribulation and live to write that perhaps embittered, perhaps sardonic parody of the sycophantic mirror-of-princes literature..." (p. 415)

I love it! No one ever seems to agree with me that Machiavelli was just messing with us. Other parts I have recently enjoyed include all the Mount Everest talk and analogies (I like Everest things), including the character Alleluia Cone who climbs Everest, sees dead people, and then occasionally sees them in London, too. I also really liked the twelve-women-in-the-brothel part. I guess that might also be one of the blaspheming parts, comparing Mohammad's twelve wives to the twelve ladies of the evening? But...it was so cleverly done. And it called him out on his polygamy.

Well, this is definitely a literary book, with allusions to Shakespeare, Islam, and all kinds of things, and I like it, although I'm not backing away from calling it weird just yet. Meanwhile, it's almost time to pick an 'S' author!

Man-made

NOW READING: The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

I've just been humming along contentedly reading The Satanic Verses, except when taking time out to do things like take gigantic lawyer ethics exams for hours on a random Saturday. I'm just about halfway through and I have yet to find anything worth getting Muslims all in a snit, but then, I don't really pretend to understand what goes on in the heads of those who believe religion justifies violence.

So, my relationship with reading is interesting. I can't believe in only four and a half months I will again be able to read only what I want when I want ... unless of course I get some job that assigns reading to me, but that would require me to get a job so I'm not holding my breath on that one.

The Satanic Verses has a lot of weird characters running around doing a lot of weird things. It's pleasant enough, but I haven't really fallen in love with it. Every once in a while, though, there's a sentence or phrase that Rushdie puts SO WELL. He is a good writer, and I can get behind that. I may even be surprised and satisfied in the end when these characters come to some sort of resolution, if they do. I've been told I should also read Midnight's Children. We'll see.

The main weird thing that happens in this book is with each new scene you have to redetermine where and when you are. (Much like an episode of Lost, these days.) The funny thing is that Rushdie is using all these characters who I vaguely recognize are characters from the mythology of Islam --for example, I got that Mahound was Mohammed, which was apparently lost on some British reviewers when the book came out -- and sometimes I just have NO idea what is going on with them. It makes me wonder how differently the book resonates with people who have grown up with/know about the characters in the Islam story.

Today is a Jewish holiday. Apparently. I guess it's not high and holy enough for us to have the day off, but "Furim" (?) involves dressing up and giving out treats. Like a spring Hallowe'en? I'm not sure; when I tried asking some classmates why they dress up the reply was, "For the holiday." Like pulling teeth, people. Anyway, in one particular class this afternoon even the professor was dressed up, and he brought cookies. Good enough for me.

So here's the point. It just so happens that this class deals with the topic of negotiation, and my professor as part of today's discussion showed a few film clips, featuring very different looks at negotiation, from Life of Brian, Erin Brockovich, and Five Easy Pieces ("I want you to hold it between your knees!") As he brought up the Life of Brian clip from the computer, he was saying, "I don't know who this guy is supposed to be; he's running away from the Romans..." And I may be reading too much into this, but first of all I thought that it was odd that someone would show a clip from a movie JUST for the negotiation lesson (trying to get Brian to haggle in the market when he just wants to pay and continue outrunning the Roman centurions) while having no idea what the film is about. I mean, wouldn't you become at least a tiny bit curious what the movie was, even if the scene was brought to your attention by a colleague in an academic seminar or something? Wouldn't you at least look it up on Wikipedia or Netflix?

Secondly, though, I thought it seemed like an almost willful not knowing what the plot was. Here's where what may be my bias comes in: as I said, I could be reading too much into it, and by all accounts I am the one Out of My Element on Long Island asking "What holiday? Why are you dressing up? Cookies, really?" all day, and I can appreciate the subversive satisfaction to be felt by someone Jewish and devout in the face of my ignorance when they later demonstrate ignorance of anything Christ-related that many of us raised in a predominantly somewhat-Christian society take for granted ... but I still think it's weird to not have looked up the plot of the movie at ALL, and weird to claim not to know what's going on at ALL in that scene. Oh well.

The point of all these musings is that ... hmmm, I'm not sure what my point is. I guess it's that Life of Brian was controversial, making light of Jesus and all. Still, I'm told that blasphemy is a far more egregious "sin" in Islamic society than the West can understand, hence the Satanic Verses fatwa. It's supposed to be more like the revulsion and lack of sympathy we feel for child molesters, that in Islamic society they wouldn't feel bad to see a blasphemer die. THAT is messed up, I say. Get. Over. It. I've never understood, in any religion, why people think their gods and prophets are not strong enough to endure a little satire.

So, what's the big deal?

NOW READING: The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

This is kind of like one of those moments when you have been hearing so much about something for so long that it could not possibly be as fantastic/scary/earth-shattering as it has been built up to be by the sheer amount of upbuilding. You know, like Amelie...The Blair Witch Project...The Catcher in the Rye...(ahem)Harry Potter... I'll even give it up to my peeps (of which I have several) who have proudly made it through three decades or more without seeing It's A Wonderful Life. That film IS wonderful, but you're right: it will never live up to all you have heard about it. At this point, it simply can't.

However, I would like to point out that this is only kind of like one of those moments. Because the work of art of which I now partake, the work of art about which I have heard so much for twenty years, the truly big famous deal, is not just big and famous and built up subjectively, and it is not a mere subject of enthusiastic acclaim, but it also was, like, objectively a big deal. It sent Salman Rushdie into freakin' hiding! A "fatwa" was issued against him, and all those involved in the publishing of the book. In fact, I recently learned, several of the translators and publishers in countries around the world were attacked and while some survived assassination attempts, the translator in Japan WAS stabbed to death.

Perhaps more shocking: the fatwa is still in place. If it weren't so murderous and wrong, it would just be pathetic. You want to kill someone for writing a book? Give me a break!!! Only it's not pathetic, because it's a threat to people's lives.

Now, I will (obviously) go on the record as saying that any such death threat to anyone for simply writing anything is so clearly unacceptable it's not even up for debate.

But my goodness, when I finally get around to reading the book I would at least expect there to be something to it. Something shocking, let's say. Something blasphemous and juicy. Something that could at least purport to try to pretend to be "worth it."

Yeah, not so much. It's kind of a silly, whimsical story. I'm 150 pages into it. As a book it's somewhere between average and good, but I am definitely carried along in reading by my fascination that this? THIS?! is what has motivated some twisted people on this planet to be violent. I just can't believe they actually feel justified in doing so.

I was already a huge supporter of Salman Rushdie, just for the idiocy of the whole thing against him. But now I'm reading this and all I can say is -- really, though?

Let's eat!

NOW FINISHED: Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
NOW READING: The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

Ishmael, for all its silly contrived gorilla-ness, made me seriously consider a thing or two. Among the thing(s) was the very notion of agriculture. As he interrogates the narrator, Ishmael opens our eyes to the fact that everything we've grown up learning about the agricultural revolution is the mythology of our culture. We learn about the cradles of 'civilization' as the beginning of it all. But of all of what? There were peoples before that, and some peoples continued living the old ways without dominating the land for years after that. There are even some such peoples around today, though fewer and farther between, and we civilized folk tend to call them "primitive."

Now, one of the things that Ishmael helps the narrator realize is that we defy the laws of nature with our agriculture. As opposed to hunting and gathering, if you will, we have ceased accepting that this or that food will be available in limited amounts, and we store it up and more importantly we insist that we have X amount available for ourselves at all times. Do you ever see the lion kill more than one gazelle, putting some aside for tomorrow?

Whether you are into the touchy-feely earthy-crunchy stuff or not, it is interesting to ponder agriculture. A few days after I finished Ishmael, Brian and I were eating dinner at our neighborhood Peruvian restaurant and pondering many things and he was talking about Anthony Bourdain, whom we love to watch (who doesn't love Anthony Bourdain?) Brian was saying how much he loves the way Bourdain gets at the heart of a culture by eating the food there, and it suddenly dawned on me in that way things will dawn on you when you are munching and pondering things, that that's the whole point. The whole point of Ishmael and of us. Agri-culture. Field cultivation. Our whole concept of "culture" IS a concept of dominance, but also creation. It's as if producing food gave us cultures, and that is in fact why each culture has representative food. Meanwhile, the "primitive" peoples are handing down over the millennia the ways of their ancestors and all kinds of wisdom and guidance about the right way to live. Did we lose that wisdom by turning the focus to food? Is it possible to pass down both?

No, I ain't gonna work on the farm no more...

NOW READING: Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

I should be saying a lot more about Ishmael. It's really grown on me. But not in a normal novel way. I give Quinn an A+ for his Philosophy 101 essay but I still don't really understand how (let alone why) he decided to make a "novel" out of it. It is barely, barely, barely a story. And there are barely characters. Just dude and Ishmael, with the occasional forced interaction with a janitor or carnival roustabout or something.

But I get excited about my periodic checking in! I look forward to my little nightly gorilla lesson. I am almost finished with the book, actually, and I'm eager to see what dramatic little exhortation will be used to send the reader back out to the world.

Most recently, Ishmael has taught the narrator and me about how the story of our civilization, our post-agricultural revolution civilization(s), were destined to fail. Ishmael has also taught us that we are totally misguided in how we look to the story of Adam and Eve as the meant-to-be dawn of our culture, when it is really more of a cautionary tale about how Adam/Cain/dominion slays the pastoral lifestyle... In fact, I have a whole deep thought to share about the meaning of food in culture, and of agriculture. But I'm tired tonight so I might save that for tomorrow. Tonight, it's straight from the gorilla's mouth.

"Whenever a Taker couple talk about how wonderful it would be to have a big family, they're reenacting the scene beside the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They're saying to themselves, 'Of course it's our right to apportion life on this planet as we please. Why stop at four kids or six? We can have fifteen if we like. All we have to do is plow under another few hundred acres of rain forest -- and who cares if a dozen other species disappear as a result?"
--page 181

Funny, just today I was reading octuplets' mother news and caught a clip of Jon & Kate Plus 8...

There is only one Ishmael

Well, actually, I guess there are two. But I mean only one post-biblical literary Ishmael. In Moby Dick. I guess it's sort of funny how I just discounted the original Ish, eh?

Anyway, I am currently reading my 'Q' author. This brings me to the upstart, wanna-be Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Ishmael in this book is a gorilla. A gorilla teacher. How can a gorilla teach his pupil? Well, in this case he "talks" via a sort of telepathic communication to his earnest, ex-hippie kind of narrator.

If this is all starting to sound very new age and perhaps silly, well, it is. I've heard about this book for a while, mostly that a)some book lovers I know hated it and b)these days, some high schools are making it required reading. But only adventurous high schools. Of course both of those things did nothing to promise me it would not be very new age and perhaps silly.

I'm having novel issues with it again, as I have with some other letters (O, J...) This one strikes me as particularly not a novel, not even a thinly veiled memoir or anything. It's more like a metaphysical self-help philosophy book that Quinn makes into a novel by giving it two "characters" who have the conversation, instead of Quinn just writing his philosophy for the world to see. I'm 157 or something pages in, and the man and his instructing gorilla never go anywhere or do anything. The man leaves at night and comes back the next day for more instruction. The whole book is dialogue, nearly.

So if one can handle all that and get over the fact that 'Q' is not going to be a novel, what then does one think about Ishmael?

Well, it's a little weird. (Obviously.) But I kind of like some of its ideas: humans think they're not subject to the laws of nature, etc. Most recently, the idea that the gods had a perfectly good reason for telling man he'd "surely die" the day he tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge was pretty fun. I liked the explanation behind that. But I am still convinced as I read it that I'm secretly sitting in Philosophy 101 and not actually reading a novel.

I read a slew of reviews on Good Reads that totally ripped Ishmael up one side and down the other. I half agreed with them. The book is really kind of silly, and yet not. I am currently quite amused with myself when I think, "hmm, I'll just go off and check in with my gorilla for a little while."

Genre fiction, no less!

Hey, I read an actual book! Two, in fact! (Actual book = not a law school text.) I read two of Alafair Burke's mysteries, Judgment Calls and Dead Connection. Why, you ask? Why mystery/thriller novels in lieu of, say, the next project book? Because Ms Alafair Burke is also my Criminal Procedure professor this semester, or, I should say, was because the semester is finally OVER! I took her final the day before yesterday in fact. I justified reading her novels this month because they totally were review. She peppers them with criminal procedure issues! Take that, stuffy overworked classmates who never crack a literary spine!

Tomorrow morn I'm off to Curacao, and I'm bringing with me 'Q' - Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.

Yay!

the end of The Road

now finished: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Well, would you look at that? I almost went the entire month of November without a post to this here literary supplement! But never fear: in the nick of time, and thanks to the holiday weekend during which I did not feel guilty about picking up the novel from the bedside table instead of lugging a few law textbooks into my lap, I have just finished reading The Road.

Short answer? I love it.

Of course I have more to say than just that. But it's one of those about which it is hard to speak eloquently. The book itself is simply and elegantly written, despite being about harsh things. Or maybe because it's about harsh things. You'll surely hear a lot of people going on and on about how it's depressing, dismal, bleak, and so forth because it is about a man and a boy journeying together along the road through a post-apocalyptic, basically destroyed country. There's a lot of death. And desperation. And ashes.

But the book is so life-affirming, as these so-called "depressing" works often are. I'm not going to give away the ending, because I highly recommend it and want you to read it. I am just saying this: how can a book that contemplates death, destruction, and the real possibility of entirely destroying civilization not make a reader contemplate life and come away with a renewed sense of all that is good about your life, relationships, and communities?

I am all kinds of excited for the movie, which, unfortunately, has been delayed until next year. (It was supposed to be out this month, but needs more time in post-production.) It's such a powerful story. It's kind of weird that just last year we had Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, which was the first book of his I'd read, and which I basically read because the movie was coming out. Actually, I read half of it because the movie was coming out, and then I went back and read the second half of it to try to figure out how it ended, since the movie certainly doesn't tell you. I must say I am glad I delved deeper into McCarthy's oeuvre because I was much more impressed by The Road, but I was expecting to be thoroughly impressed because as you may know The Road won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. See, everyone loves the road - me, Oprah, the Pulitzer committee. What more do you need?

The book starts a little slowly as it draws you into this world, but you become a part of it and it's really hard to put down. I'm sure if I hadn't been obliterated by law school fatigue on any given night I would have read it in one or two sittings; it moves quickly. But there are moments when the boy or the man expresses some thought summing up all the despair and hope into one tight, worried, heartbreaking sentence and at those moments you pause, you must pause, before going on to the next page.

While it is about what would happen to the survivors as they approach the end of the world, it's much more about the relationship between the man and the boy, and what that says about all of us and how we treat each other even before we get to the end of the world.

Hitting The Road

now reading: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

As promised, after my man-it's-been-too-long feelings on Thursday, I picked up a novel Friday and read thirty pages or so while subwaying to and from my internship.

God, I love reading novels.

Of course, this is my second year in a row to read one of his books in preparation for a late-in-the-year release of a film I expect to be quite good. Last time around, No Country for Old Men didn't really do it for me. But The Road won the Pulitzer; you know how I feel about that. ( = I love reading Pulitzer Prize-winning books, for the new folks)

Its paragraphs are even shorter than the paragraphs in NCfOM. But so far I can see where a person could get intrigued early on by the compelling premise of this man and boy -- who appear to be father and son, though it's not explicitly stated yet -- wandering through a wasteland, even if one had not read a lot about it and heard the buzz and watched it sell like mad after being distinguished by the Pulitzer committee AND Oprah. I even watched that Oprah interview with McCarthy last summer because a)I like authors b)I think it's awesome that Oprah gets someone who never does interviews to do an interview. Maybe she should be vice-president. Or maybe that says something about ol' Cormac appreciating what she does for reading -- or book sales.

Time to get back in the game

A month without a post? A month without picking up a novel? Can we say "Third Year of Law School" ... sigh!

I am reading, reading, reading, but none of it is fiction. Legal fictions, maybe, which are a whole other ball of wax. (Hmm, interesting, do lay people know what a "legal fiction" is? I can't say I ever gave it much thought before I came to law school.)

Two weeks ago, upon the sudden, unexpected (by me anyway) death of David Foster Wallace I started thinking a lot about when I will get to read another book of his, now that a few months have gone by since finishing Infinite Jest. I even touched The Broom of the System in the undergrad library and read a few pages before deciding not to check it out because it's 485 pages more than I can afford to deviate from my seven-class, 17-credit law regimen.

But 'Q' awaits -- Ishmael. Furthermore, I really want (need?) to read The Road before the movie. Time is running out, apocalyptically or no.

I Survived

now finished: Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk
now reading: um...nothing. lots. law textbooks.

It was okay. It's good that I have now read Palahniuk, master weirdo. This wasn't the weirdest book I have ever read. I mean, it's no Infinite Jest. It's not even Naked Lunch. It had a coherent story, at least. But the ending was -- well, it was silly.

So, the book was all right, I suppose. I guess I just expected Palahniuk to be more literary. I am not even sure exactly what I mean by that. I also found his device of numbering backwards to be silly. The book starts with chapter 47 and ends with chapter 1, and likewise it starts on page 289. Right: an-NOY-ing. It seemed to have no point. I mean, it's not as if he tells the story backwards. He goes back to the beginning and then tells it in order. Whatever, Chuck.

Meanwhile, all those adjectives you've heard about Palahniuk, like volatile or bizarre or creepy or whatever? Yeah, not really. Just a little kooky. But the Super Bowl bit was fun.

Chuck

now reading: Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk

Don't you maybe think "Chuck" is one of those names where you sort of become a certain type of personality just by having the name? Kind of like "Tiffany" or "Butch." Well, I guess with "Butch" you have to have a certain type of personality to get the name, but with Chuck it's as if only certain Charleses can be Chucks. This despite Peppermint Patty's harassment.

I will leave aside for now the utter frustration I feel with nicknames that have lots of letters that aren't in the original name. Chuck. Jack. Peggy. Ugh. Even Jim and Bill annoy me for that reason. As opposed to, say, Kim, Jenny, Rob, and so forth. Or like if I were Elizabeth but called Beth even though at least it's contained in the full word that would freak me out, because then you have different initials sometimes. How can you live life having two different sets of initials? That's just wrong.

OK, I guess I didn't really leave that subject aside. I ranted. Coincidentally, Rant is another of Chuck's books. So, back to the subject at hand, which is Chuck.

Hmmm, I say, in response to this man. I mean, Survivor is enjoyable enough, but it is not leading me to think any great literary thoughts. Chuck Palahniuk, so far, strikes me as the guy who you're always glad comes to writing group and to whom you enjoy listening but about whose work you never have really much to say after except maybe "That was good."

And since his reputation of weirdness precedes him, I don't have much to say about the weirdness either, really.

Anyway - I'm almost done! So there's that. A few people at law school rave about Mr. Palahniuk. But they're the intellectually curious misfits, just like the people at the bookstore that raved about Palahniuk. I wonder what authors the boring law review people like?

Surviving law school

now reading: Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk
now also reading: Comparative Legal Traditions: Text and Materials by Glendon et. al.

That's right, the school year has begun. I did not quite finish Palahniuk before the dawn of Fall Semester 2008, but maybe that's because "Fall" began in the middle of freakin' summer. Worse yet, in the middle of the summer Olympics! But I have managed to still watch lots of The Games, and get organized, and even though now it's time for the reading of text after text, case after case, scholarly journal after scholarly journal, I think I will be able to finish P, Q, and R by the end of September. I already know what 'Q' and 'R' will be, too.

As for Survivor, I can maybe make the case for it being relevant to one of my classes. In Legal Decision Making for Children and Incompetent Adults (longest class title ever) we are starting off discussing autonomy in the courts and other legal and medical decisions for children and adolescents, as well as for adults' right to end their lives at the time and in the manner of their choosing. So Survivor, being partly about the Creedish religious cult who all want to kill themselves and almost all succeed, with our narrator being the last surviving member now regaling us with his tale, is maybe somewhat related. Or at least related enough for me to not feel guilty reading it while school is in session!

I say it's "partly" about that because it's equally about obsession with celebrity and how hilarious said obsession is. Palahniuk, as I knew he would, amuses me and is crazy, and this isn't even one of his darkest works. I'm two-thirds of the way through and enjoying it. I'll say more about it when I'm not watching the closing ceremonies...if law school doesn't swallow me whole...did I mention it's my final year?!

It is O-ver

now finished: The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick
now reading: Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk

I can't remember the last time I was so glad to finish a book! The Puttermesser Papers was a giant letdown. It was also the closest I have come in this literary blog project to stopping a book in the middle and choosing a different author for that letter. I even stood there in the bookstore fondling Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara. But I ended up sticking with it, partly because I was trying to get through a few more letters before school starts up again (waaaay too soon!) All I can do now is apologize to Kenzaburo Oe. (I'm sure he cares a lot.)

I can honestly say that if I were forced to reread (who would do that?) either this travesty or Burroughs' Naked Lunch I would opt for Naked Lunch. At least it's silly and ridiculous and thinks it's deep and would give me something to puzzle over as I throw it across the room. Puttermesser is just stupid. I can't even understand who likes those stories as individual stories nor who likes them gathered together masquerading as a novel.

The last bit was the worst of the entire travesty. Was that supposed to be shocking and daring, that she got raped and murdered? Ewww. It was as lame as the rest of the book.

So, I don't really like this book, see...

now reading: The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick

First of all, I'm skeptical of the use of the word "novel" to describe it, and that annoys me, because if I had wanted to read a collection of linked short stories, I would have. This even has that whole "A Novel" thing going on on the cover (which I find annoying, generally, but vindicating here) and I selected this book in lieu of some of her other books on the Borders Penn Plaza shelves because I had heard of her and wanted a NOVEL for this literary blog project. But as I mentioned last time, it appears these vignettes of Puttermesser's life were previously published separately. In three separate magazines. Some at least as early as 1982, and this book copyright 1997. I protest!

But anyway, I'm in now. Only, some of the vignettes (not, you see, chapters) are terrible. Others are just boring. The weird thing is, she can write. It's not a terrible writing style or anything (I'm looking at you, Burroughs) so I just kind of move along reading it, but it's kind of like reading a textbook: often, I come to the end of a page and haven't a clue what I just read. So, ugh, because that's thirty seconds more I have to spend re-reading and I may have wasted seven or eight minutes of my life over the course of the book.

So, what's good about it? (Thanks, Thumper.) Well, Puttermesser is a lawyer who loves literature, so she's a likable character for me. Sometimes. And Ozick is snarky about lawyers and city politics from time to time, so that's fun. I've also learned a whole lot about George Eliot, in a bizarre chapter short story in which Puttermesser marries a "younger man" age 40 who duplicates master painters' works of art while refusing to call himself a copyist (he "reenacts") and they sort of reenact George Eliot's life, because she also married a younger man after her longtime companion died. But it's weird. Not as weird as the golem bit, but weird.

In short, I just can't wait to be done and move on to another novel. Oh well, you win some, you lose some.

Oh, Thumper, I also liked the part where Puttermesser's ex-lover told her she has no feelings: "he meant that she had the habit of flushing with ideas as if they were passions" (p.44). I could see myself being accused of that. I also liked when she went to a neighbor's party three floors above her and wryly observed the cliched "New York" patter of the guy programmed to flirt sarcastically versus the other version of the patter, all about volunteer programs and poetry. "The wisecrack version and the earnest version, and all of it ego and self-regard." (p.117) Guilty as charged, I suppose.

Well that was 70 pages ago and I'm still waiting for the next interesting thing to note. SO want to be done with this book!

'O' dear

now finished: Thomas Jefferson by R.B. Bernstein
now reading: The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick

My 'O' author is weird. Apparently, Puttermesser is a character about whom Ozick wrote several sketches and stories, some of which were previously published in The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly before she gathered them into this novel. Well, ugh, but I got past that as I was enjoying the first bit about this lawyer in her thirties who is smart and likes to be intellectual even if her strange-thinking, book-and-philosophy-loving side rubs some of the lawyer and city politics schmoozing people the wrong way.

But then around 40 pages in suddenly it got into some weird stuff. And by weird, I mean Jewish magical realism. When Joe and Jodi and I used to joke about our literary "walls" (I famously have one with sigh-fi) beyond which it is hard for us to get -- to keep reading -- to not get annoyed at the thought of a certain thing interrupting our novels. Joe kind of has a wall with South American things and I think the magical realism is part of it. A lot of people have that wall; I think that's a pretty reasonable wall. I don't totally have it because I do like me some Garcia Marquez and Allende, but, for example, Like Water for Chocolate? NO thanks.

However, I also have a kind of Jewishness literary wall. I'm almost terrified to write this because it will sound so -- well, anti-Semitic I guess. But it's really not. Anyone who understands the wall knows it's not anti- at all. Because it has nothing to do with actual Judaism or Jews. It's like a literary thing. A thing about fictional happenings. Joe, where are you?! Help me out here! It would never happen reading history. It's a literary wall. An example of my "Jewishness wall" would be when I'm reading Erica Jong's Fear of Flying and going along nicely relating to her and all of a sudden she brings up out of nowhere some weird reference and I have to puzzle through a paragraph or two and then I finally realize I'm not totally getting it because she's alluding to something insidery and then I get annoyed. I am totally not explaining this well, so if anyone wants to accuse me of racism just sit down and talk to me about books first so I can suss out your literary wall and then we will understand each other.

My point (and oh, do I have one) is that the Jewish magical realism was a bit too much for me. A wall stacked upon a wall-let, if you will. All of a sudden Puttermesser has created a golem. And I do mean all of a sudden; the story was going along quite nicely realistically, with civil servant bureaucracy and whatnot. And then it got all Jewish mystical rabbi what-are-you-talking-about creating a golem who is breathed to life with the intoning of aleph, bet, some other Hebrew letters... I don't know, it was weird. Is weird.

But, it's my 'O,' so I keep reading.

Down in the valley, the valley so low

now finished: McTeague by Frank Norris
now reading: Thomas Jefferson by R.B. Bernstein

Well, I really liked the ending of McTeague. Which means this blog post will probably be pretty spoileriffic. You have been warned.

First of all, we know I'm a fan of the desert, the stark heat, the intensity of the land, the vast spaces, and so on. So for the book to culminate in a Death Valley death scene totally works for me. But there you are with McTeague and Marcus, the former friends, killing themselves in the process of trying to beat each other, and with Marcus' last breath he clicks the handcuffs onto McTeague's wrist so that McTeague is now chained to his fate and doomed to die there as well. All the while the canary in its cage twitters feebly. What a scene! What a great ending in the annals of literature! We are chained to our fate and the doom we create. Our violence and greed for the money end up making us prisoners. Nature will kick our ass when we get so caught up in material society. But only after our fear and guilt and past misdeeds that haunt us drive us away from the real treasures -- both gold and wife -- that we've found. And so on.

A lot of book endings suck. I don't mean to criticize; as a writer I, too, find endings difficult. But it's so wonderful when you get to a glorious ending, a fully realized vision, such as that of McTeague. And just like the scenes in San Francisco, the ending chapters' trek down through California, prospecting for gold in them thar hills, and finally death in the alkali sands are all so vividly written.

Frank Norris is so interesting to me now. He had his whole literary career in a life of thirty-two years. !!! He traveled, dabbled in art, sucked at math (perhaps to spite his businessman father), played hard, made himself a legacy in his Berkeley fraternity...he's really interesting. I've been reading the intro to the book (which I can never read until after in novels, for fear of plot spoilers) and seeing all the real life influences that led him to create McTeague. So there is that "thinly veiled memoir" element, but in more of a "write what you know" way, and his writing is honest and literary. He's clever. I may seek out The Octopus, too, which is the book I'd always heard of by him.

Speaking of my desert love, I was intrigued as he tries to make his escape to Mexico when some people he meets think he's trying to escape a crime he committed and thus "trying to get down to Arizona." It's so interesting to think of what people thought of Arizona in 1899, when it was still a territory and not very populated. I like finding references to it and finding its place in people's minds back in the day. (The movie In Old Arizona was great for that, too.)

And who wouldn't love this quote, from page 280 of my edition? (ISBN: 014-0187694)

"'No, no,' Trina had exclaimed, when the dentist had repeated this advice to her. 'No, no, don't go near the law courts. I know them. The lawyers take all your money, and you lose your case. We're bad off as it is, without lawing about it.'"

Awesome!

Oh, Trina. Seriously -- the book is pretty horrifying. I read that Norris had read about a real life instance of an estranged, drunk husband murdering his wife. It's so frightening to imagine. But the horrifying reality happens in this world -- often. I mean, we never think about it, keeping it out of sight and out of mind, because it's impossible to really deal with thinking about it. Imagining being killed is hard enough. Imagine being killed by someone you know. Then by someone who supposedly loved you. I mean, what must it be like in those final moments? How must it be to be killed and to see and feel this person killing you? My brain hurts. My whole body hurts and shudders, actually, to think about it. It's SO creepy to try to really conceive of being killed and the life slipping out of you as you are violently pummeled. And it's SO creepy to think about how horribly some humans behave to their intimate partners.

I'm going to stop writing about it now for the same reasons we all want to stop thinking about it.

For those who are curious, no, obviously, the Thomas Jefferson is not part of my A to Z literary blog project, but part of a non-fiction project I started a couple years ago, abandoned, and to which I have now returned, in which I read a biography of each U.S. president in order to see where we went wrong. I read Joseph Ellis' His Excellency and David McCullough's John Adams. Now on to number three. I'll probably try to do a presidential bio a month among my other readings, until law school gets too intense again. I hemmed and hawed forever about which Jefferson because there's the Pulitzer-winning Dumas Malone multi-volume work about him that I will probably read someday, but maybe not as part of this all-the-presidents project which is meant to go quickly.

Dying in a pool of blood and stuff

now reading: McTeague by Frank Norris

So here's the thing. All of a sudden McTeague gets totally violent and creeptacular! It starts when Trina, his wife, becomes a liar and he becomes a violent abuser. Now, neither of those behaviors is acceptable and both are terrible in their own ways. But herein, his violence is almost like some kind of vindictive thing against her keeping the money, whereas I just want to scream at him, "It's not that she kept the money! She lied to you about it!" Then her: ugh. She's paranoid. But she's also desperate, and that is sad. And his violence is never acceptable.

But with all that, who knew how ugly and violent it could be in the end!

I was supposed to say something more profound about this but I don't remember what it was. Maybe tomorrow.

But, p.s., goooooo concertina!

If you're going to the dentist in San Francisco

now reading: McTeague by Frank Norris

Before Brian, my main concept of Frank N. was The Octopus, this perhaps because I started working in a bookstore when I lived in California and it just kind of happened that way. But then I started this little literary blog project and Brian suggested Norris for 'N' because he (Brian) loves McTeague.

So now I'm more than halfway through the tale of this big ol' bumbling dentist and his friends and neighbors and antics on San Francisco's Polk Street (not to mention at the theatre and on their picnics in Schuetzen Park). The story is written in a simple, charming fashion that I find delightful. I read that it is a Zola-esque "literary naturalism." But you know what else it reminds me of? Candide. (my favorite!) It's like the anti-Proust. But not with the dry choppiness of, say, a Hemingway. It's that easy, straightforward storytelling that can come across as "old-fashioned" but not in the stiff old flowery old-fashioned way.

He also does this thing of showing you how lover/fiancee/wife Trina's family speaks in their German accents which is funny and which for some reason I'm not finding nearly as annoying as other times when authors write a character's speech in the vernacular. D.H. Lawrence did a bit of that with Lady Chatterley's gamekeeper/lover to show how he switched back and forth between proper talk and that of his native village, not to mention everyone from Mark Twain to Toni Morrison having used it for African-American English, particularly in the South. I generally find it tiresome to read.

Am I the only one who gets annoyed by that stylistic device? It's OK in McTeague so far. Maybe because even out of the dialogue he'll write the son named August as "Owgooste" because that's how they say it and how McTeague hears it, so the book is reflective of McTeague's experience.

At any rate, the best thing about this book is the little flat with its various rooms and how all the neighbors who have apartments there come to life and have their quirks and interact.

A through M

Halfway through: that's me! I have closed the book on 'M' and begun 'N' (and even for good measure bought 'O,' but let's not get ahead of ourselves). At this time it is only fitting that I pause, reflect, look back, and rank those first thirteen books in order from favorite to hated. I have supplemented my rankings with the rating I give to each book, so where two or three books share a number-of-stars rating, the order of the list reflects which of those I have judged to be better.

This was hard to do!

(For those who don't remember the scale...
***** - Mexican food
****1/2 - Tibetan food
**** - Indian food
*** - Italian food
** - Thai food
* - Korean food)

With no further ado, then:

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote ****1/2
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster **** 1/2
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco ****
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence ****
The Information by Martin Amis ****
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick ***
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett ***
None to Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer ***
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler ***
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer **
Fear of Flying by Erica Jong **
Cuba and the Night by Pico Iyer *
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs *

OK, second half of the alphabet! Bring it on!

War is over (whether or not you want it)

now finished: The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

Well, I'm done! I know, that was fast, right? It was a long 'un (721 pages) but it moved quickly and it wasn't tiny, crammed type or anything. It just kind of moved along, like a mass market book would. (Notice how the blogger has learned to be careful about slighting genre fiction...)

So in the end it wasn't just about war. It was also about the soldiers fighting the war. And that really was all it was about, but he did pull it off, I think. You get to know the men in the platoon, and as you go along they each get a flashback dropped somewhere in the hundreds of pages, in which you learn about their pre-war lives, which illuminates their war selves, and it's pretty interesting. I will say that I did totally care about what was going to happen at the end, so that's a good book, I guess.

As I read it I could see how ol' Norman "burst onto the scene" with this, in 1948, half a century before Saving Private Ryan and still a few decades from Apocalypse Now. But i was starting to seriously question how Mailer came to be known as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, if not the greatest. Maybe when I read The Executioner's Song I'll feel differently. (And I will read that; it won a Pulitzer, after all.)

In the end he concocts this powerfully symbolic trek -- two actually, both the mountain climb and the carrying of jackass Wilson on a stretcher -- and he really brings it all together nicely.

But I just didn't have too much to say about it. It was, well, you know: about war.

Maybe tomorrow I'll share some thoughts on the pages I folded down that contained political ideas.

Meanwhile, 'N' has long been settled when Brian (who is sometimes a participant in this project) put in an early plug for Frank Norris' McTeague. Sorry, V.S. and Anais. But the question is, should 'O' be Kenzaburo Oe or John O'Hara? And if Oe, which Oe?

Next up, a ranking of the books read so far...

War vs. Buddha

now taking a break from: The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
now reading: Stealing Buddha's Dinner by Bich Minh Nguyen

Don't worry, I'm totally going to finish the 700-pager about war. I think. I'm just pausing because we were sitting around Brian's parents' living room and they had Stealing Buddha's Dinner on the shelf there and it had already intrigued me when I touched it at Borders a while back and then I picked it up and it's about a girl who immigrated from Vietnam as a baby and she grew up in Grand Rapids and she's my age so reading her memoir is like reading my own childhood as far as what happened in 1984 and how I felt about it and it's the perfect book to read on one's last day in Grand Rapids since it all takes place here and so that's why.

Of note: Mr. Mailer himself notes in the introduction to the 50th anniversary edition that The Naked and the Dead now strikes him as amateurish when he looks back. (Or, I should say, when he wrote that intro -- who knows how things strike him now, wherever he is, hanging out with George Carlin or whatever.)

As for my little Buddha book, it's not about Buddha at all except for the awesome bits where this 7-year-old Vietnamese-American girl blithely and matter-of-factly shuts down her uber-Christian friends playing in the backyards of Grand Rapids as they ramble on about being saved and she's like, "Whatever, Christianity!"

You know I'm not the biggest memoir fan, but I'm glad I dipped into this one. It's something about the my-age thing, too, of course.

I'm sure I'll return to The Naked and the Dead soon enough. Did I mention it's about war?

What I think so far

NOW READING: The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

It's about war.

Twaddling bossy impudence

now finished: Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

Like most things besought by scandal, the so-called scandalous bits of this book are SO not the point. I am really glad that the edition I bought (ISBN: 0-8021-33347) includes not only a critical analysis "introduction" (which I read after, of course, so as to not have the plot ruined for me) and some historical information about when it was published, but also includes an excerpt from the court decision that allowed it to be published unexpurgated (what was that I said about wanting to read novels instead of case law this summer?!) and even a letter from Archibald MacLeish saying that it should be published.

Archibald, in fact, points out that when you take out any page with a four-letter word or description of the sex act and then print that expurgated material in its own separate little bundle alongside the larger text, then of COURSE it seems "offensive" and of course its point in the novel as a whole is lost.

So, we've established that the novel is really good, and not in an "I-read-Playboy-for-the-articles" way, but why? Well, let's take the very first line:

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically."

That rings true today as well, of course. We are lost, lost, lost, but too lost to even know it.

D.H. Lawrence says humankind pretty much destroyed itself, by refusing to appreciate their human bodies. Not just for sex, although that is relevant, and symbolic, but because people are so caught up in the intellectual life and things they tell themselves are important that they neglect what is actually important.

So here's the gamekeeper, who had his stint out in the world among the cool kids, as an officer and a gentleman, if you will, and he has rejected that and returned to the shire of his youth. But, he has not gone back to the crappy coal-town village of his upbringing or back to his even more crappy wife; he is living in isolation in the wood on the Wragby estate owned by Chatterley. It's fully bacchanalian of him, especially when Lady Chatterley goes out to dance naked in the rainstorm and he grudgingly follows her. Naked, natural, earthy bliss.

But in the end when they want to be together, their bliss is thwarted by the entanglements of the world, as they both need to get divorced and their respective disgruntled spouses fight this tooth and nail. Their hope, though, lies in the child they conceived, which they call the future and which they both somehow tenderly believe is real and true. Mellors, the gamekeeper, takes a bit longer to believe in this child, because he is so altogether frustrated at the world. It's not people per se, as he explains; it's not that he couldn't have "got on" in the army. He liked the men there, and they worked well with him too.

"No, it was stupid, dead-handed higher authority that made the army dead: absolutely fool-dead. I like men and men like me. But I can't stand the twaddling bossy impudence of the people who run this world. That's why I can't get on." --pp. 344-345

I. Love. It.

I have found more and more in this novel that speaks to my law school experience, and to many of my experiences in this world. Good ol' D.H. was disgusted by an England that had died of industrialisation, but he was equally disgusted by the people who sat around living the "intellectual life" while entirely out of touch with their bodies, their selves. I think our world a hundred years later is even more hyper-technology-industrialized, and we are even more out of touch with our physical selves, whether from obesity/preservatives, or the sheer laziness that is life in front of a television, or the fact that we can't walk five steps down the street and have to jump in our car and go from fake environment to fake environment all the time. I'm thinking of the very term "air-conditioning." What artifice do we construct in which to dwell?

But so while Mellors has no hope for the future or the generation that has learned only how to spend money but now has none to spend (hello!), and Connie has her issues with everyone's constraints, there are actually some very good points made by others: doesn't Connie's sister Hilda help her out, despite major reservations about class-mixing? Doesn't their father know best, having lived quite a life but found a way to not be just trapped in a marriage? And even poor paralyzed husband Clifford, who really says some terrible things (he's sort of that obnoxious, Fox-news-watching Republican uncle at the Thanksgiving dinner) really mean well--plus he's only so awful because he's LITERALLY had his life and freedom of movement and sex taken away from him, by being paralyzed in the war?

Man, there is so much going on in this book! And it's soooo good!

Read it, I say! Or read at least something by D.H. Lawrence, at any rate.

Coming soon, my updated ranking of my literary blog project books, so far.

You can't go home again

NOW READING: Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

The gamekeeper, aka Lady Chatterley's lover himself, is often not even named. Pages and pages will go by where he is just "the keeper" or "him." Lady Chatterley, on the other hand, has two names; she is usually narrated as "Connie" while other characters refer to her as the Lady or her Ladyship or whatever. This says a lot about identity, class, who we are, and "being someone" in the world.

Well, our little friend the keeper is not just your average coal town dude. He was in the army for many years and he was the assistant to some top dog or something, so basically he has hob-nobbed with the elite before, and this is why I think Lady Chatterley is attracted to him. (As opposed to if he were a total plebe.) But now he's back and can't escape his place anymore. He even switches back and forth between proper gentleman talk and the poor folk vernacular. He's lost. He doesn't belong in either place.

"He did not know what to do with himself. Since he had been an officer for some years, and had mixed among the other officers and civil servants, with their wives and families, he had lost all ambition to 'get on.' There was a toughness...and unlivingness about the middle and upper classes, as he had known them, which just left him feeling cold and different from them.

So, he had come back to his own class. To find there, what he had forgotten during his absence of years, a pettiness and a vulgarity of manner extremely distasteful. He admitted now at last, how important manner was. He admitted, also, how important it was even to pretend not to care about the halfpence and the small things of life. But among the common people there was no pretense. A penny more or less on the bacon was worse than a change in the Gospel. He could not stand it." - p. 193

I have felt that way a million times. Sometimes when I go back to Phoenix I look around and think -- really? Would it kill you to be a bit more hip? But then in New York and L.A. I make fun of people for being slaves to trends, appearances, and fashion. I do recall moments where I have been almost embarrassed by how provincial the folk back home seem. I just want them to play it cool, to not act so dramatic when I talk about rents of $2000 (that are more than their mortgages). But when I start thinking they're ignorant, I think, "I suck!" Because when I go back to Boston or New York and meet people who've never been west of the Mississippi (or the Hudson) I think, "Who are you people?"

Come to think of it, who am I? Maybe Neil Diamond, too, has had his "gamekeeper" moment:

...nowadays I'm lost between two shores
L.A.'s fine but it ain't home,
New York's home, but it ain't mine no more
"I am," I said
to no one there
and no one heard at all...

Only boys who save their pennies make her rainy day...

NOW READING: Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

Part of Lady Chatterley’s problem – a large part – is that society places all these weird constraints on her/everyone. I think a lot of us in the so-called modern world of melting pots, student loans, civil rights and such believe that people can grow up to be anything they want to be. We tell ourselves that things like her Ladyship on the manor, or people refusing to cross class boundaries, are things of the past, and yet…are they really?

I mean, how often do you really hang out with someone from a wildly different background than yours? I think the only thing we really ever cross is geographic lines. Seriously, think about it. I remember a guy I worked with at public radio’s The Savvy Traveler said some major sociology survey had shown that we all actually tend to live in “small worlds” of 10,000 or so people, that we tend to associate throughout our lives with the same people, who share our education level, economic status, and professions.

So really, we can easily sympathize with Lady C. when she laments that ol’ saying:

“The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. There’s lots of good fish in the sea . . . maybe . . . but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you’re not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.” - p. 67

Living in L.A., hanging out with so many creative types, I started meeting more and more people who hadn’t gone to college but who were intelligent and vibrant and successful and creative. But being an artist or actor without a college degree is somehow OK in the eyes of those same people who look down on the Borders manager who DOES have a college degree but has a job that doesn’t require it. In fact I’d say working for Borders opened my eyes to the intense and very widespread prejudice against retail workers in this society, which was so silly to me: I met all kinds of smart, funny, degree-holding people at Borders. But everyone looks down on retail workers. What gives? Why do people feel justified criticizing someone who would dare to be happy in a job that doesn't pay well.

I am often highly amused in law school – highly! – particularly when I see the limited experience of people from Long Island (and Jersey) who have wound up at Hofstra and have seen precious little outside their own little small world (which may not even reach 10,000 as far as I can see). We have chapters in books called Essential Lawyering about how to interact with people from “all different backgrounds,” instructing law students to resist making assumptions, to think about what different things can mean to different people. Translation: "News flash! Not everyone is as privileged as you." Isn’t it funny that lawyers seem to interact most with the extremes of society – big corporate movers and shakers or those totally down and out, and often indigent? But your average random middle-class person: how often do I ever have need for a lawyer? Never.

I was thinking about this a lot when I was in Honduras, contemplating poverty, and again when I was forced to buy new clothes to wear to the wedding last weekend after Greyhound lost my bag. I have less money in my bank account right now than a whole lot of “poorer” people. I mean, my source of income is student loans. But I’m not considered to be in “poverty.” And how do I not slip down a class? Is it because of my parents, whom I haven’t lived with in a dozen years? Because of the apartment I rent? I don’t have any assets. I couldn’t get a loan if my life depended on it (other than a student loan). It’s so interesting to contemplate.

It’s as if there are certain assumptions and expectations that go along with defining us, which are not based on facts or reality, and as long as we can keep up those appearances that’s somehow who we “are.”

So when you think we're better somehow than the society that kept Lady Chatterley from loving a Tevershall groundskeeper, think about how shocked you'd be if for example some six-figure businessperson you knew started dating their "illegal immigrant" day laborer. Or just think about how we feel when we watch Cops. We think we are better than other people.

Not going to take this lying down

NOW READING: Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

This novel is not just smut, you know. It has a lot to say about issues of class. In fact, I would say the questions and issues of class are easily the prevailing theme, whereas Lady Chatterley's stumbling upon ecstasy is more of a random plot point.

Should a "lady" have a dalliance with a "common man" ... the feelings of the nurse toward the "masters" and the ruling class that killed her husband, a mine worker ... the intellectual life versus the physical life, the ivory tower versus stopping to smell the flowers... these are the things the reader is asked to ponder.

In fact, the novel is not particularly salacious at all. When there are exciting or revealing scenes (OK, sex scenes), they're really straightforward and brief. They also are part of the plot. The scenes are not gratuitous, so I find it amusing that the book caused such a scandal upon its publication and took thirty years to get to the U.S. I guess it's not that surprising though. But it's funny to think that I know many people who were alive and kicking when this book was not allowed to be published here.


"And we're still building churches, burning books
Killing the babies to feed the crooks,
Who said the world would turn out fair?"

--the wonder stuff

There are ladies present

NOW READING: Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

Scandalous! Ha ha. It was almost a no-brainer, choosing Lawrence for my 'L' author. Jack London gave a little competition: how is it that I have never read White Fang or The Call of the Wild? But I think I read them in some, like, junior high reading book or something, abridged. So technically Jack was disqualified.

So far, D.H. Lawrence is really more philosophical about sex than anything else. But he has named body parts and used certain words that you can't say on television. And I'm only, like, 60 pages in. Also, on the first page Mr. Lady Chatterley gets paralyzed in the war, setting up the premise, see -- he comes home unable to do anything from the waist down. So that makes this much more of a moral conundrum than the shocking tale of a scandalous woman. But over the years I never really heard about the moral conundrumness of it.

Who reads D.H. Lawrence these days, anyway? Anyone?

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.