I live in Manhattan now. The biggest, most immediate improvements:
1) the subway -- I don't have to drive anywhere, so instead I take the subway around and listen to Coffee Break French, a program where two Scots teach you how to conduct rudimentary conversations in French
2) the Local Interest Section at the Barnes and Noble around here has stuff like Bright Lights, Big City and The Collected Stories of Damon Runyan, instead of this stuff.
3) there are parks to read in -- I realize that this is true of most places I used to live, but these parks have other reading people in them. A crucial improvement.
In fact, there are people reading all over the place, and, most importantly, anonymous people. It is one thing -- it is quite a nice thing, actually -- to sit around in rooms with other people who are reading and whom you know. I do it all the time. But it is actually even a nicer thing to sit around in Starbuckses or in parks with people who are reading and reading wholly apart from you. They're reading a book they call loneliness, but it's better than reading alone, William Joel would say. Everyone sits and reads their books, and no one talks about it, but in the massed quiet of readers, is comfort. I've read considerably more since I have moved out here, even before classes have started: I read a bunch more of Updike's short stories, I read Benjamin and Moretti on cities, I read a lot of Mason and Dixon (my and my brother's book to read over vacation) that I didn't finish over vacation. When I used to sit in my hot hot house and look at my books, as I did for most of this last summer, sweating and miserable, they seemed more than anything like a bunch of things I had to work through, methodically; like they were a pile of pages I had to solitarily mark as read, like so many TPS reports. I don't know that it speaks especially well of me that it took such a drastic relocation to reappreciate my library, but I am glad that it happened.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Zeppo
Today I read jack squat. I painted the side of my house, I drove into town for lunch, I staked out the ice cream man, I went to the gym and almost fell off the treadmill, and I went out into the ocean and tried to catch some fish barehand. But I didn't really read anything. And then, just before I went to bed, we decided to watch the Marx Brother's fourth movie, Horse Feathers. This was their penultimate movie for Paramount and, more critically, the penultimate movie to feature Zeppo Marx, in my opinion the best and greatest of the Four Brothers.
Zeppo's importance, I am told by wikipedia, has been of late the subject of some scholarly study. The revisionist history on him seems to be something like, he is a gateway figure, or our representative in the anarchic world of the three older, more obviously lunatic brothers. Charlotte Chandler, in a book I now really want to read called Hello, I Must Be Going: Groucho and His Friends, says this about Zeppo:
Zeppo's importance to the Marx Brothers' initial success was as a Marx Brother who could 'pass' as a normal person. None of Zeppo's replacements (Allan Jones, Kenny Baker, and others) could assume this character as convincingly as Zeppo, because they were actors, and Zeppo was the real thing, cast to type.
This is fascinating stuff, especially her suggestion that Allan Jones, whom I find to be loathsome, is some sort of Zeppo failure. However, I find Zeppo's allure to go beyond his likeness to us; it is not just his unavoidable Marxiness that connects him to his brothers in a way that we fail to. I don't read Zeppo as an entree into the world of the maniacal brothers; instead, I see him as a lesson in how to adapt their ways into the world of our own.
Now, plotwise, he often is such an entree. In Horse Feathers, as Groucho's son, he offers some insight, gleaned from the home, into the possible policies of Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff (yammering on about how Dad will hound them). As Horatio W. Jamison, the field secretary of Capt. Spaulding in Animal Crackers, Zeppo sings reverently about how the Captain is a moral man before retreating for the middle two thirds of the movie, and in Duck Soup, as a secretary this time called Bob Roland, he bounces in a little too quickly to announce that the boss is making an appearance just when the clock on the wall strikes ten. In all of these circumstances, his presence is one that, above all, reassures us as to Groucho's connection to a world outside of Groucho: that is, Zeppo knows this guy, and appears to be vouching for him. He lets us know what's coming, just before Groucho -- the ostensible star of the show -- arrives.
The problem with this is that he is, in each instance above, spectacularly wrong. Prof. Wagstaff's single coherent action in Horse Feathers is hounding out the wrong man (that is, his other brother Chico instead of the legitimate football ringers); Capt. Spaulding's first big scene after his introduction is a halfhearted attempt to commit bigamy; and, of course, Rufus T. Firefly does not show up at ten to be sworn in (or introduced or whatever) as the ruler of Freedonia. As our entryway into the world of the lunatic Marx Brothers, Zeppo as an explainer is useless or worse. Yet he never appears to be upset, or betrayed, by any of this; he doesn't really care. So why tell us these bizarre things? I think that one particular scene from the films illustrate what Zeppo is really all about. These is one of the scenes I most often point to when I have to defend my Zeppo above all policy to incredulous family and friends.
In Duck Soup, Zeppo has been silent since the first scene (he has had one scene, Groucho's meeting with his cabinet, in which he makes, to my way of thinking, several absolutely hilarious faces) when he pops into the boss's office after the latter has met with Harpo and Chico and got nothing done. He walks in purposefully, as always, and, as a good citizen, goes to take his hat off and place it on the hatrack in Groucho's office. There is no side to the hat on his head; he is wearing half of a hat. Briefly, Zeppo is nonplused, and this is important: Zeppo is almost never nonplused. That is a state for college professors, society doyennes, cabinet officials, that is, people who are wholly outside of the Marx dominion, and if Zeppo were to voice his confusion ("Your excellency, I've lost half a hat!"), he would stake himself as a similar outsider. But he does not; he just plunges in, throws his hat away, and gets down to telling Groucho, for reasons that I have never really been able to place, that Freedonia needs to goad Sylvania into war. At no other point that I know of in Marxdom does someone have such a moment of decision -- and opt in. Here, he is most like our guide into Marx Brothers lunacy: like us, he has decided for some reason that these are people who merit his time, such as it is.
But then he begins to push for war with Sylvania, and becomes, somehow, the only free man in the entire world of the Marx Brothers. To prove that Trentino, the Sylvanian ambassador, is sensitive enough to be goaded easily into war, Bob Roland tells Firefly that he once told Vera Marquel (the gorgeous dancer and apparent hanger-on at the Freedonian court) something -- I find it compelling to believe that this "something" is either a joke or a joke-like thing -- in Trentino's presence once, and that Trentino slapped his face. Firefly, when he hears this joke whispered to him, slaps Bob Roland's face as well (and, as he says, should've slapped Mrs. Teasdale's face when she told it to him). This moment is another remarkable moment in Zeppodom: I did not realize, until he makes reference to his having done it off screen, that Zeppo is a Marx Brother free of the manic compulsions that drive his brothers: the drive to joke, and the drive to chase pretty women. Chico and Groucho will solemnly sacrifice any bit of sense to jokes, even bad jokes -- look at the self-disgust in the exchange of sewer and manhole jokes in Animal Crackers -- and Harpo's distracting pursuit of women is evident. Harpo, Chico, and Groucho seem madcap and free, but theirs is only negative freedom, the freedom to reject the demands of normal persons. Zeppo can move exactly as he pleases. Zeppo alone, exists in and of all of this, and simultaneously in and for himself. He is not just a stand-in for us, who watch passively as these dramas play out, but he is a freer man than we are. Inscrutable, self-assured (all that striding into rooms!), perfectly possessed: our Zeppo, the most perfect agent of positive freedom in the most anarchically free movies of all time.
Zeppo's importance, I am told by wikipedia, has been of late the subject of some scholarly study. The revisionist history on him seems to be something like, he is a gateway figure, or our representative in the anarchic world of the three older, more obviously lunatic brothers. Charlotte Chandler, in a book I now really want to read called Hello, I Must Be Going: Groucho and His Friends, says this about Zeppo:
Zeppo's importance to the Marx Brothers' initial success was as a Marx Brother who could 'pass' as a normal person. None of Zeppo's replacements (Allan Jones, Kenny Baker, and others) could assume this character as convincingly as Zeppo, because they were actors, and Zeppo was the real thing, cast to type.
This is fascinating stuff, especially her suggestion that Allan Jones, whom I find to be loathsome, is some sort of Zeppo failure. However, I find Zeppo's allure to go beyond his likeness to us; it is not just his unavoidable Marxiness that connects him to his brothers in a way that we fail to. I don't read Zeppo as an entree into the world of the maniacal brothers; instead, I see him as a lesson in how to adapt their ways into the world of our own.
Now, plotwise, he often is such an entree. In Horse Feathers, as Groucho's son, he offers some insight, gleaned from the home, into the possible policies of Prof. Quincy Adams Wagstaff (yammering on about how Dad will hound them). As Horatio W. Jamison, the field secretary of Capt. Spaulding in Animal Crackers, Zeppo sings reverently about how the Captain is a moral man before retreating for the middle two thirds of the movie, and in Duck Soup, as a secretary this time called Bob Roland, he bounces in a little too quickly to announce that the boss is making an appearance just when the clock on the wall strikes ten. In all of these circumstances, his presence is one that, above all, reassures us as to Groucho's connection to a world outside of Groucho: that is, Zeppo knows this guy, and appears to be vouching for him. He lets us know what's coming, just before Groucho -- the ostensible star of the show -- arrives.
The problem with this is that he is, in each instance above, spectacularly wrong. Prof. Wagstaff's single coherent action in Horse Feathers is hounding out the wrong man (that is, his other brother Chico instead of the legitimate football ringers); Capt. Spaulding's first big scene after his introduction is a halfhearted attempt to commit bigamy; and, of course, Rufus T. Firefly does not show up at ten to be sworn in (or introduced or whatever) as the ruler of Freedonia. As our entryway into the world of the lunatic Marx Brothers, Zeppo as an explainer is useless or worse. Yet he never appears to be upset, or betrayed, by any of this; he doesn't really care. So why tell us these bizarre things? I think that one particular scene from the films illustrate what Zeppo is really all about. These is one of the scenes I most often point to when I have to defend my Zeppo above all policy to incredulous family and friends.
In Duck Soup, Zeppo has been silent since the first scene (he has had one scene, Groucho's meeting with his cabinet, in which he makes, to my way of thinking, several absolutely hilarious faces) when he pops into the boss's office after the latter has met with Harpo and Chico and got nothing done. He walks in purposefully, as always, and, as a good citizen, goes to take his hat off and place it on the hatrack in Groucho's office. There is no side to the hat on his head; he is wearing half of a hat. Briefly, Zeppo is nonplused, and this is important: Zeppo is almost never nonplused. That is a state for college professors, society doyennes, cabinet officials, that is, people who are wholly outside of the Marx dominion, and if Zeppo were to voice his confusion ("Your excellency, I've lost half a hat!"), he would stake himself as a similar outsider. But he does not; he just plunges in, throws his hat away, and gets down to telling Groucho, for reasons that I have never really been able to place, that Freedonia needs to goad Sylvania into war. At no other point that I know of in Marxdom does someone have such a moment of decision -- and opt in. Here, he is most like our guide into Marx Brothers lunacy: like us, he has decided for some reason that these are people who merit his time, such as it is.
But then he begins to push for war with Sylvania, and becomes, somehow, the only free man in the entire world of the Marx Brothers. To prove that Trentino, the Sylvanian ambassador, is sensitive enough to be goaded easily into war, Bob Roland tells Firefly that he once told Vera Marquel (the gorgeous dancer and apparent hanger-on at the Freedonian court) something -- I find it compelling to believe that this "something" is either a joke or a joke-like thing -- in Trentino's presence once, and that Trentino slapped his face. Firefly, when he hears this joke whispered to him, slaps Bob Roland's face as well (and, as he says, should've slapped Mrs. Teasdale's face when she told it to him). This moment is another remarkable moment in Zeppodom: I did not realize, until he makes reference to his having done it off screen, that Zeppo is a Marx Brother free of the manic compulsions that drive his brothers: the drive to joke, and the drive to chase pretty women. Chico and Groucho will solemnly sacrifice any bit of sense to jokes, even bad jokes -- look at the self-disgust in the exchange of sewer and manhole jokes in Animal Crackers -- and Harpo's distracting pursuit of women is evident. Harpo, Chico, and Groucho seem madcap and free, but theirs is only negative freedom, the freedom to reject the demands of normal persons. Zeppo can move exactly as he pleases. Zeppo alone, exists in and of all of this, and simultaneously in and for himself. He is not just a stand-in for us, who watch passively as these dramas play out, but he is a freer man than we are. Inscrutable, self-assured (all that striding into rooms!), perfectly possessed: our Zeppo, the most perfect agent of positive freedom in the most anarchically free movies of all time.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Analysis Yet Again
Another week, another reason to drag my favorite two-word Henry James phrase into things, that quote being "remorseless analysis." (Narrowly beating out "extravagant umbrella", "hang fire", and "sacred rage"). And the reason today is that my mother tells me, daily, and the other people who live in our house confirm, daily, that what my problem is ("I have just one problem?" -- Hal Incandenza) is that I overanalyze everything. She rarely uses the word "remorseless", but there it is: the problem: overanalysis. Now, this may be a bit of killing to cure, but, as the fact that I can't get through an entire sentence here without a variety of embedded clauses and parentheses might have tipped you off, my first instinct is in most circumstances, indeed, to analyze things. But is it over-such? Can one overanalyze, and do I? Let us overanalyze.
When Strether, in the Ambassadors, invokes that beautiful phrase, he is sad; he is disappointed that his friend Waymarsh will never remorselessly analyze him. It's as though he is jealous that his powers of analysis -- which seem to be involuntary and, we learn throughout the novel, not terribly keen -- will never be turned on himself. A friend of mine once told me that she was disappointed after making a certain song the music that others heard while her phone was ringing; because she did that, she was the person she knew who heard the song the list. I myself often consider it a cruel trick of fate that, while everyone else sees it all the time they get to listen to me, I only see my perfectly straight hairline on the occasion that I visit a mirror. So maybe remorseless analysis is like that. But probably not -- it doesn't seem as though being the object of it is enviable (I mean really, think about it). Nor does it seem as though overanalysis is exposing some ugly truths through which the rest of the world slumbers, because it is, after all, not just called enoughanalysis.
Rather, I think that what my mother pinpoints when she calls overanalyzing my problem is that overanalysis is exactly what makes something into art; and art is exactly useless. I read a story this morning -- a deeply weird story -- by Nabokov, about a dragon, called The Dragon. It wonders what it be like if a dragon flew into a little town in Germany, and comes up with: it would get papered with advertisements for a tobacco company, it would be attacked by a circus performer dressed as a knight and in the service of a rival tobacco company, and as a result of this, flies up to his cave, embarrassed, and dies of shame. Which doesn't sound really wrong, as far as dragons in 1930s Germany go. And I don't mean to suggest here that my babbled observations with which I annoy my mother (or whomever's ear is the one closest to my right {which, I notice, is the side to which I most often darkly mutter snark}) is of a quality similar to a Nabokov short story, even a weird Nabokov short story. Rather, that same stream of muttering is something that, as a person who reads and probably reads too much, I have come to take for just the noise of the world; and, of course, the real world is much more often just quite. Just enoughanalyzed. I am subjecting my poor family to that roar that lies on the other side of silence.
Now, I don't super know what to do about this. It is probably the most insidious thing I have ever noticed about my career as a reader, and, luckily, it is not all that insidious. It is one of those lucky problems whose solution is the not talking about it. I tried to defend my constant, remorseless overanalysis to my mother by telling her that it was compulsory, and I don't really know which of the two of us was correct. But obviously, broadcasting whatever Deep Analysis I think of is not compulsory. It's just the fruit of reading too many stories that really work through what the tobacco companies would do to dragons.
When Strether, in the Ambassadors, invokes that beautiful phrase, he is sad; he is disappointed that his friend Waymarsh will never remorselessly analyze him. It's as though he is jealous that his powers of analysis -- which seem to be involuntary and, we learn throughout the novel, not terribly keen -- will never be turned on himself. A friend of mine once told me that she was disappointed after making a certain song the music that others heard while her phone was ringing; because she did that, she was the person she knew who heard the song the list. I myself often consider it a cruel trick of fate that, while everyone else sees it all the time they get to listen to me, I only see my perfectly straight hairline on the occasion that I visit a mirror. So maybe remorseless analysis is like that. But probably not -- it doesn't seem as though being the object of it is enviable (I mean really, think about it). Nor does it seem as though overanalysis is exposing some ugly truths through which the rest of the world slumbers, because it is, after all, not just called enoughanalysis.
Rather, I think that what my mother pinpoints when she calls overanalyzing my problem is that overanalysis is exactly what makes something into art; and art is exactly useless. I read a story this morning -- a deeply weird story -- by Nabokov, about a dragon, called The Dragon. It wonders what it be like if a dragon flew into a little town in Germany, and comes up with: it would get papered with advertisements for a tobacco company, it would be attacked by a circus performer dressed as a knight and in the service of a rival tobacco company, and as a result of this, flies up to his cave, embarrassed, and dies of shame. Which doesn't sound really wrong, as far as dragons in 1930s Germany go. And I don't mean to suggest here that my babbled observations with which I annoy my mother (or whomever's ear is the one closest to my right {which, I notice, is the side to which I most often darkly mutter snark}) is of a quality similar to a Nabokov short story, even a weird Nabokov short story. Rather, that same stream of muttering is something that, as a person who reads and probably reads too much, I have come to take for just the noise of the world; and, of course, the real world is much more often just quite. Just enoughanalyzed. I am subjecting my poor family to that roar that lies on the other side of silence.
Now, I don't super know what to do about this. It is probably the most insidious thing I have ever noticed about my career as a reader, and, luckily, it is not all that insidious. It is one of those lucky problems whose solution is the not talking about it. I tried to defend my constant, remorseless overanalysis to my mother by telling her that it was compulsory, and I don't really know which of the two of us was correct. But obviously, broadcasting whatever Deep Analysis I think of is not compulsory. It's just the fruit of reading too many stories that really work through what the tobacco companies would do to dragons.
Friday, August 7, 2009
More on Rock Bands
Today is Friday, here's a list.
TOP FIVE BANDS/MUSICAL ACTS FROM BOOKS WHOM I WISH WERE REAL
5) The Weird Sisters, from Harry Potter -- Ok, I know they already kind of real, by virtue of being played in the fourth Harry Potter movie by half of Pulp and 2/5 of Radiohead. But that has to be recommendation enough to get them on a list of imaginary bands, right? And, the Do the Hippogriff song is good. It's sounds like it's by Jarvis Cocker, which it is, and that is sufficient for my imaginary band purposes, at least. They are described as "extremely hairy and dressed in black robes that had been artfully ripped and torn" and apparently have names like Heathcote Barbary and Orsino Thruston and Gideon Crumb (which last plays the bagpipes). So yeah, I would have had a 10" by 20" poster of these guys, if they were real.
4) Ormus Cama and Vina Aspara -- These ones are on here largely because of curiosity as to all the people they wouldn't be. Ormus Cama is one third John Lennon, one third Elvis, and one third Freddie Mercury, but he lives in a world in which Elvis has somehow ripped off the music that he has been hearing psychically. It's kind of confusing. And Vina is his muse, so she'd have to come too. One of the most interesting thing's we'd learn from these people, if they were real, is what fem-Lou Reed is like, because in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Lou Reed is a woman: when his ghost twin Gayomart tells him about how weird the other world he's visited is, it's ours, and one of the things about which he is shocked is that Lou's a dude here. Fascinating.
3) Mary Bennet -- Poor Mary. All she does in Pride and Prejudice is bum everyone out, by being plain and wanting to talk about god. However, she is apparently quite gifted at the piano. She could be like a frumpier Glenn Gould! And I always feel bad for her, so she gets on the list.
2) Ok so for this one, I was going to put on Bucky Wunderlick, the pseudo-Bob Dylan from Great Jones Street, but do you know what? I didn't really like Great Jones Street. And anyway, Bob Dylan is barely real anyway, so I'll just throw him on the list his own personal self. From Chronicles, Vol. 1.
1) the Paranoids -- It had to be them, right? The goofball, fake-British invasion house band from Paranoid Mess The Crying of Lot 49 are awesome. They party at least as hard as any band in fiction, or probably real life, and they say funnier cryptically literate things than any band in real life except maybe Radiohead. They seem to sound like the Kinks when the Kinks were only loud, and their lyrics bounce around between sounding like they're by Jack Kerouac and like they're by John Donne. Just the best of both worlds, with this guys. I have an Axis: Bold as Love t-shirt that I wear and always feel self-conscious about, because I feel as if I don't know Jimi Hendrix's work well enough to justify it. And that is exactly the situation I can imagine myself in with regard to the Paranoids.
TOP FIVE BANDS/MUSICAL ACTS FROM BOOKS WHOM I WISH WERE REAL
5) The Weird Sisters, from Harry Potter -- Ok, I know they already kind of real, by virtue of being played in the fourth Harry Potter movie by half of Pulp and 2/5 of Radiohead. But that has to be recommendation enough to get them on a list of imaginary bands, right? And, the Do the Hippogriff song is good. It's sounds like it's by Jarvis Cocker, which it is, and that is sufficient for my imaginary band purposes, at least. They are described as "extremely hairy and dressed in black robes that had been artfully ripped and torn" and apparently have names like Heathcote Barbary and Orsino Thruston and Gideon Crumb (which last plays the bagpipes). So yeah, I would have had a 10" by 20" poster of these guys, if they were real.
4) Ormus Cama and Vina Aspara -- These ones are on here largely because of curiosity as to all the people they wouldn't be. Ormus Cama is one third John Lennon, one third Elvis, and one third Freddie Mercury, but he lives in a world in which Elvis has somehow ripped off the music that he has been hearing psychically. It's kind of confusing. And Vina is his muse, so she'd have to come too. One of the most interesting thing's we'd learn from these people, if they were real, is what fem-Lou Reed is like, because in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Lou Reed is a woman: when his ghost twin Gayomart tells him about how weird the other world he's visited is, it's ours, and one of the things about which he is shocked is that Lou's a dude here. Fascinating.
3) Mary Bennet -- Poor Mary. All she does in Pride and Prejudice is bum everyone out, by being plain and wanting to talk about god. However, she is apparently quite gifted at the piano. She could be like a frumpier Glenn Gould! And I always feel bad for her, so she gets on the list.
2) Ok so for this one, I was going to put on Bucky Wunderlick, the pseudo-Bob Dylan from Great Jones Street, but do you know what? I didn't really like Great Jones Street. And anyway, Bob Dylan is barely real anyway, so I'll just throw him on the list his own personal self. From Chronicles, Vol. 1.
1) the Paranoids -- It had to be them, right? The goofball, fake-British invasion house band from Paranoid Mess The Crying of Lot 49 are awesome. They party at least as hard as any band in fiction, or probably real life, and they say funnier cryptically literate things than any band in real life except maybe Radiohead. They seem to sound like the Kinks when the Kinks were only loud, and their lyrics bounce around between sounding like they're by Jack Kerouac and like they're by John Donne. Just the best of both worlds, with this guys. I have an Axis: Bold as Love t-shirt that I wear and always feel self-conscious about, because I feel as if I don't know Jimi Hendrix's work well enough to justify it. And that is exactly the situation I can imagine myself in with regard to the Paranoids.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
For Those About to Rock Band, We Salute You
I decided the other day that one of the ways I had scaled back my big dreams was, that I had previously imagined being in a band, and now I just imagine impressing a group of people with my prowess at the game Rock Band. Really. Like, before, while dangerously closing my eyes and air guitaring in the car to When You Were Young by the Killers, I would see myself on a stage with like minded hipsters in thrift store clothes, belting away. Now, instead of that, I listen to the same songs and imagine myself impressing instead maybe eight or nine people in thrift store clothes at a party. Sometimes it gets so bad that I end up thinking explicitly about that scene at the end of the episode of Gossip Girl where Serena and Vanessa decide to become friends via Guitar Hero. Terrible.
There are more than enough, probably, books about famous singers; the two I can think of off of my head are Great Jones Street and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, though I would count Ulysses as a book that's at least a little about famous singers because of Blazes Boylan, I imagine that there are a lot books about aspirant singers, too, though I am sorry to say I cannot think of any of them that I have read. I think the new Jonathan Lethem one was about that? I don't know. But at any rate, I am willing to bet, and cannot imagine, a book about someone's quest to become great at Rock Band. No one wants to see Rock Band on television or in a movie or in a book. Even that thirty second scene in Gossip Girl, with Guitar Hero, seemed as though it were wasting its and our time. The only way that could possibly be deployed would like to mark the would-be Rock Star hero as a dork.
It is as if the kind of fame simulacra is unjustifiable in a fictional character, or at least it is unjustifiable for now. It is as if we expect that if a character is going to be given some dreams, they can at least be bigger dreams than we ourselves could get for one hundred and fifty dollars at WalMart. It would be like reading about someone whose big goal was to break into Twitter, or someone who wanted to get their photos accepted by facebook. Those are not things about which people ought not to care; they are not even things about which particular persons ought not to care a great deal, or to the exclusion of caring about making it as a tambourinist or a writer. But, and because everything seems like an excuse to me to think one more thing about books, it seems worth appreciating that characters -- those fictitious entities whose race written people are the most representative of, for their pure created-ness (viz., there is not even a real person confusing things by portraying them) -- for the fact that no matter how mundane my dreams and goals get, theirs, if I'm going to care about them, will remain big. No matter how many times I start dreaming about five oncoming neon rectangles as the notes I'm banging out instead of guitar tabs, there will still be fictions dreaming the biggest dreams dreamable, like their ancestor, tilting at windmills.
There are more than enough, probably, books about famous singers; the two I can think of off of my head are Great Jones Street and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, though I would count Ulysses as a book that's at least a little about famous singers because of Blazes Boylan, I imagine that there are a lot books about aspirant singers, too, though I am sorry to say I cannot think of any of them that I have read. I think the new Jonathan Lethem one was about that? I don't know. But at any rate, I am willing to bet, and cannot imagine, a book about someone's quest to become great at Rock Band. No one wants to see Rock Band on television or in a movie or in a book. Even that thirty second scene in Gossip Girl, with Guitar Hero, seemed as though it were wasting its and our time. The only way that could possibly be deployed would like to mark the would-be Rock Star hero as a dork.
It is as if the kind of fame simulacra is unjustifiable in a fictional character, or at least it is unjustifiable for now. It is as if we expect that if a character is going to be given some dreams, they can at least be bigger dreams than we ourselves could get for one hundred and fifty dollars at WalMart. It would be like reading about someone whose big goal was to break into Twitter, or someone who wanted to get their photos accepted by facebook. Those are not things about which people ought not to care; they are not even things about which particular persons ought not to care a great deal, or to the exclusion of caring about making it as a tambourinist or a writer. But, and because everything seems like an excuse to me to think one more thing about books, it seems worth appreciating that characters -- those fictitious entities whose race written people are the most representative of, for their pure created-ness (viz., there is not even a real person confusing things by portraying them) -- for the fact that no matter how mundane my dreams and goals get, theirs, if I'm going to care about them, will remain big. No matter how many times I start dreaming about five oncoming neon rectangles as the notes I'm banging out instead of guitar tabs, there will still be fictions dreaming the biggest dreams dreamable, like their ancestor, tilting at windmills.
Monday, August 3, 2009
The False Azure of the Windowpane
Today I went for a run, and remembered that another reason I, as a literary nerd, like our house here: not our street, or the one next to it, but the one next to that is called Waxwing Lane, which is only a small, pluralizing sibilant away from being waxwing slain, and we all know what poem I have a crush on has that phrase in it's first line. Anyway, that made me think about a book issue that I often try to engage my family on, to their long-suffering: how much do you think about books when you're not reading them? Or actually, I guess the question is more: how much do you use books to think about other things?
Running is usually a thing that I don't use books to think about; that's one of the things I like about it. Unlike my interactions with other humans, myself, nature, and the rest, I never compare me running to things from books. I can't look at the color gradations in the ocean without thinking about Nabokov's description of colors; there are friends of mine I can't talk to without Maria Gostrey from the Ambassadors. But there is no such writer tied to running. Not even Haruki Murakami, though I loved his book about marathons, and not even Updike, though duh.
That said, on the run today I thought an awful lot about a few things. The main one was holy crap, my side hurts (it was the first run in several days). I also thought about the magnificence of Aaron Copland, because I had Appalachian Spring on my iPod; I thought about various pretty girls and how undoubtedly impressed they'd be with my thoroughly jogged physique; and, when I ran by that street sign, I thought about Pale Fire. Not really, though, or rather, not as usual; when I wrote my thesis, I spent about a month and a half sitting in a basement and thinking of very little but Pale Fire. Instead of thinking through Pale Fire -- instead of seeing my Maria Gostrey friend and imagining her entirely through a skein of Jamesian phrases like "remorseless analysis" -- I thought about it, about the beginning image of the Pale Fire poem just by itself, which I hadn't done for just a really long time. Then I thought about how much the cramp in my side hurt.
Running is usually a thing that I don't use books to think about; that's one of the things I like about it. Unlike my interactions with other humans, myself, nature, and the rest, I never compare me running to things from books. I can't look at the color gradations in the ocean without thinking about Nabokov's description of colors; there are friends of mine I can't talk to without Maria Gostrey from the Ambassadors. But there is no such writer tied to running. Not even Haruki Murakami, though I loved his book about marathons, and not even Updike, though duh.
That said, on the run today I thought an awful lot about a few things. The main one was holy crap, my side hurts (it was the first run in several days). I also thought about the magnificence of Aaron Copland, because I had Appalachian Spring on my iPod; I thought about various pretty girls and how undoubtedly impressed they'd be with my thoroughly jogged physique; and, when I ran by that street sign, I thought about Pale Fire. Not really, though, or rather, not as usual; when I wrote my thesis, I spent about a month and a half sitting in a basement and thinking of very little but Pale Fire. Instead of thinking through Pale Fire -- instead of seeing my Maria Gostrey friend and imagining her entirely through a skein of Jamesian phrases like "remorseless analysis" -- I thought about it, about the beginning image of the Pale Fire poem just by itself, which I hadn't done for just a really long time. Then I thought about how much the cramp in my side hurt.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Vacation, All I Ever Wanted
So, today is the first day of my vacation. Since about June, I have not been doing much of anything other than being nervous and earning my keep around the house, so this trip to North Carolina is sort of a vacation from already being on vacation. That said, I am excited: the annual Schratz family trip down here is SUMMER READING TIME, even though my reading time at home has been largely unimpeded and summer is about two thirds over. There are several reasons why going to our house in North Carolina represents ideal reading time, and that show what an ideal reading situation has on offer.
ONE: Chairs. The chairs here are better than the chairs at our house in Lockport for reading, hands down. I don't think we have any chairs in our house in Lockport, actually, except at the dining room table. It turns out that I can read for like 20-25 more minutes per sit-down of reading, when I can put both of my arms on an armrest at once. This is a critical improvement over our couches. Beyond that, we also have like a hammock swing-chair apparatus, which begs to be read upon. The more utilitarian chairs one might take for granted. When you see a hammock swing-chair apparatus, you know that it has to be sit on; and what better thing to do while so sitting, than read your book? So, lesson: Get yourself a chair you can appreciate, and appreciate it.
TWO: A relative paucity of books. I own too many books. I have to read Benjamin's Unpacking My Library essay constantly, to reassure myself that it is ok to have as many freaking books as I have. In that essay, Benjamin recounts an admirer of Anatole France's asking him (France) if he had read all of the books in his library, to which France said, "Not one tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sevres china everyday?" Point, Anatole. Anyway, I don't know if my unread books make as bad a portion as 90% of my book volume, but whatever they make, it ain't great. They take up five-ish shelves, and I stare at them. Often. Half of my unread books have bookmarks on page 3 or 4, from where I decided to start reading the book after staring at their spines before returning, like a chastened philanderer, to the books I was already on pages 50 and 300 of. In North Carolina, I've only got ten books, so way fewer opportunities to spread myself too thin. It's like committing, for two weeks, to use your Sevres china and use the hell out of it, until it is properly appreciated. Lesson here: it may be necessary to take physical measures to curtail the reader's wandering eye.
THREE: A massive body of water. This is more of a societal issue than a me-issue, but it is surprising to me how much people are more willing to let you go sit and read all day if you do it in front of an ocean or a river or a lake or whatever. Thousands of times, I have huffily told my brothers that I am BUSY READING; the only times that they have retreated with dignity in the face of this huff has been with their backs to bodies of water. I tried this once at home at the Erie Canal, but that didn't really work. There is not a lot soothing about the Erie Canal. This isn't much of a lesson; it's hard to find somebody who will really sell you on being against the contemplation of oceans.
So those are three of the reasons why I am excited for my little vacation I'm on. The books themselves, obviously, are exciting too: I've got more Proust (Proust forever), Mason and Dixon by Pynchon, The Spoils of Poynton, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and a few more. So GET AMPED to be bloggified (and now tweeted! @CaptainSchratz) in the coming days. The reading chair is a good blogging chair, as well.
ONE: Chairs. The chairs here are better than the chairs at our house in Lockport for reading, hands down. I don't think we have any chairs in our house in Lockport, actually, except at the dining room table. It turns out that I can read for like 20-25 more minutes per sit-down of reading, when I can put both of my arms on an armrest at once. This is a critical improvement over our couches. Beyond that, we also have like a hammock swing-chair apparatus, which begs to be read upon. The more utilitarian chairs one might take for granted. When you see a hammock swing-chair apparatus, you know that it has to be sit on; and what better thing to do while so sitting, than read your book? So, lesson: Get yourself a chair you can appreciate, and appreciate it.
TWO: A relative paucity of books. I own too many books. I have to read Benjamin's Unpacking My Library essay constantly, to reassure myself that it is ok to have as many freaking books as I have. In that essay, Benjamin recounts an admirer of Anatole France's asking him (France) if he had read all of the books in his library, to which France said, "Not one tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sevres china everyday?" Point, Anatole. Anyway, I don't know if my unread books make as bad a portion as 90% of my book volume, but whatever they make, it ain't great. They take up five-ish shelves, and I stare at them. Often. Half of my unread books have bookmarks on page 3 or 4, from where I decided to start reading the book after staring at their spines before returning, like a chastened philanderer, to the books I was already on pages 50 and 300 of. In North Carolina, I've only got ten books, so way fewer opportunities to spread myself too thin. It's like committing, for two weeks, to use your Sevres china and use the hell out of it, until it is properly appreciated. Lesson here: it may be necessary to take physical measures to curtail the reader's wandering eye.
THREE: A massive body of water. This is more of a societal issue than a me-issue, but it is surprising to me how much people are more willing to let you go sit and read all day if you do it in front of an ocean or a river or a lake or whatever. Thousands of times, I have huffily told my brothers that I am BUSY READING; the only times that they have retreated with dignity in the face of this huff has been with their backs to bodies of water. I tried this once at home at the Erie Canal, but that didn't really work. There is not a lot soothing about the Erie Canal. This isn't much of a lesson; it's hard to find somebody who will really sell you on being against the contemplation of oceans.
So those are three of the reasons why I am excited for my little vacation I'm on. The books themselves, obviously, are exciting too: I've got more Proust (Proust forever), Mason and Dixon by Pynchon, The Spoils of Poynton, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and a few more. So GET AMPED to be bloggified (and now tweeted! @CaptainSchratz) in the coming days. The reading chair is a good blogging chair, as well.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)