the boy who lived dies, but then lives again. · 3 August 07 by j.
A brief history of my relationship with Harry Potter:
I was late in climbing on this train, skeptical to say the least. But after enough trusted opinions insisted on my reading of “the boy who lived,” I finally gave in. Truthfully, I myself could’ve lived without the first two books, though that’s not to say I didn’t fly through them, reading each one in only a day. They were great, but definitely written for kids. The good news is that as Harry grows up, so does the writing and subject matter; things get darker, scarier, and also, more romantic, meaning Harry starts to notice girls. And so I read three and four next, one right after the other, and eventually five and six, and if you haven’t read all these little Potter stories yet, here’s the way I’d suggest: Buy all seven, lock yourself in a room, and read. It’ll be just like that time you ordered a season of Lost from Netflix and hid in your living room for a week, only better. The details, the subtleties, the threads, will never get lost. The momentum will never stop moving.
And so to book seven, the big ending.
I have to say that as I closed the cover on that whopping 759-paged book, the first thing I felt was relief, then accomplishment, but then, disappointment. But why? Let’s cover the possibilities. Was I disappointed because it was finally over? Because there would be no more books (supposedly), no more adventures of Harry, Ron, and Hermione? Maybe, it is sort of sad. Truthfully, I miss them already.
Or was it because I just wasn’t happy with the ending? Because I must admit, when it became clear to me that Harry would have to die in order for everything to come together in the end, I was impressed with Rowling’s guts. Wow, she’s really going to do it, I thought to myself. She’s really going to kill Harry. I was sad, but as a writer, I understood it had to happen that way for the story to work. I imagined Rowling at her desk late one night, the moment she realized she would have to kill Harry in the end. What must’ve that moment been like?
But anyway, so then some things happen, Voldemort kills Harry, and then…wait a second, Harry’s not dead! He’s in some sort of train station/purgatory place having a nice little conversation with Dumbledore and then next thing you know he goes back to life to kill Voldemort, save the world, get married, put his little kids named after the deceased main characters onto the Hogwarts Express and assumably live happily ever after! Yay!
Except where are the details about Harry’s life as an adult? I mean, I don’t want to know the inner workings of he and Ginny’s sex life, but I’d like to know what the man who lived does for a living, wouldn’t you? Is he an auror? Are aurors even around anymore? Does he hope to be headmaster of Hogwarts? Or does he feel deeply depressed because he fulfilled his purpose in life at age seventeen and now the only place to go is down? Oh my God, is Harry one of those awful people whose golden years were high school?
Okay, okay, okay. It’s a kids’ book. I have to keep reminding myself of this. And maybe that’s simply why I was disappointed – because in order to be fair to the millions of children reading this book, Harry couldn’t die. What would the message be? Work hard even if no one likes you, be true to yourself, triumph over evil, then die. I mean, that might not be far from the truth but we don’t have to go around printing it out for kids everywhere.
Or maybe I was just disappointed because anything that is this built up has an irrevocable tendency to disappoint. One word: Sopranos. Sometimes an ending can just do no right.
But through all this, I am still impressed (read: jealous, envious) with J.K. Rowling. I am endlessly amazed with authors who can create entirely new worlds that pulse with such character and detail. For a long time my single complaint of the series was with the language – because it was written for children, I felt there was something lacking. Don’t get me wrong, the scenes are vivid, the descriptions spot-on, but clearly there are none of those heartbreakingly good sentences that you’ll find in the best of adult fiction. Never was there a sentence where I said, “Ouch.” But then I realized that these books are ripe with language, just not in the way I’m used to. Essentially, Rowling has created a brand new dictionary of words, amazing words: horcrux, hogwarts, auror, deluminator, polyjuice, slytherin, cruciatus, quidditch. It’s as if Rowling uncovered a brand new alphabet.
All things considered, the story of Harry Potter from beginning to end is inventive, original, and well worth the read, even if for the mere reason of not letting the countless private jokes understood only to Potter fans fly over your head like a runaway Snitch. Should you read it? Yes, all seven.
the yiddish policemen's union. · 31 July 07 by j.
Maybe I’m biased. When I first opened the cover of this book, I knew I would like it before I even read the first word – and no, not just because it’s a well known fact that I consider Michael Chabon to be some sort of alien wonderboy writer – but because it was inscribed to me.
Yes, my friend Jack stood in line and asked Chabon to make it out to “The Fort Greene Assassin,” a nickname that he has for some reason pinned to me. Apparently, Chabon looked momentarily confused, curious, then gave a quick glance at the long line of fans behind Jack, and just signed the damn thing. The idea that he might’ve gone on to wonder about it later is sort of better anyway.
But the book. Well, just another serious notch on Chabon’s genius-belt. Once again he has created a completely original and vibrant world – this time within Alaska, in a district called Sitka, which for sixty years has been something of a safe haven for Jewish refugees and their families. But now the threat of reversion hangs over their heads, and alongside that the possibility of having to rematriculate back into the States, and for the many colorful characters that call Sitka home – from the hard-drinking Homicide Detective Meyer Landsman, our protagonist, who, among other things, is trying to solve a murder by following a game of chess, to his partner Detective Shemets, a gigantic half-Tlingit whose wife carries a pregnancy test around in the pocket of her bathrobe, to the mafia-esque black hats and their beyond-massive rabbi, to the new police chief who pins her hair up with paperclips, wears only orange, and wholeheartedly follows the rules (also Landsman’s ex-wife), to the deceased in question, quite possibly the most wasted miracle in history – things are about to change.
As always, Chabon’s characters and plot are distinctly his own, and again, as always, what’s even more impressive is his language. When introducing a man, who perhaps a lesser writer would describe as fat, huge, gigantic, etc., Chabon instead says: “Rabbi Heskel Shpilman is a deformed mountain, a giant ruined dessert, a cartoon house with the windows shut and the sink left running. A little kid lumped him together, a mob of kids, blind orphans who never laid eyes on a man…It would require the brain strength of the eighteen greatest sages in history to reason throught the arguments against and in favor of classifying the rebbe’s massive bottom as either a creature of the deep, a man-made structure, or an unavoidable act of God.”
This book (like above paragraph) is inventive, funny, at times silly, but most importantly, vivid, and made up of sentences that make your heart sink (in the best of ways) and most of all, never, ever, ever, ever boring. Read it.
russian lover. · 23 July 07 by j.
Joining the ranks of female fiction writers such as Amy Hempel and A.M. Homes, Jana Martin’s first collection of short stories is a force of contemporary nature. Each tale offers a voice entirely its own, and yet all seem to adhere to the perfect dichotomy of remaining vulnerable yet tough. There’s the failed amateur dominatrix in “Rubber Days,” who addresses the reader from the morphine drip of her hospital bed; the scorned wife writing a series of almost-apologetic letters to her soon-to-be-former mother-in-law in the title story; the helpless woman struggling through hearing loss in “Perforated: a Lexicon,” perhaps the most inventive, touching (and I’m betting only) telling of a perforated eardrum in history. Martin’s language is as evocative and playful as the stories themselves, with lines like, “My landlord sitting there watching like a sin professor, chewing the fat cud of what-a-surprise,” and, “I smelled like the sweat off a zoo animal.” But beware, as this is how she’ll trick you: Russian Lover is a powerhouse of subtlety, made up of stories that are original, tender, sometimes even funny, but just below every quirky surface, something deeper and darker lurks. Each narrator will invite you in like a strange neighbor you’ve always been curious about. She’ll lead you around, make sure you’re comfortable, and then she’ll sucker-punch the breath right out of you.
Reviewed for the Oct/Nov issue of BUST Magazine.
pushed: the painful truth about childbirth and modern maternity care · 23 July 07 by j.
The battle for a woman’s right to choose has come a long way, though it’s hardly over. Supreme Court aside, there’s something else we as women need to be thinking about, something so intrinsic that it’s been easily overshadowed by the red-hot abortion issue. As author Jennifer Block puts it, “mainstream American feminist groups have been slow to recognize the right to reproduce along with the right to be free from reproducing.”
In her first book, Block has fearlessly pulled back the hospital curtain on the truth of what’s really happening in the world of childbirth today—and let me just tell you ladies, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone resembling Dr. Huxtable in there. Instead you’ll discover what has become “the business of birth,” the doctors who push to induce so babies are born more conveniently between 9 and 5, the nurses who butt heads over the appropriate amount of Pitocin to pump into an expectant mom. You’ll meet the conflicted doulas stuck between supporting mothers and staying on good terms with the local physicians, and the brave women who eschew the maternity ward entirely, opting instead for a kiddie pool in the living room with a midwife, or—in the case of one mother—a completely unassisted birth of twins atop a toilet.
A must-read for anyone hoping to make an informed choice about bringing life into this world, Pushed is a fact-packed page turner that will affix new meaning to the word birthright.
Reviewed for the Aug/Sept issue of BUST Magazine.
the namesakes. · 1 May 07 by j.
vs. 
I’ve been thinking about adaptation lately.
Adaptation: noun
1. the act of adapting.
2. the state of being adapted; adjustment.
3. something produced by adapting: an adaptation of a play for television.
People forget about what the word means: to adapt. It means to change, or as in the above definition, to adjust. You can’t just take the story in a novel and throw it up on the screen. Novels are more complex, more immediate. They allow for endless digression and description. They tell the story, specifically, to you. While that book is in your hands, nothing else is.
Films are more often shared situations. You have your boyfriend or girlfriend at your side, your hand in a box of popcorn, the flux of strangers in your surroundings. You have dialogue and image and music, all gathering together to create something very large and all-encompassing.
It seems the way we take in these pieces of art reflect the way they were created. A novel is written in solitude, one single mind creating a world in hopes of sharing it with another. Sure you have readers, teachers, editors, and agents, but ultimately, it’s a singular process. Films have hundreds of hands in the mix: the ultimate plural endeavor.
To make one into the other, surely some changes must be made.
I have no problems with this. I love the idea of it, the idea of one story getting the chance to be told through many mediums. I love the idea of collaboration, of being free enough to let something beautiful take its own course.
4. Adaptation in terms of biology:
a. any alteration in the structure or function of an organism or any of its parts that results from natural selection and by which the organism becomes better fitted to survive and multiply in its environment.
b. a form or structure modified to fit a changed environment.
c. the ability of a species to survive in a particular ecological niche, esp. because of alterations of form or behavior brought about through natural selection.
Think of it this way: A book is an organism that has survived a long time. It has gone through the process of natural selection and come out the other side as a movie because consumers today have an attention span that leaves something to be desired. They say no one reads anymore, the book/amoeba thinks to itself, and so it morphs onto the big screen in order to survive.
There have been some lovely adaptations in the past few years – The Ice Storm, Brokeback Mountain, Little Children, and then there have been the not-so-lovelies. I am disappointed to say that I think I have to shove The Namesake into the second pile, though I’ll admit to being hesitant.
I loved Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel. Plot-wise, it tells the story of an arranged marriage in India that leads to the couple’s life together in America. Their first son, Gogol, is the true protagonist, forced to explore who he is and where he came from in order to find out whether or not the two are as intertwined as they sometimes seem.
Mira Nair’s film certainly brings this plot across gracefully. Visually, the film is beautiful. The performances are shockingly good, particularly those of the actors who portray the parents. But I had a major issue that, in the end, left me feeling nothing but disappointment.
It seemed that everything that revolved around India was lovely and warm, the flashbacks, histories, and food, the parents and their memories. And everything about America came across as contrived in comparison. I’m of course aware that India has a culture this country couldn’t hold a candle to, but the problem was that when all of Gogol’s Americanisms (and by that I mean girlfriends) seemed lame and trite, it took away from the richness of the story, the inner struggle that the book steers him through. And if you don’t understand his inner struggle, can’t relate to it in any way, if you just sit there thinking, “Why won’t he just dump that annoying idiot?,” then you’ve clearly missed the point. Or I did anyway.
There was just something missing, something deep and true that was so intrinsic to the novel that might be impossible to convey on the screen. Maybe in order to get between the lines, you must simply read them.
To me, The Namesake is about Gogol, about his name and what it even means to have a name. It’s about the idea of home, and what it means to call a place (or person) home. It’s about the necessity of lopping off the strings that tie you to your past in order to realize that you need to knot them up again. Sometimes those strands are the only thing that prevent you from simply floating away, like a balloon that has slipped from a child’s hand. Because a floating balloon is only good for those few seconds that you’re able to see it disappear romantically into the clouds. But after that it’s just lost.
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you might not love me yet, but that homeless guy certainly did. · 27 March 07 by j.
I will admit to not having read this book yet, but I did catch Lethem at his reading at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square last week. I slid into the back row of the packed room just as Lethem took the podium. He began to brief the audience on the plot of his latest book, You Don’t Love Me Yet. The novel tells the story of a fledgling rock band in Los Angeles, and Lethem gave the room the basics of the plot before cracking open his book; the good looking lead singer with the ubiquitous shock of hair that fell perfectly into his eyes, the relationship between said lead singer and his bass playing ex-girlfriend, the socially awkward genius behind the drums, the seemingly tomboyish guitar player in whose living room the band normally practiced. I’m a big Lethem fan, but I immediately became inundated with doubts. I mean, is it just me, or does this setup sound a bit, dare I say, cliche?
Maybe it was at this point that I began to become aware of a soft stench beside me. Two seats lay bare to my right, and beside these empty chairs sat a couple of guys. I took note of the bags at their feet, the dirt on their jeans and beneath their bitten fingernails, the angry mass of dreadlocks on the head of one. They both hunched forward in their folding chairs, having a hushed argument that I couldn’t quite catch. The dreadless one looked up at me and grinned; I shot back a noncommittal smile and turned my attention back to the reading at hand.
Lethem read, and my doubts were quickly assauged as the somewhat cliched premise gave way to the creative spin I was hoping for. After a few minutes of jamming, the band disperses; Drummer and Guitarist move to the kitchen for the hum of the refrigerator, bologna sandwiches, and ginger ale, and the ex-lovers sink into the couch. Lead singer begins to tell Bassist about how much he hates his job at the zoo, how he wants to quit but can’t bear the thought of abandoning a certain kangaroo who’s grown close to his heart. She asks if the kangaroo is a male or female, and when he answers that she’s a flyer, meaning female, the bass player finds herself inexplicably jealous.
My listen was suddenly interrupted by the grinning homeless guy’s gruff exit. He spat something inaudible to his buddy, then gathered up his bags, ambled over me with a half-hearted apology, and disappeared down the escalator. Dreadhead sighed heavily, muttered something, and moved a seat closer to me. Perhaps his friend had had the better seat.
Next thing I knew, Lethem was singing. “Monster eyes,” he sang in a glorified whisper, “Better get away from my monster eyes.” He moved from dialogue to description to song lyrics seamlessly, singing in a casual way that I can only describe as cute. “Na na na na na na. Monster eyes!”
There was some shuffling to my right. I looked over to find Dreadhead staring right at me, his bloodshot blue eyes fixed firmly on my face. My eyes traveled downward to where the movement was happening – both hands were down his pants, two bulges massaging a third. My stomach lurched; my heart beat in its chest. I looked around for a manager or at least a kindred spirit, someone who could at least share in the horror of this moment. I was desperate for anything, an eye-widening, a tongue sticking out, a disgusted shudder, but all eyes were on Lethem as he continued to keep his tune. I looked back at Dreadhead and gave him the best look of death I could come up with. He took his hands out of his pants and began rummaging through his multitude of duffel bags. I tried to pay attention.
Lethem was beginning his Q&A. Someone asked why this is the second time he’s written a kangaroo into a novel. He admitted that in his first book, Gun with Occasional Music, he made the mistake of giving the male kangaroo (a hustler-type named Joey) a pouch, which is incorrect by nature’s standards. And so he decided he wanted to right this wrong by giving it a second try.
I heard a sound that reminded me of squeezing an empty container of shampoo; air was being pushed from a plastic bottle. I heard the sharp crack of a dent retracting, then the soft whoosh of air. I looked over and down and saw that Dreadhead had his fly unzipped; his calloused fingers were shoved into the gaping hole of his jeans. He had something in there that he was fiddling with (ok, well I guess he had two things…or four if you really want to get specific/disgusting). He began gaping at me again, but this time he was undeterred when I shot him another death look.
I spotted a police officer a few feet away and offered a pleading look. He noticed and moved toward my row, eyeing Dreadhead like a terrorist. I turned back to Dreadhead, trying to see if he’d noticed that I’d alerted the authorities like a tattle tale tourist. He didn’t seem to care. He pulled the tiny clear bottle out of his pants and pressed it up against his nostrils, eyes closed, inhaling loudly through his nose like a yogi. Then he moved a seat closer, leaving only one empty space between us. His stench engulfed me. I turned back to the cop and began to stand up, but the cop quickly gestured for me to stay put. He pointed to the gun in his holster, as if it was supposed to offer comfort.
I turned back to the reading. People were raising their hands. Lethem was speaking into the microphone. It was a little like falling asleep in the middle of a movie, and then waking up right at the end. You try to gather as much as you can from that lost hour, but you’re still half-asleep and confused and possibly even dreaming. I tried to focus. Lethem mentioned experimental film rights. He advised teachers to encourage their writing students to “play”. He bragged of seeing “My Bloody Valentine” one time in a room with six other people.
Dreadhead put the small bottle on the chair between us. I looked down to discover that it was a bottle of Purell, the hand sanitizer. It was travel-sized, nearly empty, and covered in a mix of pubic hair and what I desperately hoped was leftover Purell. It was only a couple of inches from my jacket. I decided that if it touched me or any of my belongings, I would die. I would just lay down on the floor and die. Dreadhead and I made eye contact for a final time, and as he horrifically began to reach an arm over the back of my chair, I grabbed my coat, bag, and notebook in one fell swoop and flew to the back of the room, leaving Dreadhead alone with his dirty yet clean hands, and the rest of whatever Jonathan Lethem’s answers might have been.
will the real rick moody please stand up! a defense of the execrable richard ford. · 23 February 07 by j.
I’ll admit that I looked up the word “execrable,” not because I didn’t know what it meant, but rather because I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the fact that someone would use that adjective to describe someone who I’d spent the past few months reading.
Let me back up. I wrote a guest blog over at my friend Jack’s site (www.poundforpound.blogspot.com – please look). He had asked me to do a round-up of my top 5 books of 2006, and considering I was nearing the end of my Richard Ford trilogy, I decided to include the final of the three, entitled Lay of the Land.
I posted a link to the blog on piano&scene’s myspace page (www.myspace.com/pianoandscenery), and soon got a barrage of comments, most notably from a user known only as “Rick,” but upon further inspection, was supposedly the writer Rick Moody. I say supposedly because as most of you web surfers know, a lot of myspace pages are nothing but fakes, particularly when it comes to authors and bands and the like. Fans put up pages, and then try to pass themselves off as the real thing. At any rate, I exchanged a few quips with “Rick,” and ended up deciding that he seemed to me an imposter.
Some clues:
First, the pictures. Of the three currently up, two struck me as suspicious. One is a blurry shot of Moody playing a show with his band, and looks like it was probably taken from a camera phone in the audience. The other is a photograph of an ice storm. Now, for those of you who don’t leave your homes, Moody wrote a novel called The Ice Storm a few years back. (Let me just take a moment here to point out that this book is genius. Yes, the movie is great, but the book is better. And while we’re on the topic, you should also read Purple America as soon as humanly possible – my personal favorite in the Moody repertoire.) But there was something about posting a picture of a real ice storm struck me as sort of strange, or dare I say it, cheesy. I should say it rubbed me as a rather fan thing to do.
And second, in his “About Me” section, all of the books he’s written are listed out in capital letters. Now I know that a lot of writers do this, but I mean, c’mon, you’re Rick Moody! We know what books you wrote!! Do you really need to rub it in?! Maybe this reaction was just my dorkiness getting the better of my judgment, but either way, it seemed sort of weird.
But then a few things gave me pause in the opposite direction. His band is in his number one spot. Okay. His age seemed right. Easy enough. A few of the comments on his page veered away from the generic, “Thanks for the add!,” and more toward the personal. Hmmm, I thought to myself…
I began calling in my sources. My friend Liza once worked on a film with his brother Dwight, and she suggested quizzing him as to the facts on that. I sent text messages to my friend Russ in SF, who knows him from his study at Bennington. I googled, searched, read, and in fact, talked so much about the situation that my boyfriend actually came up with a nickname for the imposter. We began to call him Roody.
In the end, I decided that it didn’t matter if it was him or not. What mattered was that this whole thing got started because of Richard Ford, and because of our disagreement over his talent or lack thereof. And so I vowed to write this post, to defend Richard Ford, to send the real/fake Rick the link, and then to see what would happen next.
And so now for Richard Ford.
I read Ford’s three books in succession during December of last year, and so I’m not going to go into the details of each book, partly because the material is not as fresh as I wish it were, and partly because this post is already getting a bit lengthy with the details of my latest literary mystery (maybe someday I’ll tell the story of Frederic Tuten). In a nutshell, this trilogy tells the story of Frank Bascombe, an average guy living in suburban New Jersey. In The Sportswriter, Bascombe is introduced as a one time short story penner-turned-sportswriter coming off the death of his young son. He is in the midst of a divorce, still has two other children to raise, and is attempting to make sense of life and the strangeness that it often brings. In Independence Day, he has since traded in his freelance magazine gig for a career as a real estate agent. His ex-wife is remarried, he’s dating around, and his son is now a troubled teen. In Lay of the Land, Bascombe is remarried himself, and he and his second wife, Sally, have moved to the shore. Sally, however, has mysteriously disappeared to an island off the coast of Scotland with her ex-husband, Wally, long believed to be dead. Frank is left behind with a fresh case of colon cancer, a Thanksgiving holiday approaching, and two grown children who still seem just as strange to him as they ever were.
In some ways these books are mundane. Ford is into detail, and we get to know everything about Bascombe, right down to the exact highways he drives down every morning, what he eats (or doesn’t eat) for breakfast, and how many times a day he takes a pee. Each book is well over 300 pages, and they span just a couple of days apiece. The pace is slow and detailed and sometimes, even boring. My point is that these books take a little getting used to, but I think that’s why I’m fond of them.
I’m a fast and voracious reader, often plunging through books simply because I can’t wait to get to the next one. I’m also partial to the contemporary, which tends to help my cause. It seems the common style today is more sparse, relying more on dialogue than description, and often weighty with gimmicks or strange language. Ford’s books are the opposite. He forces the reader to slow down, to ease into the suburban nothingness, the melancholia of life. Bascombe doesn’t know everything, far from it in fact, and the vulnerable and often clueless nature of the character allows the reader to journey through his life with him. We judge Bascombe, we shake our heads at some of his impulsive behavior and often dorky language, but at the same time we relate. Because of Bascombe’s temperament, a lot of the material feels rather lighthearted. Frank Bascombe doesn’t let things get to him, so neither should we. But only upon looking back do you notice how dark a lot of this material is, how daunting. In the end, maybe we’re not so sure that we’d deal with the presented situations any better than good ‘ol Bascombe, the quintessential contemporary Dad.
It could just be that I’m a sucker for the sentimental, but lines like, “I’d find that what felt like melancholy was just a prelude to bursting out laughing and needlessly freezing a sweet small piece of my heart I’d be better off to keep than lose,” just strike me in the right way. Or even simple things like: “Silences are almost always affirmative.” These sort of thoughts are of the everyday, like the material in the trilogy, and like Bascombe himself.
So many books out there boast extraordinary protagonists. The characters are extremely perspicacious or intelligent. They’ve recovered from great calamities, or taken part in life-changing adventures that you or I will never come close to. Of course you want to read about someone interesting, someone who grows and changes, someone who has an arc. But nobodies have arcs too. Frank Bascombe is exactly that. He may not be an American protagonist who will stand the ages, a Caufield or a March, but I found myself turning those pages nonetheless, if only because I was sort of fond of the somewhat blundering Bascombe – if only just to see what would happen next. I mean, nobodies are somebodies too. Just like somebodies are nobodies. After all, even Rick Moody has a myspace page.
And so yes, if you’re wondering, it was really him.
the disappointment artist · 21 October 06 by j.
I once followed Jonathan Lethem around St. Mark’s Bookstore for close to thirty minutes. I stood beside him near the non-fiction new releases, absently picking up and thumbing through the first hardcover I could grab, then silently cursing myself when I realized the book had something to do with baseball. What if Jonathan had seen that book in my hands, the embarrassingly large white baseball that seemed to pulse like a beating heart from the cover? What if he had looked sideways for one second in even the slightest bit of interest, and then upon seeing the book in my hands, turned away in silent judgement? I judge a book (and its carrier) by its cover all the time, and I mean that literally.
I received Fortress of Solitude as a Christmas gift a few years back. I’m big on titles as well as covers, and this book succeeded in both areas right off the bat (god, do I like baseball?). I really loved that novel (think: coming of age story about two motherless boys, one black, one white, growing up in Brooklyn amidst music, graffiti, and comic books), and even though I thought it could’ve done without the last fifty pages or so, I decided Lethem was worthy of my interest.
Enter Motherless Brooklyn. Let me just say here: if you have not read this book yet, please stop wasting your valuable time. Close this browser, turn off your sad little laptop, and get yourself to a bookstore. You will fall in love with Lionel Essrog in a way you haven’t fallen in love with a character since Holden Caufield. Seriously. I’m not kidding. If I find out that you haven’t read that book but you’ve finished reading this blog, I might never speak to you again.
By the time I finished Motherless Brooklyn, my literary crush was all-consuming. I read a few of his other books and stayed on top of his essays, articles, and tendency to moonlight as a collection editor. At some point I went to see Lethem speak at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, MA. He read from The Disappointment Artist, showed obscure movie clips, and answered generic audience questions with such intelligence and wit that I was sighing and pinching my friend Amber’s arm until she nearly had bruises.
It’s safe to say I was in love.
Fast forward a few years and I found myself standing beside him in St. Marks, my heart racing, my ego quietly prodding me to casually manipulate him toward the back of the store where my author buttons sell on a small mesh wall. I knew for a fact that two bearing his name were there (I lurk regularly around the store, obsessively counting out how many buttons have sold since my last visit), and I began to imagine some sort of encounter where he would see them, and then, “oh, what a coincidence! I made those! Oh, no, it’s really nothing, just this little silly thing I do”... I get so caught up in my daydream that I only come to as Lethem is walking out the front door, bag in hand. I almost smack myself in the face for not paying attention to what books he bought.
For whatever reason, I hadn’t read The Disappointment Artist in its entirety until now, but I’m glad. Let me explain. I recently noticed that Lethem’s first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music, had been sitting in my book collection for years, having been acquired during one of my book-clerk stints, and then shelved unread. I picked it up a few weeks ago, read it in a few days, and was (intake of deep breath) disappointed.
I mean, the book wasn’t bad. It’s set in a futuristic world full of evolved animals (a sheep as a maid, a kangaroo as a gun-toting bully) and legal drugs called Avoidal and Forgettol. It’s imaginative and clever, smart and suspenseful. But I just didn’t love it.
After a few days of minor depression, I decided to pick up The Dissapointment Artist (pun slightly intended). Thank God. The topics of these essays range from the New York City Subway system to his obsession with Philip K. Dick to his mother’s death. They are beyond smart (I sent myself to the dictionary twice), interspersed with pop culture commentary, personal truths, and single sentences that you’ll want to read five times.
But what I’m getting at is this: Lethem is an obsessive. A quote from the final (as well as my favorite) essay in the collection, “The Beards”:
“I read all the Narnia books. I read Lord of the Rings. I read every book by Ray Bradbury. I read every book by Raymond Chandler. I reread every book by Raymond Chandler…I watched Star Wars twenty-one times in a single summer, largely alone…Philip K. Dick became my favorite writer, and, spellbound by forty-odd titles listed in the front of a Bantam edition of Ubik, I swore to find and read them all, and succeeded…I played the third album by Talking Heads, called Fear of Music, to the point of destroying the vinyl, then replaced it with a new copy. I memorized the lyrics, memorized the lyrics to other Talking Heads albums, saw Talking Heads play any chance I got, and when I arrived at college put up a sign in the wing of my dormitory with an arrow pointing down the hall where some Grateful Dead fans lived, reading DEAD HEADS, and an arrow pointing in the direction of the room I shared with my simpatico roommate, reading TALKING HEADS. At the peak, in 1980 or 1981, my identification was so complete that I might have wished to wear the album Fear of Music in place of my head so as to be more clearly seen by those around me.”
In this way, I can relate. I fall head over heels in love with things all the time – books, authors, films, songs. I fall in love with a certain corner in New York, a new flavor of ice cream, the perfect corn muffin. And to love things so fiercely is to set your expectations high, which in turn is to inevitably set yourself up for disappointment.
“I couldn’t bear to listen to Talking Heads records, even the ones I’d previously revered, after Naked, and after David Byrne’s early solo records…I suffered other similar, if milder divorces: from the surrealist painters Magritte and De Chirico, from Jean-Luc Godard, from Brian Eno and David Bowie. These disappointments I managed to modulate: the artists are less like ex-lovers than like friends I keep in my address book but call less often than I used to. It was my splits from Talking Heads and Stanley Kubrick and Don DeLillo that left me as indignant, ashamed, and unmoored as breakups with a girlfriend or wife, wondering who’d failed whom.”
Why is it that we, as readers, listeners, watchers, get so fully committed, so completely enmeshed, not only in the product we love but also in the producer? I find something that interests me and immediately I must know everything about it, and yet, the moment I find one hole in the fabric, I want to stuff my fist right through it, because for some reason, it’s ruined.
“The artists who’d seemed to promise the most were the ones who’d created art that stirred me while seeming to absent themselves from emotional risk – so these were the ones capable of failing my needs most violently. When I discovered their imperfections, my own hope of absenting myself from emotional risk seemed imperiled…My declaring a writer or musician or director my favorite, it seemed, contained a kind of suicide pact for my enthusiasm. The disappontment artist was me.”
The point is, there’s no reason for me to be disappointed in Gun, With Occasional Music, or rather, I should say that it’s ok if I’m a little disappointed. It doesn’t have to mean that Lethem can’t be a favorite of mine or that I therefore like his other books less than I thought I did. It just means that he is a human being and I am a human being and he is creating and consuming and I am creating and consuming and the whole thing is this gigantic (and at the moment, overwhelmingly exciting) give and take. Maybe I can’t change how much I love things, and I can’t change that tiny sinking in my chest when something doesn’t meet the love I want to feel for it. But I can change the way I think about it, the way things break down.
Imagine it like a bubble. When you’re an artist, you create a body of work, a buzz, a reputation. The bubble around you keeps getting bigger, slowly turning into something in which the sum is bigger than its parts. And so when one small section doesn’t live up to judgment, the bubble just shrinks a little. It doesn’t have to pop. It’s still there around you, clear and iridescent, the sun glinting off its exterior. And in the middle of that giant bubble is still that same person standing there, that same person you fell for to begin with. In the middle of that bubble is you.
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mysteries of pittsburgh · 3 October 06 by j.
Brace yourself: I plan to do a lot of quoting in this one.
On page one, Art, a college student in Pittsburgh, has lunch with his father, the gangster. Here is an excerpt:
“Then he asked me what my plans were for the summer, and in the flush of some strong emotion or other I said, more or less: It’s the beginning of the summer and I’m standing in the lobby of a thousand-story grand hotel, where a bank of elevators a mile long and an endless red row of monkey attendants in gold braid wait to carry me up, up, up through the suites of moguls, of spies, and of starlets, to rush me straight to the zeppelin mooring at the art deco summit, where they keep the huge dirigible of August tied up and bobbing in the high winds. On the way to the shining needle at the top I will wear a lot of neckites, I will buy five or six works of genius on 45 rpm, and perhaps too many times I will find myself looking at the snapped spine of a lemon wedge at the bottom of a drink. I said, ‘I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray.’”
Okay. Three things:
1. I don’t even know what half of that means but I am pretty sure that it’s genius.
2. I am definitely sure that Michael Chabon is a genius (see: Kavalier and Clay, the paragraph above, etc.).
3. I read this paragraph at least five times, then shut the book, dug a pencil out of my bag, and began underlining. People, this book made me start underlining again. I haven’t done that since college, and I’m not even sure I did it then.
Long story short, if you’re not feeling that excerpt, then read no more. What Art predicts in that paragraph is essentially, give or take, what happens in the rest of the novel, the writing so lovely and melancholic that it will make your heart flutter and your head spin.
The premise is simple. Art’s a college kid wandering around the strange streets of Pittsburgh in summer – getting drunk, working in a crappy bookstore, avoiding his father, falling in and out of love. The boy is lost, but still you want to follow him wherever he goes.
And the other characters. Jesus. The only justice I can do is just quote some more. I have to let Art be the one to explain, because as colorfully-wonderful as the other characters are, they all just speak a little more as to who Art really is.
Of Arthur: “He made me afraid of seeming clumsy or dull. It was not as though I had any firm or fearful objection to homosexuals; in certain books by gay writers I thought I had appreciated the weight and secret tremble of their thoughts; and I admired their fine clothes and shrill hard wit, their weapon. It was only that I felt keen to avoid as they say, a misunderstanding. And yet just that morning, while watching a procession of scar-faced, big-breasted, red-wrapped laughing African girls tap-dance down Ward Street, hadn’t I for the fiftieth time berated myself for my failure to encouter, to risk, to land myself in novel and incomprehensible situations – to misunderstand, in fact? And so, with a fatalistic shrug, I went to drink one beer.”
(What? Exactly.)
Of Phlox: “Something stood between me and Phlox – perhaps it was myself – which made loving her a perpetual effort; she was a massive collection of small, ardent details that I struggled always to keep in mind, in a certain order, repeating the Phlox List over and over to myself, because if I forgot one particular of her smile or speech, the whole thing came to pieces. Perhaps I did not love Phlox, after all – I just knew her by heart. I had memorized my girlfriend.”
(I had memorized my girlfriend, he said. I’ve mentioned the word genius, right?)
Of his father: “I was certain that…my father had a secret identity…Hundreds of times I looked in his closets, in the basement, under furniture, in the trunk of the car, on a fruitless hunt for his multicolored superhero (or supervillian) costume. He suspected my suspicions, I think, and every couple of months would encourage them, by demonstrating that he could drive our car without touching the steering wheel, or by enerringly trapping, with three fingers, flies and even bumblebees in midflight, or by hammering nails into a wall with his bare fist.”
(I think a little, tiny part of me just died.)
I guess this book is mostly about love. It’s about summer. It’s about a cloud factory and organized crime and fabulous dressers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It’s about getting dirty in the messes of others, and how somehow, sometimes, it can make you just a little more clean.
Should you read this book?
(Insert heavy, dreamy, smiley sigh here – like the kind you might release when your head hit the pillow after longing for sleep for days and days and days and days and days.)
Yes. Just, yes.
six myths of our time · 10 September 06 by j.
I think of the word myth: untrue, epic, magical. I think of gods and monsters, of secret underworlds and strange fruits. I think of Odysseus and Medea – lovely stories with lessons to be learned, stories that are stronger than time.
But what about modern day myth? And I’m not talking about razorblades in apples or that girl from that school who got found in the bathtub with something weird written on the mirror. I’m talking about things that are so inherent, so a part of us, that we don’t even notice that they’re unnatural. We don’t even notice we’re being duped.
Marina Warner’s collection of essays studies the ideas behind contemporary mythology. She talks about the myths surrounding the ideas we have about women, men, children, beasts, cannibalism, and home, in that order. “In common usage,” she writes, “the word myth rather invites dissent, implying delusion and falsehood. But my underlying premise, in these six lectures, is that myths are not always delusions, that deconstructing them does not necessarily mean wiping them, but that they represent ways of making sense of universal matters, like sexual identity and family relations, and that they enjoy a more vigorous life than we perhaps acknowledge, and exert more of an inspiration and influence than we think.”
Take dinosaurs, for example. Of course they are a part of documented history, but what about the feeling that surrounds them? Kids have dinosaur lunchboxes and stand beneath gigantic skeletons in museums, mouths wide open. But if you take a moment to consider, there’s really no reason for children to have an innate kinship to dinosaurs. It’s all marketing, years and years of marketing – it’s modern-day myth.
In the essay entitled, “Boys Will Be Boys,” Warner points out how the old mythical ideas of powerful men with cunning intelligence are gone, now replaced with boys being raised on GI Joes and video games with men who fight and kill. “Rare is the character in a video game or comic strip who develops or learns to be different.” In general, boys are expected to be sort of aggressive and childlike, but then society expects them to act differently as men. We expect them to grow up, to change, both in the world and in personal relationships. And this, if you think about it, is kind of unfair.
A short poem I wrote in response to said idea:
You were raised to be a transformer,
and so I kept waiting for you to transform, to shift
and change into something or someone else
that could love me better. But you just kept changing
into simple things, like a car
or helicopter, into things that just moved away from me.
This one idea is just an inkling, a teeny-tiny morsel of the many topics that get covered in these six essays.
But to sum it up:
We all feel a certain way, think a certain way. We have strong opinions. We pass judgements. But just how much of your personal make-up is actually your own? Have you ever stopped to think why you consider a certain place “home” when the idea of home itself is really just an imaginary concept? Have you ever wondered why you have a penchant for unicorns or why you’re always looking for the good heart within the apparent beast?
Warning: Once you start going down this road, you’ll realize it goes on forever. But, in my opinion (yes, I’m sure of it, my opinion) it’s kind of a nice walk.
If you like living in the dark, don’t read this book. But just so you know, you’re sort of an idiot.