I read newspapers & stuff...

A couple book-y articles that have caught my eye in the last couple days...

I didn't even notice the title of "Hero librarians save my babies" ("Librarians saved my babies" in the print edition) until I finished reading it. This says something about how little I notice headlines when I am charging my way through the paper. Anyway, it's a cute essay about how the characters in a novelist's work are like children that you send off into the world, and that reviews and fan mail and sightings of your book on store shelves are the ways in which you hear that your little ones are all right and making their way out there. And that when you hear your book has been remaindered... well, that's bad news for your characters. Except...

The horror of the "R" letter is mitigated by only one thought: Your babies are safe at the library! Were it not for libraries, there would be no safe harbor for characters and stories, nowhere for them to wait out disasters and economic storms. And were it not for librarians, there would be no one to introduce your characters to new children as the older ones grow up and move on.

And for this, I want to thank librarians, for the work they do and for the many, many lives they save.

So, there it is. Good job, libraries.

And then courtesy of John Dickerson's Twitter feed, I get to find out this morning about a woman who is reading a book a day for a year. (This was impressive enough back in 2007 when my friend Siel did so for a month.) So, Nina Sankovitch, I envy you. I want to do this. And then have a blog about it. Except I wouldn't want to give up the things that the NYT article says she has: The New Yorker, coffee with friends. And what I definitely would miss is getting to take time off after reading a book that really moves you. Or getting to stop and wait at least a day before you finish, because you want to prolong the experience of being inside the book's world.

Oh, and I imagine we'll see Sankovitch's book at some point in the next couple years? And finally, while I have read excerpts and stories from several more of the books, of the 349 books she has read thus far, I have read a whopping total of 7. Seems like I need to get busy...

Welcome to America, Comrade

K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist - Peter Carlson
New York: Public Affairs, 2009

Nikita Sergeyevich makes me strangely emotional. His embarrassing blustery buffoonery, his role in the Thaw and the Cuban Missile Crisis, his eventual downfall. (Soviet leaders in general bring out this reaction in me. Which is strange because most of them don't deserve my pity, and I am sure they wouldn't want it.) I don't know what it is, but for years I've found him utterly compelling. And tragic. And hilarious.

Anyway, so the point is that I was excited when I heard about Carlson's book. He's a former Washington Post reporter, and came across the story of Khrushchev's 1959 trip to America when he was working at People magazine in the 1980s. So while the book came out for the 50th anniversary of the trip, it was over 20 years in the making. And, Carlson relies on one of my favorite historical sources: press accounts. I was planning on building a career as a historian on the legs of the popular media, after all.

But I am digressing again. The book is fun. At least, it's fun for someone like me, who knows and likes Soviet history, and probably knows the 1950s USSR better than the USA of the same period. But I bet it'll be fun for you as well. It really is what the title suggests: a Cold War comic interlude. In a world that was likely far more dangerous than I am willing to imagine. As a historian at heart, I would have liked to have seen more rigorous scholarship, but then it wouldn't have been the same book, and the audience would have shrunk to essentially nil.

I've packed up all my Russia books in preparation for my move, but I am tempted to pull out the Khrushchev stuff now. Maybe when I'm unpacking... :)

My favorite line of the book was buried about 3/4 of the way through the book. Discussing Khrushchev's trip, and commentators' reactions to it as it finally came to a close, Carlson writes, "The trip was, if nothing else, a victory for nuance." Would that we have more of those.

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.

"World enough, and time"

The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
San Francisco: MacAdam/Cage, 2003

I need to take a break from these books that put me through some kind of emotional washing machine. (Or dryer?) I'm tired, y'all. I'm not saying it's not worth it, but it's getting to be a little much.

There really isn't any way to discuss the things I'd want to discuss in this post without engaging in all sorts of spoilers. And even though the book has been around for years, and the movie was released this summer, and how many people read this anyway?, I like trying to avoid spoilers.

Clare's and Henry's is a love story unlike any I think I've ever seen. He eight years older than she, but she meets him when she is six, and he doesn't meet her until he's 28. It's kind of remarkable, the way it all works out. Because she's in love with him by the time she meets him in real time, but if she weren't in love with his older self, and if she didn't know that's how things would be, would she have loved him? Maybe we're not supposed to dwell on this, and it doesn't really matter because their love is really quite something. But it's evidence of how little control they have - in so many ways - over their destiny. You have to act as though you have free will, but the result is predetermined anyway, and you know this, because Henry's been there, or a future Henry has come back and told you, or given you enough hints. It's dizzying. And puts that metaphysical question in stark relief.

I found myself wondering about Niffenegger's writing process, and how she managed to keep everything straight, since the novel runs in roughly chronological time (but of course Clare's chronology doesn't quite match Henry's, to say the least) and things that happen before also happen after. The decisions about whether to share a moment as it appears in Clare's life or in Henry's... again: dizzying. Before I began reading, a coworker who had just seen the movie asked to borrow the book to check something. She then returned it saying that she was just going to need to read the whole thing over. And I understand - there are moments I'd like to return to, to re-experience or to check for hints - and I don't know really how I would find them. Some are easy, but others would be require essentially rereading large swaths. (This is a real problem with Infinite Jest as well. Even more of a problem there in fact.)

So I regret nothing. But I'm going to try to take a break from books that leave me bruised and battered. Suggestions?

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.

I really hate the term WASP

...And in fact, that is probably my biggest gripe with this book.

Mating Rituals of the North American WASP - Lauren Lipton
New York: 5 Spot, 2009

I definitely did not expect to find myself so wrapped up in this book. I mean, it's a "oops, we accidentally got married in Vegas and now are going to pretend the marriage is legit for some ridiculous reason" chick lit plot. But I read a good review of it somewhere, and I was still adrift after finishing Infinite Jest (a post I still can't bring myself to write), so here it was.

And I have to say, I kind of loved it. I'm not sure why. I didn't love the characters, but then, I liked them much better when they were with one another. And maybe that's the hallmark of a good romance. And the whole poem thing is kinda awesome. Actually, the poetry may have been the key. I am a sucker for books that quote Yeats. And then the snippets of verse that lodge themselves inside Luke's head... I walked around with them too. "An aphrodisiac will disappear, delusional, like permanence or wealth" and especially "staid genes worked hot from your electric charms." In the cursed heat and smoke of late August, these lines hung in the air around me.

Or maybe it wasn't the poetry, or the love story, but rural Connecticut and old money. Snow is mighty appealing when you are starting to think that you may never not be too hot again. Or maybe I'm reliving a chapter of my youth; as my mom said to me last weekend, haven't I already done the Connecticut WASPy thing? Oh, but believe me, he was not Luke.

Whatever it was, the novel demanded my attention. And refused to let me go. And that was it.

Three: something important is about to happen. Pay attention. Yes, you.

How to Buy a Love of Reading - Tanya Egan Gibson
New York: Dutton, 2009

The gimmicky premise: Nouveau Riche Long Islanders decide to show up their neighbors and serve their chubby and anti-intellectual daughter by becoming patrons of the arts. That is, they hire an author to move into their home and write a novel to their daughter's specifications. Needless to say, things don't entirely go as planned.

The cast:

• Carley is the daughter, overweight and addicted to reality television. But she may be way more perceptive than she seems. She also is in love with...
• Hunter, her best friend. Also super hot and popular. Also an alcoholic who pops pills, worships Fitzgerald, and cries more than I ever knew any boy to. He's the only one who has actually read the first novel by...
• Bree, whose postmodern trickery (and footnotes! footnotes everywhere!) makes her the unlikeliest of candidates to write a Arthurian novel (the theme of Carley's upcoming Sweet 16, selected by her parents) for a teen girl. She's a former classmate of...
• Justin, a successful novelist and Hunter's idol and neighbor technically, although he's been gone since being shot by a deranged fan.

There are other characters too, obviously. I can leave them aside for now. And I will not even try to get into the web of relationships just among these four. Suffice it to say that love shows itself in strange ways. And sometimes we love someone not because of who they are, but who we are for loving them. And do those lies and misperceptions - the fault of love - matter, in the end?

I waited a week to write about this book because I had SO much to say. I still do, particularly about love and how desperately selfish it can be. How maybe we would be happier if we loved people for who they were instead of ghosts or mirages. How a "happy" ending can still be the wrong one. And how a father holding a bouquet of flowers can be the trigger that makes me cry. I honestly don't even know if I liked this book - it was ambitious, that's for sure, but that's doesn't necessarily make it successful. But like it or not, it made me think far more than I expected.

And a few miscellaneous thoughts: did I feel like the parody of pomo literature was at the expense of DFW? Not sure, but considering my other summer reading, it was on my mind. Also, the line that turned into the title of this post. It made me happy. Gibson's descriptions of Justin's panic attacks weren't entirely convincing, but perhaps close enough. And Aftermemory. When you go back and relive events the way you wished they could be. But none of this is as important as the rest of it. So go back and re-read the previous paragraph.

What I am seeking. What am I seeking?

From Tanya Egan Gibson:

...and then she and Justin are cracking up, slap-happy, teary-insane with that feeling that comes from getting exactly what you need when you don't know what to ask for.

From Robert Hellenga:

It seemed to him he'd come to the place he'd been looking for all evening, a place where prayers are answered in unexpected ways, which is just the way prayers are supposed to be answered. You might get what you want, but it won't be quite what you expected.

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.

A descent into...?

Atmospheric Disturbances - Rivka Galchen
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

This book had been on my To Read list since sometime last year, but it got bumped to the library request list when it appeared as a Slate audio book club selection in May. (Then I had to wait to actually get and read the book, so finally just listened to the podcast last week.)

This is one of those books that's so clever that I sort of feel like I won't be able to say anything sufficiently clever about it. But not in an annoying way, just in a "it is what it is" sort of way. Leo is a psychiatrist, which somehow gives him enough mental credibility that you want to believe him when one day an impostor comes home instead of his wife. Despite being right to almost the slightest detail, he knows she's not his Rema. So he goes off looking for here, and gets caught up with the Royal Academy of Meteorologists, with which one of his clients (also missing, like Rema) claims to be a secret agent. Long story short, the line between what is real and what is in Leo's head is constantly shifting as the simulacrum tries to persuade Leo to come home to her.

I expected this to be mostly a meditation on the ways in which we fall out of love, or love changes, and the person you loved is suddenly gone and replaced by someone else. It's a great metaphor. But it's that, and more and less than that too. It's about perception and love and loss and the lies we tell ourselves and those around us, and the impossibility of ever perfectly knowing another person. And it's about the ache you feel for Leo (and his wife) when you see how he almost loves this replacement Rema, and wants to love her, and yet there is this block that prevents him from seeing her for who she is.

Some points:

• I noted some similarities - in title mostly, but also in style - with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and was annoyed with the book club for pointing out the same thing and making me feel less original.
• Completion error: "with any incomplete perception - and needless to say all perceptions are incomplete - the observer 'fills in' by extrapolating from experience. Or from desire. Or from desire's other face, aversion. So basically, we focus fuzzy images by transforming them into what we expect to see, or what we wish we could see, or what we most dread to see." I love this quote in its own right, but I love it even more for Leo's further statement of being reassured that he knew right away that the impostress wasn't Rema instead of falling into completion error, without having considering that he is just committing the opposite completion error.
• Too lazy to check whether Leo's attribution to Freud is accurate, but he credits Freud with the belief that "there's always a thicket of past people between any two lovers." Leo then goes on to disagree, but really, isn't love about sorting one's way through the thicket in order to truly find each other?
• The book gets surprisingly and randomly funny toward the end, perhaps to mitigate how tragic everything is starting to feel, with a set of mistranslated drinks on a menu: Bloody Girl & Bloody Great. Also "I crash." (The first two seem to be sangria, the last maybe cocoa?)

And so that's it. Clever to be sure. But also quite touching. And disturbing too. But it was melancholy and yearning that stuck with me.

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.

It's not really about cricket at all

Netherland - Joseph O'Neill
New York: Pantheon Books, 2008

Right before I started reading it, I found this Wonkette description of Netherland:

Recall last summer: it was the summer of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, the most important book liked by people wearing the most important-looking glasses. It seems O’Neill has journeyed from that wire-rimmed menagerie of the psyche to Politics & Prose, where all such odysseys of the soul must, and do, eventually terminate.

And I thought to myself, that sounds about how I remember the talk about this book. And while I generally don't wear glasses (current facebook profile pic aside), I figure that since I like the sort of books those people like, it's a good thing I've finally checked this out from the library. Oh, plus, it's a 9/11 book, and I'm kinda fascinated by those. (Like this one and this one.)

But just like it's not really about cricket, it's not really about 9/11. Except it's not not about them either. It's about love and loss and rediscovering oneself. And - and this is what makes it most about 9/11, for me - it is a love story about America, and NYC specifically. What is it about America that keeps pulling people toward it? Why are we a nation of immigrants?

I found Hans a lovely and thoughtful - albeit lost - narrator. It's as though he serves almost entirely as a mirror to hold up the world and the other characters he sees. But anyway, a few of the lovelier observations from Hans:

• Even my work, the largest of the pots and pans I'd placed under my life's leaking ceiling, had become too small to contain my misery.
  
• Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?
• I was possibly the only person contained by the apparent world who was unable to see through it.

And, finally, "my secret, almost shameful feeling is that I am out of New York - that New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin." Which reminded me of nothing so much as E.M. Cioran:

All that is not Paris being equal in my eyes, I often regret that wars have spared it. [...] I shall never forgive Paris for having bound me to space, for making me from somewhere.

Which is a lot for a city to shoulder. But if any cities can, they are NYC and Paris. And what of my City of Angels? In what ways is it so much like and unlike the others? Could a different Netherland be set here?

Hyper radiance?

The Uses of Enchantment - Heidi Julavits
New York: Doubleday, 2006

So I actually went and looked up Bruno Bettelheim when I found out that Julavits borrowed the title from him. Fairy tales allow children a safe way to come to terms with fears and darkness. Do we ever really stop being children? In Julavits' novel, which I'm not totally certain I can discuss coherently, most of the characters are engaged in similar acts of attempting to empower themselves to be the masters of their story.

There are three narratives, set in 1985, 1986, and 1999. In the "present," Mary Veal is back in New England for her estranged mother's funeral. Her family has yet to forgive her for what happened over a decade ago, but she has held out hope that maybe her mother understood and forgave. This is juxtaposed with "What Might Have Happened" in 1985, when Mary disappeared, a willing participant in her abduction, and the notes taken by her therapist during a series of sessions early the next year, when he notices inconsistencies in her story, decides it is all a lie, and makes her the case study for his theory of hyper radiance. So it's difficult enough to tell what really happened, if a phrase like "what really happened" even makes sense. But then you realize that pretty much everyone is lying, or at least willfully ignoring what doesn't fit. And by the end you are kind of dizzy. And yet.... Julavits is smart and interesting and so are her characters. I was engaged start to finish. Frustrated as often as not, but engaged.

Pause. This isn't precisely what I want to say about this novel. I started writing in one place, and ended up somewhere entirely different. (Which is maybe not unlike what happens to some of these characters are they lose and regain control of their own narratives?) But rather than edit and re-think and try to get it right, I'll just end with the recommendation to read it for yourself.