Three Things I Read This Weekend

1. "Sleep" by Haruki Murakami. (Thanks to Carolline for the link.) As a very good sleeper, I find the opposite of sleep fascinating.

2. "Picturing Auschwitz" by Alec Wilkinson, in the New Yorker. I read this while drinking tea before preparing to drive home from Riverside early in the morning. It made me woozy - the entire disconnect between my peaceful morning and photos in the face of death - but the discovery of a treasure trove of photos from the assistant to the commander at Auschwitz is
truly extraordinary. (More pics from the album online too.)

3. Why Gen X still matters, an article in the LA Times about a new book by Jeff Gordinier. I am a Gen X cusp baby. Technically I was born three years too late (which makes me a Millenial, per the article, but I don't buy that. What happened to Gen Y? Aren't the Millenials the teens of today?) but Gen X values still intensely shaped my early cultural awareness. I discovered music right as Nirvana and Pearl Jam burst onto the scene, and I adored "Singles" and "Reality Bites" and grunge and everything else. I felt utterly Gen X. And even though the lovely dot com boom era polished a lot of that away, I still feel very close to my X-er past.

Dance Dance Dance

I never really bought into the metaphor that creates the title of this Murakami (Haruki, not Takashi) novel, but other than that, I found this book utterly enchanting.

I'm a big fan of Murakami's brand of fatalistic magical realism. And I'm particularly fascinated by his male characters. They are insightful and sensitive, and yet aloof and difficult. And they tend to like women who are like wounded birds. Women love them, and yet leave them more often that not, for whatever (sometimes metaphysical) reasons.

Anyway, am saving up some of my DDD thoughts for my book club (like trying to puzzle out the commentary on late capitalism), but I still want to share a passage, as the protagonist contemplates the teen who has become essentially his charge:

Humans achieve their peak in different ways. But whoever you are, once you're over the summit, it's downhill all the way. Nothing anyone can do about it. And the worst of it is, you never know where that peak is. You think you're still going strong, when suddenly you've crossed the great divide. [and it goes on, but I don't want to type the whole book. It's pages 209-10 of the Vintage trade paperback edition, if you want to find it]

Dancing? or floating along? How do we choose which will comprise our lives? Or do we struggle to find another action altogether?

Sunday reads - with lots of links

Every Sunday, the newspaper takes up much of my day. I have to sort it, and then read through it, spending more time with certain sections than others. For some reason, I save the Opinion/Book Review until the end. This doesn't really make sense, b/c by then I am tired of reading the paper, but yet I haven't seen fit to change my ways.

So today, I took that section out for coffee and discovered a few happy coincidences:

Professor Gordon Wood thinks about history. I don't usually have regrets about leaving academia, but articles on the state of academic history always leave me with a little longing. Reviewer and historian Douglas Brinkley (best known to me for his appearance in Spike Lee's masterful "When the Levees Broke") briefly explains the predominance of social history in the academy, and apparently neither Wood nor Brinkley like it too much, b/c it gets rid of the storytelling aspect of history and turns off the masses. (I don't really understand this sentiment - b/c can't it be both more interested in race, gender, and class and tell a good story????) Anyway, there is a nice little summation of Wood making perhaps a similar argument:

the incendiary warfare between the popularizers and academics must stop. Whether it's a bestselling Albert Einstein biography published by Simon & Schuster or an esoteric university press case study on the Watts riots using deconstructionist Jacques Derrida and structuralist Michel Foucault as gurus, the historian's mission should be the same: to communicate the past to everyday people. To Wood, an audience is essential if historians are going to influence the consciousness of our times. "We Americans have such a thin and meager sense of history that we cannot get too much of it," he writes. "What we need more than anything is a deeper and fuller sense of the historical process, a sense of where we have come from and how we have become what we are."

Well, amen, I guess.
Ben Ehrenreich talks about more books about the Odyssey. He's a good one to write this review, b/c he wrote this really wacky book loosely based on the Odyssey as well. This is a good reminder that maybe I should read the original one of these days (like apparently we should have in 10th grade).

A guy my parents knew when I was little is in the Opinion section. I love brushes with fame. And editorials in the paper are among my favorite kinds. Okay, so this guy Jess Winfield was one of the founders of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, an oddly important part of my youth. (Their Hamlet - hey Mom, did Jess play Hamlet? Or no, he was Ophelia, right? - is almost key to an understanding of who I have grown up to be. Here's a video of it - but it's really not the same as seeing it outdoors sitting on hay bales with the original cast.) But I digress, b/c this article is about how Shakespeare would view the presidential candidates, and in what ways they do or do not resemble characters from the Bard's histories and tragedies. Really good stuff.

Tessa Hadley is interviewed on the NYTimes Book Review podcast. Um, technically this has nothing to do with reading the paper, but I was listening on the way home from the coffeeshop and grocery store, so am lumping it in. She is awesome. I like her bunches.

Historical (in)accuracy

I blame my parents. Sure, lots of other women love the costume drama. But I seem to have a special affinity for movies and books that involve hoop skirts and bodices and ridiculously uncomfortable-seeming clothing.

This is why I avoided Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl like the plague. Bodices, yes; bodice-rippers, no thank you. And besides, I grew up around Elizabethan history snobs and had become one myself. But then the ads for the movie started. And this reminded me that last year I had decided I was being too stuck-up about the book, and bought myself a cheap copy. So last week, I read the book.

In the end, I think my mom, who watched last year's Elizabeth: The Golden Age on Sunday, and I could have had a "taking historical liberties" competition. (I really enjoyed my time with Wikipedia, which had to my mind a fairly balanced portrayal of the various suppositions by historians about the lives of Queen Elizabeth's mother and aunt.) Gregory was probably never out and out misrepresenting what evidence suggests; but she definitely felt free to choose what made the most exciting narrative.

Which is fine. I was entertained the entire time. But the writing style was a bit simplistic, and many of the characters too caricatured. And this is especially frustrating when Gregory is making the point that courtiers did have real lives and emotions and were forced to constantly play parts. Most frustrating was Mary Boleyn's anachronistic proto-feminism and desire to be a small woman farmer. I was skeptical of that the whole time.

But again, whatever. I was entertained. And sometimes, that's enough.

Wrapping up the inaugural book club meeting

In the last few weeks I've been far more interested in reading than in writing. (There has also been a fair amount of misc. drama and way too many hours at work in front of the computer.) So instead of a standard analysis of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and our first book club meeting, I will just share some passages from the book.

I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will. I could use it to run, push buttons of one sort or another, make things happen. There were limits, but my body was nevertheless lithe, single, solid, one with me.
Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I'm a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am.

I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name, remind msyelf of what I once could do, how others saw me.
I want to steal something.

The other two I had marked are too long to retype. But they are about how it all started, with political assassination blamed on Islamic fundamentalism. And about the loss of memory for young girls, who have no idea of a world before this, where they were more than their fertility. And yet, the societal ills of the world before did exist. It wasn't perfect then either; that much is true.

I loved talking with the rest of the group; what was interesting and important to them overlapped and differed in such wonderful ways. In particular the other readers paid more attention to the minor female characters, whereas I got caught up in the central narrative, and then the ways that history is told and retold.

And next month, Haruki Murakami...