To China...

Ready or not, here I go... Here's a list of books I am taking:

1-"Play it As It Lays" -- Joan Didion
2-"On Duty" -- Cicero
3-"The Emperor's Children" -- Claire Messud
4-"Great Expectations"--Charles Dickens
5-"An Assortment of Moleskine Cahiers"

I will be back on the 27th with new stories to tell and a (hopefully) ton of pictures to share.

Paris to the Moon... rocket just crashed.

I finished "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and started Adam Gopnik's "Paris to the Moon." To be sure, I might have not given this book a fair chance, but 37 pages through it I had to stop before I choked on the extreme usage of French and the seemingly endless comparisons between American ways and the all-powerful, all-superior French. The reason I stopped reading this is because Gopnik states early in the book that his family is no Francophile... really, it is a statement that dooms the entire narrative. I might be ready to read this book some other time; right now, however, is not the time.

Didion's fantastic collection of essays ended with passages that were so well-written perhaps that's the reason why I couldn't get into Gopnik's glorification of the French. Here's a passage from Didion that is rapidly climbing to the top of my favorite passages: "That was the year, my twenty-eight, when I was discovering that not all promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it." And then... "From my office I could look across town to the weather signal on the Mutual of New York Building and the lights that alternately spelled out TIME and LIFE above Rockefeller Plaza; that pleased me obscurely, and so did walking uptown in the mauve eight o'clock of early summer evenings and looking at things, Lowestoft tureens in Fifty-seventh Street windows, people in evening clothes trying to get taxis, the trees just coming into full leaf, the lambent air, all the sweet promises of money and summer." Maybe this is the reason why I can't read about Paris... after reading such wonderful descriptions of New York. This last passage reminds me of one by F. Scott Fitzgerald that reads like a description of manic-depression: "And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between the very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and I knew I would never be so happy again."

So, I am putting Gopnik's book aside, until I feel better prepared to face the "Paris-is-the-new-Jerusalem" prose he presents.

Phrase and Style in Joan Didion's Writing

One of the most interesting things in reading "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is really not the majority of the dated subjects and content she is dealing with here. I guess it is true what they day about the sixties... "if you can remember the 60s, you weren't there." I wasn't there... at least not consciously. I was born in 1967; a latest arrival to a couple whose best days were almost behind them (my sisters are all baby-boomers). I suppose I am not quite Generation X but not old enough to be a baby-boomer. At any rate, Didion has made me remember the sixties in a way that offers a magnificent style and phraseology (pick up "The Year of Magical Thinking" and see what I mean). She discovers a country not "in open revolution" or "under enemy siege," but rather a U.S. doting one of the strongest economic rides in recent history. The latter part of the collection are essays dealing with personal views about writing and living in California. I love the essay "Why I Keep a Notebook." She details her account of how she came to realize she was a writer and could do nothing else with her life. She states: "Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrengers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss." I believe that is the same reason I write in my notebooks, on and off, for whatever reason that doesn't fit my interpretation of how I want things to evolve. Failed relationships? Sure, quite a few... and being able to re-write them in some way helps not only the healing process, but also the dark and endless days of grief. Perhaps it all turns into a short story and one gives it the ending one really had in mind from the very beginning. In that way I do claim myself as a malcontent, anxious, as Didion says, and worst off than most. The Moleskines are public and they speak for themselves.

Eugene and Ilse left Monday at noon. Since then I have kept a strict schedule of running, working for the new semester and sleeping. I have been reading for an hour or so, hence the lack of posting. I was up until very late last night converting documents into pdf files for my students. I just finished posting it on my courses website. It's sort of funny that for more work I do, it seems that there is three or four times more work to be done before the semester begins. What to read next? I am looking at my list for this year and thinking I might just change a few titles around. Malcontent as I am :-) I am already planning my reading list for 2008 to include only "classics" I have not read and a few I would like to re-read. For example, I went to Barnes & Noble the other day and bought 4 classics for $10, among them "Great Expectations" and "Madame Bovary." I'll be reading only classics of the Western canon next year.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem -- Joan Didion

This collection of essays marks the crowning of Didion as the master of the American essay. I particularly liked the essay on John Wayne; it brought a plethora of black and white Western memories and the excitement of old time war movies. These essays--although dated--depict an era of history in the United States that could be interpreted in a million different ways. Didion's essays make it sound like the conventional wisdom about the 1960s generally holds: that everyone was out there living it up and being a hippie. But, I wonder, how did Nixon get elected in '68? He said it best when accepting the Republican nomination for president he referred to the "silent majority." I really think that was the case in the 1960s. Sure the hippies and the social activists were more visible, always on television, etc. But the truth was the the "silent majority" still ran the country.... the 9 to 5 worker, the housewives, the young men who volunteered for service in Vietnam (only a small percentage of those drafted actually served any combat time in Vietnam--the majority were volunteers).

Didion gets it all right. I think she does because essentially it did happen that way, whether to a certain degree or another that's beside the point. She is illustrative and precise in her depiction of the Haight-Ashbury scene in San Francisco. I love her reference to the Yeats poem, particularly the lines "the center cannot hold" and "The falcon cannot hear the falconer."

So, I am half way through this book which I began yesterday, including the fact that I am taking notes and also the fact that I am taking my friends from Holland for drives around the city. So I promise to do better this week. By the way, today is the FIRST YEAR ANNIVERSARY of this blog, and also my wedding anniversary! What a day!

Joan Didion's Lost Message

I don’t have Internet access in the English Department office yet, so I am writing this on Word and cut and pasting it into Blogger. I finished reading Dirda a while back and in between re-read one of our summer reading books, “Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes.” It is the story of a young woman who is burnt as a child and now suffers more than just disfigurement from her physical scars. She teams up with “Moby” or Eric Calhoune as her best friend. Eric is called “Moby” because he is excessively over-weighed but participates in the swimming team; so the nickname Moby comes from “Moby-Dick.” Sarah is hiding the secret that it was her demented father who put her face straight into a kitchen range. The excuse of her dropping a pot of boiling spaghetti on herself is the only thing she has to explain what happened when she was 3 years old. Eric and Sarah publish an underground paper in their high school; the paper’s name, “Crispy Pork Rinds,” alludes to the fact that Sarah is burnt and disfigured and that Eric is a pig. Along the way there are sufficient characters to make the plot very exciting, but the “young adult” label on this book takes away a great deal from it. For example, there are no redeeming qualities to any of the adults in the story, even the teacher that helps out and Eric’s mom or her live-in boyfriend. The end of the novel is quite predictable (assuming the reader can be attentive to the foreshadowing in the plot).

I started reading Joan Didion’s “The Last Thing He Wanted,” and I am totally lost. The third person omnipresent narrator goes back and forth—past, present, not quite present, not quite past forms are part of the course in this plot that is leading nowhere. There are so many changes in the narrative point of view that it is enough to dizzy the best of readers. The characters are, so far, atrocious. This is definitely Didion’s worst effort as a writer (at least in my opinion, and the opinion of those reviewing at Amazon). Of course I will finish reading it, but not before I start reading something else as this would be my third attempt at reading more than one book at a time. I haven’t decided what to read next, since I am still giving Didion a chance on this one as it is quite too early to tell. We’ll see. I am seeing the pile of books for this year starting to go down—that’s quite satisfying

Reading Right and Meaningfully...

I finished "The Year of Magical Thinking" in less than a day. It is not the fact that I read fast (although I suppose I did), but the real and tangible experience it was to absorb every word, to take in all of its messages and enjoy one of the most productive reads I have had all year. Joan Didion is a great writer. Her emotions translate on the page as if they were happening to us in real life. She confronts the loss of her husband with courage and determination and could be seen as heroic in her efforts to restore normalcy to her life. The book is not depressing, although it deals primarily with the consequences of death to those who remain living. This is one of my top recommendations for this year. Excellent book.

What strikes me odd was the way I came across "The Year of Magical Thinking." I bought a couple of books at Amazon last year while we were still living in the apartment. Over the course of the year, I have gone back to Amazon to check reviews or information related to several books I have purchased elsewhere. The algorithms that select "recommendations based on what you have purchased or on the basis of what other people who purchased the same book have also purchased" seems to me sort of horrific. Nevertheless, one day, up comes "The Year of Magical Thinking" and I took it up to read it because the subject matter attracted me. I didn't get the book at Amazon. I went to "Half-Priced Books" and after a couple of fruitless searches, I found it on the fiction section under "Dickens." I didn't read it right away, and I am glad that I waited. The fact that at first seating I read over 100 pages is a testimony (from a slow reader like myself) that the books is an engaging piece of genius.

The next selection on my reading list is "The Myth of the Sisyphus" by Albert Camus. Now, now... it's not that I am in a binge of depressing books--far from it. I am reading these in preparation to a larger topic in both my fiction and non-fiction reading: that of the meaningful life and how to live it. The center piece of Camus' book is the question of whether or not life has to has meaning in order to live it. Moreover, if life does not seem to have significance or meaning, is it worth living or would it be much better to commit suicide? These are difficult questions, of course, but from what I have read from Camus before I know he will deal the subject with intense passion and scrutiny. What else could we ask for?

Sebastian Knight and The Year of Magical Thinking

I finished "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight." Between yesterday and today I read over 180 pages or over 2/3 of the book. The story continues from where I left off: the narrator seeks to put together the last year of his brother's life in order to compose a biography. He finds out very little but in the course of the search he is confronted by the fact that his brother might have had an affair during one short summer stay at a hotel in France. The narrator seeks for this woman to be able to better comprehend his brother's last year. The novel is well-constructed, with animated and very alive characters (even the minor ones). The language is all Nabokov, pure genius.

Why am I reading so fast? I finished Sebastian Knight this morning (I had two chapters to go) and immediately started Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking." Today was all-school testing so all I had to do was sit there administering the tests. I read voraciously all morning while the students slaved over the test. I assume it was about two and a half hours but I am presently on page 101. Why did it go so fast? I have never been a fast reader, but I think only when I am completely lost in a book can I achieve so much in a single seating. Didion's book is a non-fiction account about how, while her daughter is in the hospital seriously ill, her husband faints during dinner and dies of a massive heart attack. Didion captures well the events, surprisingly so for someone to catch so much detail in such a terrible event. She details her relationship with her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, over the forty years of marriage and collaborating together. It is needless to say a very painful book, but one filled with fine passages and intense emotion. I found an awkward sentence: "It was just an ordinary beautiful September day," people still say when asked to describe the morning in New York when American Airlines 11 and United Airlines 175 got flown into the World Trade Center. I don't know but it seems strange to me... "got flown"... of course it is indeed what happened.

About her writing process, she writes:

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.

This is comparable to what Nabokov's narrator states about the writing process, no? I love it when writers impregnate their work with their working habits and techniques. I don't know how long it is going to take me to finish this book but I might take a break tonight (although I know I can't). This is how I love to read... forgetting everything in the daily ordinariness of my life and immersing myself into someone else's world. Escapism?... touche!