Thoughts in Random Patterns

Books Read in Bora Bora

I spent most of November reading:  in bed, at meals, on our deck overlooking the ocean, on the beach and by the pool with SPF 50 sunscreen slathered on any exposed skin.  Although I've gone back to reading "real" hardback books at home, the Kindle is still an absolute treasure trove for travel.  I'm increasingly appreciative of the option to increase the font size, so I can continue to push back the date when I have to wear reading glasses.

I had been reading Living with a Wild God:  A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything by Barbara Ehrenreich before we flew away to Bora Bora, so I finished that first.  It's worth reading for people who are interested in mystical / spiritual / transcendent experiences, although it wasn't as penetrating as I hoped it would be.  William James' The Varieties of Religous Experience (1901) is still my favorite book in this area.  Sam Harris' Waking Up:  A Guide to Spirituality without Religion is next on my list to read.    

 Then I started in with my true love - literary fiction:

• A Gate at the Stairs, and Bark:  Stories by Lorrie  Moore, 
• Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout,
• Where the God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom, 
• The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow,
• Ajax Penumbra 1969 by Robin Sloan  
• The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger,
• By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham (whose short story, White Angel (1989) is absolutely on my Top Ten All Time list),
• The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
• Netherland, and The Dog by Joseph O'Neill  

All of these were lovely in their own way, but I'm afraid I have to join the bandwagon and say that the best book of the month (and therefore the year) was All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.  My dear friend, Clarissa, had suggested we both read it for discussion during an upcoming trip we're taking together.  I'm glad she did.  It is beautifully written, complex, and well worth the accolades it's receiving.

One of the many habits I have that baffles Brad is to re-read books I've already read.  After reading a plethora of new novels and short stories, I revisted a tome, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, which I first read in Alaska in 2005.  My blog review of my first reading is here.  It has the same number of pages and footnotes the second time, and was just as funny and sad and all that, maybe heightened by DFW's suicide in 2008.

Then I re-read some other wonderful fiction:  

• Three Junes by Julia Glass
• The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
• Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg
• The Art of Fielding, which is in the same league as All the Light We Cannot See.  I loved this book when I read it for the first time in 2012, and imagine I'll be re-reading it throughout my reading life.  It's one of those first novels that I can't believe is a first novel, like The Kite Runner and The Lovely Bones.  

  After all that literary fiction, it was time for some palate-cleansing science fiction.  I read William Gibson's new book, The Peripheral, and re-read old favorites Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition.  Gibson is far and away my favorite science fiction writer, although I did also re-read Dune by Frank Herbert on this trip, which I've read maybe a dozen times.

In preparation for the New Year, I read and re-read several business / organizing / writing / inspiration books.  (Asterisks indicate re-reading.)

• *The Power of Habit:  Why We Do What We Do by Charles Duhigg
• *The Power of Less:  The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential ... in Business and Life by Leo Babauta
• *Zen to Done:  The Ultimate Simple Productivity System by Leo Babauta
• *The Joy Diet:  Ten Daily Practices for a Happier Life by Martha Beck
• *Making a Literary Life:  Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers by Carolyn See
• The Willpower Instinct:  How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What you Can Do to Get More of It by Kelly McGonigal
• Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
• Essentialism:  The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg Mckeown 

Somewhere in there I also re-read a couple of favorite action adventure spy conspiracy thriller books:  The Color of Night, and An Absense of Light, both by David Lindsey.

And that was about it.  I'm looking forward to a 2015 full of reading and writing, and maybe some more Pacific Ocean sunsets. 

 

 

Reading Project for 2012

Now that it's almost March, I've decided it's time to start on my reading project for the year - which is to read all of the books my terrific friends gave me for my 45th birthday party back in September.  I've never had reading goals (except those Read-a-thon things in elementary school) and just read whatever catches my eye from my Infinite Pile of Books.  Sometimes I borrow from Brad's pile.  I also like to re-read books I love or read so long ago that I'm starting to forget them.  This seems to happen at an alarmingly increasing rate - the forgetting part - and I find that I see things differently each time.

I was the fortunate recipient of a plethora of books that each friend chose for me because the book was significant to them, and I think that it would be good to read those books and review them.  I didn't manage to get thank you notes written for these gifts (surprise, surprise), so this is also a way of saying how thankful I am for my friends, for books and authors, for the freedom to read whatever I want.

The first book I've grabbed from the pile is The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins, given to me by David Cohen.  I did already read Jil Cohen's gift book back in September, which was You Don't Know Sh*t, which I enjoyed so much I gave a copy to another scatological trivia-loving friend.  

Thank you, David, for the thoughtful and surely thought provoking birthday gift - 

 

eReader

I may have finally found the electronic device that will change my book acquiring behavior.  For my May 1st Life Dinner gift Brad gave me a Sony Portable Reader, and then set it up for me this weekend (which may be the nicest part of the gift).  He tried it first, which is always a good idea since I'm much less excited about new technologies than he is.

But this one has been great.  The screen is easy on the eyes, and it feels like a book in the hand, and has an extremely easy user interface and easy downloading from the online bookstore.  I read The Road over the weekend for my first book.  The only strange thing is that I keep reaching to turn the page instead of pressing the Next Page > key.  I'll learn a new behavior eventually..

Scribbles: Cy Twombly

Last night, after a full day of writing work at my Spruce Street office with Brad, I was tired in that good way you get after really concentrated work.  We watched the first episode of the final season of The Sopranos.  After such a long hiatus between episodes, I had forgotten both how violent it is, and how sad.  Then we turned OFF the television and read books.  What a revolutionary concept!  I took one of the big art monographs off the top of one of several Unread Books piles on the coffee table and got lost in the world of Cy Twombly, who is one of my very favorite artists.  He has used similar motifs of writing and scribbles and letters and fragments of words throughout his long working life.  I like art that includes text and words and have been fortunate enough to see Twombly's work in person in San Francisco and New York.  After a long day of writing by hand and typing, it was very restorative to slowly savor books of creative art that incorporates myth and language, too.

The History of Love

I’m on an airplane from Miami to Denver, surrounded by sleeping Asian people, next to Brad (sleeping, too, of course).  I hardly ever bring out my computer on an airplane since it’s a 21st century kind of mercy to have a space/time where the demand to be connected can be ignored without guilt (at least until the airlines get EVDO going everywhere); but I just finished reading The History of Love by Nicole Krauss and I wanted to write while it was still fresh in me how much I loved this book.  I went back to the beginning after I read about 100 pages to slow down as much as possible and savor the first time I read this book.  It’s a good one to read in one big breath.  I’m certain there will be many other readings.  This one goes straight to the top of my Best Books Read in 2006 List.  Number One with a bullet.

This book left me with that particular sorrowful feeling of recognizing beauty and the temporary nature of all things simultaneously.  There’s probably a German word for it (Gotterdammerung? Weltschmertz?).  It comes along with the physical symptoms of true aesthetic pleasure, which I mostly experience while listening to music, but also sometimes feel when looking at art or being in nature and watching the sunrise or sunset — or reading a beautiful book; the goose bumps on the arms and the hairs raised on the back of the neck and tears in the eyes and an opening somewhere near the heart.  Maybe it’s caused by a vibration from the music or the breath or something.  I don’t really know, but it’s the part that recognizes art.  This book creates that experience in abundance.

Ms. Krauss writes about loss and recovery from loss, missing/absent parents (both through death and emotional absence), and the Jewish heritage of the Holocaust.  She and Jonathan Safran Foer (who wrote Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, my #1 Book of 2005) are married.  Comparisons between their work are probably inevitable, and there are similarities.  Both have a gift for expressing the inner lives of children and young adults, and deal with similar themes.  And both are beautiful writers.

This book is dedicated to Ms. Krauss’ husband, and to her grandparents, with what looks like their passport photos on the dedication page, with the inscription “for my grandparents, who taught me the opposite of disappearing.”  One of the major themes of the book is about disappearance and denying.  There is a hilarious and sad passage on page 36 between Alma Singer and her brother, Bird.

WHAT I AM NOT

My brother and I used to play a game.  I’d point to a chair.  “THIS IS NOT A CHAIR,” I’d say.  Bird would point to the table.  “THIS IS NOT A TABLE.”  “THIS IS NOT A WALL,” I’d say.  “THAT IS NOT A CEILING.”  We’d go on like that.  “IT IS NOT RAINING OUT.”  “MY SHOE IS NOT UNTIED!” Bird would yell.  I’d point to my elbow.  “THIS IS NOT A SCRAPE.”  Bird would lift his knee.  “THIS IS ALSO NOT A SCRAPE!”  “THAT IS NOT A KETTLE!” “NOT A CUP!”  “NOT A SPOON!”  “NOT DIRTY DISHES!”  We denied whole rooms, years, weathers.  Once, at the peak of our shouting, Bird took a deep breath.  At the top of his lungs he shrieked:  “I!  HAVE NOT!  BEEN!  UNHAPPY!  MY WHOLE LIFE!”  “But you’re only seven,” I said.

Passages like this remind me of the deep and real sadnesses of childhood, and how much I really like being an adult.  And how much I love beautiful writing.  Put this one in your To Read pile if you  haven’t read it already.

Sestinas, DFW, and Television

Okay, in addition to leafing through old Vogue magazines, and tearing out pretty pictures, I'm still deeply hooked on David Foster Wallace.  I'm reading A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, a collection of essays and arguments.  I love his writing, his voice, his idiosyncratic thinking, and his appalling critical clarity, especially about television.  In his essay E Unibus Pluram:  Television and U.S. Fiction, he refers (on p. 45) to a book of poetry by James Cummins called The Whole Truth, "a cycle of sestinas deconstructing Perry Mason." 

I first encountered the sestina form in college in Frank Bidart's poetry class, and have frequently used it as a palate cleansing exercise as I wade through the swampy quagmire of my novel.  There's something very orderly and tidy to me about the rigid formality of this form, and I can complete a decent draft in about 4 hours -- which feels so good after never ever ever never finishing my damn novel.  (Yet.)

Of course, when you look around on the internet, you're likely to find all kinds of things.  Here are some sestinas written for a contest, as well as a sestina group and forum.  No matter how quirky your taste (gotta real jones for those sestinas!?!), you're not alone in the internet universe.

And I found a page of sestinas on McSweeney's, which is another one of Dave Eggers' great things.

The irony of this whole essay for me is that I was raised in a television-free household, and have literally never seen a single episode of Perry Mason.  I've caught up on a lot of other t.v. in hotel rooms and at home on my own ginormous flat panel 50" screen, but not Bewitched or The Partridge Family or The Mary Tyler Moore Show or Lou Grant or any of a number of other genres and periods, including our current "reality" tv craze.  We don't have a television here in our house in Homer, and I think of all the people I know, myself included, who all always claim not to watch "much" tv.  Two entire solid months with no tv is a far cry from the 2-3 daily hours that folks who claim "not much" tv watching seem to watch.  More time to read David Foster Wallace.  Try it sometime.

Cloning

I experienced two entertainments this weekend whose central theme was cloning, one a literary novel and one a blockbuster summer movie.  One of these is theoretically "high brow" and one "low," which has started me thinking some about culture.  I've moved Nobrow:  The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture to the top of the To Read pile. 

Friday night we went to see the summer movie The Island with our visiting friends, Rachel and Robin Bordoli, and Aaron Cheatham.  The movie was much more scary than I expected from a PG-13 movie, but I think that's just another sign that I'm getting older.  It was definitely entertaining, and surprisingly thought provoking.  It had excellent visual montages and settings of beautiful contemporary architecture, and the luscious Scarlett Johansson.  As with almost all movies these days, it could have been edited more tightly, perhaps down 10-15 minutes (another sign I'm getting old).  I liked the clean, crisp, well-lit visuals.  There was several good chase scenes that caused actual flinching at several impacts, but when Ewan McGregor gets on a flying motorcycle, my brain is transported into Star Wars and my willing suspension of disbelief was broken.  But it was a good seed for a lively conversation about cloning, definitions of personhood, chattel property, slavery, and immortality -- which is more than I usually get from a summer movie.

Yesterday I read Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, who also wrote Remains of the Day (and several other works.  Like The Dogs of Babel, you read along for awhile before you figure out what's going on -- which is actually the same as what's going on in The Island.  The narrator has a deliberately plain voice as she recounts stories of maturing in a boarding school setting with other clones who are to be used for organ transplants, but don't seem to realize the implications of that.  Death is called "completion."  The eerie thing about Never Let Me Go is that it's set in late 1990's England, implying that these programs are already secretly underway.

Definitely still thinking about what it means to be a person..

The Dogs of Babel

I knew that whatever book I read after Infinite Jest was going to seem sparse in comparison, so I just pulled a random book from the To Read shelves and ended up with a first novel, The Dogs of Babel, by Carolyn Parkhurst.  I'm enjoying books that don't set everything up for the reader, and this one leaves some nice room to figure things out on your own.  The central mystery is whether the narrator's wife fell to her death accidentally or committed suicide.  The writing is clear and fluid and the characters reveal themselves gradually.  The narrator's voice changes as he moves through his grief and brings you along with him.  It's very nicely done --

Infinite Jest: Victory

Whew! I'm finished reading Infinite Jest. David Foster Wallace is a genius. Definitely. Absolutely. No doubt about it.

Don’t read further if you’re thinking of reading this book, because I’m revealing all kinds of goodies in here.

I stayed up late Saturday night / Sunday morning (at 2 a.m. it’s dark outside, even here at the 59th parallel) and mowed through a healthy chunk (up to page 809) which made it possible to imagine that the end was in sight. I finished Sunday night. This is a long book. And difficult. It should have a Tipper-Gore-style sticker on the front saying, (in addition to Adult Lyrics) —  Warning:  Reader is required to pay close attention throughout and to keep a dictionary handy at all times. There were other things that were difficult for me. There were stretches in the middle where I was just kind of slogging through, slowly, carefully, dictionary in hand. It does pick up momentum rapidly toward the end and he starts to weave some narrative threads together, which brings me to another difficulty — I’m not enough of a post-modern lit crit hysterical realism theorist to be beyond all narrative conventions. I kept expecting convergence, but the narrative lines are asymptotic. I kept going back and re-reading to see if I had missed some important moment that explains what happens to Hal, but I don’t see it. I don’t mind being left in the middle of a narrative — I’m left with Gately in a hospital bed, and don’t really "know" what happens to him (or any of the other characters either), but I liked Hal and wanted to know what happend to turn him into a freakazoid in the opening pages of the book. I also hereby publicly confess that I skimmed through an ugly section about a drug addict killing cats and dogs (pps. 538-547) and another ugly part that described in detail a movie showing a homosexual rape where the victim secretly had AIDS, and maybe a couple of other ugly things too bleak and graphic for my delicate sensibilities. He definitely has a flair for the grotesque.

I think my real criticism is somewhere in the neighborhood of admiring the intellectual firewords (meant to type "fireworks," but I’m getting into the neologism thing), which are brilliant — but thinking that the light doesn’t give off a lot of emotional heat. Reviewers (which I spent a couple of hours reading) compare his work to those of Dave Eggers and Jonathan Franzen and other cranky and hilarious writers in my generation whose work I admire/enjoy/love. I think Infinite Jest gives less for a reader to hold on to emotionally than these writers. It doesn’t connect to things outside its own world. It wasn’t particularly thought provoking/inspiring for me, especially compared to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, where I paused often to consider and ponder and think and reflect for long moments on humanity and history.

Which may be at least part of what he’s saying: the anomie of our generation — whose earliest memories include Watergate and helicopters lifting from embassy roofs in Saigon and Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army and stagflation and a whole plethora of institutions falling down.

And on a lighter note, for those of us who really did spend time reading the dictionary as children, the Vocabulary Development section:

Here’s a list of words I didn’t know before and managed to look up. There are other medical and pharmacological terms that I understood from context and didn’t feel compelled to look up, and I can only imagine that I missed a few others scattered about here and there, but these are some juicy ones:

• anfractuous (p. 39)
• fulvous (p. 93)
• strabismic (p. 290)
• saurian (forgot to track the page number)
• ephebe (p. 292)
• extant (p. 101)
• papular (p. 200)
• sallet (p. 527)
• caparison (p. 533)
• carminative (p. 630)
• apical (p. 290) N.B. definition 2
• Actaeon (p. 290)
• parturient (p. 789)
• antinomically (p. 792)
• strigil (p. 832)
• effulgence (p. 854)
• inspissated (p. 1078)
• sinciput (p. 950)
• felo-de-se (p. 1048) (hyphenated in the dictionary entry, but not in the text)
• nystagmus (p. 1018)
• Eschaton (found everywhere)
• parget (p. 666)
• pules (p. 670)
• ablative (p. 470) (ablation)

And an entirely new category of words not found in dictionary.com:

• pedalferrous (p. 93)
• ascapartic (p. 290)
• semion (p. 101) which I’m going to relate to semiotics since it’s about making a sign
• spansules (p. 1078, footnote 368)
• fremitic (p. 353) [frenetic?]
• omnissent (p. 599) [omniscient]?
• lalating (p. 788) [ululating?]
• votaried (p. 434) [votaries does exist]

I went to Google, typed in ascapartic and found a blog post of other words from Infinite Jest that are exciting and new and imaginary. He also uses ‘mobiusizing," thereby making a noun into a verb. I have a college friend who did her PhD work on this syntactical magic which I can’t remember the name for right now. Examples: fax, FedEx, office, and many others from the world of technology, but also the New England-y verb "to summer."

In this whole huge book the only thing that stood out in my mind as a possible error was a description of a scream on a B#.  B# is almost always called C natural and I didn’t think B# really existed as a notation.  But I’ve been trolling around on wikipedia, brushing up my music theory, and B# exists as the final and 7th sharp in the key of C# major.  Have I mentioned yet that David Foster Wallace is a genius?

I’m sure I have lots more (prolix, verbose, bombastic, circumlocutory, diffuse, flowery, fustian, gabby, garrulous, grandiloquent, involved, long-winded, loquacious, magniloquent, palaverous, periphrastic, pleonastic, prolix, redundant, prolix, repeating, repetitious, repetitive, rhetorical, talkative, talky, tautological, tautologous, tedious, tortuous) things to say about Infinite Jest — but I’ll save something for tomorrow.

Infinite Jest: Prolix

Prolix:  tediously prolonged; wordy, or tending to speak or write at excessive length. Antonym: concise. 

I'm on page 198 of Infinite Jest, and while I'm thoroughly enjoying myself, I must say that David Foster Wallace asks a lot of a reader.  You actually must pay attention, read slowly, and use all of your vocabulary -- and then some.  I've used www.dictionary.com to look up palaver and apotheosizing and, ironically, prolix.  I'm not finding it to be excessively wordy or tedious; it's highly amusing and he has a real knack for capturing different voices and small moments that feel genuine -- but he does use a LOT of words.  David Foster Wallace is the anti-Hemingway.  Antonym:  concise.

Here's his description of an FM radio show on M.I.T.'s station,  "WYYY 109, Largest Whole Prime On The FM Band." [Although I want to ask some radio geek whether the FM broadcast band really goes all the way up to 109?]

Albeit literally sophomoric, "Those Were the Legends..." is a useful drama-therapy-type catharsis-op --- M.I.T. students tend to carry their own special psychic scars:  nerd, geek, dweeb, wonk, fag, wienie, four-eyes, spazola, limp-dick, needle-dick, dickless, dick-nose, pencil neck; getting your violin or laptop TP or entomologist's kill-jar broken over your large head by thick-necked kids on the playground -- and the show pulls down solid FM ratings, though a lot of that's due to reverse-inertia, a Newton's-II-like backward shove from the rabidly popular Madame Psychosis Hour, M-F 0000h.-0100h., which it precedes. (p. 182)

And a juicy tidbit from the almost 100 pages of end notes:

57. Ingesters' accounts of the temporal-perception consequences of DMZ in the literature are, as far as Pemulis is concerned, vague and inelegant and more like mystical in the Tibetan-Dead-Book vein than rigorous or referentially clear; one account Pemulis doesn't completely get but can at least get the neuro-titillating gist of is one monograph's toss-off quote from an Italian lithographer who'd ingested DMZ once and made a lithograph comparing himself on DMZ to a piece of like Futurist sculpture, plowing at high knottage through time itself, kinetic even in stasis, plowing temporally ahead, with time coming off him like water in sprays and wakes. (p. 996)

And a small jewel of a sentence: "He had never been so anxious for the arrival of a woman he did not want to see."  (p. 23)

And let's not forget the herds of feral hamsters rampaging through the desert outside of Tucson (p. 93, and likely more to come since I'm only on page 198).  This struck a personal chord with me because one of my numerous and varied types of childhood rodents was a mouse named Farrell; named both as a play on "feral" and as an homage to Suzanne Farrell, prima ballerina of the New York City Ballet and Balanchine muse.  I like lemmings and capybara and pika and appreciate a writer who has the good sense to include hamsters in his sometime-in-the-alarmingly-near-future world.

Some of the things that other people say about Infinite Jest and one of his other books, Oblivion, and what he says himself corroborates my sense that he's asking readers to dig deep and engage, and I'm happy to do so.  I'm going to keep reading along -- only 800 more pages to go..