Foreword is Forewarned

Today I went to see a talk by a performance artist named Deke Weaver, who is a very interesting and talented man. He told a story about a polar bear that was just magnificent, and then he screened a portion of his performance called Monkey that he had put on in I think Illinois. You should check out his website.

I went to this talk partly because it was sponsored by one of my professors, and has some concerns in come with the class I am currently taking with that professor, but I also went because, like all such small events given by American universities, they had FREE FOOD. I was so excited! They had sandwiches, they had enormous pickles, chips, salad, and for dessert, cookies. I happily loaded up a plate with turkey/brie/bacon sandwich, chips, pickle and salad, and sat down to listen to the first segment of the talk. When I had finished my food, I thought, "I can't wait to get more food at the next break!" But then, in the time while watching the performance, I became seized with a deep panic. Frequent readers of this blog know that I get into a deep panic about thinks like turning off my light too early or hurting the feelings of my books I've owned since high school, so this should not be a surprise. What was I in a panic about, you ask? I was in a panic about this: I could not sort out whether or not I should get another pickle and bag of chips, or get a cookie. This was a horrible dilemma. Do I risk getting too full on the pickle and chips, and having to forgo the cookie? Or do I eat the cookie, feel un-full, and go the entire rest of the day feeling one pickle short? I often feel this way about desserts and the closure they offer: how do we know it is time to put the capstone on things?

You'd think it would be easy to know when to put the capstone on a book you're reading: figure the capstone is the last tenth of the book, or whatever fraction, and then read the tenth that comes last, last. But it isn't, because books -- especially Important Books -- have decided to fuck with you by inventing the Foreword. The Foreword is actually the dessert of the book, even though it comes first. It's a big time aberration. Here come some spoilers, too, so if you care about Major Plot Developments in Crime and Punishment, then beat it. This is good news because it means now you all have an excuse not to read a post. Go with god, people who want to avoid spoilers!

Now, down to business. The allure of the foreword is twofold: one, it is fun because the people who get called upon to write forewords are usually writing about something they quite enjoy, but do not have a huge stake in (you bought the book, it's not as if they are breaking their balls to sell you on it), so the writing itself is usually lively and fun. Two, it is fun because it's not like you have to super pay attention. Just read it! If you zone out while reading Moby Dick, maybe you miss out on part of the Great American Novel. No one is going to wish they had paid just a little more attention to the Great American Editor's Introduction. They are high in sugar and low in nutritional value, the cookie of the Parts of the Book. But caveat lector, because they are cookies that sometimes have, I don't know, steak cubes or something else in them; stuff that would be fine as part of the entree, but that are just disastrous and appetite killing if they come in the cookie eaten too soon. And those steak cubes or whatever, are Critical Plot Points.

Nothing ruins the good dessert feeling of reading a foreword like those. The first time I was exposed to this was when I was in tenth grade, and my friend's mother was giving us a ride home from school but had to stop at Office Max for printer ink on the way home. This was a disaster for me on par with being unable to determine how full I am. I was terribly fat and shy in high school, and I had a catastrophic bowl cut, and the two kids also getting a ride home were a year ahead of me and thin and probably knew girls. So, like Mizaru, I elected not to look at anything but a book, so that these Two Cool Guys would not try to talk to me, or make fun of my Looney Tunes tie, or whatever. Now, it would never do to read a book I was actually supposed to be paying attention to, because my chubby heart was pounding away in fear, and I couldn't focus; so instead I read the Foreword to the Signet Classic Edition of Crime and Punishment, which comes with a handy little map of St. Petersburg, marking key events like the bridge where Svidrigailov commits suicide, which happens on like page 500. What the hell, map? At least he shoots himself on the bridge, rather than jumping into the river, saving a little bit of surprise. I was disappointed. I could taste the steak cube in my cookie. I turned green, slightly, the chalky greenness of those who have had their future surprises ruined, and of those who have miscalculated their appetites by one bag of chips and one giant pickle, and foreclosed them with a cookie. And those kids made fun of me for turning an unnatural pastel color while reading, despite my brilliant strategy of not looking at them. I guess I should've been more like Kikazaru, instead.

So the moral of the story is: Forewords, delicious and enjoyable, but for god's sake only partake when you're sure you have already had enough book to eat. That, and check out Deke Weaver.

A Long Green Flattening

It's sports season; I am watching, and discussing in civilian life even more than usual, sporting events; according to Steve Almond (and I think he's right), the troubling recent political events out of Massachusetts can be called The Sports Talk Radio Election; and soon we, even the parts of we who don't give a shit about sports, will watch the 44th running of the American Football Super Bowl, an event so important, and an event that works as such a metaphor of importance, that every time I've been up for more than forty hours working on a paper, at some point I will begin thinking, over and over, "All right, Schratz, this paper is our Super Bowl". It's like a Waterloo that doesn't necessarily end you, which I guess means it's like the real Waterloo.

And so imagine my delight when the protagonist of the book currently serving as my roman de gare, Jonathan Lethem's the Fortress of Solitude, watches Super Bowl IX with his friend and the friend's father. He thinks this about the tilt, between the Minnesota Vikings and the Pittsburgh Steelers:

The game itself...turned out to be a long green flattening: of huffing, robotic men, and of Dylan's interest. Football was an arrangement of failures, a proving how unlikely most things were.

Later, Dylan, the protagonist, is given a ring that enables him to fly, so, that shows you how unlikely things in fiction (rather than sports) can stay. But no matter: there it is, a masterful evocation of The Sports. An arrangement of failures. The most crushing thing about sports -- and, I suppose, a thing that can crush us in fictions about which we care, as well, is the total lack of a) appellate processes, and b) corrigibility. No matter how much you care about the Buffalo Bills (and I do), or how much you think they ought to have won, based on talent, a particular game, they will a) never get the decision reversed, and b) never get to play quite that game again. And no matter how much you want Othello to wait ten minutes or whatever and listen to what Desdemona has to say, he is a) never not going to suffocate her, and b) never not going to kill himself later that scene. No appeals, no corrections. A proving how unlikely most things are.

Of course, unlikely things do happen, no matter how proven their unlikelihood. That is why I am announcing here, as the Official Super Bowl XLIV recipient of the support of the Unpacking My Library book blog, the previously un-Super Bowl'd New Orleans Saints. I hope that this works out better for them than the time we, as a blog, threw our support behind the Cleveland Indians. We'll find out in two weeks!

Paris Before the War

Proust, why not, I'm tired:

Moreover, the name Guermantes existed for me in many forms. If the form which my memory had merely noted down as in an address book was not accompanied by any poetry, older forms, those which dated from the time when I did not know Mme de Guermantes, were liable to renew themselves in me, especially when I had not seen her for some time and the glaring light of the person with human features did not quench the mysterious radiance of the name. THen once again I began to think of Mme de Guermantes's dwelling as of something that was beyond the bounds of reality, in the same way as I began to think again of the misty Balbec of my early day-dreams as though I had not since then made that journey, or of the 1.22 train as though I had never taken it....Then the idea of reality returned as I entered the Duchess's hall. But I consoled myself with the reflexion that in spite of everything she was for me the real intersection between reality and dream.

It's a sign that you are reading a book so long that you have less read it than lived parts of it that I actually felt the way he feels about the name Guermantes, the 1.22 train, Balbec, before I even did the usual readerly solipsistic work of thinking about things that work for me that way. I don't have to think of women I knew of and then knew to feel the way Proust does about the duchess; I just have to think of Oriane de Guermantes, and I get enough of the sense of lost mystique to feel with him.

What is Oriane de Guermantes before we knew her, when all she was was a set of phonemes blobbed together that reminded us of a lantern projecting figures of long-dead nobility on the wall? Nothing, I suppose, the same way in which the people that we haven't met yet are, for us, nothing now. Young Proust, thinking of her at Combray, can't think of anything about her that he can say: this is what the Duchesse de Guermantes is. But there is nothing that he can say she isn't, and so she gets to be, as a name, free-for-him. The name Guermantes is for young Proust freedom, freedom as the condition of uncollapsedness. No possibility in her, in Balbec, in the 1.22 train, has collapsed into its own not-actually-having-been. What that is, I think, is the fullest form of freedom: not the negative freedom, that, say, Kant condemns (the freedom to do whatever one pleases), nor the positive-but-in-practice-soulless freedom that Kant really likes (the freedom to act noumenally in accordance with laws and so verbosely on). Both of those freedoms are actionable senses of freedom -- they sit open to action, and as such, they sit with their collapsability into an accomplished fact -- an unfree fait accompli -- as their most salient feature.

The downside to the fullest freedom we can feel -- Oriane before we knew her, Paris before the War, Williams College just before I graduated-- is that, of course, it can only be recognized after we know Oriane, after the War makes our bullfights and our lives in the brasseries seem so open and wonderful, after I graduate. The Duchesse de Guermantes whom we actually know -- incredibly stylish, sharp witted, more than a little superficial -- is a saturated object of knowing (to slightly alter topographical metaphors), a collection of possibilities filled in, closed off. And so with every damn thing: know more, wonder less, long for the haunting that those names had for us once, that little haunting that is the one proleptic taste of fullest freedom we can get our hands on. And to long for that haunting -- to be full of a yearning for the sensuous notion of the uncollapsability of everything that has gone before -- that is just what it is to be tired.

Syllabus!

"What are the books your book club has read?" Ryann's friend Serena asked me today at dinner. Good question! And nobody is in a better position to answer than me. So let's take a look, shall we, at what kind of syllabus we've built up over the years here at unpacking my library.

We led off with The Road, which, I wrote, is a horrible book with which to lead off one's book club. Not an auspicious start! But the lack of any auspices ended quickly, with Atonement, which was a good 'un. And then the wheels came off, as far as anyone regularly remembering to read the book and comment on it, your truly not excepted. But the off-wheels brigade looks like this:
Grendel by John Gardner
Author, Author by David Lodge (SUSPENDED)
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton
And now, Blind Willow Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami.

Here's the first thing: I would have guessed more books! This is like figuring that a cousin or someone you haven't seen for a while must be seventeen or eighteen by now and finding out that he's twelve. Also, in the interim, I've read, on my own time, about a hundred and twenty books. Yikes. I'm sure you too, Official Book Club Members and Also Interested Members of the Public, have read way more than eight books since November 2007. So I guess the first thing we learn from the Syllabus is, we should try to stay a little firmer in the saddle on the curricular horse.

What else can we learn about the books chosen, in methods varying in their democratic-ness, as the Official Selections of our book club? No women thus far, a statistic on which we should improve. A bunch of books that, the Road notwithstanding, are sort of academic but still sort of fun. The theme most evident on the Syllabus, I guess, would be writerliness, particularly in the amount of time stretching from My Late Life in Norwell, with Atonement and the aborted attempt at Author Author (which I finished, incidentally, while also half-listening to life stories from my cousin Kate at the Tampa Bay airport) up until my Wintry Life in Western New York, with the Savage Detectives. Granted, this was almost exactly the period of my dictatorial control of the Official Selection of the Book Club, but there we are: a book club that, Officially, wants to read fiction about people whose job it is to write fiction. That seems right, if a little broad; maybe a book club that, Officially, wants to read fiction about people who are critically ambivalent about their destinies as producers of fiction (Briony, Grendel, and the narrator of Pnin in particular, here). And what the hell, me too, or at least someone ambivalent about his evident destiny as a producer of words for the purpose of entertainment. And, there being no better way to struggle through the production of words for entertainment, than continue to produce words for entertainment, I suppose we will go on, thus writerly, unpacking our library.

Murakami and Privacy

What's it time for again? What else, but a slightly self-serious piece of literary criticism done on a couple of short stories. These short stories are the first dozen-ish in the Current Official Selection of the Book Club, which is Haruki Murakami's Blind Willow Sleeping Woman. To talk about a book of short stories is, I think, to talk about a series of attempts to do something. It is hard for me to imagine a wild-eyed, free-spirited Writer Type who wasn't working on poems or a novel; the production of some, and especially the production of many, short stories seems to me to be a guarantor of authorial seriousness, or some sense that the author knows what she is doing well enough to keep plugging away at it: there's just so many of them.

A couple of Murakami's stories in this collection feature his commentary on his process as a writer of short stories, or at least on the process of their own production. One wishes to look in these pieces in particular for something like the Murakami credo, and in "A Poor Aunt Story", we find something that, if not a credo, will do til the credo gets here. The narrator/protagonist is trying to explain to his companion that he wants to write a story about a poor aunt, despite the fact that he has no poor aunt (the companion does). Trying to explain himself, he says this: "I can't put it into words very well...In order to explain why I want to write a story about a poor aunt, I'd have to write the story, but once the story was finished, there wouldn't be any reason to explain the reason for writing the story -- or would there?"

Or would there? Murakami's stories always have some element that, once we've done the usual work we do on short stories, that still demand a reason to explain the reason for writing the story, little cores of ineffability, which, if you didn't like Murakami, could probably seem really really annoying. What is going on with the dabchick at the end of "Dabchick"? Why does Tony Takitani just send the new woman away, and why is everyone more or less ok with this? What the hell is a poor aunt, really, and how does one materialize on one's back? And why is the other thing that might pop up on one's back a hatstand?

Richard Rorty writes that the things we value in artists (and he counts just about everybody using words in the category of possible artists) is that their system of private metaphors that they find important has resonance with us. The most lasting artists are the ones whose metaphors (a Rorty example is the atom as a metaphor for the way stuff is organized) become public property. What I find so appealing about Murakami, I think, is that his metaphors are the floatiest possible kind -- almost all signifier, for which we can stick in any signified -- so that we get the sense of resonance with Murakami that we get with great artists while at the same time retaining our privacy. We can identify with the Vinteuil sonata, and love Proust more for it, but by doing so we are in some way become less private persons. (Incidentally, this is even more an issue with television shows -- I love Liz Lemon to death, but I love her for the same reason that millions of other people do). I am much more confident that my fascination with particular Murakami stories is a more private affair, because I feel like I have brought a lot more to the table on which he and I are going to figure out what the hell he's talking about.

My favorite story this far has a good example of this: "The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes", which features a narrator in the "what the hell was that?" mode in which Murakami operates so well. The story culminates in crows pecking each other to death over a question of whether or not a cake of the narrator's making is a genuine Sharpie Cake, and the narrator washing his hands of the whole affair. It's not impossible that the crows and the cake are a metaphor for writing to please oneself rather than crows, but it's also not impossible that that has nothing to do with it. I personally like it because, owing largely to a Kafka quote I happened to read in the New York Review of Books two years ago, and things that Kafka quote about crows has meant to me in the ensuing years, I think that the set of phonemes "crow" is absolutely gorgeous and fascinating and important, and the idea of crows determining cake quality was for me an aesthetic delight. And Murakami's ineffable prose lets me have exactly that delight.

New Years Resolution

In my current lodgings, I am obliged, just before going to sleep, to stand up from my bed, kick the cardboard box on which I keep my laptop out of the way, lean over about a yard, and switch of the light before repositioning myself in the bed and going to sleep. This is terrible, because it is causing me to leave reading minutes on the table. I noticed this when I was home over Christmas, and slept in a room whose light switch was less than the length of my arm away from where, in prone reading position, I kept my arm on the bed. I would read until I was just about to fall asleep and drool onto my book, and then at the last second fling the book on the ground, smack at the light switch and go to sleep. Often, the next morning I would discover my flinging to have been overzealous, not be able to find that particular book, and be forced to go find another one, but that was a small price to pay.

The worst part about those minutes in which I feel as though I could -- not should, but could -- be reading is that my anxiety that I have misestimated how long it will take me to fall asleep often itself prevents me from falling asleep. I am constantly curious whether I had, say, another chapter's worth of wakefulness left in the tank, and I feel as if I find myself waiting up to see if I will wait up long enough to have read that chapter, a process which, if it makes sense, is absurd. Sometimes I will even capitulate, turn the light back on, survey my books on the floor and on their shelf, and attempt to happily read myself to sleep again. Of course, at the end of this process is the ominous truth that at some point I will again have to estimate that reading time is up and that the standing and kicking and toggling must be got through again, an ominous truth that not only prevents me from sleeping but prevents me from being at all attentive to whatever soporific reading I thought I was going to be doing, and fills me with even more potent metaphysical doubts that I will ever even really sleep again in my life.

When I was a child, and lived in a room with my brother Connor in twin beds with a toybox/bookshelf thingum between us, I used to take advantage of my status as sole literate member of the room (he was two years old) by monopolizing all of the books we owned for the night. I would arrange them in a stack, with the most entertaining books on the bottom and the least entertaining books on the top, and read every single one of them, every night, and fall asleep triumphantly at the end of the stack, lights on and all. I have surveyed the books currently on my floor, and do not think that a return to this practice would be a good idea -- it would take too long, for one thing, to read through the whole stack, and also I have got to a point in life where the burden of assigning entertainment value to all of my books (or even all of the books I have recently flung on the floor) is too great for me to bear, as I always wind up feeling really sorry for the books adjudged least entertaining.

Given all of that, my New Years Resolution for 2010 is to buy one of those things that will turn the lights on and off by clapping.