Chapter 17: In which I Expose Myself in Shameful Ways, as All Writers Must Eventually Do

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We are, all of us, prejudiced.

There. I’ve said it.

It’s a simple fact, really, yet one that we’re unwilling to admit. The reason for our obstinance, I propose, is that we have falsely conflated the ubiquitous reality of prejudice with the much rarer reality of bigotry. They’re not the same thing. Prejudice is merely the tendency (habit, even) of prejudging, while bigotry is the unwillingness to recognize and overcome prejudice, and then behaving in ways that demonstrate that unwillingness.

Prejudice, in fact, may be built-in, an evolutionary advantage that allows us to create patterns based on previous experience. To “pre-judge” strange sounds or strange people gives us an opportunity to flee, and while that may sound rude (or even racist) in today’s world, it sounds pretty damn smart when judging early man on the African veldt, where strange sounds might just augur something very dangerous indeed, something that might wish to dine on his very bones. A bit of pre-judging—rather than waiting around to find out—might just make the difference as to where he spends the night—at home all comfy with his friends and relatives, or slowly rotting while a buzzard’s beak picks at his remaining entrails.

I’ve encountered this revelation (redux, as you’ll see) after reading two more Pulitzer Prize winners. Neither impressed me terribly, but they certainly impressed upon me. The first was the previously mentioned Advise and Consent (begun but set aside a couple of weeks ago, then finally picked up again) and the second, the more recent Middlesex.

You may recall that I expected Advise and Consent to be something of a “humdinger”; I was mostly right. (The book even used the word “humdinger” on one occasion.) The story—about the political machinations associated with confirming the President’s appointment for Secretary of State—is filled with the detailed inner-workings of the Senate, overlaid with a bit of McCarthy-ish melodrama involving blackmail, communism, and homosexuality. The character that helped feed my prejudicial distaste wasn’t, however (as you might have prejudicially assumed), the Senator with the homosexual history; it was instead Seab Cooley, the aged and stubborn Senator from South Carolina.

When Cooley’s picture is first painted you learn little about him. He’s stubborn. He holds a grudge. He’s powerful. He’s intensely… southern. Without realizing it, though, I filled in other parts of the paint-by-number. I assumed he had gotten somewhat dotty. I assumed he was something of a racist. I assumed he survived through self-interest. I assumed he was Republican.

All of these assumptions were wrong. In fact, by the end of the book, Seab Cooley was a guy I respected. Someone I might even, just a little bit, aspire to be like.

Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex was altogether different, and nothing like what I expected when I picked up the book; the cover and title anticipated something English and (possibly) Victorian (the result of yet another prejudice, no doubt). Instead, the novel is the ostensible memoir of Callie/Cal, a hermaphrodite. “Middle sex.” Get it? Callie (I’ll stick with that name for simplicity, and because “she” dominates about 80% of the novel) is of Greek heritage, just a skipped generation removed from a brother—sister marriage, a coupling which provides the genetic narrative necessary to produce her. Pediatrically treated by a kindly but largely incompetent doctor, the condition (which has subtle but clinically obvious physical realities) remains overlooked until her early teens, at which time she makes the decision to personify as Cal (while remaining physically unchanged).

I admit to a subtle queasiness over the topic and the character, the press of a societal button installed when I was very young. It made me think of other reactions I’ve had in the past—particularly those from my teen and college years when I was less self-aware and more visceral. When, Pavlovian-like, I reacted negatively to outward displays of “not normal” behavior.

Sad, isn’t it?

*****

This is an essay that I’ve wanted to write for a long time. The first draft (penciled in a composition book that I can no longer find) first emerged on a Maine shoreline during a years-ago Labor Day weekend. I’d been sitting on some rocks just beyond the back porch of the house we had rented for a week’s vacation, watching the tide slowly ebbing, and a lobster boat circling the bay. A man stood smoking on the deck of the boat, and I watched him take a long, last drag before flicking the butt overboard. He wore overalls and a baseball cap, the former white and the latter grey.

I built a story for that man—as we all often do—giving him a family, friends, childhood memories, political beliefs. I scribed him where he stood. In doing so I built on every stereotype I pretended to know about someone who would grow up and become a Maine lobsterman. I imagined him with barely a high school diploma and a thick accent, someone who rarely read a book but was kind to his wife and three kids. His house, I was sure, needed painting, and he wasn’t above a few beers after a rough day on the water. The overall effect was of someone whom you might just barely see in an old episode of Murder, She Wrote, hazily out of focus at a diner counter, drinking coffee and reading the paper while Angela Lansbury puzzled over some not-quite-right whodunit clue.

A pleased limner, I re-read the description, changing a couple of words here and there, never once thinking about how I was building my character.

It was later that evening that I thought about exactly what I had done, how I had created a character from a nearly still image and the flick of a cigarette butt, using as material unknown (but obviously learned) habits of prejudice and composition. I had no sudden regret, of course: such construction is what we writers do. It’s our sera, our pulse beat. But I was taking note in a larger way, just for a moment, imagining the many other times I’d done the same thing, and not because I was working creatively, but because I was just reacting. Why, as a twelve-year-old kid a bit on the scrawny side, did I get a lump in my throat when, walking home alone from the park, I saw a trio of black kids about my age, walking towards me? Why, as a teenager (and recently Bar Mitzvah-ed myself), did I snicker behind my hand when approached by several Chassidic Jews asking if I wanted to pray with them? Why as a hormonal high-schooler, did I believe the rumors about Sharon, who wore those loose-fitting halters and walked around without a bra, but always treated me as a friend?

And why was it years later that I first asked myself such questions?

I truly believe that people who argue they have no prejudice are like horses wearing blinders, unaware that they can’t see what they can’t see, blithely moving forward, and that such attitudes are every bit as dangerous to society as outright bigotry. Perhaps even more so. Outright bigotry, you see is… well… outright. It’s seen and heard, and abhorred. But it is also, somehow, managed, in part because it is so obvious. Prejudice is more subtle and therefore more invasive. It is cultural norm, and so must be where the battle is fought. But that battle is in each of us; it’s a fight of self-reflection and self-honesty.

The sad part isn’t that a middle-aged man sat in his leather chair reacting with prejudice at a Southern politician or a Midwestern hermaphrodite. Those reactions, unfortunately, are to be expected. The sadness is that there are so many who won’t admit they have such reactions, and so can never help society to overcome them. 

Read since last post:

• Advise and Consent, Allen Drury (1960)
• Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides (2003)

 

Currently reading:

• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)

Count: 64 read, 23 to go

Photo courtesy of 123RF Stock Photo

Note: for those interested in discussing the intersection of written words, politics, and social issues, Coffee Party USA has re-established the Coffee Party Book Club.

Chapter 16: Interlude and Devastation

First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow the Chapters in the Archives list on the right sidebar, going from oldest to newest.

 

I needed a break.

After winding my way through the last of Jean Stafford’s stories I felt exhausted, like a household generator with only ounces of fuel remaining yet desperately trying to warm an iced-in, powerless cabin. Melancholy set in, overlaid with a nagging feeling that I just wasn’t up to the task I’d set myself. Something about the Pulitzer committee must love the deeply depressing, for only a very few of those read so far had brought me anything approaching a smile. And with both Andersonville and Humboldt’s Gift before me, I think that unlikely to change. Oh, there may be some satire and absurdity ahead (there’s a Michael Chabon awaiting, after all, and a Richard Russo), but I’m resigned to a home stretch of frayed electrics, nerves rubbed raw.

So following Stafford I took the break I needed and read books un-Pulitzered.

The laughter I craved came from How About Never… Is Never Good For You? My Life in Cartoons, a memoir by the current cartoon editor of The New Yorker, Bob Mankoff. Mankoff’s book—made up of equal parts words and line drawings (both his and others)—takes us on an interesting journey into what life is like for the crème de la crème of those plying the trade. He likens working for The New Yorker to playing for the Yankees—there is no higher aspiration (at least for a New Yorker). After a brief obligatory trip through his own childhood and subsequent calling, he dives into the real stuff, discussing what it’s like to churn out ten-plus good ideas a week in the hopes that one of them will be great, in the hopes that one of those will be great enough to find its way into the sacred pages. At the same time he reminisces about what it was like to a) disappoint his parents, b) find his own voice and style, and c) remind us that no one—no one—will ever be another James Thurber. (Okay, that last one was mine. But really, you have to admit it. Thurber was something else, the Olivier of magazine cartoonists, working so hard to make it look so easy….)

I followed Mankoff’s book with A Little Lumpen Novelita, another spot of brilliance from the late Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño seizes unceasingly; his work (including the epic 2666 and the poetically challenging The Savage Detectives) never fails to grasp and hold my attention. This brief work, best read in one sitting, is simultaneously depressing and uplifting, telling the story of the older of two orphans who finds herself in a very unusual (and oddly romantic) situation where she seduces someone she plans to rob, but never effectively manages either. (Bolaño’s voice, silenced so early, will be missed, but I’ll continue to look forward to whatever posthumous translations appear.)

At this point I began to feel guilty. I’d set a project for myself, after all, and had allowed this unintended sidetrack. Worse, I was enjoying it. Now and again I’d look toward where a beaten hardback copy of Advise and Consent sat on my end table (I’d already decided Drury’s book was the next stop on the Pulitzer train), and thought about how much I didn’t want to open its pages. Over six hundred of them waited for me, all densely packed with what a cursory flip through suggested would be endlessly boring descriptions of hallways and long passages of mediocre dialog. (In fairness, the plot was supposed to be a humdinger, but then I’d always been wary of anything where the word “humdinger” seemed an appropriate descriptor.)

Guilt and I don’t get along. In particular, self-guilt and I don’t get along. I don’t know where it comes from or why it should be so but, given that I’m in my mid-fifties and it’s merely annoying (rather than debilitating), I’m long past figuring out how to fix it. I just take the ride.

So my break broke down. I cracked open Advise and Consent. Waded through fifty pages or thereabouts. I’m so far unimpressed, but I’m not sure if that prophecy isn’t of the self-fulfilling variety.

Then I had a moment of inspiration, an insight as to how both having and eating might be possible. On the shelf in my office sat a slim volume, Out of the Dark, by the recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Patrick Modiano. Since an earlier reading obsession had led to working my way through all of Alfred's honorees, Modiano’s book gave me the opportunity to continue my brief but much-needed Pulitzer break while still feeling that I was reading something I was “supposed” to read. I’d simply shift lanes, obsession-wise, and knock off a book I knew I had to get to sooner or later, anyway. So that’s what I did.

Modiano—at least based on this one thin example—reminds me a bit of Camus, though with the personality of an arrogant flaneur, someone who writes in the same way that someone taking a stroll looks into every shop window—sometimes twice—then dismisses the window’s contents with a subtle wave of the finger. Those around will notice and take heed, drawn in by the conceit. If the street is interesting enough, attention commands attention. In Modiano’s case it is. He limns his characters just so—giving you enough but not too much—allowing you to observe with just the distance needed to maintain the necessary air of existentialism that runs, Styx-like, beneath the story.

The plot, detailed by an untrustworthy narrator, wanders through the lives of a young, somewhat bohemian couple who are both likeable and unlikeable in equal doses. Our narrator seduces (or finds himself seduced) by the pair’s female half, setting off nothing at all dramatic in any conventional sense, yet proving a watershed moment nonetheless.  The characters, like their reader, experience sans guilt.

A good read, but not a great read. That was yet to come.

*****

I have yet to find a writer who will fully admit to what it is they’re trying to do when they sit down to write. Some will say that they write for themselves, to tell the stories they want told or that they would want to read. Others to share an experience that just might uplift, enlighten, or assist some person “out there.” The slightly more honest among us will talk about compulsion and a hidden desire for widespread readership (and the fame that sometimes comes with it). But none of that is true.

What a writer wants, more than anything, is to devastate, to write just one sentence now and again that stops a reader like a bullet to the heart. A sentence so full of the writer’s soul that the reader can’t help but feel what the writer wants them to feel, a flayed sense of raw immersion that overwhelms, that forces a moment’s pause for breath.

I’ve found a book that does that, and more than once. Listen with your nerves and soul to this sentence:

The membrane between space and time is a sieve; I can be dusted through it and reassembled on the other side.

Or this one:

The second-to-last time he spoke, he was six years old.

Both come from Know the Night, a brilliant memoir from Maria Mutch. The book—and “book” isn’t quite the right word, though I haven’t one better—describes two years of nights she spends—obsessively, passionately, and reluctantly—with her son Gabriel, who has Downs Syndrome combined with autism. With a mother’s sensitivity, Mutch awakens frequently to comfort, console, and coax her son through these darkened hours. She stumbles, like the sleep deprived will, through whatever the darkness casts their way. Simultaneously she becomes engrossed in the stories of Admiral Richard Byrd, whose explorations provide a telling undercurrent of what it feels like to be alone—what she imagines it might be like for Gabriel.

At the same time Gabriel loves jazz, and the book emphasizes this connection through its free-form (yet still organized) structure, counterpointing stories of Gabriel with those of Byrd, and again with those of Mutch herself, and her husband and second son. The book reads like the jazz clubs it describes, and I felt Gabriel’s connection to the music as surely as if I were there myself.

But, finally, it is the sentences.

Here she artfully juxtaposes Byrd’s contemplation of his reflection ...

But at the moment, he [Byrd] is suspended in his little mirror, watching himself watching himself; he is turning in the vortices that layer Antarctica, a witness to being consumed.

...with the way Gabriel avoids his own:

Gabriel rarely watches himself. He only catches glimpses. Like our cat, he’ll often smoothly avert his gaze when he’s standing in front of a mirror, not as if he’s afraid to see himself but as if he has no curiosity about how he appears in the glass nor interest that there is a glass at all. Then again, maybe he understands the power of the other self, and like Byrd would prefer not to see the one that is darker and harder to grasp.

And here, near the end, when Mutch describes listening to “Flamenco Sketches,” from Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue sessions:

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the tune before, it would be many, but I don’t know that I have ever really listened, or listened in the way that Gabriel is listening. He opens a door for me, and I step inside. Is this what it’s like to be him? Or what it’s like to be him at least some of the time? I am never ready, I am never ready. I am ready.

The beauty and power of a story well told come not from singularity, but from the telling. Mutch is not the first mother with a special-needs child, nor the first to write about it; bookstores have entire sections devoted to such works. But Mutch is the first I’ve read who writes with such pure devastation, a devastation that is not about destruction, but about awe. When the best sentences and stories devastate, it is as if Sisyphus, in reaching the top, finds that the rock remains, that he is finished and yet feels entirely alone, unable to conceive of what comes next. It is both fullness and emptiness.

Few authors have made me feel this way. Annie Dillard. Joan Didion. Orhan Pamuk. Dario Fo. Alice Walker. Paul Auster.

Reading Mutch’s memoir has washed away the guilt I’ve been feeling, the nagging ache that it’s somehow wrong to read anything other than those books I’ve set as tasks. The experience reminds me that this project shouldn’t be thought of as a project at all. It should simply be reading. Reading for joy. For insight. For feeling. And for devastation. 

Read since last post:

• Collected Stories, Jean Stafford (1970)
• Know the Night, Maria Mutch
• A Little Lumpen Novelita, Roberto Bolaño
• Out of the Dark, Patrick Modiano
• How About never… Is Never Good For You? My Life in Cartoons, Bob Mankoff

 

Currently reading:

• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)
• Advise and Consent, Allen Drury (1960)

 

Count: 62 read; 25 to go.

Chapter 15: In Which 34 Words Remind me of a Thief I Can’t Quite Revile

First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow the Chapters in the Archives list on the right sidebar, going from oldest to newest.

 

For someone who anticipates epiphany with each author newly encountered, nothing matches the sun-flare of excitement as when first discovering language that transports, when just the right, the ideal, combination of words and letters and pauses and starts combine to make me feel, just for a few seconds, that nothing else I’ve ever read—or ever will read—can touch me in quite this particular way. On the rare occasions when this happens it’s not because the words are perfect or the phrases unique, but that they unfailingly cooperate with me, triggering memory and feeling in sudden, energetic bursts. Such bursts are passing strange, as Othello might say, both rare and teasingly diaphanous, but when it happens it feels like, for just that one moment, I am alone with beauty in the universe.

It happened to me just this morning, emerging from the opening of an otherwise non-descript story buried in a set of such stories by Pulitzer winner Jean Stafford: “One of the great hardships of my childhood,” she writes, “—and there were many, as many, I suppose, as have every plagued a living creature—was that I could never find a decent place to read.”

With these few words Stafford—as I do—elevates the act of reading to sepulchral heights, a need, a pain too often unassuaged, a preference few around me understand.

These words do not describe me, yet they are me. My childhood shared no such hardships, and locating reading’s Eden was never terribly difficult. I had my own room, and headphones. I had a quiet backyard, and school stairwells. Anywhere and everywhere served as a reading room when I wanted.

Yet these 34 words ignite.

Reading has always been for me just as it is for Stafford’s young narrator: important, prioritized, invaluable. And so I’m now living in a memory, intensely strong, that echoes Stafford’s fiction, a memory that reminds, viscerally, that reading is everything….

*****

Every child has a sad-sacked side, a reason for feeling that luck never leans leeward. Even, I’m sure, the tough guy, the wisecracker, the quarterback, have moments when they feel nothing ever goes quite right.  For me, that feeling came with paired wheels.

Every bike I’ve ever had, save one, was stolen. (The one that didn’t suffered Goodyear's nasty kiss when I inadvertently left it in the driveway and my mother, on a dusky late autumn evening, pulled into said driveway rather quickly, resulting in metal remains so warped that I literally threw the bike into a dumpster.)

First stolen was a plain-vanilla bike, the kind with foot brakes and a barely adjustable seat. This was followed by my first sting-ray (a 3-speed Huffy given for Christmas by a father who meant well but had no idea that Huffy’s weren’t at all cool). My first ten-speed (the highest number of speeds you could get back then), a brown Schwinn Varsity, disappeared from the bike rack at school. Right up through college, where my high-end French racing bike joined a dozen others as victims in a massive theft at a dorm party, they all took flight.

 The one that sticks with me the most, though, is the yellow 5-speed stingray that Schwinn called a “Lemon Peeler.”

 

 

Mine had a basket on the front.

As a boy, I wasn’t supposed to have a basket on the front of my bike. It was less cool, even, than owning a Huffy. But this was a time before backpacks, and if you had stuff to carry around, you either bungeed it somehow to the back of your bike, or you had a basket. The bungee-cord method worked fine for most people, but I needed the basket because, well, I went to the library. A lot. And took out books. A lot.

On one particular summer Saturday I was heading to the Gardner Park Library, my bike basket weighed down by five or six books all approaching their due dates. I can’t recall what they were (I’m no savant, after all), but I can guess that at least one of the books was by Madeleine L’Engle (whose wrinkles in time I found endlessly fascinating), and another probably had something to do with sports. Perhaps it was a biography of Willie Mays.

Between home and the library sat Hancock Park Elementary School, the very place from which I'd graduated just a couple of years earlier, and on this Saturday there were a handful of same-aged boys playing softball on the painted concrete playground. (Back then safety and security were generally assumed, and lawsuits were not. Besides, the fence was low and easily climbed.) Tim’s and David’s waved hands brought me closer, and I decided to join them for a bit, continuing on to the library later on. It was Saturday, after all, and I could ignore any clocks. I de-biked, using my lock and chain to secure the Lemon Peeler to the bike rack at the end of the playground, even taking care to wind the chain through and around the basket of books.

You know what happens next, of course, and to this day I have no idea how someone could have cut the lock and ridden away with none of us seeing it happen. But it did.

I freaked—not at the loss of the bike (which had sadly become routine by then)—but at the loss of the books. These were library books! I was responsible for them!

Only much later did I realize what an odd, odd reaction I’d had.

I walked home, despondent, knowing that I would have to face my parents not only with the loss of another bike (“How could you NOT see someone stealing it from the playground?” “Better start saving your allowance, mister!”) but would also need to let the library know what had happened.

The first of these—parental reaction—came later that evening; the second I delayed several days. I’d written down the names of the stolen books, but hadn’t yet managed to get myself to the library; at that age my fear of authority ran deep.

Finally I couldn’t delay any longer (my stepfather having decided to hold the current week’s allowance as hostage), and I headed off—this time on foot—to the library. There was no one at the schoolyard to distract me this time, not that I was in the mood anyway. When I got to the library I slinked up to the desk where one of several interchangeably frightening librarians greeted me. I explained what had happened, handed her the list I’d made, and waited while she shuffled off to check. She came back just a few moments later, a puzzled look on her face.

“All the books are here,” she said. “They’ve been returned.”

I would have been flabbergasted if flabbergasted had then been a word in my vocabulary. Who steals a bike but returns library books? How in the world did L’Engle and company not end up in some alleyway trashcan?

I’ll tell you how: that thief was a reader. Someone with a passion for words, who feels, now and again, that passing strange feeling, that sense of transport, that ephemeral tingle that somewhere between any of those pages someone might be writing just for him.

An odd kinship to admit, certainly, with someone who stole my bike. As it turns out, though, that was all he stole. He left me this memory and I find it much, much more valuable.

Read since last post:

• Independence Day, Richard Ford (1996)
• The Edge of Sadness, Edwin O'Connor (1962)

Currently reading:

• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)
• Collected Stories, Jean Stafford (1970)

 

Count: 61 read; 26 to go.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 14: In Which I Blend my Love of Reading with my Role as An Incredibly Minor Public Figure in Order to Discuss The Stark Reality

First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow the Chapters in the Archives list on the right sidebar, going from oldest to newest.

 

The midterm elections are now a few weeks behind us and, with enough showers having washed away the stink of it all, I can reflect with perhaps a little less anger than I had when the results were more immediate.

I know the conventional thinking is that the Democrats lost this election and the Republicans won it; I’m here to tell you that the conventional thinking is wrong. The real losers of this election were the Republicans.

You remember the Republicans, right? The party that used to be, right up until the extreme right wing—those people too cowardly to form their own party—took it over? Yep: that party. The one that originally defined progressivism, that understood that a “free” market and a “fair” market would never be the same thing, and so took careful steps to insure a free/fair market for all. The one that deplored the military/industrial complex. The one that fostered science and education and charity and spirit.  Yeah.  I remember ‘em, too. Now the only thing left of them is the elephant logo. Oh, wait. That’s not the only thing left of them.  Everything (and everyone) is left of them. And these people—these representatives—of this unnamed new party keep getting elected.

 

More and more I’m wondering if the battles we’re fighting over our political system are the right battles to wage. Our form of governance seems condemned to end up even more corrupt, more purchased, than it already is yet, like the pulped, second-rate prize fighter who doesn’t know that his career is already over, we keep fighting against the count of ten only to take one more devastating punch.

Perhaps it’s time we took a lesson from Willie Stark, the anti-hero of Robert Penn Warren’s brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the King’s Men. Based (loosely, according to Warren), on Huey Long’s Louisiana dynasty, the novel portrays a politician who fundamentally wants to do good things—build safe schools, a fantastic research hospital, better roads—but is also fundamentally corrupt because he knows that the system is corrupt, and the only way to do good things is to do them corruptly.

In our political system the corruption seems endemic. (Actually, “seems” is a word that belongs to a less cynical time. It is endemic—let’s just admit it.) Perhaps the real problem isn’t that we have a system so prone to corruption, but that we’ve stopped electing fundamentally good people. Our perspective, if we focus less on the system and more on the individuals we elect into it, might just shift.

I recognize that this is a form of giving up, of giving in, of saying that “we can’t change things.” And that’s true: I do believe the battle is basically over. But the battle has been largely about changing the game when maybe it should be about changing the players. Perhaps less time should be spent on where dark money comes from and more time on who that money supports. Perhaps less time should be spent on whether the Democrat or Republican Party wins, and more time on the individuals who choose either mantle.

We are supposed to be a nation of individuals, but we elect by group. We are supposed to be a nation of individual achievement, but we worry about system and process. Let’s focus, one at a time, on the quality of the individuals we choose, selecting those that can breathe the inevitably corrupt air yet still exhale safe schools, fantastic research hospitals, and better roads.

Maybe it’s time for us to look at this Stark reality. Good people can do good things even as they embrace a bad system. So, between now and the next election, let’s look more at who than we have in the past, worrying more about the quality of the people we vote for and less about the system they engage in.

When I began this essay I pointed out that the real losers in the election were the Republicans. I have to correct myself, though. We are the real losers, and it’s probably because we’ve stopped electing winners, regardless of party.

Read since last post:

·         Foreign Affairs, Alison Lurie (1985)

·         A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Robert Olen Butler (1993)

·         The Keepers of the House, Shirley Ann Grau (1965)

·         All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren (1947)

·         The Late George Apley, John Phillips Marquand (1938)

·         The Good Earth,  Pearl S. Buck (1932)

Currently reading:

·         The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)

·         Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)

·         Collected Stories, Jean Stafford (1970)

Count: 59 read, 28 to go

Chapter 13: In which I Remember a Barely Amusing Joke, and then go off on a Semi-Political Rant (which Includes Variously Flavored Jams)

First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow the Chapters in the Archives list on the right sidebar, going from oldest to newest.

I’ve recently finished reading The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt’s 2014 Pulitzer-Prize winning novel. I’d call it a reasonably decent 300-page novel. Not anything to win a prize for; nothing like that at all. But serviceable, with some entertaining bits and a pace that whips right along, fast enough so that you don’t have to pay any really serious attention to the plot holes.

Unfortunately, it’s nearly 800 pages long, and those other nearly 500 pages are rather bloated, filled with one-dimensional characters from all over the globe, mostly driven by stilted dialogue with accents artificially implanted into the text through the tritest of methods: missing words here or there, awkward phrasings, laughter at the wrong things and at the wrong times. The plot is layered like a European elevator which, for no reason I’ve ever been able to ascertain, always seem to have both a ground floor and a first floor; that seems to me one too many. When the plot attempts cohesion it’s only for brief moments; most of the key plot elements turn on Dickensian coincidence, a phrase I always hate to see associated with any book not written by Dickens. He was the best at it, after all, and I’ve never understood why others would aspire to his heights when they are so clearly unattainable. There’s a ton of overblown description in the book as well, including a longish section on how to fake antiques which reads like the whale-killing sections of Moby Dick, only less fun.

In sum: it’s something of a bloated mess.

Ironically (or sadly—I’m not sure which), I waited weeks and weeks and weeks for a copy, one of two stocked, to come available at my local library. Initially the book was only available in the newer-than-even-the-NEW-BOOKS section, a category that meant you had one week to read it, and only that one week, no renewals and double the normal late fees. Not sure I’d finish in just one week (and facing a waiting list with a dozen or so names on it anyway (not to mention the fact that I still had the previous pile of books to wade through), people apparently more anxious than I was to read it), I decided to wait until it hit just the regular NEW BOOKS heading. When it finally did, there I was.

(In the meantime I’d finished those other books, the ones that I hadn’t really enjoyed all that much, except I have to admit that Porter’s work grows on you, particularly her later stuff.)

The Goldfinch was one I was really waiting for, really looking forward to. I’d heard so many good things, and the author photo on the back jacket had an eerie, dark (almost gothic) sense to it that gave me a bit of a chill. I was very, very hopeful, which made the whole experience that much more disappointing.

*****

I’m reminded of a time, perhaps thirty years ago now, when I went with my father and our family to a mid-priced steakhouse for a celebration of some kind. It might have been an anniversary or someone’s birthday, perhaps even a post-performance feast after one of the local community theater events in which my father sometimes performed. (His King Pellinore, from Camelot, drew more than a few friendly notices.) My father was particularly excited about this particular restaurant, since he had a love of red meat and the place was famously known for its oversized slabs of steer. 

Unfortunately that was all they really had going for them. They were a bit tough (even medium-rare, the way I liked them), and not all that flavorful. On the plate in accompaniment was a baked potato large enough to wonder whether or not it had a thyroid condition, and what seemed like a bushel of green beans. The former had about a cupful of butter and an equal amount of sour cream loaded into its crevassed topline, while the latter appeared as much gray as green and floated in the tiniest amount of an opaque, watery liquid which I can only assume resulted from inadequate straining after overmuch boiling.  Sitting next to the plate was a Pepsi in a red plastic glass—the kind with the textured nibs all over its surface—almost too large to hold in one hand.

The meal was awful. But at least—as the old joke goes—the portions were generous.

*****

Our culture seems to require size, things bigger, more important, more substantial. Think of something as simple as a car. Pick any model you like and each new generation emerges a little wider, a little longer, a little more powerful. We need IMAX movies and multi-state lotteries, double and triple cheeseburgers and bottomless plates of pasta. We need multi-year television stories with layer upon layer of plots and machinations, so complex that we aren’t even sure if we’re enjoying it because the effort needed to follow is practically headache-inducing. We long for a larger television, a bigger house, more land. We have handheld “devices” and “laptops” nearly as large as the thirteen-inch television I had in my bedroom growing up. We want more choice in more sizes, whether it’s toothpaste or ravioli or soup or channels. We don’t merely trade quality for quantity, we surrender to the quantity gods. Size, as we all know, matters.

It’s to our detriment that we continue this push for more, bigger, faster, better. While we scream for the freedom to want whatever we want, when it actually becomes available to us we end up paralyzed, unable (or unwilling) to choose at all. One famous study—the “Jam” study as it’s colloquially known—documented this phenomenon. Conducted by Sheena Iyengar, a professor of business at Columbia, the study involved providing people with choices of different flavored jams, and then followed up to see who bought a jar. In one group people were offered six jams, in another, twenty-four. Regardless of the number of choices available to them, people were about equally willing to stop by for a sample taste, but when it came to actual purchases things were different: 30% of the people who stopped by the six-flavor sample bought something, whereas only 3% of those faced with twenty-four choices put down the cash for a jar or two.

It’s true: there can be too much of a good thing. Yet ask anyone if they would be willing to forego choice for efficiency, for even, possibly, peace of mind, and here in America I’m guessing the bulk would say “No.” They want the freedom, the choice, the very bigness of it all.

*****

I just recently finished another book on my list, The Way West, by A.B. Guthrie. It tells the story of a wagon train traveling the Oregon Trail in 1843, the characters weaving their way along the perilous route that ran from Independence, Missouri to Oregon City in the (then) British-run Oregon Territory. What drives them all—shopkeepers, outlaws, politicians, farmers, cattlemen—is the desire for something bigger, wider, newer. Perhaps these are the origins of our compulsion: before us spread a vast continent filled with potential, with opportunity. The difference, though, is that those trekkers were invested in their journey; they understood the risks ahead, the work required, and the pain they would have to endure. Sacrifice in the name of opportunity was the trade they were willing to make.

Not so today. There is no more “way west” for us. We don’t like a challenge; we don’t want to work. We just want what we want. As one movie title has it, we’re “bigger, faster, out of control.” We want a fake freedom wrapped up in too much of too many things. And we sadly believe we’re better off because of it.

Read since last post:

• House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday (1969)
• Dragon's Teeth, Upton Sinclair (1943)
• Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Katherine Anne Porter (1966)
• The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt (2014)
• Rabbit is Rich, John Updike (1982)
• Rabbit at Rest, John Updike (1991)
• The Way West, A. B. Guthrie (1950)

Currently reading:

• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)
• Foreign Affairs, Alison Lurie (1985)

Count: 53 Read, 34 to go.

Chapter 12: In Which I Admit that it’s Me and not the Books, and Further Realize that Wallowing Has Very Few Benefits

First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow the Chapters in the Archives list on the right sidebar, going from oldest to newest.

I’m currently reading five different books and all of them are boring me to tears.

Okay, maybe not to tears. Maybe I just wrote that for effect, an intentional cliché, meant more to emphasize that I just don’t care all that much, that nothing seems all that interesting right now, so much so that I don’t even care if I slip into cliché, ending up with banal writing that just stands there, wallflower-like, waiting for someone to request a dance but knowing that no one will. Or perhaps it wasn’t for effect at all, but mere laziness, cliché not for cliché’s sake, but just to get through the paragraph.

It all just seems so….so…pointless….

In any case, if you’ve read this far and aren’t yet bored yourself, here’s the quick rundown:

Dragon’s Teeth is an Upton Sinclair novel that throws a few rich but basically two-dimensional characters into the early days of the Nazi era, apparently as a device to let us know how terribly awful it all was. Written before the end of the war, it has a hint of tension, the kind you might expect from a writer who isn’t really sure how it all turns out; but looking at it now, through the rear-view mirror—especially after so much has been written and documented—leaves one merely reading a not-very-engaging history text, only with yachts.

House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday is a breakthrough novel from a Native American writer, a Kiowa, written back when he was still an Indian, and well before his nation put up the website which prominently displays the “gushers of cash” available at their very modern casino, right alongside the picture of a nine-dollar quesadilla burger (with taco fries). Written in a style that combines thickly layered poetic prose with a fractured narrative, it’s one of those books with lots and lots of beautiful phrases, all insisting I read them over and over again in the hopes I’ll stumble upon just a hint of captured meaning. It reminds me of the first time I read Wallace Stevens’ Anecdote of a Jar. And the second time. And the third time.

Two short-story collections also contribute to my literary lethargy, the first by Katherine Anne Porter and the second by John Cheever. Neither author thrills me; the prose (though staying well right of purple) feels overtly weighty, as if it’s longing to slap me across the face to insure I pay it the proper attention. (I haven’t yet run across any yachts, but expect to, sooner or later.) Adding to my disinterest are the facts that both collections are quite long and that, at least in the case of the Cheever, the print is very very small and the pages very very large, something my middle-aged eyes rebel against.

And then, of course, there’s still Honey in the Horn, Gillian Flynn’s bane and the book that started all of this. I have to say that Honey isn’t bothering me quite so much these days. It still serves as a splendid soporific, but maybe—just maybe—it’s not the worst on the list….

All of these books reluctantly encourage a wandering mind; I’ll be right in the middle of some long passage about rich people arguing over fascism, or about how an albino’s hair looks when the albino dies, or about something a family member said to another family member in some story about family members, and I’ll realize that, while I’ve been intending to read, what I’ve in fact been doing is mentally balancing my checkbook, or wondering whether I remembered to check the date on the Greek yogurt I just bought at Hannafords, or wondering if I want to take a trip to Toadstool Books in Milford, perhaps to buy something interesting.

We’ve all had moments like this, of course, moments when our minds drift and we realize we’ve read a couple of paragraphs (or even a page or two), and don’t quite remember the gist. But this is different, deeper, and it’s happening with five books, all at the same time. This degree of random inattention has never happened to me before; I’ve certainly run across books that dull my brain, that make me wish I were doing anything else but reading them, but I’m a book lover, a bibliophile with online accounts at a dozen different used-book sites. If I don’t like a book I’ll put it down; there are many more to choose from, dozens and dozens of wonderful volumes I’ve picked up over the years but have yet to get around to. So this can’t be the books. It has to be me. It has to be.

So then: time for mirror-glancing, for reflection.

Things haven’t been all that great lately; recovery from my recent hand surgery has been slower than expected, and while I can type nearly as rapidly as ever (and play lead guitar about as poorly as ever), such activity requires periodic respites else the throbbing in my fingers sets me searching for medication. On top of that my back has decided to act up, and this only days before house guests are due to arrive, which has me wondering about when the vacuuming will get done. And on top of that, business has chosen just now to slow down, leaving me regularly (perhaps even obsessively) worrying about money, and reacting in patently absurd ways, like deciding to skip breakfast.

All of this is bringing me down a bit, or so I’ve been told. (At least one person has suggested that perhaps I should go off by myself for a few days, but I think that’s more for her benefit than mine.) The down, though, doesn’t seem all that extreme—and is certainly well short of clinical. My mood can lift easily, often by something as simple as hearing Katrina and the Waves doing Walking on Sunshine, or running across the “tiara” clip from Big Bang Theory.

Unfortunately, I’m forced to admit that I might secretly enjoy the now-and-again wallowing. It gives me a chance to pretend that I’ve got a very good reason for not doing anything productive like, say, writing. Or doing my physical therapy. Or marketing my business.  But then there’s the guilt that comes from wallowing myself into unproductivity, and that makes me wallow even more, which makes the desire to avoid doing anything meaningful even stronger, which makes me wallow more, and… well, you get the picture.

It’s difficult having a Mobius strip for a brain.

And sooner or later, since reading has always been my favorite escape, I find myself back in that leather armchair, next to that cherry end table with the stack of books on it. Except that I don’t particularly like that stack of books right now, mostly because I’ve been wallowing.

It will shift, though, and must, because I am, after all, obsessive. At some point the mental wanderings become too discordant for my little-o, little-c, little-d personality, and I’m forced to restore order. That means plans and schedules and checklists. It means small but real successes as those checklists fill out. And, of course, finishing those books and writing about them simply must be on those checklists. That’s who I am, after all. But maybe not just yet. I think, first, I’ll head to the bookstore. That always clears my head.

Read since last post:

• None 

Currently reading:

• House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday (1969)
• Dragon’s Teeth, Upton Sinclair (1943)
• Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Katherine Anne Porter (1966)
• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)

Count: Still 46 read, 41 to go.