National Library Week

I enjoyed the heck out of this NPR blog post about how awesome libraries are. It's a lot about how it's free, but there was also this:

In particular, I found that all those cheap romance paperbacks were beaten, mangled, shaken and stirred. Not so that you couldn't read them, but just so you knew they'd been read a lot. Oddly, I found this ... comforting. I picked up some of those horribly abused books and felt like I was putting my hands on tangible populism. Those books are there because they're read, and it actually made kind of a good reminder that the library was trying to help, that the idea was to serve readers.

And anyone who manages to check out DFW's Infinite Jest and three Nora Roberts novels on a single visit deserves applause for sheer awesomeness. (Also for being quite a bit like me, although I needed my own IJ copy, and have different guilty pleasure authors.)

2666 - The Part about the Critics

2666 - Roberto Bolaño (Picador, 2009)

The date is a little misleading. Bolaño was by all accounts still working on 2666 when he died in 2003. He instructed his heirs to publish the work in five separate volumes, most likely to maximize income. But, as they explain in a foreword, they chose "to reverse Roberto's decision and publish 2666 first in full, in a single volume, as he would have done had his illness not taken the gravest course." This volume first appeared in 2004, and the English translation in 2008. At that point, from what I remember, Bolaño was huge in the American literary world, and it seemed everyone was reading him and proclaiming him among the best authors of our time. (I, iconoclast as always, said hmph, and read only a short story that appeared in the New Yorker around that time.)

But then Infinite Summer happened and I gained some appreciation for long, unwieldy books, and reading them at the same time as a bunch of other people who had interesting and witty things to say about them online. So when it appeared that the site would tackle 2666 at the start of 2010, I bought my copy. And even when the site appeared to flag, and the group read disappeared, I was ready to go. So go I did. But now, it appears there will be a group read after all. This is (obviously) good news. But I had already started reading. I was more than 100 pages in. I wanted to finish before school started again. So I'll be done before the group read starts, and will "re-read" the novel through the blog.

But I digress. Each of the 5 parts, while circling around the Mexican border city of Santa Teresa (supposedly - I am waiting for Part 5 to get there) could conceivably stand alone. And to keep from another "wow, this book is too big to say anything coherent about" wrap-up post, I'm going to write separately on each. So....

1. The Part about the Critics

This may prove to be my favorite section of the whole. Certainly it provided more narrative cohesiveness, and I felt more clearly connected to the characters. Oh, the characters. Well, there are four. Five, if you count Archimboldi. All four are scholars of the reclusive German author: one a Frenchman, another Spanish, a third Italian. The fourth is female, English, a bit younger. So of course they are all in love with her.

In short short short sections, we meet the scholars, learn how Archimboldi affected them, shaped their academic worlds. We follow their interactions, across countries, mostly at academic conferences. We trace some of the scholarly debate over the author, and how the mystery of his identity drives them all a little mad. We watch them navigate minefields of sex and love and friendship. And eventually, three end up in Mexico, following a lead that may eventually guide them to Archimboldi.

Does this oversimplify things? Certainly. And it doesn't even begin to get at the prose style, complex in both vocabulary and ideas. But not uniformly so, and not in a way that you miss the main points. Whether or not you miss lesser points... well, I'm sure you do. I'm sure I did.

DFW lives on

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men - David Foster Wallace
Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1999

First and foremost, I am still sad that Infinite Summer is over. Although happily it is living on in the reading of more and new books. (I already own 2666 and am ready for January! Skipping Dracula.) And secondly, I am so grateful that LA has Skylight Books, and even more grateful that Skylight hosted an Infinite Summer party so we could all celebrate. (Plus, John Krasinski! see above for blurry proof)

I will skip my musings on how sweet Krasinski was and how much I am looking forward to seeing his film adaptation of the book. I will get right to the book, which I read in a hurry so that I could go see the film.

Here's the thing. With Infinite Jest, I knew what I was getting myself into. I gave myself lots of time, expected it to be hard. Why didn't I expect this with Brief Interviews? I guess because I had already battled through his fiction once, and thought I had the process down. And besides, this was less than 300 pages. And there was a lot going on in my life. What I had forgotten is that DFW never made things easy. So I blame myself for not liking this book all that much. And that said, it had some moments that blew me away. Here they are...

An adolescent boy at a community pool:

And girl-women, women, curved like instruments or fruit, skin burnished brown-bright, suit tops held by delicate knots of fragile colored string against the pull of mysterious weights, suit bottoms riding low over the gentle juts of hips totally unlike your own, immoderate swells and swivels that melt inlight into a surrounding space that cups and accommodates the soft curves as things precious. You almost understand.

And it is, of course, that last sentence that makes that whole paragraph amazing.

B.I. #14 (pp. 14-15) - it's the ones that understand that are the worst, that bring out his contempt. Because his affliction, you see, Is. Not. Understandable.

All of Pop Quiz #9 (pp. 123-36) and its call back to the ambiguity of PQ #4. And the fucking sincerity of DFW, that breaks your heart and makes you want to be a better person.

At any rate it's not going to make you look wise or secure or accomplished or any of the things readers usually want to pretend they believe [you are]. Rather it's going to make you look fundamentally lost and confused and frightened and unsure [...]

With a different writer, that could just be meta and pretentious and everything else. But with Wallace, for whatever reason, you believe him. You believe that he's really had these feelings and these moments of self-doubt, and is sharing them with you because he really wants you to understand, not as some sort of cute exercise. And that's why he means so much to so many people.

Nothing lasts forever, not even an Infinite Summer

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1996

I finished the book three weeks ago, but wasn't ready to write about it, to really be finished with it. But it seems like there's no better day that on the first anniversary of Wallace's death to take a stab at wrapping up my time with the novel. For now anyway. I won't try to memorialize DFW here, since Infinite Summer (and others, I am sure) have already done a far better job of that. But know he's been very much on my mind.

But the novel. My book is battered and bruised. It was a little roughed up before, since it was a borrowed used copy. But now I'm a little embarrassed to give it back. I also don't want to have to return it. This is the physical copy that I read. That means something. (I also feel this way about my copy of Fall of a Sparrow, which is why I spurned my mom's gift of a nice hardback edition.)

I have run my mind ragged trying to figure out what happened and what it all means. I'd come close to an epiphany, and then it would shimmer and disappear. And that's okay. I don't really mind anymore. I'll read it again someday, and maybe I'll see something new. I'm sure I will see something new. But it won't offer all the answers either.

I mainly just read and read. And didn't stop and note funny quotes or moments that I particularly wanted to go back to. So when I did write on my bookmark, you would figure those moments would be important. And they are, except now I look at them and I don't know what I wanted to say. What I do know is that they are all about Hal. Hal through the lens of Mario. Hal and sadness and irony and and Avril's awesome definition of existential ("vague and slightly flaky"). And Hal & Mario talking almost past each other.

'I feel like you always tell me the truth. You tell me when it's right to.'
'Marvelous.'
'I feel like you're the only one who knows when it's right to tell. I can't know for you, so why should I be hurt.'
'Be a fucking human being for once, Boo. I room with you and I hid it from you and let you worry and be hurt that I was trying to hide it.'
'I wasn't hurt. I don't want you to be sad.'
'You can get hurt and mad at people, Boo. News-flash at almost fucking nineteen, kid. It's called being a person. You can get mad at somebody and it doesn't mean they'll go away.'

It's so.... it's too big to talk about. I wish I could, and it makes me crazy a little that I can't. If I had specific questions to answer - if this were an essay exam where someone asked me something like "Compare and contrast the archetypal roles that mother- and father-figures play for the main characters" I would have something to say. But to just try to get over 1000 pages into a single post, or even several posts, it's too much.

This is water

(aka an update on Erin's own Infinite Summer)

I'm a member of that generation that has a hard time with sincerity. Whenever feelings get a little too real, we need to say something caustic, ironic, to back away. Is this a generational thing, or a cultural thing, or just part of being young? I'm not sure. Anyway, I found it again yesterday while reading about Mario Incandenza:

The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. over the age of about Kent Blott finds stuff that's really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It's like there's some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn't happy. (p. 592, btw)

And that's the thing about Madame Psychosis for him (and prob not just him) - she talks about "stuff that is real."

Because I suspect we all secretly crave that sincerity, even as we are embarrassed by it.

So this is the real thing I read 2 pages before, about Mario, that just pulled and pulled at me:

He can't tell if Hal is sad. He is having a harder and harder time reading Hal's states of mind or whether he's in good spirits. This worries him. He used to be able to sort of preverbally know in his stomach generally where Hal was and what he was doing, even if Hal was far away and playing or if Mario was away, and now he can't anymore. Feel it. This worries him and feels like when you've lost something important in a dream and you can't even remember what it was but it's important. Mario loves Hal so much it makes his heart beat hard. He doesn't have to wonder if the difference now is him or his brother because Mario never changes.

Oh, and the title for this post? That's from here.

I really cannot believe I read this.

The Hopeless Romantic's Handbook - Gemma Townley
New York: Ballantine, 2007

I am really enjoying Infinite Jest. A lot. But it is hard work. (Lots of testimonials to this fact over at the Infinite Summer site.) Instead of giving up, I am taking brain breaks. I have also been fighting off a cold.

All of which led to reading this. Believe me people, I KNOW. And I'm not even going to go into the story of how I came across it. What has been fun - and more fun than reading the book, which was fine, I guess - has been casting the actors in the film version. I've gotten as far as NOT Keira Knightley thankyouverymuch for Kate (maybe Natalie Dormer? or Jacinda Barrett?), Martin Freeman for Tom. I'm having more trouble with Joe, perhaps b/c I can totally picture him but can't think of the actor who is most "him." Leaning toward someone like Teddy Dunn. Anyway, I am back to the tome and on track to finish before my semester starts.

Characters I Love

Memories are slippery, so I can't be sure exactly how dramatic this moment actually was, but I remember sitting, at 17, in a waiting room at Kaiser. I was there with my grandmother for some appointment or other, and I was reading War and Peace. (Isn't this how everyone spends the summer after their high school graduation?) Anyway, I had a thing for Prince Andrei. In fact, I'm looking forward to re-reading the book just so I can see how he holds up over a dozen years. And so there came a moment where another character acts in a way that will hurt him, and I exclaimed, to the whole room, "You whore!" Um, that was embarrassing.

Anyway, he's not the only character I have gotten too close to. And if you add in tv shows and movies, I am over-empathizing with characters all the time. But he's still the one that matters the most.

And now, reading Infinite Summer, I find myself (like Avery Edison) liking Hal Incandenza just a little too much. And fearing for him. Avery says anxious, and since I have such a close personal relationship with anxiety, it goes without saying that that's the best word for it. I just... I want it to be okay. But I don't think it will be.

I've always liked to root for the bad guy and tried to create antiheroes where they didn't exist. And I was down with my ex who, we joked, only liked movies where people died at the end. And yet.... A co-worker was telling me something he heard about ways in which women conceive of fairness differently than men. And really, when it comes down to it, as much as I don't want to be like everyone else, man do I crave the happy ending. I want things to be the way they are supposed to be. Which isn't always happy per se. But is the way I feel like it should be. It's unoriginal perhaps, and quite possibly is pretty unhealthy, but it's me.

All that said, I can't imagine DFW giving me what I want. And probably I'd respect him less if he did.

Did I mention I am doing this?

Infinite Summer

Which is not quite what it sounds like, the long lazy summers of my youth. Or at least, the ways we choose to remember the summers of our youth.

Anyway, I am reading DFW's Infinite Jest, alongside a cast of thousands. And as could be expected, I started late, then got ahead, and now have stopped to read another book. But it's fantastic. I don't think I know how to talk about it. I tried, a little, yesterday, and ended up mostly speechless. All I could really say was that his mind worked in a way that we, as mere mortals, can't really understand. Which is what made him a genius. And also what must have been such pure torture.