The Least Yet About Reading

So, as some of you know, I have decided to quit my marginally industry job and go home, mostly so I can drink beer and watch baseball with my brother Connor while we make jokes about books that we have read and only he has understood. This, and a recent State of the State address from The Millions got me wondering about what kind of things people really want from a bookstore. There are people who come into the Borders where I work and stay for hours, and who obviously don't really care about books -- one guy came and read nothing but "How to Win at Texas Hold 'Em" for four hours -- and lots of people who like niche books, what Borders calls "destination locations", which are mainly manga and cookbooks.

I think that what I like to do most at the bookstore -- bookstores where I don't work, I mean -- is to go and read paragraphs from the middle of books that I have heard about but am not familiar with. Especially if they are supposed to be "difficult" -- I have read chunks over and over again from Finnegans Wake-- and wondered whether I could see myself reading such a thing. Usually, I decide not and don't buy anything. Because I require virtually nothing out of a bookstore, really nothing but a few books I find intriguing and difficult to pick at, I don't have a lot to say about the ambience of the bookstore. I prefer it if coffee is around, but I also think that about department stores, supermarkets, taquerias, whatever. I don't especially want any music on, though I can abide it (granted, I hate hate hate any music played at Borders in Braintree between September 2007 and June 2008). But, I am a freaking dork. Of course my ideal bookstore would shake out to be more or less identical to a costly version of the Lockport Public Library. But what about you guys? Let us know, and who knows? Maybe some marginally industry insiders will read the comments (ha!), and take your advice and revitalize the whole business. See visions, dream dreams.

For No Reason: A Plea for Your Thoughts on John Irving

OK, here is a sign of how far afield things get, but whatever. I was reading a particular book and it mentioned an author who was very much beloved, by me, in my ghastly misspent youth. That writer is John Irving, about whom I hadn't thought seriously for years until like three weeks ago when I read two or three pages at my soon to be ex-job while I was standing around doing nothing, from the Pension Grillparzer part of Garp. So anyway, now you see what the topic is, and here I ask:

What do we think of John Irving? The reference to him in that book I am reading now was majorly slighting, if that makes sense; the Times called his most recent book "bloated and lugubrious" but seemed to view this as a too-bad falling off of Garp's creator (Their review of Garp is all about tone and, for the Times, strangely void of a real critical stance). And weirdest, his admiring wikipedia page HAS A CHART LISTING COMMON WEIRDNESSES IN HIS BOOKS, with check marks for what book has what. New England, Prostitutes, Wrestling, Bears, Vienna, Bears, Deadly Accidents, and Sexual Variations (the Variations are, helpfully?, named). Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire are the ones, incidentally, that hit the octfecta. That seems like something that would get done for, say, pulp writers, rather than the sort of guys who get tapped to review the new Gunter Grass memoir.

I hope this doesn't sound hopelessly snobbish or pigeonholeminded, especially since a good chunk of it is based on the discrepancy between what seems to be reported (middlebrowish) and what I remember from eighth grade (cool). I don't think it is; Pierre Bayard says, "we never talk about a book unto itself...[each book and its associated books] serves as a temporary symbol for a complete conception of culture." (Bayard, op.cit, 73) So help me out, if you will: how should this guy fit into our symbol for a complete conception of culture?

Will anyone, will I, ever write here about poor dear Timofey Pnin? Who knows? More on something in the coming days.

The Doings At Other Book Clubs

Never wanting to skip a reason to cross two entire states twice in one day, a week ago or so I bolted for the fantastic city of White Plains, took the much-touted Metro North into the city and attended a discussion on Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, presided over by Gage McWeeny, a professor at Williams. This was part of the Williams Club’s series of discussions about books that have been made into semi-autonomous movies (that is, movie-book duos where both are agreed to be worth it; so like, The Cat in the Hat is out on one end, The Godfather on the other, and The Fountainhead on both).

This whole discussion was great good fun, because it was basically English class minus pressure and plus cocktails. What made it singular, or close to singular, or mentionable here in a context of more interest than pure praise, was that it represented to me a distinct way of talking about a book. Almost the entire discussion was geared around what I would call orientation. Normally the relationship between a reader and his book is one of use, and is assumed: at the most basic level, it is taken to provide amusement, and at higher, murkier levels, it may provide dignity or depth of feeling or whatever. But nobody asked what American Psycho might help us do, at least not at first; rather, we discussed what was the proper way to position ourselves to it.

I spent all day today watching baseball and reading book reviews from the Times, and while they ranged from high praise to sniffy contempt, they all took as their object – the thing under review – to be what the author had set out to do, and how well she had accomplished it. Not so, with American Psycho: what we talked about was how we related to it, whether we were allowed to take certain attitudes toward it or not. The capacity of this book – of any book – to cause real discomfort seemed a peculiar phenomenon. I don’t want to act as though I wasn’t made uncomfortable by American Psycho – it made me uncomfortable to the point that I opted out of lending it to a friend of mine who loved the movie – but I still wonder. For one thing, there are things as disturbing in other books that are not so discomfiting on the whole. Hannibal Lecter, from his cheesy books, is not less clinically creepy than Bateman. The problem maybe the first-person narration, a famously sympathizing gesture (though Ellis doesn’t use it much, and his robotic protagonist, even when he generates positive feeling from his readers, doesn’t quite get sympathy [I am at a loss to describe what quite it is he gets]). And the cinematic novels of Hannibal Lecter and his ilk, as David Foster Wallace said of mainstream films, “set us up so relentlessly to approve the villains’ bloody punishment in the climax that we might as well be wearing togas” (from “David Lynch Keeps His Head”).

Anyway, this seemed peculiar to me at that discussion. Can the merits of books that are utterly morally discomfiting sit at the table with books like Nicholas Nickelby? Can we shelve the moral problems with it and put its aesthetic merits (which are ample) on the same high-praise-to-sniffy-contempt scale that the Times uses? Are there other books that go in this slot where moral orientation is more important than artistic assessment? I have no idea. Post away, thereon, below.

Are You There, God? It's Me, Matthew

And but so. We (I) generated some momentum, but then it petered out in the cold face of a Judy Blume essay. As the hippest of you are apprised, I had planned on writing a piece on a rediscovered chunk of my childhood – the sudden coming-across, at my ridiculous workplace, of Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing and of Fudge-a-Mania, both by Ms. Blume, and my sudden, flooding realization that these books had at one point been deeply important to me. That essay, appropriately, began like this:

“Here is a quote about arriving at the bookstore, an experience that with effort I can still recall fondly, from Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler. He has just described the way in which you taxonomize the books you haven’t read, and then:

Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large, but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of Books Read Long Ago Which It’s Now Time to Reread and Books You’ve Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It’s Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them.”

That essay was then to go on to talk about the sort of book that it’s time to reread again, and the space that that thing occupied – a shadowy space, that I used to fill in slowly with rereadings – and counter this with this intense and strange Judy Blume phenomenon, in which the lights were not dimmed up but flooded on – I suddenly remembered huge swaths of these books, plot-wise – and, more weirdly, the things I had been doing when I read them, at points throughout my prepubescent life. And this was deeply weird. There was one thing – I remember better than I have any right to, a moment in which my lovely and civic-minded mother and I were tasked to take something, somewhere – and all I remember is the sensation of listening to Adam Sandler’s “The Lonesome Kicker” in her van as she deposited whatever it was, and reading in my copy of Fudge-a-Mania the passage about the families’ baseball game. Other recalled phenomena were similarly accompanied – just quanta of interactions in Lockport, the impossibly dull little place where I tried to learn to be a real person, accompanied in a disturbingly inextricable way by Peter Warren Hatcher, that milquetoast fourth-grade nothing, and his rambunctious brother, Fudge. This disturbed me, in fact, into writing the essay that now lies in shambles in front of me, the essay upon which I am now performing a post-mortem.

What was weird – and what weirdness I had hoped to communicate – was not that I had associated particular events in my young life with books. All I remember of a trip to Carowinds amusement park in the Carolinas was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, all I remember of a spring break 2000 is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; even a very pleasant trip to Bay Shore Long Island, in 2006, is dominated by reading Pynchon’s V. But – and I hope this makes sense – I remember those as discontinuities: “that was the week I read Kesey”, “Such were the days in which I read V” – and they are discontinuities that I remember. Those books may be books that, as Calvino notices, It’s Now Time to Reread – but they are books tagged as such every time I walk, with eyes averted, through the bookstore. So what the hell are these Judy Blume books that provided cross-hatch on all of the cartoony memories I retained of Lockport with my mother? I never, ever thought about these books until I started reading them and they cascaded in upon me. They were different, of course – one of the things I wanted to communicate in the original version of this essay was the decreased capaciousness of these books – but really, what astonished was the way in which this reading pervaded and controlled my memories of early Lockportian life, the way in which the only “there” there was provided by a pair of children’s books about a rowdy three-year-old named after a piece of candy. It is as if all of the time I imagined I spent wasted on slightly educational computer games and mooning about girls had been weirdly matched in importance by this series of novellas.

But what was most marking about this weirdness, of course, was that it was not weird in any palpable way at all. It was alienated not in the way that genius, but in the way that dreams are alienated – they return not with majesty, but with mundanity. I had hoped to tell you just how terribly strange it was that I was reading all of these things and finding them both familiar and bizarre – but that is nothing new under this sun. It is just the way in which we find those rare books that speak to us shortly and dissipate. Trying to tell you the weirdness of rereading Judy Blume would be like trying to tell you about the weirdness of my dreams – yes, you would say, that is peculiar, but is the world in which the peculiar finds its home. The very idea of the essay I see scissored up before me is one of tactibility, and one that the proper way of thinking reveals as a pomposity. You cannot find my relationship to Judy Blume any more interestingly strange than you could find my dreams, the other night, about the claustrophobia of airplanes. My relationship with these Fudge books – like my dreams – are not alien to me, but of my own making. To the rest of the world, this is business as usual. It is only to the suddenly remembering part of me that the system appears remarkable at all.

This is where, to the disappointment of dorks like me, books finally flare sadly out. One of my smarter friends has been telling me, for years, that books are whores – that, whatever their arguments for replacing the humans we know, their essentially mercenary nature will always keep them, well, whorish. What began, in this essay, as a plangent plea for commiseration – didn’t your lovely and civic minded mothers take you out to be amused by Fudge? – has ended in a declaration of, what else, loneliness. I cannot even put before you the passages that most made me feel as I feel – what would be the point? The point, of course, is alienation from a reading past – no different for me, looking ponderously back at a reading nine-year-old self, than it is for you, looking at me reading.

So why bother? Why read what I read, and try to find some common ground? The answer is not an answer, really, but a hope – a fantasia – that I am more different from my bookish nine-year-old self than I am from you, right now, fighting the same literary fights which I am fighting. It is perhaps a foolish hope, but it is what we have got. And isn’t that almost enough? This essay began as a call to common response – a sort of “Don’t you know what it’s like to have the books that mattered to your young self sneak up on you?” But, as such, it fails. And but all is not lost. Because while the weirdness of new readings of old things may not be communicable, there is something in books that is.

Here speaks our second favorite Emerson: “Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire” (from “The American Scholar”). I think that what my wise friend pointed out when she accused my bookishness of being a type of whorishness (or johnishness, rather) was that I had meant my recollection of books restored not to inspire, but to be an end in itself. These Fudge books were a source of inspiration that had died. They inspired me when I was nine; their alien quality now seemed difficult to reconcile with the potent force they had been once. But such is the way of reading. They had built me, like (as Emerson notes elsewhere) my meals from the same period, but there is no real call to remember them now. What we, of course, can do, is to talk not about the books that surreally inspired selves no longer current, but tease out the inspirations ongoing – so, tomorrow or the next day, I will tell you what I have thought of re-reading the first chapter of Pnin.