Counterbalance

Reader-Writer Moment #473

In the fraught-with-fear space between Vida's last novel and the moments when I will take up Mitchell's latest, I've been reading Sloane Crosley's latest. I'm also freshly back from a trip to New York. A trip that required me to regale my traveling companions (longtime NYC dwellers among them) with tales of crazy taxi life & death situations. Why? Because this last trip involved even crazier taxi life & death situations that required the telling of previous ones to provide some sort of context, a barometer for the new level of craziness just-experienced. 

When I say "life & death" I'm not being novelistically dramatic. I've been in cabs that hit cyclists. I've witnessed drivers in head-on collisions. I've been called many things en route to Manhattan from JFK. I've been shouted at, asked to get out, begged to be let out and many variants in between. On this recent trip, I had the once in a lifetime (hopefully) fun of being in a taxi that was playing a rousing group game with another cab of let's cut each other off all the way down 9th Ave. no matter how many times my passenger's faces almost hit the front of the in-cab television or how many cars we sideswipe along the way. It was very bad. So bad we begged to be let out and weren't. For many swervy blocks.There were also smells. So. Many.

I'm a fan of humor in writing & Crosley's How Did You Get This Number does not disappoint. Her humor, my current in-between Vida/Mitchell state, and my recent return from NYC made Crosley's diatribe on taxi fun a delicious reader-writer moment:

"But there is no escaping the concoction of armpit and cheese rot currently molesting your face. Your mind does a quick calculation, multiplying the degree of stank by the distance between here and your destination, dividing the whole thing by your fear of overreacting. The idea that you might offend the driver is irrelevant. If he's going to tool around this town in an air bubble of poop, he should know there are consequences."

 

"The moment you shut the cab door, you can be who you want to be. If you are normally loath to make demands, you are now free to raise definitive questions: Why this route? Can you avoid Times Square? Can you please identify this sticky substance? How in the name of all that is holy can you not smell that? If you are a gregarious sort of person, you can finally have ten minutes of absolute silence in the presence of another human being without anyone asking you what's wrong. If you spend your day making decisions, you can stop, releasing yourself with those magic words: Whichever way's the fastest. Repeat it again when your driver attempts to brainstorm with you. He could tell you that the West Side Highway is closed and he'll need to swing around the moon first. Really. Whichever way."

There's more goodness in Crosley's latest collection of essays, including the complete taxi riff. I'll be finishing it up over the next few days before I take on the looming-large Mitchell novel.

Reader-Writer Moment #469

So I'm reading Bolano's 2666 (#2666 for those following on Twitter) and I'm having all the thoughts I usually have when I'm only half an inch in to a three-inch book: can I do this? Do I want to?  Can Bolano keep me interested for this many pages? Am I willing to go along for the ride and let all the other books (beckoning me, calling, whining) wait until I finish this journey?

I'm still wavering.

Because here's what I often hate in big novels: the introduction of completely new characters and completely new lives in each new section.  I understand this may be vital for a big sprawling epic, but it wears on my reader-patience sometimes.  Just as I'm into all the professors in section one, just as I'm rooting for them or hating them in equal parts, I have to drop them altogether and meet someone new.  I hate meeting someone new in these situations.  It's work.  So the question, re-phrased, comes down to this: am I willing to put in the work this book requires?

Again, jury out.

I'll admit that I enjoyed The Part About the Critics.  I will also admit, shamefully, that I skimmed much of The Part About Amalfitano. This may come back to bite me.  There may have been critical facts, linkages, parallels drawn that I have now missed.  I'll take my chances.  

Lucky for Bolano (or, really, me I suspect), just as I was gearing up for Part Three - The Part About Fate (and just as I was rebelling against the thought of meeting yet another new character), I had the always-excellent moment in reading when you feel either that the writer has understood you completely or that you are at least getting some insight into them that you previously did not possess.

Here is the passage that triggered this reader-writer moment:

"One night, while the kid was scanning the shelves, Amalfitano asked him what books he liked and what book he was reading, just to make conversation. Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartelby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who in another life might have been Trakl or who in this life might still be writing poems as desperate as those of his distant Austrian counterpart, and who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartelby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench."

I can't help but think that this is Bolano's grand caveat, his way of throwing down the gauntlet for his reader: this is my big, sprawling, messy work that is unlike the perfection of my other, smaller, less ambitious works. It will be messy and it will be bloody and, dear reader, it will be work. Are you up to it?  Because only the strongest among you can handle it.  The rest of you can f-off and continue to celebrate my other books.

At least, that's how I see it, 239 pages into 2666. Can't decide if I love the 'tude or hate it...but I'm pressing on.  Read into that what you will.

Reader-Writer Moment #442

It is rare for me to be only pages - mere pages - into a book and scold myself for having missed out on such greatness for so long.  How could I have missed Theroux's travel writing entirely? It would be one thing if I didn't obsess about books daily...but to be so focused on writing and reading and to have missed this entire oeuvre of Theroux is just...maddening.  More worrisome: have others? The good news: I've discovered he writes more than novels, and boy does he ever. It is early going, but I suspect his work will lead me on a fascinating journey.  In addition to the work itself, I've already had a few of those extra-lovely moments where connections to other writers/folks of interest are made - writers that have either been on my list for a long time or those who've only recently come to my attention but now seem to appear in everything I read (which I always interpret as a message from the book universe that I must follow the tail as it darts in and out of whatever I'm reading and see where it takes me).

The first hook-line-sinker passage for me:

"Out of touch in Africa was where I wanted to be. The wish to disappear sends many travelers away. If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect: let other people wait for a change. Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party's extension, being kept waiting all your working life - the homebound writer's irritants. Being kept waiting is the human condition.

I thought, Let other people explain where I am. I imagined the dialogue:

    'When will Paul be back?'

    'We don't know.'

    'Where is he?'

    'We're not sure.'

    'Can we get in touch with him?'

    'No.'

Travel in the African bush can also be a sort of revenge on cellular phones and fax machines, on telephones and the daily paper, on the creepier aspects of globalization that allow anyone who chooses to get his insinuating hands on you. I desired to be unobtainable. Kurtz, sick as he is, attempts to escape from Marlow's riverboat, crawling on all fours like an animal, trying to flee into the jungle. I understood that.

I was going to Africa for the best reason - in a spirit of discovery; and for the prettiest - simply to disappear, to light out, with a suggestion of I dare you to try and find me."
 

                                       --Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari

Reader-Writer Moments #432 & #433

"I see a lot of people, especially younger people, they involve themselves---they have an opportunity to open a restaurant---they involve themselves heart and soul, and that's good, but to the point where they may get burned out. My viewpoint is, there are other parts to life that are very important, and it's by maintaining that balance that I can always find this to be exciting and always get pleasure out of being involved in cooking. If this is the only thing I do and I do it eighteen hours a day, it becomes drudgery and something I may not look forward to. A friend of mine felt that way: he hated to go back into the bakeshop, into the kitchen, and that's terrible if it comes to that, because then he doesn't do a good job. You're not happy, you're miserable, you don't look forward to it."

"You know an artist is represented by his or her paintings or drawings or sculpture, the quality of it...I think we project our values by the food we have on the plate, not necessarily in an artistic sense, but in the sense of flavors we offer. I always feel that when I put food on the plate for my family---anybody---I'm saying 'I feel good about this. This is what I believe is good food. If it's not good food, I wouldn't put it there. This is what I like, this is my standard, this is what I believe is good food and I hope you enjoy it.' I think you make a value statement every time."

        -Ferdinand Metz, speaking to Michael Ruhlman in The Making of a Chef

Reader-Writer Moment #428

I haven't had a moment of "oh yes, this is spot on" in a long time and while I've been enjoying Seth Greenland's Shining City, it wasn't until the revelatory end that I arrived at this pasage:

"It must be glorious to exist in the eternal present, Marcus thought, as he watched the littled dog dig a hole. He wished he had faith. He envied those who did, and the blissful afterlife they were promised. In the meantime, this was the dirty world in which he found himself, the moist field on which he played; this realm of animal and mineral, salt, iron, water, dust, light, desire, and darkness. He'd seen it up close, tasted it, felt it in his pores. It was the essence, bountiful and life-giving, and human beings wanted to touch it, wanted to live, to stretch their spines, arch their backs, and, arms spread, face the sun, fingertips reaching upward toward the eternal sky. But they needed to go to school, to work, to make money, to raise families, to bury the dead. He understood. He knew."

I suspect that many are feeling this unique brand of desire mixed with harsh reality at the moment. The beauty of this passage, though, is that it resonates in any time, any place. It strikes me as a dreamy example of damn good writing.

Reader-Writer Moment #412 - #414

"She didn't have what one would call a 'profession,' but I didn't know why she particularly wanted one; it seemed like she'd been infected by a very American idea of identity, to think that who you were mostly consisted of what you did to get paid--that seemed silly to me. If I looked like Rema, if I had her ways, and if I weren't a man, I'd consider it profession enough to have streaky bleached hair, to wear a green scarf, to spill spicy teas, to walk (slightly) unevenly on high heels. What more is there to give the world than that?"

                                           

"We need to develop a better descriptive vocabulary for lying, a taxonomy, a way to distinguish the lies that the liar himself believes in--a way to signal those lies that could more accurately be understood as dreams. Lies--they make for a tidy little psychological Doppler effect, tell us more about a liar than an undistorted self-report ever could."

                                          

"I had removed myself--parts of myself--from the conversation; a few cells were listening to Magda but whole factions of me had been devoted for some time to the question of whether enough time had passed to enable me to graciously reach for one of the oddly tall chocolate-covered cookies."

             from Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen

Reader-Writer Moment #399

"It seeps into you, excess, through the pores of your skin like sweat going the wrong way, until you're so bloated you've got only two choices: pop, or float like that until you die; most of us choose to float."

                                       Ceridwen Dovey, Blood Kin

Reader-Writer Moment #366

"The thing is not to write what no one else could have written, but to write what only you could have written. I recently found this fragment in one of my old notebooks. The person who wrote that couldn't have known what would happen: how time can hold itself against you, how a voice hollows, how words you once loved can wither on a page."

                                    -from The Boat by Nam Le

When Writer's Writers' Dream of Imaginary Phenoms

Stephen Dixon's protagonist Meyer, in the middle of a writing funk, thinks he's hit upon an idea for a story:

A boy. Something about a boy. And a bookstore. Got it, he thinks, and starts typing: "A boy in a huge bookstore was signing copies of a book of short-shorts and prose poems he'd written. He looked to be around twelve or thirteen. He was sitting behind a table stacked with copies of his book and more were in opened cartons on the floor. There were fifty or so people, all of them adults, waiting on line with copies of his book. Al, who'd had a few stories and poems in literary magazines the last twenty years but never a book published, walked up to the table and took a book. 'If you want that signed,' someone said, 'you have to get to the end of the line.' 'I just want to look at it; I don't want to buy it,' Al said. It was published by a major publisher. The jacket copy began with 'A youthful masterpiece, unlike anything ever written.' There were blurbs in back by well-known serious writers. One called the kid 'The real thing, besides being a literary phenom. The future of American literature is assured.'" Enough, he thinks, this is going nowhere, and he takes the two sheets out of the typewriter, tears them up with the poem he tried writing before, drops the pieces into the trashbasket under the table, and re-covers the typewriter.

Reader-Writer Moment #302

I finished Colm Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship and I'm flummoxed. The beauty of it crept up on me and didn't finally make itself known until the end. I find that really great novels do exactly that -- they are less "hey look at me" while you are reading them (you know how that goes, every sentence is so good that you slow down because you don't want it to end, and you worry that the end won't justify the gorgeousness of the beginning, middle and almost end) and instead seduce with with normalcy, with a world that is so fully formed you don't even notice the author's attempt to create it before you. That is wow. That is oh my goodness.  Were I to meet Mr.Tóibín during the Dublin leg of my trip, I would run up and hug him. And then maybe bow. And then beg off to give him as much free time as possible to write another novel STAT.

Who else does complex human relationships like this? And gets it right (a few moments felt forced, a little I don't know if that's really how they'd behave...but perhaps that is my own failing as a reader)?  Who? Who? I've got to know. Franzen in Corrections? McGahern in By the Lake? Banville in everything he's ever written?

Powell's has an excerpt (not the strongest beginning...as I said, it builds on you so don't let this one snippet be your guide) and an interview with Tóibín which leads me to wonder aloud - how did I manage not to read his work for the past...um...ten years?  You can bet I'll be picking up Mothers and Sons as soon as I've got a spare minute.

There's such a quiet beauty to this book and I don't want to ruin a thing by sharing a pivotal scene.  I will, instead, share a funny scene (funny to me anyway and I always wonder if it's just me or genuinely funny, I suspect we're about to find out) in which the perfectly-drawn grandmother is telling her guests about her desire to re-obtain a driving license late in life and how her neighbor down the road just managed to make it happen:

"Didn't I tell you what Kitty Walsh from The Ballagh did last year, and she's so blind she can't see in front of her nose, and that's God's truth. Didn't she go into the eye man the day before her appointment, and she just said she was looking at spectacle frames -- her sister Winnie told me this -- and didn't she look closely at the letters when the door was open, you know, the letters you have to read. She wrote them down and went home and learned them off. So by the next day the eye man complimented her on her sight when she could hardly see the colour of the money she was paying him with. And she driving a Mazda mad all over the country now. Get into the ditch if you see her coming. A red Mazda."

Get into the ditch, indeed. I laughed out loud when I read this passage. And upon re-reading, laughed again. Pitch-perfect, I say. Flat out yum.