"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.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Monday, January 11, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Besties
The day after the day after tomorrow is certainly the last day of the year, and, according to most, the last day of the decade. Because it is fun, this has got people to wonder what the Best (Book/Movie/TV Program/Album) of the arbitrary period of time has been. And, in just before the gate closes, it's time to do just that here at unpacking my library.
First, the best book of the year was, I have no idea. I have read I think two and a half books published this year, and they were fine. I think that the larger commitment of time and mental energies that books demand results in their being less plausible than movies and music to being the accoutrements of a particular year. Everybody listened to Funeral by Arcade Fire in 2004, because that's when it came out; but everybody read the Time Traveler's Wife when it came out, or when it came out in paperback, or when it was optioned for a movie or after they saw the movie or when they had time to kill at Logan Airport on Christmas Eve 2007. It's just a more drawn-out thing. The only book I can at all remember associating with a particular time is The Corrections (on which more below!), which was a Big Deal in pre-September 2001, and even that was more to do with a television hoopla than with the book itself. So the best book of the year is best talked about not the way we pick a Best Picture, but more as a sort of suggestion: the best thing that I happened to have read this year rather than another year. For me, that was probably the Sound and the Fury. Boring, but oh well.
Decades, on the other hand, are long and slow enough to let books be the kind of thing that, retrospectively at least. It makes sense to try to order how we understand the past by awarding some books The Book of the Decade status. Infinite Jest, for example, jumps out as The Book of the Nineties; maybe On the Road or the Catcher in the Rye for The Book of the Fifties? The Dudebrodogman has even suggested that books can be The Book of a Decade without even being published in that decade, in which case his vote for American Psycho would beat out mine for Bright Lights Big City as The Book of the Eighties. So maybe the Book of the Aughts won't get written for another five years or so; but until then, who are our contenders? Here are my ideas, in no particular order.
1) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao -- this got the vote of New York Magazine, and one can see why. Of the books I've thought about, it has the form best suited to a claim of representing, somehow, the millennial attitude toward the presentation of information.
2) The Corrections -- this one was the best book of the Aughts according to themillions, and, again, it has a lot of prestige and such. I personally was underwhelmed by the whole thing, but am willing to hear arguments contra.
3) The Road -- this is one of the two Gloom and Doom contenders, because really, the decade was pretty gloomy and more than a little doomy. It's a spare kind of g&d, as many of you know, since it was our ill-advised first pick for Book of the Book Club.
4) 2666 -- and here's some of the other kind of Gloom and Doom. I actually think this would be a better Book of the Aughts than the Road, because its sense of vaguely defined menace also has the decade's particular style of overinformation and overdetermined connections that's on display in the less apocalyptic Oscar Wao.
5) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay -- and one for the optimists. I think that this could make its case for being the Book of the Aughts the same way in which Gravity's Rainbow could make a case for being the Book of the Seventies. They both use raw matter from actual history, refashioned in their own time.
6) The Tipping Point -- this is probably really the Book of the Aughts, because the most people read it, and it gets taught in seminars and such and isn't fiction. I guess I spent too little time reading non-fiction in the past ten years; I guess I'll have to shape up.
First, the best book of the year was, I have no idea. I have read I think two and a half books published this year, and they were fine. I think that the larger commitment of time and mental energies that books demand results in their being less plausible than movies and music to being the accoutrements of a particular year. Everybody listened to Funeral by Arcade Fire in 2004, because that's when it came out; but everybody read the Time Traveler's Wife when it came out, or when it came out in paperback, or when it was optioned for a movie or after they saw the movie or when they had time to kill at Logan Airport on Christmas Eve 2007. It's just a more drawn-out thing. The only book I can at all remember associating with a particular time is The Corrections (on which more below!), which was a Big Deal in pre-September 2001, and even that was more to do with a television hoopla than with the book itself. So the best book of the year is best talked about not the way we pick a Best Picture, but more as a sort of suggestion: the best thing that I happened to have read this year rather than another year. For me, that was probably the Sound and the Fury. Boring, but oh well.
Decades, on the other hand, are long and slow enough to let books be the kind of thing that, retrospectively at least. It makes sense to try to order how we understand the past by awarding some books The Book of the Decade status. Infinite Jest, for example, jumps out as The Book of the Nineties; maybe On the Road or the Catcher in the Rye for The Book of the Fifties? The Dudebrodogman has even suggested that books can be The Book of a Decade without even being published in that decade, in which case his vote for American Psycho would beat out mine for Bright Lights Big City as The Book of the Eighties. So maybe the Book of the Aughts won't get written for another five years or so; but until then, who are our contenders? Here are my ideas, in no particular order.
1) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao -- this got the vote of New York Magazine, and one can see why. Of the books I've thought about, it has the form best suited to a claim of representing, somehow, the millennial attitude toward the presentation of information.
2) The Corrections -- this one was the best book of the Aughts according to themillions, and, again, it has a lot of prestige and such. I personally was underwhelmed by the whole thing, but am willing to hear arguments contra.
3) The Road -- this is one of the two Gloom and Doom contenders, because really, the decade was pretty gloomy and more than a little doomy. It's a spare kind of g&d, as many of you know, since it was our ill-advised first pick for Book of the Book Club.
4) 2666 -- and here's some of the other kind of Gloom and Doom. I actually think this would be a better Book of the Aughts than the Road, because its sense of vaguely defined menace also has the decade's particular style of overinformation and overdetermined connections that's on display in the less apocalyptic Oscar Wao.
5) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay -- and one for the optimists. I think that this could make its case for being the Book of the Aughts the same way in which Gravity's Rainbow could make a case for being the Book of the Seventies. They both use raw matter from actual history, refashioned in their own time.
6) The Tipping Point -- this is probably really the Book of the Aughts, because the most people read it, and it gets taught in seminars and such and isn't fiction. I guess I spent too little time reading non-fiction in the past ten years; I guess I'll have to shape up.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
On the Giving and Receiving of Books
I always give people books at Christmas; I almost never get books from other people on Christmas. This is fine with me; I get enough books, however they're got, that I don't especially have to count on Christmas for any kind of influx. That I have become expected as a giver of books, too, is fine with me. It is rare, I suppose, and I am lucky, I suppose, to have any sort of gift-giving nature that coincides so nicely with my larger nature; it makes a man feel nicely fixed in the universe. My brother likes dance as much as I like books, and it is not as though that translates nicely into his gift-giving life.
There are two ways you can give books, especially when the onus of getting anything else for them has sort of been vaporized away. One is the way I usually give books to my sister, which I think of as the "Time to Take Your Medicine" approach. That is where, I buy my sister not so much books that I imagine that she'll like (although I do think that she will wind up liking them), as books that I think she had better read. She probably wants to read something written for teenage girls, or read the fifth Harry Potter again, but too bad, this Christmas she got, from me, the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She never said anything to me that remotely suggests a desire to read the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but she is a girl a little older than the girls in the Brodie set, and she goes to an all-girl's school. I figure that all such people ought to read the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and, what with ought implying can and all, I supposed that I would do what I could at Christmastime to help her along. At the opposite of this gift-giving idea spectrum is my grandfather. I suppose that there are some books that I can imagine it behooving my grandfather to read, books that I would think best for him if really pressed on it. Like, Bartleby the Scrivener, for some reason, strikes me as a book one would benefit from particularly in retirement, or maybe one of Philip Roth's later books like the Plot Against America or Indignation, which I think would do a really good job of making someone of my grandfather's age organize his thoughts about the recently ended century. Or but whatever, I could talk for hours about the books I would get an older gentleman if I thought it were time for him to take his bookish medicine, but Pop is no such older gentleman; he needs no bookish medicine of mine. So every year I get him a book, preferably by David Halberstam, about the Yankees, and every year he reads and gives it to me and then I read it and tell him that hate them or love them, the Yankees are a worthy organization and all of that.
Pop and Lizzie are the two poles of book selection; almost all of my friends, and my mother, and brother Connor, exist between them, which is to say that I go back and forth. Last year, it was time for my mother to take the medicine, and she got Jane Eyre; this year, I got her U is for Undertow, a book about which I know nothing except that my mother has read and enjoyed all twenty of its predecessors.
Does a gift given as medicine count as a gift? Derrida, gunning hard against the long incumbent Ralph Waldo Emerson for runner-up-patron-saint of this blog, thinks not; actually, Derrida thinks that the very action of giving a gift is impossible, that the conditions of the possibility of gift-giving are the conditions of its impossibility, that the whole idea of giving a real gift is an unreachable ideal. Well. I guess. But it would seem that the it's-time-to-take-your-medicine gift is even shorter of the ideal, impossible gift than most. What makes gifts impossible is the fact of their address necessarily creating the expectation in the recipient of repayment. And nothing suggests automatic repayment (amortization?) than a book proffered for betterment in my opinion: all you have to do to repay the gift (and the gift bears that in itself) is to read the book. It carries the condition of its impossibility right on it.
So much for that. But there is of course the other thing I am attached to doing with my gift-given books: writing in them. I love to write in books, though I can't really figure out my system. This Christmas I put a quote from Sir Thomas Malory in a book about bottled water, and a quote having to do with Mad Men in a book by Sarah Vowell. It took me an hour to find those two quotes and then I sat, looking at the quotes and wondering what kind of sense it makes to write little chunks of some other text-- or even some globs of texts lifted from a television show -- into a book that had nothing to do with them. For a while I felt like it represented a betrayal of whatever book I was gifting, like, "Here, Executive Committee Member Blood, enjoy your book about water but know that what I really feel about you is a different quote about King Arthur". And then it felt like a betrayal of the (of course, impossible alter) people to whom I was gifting these books, as if I had to put everything which I thought about them into a quote that sat in front of their books. It was a long hour, really. But, figure that these are books I am giving people motivated in some way from a take-your-medicine impulse, because it's not like either of these people voiced any particular desire for them. But what I think that prefatory quotes yanked in from other things do is, however much possible, mediate the amortizing built into the take-your-medicine books. It is as if to say: read this book, but here too is a chunk of text that cannot be repaid, that is only here for you. Books can be amortized, repaid, can be a cause for the creation of a new obligation in you, my friends; as can, of course blog posts. But here too are these quotes, unrepayable even in kind, because it is not a move available to any donee to shoot back a piece of text given unto them. All it takes for more ideal gifts is a little inscription, which is actually good medicine for almost anything at all.
There are two ways you can give books, especially when the onus of getting anything else for them has sort of been vaporized away. One is the way I usually give books to my sister, which I think of as the "Time to Take Your Medicine" approach. That is where, I buy my sister not so much books that I imagine that she'll like (although I do think that she will wind up liking them), as books that I think she had better read. She probably wants to read something written for teenage girls, or read the fifth Harry Potter again, but too bad, this Christmas she got, from me, the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She never said anything to me that remotely suggests a desire to read the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but she is a girl a little older than the girls in the Brodie set, and she goes to an all-girl's school. I figure that all such people ought to read the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and, what with ought implying can and all, I supposed that I would do what I could at Christmastime to help her along. At the opposite of this gift-giving idea spectrum is my grandfather. I suppose that there are some books that I can imagine it behooving my grandfather to read, books that I would think best for him if really pressed on it. Like, Bartleby the Scrivener, for some reason, strikes me as a book one would benefit from particularly in retirement, or maybe one of Philip Roth's later books like the Plot Against America or Indignation, which I think would do a really good job of making someone of my grandfather's age organize his thoughts about the recently ended century. Or but whatever, I could talk for hours about the books I would get an older gentleman if I thought it were time for him to take his bookish medicine, but Pop is no such older gentleman; he needs no bookish medicine of mine. So every year I get him a book, preferably by David Halberstam, about the Yankees, and every year he reads and gives it to me and then I read it and tell him that hate them or love them, the Yankees are a worthy organization and all of that.
Pop and Lizzie are the two poles of book selection; almost all of my friends, and my mother, and brother Connor, exist between them, which is to say that I go back and forth. Last year, it was time for my mother to take the medicine, and she got Jane Eyre; this year, I got her U is for Undertow, a book about which I know nothing except that my mother has read and enjoyed all twenty of its predecessors.
Does a gift given as medicine count as a gift? Derrida, gunning hard against the long incumbent Ralph Waldo Emerson for runner-up-patron-saint of this blog, thinks not; actually, Derrida thinks that the very action of giving a gift is impossible, that the conditions of the possibility of gift-giving are the conditions of its impossibility, that the whole idea of giving a real gift is an unreachable ideal. Well. I guess. But it would seem that the it's-time-to-take-your-medicine gift is even shorter of the ideal, impossible gift than most. What makes gifts impossible is the fact of their address necessarily creating the expectation in the recipient of repayment. And nothing suggests automatic repayment (amortization?) than a book proffered for betterment in my opinion: all you have to do to repay the gift (and the gift bears that in itself) is to read the book. It carries the condition of its impossibility right on it.
So much for that. But there is of course the other thing I am attached to doing with my gift-given books: writing in them. I love to write in books, though I can't really figure out my system. This Christmas I put a quote from Sir Thomas Malory in a book about bottled water, and a quote having to do with Mad Men in a book by Sarah Vowell. It took me an hour to find those two quotes and then I sat, looking at the quotes and wondering what kind of sense it makes to write little chunks of some other text-- or even some globs of texts lifted from a television show -- into a book that had nothing to do with them. For a while I felt like it represented a betrayal of whatever book I was gifting, like, "Here, Executive Committee Member Blood, enjoy your book about water but know that what I really feel about you is a different quote about King Arthur". And then it felt like a betrayal of the (of course, impossible alter) people to whom I was gifting these books, as if I had to put everything which I thought about them into a quote that sat in front of their books. It was a long hour, really. But, figure that these are books I am giving people motivated in some way from a take-your-medicine impulse, because it's not like either of these people voiced any particular desire for them. But what I think that prefatory quotes yanked in from other things do is, however much possible, mediate the amortizing built into the take-your-medicine books. It is as if to say: read this book, but here too is a chunk of text that cannot be repaid, that is only here for you. Books can be amortized, repaid, can be a cause for the creation of a new obligation in you, my friends; as can, of course blog posts. But here too are these quotes, unrepayable even in kind, because it is not a move available to any donee to shoot back a piece of text given unto them. All it takes for more ideal gifts is a little inscription, which is actually good medicine for almost anything at all.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
The Mall and the Bookstore
Today I went Christmas shopping at the mall, even though I went to the same mall -- and, more importantly, the bike shop and the bookstore -- yesterday and bought all of the gifts that I am going to buy for anyone. So I suppose that it is not right to say that I went Christmas shopping at the mall, but rather that I went to the mall in the company of people who were Christmas shopping. I don't know exactly what it was that I was doing, then.
The mall in Amherst, NY, particularly around Christmastime, is a danger zone for people who do not want to run into whom they know without an awful lot of advance notice. I suppose that that is the case for most malls for most people who go home for Christmas. Or "home" -- this has gotten confusing, to the point that I will say things like "Yeah, I'll be home until the weekend after New Year's, but I'm coming home that Monday". Home is a detached signifier, floating from one end of New York state to the other one. Anyway, here I am at home-ish, and I am exactly the sort of person who needs a lot of warning before he sees anyone that I know. If I go to see a movie at the movie theater, I have to have known that I was going to the movie from the time I woke up that day; if I am going to see people I know, I find it is best, for comfort reasons, to know I am going to see them at least from the time I leave the house. It's a thing. Anyway, going to the mall when I have no real reason to and without mapping out all of the possible people I might see is, on paper, a really foolish thing for me to do. But I did it anyway.
Malls and bookstores are my two favorite places to go and wander around, narrowly edging out the park, and widely edging out the park when, as now, it is really cold out. I don't ever want anything at the mall, usually; and especially, I didn't want anything when I went there today. What I suppose I wanted to do was to be at the bookstore, where I always want things, and where even more than that I enjoy just handling the merchandise. But for some reason, I was content to just wander around the mall: and I think it was because I was happy to enjoy, for a little while, the complete opposite of my attitude at the bookstore. The bookstore means plenitude: here is all that you could ever want to read, here is the whole of your reading life stretched out before you with more or less competent people on hand, usually, to give you whatever guidance you need. No one is around to show where the things are in the mall. They have people in the stores, but no mall guides. And, as I have said, they usually have nothing I want. The mall does not mean a plenitude for me; it means that by going there, with my one book I've brought to read while walking around, which I already had, that I am my own plenitude, there. Even accosted by people I know and for whom I am not ready, I remain my own little unit: the mall does not impinge on me, which is exactly what I want from it.
The mall in Amherst, NY, particularly around Christmastime, is a danger zone for people who do not want to run into whom they know without an awful lot of advance notice. I suppose that that is the case for most malls for most people who go home for Christmas. Or "home" -- this has gotten confusing, to the point that I will say things like "Yeah, I'll be home until the weekend after New Year's, but I'm coming home that Monday". Home is a detached signifier, floating from one end of New York state to the other one. Anyway, here I am at home-ish, and I am exactly the sort of person who needs a lot of warning before he sees anyone that I know. If I go to see a movie at the movie theater, I have to have known that I was going to the movie from the time I woke up that day; if I am going to see people I know, I find it is best, for comfort reasons, to know I am going to see them at least from the time I leave the house. It's a thing. Anyway, going to the mall when I have no real reason to and without mapping out all of the possible people I might see is, on paper, a really foolish thing for me to do. But I did it anyway.
Malls and bookstores are my two favorite places to go and wander around, narrowly edging out the park, and widely edging out the park when, as now, it is really cold out. I don't ever want anything at the mall, usually; and especially, I didn't want anything when I went there today. What I suppose I wanted to do was to be at the bookstore, where I always want things, and where even more than that I enjoy just handling the merchandise. But for some reason, I was content to just wander around the mall: and I think it was because I was happy to enjoy, for a little while, the complete opposite of my attitude at the bookstore. The bookstore means plenitude: here is all that you could ever want to read, here is the whole of your reading life stretched out before you with more or less competent people on hand, usually, to give you whatever guidance you need. No one is around to show where the things are in the mall. They have people in the stores, but no mall guides. And, as I have said, they usually have nothing I want. The mall does not mean a plenitude for me; it means that by going there, with my one book I've brought to read while walking around, which I already had, that I am my own plenitude, there. Even accosted by people I know and for whom I am not ready, I remain my own little unit: the mall does not impinge on me, which is exactly what I want from it.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
The Short Story Mixtape
Before I heard about the subject of this piece from the Guardian UK, I had already thought of it, for the first time that I especially remember in a bar in Buffalo: when a girl whom I was talking to refused my offer of a mix cd because she already had enough mix cds, I told her that that was ok because I don't pay enough attention to new music these days to offer what I feel like counts as an engaged mix cd anyway, and what (shifting here to the contemplative register) I would really like to do was offer people a Short Story Mixtape, a book of short stories that I had personally curated for someone's linear enjoyment. Zadie Smith and Jeffrey Eugenides had done it; why not bring their fun to the masses? The girl at the bar told me that she didn't like short stories, saying that if something was going to be short it should just be a poem and if it were going to be long it should just grow a pair and be a novel. But! The people who brought us the Kindle are now bringing us the download-alone short story, which means that my idea (and really, it's an obvious idea, I don't want to sound like those people in the Windows 7 commercials) could be a reality.
The people in that Guardian article don't actually think that a Short Story Mixtape is a "good idea", actually, because they don't, stricto sensu, seem to think that mix cds are a good idea, at least not as a courtship device, which is the most famous and time-honored use for the mix cd (they specifically mention putting in "some ruggedly attractive soul by including The Song of Solomon", which is like putting Let's Get it On in your mix cd). But not all mix cds need be amorous. I agree much more with the sentiment later in the article, the joy that one would feel in being one's own anthologist. They suggest putting the Death of Ivan Ilych in juxtaposition with At the Tolstoy Museum, which is I guess like putting Steal My Sunshine right after More More More. Or you could do mood themed ones, like "Rainy Day" or "Road Trip" or "Party Time", all of which I am pretty sure I have made mix cds themed to. I guess it would be tricky to do the last one as a Short Story Mixtape -- it would have to be kind of a quiet party, for one thing -- but the other two would work well.
Rainy Day Mixtape
Axolotl by Julio Cortazar
Spring in Fialta by Vladimir Nabokov
The Lady with the Little Dog by Anton Chekhov
Auggie Wren's Christmas Story by Paul Auster
Road Trip
A Choice of Accommodations by Jhumpa Lahiri
Nevada by John Updike
Under the Rose by Thomas Pynchon (only if it's a really far trip, though)
Tyrants Destroyed by Vladimir Nabokov
Yeah, I know, two Nabokovs. But every mix cd I ever made, road tripping, partying or rainy daying had a song on it by Spencer Krug, so somebody was bound to be on there a few times. But the Short Story Mixtape is fun! What kind of moods, and what kinds of stories, would you guys make?
The people in that Guardian article don't actually think that a Short Story Mixtape is a "good idea", actually, because they don't, stricto sensu, seem to think that mix cds are a good idea, at least not as a courtship device, which is the most famous and time-honored use for the mix cd (they specifically mention putting in "some ruggedly attractive soul by including The Song of Solomon", which is like putting Let's Get it On in your mix cd). But not all mix cds need be amorous. I agree much more with the sentiment later in the article, the joy that one would feel in being one's own anthologist. They suggest putting the Death of Ivan Ilych in juxtaposition with At the Tolstoy Museum, which is I guess like putting Steal My Sunshine right after More More More. Or you could do mood themed ones, like "Rainy Day" or "Road Trip" or "Party Time", all of which I am pretty sure I have made mix cds themed to. I guess it would be tricky to do the last one as a Short Story Mixtape -- it would have to be kind of a quiet party, for one thing -- but the other two would work well.
Rainy Day Mixtape
Axolotl by Julio Cortazar
Spring in Fialta by Vladimir Nabokov
The Lady with the Little Dog by Anton Chekhov
Auggie Wren's Christmas Story by Paul Auster
Road Trip
A Choice of Accommodations by Jhumpa Lahiri
Nevada by John Updike
Under the Rose by Thomas Pynchon (only if it's a really far trip, though)
Tyrants Destroyed by Vladimir Nabokov
Yeah, I know, two Nabokovs. But every mix cd I ever made, road tripping, partying or rainy daying had a song on it by Spencer Krug, so somebody was bound to be on there a few times. But the Short Story Mixtape is fun! What kind of moods, and what kinds of stories, would you guys make?
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