Back to What Matters

June 11th, 2009

I sent a link to my blog to an objective party, an anonymous internet person from reddit, and he/she said it was well written, but that too much of the subject matter is irrelevant to anyone who doesn’t know me and probably to most of the people who do, ie, even your best friends don’t want to hear you kvetch about men all the time.  Point well taken.  I guess I’ve been a little brainless lately, I’ve been feeling pretty spent from work and emotional turmoil, and on top of that my internet access has been unreliable, so when I’m here, I’m generally feeling pressed to hurry up and write something witty and deep.  I guess I’m coming up short.  With that in mind, a brief overview/partial review of my current read, Amitav Ghosh’s “Sea of Poppies.” 

 Regular readers know of my great fascination with all things India, and so it will come as no surprise that I am reading this book.  What might be a surprise is how very difficultI am finding it.  There are so many characters and so much bizarre vocabulary, but it is beginning to come together.ghosh

One observation I have is that because of the melange of people from such varied origins, there is such a great deal of colloquial language.  Ghosh makes little effort provide explicit clues to the meaning of each of these words and phrases as they are used, and I’m not smart enough to understand how the glossary in the back is supposed to be of use to me.  The effect is that at first, I felt lost.  Now I feel less like I am muddling through a meaningless mess with only minimal comprehension of what’s going on;  the nonsensical words have begun to take on meaning–be they sailor slang based in Arabic, bastardizations of English as deciphered by Indians of the 1830’s, or Indian words that have made their way into the speech of the British transplants.  Somehow, persisting through three hundred-plus pages of difficult text and piecing together meaning from the Swiss cheese that was left when I mentally excised completely unknown words is an enjoyable challenge to me.  It makes me consider that it is not so for everyone, and therein lies a point of compassion for my students, who often lack the desire to persist through difficult text or think holistically when words fail them.  It’s not often that I really get to know what it might feel like to be them, and Ghosh’s book provides that in addition to the pleasure of a good story and the escape of a faraway land.

Hooray for adventure.  Speaking of which, I’m going to Ecuador in July.  More on that to follow.

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What do these things have in common?

May 28th, 2009

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer

Forever, by Pete Hamill

The Emperor’s Children, by Claire Massud

I will give you a hint:  It is not that I have read them all.  If it were, I couldn’t include Falling Man, by Don DiLillo.  In fact, that title may be more of a hint than anything I’ve written so far.

All of the first three are about to be concisely reviewed by me in the next fourteen minutes, also, but that’s not it either.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was weird.  I loved the little boy, Oskar, who is 9.  He is narrating, in his Asperser’s syndrome way, the experiences of his recent past.  He has suffered the loss of his father, he is lonely, and he is struggling to find a tangible answer the questions and painful realities surrounding his father’s death.  There are some tragic and strange characters in the supporting cast.  I would call this experimental fiction.

Forever was wonderful.  I have given it to a couple of people as gifts and both enjoyed it.  It’s magical realism, so it follows one man for four hundred years, and in doing so traces the burgeoning, bustle, decay, and resurgence of life Manhattan.

The Emperor’s Children is frustrating.  What is with this trend of authors writing incipient, unlikable characters?  I guess it is because novelists have already thoroughly picked over the salvageable personalities, and now, in order to be original, they feel they need to make us learn from people we can hardly sympathize with.  Is it avant-garde lite?  I am almost finished with this one and perhaps the only one worth rooting for will come out on top.  Yawn, that would be different.

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Time to Move on

May 14th, 2009

I tried.  I want you to know how hard I tried, and I am usually good at this sort of thing.  It’s just, I mean, to tell you the truth, you’re boring.  I don’t know if you are boring all the time, or just in this one instance, but it’s been a few days, and it is just not abating.  I really thought we would get along, but instead of wide open spaces, your story was cramped blathering about Kafka and African novels and pig farms and I don’t know what.   You give me a dour old woman with a sourpuss and a dry, hyper intellectual nervous monotony.  I’m doing this for enjoyment, remember?

I’m talking to you, J.M. Coetzee.  You character is boring, your words are too numerous, and that gimmick from the beginning where you kept jolting me loose from my gaze on the action; it is unpleasant to read.  I understand, I think, a little bit what you are doing.  I think you should stop, because the people who read that kind of stuff are unhappy enough already, they already have heaps of philosophy, and they don’t need to be reading the bland confusion of your book on top of that. 

I’ll never know if this one gets better, because I just can’t. That’s rare for me.may-14 I read at least a couple of dozen books each year.  I’m ninety pages in, and I skipped over twenty of those, that whole speech at the college her son teaches in.  I don’t claim to be proficient critic of literature, I consider that it might be intentional—that it’s written with the intention to be boring because now your reader is thinking of what it would be like to be in that audience, listening to that reticent woman drone on and on about animals and Jews.  Maybe you mean for it to frustrate me, so that rather than simply telling me that the students felt bored and restless, I felt bored and restless, (which is not the same as saying I was made to feel how they are feeling).  If you counted on that reaction, then good on you. 

I still don’t think I’ll finish it.

[I just did a little research and you are serious.  Sorry.  I know you are very talented, since you have two Booker prizes and a Nobel.  I know you are very disciplined and principled and you are also super successful.  So really, what do I know?]

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Perceptive perspective

April 26th, 2009

First among my gifts I count intellect and wit.  Then maybe compassion, but that’s not really a gift to the person who has it.  Relative beauty makes the list, too.  The fact is that if something “counts” (style, size, dollars), then there is at least one decision or set of conditions for which this criterion is the deciding factor.  I hope, when I get to a day this year when all the things I love about myself are not enough to tip the balance toward “joyfully accept,” that I don’t feel too crummy standing next to a woman with a salon blow out and the perfect pair of jeans knowing I won’t be soothing my insecurity with the balms of acquisition and display.  

I pride myself most on the hundreds of books, articles, essays, and factoids whose contents are filed away in my mind, synthesized with my own experiences and related readings.  Photos today are the bookshelves in my living room.  Last year I read 24 books.  So far this year I am on number 14, which is Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.  I like big books because the world that the author conjures up remains solid in this dimension for that much longer.  Nobody makes a place like Michael Chabon. 

 

What'cha reading?

What'cha reading?

 

Other notable texts in this first picture are 1421:  The Year China Discovered America by Gavin Menzies, and A Prayer for Owen Meany.  If you haven’t read 1421 or seen the PBS special and you are looking to get your world rocked, check that out.  John Irving was my favorite living American author for many of my teen years and into early adulthood.  He’s an excellent storyteller. 

I collect children’s literature too, and I like unconventional books.  I have all of the Gryphon and Sabine books by Nick Bantock, and both of the hardcovers for Clive Barkers’ adventure, Abarat.  If you have any young people in your life that like adventure, or if you read all the Harry Potter books, Lord of the Rings, Alice in Wonderland, or love Roald Dahl, you need to read these books.  If you like art, phantasmagorical shapes and allegorical characters, do not miss Abarat.

Also on that pic is The Elegant Universe, which I haven’t read.  I read the first couple chapters like four times.  After that my brane iz to tired phor more fisics.

Below that we have some non-ficiton, and some Dave Eggers.  

External Hard Drive

External Hard Drive

I bought What is the What not long after the first promising reviews at a local bookstore in Key West.   I loved You Shall Know Our Velocity equally well at least.  The Power of One by Bryce Courtney is also can’t-miss, as are A Fine Balance, and The Rice Mother.

References to health and cooking are on the bottom with the big books, including my favorite aunt’s copy of The Giving Tree, and Helpful Mr. Bear, Allumette, I Wonder What’s Under,  and Ms. Suzy from when I was a child, plus all the classics:  Matilda, Peter Pan, The Chocolate Touch, Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark, The Twenty One Balloons, Pinnochio, and The Little Prince (in both French and English).   

I am subject to the same superficiality that threatens to subjugate all of us, and I may be more insecure than some.  Style and clothes are part of how I see myself and how I interact with the world, and if there is such a thing as real value in retail therapy, then my simply closing that avenue for mood regulation only eliminates that intervention as an option:  it does not supplant the need for it or mitigate the circumstances that set it in to motion. 

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