I want this

Ad in a recent New Yorker:


This is a Russian magazine called Snob. Obviously I must find myself a copy.

New Yorker Fiction!

So The New Yorker had a summer fiction issue again! And like one of the very first I remember reading, this one features Jonathan Safran Foer. This time, he's one of "20 Under 40" - a pretty eclectic group of young authors, most of whom will be familiar to NYer readers.

This issue had stories by eight of the 20, with the rest to come in the next several issues. I tend to stick with this magazine for the reporting, not the fiction, but it's nice to have a nice big set of stories from time to time.

You can see more about the authors, including individual Q&A and links to their stories (if already published), here. Frustratingly, a bunch of the stories aren't available online except to subscribers, but some are. In brief, I am curious to see if Foer's "Here We Aren't, So Quickly" is part of a larger project, and I heartily enjoyed (as usual) Gary Shteyngart in "Lenny Hearts Eunice." Everything else was good (in that New Yorker fiction way) but I will just leave it at that.

Brief? Yes. Wondrous? Uncertain

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz (Riverhead Books, 2007)

First and foremost, I would like to say that this book, a Pulitzer Prize winner, deserves all the accolades it has received. It is lively and witty and intense and well-written and filled with pathos and history and I don't even know what else.

But I kind of blew it. How? you might ask. Well. I read too much of the hype. People gushed over it, and I think I might have expected too much. I also think that I might not have been the right audience. One of the brilliant aspects of Diaz's prose is the insertion of lots of sci-fi, fanboy references that make perfect sense considering Oscar and the novel's narrator. I recognize them, sort of, but I don't really live them. So while I can appreciate them, I don't get them all the way. My fault, not Diaz's.

Plus, Oscar was a difficult character for me. I felt simultaneously intensely protective of and embarrassed by and for him. This, again, is all to Diaz's credit, but made for a difficult reading experience. I could much better handle Lola and Beli, and the other side stories. And I was absolutely fascinated by the footnotes, the vast majority (all?) of which dealt with Dominican history.

Another thing: at least two excerpts were published as short stories in the New Yorker. (This one actually spans the entire plot.) I remember reading them. But I didn't recognize them reading the novel, as I usually do when this happens. I don't think that's good or bad, just unexpected.

This is a much more tepid review than the book deserves. Seriously, take this as an endorsement. It's good. Really good. You won't be sorry that you read it. But don't let your expectations run away with you.

WASPS!

Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor - Tad Friend (Little, Brown & Co., 2009)

Carolline says I am obsessed with WASPs. This may be true. I have fantasies about living in a Ralph Lauren ad. (That pic is not the best example. Anyhoo...) I also really like cable knit sweaters. However, I am pretty sure I do not live well on the East Coast. So....

Tad Friend is a staff writer for the New Yorker, so obviously I like his writing. (I don't understand why he's their Calif. writer when he's based in Brooklyn, but whatever.) He's also a Wasp. (I like it better all capitalized, like in the previous paragraph, but I'll bow to his usage for the rest of this post.) He's from what may prove to have been the last generation of Wasps to actually be Waspy. The book is a memoir of his family, on both parents' sides, and the wacky, wonderful, and often tragic turns their lives took. I added it to my list based on a recommendation that made it sound hilarious. It is not hilarious. It is however entertaining and often touching.

Among the themes that appear again and again: abandonment, emotional distance, drinking, thrift, not quite living up to promises of success, divorce and remarriage, homes that had names, and lots and lots of nicknames. The narrative is told out of chronological order, which was absolutely the right way to tell it. There are ways in which there is a grand narrative of Tad moving from childhood through to his post-college years, failed relationships, and eventual marriage. But mostly we move back and forth through years and between families. I had trouble keeping people straight at times, even with the very welcome family tree at the beginning of the book.

In some ways an elegy to a world that is slipping away, I think Friend ultimately paints a hopeful picture of the future. Not because he has embraced his Wasp heritage, or rejected it, but because he has made his peace with it.

I don't read a lot of memoirs - it's not really my genre, which is strange since it's history, after all - but I liked this one. It felt like the world it described, and allowed me to feel it too.

(PS - Friend's appraisal of certain attitudes toward privilege and success and working too hard made me aware of the ways in which places like Stanford still embody parts of the Wasp ethos. This could be a longer discussion, but I'll leave it at that.)

Rahm Emanuel and I are not meant to be

Per Ryan Lizza:

Rahm Emanuel’s office, which is no more than a three-second walk from the Oval Office, is as neat as a Marine barracks. On his desk, the files and documents, including leatherbound folders from the National Security Council, are precisely arranged, each one parallel with the desk’s edge. During a visit hours before Congress passed President Barack Obama’s stimulus package, on Friday, February 13th, I absently jostled one of Emanuel’s heavy wooden letter trays a few degrees off kilter. He glared at me disapprovingly.

Sigh.

Human Nature, reduced

I had a few minutes to read yesterday sitting in front of the Central Library, waiting for my students to appear. And this moment, in a profile of movie marketing exec Tim Palen, made me laugh:

The collective wisdom is that young males like explosions, blood, cars flying through the air, pratfalls, poop jokes, “you’re so gay” banter, and sex—but not romance. Young women like friendship, pop music, fashion, sarcasm, sensitive boys who think with their hearts, and romance—but not sex (though they like to hear the naughty girl telling her friends about it).

Collective wisdom is awesome. And sad. Ooh, and it stays good even as we get older:

Older women like feel-good films and Nicholas Sparks-style weepies: they are the core audience for stories of doomed love and triumphs of the human spirit. They enjoy seeing an older woman having her pick of men; they hate seeing a child in danger. ... Older men like darker films, classic genres such as Westerns and war movies, men protecting their homes, and men behaving like idiots. Older men are easy to please, particularly if a film stars Clint Eastwood and is about guys just like them.

So if you've ever wondered how exactly the film industry saw you, now you know.

Erin reads The New Yorker

...and links to random things that catch her fancy.

from July 28:
Jonah Lehrer, Annals of Science, "The Eureka Hunt," The New Yorker, July 28, 2008, p. 40
I knew I was right about this!

The insight process, as sketched by Jung-Beeman and Kounios, is a delicate mental balancing act. At first, the brain lavishes the scarce resource of attention on a single problem. But, once the brain is sufficiently focused, the cortex needs to relax in order to seek out the more remote association in the right hemisphere, which will provide the insight. "The relaxation stage is crucial," Jung-Beeman said. "That's why so many insights happen during warm showers."

fave Aleksandar Hemon has a new book, and is separated at birth from another fave?

(left, Hemon; right, Vladimir Mayakovsky)



from Aug. 4:
Sasha Frere-Jones explains contemporary popular rock:

The main antecedent [to Coldplay's sound] is U2, who invented the form that Coldplay works within: rock that respects the sea change of punk but still wants to be as chest-thumping and anthemic as the music of the seventies stadium gods. Translated, this means short pop songs that somehow summon utterly titanic emotions and require you to skip around in triumphant circles and pump your fist, even if it is not entirely clear what you are singing about.

from Aug. 11 & 18:
Matthew Dickman writes a lovely and haunting poem mostly about suicide, that includes the following line: "If you are/travelling, you should always bring a book to read, especially/on a train." Sound advice.

Mmm, history...

My first week as a grad student, Prof. K assigned both Herodotus and Thucydides for us to read and come back to discuss the next week. (Um, right. So I made it about 1/3 to 1/2 through each. Isn't 600 pages for one class as a baby grad student enough???) And then school got crazy - and then I left - and I've never finished reading them. I want to though! And after reading Daniel Mendelsohn's recent New Yorker article on Herodotus I might even find the wherewithal to do so.

First off, most awesome depiction of H ever: he was "like having an embarrassing parent along on a family vacation. All you wanted to do was put some distance between yourself and him, loaded down as he was with his guidebooks, the old Brownie camera, the gimcrack souvenirs—and, of course, that flowered polyester shirt." (Mendelsohn and co. originally preferred Thucydides. I, on the other hand, hate all that on vacations but LOVE it in my histories.)

Anyway, the article is awesome; it makes me want to go back to the books soon soon soon, and even compares H's style to that of "War & Peace" and the events covered to America's current escapades in the Middle East. So look for some ancient history coming to this blog sometime this summer...

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.

Roundup

Between work and illness over the last couple weeks, I just haven't felt like blogging. I have been reading some though, when I can steal time.

First off, I am all set for next week's inaugural book club meeting. We'll be discussing The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood, a book that I owned but was likely never going to get around to reading. Oddly enough, my main association with Atwood is the short story "Rape Fantasies" which we read in my AP English class. Anyway, I'll write about the book after the meeting, but suffice it to say that I was apprehensive about it; I don't often like dystopias, and 1980s feminist versions seemed intimidating. But. In the end I really enjoyed it, and was particularly fascinated by the coda chapter.

Speaking of Canadian female writers and rape fantasies, the anniversary issue of the New Yorker featured a short story by Alice Munro that addresses age, fear and fearlessness, and guile in the face of male violence. Thumbs up to "Free Radicals."

The article in that issue that I went crazy for, however, was David Grann's "True Crime" (sadly, the link is just to an abstract, but the article is AWESOME). It's couched as "a postmodern murder mystery" and I think would make a fantastic movie. A Polish detective, looking at a cold case, connects it to an author who wrote (shortly after the murder) a strange, violent, and disturbed novel that may or may not have some connection to the case. Grann talks about the suspect's philosophical bent, and desire to be a Nietzschean superman mixed with Derridean suspicion of language and truth. Oh, and the book - and maybe the murder case - are deeply intertwined with Dostoyevsky and Crime & Punishment. Ooh, I get goosebumps just thinking about how good this article was.

Also happening: BCAM was a lot of fun and hooray for free tickets. And I started reading another new book that was making me apprehensive: Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants. I was like "hmm, this book has been on the paperback best-sellers list for ages. It must be good." So I checked it out and then found out it was about the circus. But 70 pages in, I am pleasantly surprised. Thank goodness.

It is done

as of yesterday afternoon. I am pretty bloody proud of myself.

My December resolution

I know there is no chance of my keeping up in the New Year, but I'd like to get off on the right foot, so I plan to catch up on all of my New Yorkers by December 31st. I'd say my odds are probably decent. It's not a sure thing, but I will try.

It's all madness

While I talk about the New Yorker incessantly in this blog, I've actually become much better over the years about not prefacing every remark with "I was reading in the New Yorker that..." But this somehow resonated so I had to share.

Adam Gopnik, on abridged books and director commentaries (abstract only): "Masterpieces are inherently a little loony."

Yes, exactly! Funny how I've heard (and repeated) time and again that line about no genius without a touch of madness (Seneca?), and yet never extrapolated to the work of the genius. So thanks New Yorker. And thanks Adam. Can I call you Adam?

My new job...

Well, probably not. But um, who knew you could make a career out of picking out Indiana Jones' books?

We all know I am several issues behind on the New Yorker, so I am just now discovering things more timely readers would have known back at the end of September. (Someday, I believe, I will catch up again.) Anyway, an October 1st "Talk of the Town" - linked above - is about Strand Bookstore and its books-by-the-foot service.

Since the program’s inception, in 1986, the Strand has built scores of imaginary reading rooms, from the prison library in “Oz” to the Barnes & Noble clone in “You’ve Got Mail.” Clients also include window dressers, commercial architects (the Strand furnished each floor in the Library Hotel with a different Dewey decimal category), and people with more shelf space than leisure time. Kelsey Grammer requested all hardback fiction in two of his homes, while Steven Spielberg, who, incidentally, is the director of the new Indiana Jones movie, allowed a wider range (cookbooks, children’s books, volumes on art and film) to penetrate his Hamptons estate. “There have been a lot of biographies on him, so I put those in there, too,” Nancy Bass Wyden, a co-owner of the store, said.

I wonder if Strand needs a West Coast affiliate...

The Master Bedroom

The eponymous room of Tessa Hadley's novel was hard for me to envision, but apparently was a monster that ran along an entire side of what seems to have been a big English manor. It's also where Kate and her mother - whom Kate has moved home to care for - were both born. And more, but that comes later.

It's always strange when you come across a New Yorker short story in a novel, but it particularly threw me in this case because the story pulled from a plotline that stretched across the whole novel, rather that grabbing a chapter in whole.

I liked this book, because I found it touching how tentatively the characters reached out to one another. And also because the characters were mysteries, to one another but more importantly to themselves. But that said, The Master Bedroom was also deeply flawed. The mystery that makes a character intriguing also means that you never get to know them quite well enough to understand their actions, or at least to understand why their actions are incomprehensible. The teenaged Jamie is particularly unknowable, even as he seems perhaps the most adult of the bunch, and that's in some ways especially infuriating.

In the end though, the novel was sweet. And quick to read. And poignant. Like wrapping oneself in a warm blanket. And sometimes that's enough.

(oh, and one last thing. I loved how Kate describes Jamie on first meeting him: "Kate wouldn't have minded him in one of her classes: a Tolstoy type, not a Dostoevsky type, who were two-a-penny.")

Holy F***

I know I complain a lot about how behind I get on my reading (particularly of New Yorkers, and I just finished the July 2 issue today while at jury duty). But it has assumed tragic proportions - my magazine pile now stands 31 issues deep, and includes issues dating back to January of certain mags. AND it doesn't fit in my nightstand anymore.

This calls for desperate measures.

And yet, I'm currently enraptured by a most unusual academic mystery, Rebecca Stott's Ghostwalk. More on that soon.

omg maybe the saddest expression ever

I have been steadily working through The New Yorker today, and reached the Summer Fiction issue. (That would be mid-June for those of you wondering how behind I have fallen.) In past years, the SF issue introduced me to writers like Jonathan Safran Foer. The debut piece in this year's installment is "Sweetheart Sorrow," by David Hoon Kim.

I'd be willing to bet that Kim has been influenced by Haruki Murakami. Or rather, I was willing to put money down. But an extra search made the whole thing irrelevant (see page 2 of the interview for the confirmation). It wasn't just that the characters were Japanese - it was that they were out of place, living between cultures. And there was sorrow and silence, and a willingness to live inside the mind rather than wholly in the world.

Of course it is a quintessentially New Yorker story too. What that means exactly, I'm not sure. I know there is such a thing. And I've heard definitions. For me, it means that I read the last words under a curtain of solemnity.

But anyway, to the saddest expression ever. The title, it seems, is from the Danish "kæreste sorg—sweetheart sorrow—to describe the sadness one feels at the thought of a love affair nearing its end. A sadness one is not yet ready to face." The phrase is so evocative and real - I knew immediately and wholly what Kim - and the Danes - meant.

I wish I were as amusing as Patricia Marx

Last month I read Him Her Him Again The End of Him, by Patricia Marx. It's a pretty recent book, as I was reminded this evening when I was looking through my Google Reader and came across a Q&A she did with New Yorker writer Nancy Franklin.

Marx cracks me up. She is funny is a very understated way. Where you realize how funny something is a second or two later. Some highlights:

Q: Did you know there is actually a pop star named Patricia Marx in Brazil?
A: I do know and I’m so happy, because if anybody ever Google-Images me, they’ll think that I’m a beautiful Brazilian pop star.

(the Brazilian Marx)

How she is like my interns: I just loved [SNL]. I had never lived in New York; I loved that. I loved being there twenty-four hours a day. If there had been two hundred and forty hours in a day, I would have loved staying there those hours, too. I especially liked the fact that there was Diet Coke in the refrigerators that you could have for no money. It was summer camp.

On not liking her name: My mother said to me the other day, “Why does your name have to be Patty? My friends say, ‘How’s Patty?’ and I think they could be saying, ‘How’s Jane? How’s Anne?’ ”

So I've become a Marx fan. A Marxist, you could say. But that's just one example of how I'm not as funny as she is.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: The Shipping News

When I was told under no uncertain circumstances that I must read E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, I was nervous. Why? I didn't think it wouldn't be good - I've read enough of her stories in the New Yorker, and besides, it won a Pulitzer. So again, why? Because when someone raves to me about a book, I'm always worried that my expectations will be too high, and then I won't enjoy it as much. (Oddly enough, this does not stop me from doing the same thing to friends, family, strangers, etc.)

So my borrowed copy of the book stayed on my shelf roughly forever. Until this past week. And quite honestly, I was entranced. It has this quiet, peaceful energy. I felt very calm while I was reading, even if the particular plot points were not calm indeed. And in my mind I kept comparing Newfoundland to Maine, where I visited last summer. I was infused with a sense of serenity, and slowness. It was lovely.

Proulx is an amazing detailist. As a result, the world of the novel comes through picture perfect. It seems very foreign to a California girl, but utterly believable. And without detracting from the flow of the narrative.

Another point. You want the Quoyle family to find the happiness they so clearly deserve. And so it's a pleasure throughout the book to see them finding it.

Thanks Sophie, for the recommendation!

Statistics

A sampling of the reading facts surrounding my life these days:

• Number of books in my bedroom waiting to be read: 47 (auspicious)
• Number of books in my "Books to Check Out" list: 51
• Current New Yorker issue: May 14, 2007
• Favorite "innovators" from said issue: Richard Branson and Banksy
• Most recent book finished: Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
• Number of stories in IoM: 9 (also auspicious)
• Time finished: approx. 7:05pm on Monday night
• Thoughts on said book: Marriages are fickle and difficult things; being an old and single woman sucks; culture shock is a big big big problem - both India to America and vice versa; who goes by the nickname Twinkle???
• Other thoughts: Lahiri is a lovely writer, and has luscious, evocative detail - but all of the stories are tinged with sadness. It's a lot of sad to take all at once.
• Number of Guggenheim Fellowships won by Lahiri: One
• Number of Guggenheims won by me: None (yet)
• Shoulder blade currently more sunburned: Left
• Most surprising vocabulary today: Repository (context: "This folder will be the repository of your paperwork... repository? Did I just say repository?!")
  
• Next book: hmmm, I think it'll be a surprise.