That is one damn amazing trailer. I just bought the soundtrack and I'm going to stream the movie on Netflix later tonight.
descensus Averno facilis est
Monday, February 25, 2013
ACT UP
That is one damn amazing trailer. I just bought the soundtrack and I'm going to stream the movie on Netflix later tonight.
Sunday, February 24, 2013
"a blue story"
Inset tale from "The Young Man with the Carnation," in Winter's Tales:
“There was once,” he began, “an immensely rich old Englishman who had been a courtier and a councillor to the Queen and who now, in his old age, cared for nothing but collecting ancient blue china. To that end he travelled to Persia, Japan and China, and he was everywhere accompanied by his daughter, the Lady Helena. It happened, as they sailed in the Chinese Sea, that the ship caught fire on a still night, and everybody went into the lifeboats and left her. In the dark and the confusion the old peer was separated from his daughter. Lady Helena got up on deck late, and found the ship quite deserted. In the last moment a young English sailor carried her down into a lifeboat that had been forgotten. To the two fugitives it seemed as if fire was following them from all sides, for the phosphorescence played in the dark sea, and, as they looked up, a falling star ran across the sky, as if it was going to drop into the boat. They sailed for nine days, till they were picked up by a Dutch merchantman, and came home to England.
“The old lord had believed his daughter to be dead. He now wept with joy, and at once took her off to a fashionable watering-place so that she might recover from the hardships she had gone though. And as he thought it must be unpleasant to her that a young sailor, who made his bread in the merchant service, should tell the world that he had sailed for nine days alone with a peer’s daughter, he paid the boy a fine sum, and made him promise to go shipping in the other hemisphere and never come back. ‘For what,’ said the old nobleman, ‘would be the good of that?’
“When Lady Helena recovered, and they gave her the news of the Court and of her family, and in the end also told her how the young sailor had been sent away never to come back, they found that her mind had suffered from her trials, and that she cared for nothing in all the world. She would not go back to her father’s castle in its park, nor go to Court, nor travel to any gay town of the continent. The only thing which she now wanted to do was to go, like her father before her, to collect rare blue china. So she began to sail, from one country to the other, and her father went with her.
“In her search she told the people, with whom she dealt, that she was looking for a particular blue colour, and would pay any price for it. But although she bought many hundred blue jars and bowls, she would always after a time put them aside and say: ‘Alas, alas, it is not the right blue.’ Her father, when they had sailed for many years, suggested to her that perhaps the colour which she sought did not exist. ’O God, Papa,’ said she, ‘how can you speak so wickedly? Surely there must be some of it left from the time when all the world was blue.’
“Her two old aunts in England implored her to come back, still to make a great match. But she answered them: ‘Nay, I have got to sail. For you must know, dear aunts, that it is all nonsense when learned people tell you that the seas have got a bottom to them. On the contrary, the water which is the noblest of the elements, does, of course, go all through the earth, so that our planet really floats in the ether, like a soap-bubble. And there, on the other hemisphere, a ship sails, with which I have got to keep pace. We two are like the reflection of one another, in the deep sea, and the ship of which I speak is always exactly beneath my own ship, upon the opposite side of the globe. You have never seen a big fish swimming underneath a boat, following it like a dark-blue shade in the water. But in that way this ship goes, like the shadow of my ship, and I draw it to and fro wherever I go, as the moon draws the tides, all through the bulk of the earth. If I stopped sailing, what would those poor sailors who make their bread in the merchant service do? But I shall tell you a secret,’ she said. ’In the end my ship will go down, to the centre of the globe, and at the very same hour the other ship will sink as well—for people call it sinking, although I can assure you that there is no up and down in the sea—and there, in the midst of the world, we two shall meet.’
“Many years passed, the old lord died and Lady Helena became old and deaf, but she still sailed. Then it happened, after the plunder of the summer palace of the Emperor of China, that a merchant brought her a very old blue jar. The moment she set eyes on it she gave a terrible shriek. ’There it is!’ she cried. ’I have found it at last. This is the true blue. Oh, how light it makes one. Oh, it is as fresh as a breeze, as deep as a deep secret, as full as I say not what.’ With trembling hands she held the jar to her bosom, and sat for six hours sunk in contemplation of it. Then she said to her doctor and her lady-companion: ‘Now I can die. And when I am dead you will cut out my heart and lay it in the blue jar. For then everything will be as it was then. All shall be blue round me, and in the midst of the blue world my heart will be innocent and free, and will beat gently, like a wake that sings, like the drops that fall from an oar blade.’ A little later she asked them: ‘Is it not a sweet thing to think that, if only you have patience, all that has ever been, will come back to you?’ Shortly afterwards the old lady died.”
“There was once,” he began, “an immensely rich old Englishman who had been a courtier and a councillor to the Queen and who now, in his old age, cared for nothing but collecting ancient blue china. To that end he travelled to Persia, Japan and China, and he was everywhere accompanied by his daughter, the Lady Helena. It happened, as they sailed in the Chinese Sea, that the ship caught fire on a still night, and everybody went into the lifeboats and left her. In the dark and the confusion the old peer was separated from his daughter. Lady Helena got up on deck late, and found the ship quite deserted. In the last moment a young English sailor carried her down into a lifeboat that had been forgotten. To the two fugitives it seemed as if fire was following them from all sides, for the phosphorescence played in the dark sea, and, as they looked up, a falling star ran across the sky, as if it was going to drop into the boat. They sailed for nine days, till they were picked up by a Dutch merchantman, and came home to England.
“The old lord had believed his daughter to be dead. He now wept with joy, and at once took her off to a fashionable watering-place so that she might recover from the hardships she had gone though. And as he thought it must be unpleasant to her that a young sailor, who made his bread in the merchant service, should tell the world that he had sailed for nine days alone with a peer’s daughter, he paid the boy a fine sum, and made him promise to go shipping in the other hemisphere and never come back. ‘For what,’ said the old nobleman, ‘would be the good of that?’
“When Lady Helena recovered, and they gave her the news of the Court and of her family, and in the end also told her how the young sailor had been sent away never to come back, they found that her mind had suffered from her trials, and that she cared for nothing in all the world. She would not go back to her father’s castle in its park, nor go to Court, nor travel to any gay town of the continent. The only thing which she now wanted to do was to go, like her father before her, to collect rare blue china. So she began to sail, from one country to the other, and her father went with her.
“In her search she told the people, with whom she dealt, that she was looking for a particular blue colour, and would pay any price for it. But although she bought many hundred blue jars and bowls, she would always after a time put them aside and say: ‘Alas, alas, it is not the right blue.’ Her father, when they had sailed for many years, suggested to her that perhaps the colour which she sought did not exist. ’O God, Papa,’ said she, ‘how can you speak so wickedly? Surely there must be some of it left from the time when all the world was blue.’
“Her two old aunts in England implored her to come back, still to make a great match. But she answered them: ‘Nay, I have got to sail. For you must know, dear aunts, that it is all nonsense when learned people tell you that the seas have got a bottom to them. On the contrary, the water which is the noblest of the elements, does, of course, go all through the earth, so that our planet really floats in the ether, like a soap-bubble. And there, on the other hemisphere, a ship sails, with which I have got to keep pace. We two are like the reflection of one another, in the deep sea, and the ship of which I speak is always exactly beneath my own ship, upon the opposite side of the globe. You have never seen a big fish swimming underneath a boat, following it like a dark-blue shade in the water. But in that way this ship goes, like the shadow of my ship, and I draw it to and fro wherever I go, as the moon draws the tides, all through the bulk of the earth. If I stopped sailing, what would those poor sailors who make their bread in the merchant service do? But I shall tell you a secret,’ she said. ’In the end my ship will go down, to the centre of the globe, and at the very same hour the other ship will sink as well—for people call it sinking, although I can assure you that there is no up and down in the sea—and there, in the midst of the world, we two shall meet.’
“Many years passed, the old lord died and Lady Helena became old and deaf, but she still sailed. Then it happened, after the plunder of the summer palace of the Emperor of China, that a merchant brought her a very old blue jar. The moment she set eyes on it she gave a terrible shriek. ’There it is!’ she cried. ’I have found it at last. This is the true blue. Oh, how light it makes one. Oh, it is as fresh as a breeze, as deep as a deep secret, as full as I say not what.’ With trembling hands she held the jar to her bosom, and sat for six hours sunk in contemplation of it. Then she said to her doctor and her lady-companion: ‘Now I can die. And when I am dead you will cut out my heart and lay it in the blue jar. For then everything will be as it was then. All shall be blue round me, and in the midst of the blue world my heart will be innocent and free, and will beat gently, like a wake that sings, like the drops that fall from an oar blade.’ A little later she asked them: ‘Is it not a sweet thing to think that, if only you have patience, all that has ever been, will come back to you?’ Shortly afterwards the old lady died.”
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
reading Wednesday!
Reading Wednesday, whoo! .....damn, fewer people I know appear to be still doing this. Oh well.
What are you reading now?
Lawrence Wright's book on Scientology, which is much less awesome than his book on Al-Quaeda -- it reads more like a bunch of fragmented pieces stitched together, and I get tired of reading about nothing but Tom Cruise and Paul Haggis (to the extent that there is a long loving description of the latter's Crash -- surely one of the most awful White Liberal Guilt movies ever filmed) (Haggis seems like EXACTLY the kind of guy who would never think about racism until his Porsche got carjacked on Wiltshire). Haggis is Wright's main informant, so of course he gets off very lightly, and if you've read Wright's New Yorker profile of him, that's the structure for the book. I'm not sorry I bought it, because I want to support critiques of Scientology (I remember wayy back when this was just about the only critical piece online) but it's just not very informative or enlightening. In a way it's a blessing some of the atrocities are so sketchily reported -- the breakup of families, forced abortions, spouses informing on each other, slave labour that would rival Communist prison camps -- because just realizing how terrible Scientology is for everyone but a few hundred people on top is upsetting. I wanted less dwelling on the psyche of the rich white privileged man who felt really bad about being in denial for nearly four decades, and more of the actual stories about people like Paulette Cooper and Lisa McPherson, or even just more from Haggis' own daughters.
What did you just finish reading?
The Horned Man, by James Lasdun, which was very well-written but sort of....airy? Fluffy? Hard to get hold of. It's very self-referential in a way -- the narrator mentions teaching the Bacchae to undergraduates and then, many chapters later, there's a very long (and unconvincing) sequence where he cross-dresses to try to get into a women's shelter (don't ask). Other literary references -- to Kafka, mainly -- play out in the character's "real life" as well, but somehow the parts just don't organically come together into a meaningful whole. It's very well-written, though, and features perhaps the most unreliable narrator ever; intriguingly, he can be read either as a complete victim, or a self-deluded monster.
What do you expect to read next?
Scientology makes me feel rather ill, but I might read Janet Reitman's Inside Scientology, or the amazing Paulette Cooper's The Scandal of Scientology -- available in full, for free. It would just be nice to read something about "the church" that wasn't so intently focused on Hollywood starfucking. Am hoping those books will be better, or at least have fewer pages devoted to Tom Cruise's motorcycle's paint job.
What are you reading now?
Lawrence Wright's book on Scientology, which is much less awesome than his book on Al-Quaeda -- it reads more like a bunch of fragmented pieces stitched together, and I get tired of reading about nothing but Tom Cruise and Paul Haggis (to the extent that there is a long loving description of the latter's Crash -- surely one of the most awful White Liberal Guilt movies ever filmed) (Haggis seems like EXACTLY the kind of guy who would never think about racism until his Porsche got carjacked on Wiltshire). Haggis is Wright's main informant, so of course he gets off very lightly, and if you've read Wright's New Yorker profile of him, that's the structure for the book. I'm not sorry I bought it, because I want to support critiques of Scientology (I remember wayy back when this was just about the only critical piece online) but it's just not very informative or enlightening. In a way it's a blessing some of the atrocities are so sketchily reported -- the breakup of families, forced abortions, spouses informing on each other, slave labour that would rival Communist prison camps -- because just realizing how terrible Scientology is for everyone but a few hundred people on top is upsetting. I wanted less dwelling on the psyche of the rich white privileged man who felt really bad about being in denial for nearly four decades, and more of the actual stories about people like Paulette Cooper and Lisa McPherson, or even just more from Haggis' own daughters.
What did you just finish reading?
The Horned Man, by James Lasdun, which was very well-written but sort of....airy? Fluffy? Hard to get hold of. It's very self-referential in a way -- the narrator mentions teaching the Bacchae to undergraduates and then, many chapters later, there's a very long (and unconvincing) sequence where he cross-dresses to try to get into a women's shelter (don't ask). Other literary references -- to Kafka, mainly -- play out in the character's "real life" as well, but somehow the parts just don't organically come together into a meaningful whole. It's very well-written, though, and features perhaps the most unreliable narrator ever; intriguingly, he can be read either as a complete victim, or a self-deluded monster.
What do you expect to read next?
Scientology makes me feel rather ill, but I might read Janet Reitman's Inside Scientology, or the amazing Paulette Cooper's The Scandal of Scientology -- available in full, for free. It would just be nice to read something about "the church" that wasn't so intently focused on Hollywood starfucking. Am hoping those books will be better, or at least have fewer pages devoted to Tom Cruise's motorcycle's paint job.
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Gulliver
Jonathan Swift was a difficult and unaccountable man: a parson without piety; a chaste adulterer; an Irish patriot who longed to be an English bishop, and lamented that he would die in Dublin like a poisoned rat in a hole; a grave man who rarely laughed but wrote outrageous satires; a misanthrope capable of great kindness to individuals; a social climber who habitually sabotaged himself with his mutinous tongue and pen; a fussy man obsessed with order, notorious for his disorderly relations with two women; an establishment man with the bomb-tossing instincts of an anarchist. If every joke is a tiny revolution, as Orwell said, then Swift is one of our most dangerous and unlikely revolutionaries.
- Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough, John J. Ross
“Dying From the Top Down: The Dementia of Jonathan Swift”
Oh man, this chapter is one of the big reasons I BOUGHT this book
(well, that and the Bronte chapter….and Joyce….and Yeats…..and….), but
just the epigraphs to it are nearly making me cry. //clutches the Dean
Swift is a diseased writer. He remains permanently in a depressed mood which in most people is only intermittent, rather as though someone suffering from jaundice or the after-effects of influenza should have the energy to write books….Yet curiously enough he is one of the writers I admire with least reserve, and Gulliver’s Travels, in particular, is a book which it seems impossible for me to grow tired of.
- George Orwell, “Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels”
The least miserable among them, appear to be those who turn to dotage, and entirely lose their memories.
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
Young….found Swift at some distance gazing intently at the top of a lofty elm, whose head had been blasted. Upon Young’s approach he pointed to it, saying, “I shall be like that tree; I shall die first at the top.”
- Thomas Sheridan, Life of Doctor Swift
Epigraphs from Shakespeare’s Tremor and Orwell’s Cough, John J. Ross (it really is quite well-written)
Swift is a diseased writer. He remains permanently in a depressed mood which in most people is only intermittent, rather as though someone suffering from jaundice or the after-effects of influenza should have the energy to write books….Yet curiously enough he is one of the writers I admire with least reserve, and Gulliver’s Travels, in particular, is a book which it seems impossible for me to grow tired of.
- George Orwell, “Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels”
The least miserable among them, appear to be those who turn to dotage, and entirely lose their memories.
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
Young….found Swift at some distance gazing intently at the top of a lofty elm, whose head had been blasted. Upon Young’s approach he pointed to it, saying, “I shall be like that tree; I shall die first at the top.”
- Thomas Sheridan, Life of Doctor Swift
Epigraphs from Shakespeare’s Tremor and Orwell’s Cough, John J. Ross (it really is quite well-written)
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
reading Wednesday 2/13
Reading Wednesday! Holy shit, nearly forgot.
What are you reading now?
I haven't reread any of Isak Dinesen's story collections in years and years -- seriously, maybe a decade? -- although I often reread Out of Africa (hey, Carson McCullers reread it every year), so I decided on Winter's Tales. I had forgotten "The Sailor-Boy's Tale" is in it -- the first Dinesen story I ever read, as a teenager, in some gigantic Stories of the World anthology, and what made me track down her books originally. It is just as fantastic as ever.
What did you just finish reading?
Mad Girl's Love Song, which was terrible; American Isis, which was slightly better, but hampered like all the would-be Plath biographies by the writer's inability to quote from her work without permission from the Estate; The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which seemed less awful than a lot of my friends thought it was, but wasn't that great, either. (Someone wryly called it "The Harry Potter of science writing," which....yeah, pretty much.) Was immensely put off by the writer's website bragging how she began publicizing the book eight years before it was even published, which I guess paid off for her, but EIGHT YEARS? In all that time you could have written two or maybe even three much better books. But you wouldn't have the fame and money and Oprah deal, which is what matters in our culture. A much better, less personalized and less patronizing book on cross-cultural misunderstandings in medicine is The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down, which I recommend without reservation to everyone.
What do you expect to read next?
I want to read more fiction -- still -- maybe Seven Gothic Tales, or The Matisse Stories, or Vampires in the Lemon Grove. I did just get two nonfiction collections by Katha Pollitt for my Kindle, tho, so I might not be able to kick nonfiction just yet.
What are you reading now?
I haven't reread any of Isak Dinesen's story collections in years and years -- seriously, maybe a decade? -- although I often reread Out of Africa (hey, Carson McCullers reread it every year), so I decided on Winter's Tales. I had forgotten "The Sailor-Boy's Tale" is in it -- the first Dinesen story I ever read, as a teenager, in some gigantic Stories of the World anthology, and what made me track down her books originally. It is just as fantastic as ever.
The bewildered boy began to stammer his thanks to her. "Wait," said she, "I shall make you a cup of coffee, to bring back your wits, while I wash your jacket." She went and rattled an old copper kettle upon the fireplace. After a while she handed him a hot, strong, black drink in a cup without a handle to it. "You have drunk with Sunniva now," she said; "you have drunk down a little wisdom, so that in the future all your thoughts shall not fall like raindrops into the salt sea."
What did you just finish reading?
Mad Girl's Love Song, which was terrible; American Isis, which was slightly better, but hampered like all the would-be Plath biographies by the writer's inability to quote from her work without permission from the Estate; The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which seemed less awful than a lot of my friends thought it was, but wasn't that great, either. (Someone wryly called it "The Harry Potter of science writing," which....yeah, pretty much.) Was immensely put off by the writer's website bragging how she began publicizing the book eight years before it was even published, which I guess paid off for her, but EIGHT YEARS? In all that time you could have written two or maybe even three much better books. But you wouldn't have the fame and money and Oprah deal, which is what matters in our culture. A much better, less personalized and less patronizing book on cross-cultural misunderstandings in medicine is The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down, which I recommend without reservation to everyone.
What do you expect to read next?
I want to read more fiction -- still -- maybe Seven Gothic Tales, or The Matisse Stories, or Vampires in the Lemon Grove. I did just get two nonfiction collections by Katha Pollitt for my Kindle, tho, so I might not be able to kick nonfiction just yet.
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted, Andrew Wilson
Damn this book is disappointing. It has a wonderful premise -- after all, Sylvia Plath met Ted Hughes in a famous collision in early 1956, when she was twenty-three, and the couple separated in the summer of 1962, after which Plath wrote most of the poems which made her famous, in a single autumn. As the jacket flap copy of this book says, "Before she met Ted....her father had died when she was only eight; she had....been unofficially engaged, had tried to commit suicide, and had written more than two hundred poems," as well as winning dozens of scholarships and awards, many for important publications. Plath herself insisted that both her poetry and life were born anew with her marriage, and supposedly dismissed everything she had written prior to 1957 as "juvenilia" (her Collected Poems, which won the 1982 Pulitzer for poetry and was, inevitably, edited by Hughes, begins with that year as well). (This sweeping assessment is diluted slightly by a later announcement that everything she had written prior to "The Stones," in 1959, was juvenilia, and most modern critics go even further, dismissing everything written prior to October 1962 (a view Hughes pushed whenever he could, usually in introductions to collections of her work he edited), with a few exceptions such as "You're," "Morning Song," "Tulips," and so on. Plath gladly apprenticed herself to one master male poet after another: W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke, Ted Hughes, Yeats, Blake, Shakespeare, Pound (female poets such as Dickinson, Teasdale, Millay and even Anne Sexton were more subterranean influences). In the last explosive year of her life, Plath vehemently cast off all the men she had idolized, from her father to her husband to all those long-worshipped literary mentors, and deliberately reclaimed what she saw as an authentic, speaking, long-buried and female individual self, fluent and authentic. To understand and appreciate her breakthrough, which came only after her marriage broke up, it would seem helpful to examine her life -- and writing and publications -- before that marriage.
Unfortunately, if you have read the first turgid biography of Plath ever, by Edward Butscher, you have read this book, down to its utter pathologizing of Plath (one acquaintance claims that she had tried to cut her throat at ten -- as far as I can tell this is a complete misconception based on a line in "Lesbos": "She'll cut her throat at ten if she's mad at two" -- yet three biographies I've read have repeated it without questioning its source, yet another disappointed boyfriend ((there are many)) ). Plath's drawing on life for her writing is seen as vampiric, her considerable literary success at a young age is desperate perfectionism, she is boy-crazy and father-fixated, and only disappointed would-be and ex-boyfriends like Eddie Cohen and Gordon Lameyer (both of whom she rejected) really understood her. Even the debilitating sinusitis which she suffered from all her life (a condition she shared with her father, which suggests a genetic susceptibility possibly based on facial structure) is diagnosed by Cohen in the early fifties as "purely psychosomatic": "every cold which you have written me about has come on the heels of a breakup". Wilson unquestioningly picks this up, despite Cohen's complete lack of medical and psychiatric training whatsoever, and echoes "....the first occurrence of the illness came in the week after her father had died. It seems probable that her repeated attacks of sinusitis were physical expressions of separation anxiety." This is straight-up misogynist literary history: the actual illness suffered by the woman in her physical body is blamed on her inadequate psyche, which is fixated on men.
The rest of the book is pretty much just like that. I'm over two-thirds done with it, yet finishing it is a struggle, because of the terrible writing and even more terrible ideas. Illness as a subconsciously willed physical expression of separation anxiety from men! Really!
Unfortunately, if you have read the first turgid biography of Plath ever, by Edward Butscher, you have read this book, down to its utter pathologizing of Plath (one acquaintance claims that she had tried to cut her throat at ten -- as far as I can tell this is a complete misconception based on a line in "Lesbos": "She'll cut her throat at ten if she's mad at two" -- yet three biographies I've read have repeated it without questioning its source, yet another disappointed boyfriend ((there are many)) ). Plath's drawing on life for her writing is seen as vampiric, her considerable literary success at a young age is desperate perfectionism, she is boy-crazy and father-fixated, and only disappointed would-be and ex-boyfriends like Eddie Cohen and Gordon Lameyer (both of whom she rejected) really understood her. Even the debilitating sinusitis which she suffered from all her life (a condition she shared with her father, which suggests a genetic susceptibility possibly based on facial structure) is diagnosed by Cohen in the early fifties as "purely psychosomatic": "every cold which you have written me about has come on the heels of a breakup". Wilson unquestioningly picks this up, despite Cohen's complete lack of medical and psychiatric training whatsoever, and echoes "....the first occurrence of the illness came in the week after her father had died. It seems probable that her repeated attacks of sinusitis were physical expressions of separation anxiety." This is straight-up misogynist literary history: the actual illness suffered by the woman in her physical body is blamed on her inadequate psyche, which is fixated on men.
The rest of the book is pretty much just like that. I'm over two-thirds done with it, yet finishing it is a struggle, because of the terrible writing and even more terrible ideas. Illness as a subconsciously willed physical expression of separation anxiety from men! Really!
Friday, February 8, 2013
whoops....
Often I question whether or not I "deserve" to be on disability, and then when I run out of antidepressants and can't afford to get any more over the weekend, I also can't get out of bed. (Let's not even talk about what happens when I run low on the mood stabilizers/anticonvulsants.)
Thursday, February 7, 2013
From the Elysian fields you will see me as queen of the profound Stygian realm
I am Nature, the universal Mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen of the ocean, queen also of the immortals, the single manifestation of all gods and goddesses that are.
….Though I am worshipped in many aspects, known by countless names, and propitiated with all manner of different rites, yet the whole round earth venerates me….Some know me as Juno, some as Bellona of the Battles; others as Hecate….the Egyptians who excel in ancient learning and worship me call me by my true name….Queen Isis.
- Apuleius, The Golden Ass, tr. Robert Graves, used as the epigraph to American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
reading Wednesday 2/06
Reading Wednesday! Aww yeah.
What are you reading now?
Just started The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which.....isn't great, but is at least about one topic and the life of one person, which makes it a lot easier to read compared to....
What did you just finish reading?
.... Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, which, OY, can be best described as a Piping Hot Mess. Remember how I said there's one book every season that everyone else loves which I am baffled by? Yeah, I was wrong, it's this one. Everyone else I know (especially people of the parental persuasion) is writing sniffly teary-eyed reviews about how this book is about Hope and Acceptance and Love, and I'm stuck going "....but this is bad. Well, I guess its.....heart....may be in the right place?" (DOUBTFUL) " -- but it's so bad." This is what gains me the reputation of Heartless Bitch. But, seriously: while usually I complain that most modern nonfiction books are clearly expanded magazine pieces, this book's topic bites off not only more than Solomon himself can chew, but more than that guy who's won the Nathan's Famous Forth of July hotdog-eating contest for the past six years running could chew, in all six years. Solomon's approach works okay with more limited topics such as "Deaf," "Dwarf," and "Down Syndrome," especially since he's written, well, magazine pieces about them before, but -- to take just one example -- with "Rape" he veers wildly from women raped by strangers to sexual abuse in families to (oh no, he's not going to go there....oh yes he is) rape as part of genocide and extreme torture in Rwanda.
And this points up a huge problem with his entire project: there are experiences that just aren't comparable. He makes all sorts of interesting points about disability identity and whether conditions like dwarfism or deafness should be viewed as disabilities (and what happens to people with those conditions if they aren't), and his personal hook into the topic is that his own parents thought his homosexuality meant he would be cut off from having children, or any family at all, and homosexuality itself was not removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the famed DSM) until 1973 (that always amazes me. I was three years old then). But the sudden introduction of the horrific rapes in Rwanda -- which topic could fill a book, or several books, just in itself, and which also is taken as a kind of shorthand to stand for similar horrors from the Sabine women to "the former Yugoslavia" -- reveals the shakiness of the entire scaffolding. To a lesser extent, his interview with Dylan Klebold's parents at the end of his "Crime" chapter does the same thing. There's something grotesque about summarizing such huge, terrible, almost cripplingly tragic topics into soundbites to support a thesis, and this problem underlines another, greater flaw with the book.
Essentially Solomon's book is about what happens when you're a hit-and-run victim of the Wheel of Fortune. Some people collapse under the terrible crushing weight of tragedy. Some people are deformed by it to such an extent that they lash out themselves, and help ruin someone else's life. Some people can find the inner strength and grace -- usually enabled by things like familial support, social status, and money -- to not only integrate the tragedy into their own lives but somehow transcend it, and while Door Number Three is the one we all, including Solomon, like to focus on and what Oprah specials are made of, there is a particularly modern American viewpoint I've talked about before which views this kind of extreme spiritual grace as an expected duty. One reason Americans ate up that terrible novel The Lovely Bones a while back was the philosophy contained in its title -- that in the absence of someone dearly loved who was taken away by extreme horror, love itself can create something almost beautiful. This can be true, but the limitations of this viewpoint are shown most clearly in his treatment of Susan Klebold, whom he compares to Cordelia, which....makes no sense. (Again, we're back to the Heartless Bitch thing: "Hers was a love as dark and true, as embracing and self-abnegating, as Cordelia's." This makes no sense. Dark love? And why is it admirable for a mother's love to be self-abnegating? And isn't parental love so blind that said parent entirely misses out on any danger signals that can lead to violence not a good thing?)
"Privilege" is a very loaded word nowadays, but I was struck, over and over again, reading this book, by how many parents Solomon spoke to were very affluent -- they could afford to have one parent (usually the mother) stop working in order to become a full-time caretaker, or retrofit an entire house for the benefit of a disabled child, or even better, build an entirely new one. Solomon does interview some poor families, but the way he treats them veers between a kind of weird exoticising and extremely patronizing -- this is shown to greatest effect when he goes to Rwanda and makes judgements based on the personal appearances of rape survivors: one is "mousy" and beaten-down while another, described much more approvingly, is stereotypically tall and elegant and spotlessly groomed despite extreme poverty. Solomon never appears to think how these women might feel about talking to a man about their brutal experiences, much less a well-off inquiring white male visitor -- in short, a tourist. The book is filled with such unfortunate sentences as "To understand how children of wartime rape differ from children conceived in less systematic rapes, I traveled to Rwanda" (there are equally unfortunate and self-revealing moments in the "Crime" chapter, including one truly stereotypical moment where the Repressed White Man visits a Swingin' Black Church).
This kind of misery tourism inevitably brings to mind the spectre of celebrities visiting "war-torn areas" and dutifully reporting back that for the extent of their visit, their bubble of privilege and good fortune was heartbreakingly pierced, as was ours, sitting at home and listening to them in the five minutes before the commercials for luxury goods air. It is the equivalent of a television reporter flying in to a place they would never visit otherwise to do a "stand-up" in order to give the illusion of authenticity. It is the opposite of such true immersive journalism like Wiseman's documentaries or the amazing Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, where the focus is not on how the reporter feels but the people themselves, in all the glory and misery of their daily lives.
This privilege is most unfortunately -- and probably unconsciously -- flaunted in the triumphant end to Solomon's book -- in the end, through the rather labyrinthine modern methods that lead to such phenomena as "twiblings," he and his husband have their own baby boy who is part of an extended, happy family, and one cannot help but be happy for him, especially after his poignant descriptions of lifelong yearning for children of his own. But there is a terrible moment just after his son's birth when a concerned doctor orders a CAT scan and it seems Solomon himself will have to face the "difficult love" a parent can have for a challenged child, which he has been praising for the past seven hundred pages -- that in Woolf's inimitable phrase, "tragedy had once more put down his paw, after letting us run a few paces." But, as in the occasion Woolf was describing, the wheel of tragedy swerved away; Solomon's son was perfectly healthy. Again, one cannot help but be happy for him, especially given the wrenching details so many families supply in his book, and yet at the same time the author celebrating his own good fortune after chronicling the disasters so many others have endured cannot seem anything other than exquisitely tasteless.
WELL THEN. I also read Learning to Drive by Katha Pollitt and In Praise of Messy Lives by Katie Roiphe (yes, that Katie Roiphe), both collections of well-written essays with intriguing insights by totally different women into the same self-mythologized kingdom of New York. I finished the "Rivers of London" series by Ben Aaronovitch, which is up to three books so far: Rivers of London (badly titled Midnight Riot in the US), Moon over Soho, and Whispers Under Ground. The first book is fantastic, tightly plotted and almost wholly lacking in the awkward "infodumping" of so many genre novels; the second and third installments are less impressive, but still very enjoyable, especially in their treatment of multicultural London and female characters. The first-person narration by a mixed-race constable who also finds himself apprenticed to magic is vivid, witty, sharp, and utterly real. I'd recommend this series highly, except I do hope some dangling series plot threads get wrapped up, or at least embroidered a bit, in the next few novels. The next one, Broken Homes, is scheduled to come out June of this year, I think.
What do you expect to read next?
After Henrietta, I'm still hoping to get to Seven Gothic Tales. Or possibly the shorter fantastic fiction of A.S. Byatt; I have the series of those small black-covered hardbacks and they look sort of like delightful candies for the mind, or something.
ETA HOLD UP THE NEW BIOGRAPHIES OF AUSTEN AND PLATH JUST ARRIVED. //dives in
Skeptical acquaintances -- or even friends -- have often expressed disbelief at how much and how fast I read, implying that I lie about it or something (I mean.....why? Why would you lie about being a book nerd? It would be like lying about your USCF rating, like, the opposite of cool) or, worse, that I don't retain anything from reading so quickly. First, that "reading is my superpower" tag is not a joke: it's one of the few things I am good at. Very, very good at. You know that theory that talent doesn't count (haha; Solomon actually writes about this), it's more the ten thousand hours of practice? I have logged a lot more than ten thousand hours of reading books. I can't tell you how many impromptu pop quizzes I have had to endure from friends or even family members -- "You did not read that whole book in one day!" "Yes, I did." "What did you think when so-and-so DIED, then?" "He didn't die, and you're being rude." It takes me longer to read some books than others -- about two days each for The Looming Tower and Far from the Tree, I think. Also, because of agoraphobia, I rarely leave my apartment. I can't work. But this is the main thing:
I don't have a television set.
Sure, I have DVDs of movies and TV shows, I waste way too much time on the internet, and I don't read half as many challenging books as I'd like. (Let's not even talk about my awesome ability to procrastinate.) This means I am tragically out of step with most modern pop culture, but, well, that's been the case since I was about eight, so it's a little too late for me to try catching up now.
Reading: it's what I do.
What are you reading now?
Just started The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which.....isn't great, but is at least about one topic and the life of one person, which makes it a lot easier to read compared to....
What did you just finish reading?
.... Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, which, OY, can be best described as a Piping Hot Mess. Remember how I said there's one book every season that everyone else loves which I am baffled by? Yeah, I was wrong, it's this one. Everyone else I know (especially people of the parental persuasion) is writing sniffly teary-eyed reviews about how this book is about Hope and Acceptance and Love, and I'm stuck going "....but this is bad. Well, I guess its.....heart....may be in the right place?" (DOUBTFUL) " -- but it's so bad." This is what gains me the reputation of Heartless Bitch. But, seriously: while usually I complain that most modern nonfiction books are clearly expanded magazine pieces, this book's topic bites off not only more than Solomon himself can chew, but more than that guy who's won the Nathan's Famous Forth of July hotdog-eating contest for the past six years running could chew, in all six years. Solomon's approach works okay with more limited topics such as "Deaf," "Dwarf," and "Down Syndrome," especially since he's written, well, magazine pieces about them before, but -- to take just one example -- with "Rape" he veers wildly from women raped by strangers to sexual abuse in families to (oh no, he's not going to go there....oh yes he is) rape as part of genocide and extreme torture in Rwanda.
And this points up a huge problem with his entire project: there are experiences that just aren't comparable. He makes all sorts of interesting points about disability identity and whether conditions like dwarfism or deafness should be viewed as disabilities (and what happens to people with those conditions if they aren't), and his personal hook into the topic is that his own parents thought his homosexuality meant he would be cut off from having children, or any family at all, and homosexuality itself was not removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the famed DSM) until 1973 (that always amazes me. I was three years old then). But the sudden introduction of the horrific rapes in Rwanda -- which topic could fill a book, or several books, just in itself, and which also is taken as a kind of shorthand to stand for similar horrors from the Sabine women to "the former Yugoslavia" -- reveals the shakiness of the entire scaffolding. To a lesser extent, his interview with Dylan Klebold's parents at the end of his "Crime" chapter does the same thing. There's something grotesque about summarizing such huge, terrible, almost cripplingly tragic topics into soundbites to support a thesis, and this problem underlines another, greater flaw with the book.
Essentially Solomon's book is about what happens when you're a hit-and-run victim of the Wheel of Fortune. Some people collapse under the terrible crushing weight of tragedy. Some people are deformed by it to such an extent that they lash out themselves, and help ruin someone else's life. Some people can find the inner strength and grace -- usually enabled by things like familial support, social status, and money -- to not only integrate the tragedy into their own lives but somehow transcend it, and while Door Number Three is the one we all, including Solomon, like to focus on and what Oprah specials are made of, there is a particularly modern American viewpoint I've talked about before which views this kind of extreme spiritual grace as an expected duty. One reason Americans ate up that terrible novel The Lovely Bones a while back was the philosophy contained in its title -- that in the absence of someone dearly loved who was taken away by extreme horror, love itself can create something almost beautiful. This can be true, but the limitations of this viewpoint are shown most clearly in his treatment of Susan Klebold, whom he compares to Cordelia, which....makes no sense. (Again, we're back to the Heartless Bitch thing: "Hers was a love as dark and true, as embracing and self-abnegating, as Cordelia's." This makes no sense. Dark love? And why is it admirable for a mother's love to be self-abnegating? And isn't parental love so blind that said parent entirely misses out on any danger signals that can lead to violence not a good thing?)
"Privilege" is a very loaded word nowadays, but I was struck, over and over again, reading this book, by how many parents Solomon spoke to were very affluent -- they could afford to have one parent (usually the mother) stop working in order to become a full-time caretaker, or retrofit an entire house for the benefit of a disabled child, or even better, build an entirely new one. Solomon does interview some poor families, but the way he treats them veers between a kind of weird exoticising and extremely patronizing -- this is shown to greatest effect when he goes to Rwanda and makes judgements based on the personal appearances of rape survivors: one is "mousy" and beaten-down while another, described much more approvingly, is stereotypically tall and elegant and spotlessly groomed despite extreme poverty. Solomon never appears to think how these women might feel about talking to a man about their brutal experiences, much less a well-off inquiring white male visitor -- in short, a tourist. The book is filled with such unfortunate sentences as "To understand how children of wartime rape differ from children conceived in less systematic rapes, I traveled to Rwanda" (there are equally unfortunate and self-revealing moments in the "Crime" chapter, including one truly stereotypical moment where the Repressed White Man visits a Swingin' Black Church).
This kind of misery tourism inevitably brings to mind the spectre of celebrities visiting "war-torn areas" and dutifully reporting back that for the extent of their visit, their bubble of privilege and good fortune was heartbreakingly pierced, as was ours, sitting at home and listening to them in the five minutes before the commercials for luxury goods air. It is the equivalent of a television reporter flying in to a place they would never visit otherwise to do a "stand-up" in order to give the illusion of authenticity. It is the opposite of such true immersive journalism like Wiseman's documentaries or the amazing Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, where the focus is not on how the reporter feels but the people themselves, in all the glory and misery of their daily lives.
This privilege is most unfortunately -- and probably unconsciously -- flaunted in the triumphant end to Solomon's book -- in the end, through the rather labyrinthine modern methods that lead to such phenomena as "twiblings," he and his husband have their own baby boy who is part of an extended, happy family, and one cannot help but be happy for him, especially after his poignant descriptions of lifelong yearning for children of his own. But there is a terrible moment just after his son's birth when a concerned doctor orders a CAT scan and it seems Solomon himself will have to face the "difficult love" a parent can have for a challenged child, which he has been praising for the past seven hundred pages -- that in Woolf's inimitable phrase, "tragedy had once more put down his paw, after letting us run a few paces." But, as in the occasion Woolf was describing, the wheel of tragedy swerved away; Solomon's son was perfectly healthy. Again, one cannot help but be happy for him, especially given the wrenching details so many families supply in his book, and yet at the same time the author celebrating his own good fortune after chronicling the disasters so many others have endured cannot seem anything other than exquisitely tasteless.
WELL THEN. I also read Learning to Drive by Katha Pollitt and In Praise of Messy Lives by Katie Roiphe (yes, that Katie Roiphe), both collections of well-written essays with intriguing insights by totally different women into the same self-mythologized kingdom of New York. I finished the "Rivers of London" series by Ben Aaronovitch, which is up to three books so far: Rivers of London (badly titled Midnight Riot in the US), Moon over Soho, and Whispers Under Ground. The first book is fantastic, tightly plotted and almost wholly lacking in the awkward "infodumping" of so many genre novels; the second and third installments are less impressive, but still very enjoyable, especially in their treatment of multicultural London and female characters. The first-person narration by a mixed-race constable who also finds himself apprenticed to magic is vivid, witty, sharp, and utterly real. I'd recommend this series highly, except I do hope some dangling series plot threads get wrapped up, or at least embroidered a bit, in the next few novels. The next one, Broken Homes, is scheduled to come out June of this year, I think.
What do you expect to read next?
After Henrietta, I'm still hoping to get to Seven Gothic Tales. Or possibly the shorter fantastic fiction of A.S. Byatt; I have the series of those small black-covered hardbacks and they look sort of like delightful candies for the mind, or something.
ETA HOLD UP THE NEW BIOGRAPHIES OF AUSTEN AND PLATH JUST ARRIVED. //dives in
Skeptical acquaintances -- or even friends -- have often expressed disbelief at how much and how fast I read, implying that I lie about it or something (I mean.....why? Why would you lie about being a book nerd? It would be like lying about your USCF rating, like, the opposite of cool) or, worse, that I don't retain anything from reading so quickly. First, that "reading is my superpower" tag is not a joke: it's one of the few things I am good at. Very, very good at. You know that theory that talent doesn't count (haha; Solomon actually writes about this), it's more the ten thousand hours of practice? I have logged a lot more than ten thousand hours of reading books. I can't tell you how many impromptu pop quizzes I have had to endure from friends or even family members -- "You did not read that whole book in one day!" "Yes, I did." "What did you think when so-and-so DIED, then?" "He didn't die, and you're being rude." It takes me longer to read some books than others -- about two days each for The Looming Tower and Far from the Tree, I think. Also, because of agoraphobia, I rarely leave my apartment. I can't work. But this is the main thing:
I don't have a television set.
Sure, I have DVDs of movies and TV shows, I waste way too much time on the internet, and I don't read half as many challenging books as I'd like. (Let's not even talk about my awesome ability to procrastinate.) This means I am tragically out of step with most modern pop culture, but, well, that's been the case since I was about eight, so it's a little too late for me to try catching up now.
Reading: it's what I do.
Sunday, February 3, 2013
books read in February 2013
Fiction is in red.
17. Elegy for a Soprano, Kay Nolte Smith
18. Rivers of London, Ben Aaronovitch (I am enjoying these A LOT. I am also picturing Peter as a young Colin Salmon)
19. Moon over Soho, Ben Aaronovitch
20. Whispers Under Ground, Ben Aaronovitch
21. Far from the Tree, Andrew Solomon
22. In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays, Katie Roiphe
23. Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories, Katha Pollitt
24. American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath, Carl Rollyson
25. Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted, Andrew Wilson
26. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
27. Notes on a Scandal, Zoe Heller
28. To Die For, Joyce Maynard
29. Finding Henrietta Lacks, Michael Rogers (another Kindle Single thing. Kingle? How do I count these? I have no idea. I don't care about how long they are, I just want to keep track of when I read them)
30. Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough, John J. Ross
31. Winter's Tales, Isak Dinesen
32. A Card from Angela Carter, Susannah Clapp (beautifully written, only there should have been plates, not smudgy b&w reproductions -- and not of the banal postcards, but of Carter's writing on the "back." Still, lovely)
33. The Horned Man, James Lasdun
34. Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, Lawrence Wright
35. Inside Scientology, Janet Reitman
36. A Great and Terrible Beauty, Libba Bray
37. Rebel Angels, Libba Bray
38. The Sweet Far Thing, Libba Bray
2013 booklist
17. Elegy for a Soprano, Kay Nolte Smith
18. Rivers of London, Ben Aaronovitch (I am enjoying these A LOT. I am also picturing Peter as a young Colin Salmon)
19. Moon over Soho, Ben Aaronovitch
20. Whispers Under Ground, Ben Aaronovitch
21. Far from the Tree, Andrew Solomon
22. In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays, Katie Roiphe
23. Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories, Katha Pollitt
24. American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath, Carl Rollyson
25. Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted, Andrew Wilson
26. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
27. Notes on a Scandal, Zoe Heller
28. To Die For, Joyce Maynard
29. Finding Henrietta Lacks, Michael Rogers (another Kindle Single thing. Kingle? How do I count these? I have no idea. I don't care about how long they are, I just want to keep track of when I read them)
30. Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough, John J. Ross
31. Winter's Tales, Isak Dinesen
32. A Card from Angela Carter, Susannah Clapp (beautifully written, only there should have been plates, not smudgy b&w reproductions -- and not of the banal postcards, but of Carter's writing on the "back." Still, lovely)
33. The Horned Man, James Lasdun
34. Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, Lawrence Wright
35. Inside Scientology, Janet Reitman
36. A Great and Terrible Beauty, Libba Bray
37. Rebel Angels, Libba Bray
38. The Sweet Far Thing, Libba Bray
2013 booklist
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Parade's End
For those interested in Ford Madox Ford after the BBC miniseries, the Wordsworth edition of Parade's End for the Kindle is available for $2.49 -- now that's a bargain. (I got it because shockingly I only had The Good Soldier, and Mizener's biography -- and shamefully haven't read either.)
Speaking of bargains, the Kindle store also has some Dorothy Sayers (Whose Body?, Lord Peter Views the Body, The Clouds of Unknowing, &c) on sale (from $.099 to $2.99) but reviews seem to indicate there might be problems with formatting. ALWAYS PREVIEW BEFORE YOU BUY ON KINDLE. I cannot stress this strongly enough.
Speaking of bargains, the Kindle store also has some Dorothy Sayers (Whose Body?, Lord Peter Views the Body, The Clouds of Unknowing, &c) on sale (from $.099 to $2.99) but reviews seem to indicate there might be problems with formatting. ALWAYS PREVIEW BEFORE YOU BUY ON KINDLE. I cannot stress this strongly enough.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
reading Wednesday
What are you reading now?
The Panic Virus, Seth Mnookin, and boy, is it terrible. I first got into his writing a looong time ago when he wrote about his addiction for Salon, and while I wasn't that impressed with Hard News, I still thought it was pretty good. This book -- altho I sympathize mightily with the subject and don't mind having bought it because that supported actual science reporting/writing -- is just BAD, really. Something I already made fun of on G+: "Instead of thinking as F=ma as being wrong, think of E=mc2 as being more right." Footnote to this immortal sentence: "Don't worry if you're having a hard time following this oversimplified explanation of physics' most challenging problem. For most of us, understanding special relativity is a little like true love: We should consider ourselves lucky if we can grasp hold of it for even one fleeting moment." Special relativity! A little like slippery soap in the bath: We should consider ourselves lucky if we can grasp hold of it for even one fleeting moment. OR: A little like trying not to drop an ice cube: We should consider ourselves lucky if we can grasp hold of it for even one fleeting moment. OR: A little like -- MAKE UP YOUR OWN, IT'S FUN.....
....yeah yeah, I know the audience he's writing for, and he's trying to emphasize how science really isn't dogmatic and no scientist will ever come out and say "there is no possible way this vaccine could harm a child" (although....anyone who's spent about fifteen minutes around doctors when a loved one is having a major health crisis will know that already, really). But, my GOD. It's also too short and just too shallow -- for example, why the fuck did the Lancet originally publish that study that arguably kicked off the whole crisis? I don't care about all the supposed disclaimers "slapped" on it, why PRINT it in the first place? What do you mean, the editor was young and inexperienced? The book is like 400 fucking pages long, couldn't there have been 2 pages on why the editor made this horrible, world-changing decision? (Or was the space needed for fulminating about Twoo Wuv and extra-special relativity?)
Then again, I'm glad he wrote the book, because my God, these people are batshit. "'He had the MMR and he's autistic,' one mother said (on the BBC's Panorama)....'Overnight he had the fever, the high temperature. Literally overnight. He was never the same again. He stopped talking and his behaviour was bizarre.'" OVERNIGHT your kid went autistic? What the actual fuck?
What did you just finish reading?
Mostly comfort reading -- some Pratchetts (I always go for the first three Witches books when I fall ill), two mysteries by B.J. Oliphant (mildly disappointing), Dead Souls by Ian Rankin (rather meh -- the strands just didn't come together). I really want to read something JUST A LITTLE MORE intellectually challenging, or at least stimulating, but that's not happening when I don't feel well. -- Oh, and I did read Pat Barker's Border Crossing, in which everyone was so unpleasant I was longing for the grown-up juvenile killer to throttle the smug divorcing shrink who'd put him away, but basically nothing happened. It was very very well-written, as is everything I've read by her so far, but seriously, Nothing Happened.
What do you expect to read next?
This always stymies me. NOT NONFICTION. Probably not another mystery. Not more rereads dear God. Maybe Seven Gothic Tales -- I think the last time I read that was about ten? years ago -- maybe some Christina Stead, maybe Dorothy Sayers....possibly....
The Panic Virus, Seth Mnookin, and boy, is it terrible. I first got into his writing a looong time ago when he wrote about his addiction for Salon, and while I wasn't that impressed with Hard News, I still thought it was pretty good. This book -- altho I sympathize mightily with the subject and don't mind having bought it because that supported actual science reporting/writing -- is just BAD, really. Something I already made fun of on G+: "Instead of thinking as F=ma as being wrong, think of E=mc2 as being more right." Footnote to this immortal sentence: "Don't worry if you're having a hard time following this oversimplified explanation of physics' most challenging problem. For most of us, understanding special relativity is a little like true love: We should consider ourselves lucky if we can grasp hold of it for even one fleeting moment." Special relativity! A little like slippery soap in the bath: We should consider ourselves lucky if we can grasp hold of it for even one fleeting moment. OR: A little like trying not to drop an ice cube: We should consider ourselves lucky if we can grasp hold of it for even one fleeting moment. OR: A little like -- MAKE UP YOUR OWN, IT'S FUN.....
....yeah yeah, I know the audience he's writing for, and he's trying to emphasize how science really isn't dogmatic and no scientist will ever come out and say "there is no possible way this vaccine could harm a child" (although....anyone who's spent about fifteen minutes around doctors when a loved one is having a major health crisis will know that already, really). But, my GOD. It's also too short and just too shallow -- for example, why the fuck did the Lancet originally publish that study that arguably kicked off the whole crisis? I don't care about all the supposed disclaimers "slapped" on it, why PRINT it in the first place? What do you mean, the editor was young and inexperienced? The book is like 400 fucking pages long, couldn't there have been 2 pages on why the editor made this horrible, world-changing decision? (Or was the space needed for fulminating about Twoo Wuv and extra-special relativity?)
Then again, I'm glad he wrote the book, because my God, these people are batshit. "'He had the MMR and he's autistic,' one mother said (on the BBC's Panorama)....'Overnight he had the fever, the high temperature. Literally overnight. He was never the same again. He stopped talking and his behaviour was bizarre.'" OVERNIGHT your kid went autistic? What the actual fuck?
What did you just finish reading?
Mostly comfort reading -- some Pratchetts (I always go for the first three Witches books when I fall ill), two mysteries by B.J. Oliphant (mildly disappointing), Dead Souls by Ian Rankin (rather meh -- the strands just didn't come together). I really want to read something JUST A LITTLE MORE intellectually challenging, or at least stimulating, but that's not happening when I don't feel well. -- Oh, and I did read Pat Barker's Border Crossing, in which everyone was so unpleasant I was longing for the grown-up juvenile killer to throttle the smug divorcing shrink who'd put him away, but basically nothing happened. It was very very well-written, as is everything I've read by her so far, but seriously, Nothing Happened.
What do you expect to read next?
This always stymies me. NOT NONFICTION. Probably not another mystery. Not more rereads dear God. Maybe Seven Gothic Tales -- I think the last time I read that was about ten? years ago -- maybe some Christina Stead, maybe Dorothy Sayers....possibly....
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
list of books read in January 2013
From my Librarything 75 books in 2013 thread (which, for me, overlaps with the Read The Books You Already Have, Dammit thread).
Fiction is in red, so I can track it more easily.
1. The Man in the Empty Boat, Mark Salzman (Kindle Single)
2. The Last Novel, David Markson
3. 43, Jeff Greenfield (Kindle Single. Do these count as one book? .5 of a book?)
4. Final Vision, Joe McGinnis (Kindle Single)
5. Battleborn, Claire Vaye Watkins
6. The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton, Joe Klein
7. Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow!: Inside the Strangest Presidential Election Finish in American History, Jeff Greenfield
8. Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan, Jeff Greenfield
9. Libriomancer, Jim C. Hines
10. The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright
11. People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo--and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up, Richard Lloyd Parry
12. Death Served Up Cold, B.J. Oliphant
13. Here's to the Newly Dead, B.J. Oliphant
14. Dead Souls, Ian Rankin
15. Border Crossing, Pat Barker
16. The Panic Virus, Seth Mnookin
VIDA count: Twelve books by men, four by women (year-end goal is 50% or better)
ROOT count: a big whopping FIVE (year-end goal is fifty books I didn't buy in 2013)
Fiction vs. non: Ten to six, a bit better. This isn't as big a goal, it just bugs me that I wound up over the years somehow reading much less fiction -- I think that's mainly because so little mainstream big names (Franzen, et al) don't appeal to me. It also means I read wayy too many memoirs, mainly for research, but still.
2013 booklist
Fiction is in red, so I can track it more easily.
1. The Man in the Empty Boat, Mark Salzman (Kindle Single)
2. The Last Novel, David Markson
3. 43, Jeff Greenfield (Kindle Single. Do these count as one book? .5 of a book?)
4. Final Vision, Joe McGinnis (Kindle Single)
5. Battleborn, Claire Vaye Watkins
6. The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton, Joe Klein
7. Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow!: Inside the Strangest Presidential Election Finish in American History, Jeff Greenfield
8. Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan, Jeff Greenfield
9. Libriomancer, Jim C. Hines
10. The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright
11. People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo--and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up, Richard Lloyd Parry
12. Death Served Up Cold, B.J. Oliphant
13. Here's to the Newly Dead, B.J. Oliphant
14. Dead Souls, Ian Rankin
15. Border Crossing, Pat Barker
16. The Panic Virus, Seth Mnookin
VIDA count: Twelve books by men, four by women (year-end goal is 50% or better)
ROOT count: a big whopping FIVE (year-end goal is fifty books I didn't buy in 2013)
Fiction vs. non: Ten to six, a bit better. This isn't as big a goal, it just bugs me that I wound up over the years somehow reading much less fiction -- I think that's mainly because so little mainstream big names (Franzen, et al) don't appeal to me. It also means I read wayy too many memoirs, mainly for research, but still.
2013 booklist
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Friday, January 25, 2013
the read and the unread
I am so serious about this (my thread is here) I spent actual HOURS organizing my Kindle and from one folder called "books" creating two new ones, "new books" and "read." This took for-fucking-ever and drove me BATSHIT because there are over 1000 books on my Kindle, and it's one of those old keyboard ones, and it was a lemon out of the box because it's always been very halting. Maybe it knew how hard it was going to be driven. Anyway, the total damage is about 300 books read, and 750 books unread.
....yeah. That's a worse percentage of read/unread than my paper library. //cries
-- Some people on LibraryThing seem bent on downsizing their libraries, tho. I find that horrifying. (After about three giant culls of my own library -- just before I went to college, when I had to sell books in bulk in grad school because I was so broke and when my parents sold everything we owned when I was ten because we were Moving To Europe Forever ((i.e. Nine Months)) -- I got so absolutely sick of not being able to find books, or not remembering what a book I'd had was called and being unable to replace it, I determined to NEVER GET RID OF A BOOK AGAIN. Yeah. Basically I don't get rid of books unless they become unreadably damaged somehow, and even then I might keep them for sentimental reasons, like the Smollett-translated Don Quixote I had at St John's which my tiny adorable evil kitten peed all over before she got fixed. It lives in a vacuum-sealed bag wrapped in a series of bags in a taped-up box sunk deep in a closet. But anyway.)
WILL I MAKE IT? STAY TUNED THROUGH 2013 TO FIND OUT. Lord.
I just figured out it would probably take me over ten years just to read all the paper books in my house I haven't gotten to so far, which was so depressing I had to spend a quarter of an hour updating my Amazon wishlist to cheer myself up.
TRUE STORY.
I think I also probably "won." Especially if you count the unread books on the Kindle. //facedesk
....yeah. That's a worse percentage of read/unread than my paper library. //cries
-- Some people on LibraryThing seem bent on downsizing their libraries, tho. I find that horrifying. (After about three giant culls of my own library -- just before I went to college, when I had to sell books in bulk in grad school because I was so broke and when my parents sold everything we owned when I was ten because we were Moving To Europe Forever ((i.e. Nine Months)) -- I got so absolutely sick of not being able to find books, or not remembering what a book I'd had was called and being unable to replace it, I determined to NEVER GET RID OF A BOOK AGAIN. Yeah. Basically I don't get rid of books unless they become unreadably damaged somehow, and even then I might keep them for sentimental reasons, like the Smollett-translated Don Quixote I had at St John's which my tiny adorable evil kitten peed all over before she got fixed. It lives in a vacuum-sealed bag wrapped in a series of bags in a taped-up box sunk deep in a closet. But anyway.)
WILL I MAKE IT? STAY TUNED THROUGH 2013 TO FIND OUT. Lord.
I just figured out it would probably take me over ten years just to read all the paper books in my house I haven't gotten to so far, which was so depressing I had to spend a quarter of an hour updating my Amazon wishlist to cheer myself up.
TRUE STORY.
I think I also probably "won." Especially if you count the unread books on the Kindle. //facedesk
Thursday, January 24, 2013
75 books in 2013 - LibraryThing
Blog redesign! Still not happy with the link colour, or the font, or oh my God the header, but it was fun to do anyway. You'll notice this looks more like a page in a book now (hopefully, anyway) than one of your typical blog designs with the columns and widgets everywhere. Yes. (Okay, there are still some widgets.)
I'm doing the "75 books in 2013" challenge on LibraryThing -- my thread's here. This is unofficially my "SUCK IT, GOODREADS" project for the year. Heh. I'm just so sick of being bullied and hassled in other ways by men over there (not to mention the really horrific bullying -- stalking and harassment, to put it plain -- by would-be "authors" of some reviewers, and the utter inability of GoodReads to respond in anything like a timely and appropriate manner, but let's not even go there). LibraryThing is a lot quieter, and a lot less slickly designed, but it's -- well, yes, quieter. Like a, you know, library.
Quiet is not bad. Obscurity is not bad. Not having 500 "friends" on your social network is not bad. I am almost completely out of step with these our times, I know.
I'm doing the "75 books in 2013" challenge on LibraryThing -- my thread's here. This is unofficially my "SUCK IT, GOODREADS" project for the year. Heh. I'm just so sick of being bullied and hassled in other ways by men over there (not to mention the really horrific bullying -- stalking and harassment, to put it plain -- by would-be "authors" of some reviewers, and the utter inability of GoodReads to respond in anything like a timely and appropriate manner, but let's not even go there). LibraryThing is a lot quieter, and a lot less slickly designed, but it's -- well, yes, quieter. Like a, you know, library.
Quiet is not bad. Obscurity is not bad. Not having 500 "friends" on your social network is not bad. I am almost completely out of step with these our times, I know.
The word “howdy” should probably never appear in a poem
A-fucking-men.
(For the record, I think Blanco's poem sucked. I also thought the poem from Obama's first inauguration sucked. I don't like that Frost poem, either -- "this land was ours"? Nice one, white man -- and I fucking hated that "drone poem" everyone too hip for the room is raving about. I don't know if there can be such a thing as a good inaugural -- Establishment, if you will -- poem. Think of Ted Hughes writing that awful slop for the Queen. Poetry doesn't go well with official capacities. You'd never catch Emily Dickinson at an inauguration.)
Judge: And what is your profession?
Brodsky: Poet. Poet and translator.
Judge: And who told you you were a poet? Who assigned you the rank of poet?
Brodsky: No one. Who assigned me the rank of a human being?
Judge: Did you study for this?
Brodsky: For what?
Judge: To become a poet. Did you attend a school where they teach poets? Where they train you how to be a poet?
Brodsky: I don't think it comes from school.
Judge: From where, then?
Brodsky: I think that it....comes from God.
(source)
(For the record, I think Blanco's poem sucked. I also thought the poem from Obama's first inauguration sucked. I don't like that Frost poem, either -- "this land was ours"? Nice one, white man -- and I fucking hated that "drone poem" everyone too hip for the room is raving about. I don't know if there can be such a thing as a good inaugural -- Establishment, if you will -- poem. Think of Ted Hughes writing that awful slop for the Queen. Poetry doesn't go well with official capacities. You'd never catch Emily Dickinson at an inauguration.)
Judge: And what is your profession?
Brodsky: Poet. Poet and translator.
Judge: And who told you you were a poet? Who assigned you the rank of poet?
Brodsky: No one. Who assigned me the rank of a human being?
Judge: Did you study for this?
Brodsky: For what?
Judge: To become a poet. Did you attend a school where they teach poets? Where they train you how to be a poet?
Brodsky: I don't think it comes from school.
Judge: From where, then?
Brodsky: I think that it....comes from God.
(source)
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
waste of breath
Speaking of that (fucking TERRIBLE) book, there's a really odd little moment in it -- when her family buries Lucie's ashes, her sister has two little silver plaques with the first lines of "Lucie's favourite poem" on them - Yeats's "An Irish Airman foresees his Death," which seems a strange choice for a twenty-one-year-old girl without much education whose parents were interested in, respectively, woowoo and yachting. Absolutely nothing is said about what this might mean, which is also odd because it's a very haunting poem -- it speaks of exile, passivity, suspension in limbo, and that seemingly goes with the odd rootless freedom so many Westerners in Japan describe in the book (and which is fetishized in pop culture like, say, Lost in Translation).
reading Wednesday 1/23/2013
FINALLY I catch up and post on the actual Wednesday! It only took about....three and a half weeks, go Moi!
What are you reading now?
Well, nothing currently. I may update that in the next five minutes!
What did you just finish reading?
People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo--and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up -- yeah, that's some title, isn't it. Yes, this is the fairly typical story of the beautiful-missing-blonde-girl-in-a-foreign-land, except the author gets inside her personality enough you feel the actual loss of her life (which is, well, depressing) and he does interrogate the Missing Blonde Girl stereotype/trope/whateveritis, somewhat. HOWEVER, the book goes completely to hell when he tries to defend the indefensible actions of Lucie's father, who not only accepted a giant payoff from the man who killed her and then cut her into little pieces, but also signed a statement prepared by either the nutcase or his lawyers about how bad the evidence against him was. (The author says "This didn't affect the guy's being acquited of those charges at all, because the judges said so!" WELL THEN.) What did he do with the money? Glad you asked. He bought a yacht. A second yacht. The author also then natters pointlessly on about how you can't call the murderer a sociopath (despite his raping hundreds of unconscious women and killing at least two), you can't judge the father for accepting the money, and you can't judge Japan by what happened to Lucie (despite detailing dozens of rapes that went unreported out of fear, and rapes that did get reported which were then ignored). Despite that, the first two-thirds or so really is fairly well-written, but I would not recommend this at all. If it sounds interesting, either buy a used copy or go to the library. You need to go to the library, anyway.
What do you expect to read next?
Such a good question. I am afraid, unless I'm researching something (my school days are loooooong behind me....altho my student loan debt sure isn't) this is governed pretty much by whim. I have so many good books I should be reading -- Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf, Bad Blood, Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, Angelica Lost and Found, Seven Gothic Tales....I might go for fiction, short fiction at that; I'm a little burned out on long nonfiction books since that's mostly all I've read this month, I think.
What are you reading now?
Well, nothing currently. I may update that in the next five minutes!
What did you just finish reading?
People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo--and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up -- yeah, that's some title, isn't it. Yes, this is the fairly typical story of the beautiful-missing-blonde-girl-in-a-foreign-land, except the author gets inside her personality enough you feel the actual loss of her life (which is, well, depressing) and he does interrogate the Missing Blonde Girl stereotype/trope/whateveritis, somewhat. HOWEVER, the book goes completely to hell when he tries to defend the indefensible actions of Lucie's father, who not only accepted a giant payoff from the man who killed her and then cut her into little pieces, but also signed a statement prepared by either the nutcase or his lawyers about how bad the evidence against him was. (The author says "This didn't affect the guy's being acquited of those charges at all, because the judges said so!" WELL THEN.) What did he do with the money? Glad you asked. He bought a yacht. A second yacht. The author also then natters pointlessly on about how you can't call the murderer a sociopath (despite his raping hundreds of unconscious women and killing at least two), you can't judge the father for accepting the money, and you can't judge Japan by what happened to Lucie (despite detailing dozens of rapes that went unreported out of fear, and rapes that did get reported which were then ignored). Despite that, the first two-thirds or so really is fairly well-written, but I would not recommend this at all. If it sounds interesting, either buy a used copy or go to the library. You need to go to the library, anyway.
What do you expect to read next?
Such a good question. I am afraid, unless I'm researching something (my school days are loooooong behind me....altho my student loan debt sure isn't) this is governed pretty much by whim. I have so many good books I should be reading -- Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf, Bad Blood, Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, Angelica Lost and Found, Seven Gothic Tales....I might go for fiction, short fiction at that; I'm a little burned out on long nonfiction books since that's mostly all I've read this month, I think.
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
books read in 2013 - January
Nothing too elaborate for right now; I'm just going to split the record out by month like I did wayy back when I first had a blog, because it's harder to remember what I read when otherwise. And I'm just a little sick of fucking Goodreads at the moment.
The Man in the Empty Boat, Mark Salzman. Really not as good as the talk it was based on; also has the weird abbreviated quality peculiar to "Kindle singles," which sound like they'd be great for novella-length fiction or longer nonfiction features (I am not using that fucking fake word "longreads" and you can't make me), but somehow wind up oddly....hollow.
The Last Novel, David Markson. I read this out of sequence -- it's the last of the four "index card books" -- but I couldn't help gobbling, and in the end I'm almost glad I did so, despite its being so disappointing....I would've hated to have read it as the very last one in the series. A very bitter aftertaste. People joked about Markson writing "The Posthumous Novel," but this really felt like that title. It's prickly, sad, and self-pitying, obsessively concerned with posterity, critical judgements, and the impossible subjectivity of same. (Bookslut managed to miss the point impressively.) The reader is gone -- it's all critics, all about criticism, not reading, not writing; it's not play, anymore. Suicide is constantly hinted at, but Markson also jabs at "the casual reader" (or, more likely, the skimming for-pay book critic) so the emotional impact is diluted. If Wittgenstein's Mistress was about creating, the world well lost for works of art -- literally -- this one is about what happens when the world fights back and does its best to seemingly destroy the artist. Markson/the author keeps talking about how high the building is and it seems like a long, long suicide note, but then he also keeps undercutting it elsewhere: Schrödinger's Author? (Open the book/box, is he dead/not dead?) It's a sad end.
Two more Kindle Singles: 43* by Jeff Greenfield, which was like a missing or extra chapter of his book on the same topic. Greenfield's a funny and slick nonfiction writer, but his fiction is sort of thuddingly traditional, and when he tries to write fancy, the result is wince-worthy. The original setup (Gore doesn't lose Florida partly because Elian Gonzales' mother didn't die in the crossing) was interesting, but then it went OFF THE RAILS, which is just about what happened in the bigger (actual book-sized) book of his alternate histories, which I got after reading this, which I suppose I was supposed to do. So basically this is sort of like a fictional ad for his not-a-novel.
And then Final Vision by Joe McGinnis, which was mainly about Jeffrey MacDonalds' appeals and included some snotty remarks about A Wilderness of Error, which I read last year. (Shameful true-crime addict here.) Basically a ripoff - large chunks of Fatal Vision are cut and pasted without any revision at all, and while he does answer Errol "Thin Blue Line" Morris, it's not done very well at all.
Battleborn, Claire Vaye Watkins. Every year there's a book everyone loves but me, and this one is probably going to be 2013's. (Others: the first Harry Potter book, The Time Traveller's Wife, Jonathan Strange, you get the picture.) This is the kind of book that knocks you out if you've never read any MFA-produced, self-consciously "gritty," this-is-my-territory-let-me-stake-it-out first short story collections. I have GOT to stop getting books based on glowing NYTBR reviews. The author gets a bit of notoriety because her father was Paul Watkins, and I'll wait here while everyone under thirty has to go Google that name. She wrote a much better memoir about him in Granta. She does describe the Southwest, especially the charred isolation of the high desert, very well, but her plots are cardboard and her characters are worse. Probably we'll see either a novel or memoir (or the oh-so-modern combination of those genres) from her about her childhood in the next few years.
The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton, Joe Klein. I actually remember reading Primary Colours when it first came out anonymously (yes, I am THAT OLD), and the big flap about figuring out who the author was, &c &c. I didn't realize Klein was this....conservative. Sort of interesting in a historical sense, in terms of how Clinton's personality and two terms badly affected Gore, and how he fits into the phenomenon of New Conservative Democrats, but not that good, really. If anything's interesting in the book it's the topic, not the prose style, or the narrative choices, or the longer perspective afforded by writing books after the fact rather than newspapers. This is typical of nearly all 21st-century nonfiction I've read lately.
Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow!: Inside the Strangest Presidential Election Finish in American History, Jeff Greenfield. Despite the goofy and hellishly long title, a valuable inside look at the 2000 US election, which I just couldn't read anything about for a good long while (I still can't read even news articles about the one in 2004). Greenfield's a real smartass and this book basically is all the thoughts he couldn't say on the air or even out loud off-camera at the time. He gets a bit defensive now and then but it's hard to blame him. It was particularly sweet to read this right after Karl Rove made a huge deal out of the networks "not prematurely calling Florida for Obama like they did in 2000" in 2012.
Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan, Jeff Greenfield. (Yes, I tend to focus on one author or topic at a stretch, sue me.) I've read a lot of genre "Speck Fic" (as Ursula Le Guin terms it) alternate histories, and the ones gathered in this book -- JFK's assassinated before he becomes president, RFK isn't, and so on -- just aren't that good. The tone is a very weird mix of detailed reporting, wild speculation, pulpy fictional plotting and at least one terrible shaggy dog punchline involving President Gary Hart, Governor Clinton and Secretary of State Rodham (don't ask). I might check out Greenfield's entirely fictional account of a contested Presidency, The People's Choice, but if it's written in the same style as his rather stuffy fiction, I'll take a pass. (Primary Colours, way back when, had the same problem: everyone knew they were reading real details about real people, so the fictional "waking dream" never took over, but the story was shaped as if it were fiction, complete with artistic license here and there, so it also felt very inauthentic. The whole question of pop nonfiction -- ghosted celebrity "books," rushed ebook or paperback true crime tie-ins, memoirs written two or three decades after unverifiable events, histories more poorly sourced than freshman term papers -- is a vexed one.)
Libriomancer, Jim C. Hines. I really wanted to like this, because it was supposedly urban fantasy done "right" without a passive heroine trapped in a limp love triangle, because the author writes great posts about feminism, rape, patriarchy and the like on his blog, and he's behind the entirely delightful Striking a Pose series where he tries to copy those terrible urban fantasy covers. Unfortunately the description everyone's quoting, a "cross between Dresden and Thursday Next," is accurate, and I....don't like either of those series. I actually had a similar reaction to reading the Next books: I thought there would be a lot more literary in-jokes, and instead it was sort of focused on geeky cleverness. There was a fairly lengthy discussion of the book's flaws (including especially its female lead) here.
(Yeah, I also hate Jasper Fforde, along with J.K. Rowling, Audrey Niffenegger, Susanna Clarke, and so on. Neil Gaiman gets a bye, but not really. In my spare time Ikick puppies cultivate my exquisite taste.)
Finally, I did just finish The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright, which took about two and a half days of sustained reading -- I wanted to really understand it (I read fast, but I'm also one of those people who reads all the endnotes....the acknowledgements....the list of sources....the index. You can tell a lot about a book from its index). I'm not sure what to say about it -- it was gripping, even riveting, altho the places where he tried to write fancy (what is it with reporters suddenly wanting to turn out embroidered prose in books? Does it just become a pent-up urge after so many years of Just the Facts and strict wordcount limits?) were pretty bad. I was really surprised at how much I didn't know (which I am not going to reveal here because it would be very embarrassing) (this included: what Osama's father did to earn all that money, who Sayyid Qutb was, the Grand Mosque Seizure, the Luxor Massacre, you get the picture). I wonder, inevitably, what the author's thoughts were on bin Laden's finally being killed, by a Democrat administration no less. The book seems to stop a little abruptly, because he goes into the causes of 9/11 so thoroughly and then very briefly (but harrowingly) describes the Twin Towers dying, but I could understand it. We've all seen those final moments endlessly on film, the hijackings have been filmed over and over again too in very sketchy "docudramas," and this is about what we didn't know, what we didn't see -- and what the people in the book didn't see, either. Like all good books this one made me want to read more books: Through Our Enemies' Eyes, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, The Man Who Warned America....This book does lean very heavily on the testimony of those authors -- Michael Scheuer, Ali Soufan, memories of John O'Neill -- but that's not a bad thing.
That's it so far -- I want to read some more serious stuff before the end of the month (this was what I was saying for nearly all of 2012. sigh). I also reread some -- the Sherlock Holmes canon, The Taste of Sorrow, Wintering, Tweak -- but I try not to do that because well, the stacks just go piling on up and up in here, and rereading is really not the best use of my time unless it's for research, or I need comfort when I'm sick.
The Man in the Empty Boat, Mark Salzman. Really not as good as the talk it was based on; also has the weird abbreviated quality peculiar to "Kindle singles," which sound like they'd be great for novella-length fiction or longer nonfiction features (I am not using that fucking fake word "longreads" and you can't make me), but somehow wind up oddly....hollow.
The Last Novel, David Markson. I read this out of sequence -- it's the last of the four "index card books" -- but I couldn't help gobbling, and in the end I'm almost glad I did so, despite its being so disappointing....I would've hated to have read it as the very last one in the series. A very bitter aftertaste. People joked about Markson writing "The Posthumous Novel," but this really felt like that title. It's prickly, sad, and self-pitying, obsessively concerned with posterity, critical judgements, and the impossible subjectivity of same. (Bookslut managed to miss the point impressively.) The reader is gone -- it's all critics, all about criticism, not reading, not writing; it's not play, anymore. Suicide is constantly hinted at, but Markson also jabs at "the casual reader" (or, more likely, the skimming for-pay book critic) so the emotional impact is diluted. If Wittgenstein's Mistress was about creating, the world well lost for works of art -- literally -- this one is about what happens when the world fights back and does its best to seemingly destroy the artist. Markson/the author keeps talking about how high the building is and it seems like a long, long suicide note, but then he also keeps undercutting it elsewhere: Schrödinger's Author? (Open the book/box, is he dead/not dead?) It's a sad end.
Two more Kindle Singles: 43* by Jeff Greenfield, which was like a missing or extra chapter of his book on the same topic. Greenfield's a funny and slick nonfiction writer, but his fiction is sort of thuddingly traditional, and when he tries to write fancy, the result is wince-worthy. The original setup (Gore doesn't lose Florida partly because Elian Gonzales' mother didn't die in the crossing) was interesting, but then it went OFF THE RAILS, which is just about what happened in the bigger (actual book-sized) book of his alternate histories, which I got after reading this, which I suppose I was supposed to do. So basically this is sort of like a fictional ad for his not-a-novel.
And then Final Vision by Joe McGinnis, which was mainly about Jeffrey MacDonalds' appeals and included some snotty remarks about A Wilderness of Error, which I read last year. (Shameful true-crime addict here.) Basically a ripoff - large chunks of Fatal Vision are cut and pasted without any revision at all, and while he does answer Errol "Thin Blue Line" Morris, it's not done very well at all.
Battleborn, Claire Vaye Watkins. Every year there's a book everyone loves but me, and this one is probably going to be 2013's. (Others: the first Harry Potter book, The Time Traveller's Wife, Jonathan Strange, you get the picture.) This is the kind of book that knocks you out if you've never read any MFA-produced, self-consciously "gritty," this-is-my-territory-let-me-stake-it-out first short story collections. I have GOT to stop getting books based on glowing NYTBR reviews. The author gets a bit of notoriety because her father was Paul Watkins, and I'll wait here while everyone under thirty has to go Google that name. She wrote a much better memoir about him in Granta. She does describe the Southwest, especially the charred isolation of the high desert, very well, but her plots are cardboard and her characters are worse. Probably we'll see either a novel or memoir (or the oh-so-modern combination of those genres) from her about her childhood in the next few years.
The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton, Joe Klein. I actually remember reading Primary Colours when it first came out anonymously (yes, I am THAT OLD), and the big flap about figuring out who the author was, &c &c. I didn't realize Klein was this....conservative. Sort of interesting in a historical sense, in terms of how Clinton's personality and two terms badly affected Gore, and how he fits into the phenomenon of New Conservative Democrats, but not that good, really. If anything's interesting in the book it's the topic, not the prose style, or the narrative choices, or the longer perspective afforded by writing books after the fact rather than newspapers. This is typical of nearly all 21st-century nonfiction I've read lately.
Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow!: Inside the Strangest Presidential Election Finish in American History, Jeff Greenfield. Despite the goofy and hellishly long title, a valuable inside look at the 2000 US election, which I just couldn't read anything about for a good long while (I still can't read even news articles about the one in 2004). Greenfield's a real smartass and this book basically is all the thoughts he couldn't say on the air or even out loud off-camera at the time. He gets a bit defensive now and then but it's hard to blame him. It was particularly sweet to read this right after Karl Rove made a huge deal out of the networks "not prematurely calling Florida for Obama like they did in 2000" in 2012.
Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan, Jeff Greenfield. (Yes, I tend to focus on one author or topic at a stretch, sue me.) I've read a lot of genre "Speck Fic" (as Ursula Le Guin terms it) alternate histories, and the ones gathered in this book -- JFK's assassinated before he becomes president, RFK isn't, and so on -- just aren't that good. The tone is a very weird mix of detailed reporting, wild speculation, pulpy fictional plotting and at least one terrible shaggy dog punchline involving President Gary Hart, Governor Clinton and Secretary of State Rodham (don't ask). I might check out Greenfield's entirely fictional account of a contested Presidency, The People's Choice, but if it's written in the same style as his rather stuffy fiction, I'll take a pass. (Primary Colours, way back when, had the same problem: everyone knew they were reading real details about real people, so the fictional "waking dream" never took over, but the story was shaped as if it were fiction, complete with artistic license here and there, so it also felt very inauthentic. The whole question of pop nonfiction -- ghosted celebrity "books," rushed ebook or paperback true crime tie-ins, memoirs written two or three decades after unverifiable events, histories more poorly sourced than freshman term papers -- is a vexed one.)
Libriomancer, Jim C. Hines. I really wanted to like this, because it was supposedly urban fantasy done "right" without a passive heroine trapped in a limp love triangle, because the author writes great posts about feminism, rape, patriarchy and the like on his blog, and he's behind the entirely delightful Striking a Pose series where he tries to copy those terrible urban fantasy covers. Unfortunately the description everyone's quoting, a "cross between Dresden and Thursday Next," is accurate, and I....don't like either of those series. I actually had a similar reaction to reading the Next books: I thought there would be a lot more literary in-jokes, and instead it was sort of focused on geeky cleverness. There was a fairly lengthy discussion of the book's flaws (including especially its female lead) here.
(Yeah, I also hate Jasper Fforde, along with J.K. Rowling, Audrey Niffenegger, Susanna Clarke, and so on. Neil Gaiman gets a bye, but not really. In my spare time I
Finally, I did just finish The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright, which took about two and a half days of sustained reading -- I wanted to really understand it (I read fast, but I'm also one of those people who reads all the endnotes....the acknowledgements....the list of sources....the index. You can tell a lot about a book from its index). I'm not sure what to say about it -- it was gripping, even riveting, altho the places where he tried to write fancy (what is it with reporters suddenly wanting to turn out embroidered prose in books? Does it just become a pent-up urge after so many years of Just the Facts and strict wordcount limits?) were pretty bad. I was really surprised at how much I didn't know (which I am not going to reveal here because it would be very embarrassing) (this included: what Osama's father did to earn all that money, who Sayyid Qutb was, the Grand Mosque Seizure, the Luxor Massacre, you get the picture). I wonder, inevitably, what the author's thoughts were on bin Laden's finally being killed, by a Democrat administration no less. The book seems to stop a little abruptly, because he goes into the causes of 9/11 so thoroughly and then very briefly (but harrowingly) describes the Twin Towers dying, but I could understand it. We've all seen those final moments endlessly on film, the hijackings have been filmed over and over again too in very sketchy "docudramas," and this is about what we didn't know, what we didn't see -- and what the people in the book didn't see, either. Like all good books this one made me want to read more books: Through Our Enemies' Eyes, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, The Man Who Warned America....This book does lean very heavily on the testimony of those authors -- Michael Scheuer, Ali Soufan, memories of John O'Neill -- but that's not a bad thing.
That's it so far -- I want to read some more serious stuff before the end of the month (this was what I was saying for nearly all of 2012. sigh). I also reread some -- the Sherlock Holmes canon, The Taste of Sorrow, Wintering, Tweak -- but I try not to do that because well, the stacks just go piling on up and up in here, and rereading is really not the best use of my time unless it's for research, or I need comfort when I'm sick.
Sunday, January 20, 2013
reading, uh, SUNDAY, whoops
DAMN I keep forgetting to do this "WWW reading" thing. It's a cool idea, and that's a shame, so....
What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?
(I'm recovered from the sinusitis, THANK GOD. For now. Judicious use of Sudafed and Afrin, plus Flonase, plus it's been really really foggy around here. Cold, but foggy. ((Husband asked the other day: "How are you enjoying the particulars?" Geek.)) )
Currently reading - My signed, PERSONALLY INSCRIBED copy of Hanne Blank's The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts, which is awesome: hilarious, wonderfully written, wry, and incendiary indeed. As one review puts it:
Recently finished - A reread of Hound of the Baskervilles, a perpetual comfort book (altho that bit about "We chatted about the skulls of the Hottentots and Bushmen" - oy), and What Fresh Hell is This?, a terrible biography of Dorothy Parker (also a reread), sparked off by reading a Nora Ephron column on Dorothy Parker, altho that references a different terrible Dorothy Parker biography. Note to self: write biography of Dorothy Parker that isn't terrible, for sake of own sanity if nothing else. Altho I understand this book is neat, so of course I don't have it. SIGH.
What I might read next - Either The Looming Tower or the new Scientology book, both by Lawrence Wright -- I started reading his stuff when he was writing about ritual Satanic abuse for the New Yorker, so it's nice to see him get a lot of recognition. Maybe the People Who Eat Darkness, even if that sounds fucking terrifying. I seem to have a nonfiction jones right now.
***
INTERVIEWER: What, then, would you say is the source of most of your work?
DOROTHY PARKER: Need of money, dear.
- Paris Review interview
What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?
(I'm recovered from the sinusitis, THANK GOD. For now. Judicious use of Sudafed and Afrin, plus Flonase, plus it's been really really foggy around here. Cold, but foggy. ((Husband asked the other day: "How are you enjoying the particulars?" Geek.)) )
Currently reading - My signed, PERSONALLY INSCRIBED copy of Hanne Blank's The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts, which is awesome: hilarious, wonderfully written, wry, and incendiary indeed. As one review puts it:
Redefining exercise as "body practice", and treating it as affirming self-care rather than a chore, and acknowledging that it encompasses everything from intense training in a sport to simply moving around and lifting and carrying and bending to get things that have fallen under the entertainment center, and that it's the sort of care every body deserves, is both a radical and a comforting thing.
Recently finished - A reread of Hound of the Baskervilles, a perpetual comfort book (altho that bit about "We chatted about the skulls of the Hottentots and Bushmen" - oy), and What Fresh Hell is This?, a terrible biography of Dorothy Parker (also a reread), sparked off by reading a Nora Ephron column on Dorothy Parker, altho that references a different terrible Dorothy Parker biography. Note to self: write biography of Dorothy Parker that isn't terrible, for sake of own sanity if nothing else. Altho I understand this book is neat, so of course I don't have it. SIGH.
What I might read next - Either The Looming Tower or the new Scientology book, both by Lawrence Wright -- I started reading his stuff when he was writing about ritual Satanic abuse for the New Yorker, so it's nice to see him get a lot of recognition. Maybe the People Who Eat Darkness, even if that sounds fucking terrifying. I seem to have a nonfiction jones right now.
***
INTERVIEWER: What, then, would you say is the source of most of your work?
DOROTHY PARKER: Need of money, dear.
- Paris Review interview
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)