Vote! (or else I'll footnote you to death)

Among other things in recent days, I've been reading Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace's collection of essays about random cultural phenomena that he has been contracted by some magazine or another to write about. He's an interesting guy - I'd like to know a little more about him. (Probably googling or wiki-ing him would work. If only I weren't too lazy to do that before writing this...)

Anyway, DFW has a reputation for being ridiculously smart and for loving the footnotes. As a tangential, full-of-asides thinker, I like this. But I still think it's a gimmick. Plus, it sometimes works better than others. In "Big Red Son," the footnotes are hilariously juxtaposed against the topic, which is porn. In "Host," the footnotes are actually placed within boxes within the body of the text, with arrows from the referring point (and sometimes more arrows to fn's about fn's, etc.) Visually kinda cool. The Dostoyevsky article, on the other hand, is too academic for footnotes, even if it seems ironic to write that. And "Up, Simba," a 2000 Rolling Stone profile of John McCain, would completely flounder if it had footnotes at all.

Which reminds me, "Up, Simba" is perhaps the most interesting article of the bunch. (Speaking as a historian.) It's an amazing reminder of how quickly political history can move. McCain's primary opponent is "the Shrub" and the journalists are in thrall to their cell phones (with pull-out antennae) and the occasional Palm Pilot. Imagine political wonks now without their Blackberries. And DFW's commentary on voter apathy and politician sincerity and the staged artifice of the whole campaign trail is like crack for this post-West Wing viewer. And since political engagement is near and dear to my heart, I was particularly impressed by this passage:

If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary [replacable with Election - ed.] day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

And this is backed up by all sorts of anecdotal evidence, btw. Anyway, I'm planning to use this argument whenever I can. It's the kind of thing that you know on some level, but sometimes need spelled out for you. At least I think so.

I'm going to put Infinite Jest, DFW's novel, on my reading list. I need the extra information to determine what exactly I think of this hyper-erudite writer.

Not the most uplifting of reading...

I finished Disgrace (J.M. Coetzee) sometime in the last week or so. I haven't written about it mainly because I wasn't sure what to say. Sometime, with the book club selections, it seems to work best to blog my review after the meeting, and incorporate others' views into my own coalesced opinion.

But I got bored of waiting. This novel is filled with disturbing events and internal reveries. In this respect, it reflects - sometimes overtly, sometimes implicitly - the confusion and readjustment of whites (even liberal ones) to the post-apartheid world. Sex is potent as a symbol of asserting manliness and power - as a weapon, a reassurance of attraction, etc. It reminded me a lot of Philip Roth in this respect. (I'm not very convinced that male authors like women very much. Are they representative of the average man's secret fears? I'd prefer to think not.) But there is also a generational dispute between the male pro(?)tagonist and his daughter. Like in Fathers and Sons (thanks to Michael and a review he found for the comparison), in a time of change and confusion, the eternal struggle between parents and children is freighted with extra meaning.

But attempts of erudition aside, what was most striking about Disgrace was how much of it I spent wanting to cover my eyes, urging the main character "What are you thinking?! - Stop." It's not that much fun, and I'm not totally convinced that it deserved the Booker.

For all my ambivalence, however, Disgrace is a far more accomplished novel than the one I just finished: Intuition, by Allegra Goodman. It made it onto my reading list after a promising review earlier this year. Set in a research lab in the mid-80s, Intuition addresses the ups and downs of scientific research and the intuitions (hence the title) that lead people to monomaniacal obsession with proving their instincts correct. In the end, intuition can ruin relationships.

Intuition is a fascinating topic for a book on scientific inquiry, a field that is supposedly ruled by reason and empirical evidence. And Goodman starts out with a fast pace, drawing interesting characters and setting up several intriguing story arcs. But around half-way through, it fizzles out, and the last hundred or more pages was just a slog to the finish. I also wondered why Goodman set the novel in Boston of 1986 rather than today - it was never clear to me why an era two decades past was crucial to her story.

So both books are pretty much downers, and while I wouldn't go so far as to say I disliked either, neither managed to capture my imagination for very long.

Cricket - c.1989-2006

this is my fuzzy little princess, seen last Christmas

On a day tailormade for memorials, it saddens me to add to the bunch Cricket, my (parents') tortoiseshell who was terrified of just about everything, and a little bit bitchy, but all in all a very sweet little cat.

She became part of our household in July 1995; she came into the animal shelter in a carrier while we were there and settled into my mother's arms before ever going into a shelter cage. And though she hid for the first few days in our house, and was later pestered by her rambunctious fellow kitty Mikey, she settled in. We named her Cricket after the squeaky noise she made, although she came to whine imperiously more than squeak. And even though she had been ailing for quite some time, it is still a shock to lose her.

Lest you be thinking this is unrelated to books, Cricket used to like to lie on my back or the back of my legs if I was reading on my stomach. (Each of my cats has had a different way of reading with me. Pushy used to like to curl up under my chin and drool on the pages; Mikey would prefer to swish his tail in front of my face so that I couldn't see.)

Farewell Cricket. We've loved you very much.

Meme, or, How I Learned a New Word Today

Until this afternoon, meme was one of those words (like trope and singularity had once been) that I vaguely knew but mostly dismissed as pretention. Until I got tagged by greenLAgirl, accused of falling for a pyramid scheme by Michael, and figured it was time I got an official definition. Hooray for Dictionary.com which built on Michael's expanded definition of "chain letter/thought virus" and explained that a meme was from same Latin root as "mime" and is "a unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another." Like a gene, except of ideas.

Anyway, but I believe I was tagged to talk about my literary tastes, not my fondness for etymology. So, without further ado:

A book that changed my life
The Fall of a Sparrow, by Robert Hellenga. Friends have challenged this one, but I read it at the exactly the right moment, in the right place.

A book I’ve read more than once
Emma, by Jane Austen. Possibly my all-time favorite book.

A book I’d take with me if I were stuck on a desert island
I am leaning toward Tolstoy, and War and Peace for the epic sweep. But I would also consider The Bible (King James), since I haven't read much of it and I'd have the time to consider a lot of stories.

A book that made me laugh
Anything by Helen Fielding - I am particularly fond of two that I know made me laugh aloud in public: Cause Celeb and Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination

A book that made me cry
A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving. That book tore me apart inside.

A book that I wish had been written
My dissertation? It was going to be on life behind the lines (i.e. where they sent all the promising students and most of the government) in Soviet Union during WWII.

A book that I wish had never been written
So many books have inspired hatred and violence - I could choose one of them. But I won't, because I don't seem to be able to find it in me to wish a book unwritten.

A book I’ve been meaning to read
I've had Herodotus' Histories on the backburner since I got through half of it the first week of my graduate program. Also at least 30 others.

I’m currently reading
In addition to my pile of New Yorkers, I have begun Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee.

Mr. Library (better known to some as the voice behind Vibes Watch) has graciously consented to be tagged. And I am realizing that my blogroll is pretty limited. So.... help me build it up, yo. I recognize that Rahul is probably above this, but just in case, I'll try tagging him too. As well as HH, whose i8 I just discovered. Will you come to LA and cook for me?

Three Lucys

A glimpse at three characters sharing the Library "Name of the Week":

She wore the prettiest sundresses, white and yellow and covered with blue and purple flowers. All wavy and loose. Sometimes she'd wear her hair up, to give her neck some air she said, and she looked nice that way. But then when she'd take it down, the way it tumbled off her heead and rolled across her shoulders in waves, and colored like fire, the way fire is not just one color but about seven, all becoming one another over and back again: that was her hair.

There was something that she did to me, just looking at her, knowing she was close. That was all I did, of course: look, pass her in the hallway on the way to supper, smell the scent of her in my room after she'd cleaned it, her presence everywhere, in this house, on my mind, her note in my pocket.

Now here she is, flowered dress, bare feet and all, in a house full of the smell of baking, no longer a child playing at farmng but a solid countrywoman, a boervrou.

Temptress and Madonna, these Lucys. Or maybe simply Eve. The former two are the magical women at the heart of Daniel Wallace's The Watermelon King; the latter is the stable daughter of a unstable academic in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, my current read and next book club selection.

The Watermelon King

My "books to read" list - at least the one I currently use - dates back to Christmas 2002, when Michael purchased me an adorable book-tracking book. It has served me quite happily. So no entry on the list is even four years old. Yet I cannot for the life of me remember the circumstances that led me to put Daniel Wallace's The Watermelon King on the list. But list it I did, and this past weekend, I actually got around to reading it.

It came as a bit of a surprise. In addition to a quirky title, it had a quirky design. (You can see the cover here.) And this is when I discovered that it was by the author of Big Fish, the 2003 film directed by Tim Burton and starring Ewan McGregor. I watched this movie with my parents (it is right up their alley); while I found it sweet, I couldn't imagine seeking out works by the author. And yet apparently I had. Anyway, on with the book...

The Watermelon King is set in the same fictional town as Big Fish - Ashland, Alabama. And in both stories, a young man is in search of a parent's past; in both, the father figure has created a world of fabulous tales that cannot be believed. But perhaps they should be.

Wallace's characters are mostly caricature, and yet roughly plausible, even when the events befalling them are not. In TWK, our hero Thomas Rider spends the first half of the novel allowing them to speak for themselves, and make their case about their role in his mother's life and death. And once he takes over the narrative, events again converge in a way that sweeps everyone in the town along with it. The journey's end is mostly predictable; the past that leads you there is not quite.

I enjoyed reading TWK. It passes quickly and has a strong forward momentum. I started it while lying on the beach, which may be why I would label it "beach reading." More accurately, it's for a wicker chair on a veranda (a porch will do) on a sticky afternoon, with a pitcher of lemonade by your side.

The Secret Life of Books

Normally I don't have that much patience for essays about how "readerly" a person is - I kind of find it annoying. Maybe because I like to believe that I'm an iconoclast, and whenever other people proclaim their allegiance to books I'm like "uh, poseur" or "oh, maybe I'm not so unique."

But for whatever reason, I was touched by Dana Gioia's essay in a recent issue of Stanford magazine. It's about his childhood as a reader - definitely going against the grain in his immigrant, working-class community. And the way that reading opened new vistas. I had already learned that Gioia is a reader by compulsion, but was nonetheless moved by his phraseology:

every true reader has a secret life, which is equally intense, complex and important. The books we read are no different from the people we meet or the cities we visit. Some books, people or places hardly matter, others change our lives, and still others plant some idea or sentiment that influences our futures. No one else will ever read, reread or misread the same books in the same way or in the same order. Our inner lives are as rich and real as our outer lives, even if they remain mostly unknowable to others. Perhaps that is why books matter so much. They serve as our intimate companions. Some books guide us. Others lead us astray. A few rescue or redeem us. All of them confide something of the wonder, joy, terror and mystery of being alive.

I've argued with others whether it's better to observe or do. I usually end up feeling like I'm losing out by liking to read my adventures rather than live them. But Gioia argues that the lives we read are our own and intensely real as well, something I've felt intuitively but not heard often enough from others. So despite the fact that he is part of the Administration as head of the National Endowment for the Arts, he gets a little star from Erin's Library.