I tried to read Don DeLillo's "White Noise" at some point in the late 80s or early 90s, I don't remember. It was published in 1985 and it wasn't then but not too long after. There were a lot of clever post-modernist books floating around my periphery then, and some I liked and some I just didn't. John and I would go rounds on them and I wanted to like what he liked or know why I didn't, so I'd try. Bret Easton Ellis. Mark Leyner. I liked more the older stuff – Vonnegut, Stoppard. Not a lot of women on the list in either direction. Anyway. I read "White Noise" and that was, as I remember now, the beginning of my quitting that kind of writing, the spectacular warp of a sentence that served no purpose other than to marvel at its own warp. There's a scene when two men are circling each other and talking about Elvis and Hitler and it is very quotable, and also very meaningful because it's a commentary on the blurring of pop culture and human history or something equally important and I just felt tired. 

One July day in 1993 I was driving to a job, this was when I was working in the Bay Area and going around to elementary schools giving speeches about multicultural education which seemed very meaningful but were really just the foot in the door for the sales company I worked for. That is, I was doing a good thing, maybe a very good thing, but for a fairly weak or even bad reason. On the way to work I drove through Richmond, the town next to mine, where there was a train yard and there was an explosion, and I drove through a cloud of toxic smoke. I went and gave my presentation with tears streaming down my face, and then I went out to the parking lot of the school and threw up, and then I drove home, and they'd closed the freeway so I took surface streets because I didn't somehow grasp the situation. I drove through a cloud of poisonous gas that was engulfing the place where I live. Twenty-four thousand people were affected, there were lawsuits, but I didn't think that way; I thought: this is very unpleasant. By the time I got home I'd caught up with things on the news and I understood that it was more than just a cloud but I didn't know what I could do. I didn't have health insurance so it didn't seem like I could go to the hospital. I took a cool shower and went to bed and I guess I was okay, because I don't remember much else other than a sense of vague embarrassment for having thrown up in the parking lot. 

And then later when I was talking to John I called it an "airborne toxic event", which is what it's called in the book when a train crash releases toxins into the air, and we laughed because it was in a book and then it was real and I thought about re-reading the book to learn more about the future but I didn't because it didn't feel like a wry commentary on the possible state of things or whatever, it felt too close to home. And of course now we know, if we didn't know then, that such things happen and happen again, past present and future.

Noah Baumbach directed a film version of "White Noise" and I have to tell you the internal dialogue on whether to watch it was exhausting even for me. I have complicated feelings about Noah Baumbach because I think he's clever in the same self-congratulatory way that yes yes it's wonderful but I'm tired of it. On the other hand, Greta Gerwig is with him and she seems like someone who wouldn't be with a bore. On the other hand, he seems to have left Jennifer Jason Leigh for her and I like Jennifer Jason Leigh. I can't ignore the whole "younger woman" thing either which I'm sure is a very unique and special circumstance for each person but you do see it piling up behind all the dudes who are sooner or later problematic. And I didn't love "Marriage Story". And I don't really like Adam Driver, I understand that you might but I don't; don't take it personally. But I like Greta Gerwig. And Andre Benjamin bonus (though he isn't in it very much, it turns out). Plus Danny Elfman on the soundtrack. 

Friends, I fell asleep four times and had to wake up and go back and try again. I can see how well done it was etc and there were certainly parts I enjoyed very much and I even forgive them for leaving out the barn, which was one of the parts in the book I liked. My takeaway is that I do really like listening about death and dying but to a much lesser extent listening about fear of death and dying, and basically this was two hours of that fear, even more that than the "we're wasting our lives looking at things instead of living" that I got from the book. I'd recommend it for insomnia. That's about that. 

for Patricia, who asked:

Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain , particularly "Taran Wanderer". Alexander is hands-down my favorite writer for children/young adults, amazing with the fantasy genre and so beautiful at the sentence level as well, and Taran's search for himself as reflected in his friends and embodied in the work he learns to do is perfection.

Margaret Atwood "Cat's Eye" because it's a perfectly constructed novel and because its description of friendship, among women in particular, still hits me between the eyes. 

Jane Austen's "Emma" because it made me go back and re-examine that whole period and wonder if it wasn't a lot smarter and funnier than I'd thought (it was!). It was my introduction to sophisticated irony, maybe.

Nicholson Baker's "The Mezzanine" because it does what I wanted "Ulysses" to do; it takes the reader inside a moment and makes the nuances of that moment visible through his eyes; and it made me see the value in examining my own moments more carefully.

Kazuo Ishiguru's "Remains of the Day" … I went through a long period of fascination with characters who knew their hearts but couldn't speak them (Prufrock, too; actually it's an undercurrent with a lot of poets I like, including Parker and Bukowski). I feel like I've moved past that but the clarity that Ishiguru brings to that fear and the resulting anguish is still beautiful. 

Judith Martin's "Miss Manners Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior" because it's one of the funniest and smartest books I've ever read. 

Josef Skvorecky's "The Engineer of Human Souls" was a huge factor in deciding to live here, and the translation really influenced how I feel about what translation can and should do, so it's affected me professionally as well as just generally being a great book. 

Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" because time travel and regret and memory and everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. 

David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing…" because "Infinite Jest" is a masterpiece, fictionwise, and I admire it intellectually, but his essays are where he shows his heart and where he took mine. 

Jeanette Winterson's "Written on the Body" because I love a gimmick novel and because it's just so poetic. And the questions of when to let love go for the sake of the beloved and when to fight for it for yourself are still interesting to me.  

That a young and gifted person should be in too much pain to be asked to stay alive in the world and give it more in no way diminishes the gifts already given, what they meant, what I learned. I know that. But I still spent most of last night and this godawfully early morning picking at a wound that isn't mine in the first place, reading bits over and over, laughing again at an insight and weeping over flashes of merriment that are forever gone.

I should have rented movies this morning and permitted myself a day of escapism. Instead I thought I would work past it, as the salt of sweat is the best salt for such wounds, and wound up punching aimlessly at work that while meaningful will never mean that much, failing and flailing and finding myself at 3 p.m. eating grilled cheese with the salt of tears and a side of punch-my-face for letting the day go the way it did, wasted because I did neither what my head intended nor what my heart wanted.

I am sorry for his family; sorry for us: for the words that won't be said, for the places we might never go because he can't take us.

dammit.

Dear E.L. Konigsburg,

With all due respect to you for bringing Claudia Kincaid into the
world, you need to either get a better editor or stop writing.

"The
View from Saturday" had a few sloppy mistakes in it. I was mainly angry
at the Newbery people for choosing the book, because it meant it would
be read more than it deserves to be read. The Magical
Indian thing was ridiculous; the "she knew that she knew but she didn't
know how she knew but he knew that she knew before she knew that she
knew" stuff was just… you know, if you can't figure out what a
character's motivation is, that doesn't mean you should coat it in
twinkling magic in order to get the reader to swallow it. I thought it
was sloppy plotting, and I thought it was beneath you. And then on top
of that, sloppy writing: "[she] was not sure how much the correct
amount [of French cuff to show from beneath jacket sleeves] was, but
she knew that if she put a spirit-level to his, they would be exactly
right." A…spirit level (hint: not hyphenated)? To measure length?
Ch-wha? And then, as a nit-picking pointy brain, it really irritated me
that a piece of the story hinges on a student standing up to the adults
for what he knows to be right, and the book implies that he is right,
only… he's not. This sort of took the wind out of the book's sails
for me.

But I had no idea what it was to fall out of love with a beloved
author from my childhood until I read "The Mysterious Edge of the
Heroic World" because… wow. And not a good "wow". First, the
characters have no clear voices (one of the redeeming features of "The
View from Saturday"). They have no clear voices because they have no
clear characters, and I don't mean they're complicated, but that
they're self-contradictory. Second, we've got the sleeping fact-checker
again at the helm for the Degenerate Art facts. The book implies that
the degenerate art that is in the exhibition is also the art that was
in the exhibition in 1937, but Renoir was not in the Degenerate Art
exhibition; neither was Braque, Picasso, or van Gogh. And… All the
Impressionists had a disease of the visual cortex? Ch-wha-? See, and
these are just things I KNOW are wrong. But worse, worse, is this Noble
Goal to call attention to the homosexuals killed during the Holocaust.
It's not a bad story, but it's better if it's told right: there is no
way that Pieter came home wearing a pink triangle. Things like this are
almost worse than not telling the story at all. If you want to slip a
little fact into your fiction to spice it up, it is possible to find
actual facts that will do that without leading people to misunderstand
history any more than they are already inclined to do. As it is, you're
doing the writerly equivalent of chewing scenery on your way to another
children's book award show, and I loved you, I did, but you have to
stop this. Sloppy writing makes the world an uglier place than it needs
to be.

Please get a better editor. No, really. You owe it to the children. You owe it to yourself.

****
In other books, David Sedaris sure loves himself some David Sedaris; Polish surrealism is troubling and excellent the second time around; and Alain de Botton writes well but keeping up with the Joneses is the least of my interests and I think he's lost me here. Squire and I are plugging along through Huck Finn and loving it a lot, though it makes us talk funny.

I finished The Line of Beauty finally. Around the middle, I
started thinking: Are we ever going somewhere with this? and sort of
sped through the second half of the book. I decided that we were not,
in fact, really ever going anywhere, Alan and I, but that I would give
his sentences the attention they deserved, so I went back to the middle
and started again and finished.

It was… good. I guess. I was reminded of the Penn Jillette
rule of clapping for the title of a movie when it appears in the movie,
and clapped dutifully every time Hollinghurst name-checked his own
novel, and ovated whenever he wanted to explain the title. It happened a lot. It’s true that it may have seemed worse to me for having Evelyn Wood-ed
and then seriously re-read the second half, but I think this really was
laid on thick and recurrent. Including, of course The Amazing Parallels
(or perhaps, the Amazing Serpentine Curves, bwaha) between the title of
the book, the plot, and the presentation of the plot. It was a little
anvillicious for me, as was the whole "Wow, and so the character named
Nick Guest turns out to be a permanent guest! Who knew?!" Uhm… the
guy who wrote the book? I know, I should have been prepared after Edward Manners, but… really?

I don’t know, y’all,
maybe I can’t read grown-up fiction anymore. I’m a little too aware of
the author wanting me to go someplace and I feel the pull of the puppet
strings too much and then I’m irritated. I’ve read precious little
contemporary fiction in the last decade where it felt like I was
reading something that was both True and true*, and I think that I now
value the latter, the feeling of the latter, as much as the former. If
you’re going to give me a story set in a world I’ve experienced or
believe is true (Thatcher’s England or whatever, as opposed to, say,
Prydain) I need to have it that things don’t always line up, the murder
isn’t always solved, the object of affection is not always attained;
and the misalignment and unsolved murder and unrequited love don’t make
everything worse–any more than coincidence leads to enlightenment or
solving the murder makes it less gruesome or falling in love means your
troubles are over. I like a revelation on the human condition as much
as the next person, but if it’s too contrived it feels like less a
moment of clarity and more like smoke and mirrors.

*off the top of my head: The Crow Road, Remains of the Day, Cat’s
Eye, and Middlesex all did a great job of making me feel like I was in
a real place and that the people were real without overdoing the
reality and while simultaneously getting to a point.

So Hollinghurst: dude, I don’t know. The sentences were nice,
sometimes even activating that little tingly part of my brain, which is
certainly a thrill. And the way he wrote dialogue, which at first made
me nutty, eventually sort of got entertaining, which may have been the
point in the beginning and I was too slow to catch it. He’s all "Really?" said Nick, meaning to convey his confusion at the
statement and also a sense of disbelief in Rachel’s apparent
unawareness, if she was, in fact, unaware. "Hmm," answered Rachel, and
Nick understood that she was keeping herself unaware, willfully holding
herself in check against the onslaught of inevitable, horrible reality.

So, I liked the sentences. I thought the backthought was
clever. I liked the snooty arty stuff, assuming he meant it to be both
informed, informative, and a bit pedantic. But the insights were…
Hey, did you know that coming of age was tricksy? Did you know that
when you move outside of the social circle you were born in, there can
be misunderstandings? Did you know that no matter how comfortable you
are with your identity, other people may not be? Put against a backdrop
of "hey, conservative politics were bad for lots of people; also, AIDS
sucks" and the message I get is that Hollinghurst thinks his readers
are a bit on the dumb side, and then the pedantic charm becomes a bit
less charming.  Maybe I should have just seen the movie.

NOTE TO G: I did like reading it, for clarity. I think I just miss our book group.

We watched Star Trek: Nemesis over the weekend. Squire told Friar that
it was about "how we define our humanity under different circumstances"
and I thought: well, yeah. And this is, I think, one of the appeals of
fantasy. It’s not just looking at a different world: it’s also that
it’s interesting to look at what’s true about ourselves against a
variety of backgrounds.

The Chronicles of Prydain are my favorite fantasy books. They
may be my favorite children’s books, hands down (although Bridge to
Terabithia now looks at me with its lovely painful face and I am not
sure, but…. ) Okay, definitely my favorite series. I’ve re-read them
every year since fifth grade, which is a lot of times to read the same
books. I learned about writing from those books; I learned about the
subtle beauty of "not without regret". And I learned about the
difficult choices, and about both sides of trust, and about saying what
you’re afraid to say because not saying it is worse.

The only thing I didn’t like about those books was the ending.
It seemed unbearably unfair to my childish hedonist heart that the
choice would come down to happy oblivion or emotionally wrenching
reality. Later I concluded that the happy oblivion was a metaphor for
death (see also: C.S. Lewis; Tolkein), and I was irritated that this
was presented as happiness. I mean: really irritated. Because in fact I
think the choice is: emotionally wrenching and rewarding reality or…
nothing. Do you want to go through life standing in the dank armpit of
the tram and watching the light catch the snowflakes as they fall and
listening to your child laughing or do you want… nothing?

And I felt like Alexander skipped the real choice, which is
interesting, in exchange for a fantasy set up: You get the kingdom of
happy ever after or you get the kingdom of right here right now. The
first one is unreal, is blissful oblivion, is heaven, is death. And the
second one is…hard. According to Alexander, a hero chooses the
second; death comes to a hero only incidentally, only later. I’m not
crazy about that, but at least I get it. Certainly I prefer it to the
choice of deciding whether you believe you
can go further up and further in whilst in a room too small to swing a
dwarf, because it seems like a fairer choice. Though I don’t like the
choice as it is presented, at least it is a choice, and the point is
clear: If we are heroes, we choose what is right, and what is right is
difficult. It’s like Fantasy Novels for a Young Poet or something.

Second favorite fantasy series: The Dark Is Rising. It’s a
child swept into a parallel world; it’s time travel; it’s Arthurian
legend; it’s beautiful You Are There writing (first time I saw the
Thames, I was like: yeah); it’s trust and honor and all the things I
want a book to do. It’s also Destiny, which I have problems with. You
should have seen me try to have a reasonable discussion of "Sinners in the Hands of
an Angry God" because it induced the same sputtery anger that hits me any
time I see destiny, no matter how pretty the packaging: That’s not
fair.

I don’t mean fair like "she gets more candy than I do"
because while that is not fair, it is certainly true. Some animals are
more equal than others: some people will get more advantages than they
deserve and they will get away with murder and they will be rewarded
rather than punished. This is true, and I don’t expect fantasy books,
no matter how fantastic, to present me with something truer than
reality can muster: I do not expect the fairness of equality. But the
unfairness that I cannot handle is the unfairness conveyed by Destiny,
by Fate.

So I was pretty excited to read Philip Pullman‘s books,
because I thought he would have no truck with Because God Said So,
whether we called it God or The Oracle or The Light or Dumbledore. I
thought: Yay! A new children’s series with free will! Characters doing
what they think is right without regard for messages from higher
beings. Characters stumbling in their steampunk darkness, so like our
own; characters making their own choices. And then on top of that,
Pullman can write his way around a sentence and through a book like nobody’s business. I even thought in my naivety that perhaps the characters would not get the kingdom of hard work vs. kingdom of happy oblivion choice at the end, and wouldn’t that be nice!

HAHAHA. I should have known already in the Golden Compass,
when the alethiometer gave me pause, but Lyra seemed so self-determined
and Will even more so: "I may be inclined to be this sort of person but
it doesn’t mean I have to choose it." And so we bopped on through three
books of me thinking my lofty thoughts about fairness and free will and real choices. Boy, was I pretty pissed when I finished Amber Spyglass. Philip Pullman
so didn’t "kill god". He pulled deux ex machina like a rabbit out of a
hat. Fate? We pretend it doesn’t exist only because it’s too depressing
to contend with. Destiny is reality, and the only reason the human
characters won’t be told their destinies is so that they continue
existing under the apparently illusory free will they hold so dear
(even though they don’t have it really have it, since Destiny trumps
Free Will). And so to be heroic is to acknowledge the existence and
even inevitability of your fate without even asking what it is. This
is… not free will. Oh, and yeah, and the final choice (which isn’t a choice)? You have to give up what you want
most because an angel said so. OH, ferfle.

We’re totally going to see the movie still, but I am disappointed. I’m getting my Alexander books encased in gold, I guess. And
I will continue living in the Star Trek world with Squire Tuck, unless
somebody can recommend some fantasy books where the world is fantasy
and the moral approaches something I can live with, something at least
as true as reality.

SORRY THAT WAS SO LONG.