... of all the self-congratulatory hooplah plastering every possible bourgeois media outlet celebrating the 20th anniversary of the end of the Berlin Wall, you might find this interesting.
According to an international poll conducted for the BBC to gauge world opinion 20 years after the demise of the socialist countries in Europe, "Opinion about the disintegration of the Soviet Union is sharply divided." Western Europeans applaud it. Strong majorities in Egypt and other poor countries--and in Russia and Ukraine-- say it is "mainly a bad thing."
Check out my comrade Greg's finely honed observations about the German Democratic Republic at his blog Absent Cause.
In Germany, it seems there's growing interest in the writer Peter Hacks, who lived in the GDR and never turned against communism. I hadn't known about him and, having waded through this heavily anti-communist New Yorker blog post about him and the renaissance of his work, I'm going to check out whether any of his stuff is available in English.
My own view, in case anyone cares and in case it isn't clear by now, is that the Soviet Union, GDR, Yugoslavia and other European and Central Asian countries that were trying to build socialism were flawed workers' states. Despite the flaws--and they have been so exaggerated, so many of them simply fabricated and much of the rest so enormously distorted by 92 years of masterful imperialist propaganda that the only honest attitude a pro-communist partisan can take is to distrust any critique that comes from any source except a defender of these comrades' heroic efforts and sacrifices before, during and after World War II--enormous gains were made that immeasurably improved the lives of the masses of people. In the years since the end of those first attempts to build socialism, conditions of life in the formerly socialist countries have deteriorated sharply for the vast majority. Infant mortality is up. Life expectancy is down. The situation for women, always the central marker of the justness of any society, has worsened dramatically. And so on.
So celebrate all you want, imperialism and all those you've managed to sucker into believing your lies. The workers will rise again, in eastern Europe and central Asia no less than Latin America, where our class is already more and more engaged in many countries, no less than Nepal where the armed struggle continues, no less than Ethiopia and Afghanistan where nascent workers' states were overturned by U.S.-funded and -armed counterrevolutionaries, no less than South Africa, the Philippines, and even, no, especially, in the headquarters of Japanese, western European and U.S. imperialism.
This seems a good moment to send a shout-out to Read Red's friends in the former socialist republics of Europe and central Asia. I've noticed that this blog has been getting more and more visits from people in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Georgia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan. Perhaps it's just coincidence. I prefer to think they are kindred spirits who've somehow heard about this little outpost of flawed but earnest attempts at communist literary thought. Welcome, sisters and brothers! I'm happy to know you're checking in, keeping me honest as I keep trying my best to read red.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Reasons to stop reading in the first 20 pages
When the main character, temping as a clerical worker in a university academic department, grouses about the fat, stupid secretaries she's temporarily stuck among. As a secretary at a university academic department, sometimes a fat one but not, I declare, a stupid one, I was offended to the point of cursing out loud and throwing the book across the room. This was in the early pages of a widely acclaimed novel of a couple years ago.
When the writer recounts, in a tone of arch wit, how she endured an awful cross-country flight stuck sitting next to an African American man she claims had body odor, which the writer explicitly describes as typical for African Americans. Really, she did, and really, I not only threw that book across the room, I tore it up and trashed it. This was in the early pages of a widely acclaimed memoir by a Hollywood wheeler-dealer some years back. Amid all that acclaim not one reviewer had taken note of this extraordinarily offensive racist passage in the first few pages.
The first example shows how every treacherous are the waters into which we readers wade every time we open a book. You never know what gratuitous bit of idiocy might be embedded in what everyone's been telling you is a great book, none of them having noticed or cared about the passage that stops you cold. The second example is of course much more important but, unfortunately, just as commonplace. One of the more frequent refrains of my postings here has been about the stranglehold of bourgeois consciousness in the literary world. This plays out in what writers write, and equally in what reviewers read--what they don't take note of continually astounds and arrests me, as time after time I pick up a book that I'd concluded from the reviews I might like, only to quickly skid to a stop as the stain of unconscious racism or sexism or anti-worker sentiment spills onto the pages making them unreadable and any further time with the book impossible to contemplate.
Or some mix of the above. It happened to me again recently, in this case with a book I'd been sent as a free review copy--the first time that's happened and probably the last. The book is Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life by Michael Greenberg. Gosh, what a lot of laudatory blurbs it comes with. "Brilliant." "Dazzling." "Moving" "A work of art." And so on. Well, I wouldn't know about all that. All I know is that I couldn't make it past the first 20 pages or so. It's a matter of twice being brought up short by the writer's petit-bourgeois consciousness in full display of utter unconsciousness.
True, I was less than enthralled anyway. In fact, I was put off from the start. For one thing, unlike the impression I had from the reviews I'd read, that this writer came from the working class, he's in fact just one more sort-of rebellious child of a small-business owner. OK, so much for some gritty tale of a working-class kid's struggles making a life from writing. Then there's the name dropping about the 60s Village scene, which I find tedious.
But here are the two stop signs beyond which I had no desire to slog.
One of the first passages is about how Greenberg as a youth dreaming of becoming a writer had refused to join the father's business, a scrap-metal yard in the Bronx, and then about how after his father's death his brothers decided to shut it down. Greenberg takes one last trip to visit the site. He recounts his conflicted feelings. He has a brief conversation with one of the workers but never for an instant contemplates, or at least has no word to say in the book about, what is to become of the workers who are losing their jobs, their livelihoods, after their long years of labor created the profits off which his family has lived. Hey, I know, fuggedaboudit, right? They're just some dumb workers, this isn't their story, who cares what happens to them. I can't forget about them, though, I'm funny that way. Especially workers in the Bronx who are left to fend for themselves when their exploiters flee.
So there I sit, already fuming, and here comes the icing on the cake: a reference to the "crack whores" who used to populate the Bronx streets. Human beings--women--impoverished, oppressed, exploited, desperate, ill women, reduced to a snide shorthand, "crack whores." And I'm supposed to care about this guy's life?
Still, I read on for another dozen or so pages. Until I finished the lovely little chapter about how his first son was conceived. Long story short: he and his girlfriend happened to find themselves in Argentina at the time of the fascist takeover; she accidentally found herself nabbed and jailed; don't worry, he was able to spring her with the aid of a wad of cash and the support of the U.S. embassy (a.k.a. the fascists' backers); they got the hell out of the country and holed up in a motel, shellshocked at her four-day ordeal, having sex that ultimately brings forth the issue of his firstborn. All this is told in under three pages, all of it is of the "then I did this and then I did that in an exotic crazy place where exotic crazy things were happening and it's all fodder for my writer's life boy have I had a writer's life or what" school of memoir--and none of it breathes an ounce of concern or awareness about the reality of the dirty war in Argentina other than its standing as background to how his son was born. Not a reference to the tens of thousands of the Disappeared, to the war against the workers, the unions, the students, the women, to the mass murder that brought long years of misery to the masses of Argentina. Not another page worth turning.
When the writer recounts, in a tone of arch wit, how she endured an awful cross-country flight stuck sitting next to an African American man she claims had body odor, which the writer explicitly describes as typical for African Americans. Really, she did, and really, I not only threw that book across the room, I tore it up and trashed it. This was in the early pages of a widely acclaimed memoir by a Hollywood wheeler-dealer some years back. Amid all that acclaim not one reviewer had taken note of this extraordinarily offensive racist passage in the first few pages.
The first example shows how every treacherous are the waters into which we readers wade every time we open a book. You never know what gratuitous bit of idiocy might be embedded in what everyone's been telling you is a great book, none of them having noticed or cared about the passage that stops you cold. The second example is of course much more important but, unfortunately, just as commonplace. One of the more frequent refrains of my postings here has been about the stranglehold of bourgeois consciousness in the literary world. This plays out in what writers write, and equally in what reviewers read--what they don't take note of continually astounds and arrests me, as time after time I pick up a book that I'd concluded from the reviews I might like, only to quickly skid to a stop as the stain of unconscious racism or sexism or anti-worker sentiment spills onto the pages making them unreadable and any further time with the book impossible to contemplate.
Or some mix of the above. It happened to me again recently, in this case with a book I'd been sent as a free review copy--the first time that's happened and probably the last. The book is Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life by Michael Greenberg. Gosh, what a lot of laudatory blurbs it comes with. "Brilliant." "Dazzling." "Moving" "A work of art." And so on. Well, I wouldn't know about all that. All I know is that I couldn't make it past the first 20 pages or so. It's a matter of twice being brought up short by the writer's petit-bourgeois consciousness in full display of utter unconsciousness.
True, I was less than enthralled anyway. In fact, I was put off from the start. For one thing, unlike the impression I had from the reviews I'd read, that this writer came from the working class, he's in fact just one more sort-of rebellious child of a small-business owner. OK, so much for some gritty tale of a working-class kid's struggles making a life from writing. Then there's the name dropping about the 60s Village scene, which I find tedious.
But here are the two stop signs beyond which I had no desire to slog.
One of the first passages is about how Greenberg as a youth dreaming of becoming a writer had refused to join the father's business, a scrap-metal yard in the Bronx, and then about how after his father's death his brothers decided to shut it down. Greenberg takes one last trip to visit the site. He recounts his conflicted feelings. He has a brief conversation with one of the workers but never for an instant contemplates, or at least has no word to say in the book about, what is to become of the workers who are losing their jobs, their livelihoods, after their long years of labor created the profits off which his family has lived. Hey, I know, fuggedaboudit, right? They're just some dumb workers, this isn't their story, who cares what happens to them. I can't forget about them, though, I'm funny that way. Especially workers in the Bronx who are left to fend for themselves when their exploiters flee.
So there I sit, already fuming, and here comes the icing on the cake: a reference to the "crack whores" who used to populate the Bronx streets. Human beings--women--impoverished, oppressed, exploited, desperate, ill women, reduced to a snide shorthand, "crack whores." And I'm supposed to care about this guy's life?
Still, I read on for another dozen or so pages. Until I finished the lovely little chapter about how his first son was conceived. Long story short: he and his girlfriend happened to find themselves in Argentina at the time of the fascist takeover; she accidentally found herself nabbed and jailed; don't worry, he was able to spring her with the aid of a wad of cash and the support of the U.S. embassy (a.k.a. the fascists' backers); they got the hell out of the country and holed up in a motel, shellshocked at her four-day ordeal, having sex that ultimately brings forth the issue of his firstborn. All this is told in under three pages, all of it is of the "then I did this and then I did that in an exotic crazy place where exotic crazy things were happening and it's all fodder for my writer's life boy have I had a writer's life or what" school of memoir--and none of it breathes an ounce of concern or awareness about the reality of the dirty war in Argentina other than its standing as background to how his son was born. Not a reference to the tens of thousands of the Disappeared, to the war against the workers, the unions, the students, the women, to the mass murder that brought long years of misery to the masses of Argentina. Not another page worth turning.
The horror! The horror!
How is Stephen King like Joseph Conrad? The body of work of both authors is ostensibly positioned on the side of the oppressed yet actually shot through with racism.
In Conrad's case there is the epitome of this contradiction, Heart of Darkness. I'm no expert but I have read that Conrad was appalled by what he saw in Africa, in particular the genocidal nightmare visited on the people of the Congo by the Belgian colonizers. He positioned himself as a sort of liberal voice of conscience, but not against colonialism itself, not against Europe's right to exploit the natural riches and human labor of the African nations. It's clear in the pages of the novel that, upsetting as all that blood and suffering might have been to him, he never regarded those shedding the blood as actual people, fully human people equal to his peers in Poland, Belgium or England. Chinua Achebe deconstructed all this in his famous 1988 essay "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness.'"
For if anything defines King's oeuvre, it's that: the otherness of African Americans. I've read quite a few of his books--more on that in a minute--and I don't recall a single Black character that is a fully fledged and also a fully normal human being. From The Stand to The Shining to Bag of Bones to The Green Mile and on and on, they appear time and again, Black ghosts, Black wise women, Black wise men, Black genies, Black angels. Never, at least in the books I read till I stopped reading his books, a Black person who is simply and wholly that, a person. Like Conrad, it seems, King has seen the horrors to which Black people, in his case African Americans, have been subjected, and he's keen to express it, to show that he knows of it, and he does so the only way he seems to know how. Which is by writing them as the Other.
I admit I did not realize this until after having read several of King's books. I enjoyed them as spooky, engrossing escapes, and the writing is fast and fluid so that you do escape into the story. I was always turned off by his many annoying tics, like the constant product placement and the hokey sayings he makes up for his characters to constantly mouth, but the fast-paced and genuinely scary plots sucked me in enough that I overlooked them. Then, however, I started getting turned off by the slick, shallow hollowness of the liberal ethic at the core of most of his stories. And I woke up to his really appalling portrayal of Black characters. And then I read about his shrunken head.
In some interview a decade or more ago (I just searched and couldn't find it, but I swear I did read it), King was quoted as "revealing" the inspiration for much of his fiction. How he works up a head of horror steam, basically--how he gets his head into that spooky scary place where his stories reveal themselves to him. Here's how, he said. He opens his desk drawer and takes out the shrunken head he keeps there. It is, he said, the head of a Black slave boy from the early 19th century. He couldn't reveal where he got it and he couldn't prove it was real, he said, but he thought it was. A shrunken head of an enslaved Black teenager from some 1800s plantation. This, said King, this is the real horror. Slavery. What was done to this lad and so many others. I keep this here to remind myself that real life is full of horrors, and when I take it out and look at it, or even when I don't since I'm always aware that it's there in the drawer, I am filled with rage and terror and my stories come to me.
That's all paraphrase, but it's basically true to what I read. I've never read another word by Stephen King. Do I need to spell out why? The fact that he keeps such an artifact, that he can and wants to and does, is in itself revolting. The fact that he uses it for inspiration is even more repulsive. That he holds it up as proof of his sensitivity when in fact it proves the opposite; far from engaging in any deep consideration of the system of chattel slavery in the United States, King rather exploits it in the form of what amounts to a talisman, exploits all that horror and pain in the service of his bestsellerdom.
In Conrad's case there is the epitome of this contradiction, Heart of Darkness. I'm no expert but I have read that Conrad was appalled by what he saw in Africa, in particular the genocidal nightmare visited on the people of the Congo by the Belgian colonizers. He positioned himself as a sort of liberal voice of conscience, but not against colonialism itself, not against Europe's right to exploit the natural riches and human labor of the African nations. It's clear in the pages of the novel that, upsetting as all that blood and suffering might have been to him, he never regarded those shedding the blood as actual people, fully human people equal to his peers in Poland, Belgium or England. Chinua Achebe deconstructed all this in his famous 1988 essay "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness.'"
... Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked.Now to Stephen King. Granted that, unlike Conrad, who still has slews of defenders despite Achebe's to my mind definitive takedown, King is not generally regarded as meriting a place in the literary pantheon. Oh, wait a minute--bizarrely, he kind of is: in 2003 he was awarded the National Book Foundation's "Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters." Anyway, whether he's seen as a shlockmeister or a fine artist, the guy writes a lot of books, and they all sell a lot of copies, they all get read. He's got a new one out, featured on the front page of today's New York Times Book Review. If you read the review (if, that is, you're able to go on after the incredibly clueless, ass-backward misread of the 1960s in the first paragraph), you'll find that this new novel is quite political, King's liberal fictive commentary on some of what's going on in this country now. So I immediately wondered: hey, are there any magical Black people?
... And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot.
For if anything defines King's oeuvre, it's that: the otherness of African Americans. I've read quite a few of his books--more on that in a minute--and I don't recall a single Black character that is a fully fledged and also a fully normal human being. From The Stand to The Shining to Bag of Bones to The Green Mile and on and on, they appear time and again, Black ghosts, Black wise women, Black wise men, Black genies, Black angels. Never, at least in the books I read till I stopped reading his books, a Black person who is simply and wholly that, a person. Like Conrad, it seems, King has seen the horrors to which Black people, in his case African Americans, have been subjected, and he's keen to express it, to show that he knows of it, and he does so the only way he seems to know how. Which is by writing them as the Other.
I admit I did not realize this until after having read several of King's books. I enjoyed them as spooky, engrossing escapes, and the writing is fast and fluid so that you do escape into the story. I was always turned off by his many annoying tics, like the constant product placement and the hokey sayings he makes up for his characters to constantly mouth, but the fast-paced and genuinely scary plots sucked me in enough that I overlooked them. Then, however, I started getting turned off by the slick, shallow hollowness of the liberal ethic at the core of most of his stories. And I woke up to his really appalling portrayal of Black characters. And then I read about his shrunken head.
In some interview a decade or more ago (I just searched and couldn't find it, but I swear I did read it), King was quoted as "revealing" the inspiration for much of his fiction. How he works up a head of horror steam, basically--how he gets his head into that spooky scary place where his stories reveal themselves to him. Here's how, he said. He opens his desk drawer and takes out the shrunken head he keeps there. It is, he said, the head of a Black slave boy from the early 19th century. He couldn't reveal where he got it and he couldn't prove it was real, he said, but he thought it was. A shrunken head of an enslaved Black teenager from some 1800s plantation. This, said King, this is the real horror. Slavery. What was done to this lad and so many others. I keep this here to remind myself that real life is full of horrors, and when I take it out and look at it, or even when I don't since I'm always aware that it's there in the drawer, I am filled with rage and terror and my stories come to me.
That's all paraphrase, but it's basically true to what I read. I've never read another word by Stephen King. Do I need to spell out why? The fact that he keeps such an artifact, that he can and wants to and does, is in itself revolting. The fact that he uses it for inspiration is even more repulsive. That he holds it up as proof of his sensitivity when in fact it proves the opposite; far from engaging in any deep consideration of the system of chattel slavery in the United States, King rather exploits it in the form of what amounts to a talisman, exploits all that horror and pain in the service of his bestsellerdom.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
I'm-a-pitiful-excuse-for-a-blogger links
I'm sorry that I haven't had the time or wherewithal for substantive blogging of late. I hope that'll change soon. The question of big vs. small bookstores is still on my mind and I'll post a thought or two about it as soon as I can. In the meantime all I can offer is more links, starting with one that has some tangential connection to this very topic. I was interested and surprised to come across this piece on big vs. small farms at Slate. The writer, Tracie McMillan, comes down on the side of agribusiness because, in her view, life is better for the workers on a mega-farm than those on a small farm. Now, by my read there's lots wrong with her analysis, lots and lots and lots. (Hint: Agribusiness is still the villain. And the better deal for workers is not about what the bosses can afford so much as it's about how the workers can organize.) But I'm pretty sure she's right about which jobs offer the potential for better pay, benefits, hours and working conditions. There's a similar dynamic to bookstore work, I think. More on this soon.
People are pissed off at Publisher's Weekly, which reviewed all the 2009 books written by men and picked the best 10. Only when PW put out the list, it for some reason called them simply the best 10 books of the year, not, as would be more accurate, their favorites by men, mostly white, writing in English etc etc. Now Women in Letters and Literary Arts, that Facebook grouping that established itself earlier this year, has responded by setting up a Wiki page called The Willa List, and calling on people to enter their own choices for best books of 2009 written by women. The list is already pretty long, showing that the PW folks had plenty to choose from had they cared to consider writers who belong to the majority of the human race.
Which just too too perfectly leads to this, the Guardian's latest digested read.
Finally, while the capitalist class and all those whose minds are befogged by its ideology celebrate the 20th anniversary of the demise of the European workers' states, this 92nd anniversary of the great Russian Revolution must be noted.
People are pissed off at Publisher's Weekly, which reviewed all the 2009 books written by men and picked the best 10. Only when PW put out the list, it for some reason called them simply the best 10 books of the year, not, as would be more accurate, their favorites by men, mostly white, writing in English etc etc. Now Women in Letters and Literary Arts, that Facebook grouping that established itself earlier this year, has responded by setting up a Wiki page called The Willa List, and calling on people to enter their own choices for best books of 2009 written by women. The list is already pretty long, showing that the PW folks had plenty to choose from had they cared to consider writers who belong to the majority of the human race.
Which just too too perfectly leads to this, the Guardian's latest digested read.
"Have you ever slept with a man," he asked.Here's a piece dissenting from the standard version promulgated about Roberto Bolaño in this country.
"Not for more than 20 years," Pegeen replied. "But there's something about your arthritic body I find irresistible."
... he was never a subversive or a revolutionary wrapped up in political movements ... . From the beginning of the 1970s he was a non-conformist against the Mexican literary establishment ... With that same non-conformist mentality, and not with any political militancy, he went to Allende's Chile.Shocking! (Not.) The pigs got the first shots against the NAFTA flu.
Finally, while the capitalist class and all those whose minds are befogged by its ideology celebrate the 20th anniversary of the demise of the European workers' states, this 92nd anniversary of the great Russian Revolution must be noted.
The imperialists promised that the post-Soviet era would be one of peace and prosperity. ... What a joke. With the downfall of the bloc of countries that had broken with capitalism, the full irrationality of the capitalist system is revealed in all its nakedness. The higher the technology, the greater the misery of the masses. The more goods produced, the more unemployment. The closer humanity comes to being able to feed, house and clothe itself, with plenty left over for culture, education and recreation, the further away these things become for most of the world's people.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Endurance-not-speed links
Coretta Scott is a new biography-in-verse written for children by Ntozake Shange. It's earning rave reviews.
New literary magazine Mythium describes itself as "a miscegenation of indigenous and diasporic voices ... This is our way of reinforcing those strong storytelling elements that often refuse to endorse or be endorsed by traditional, european perspectives, refusing to fit into some easily marketed literary niche." More on why this is such an exciting development from Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, one of the writers with work in the first issue.
It's National Novel Writing Month. Who cares? I agree with Tayari Jones, who says, "NaNoWriMo--Count Me Out," and offers succinct reasons why.
Ms. Jones also recently saw the new documentary "Being Billie," a "fascinating and empowering" reconsideration of the live of the jazz singer Billie Holiday. The filmmakers are trying to raise the final funds they need; info here.
Author and reviewer Jessica Mann's observation about murder mysteries and crime fiction that "dead, brutalised women sell books" is no great revelation but it's probably a good thing that she made it and it's been getting a lot of attention.
This looks like an interesting exhibit so I'll add it to my already unrealistically long list of art shows I'd like to get to. (I personify the famous truism about New Yorkers, that we never get ourselves to the many cultural riches on offer, or only when out-of-town visitors force us to.) At the Whitney, it's painter/sculptor Steve Wolfe's paintings and drawings of books. I know, it sounds silly or boring when you boil it down that way, but read the Times piece on it and you too might be beguiled.
Pretty freaking funny, and spot-on: the Guardian's latest digested read, this time of Superfreakonomics. "The reason it's taken us four years to come up with a second volume is that we haven't really got any interesting material."
If you've ever watched the Emmy awards, you know that the Leno/Letterman/O'Brien world is a land where testosterone reigns supreme. As does whiteness, I might add. Now a former Letterman staffer, a female who briefly hoped to break through, tells about the awfulness of working in such an atmosphere.
Speaking of misogyny, I know this story is no longer hot but Jenny Diski's piece on the Roman Polanski rape case is worth reading though also painfully hard to read. I haven't read any of Diski's books. I want to.
He's one of our martyrs, and now, finally, work has begun to find his bones and bury them with an appropriate marker. I don't feel passionate about this but I also don't understand why Federico Garcia Lorca's great-nieces and other relatives have so opposed the effort, and that's after reading various of their statements none of which had any understandable core argument. I do know that to this day strong vestiges of the Franco fascist years live on in Spain, and any action that shines a light on them and perhaps contributes to their further shriveling must be a good thing.
A few days ago Vanessa Redgrave performed in a one-time-only encore of The Year of Magical Thinking. The performance was a special benefit to aid Palestinians in Gaza. Last Sunday on the local TV station NY1's weekly theater program "On Stage," Redgrave was interviewed about this upcoming benefit, and Teresa and I commented to each other about how many times--it seemed like every other word--she managed to say the words "Gaza" and "Palestine." I respect her for her continued, unbending solidarity with the Palestinian nation over all these years and after all the calumny to which she's been subjected because of it. For those who might not have seen it, here again is a link to her courageous Oscar acceptance speech at the 1978 Academy Awards.
I've had more important things to do lately than rag on the New York Times Book Review, but a few weeks ago its review of Richard Dawkins' new book about evolution included a ludicrously wrong-headed paragraph or two asserting that evolution is a theory, not a fact. Oy. Many others besides me were pissed off at this. The NYTBR printed a couple rebuttals from scientists but it seems that there were scads so the Times literary blog Paper Cuts ran several more. The point: evolution is indeed a fact, proven over and over again; what remains in the realm of theory is exactly how evolution works.
Finally, although I probably shouldn't take this chance, here are some links to stuff that looks interesting to me but that I have not yet fully read. You're on your own in these waters:
A typo more mysterious that most--and no, that "that" is not a typo.
Michael Denning on "The Novelists' International." Via A Practical Policy.
"Bad Paper" and "literary fiction." Via Contra James Wood.
Kay Ryan on poetry at community colleges. Via Inside Higher Ed.
New literary magazine Mythium describes itself as "a miscegenation of indigenous and diasporic voices ... This is our way of reinforcing those strong storytelling elements that often refuse to endorse or be endorsed by traditional, european perspectives, refusing to fit into some easily marketed literary niche." More on why this is such an exciting development from Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, one of the writers with work in the first issue.
It's National Novel Writing Month. Who cares? I agree with Tayari Jones, who says, "NaNoWriMo--Count Me Out," and offers succinct reasons why.
Ms. Jones also recently saw the new documentary "Being Billie," a "fascinating and empowering" reconsideration of the live of the jazz singer Billie Holiday. The filmmakers are trying to raise the final funds they need; info here.
Author and reviewer Jessica Mann's observation about murder mysteries and crime fiction that "dead, brutalised women sell books" is no great revelation but it's probably a good thing that she made it and it's been getting a lot of attention.
This looks like an interesting exhibit so I'll add it to my already unrealistically long list of art shows I'd like to get to. (I personify the famous truism about New Yorkers, that we never get ourselves to the many cultural riches on offer, or only when out-of-town visitors force us to.) At the Whitney, it's painter/sculptor Steve Wolfe's paintings and drawings of books. I know, it sounds silly or boring when you boil it down that way, but read the Times piece on it and you too might be beguiled.
Pretty freaking funny, and spot-on: the Guardian's latest digested read, this time of Superfreakonomics. "The reason it's taken us four years to come up with a second volume is that we haven't really got any interesting material."
If you've ever watched the Emmy awards, you know that the Leno/Letterman/O'Brien world is a land where testosterone reigns supreme. As does whiteness, I might add. Now a former Letterman staffer, a female who briefly hoped to break through, tells about the awfulness of working in such an atmosphere.
Speaking of misogyny, I know this story is no longer hot but Jenny Diski's piece on the Roman Polanski rape case is worth reading though also painfully hard to read. I haven't read any of Diski's books. I want to.
He's one of our martyrs, and now, finally, work has begun to find his bones and bury them with an appropriate marker. I don't feel passionate about this but I also don't understand why Federico Garcia Lorca's great-nieces and other relatives have so opposed the effort, and that's after reading various of their statements none of which had any understandable core argument. I do know that to this day strong vestiges of the Franco fascist years live on in Spain, and any action that shines a light on them and perhaps contributes to their further shriveling must be a good thing.
A few days ago Vanessa Redgrave performed in a one-time-only encore of The Year of Magical Thinking. The performance was a special benefit to aid Palestinians in Gaza. Last Sunday on the local TV station NY1's weekly theater program "On Stage," Redgrave was interviewed about this upcoming benefit, and Teresa and I commented to each other about how many times--it seemed like every other word--she managed to say the words "Gaza" and "Palestine." I respect her for her continued, unbending solidarity with the Palestinian nation over all these years and after all the calumny to which she's been subjected because of it. For those who might not have seen it, here again is a link to her courageous Oscar acceptance speech at the 1978 Academy Awards.
I've had more important things to do lately than rag on the New York Times Book Review, but a few weeks ago its review of Richard Dawkins' new book about evolution included a ludicrously wrong-headed paragraph or two asserting that evolution is a theory, not a fact. Oy. Many others besides me were pissed off at this. The NYTBR printed a couple rebuttals from scientists but it seems that there were scads so the Times literary blog Paper Cuts ran several more. The point: evolution is indeed a fact, proven over and over again; what remains in the realm of theory is exactly how evolution works.
Finally, although I probably shouldn't take this chance, here are some links to stuff that looks interesting to me but that I have not yet fully read. You're on your own in these waters:
A typo more mysterious that most--and no, that "that" is not a typo.
Michael Denning on "The Novelists' International." Via A Practical Policy.
"Bad Paper" and "literary fiction." Via Contra James Wood.
Kay Ryan on poetry at community colleges. Via Inside Higher Ed.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Songs in Ordinary Time
It's a funny thing how this book had its way with me. Songs in Ordinary Time by Mary McGarry Morris. It took me longer to read it than it should--it's about 740 pages, but the pages fly--because of my horrid error last week leaving the book in Manhattan over the weekend. I ended up not getting it back into my hands till Tuesday night so didn't get back to reading it till Wednesday morning on the way in to work. But it stayed on my mind. And I re-entered the story easily. All of which, how it pulled me in and held me, is a little surprising. Because, on the surface at least, it doesn't seem to be the sort of book that would enthrall me so.
Now that I've finished it, and the end was very satisfying indeed, I'm thinking about why--why it had its way with me and why I wouldn't have expected this. I'm not a snob of the variety who turn their noses up at any Oprah Book Club pick, an attitude I find ridiculous. I'm not against what are generally thought of as women's books--by which I don't mean chick lit but rather quality fiction, usually by women writers, that focuses on family relationships and especially women's lives and women's roles. I've read plenty such books. But, especially in recent years, I have less and less patience for stories that are so exclusively focused on this kind of stuff, novels I think of as kitchen-table books, stories that consist so wholly of dissecting familial relationships and their dysfunction that they become, from my viewpoint, irrelevant and therefore uninteresting, boring. Familial relationships, women's lives especially, interest me if--only if--they're presented in the context of the society in which they're formed. If, and only if, these stories have something to say about this society and what it does to women and their children and their relationships and the work they do in and out of the home.
This novel does that, and more. The central characters are one woman and her family in a small New England town in the summer of 1960, and it's also about the whole town and the social dynamics at play. Poverty. Racism. Deep, clear class divisions. Women's oppression. The damage done by religious hypocrisy and the social strictures of the time, damage to women especially. We readers sweat through the wrenching, excruciating lives of Marie and her kids day by day. We become deeply involved, caring, stomachs churning, biting our nails, bracing ourselves for the awful climax we're afraid is inevitable. It's a mark of Morris's skill that, while the readers are most centrally focused on the Fermoyle household, we also engage with the big cast of more peripheral characters too. There's not a type or stick figure in the bunch.
There is a lot of pain. Ultimately, I was relieved to find, there is also some hope. Both of which, the pain and the hope, ring true.* This is a very good book. It was published well over a decade ago and has been sitting on my shelf for who knows how long and who knows why I finally picked it up but I'm glad I did.
*Only one thing, a tiny, minor thing on a page or two, bothered me. A tiny, minor flaw in verisimilitude: a reference to somebody driving a Mustang. The Ford Mustang did not exist in the summer of 1960. See, I'm from Detroit. We know these things. I know this specific thing because one of the most memorable days of my elementary school life was our fifth-grade field trip to the River Rouge plant in 1964. At River Rouge, Ford had the biggest industrial production plant in the world. It had everything and did everything necessary to build a car, from start to finish. There was a steel mill right there--I'll never forget what a fiery hell it was--and the milled steel then rolled on to the main assembly line where the cars were made. On that day we visited, it happened that the first Mustangs were rolling down the line. It might sound hokey now, but wow that car looked to us like it was from outer space, the design was so fresh, so different--and the colors! Orange! Metallic greens and blues! Colors never before seen on a car. Anyway, as you can see, when I got to the paragraphs that had a Mustang driving through, a Mustang that I know didn't exist in 1960, it broke my concentration and sent me off into reminiscence about when I watched Mustangs being built ... and then about my uncle Sam Saad who worked at another Ford plant and was for many years a UAW committeeman and later, when I was a bus driver in Ann Arbor and we went on strike was the only person in my family who was supportive and encouraging to me ... and then about Detroit, the ruined city of Detroit, the most impoverished, wiped out city in this country, and how the auto industry sucked billions of dollars in profit out of the workers of Detroit, how Big Auto sucked the lifeblood out of Detroit and then shut it down, just jettisoned the workers and the city and for that were awarded a zillion-dollar bailout of tax dollars from the federal government. ... But that's another book for another time.
Now that I've finished it, and the end was very satisfying indeed, I'm thinking about why--why it had its way with me and why I wouldn't have expected this. I'm not a snob of the variety who turn their noses up at any Oprah Book Club pick, an attitude I find ridiculous. I'm not against what are generally thought of as women's books--by which I don't mean chick lit but rather quality fiction, usually by women writers, that focuses on family relationships and especially women's lives and women's roles. I've read plenty such books. But, especially in recent years, I have less and less patience for stories that are so exclusively focused on this kind of stuff, novels I think of as kitchen-table books, stories that consist so wholly of dissecting familial relationships and their dysfunction that they become, from my viewpoint, irrelevant and therefore uninteresting, boring. Familial relationships, women's lives especially, interest me if--only if--they're presented in the context of the society in which they're formed. If, and only if, these stories have something to say about this society and what it does to women and their children and their relationships and the work they do in and out of the home.
This novel does that, and more. The central characters are one woman and her family in a small New England town in the summer of 1960, and it's also about the whole town and the social dynamics at play. Poverty. Racism. Deep, clear class divisions. Women's oppression. The damage done by religious hypocrisy and the social strictures of the time, damage to women especially. We readers sweat through the wrenching, excruciating lives of Marie and her kids day by day. We become deeply involved, caring, stomachs churning, biting our nails, bracing ourselves for the awful climax we're afraid is inevitable. It's a mark of Morris's skill that, while the readers are most centrally focused on the Fermoyle household, we also engage with the big cast of more peripheral characters too. There's not a type or stick figure in the bunch.
There is a lot of pain. Ultimately, I was relieved to find, there is also some hope. Both of which, the pain and the hope, ring true.* This is a very good book. It was published well over a decade ago and has been sitting on my shelf for who knows how long and who knows why I finally picked it up but I'm glad I did.
*Only one thing, a tiny, minor thing on a page or two, bothered me. A tiny, minor flaw in verisimilitude: a reference to somebody driving a Mustang. The Ford Mustang did not exist in the summer of 1960. See, I'm from Detroit. We know these things. I know this specific thing because one of the most memorable days of my elementary school life was our fifth-grade field trip to the River Rouge plant in 1964. At River Rouge, Ford had the biggest industrial production plant in the world. It had everything and did everything necessary to build a car, from start to finish. There was a steel mill right there--I'll never forget what a fiery hell it was--and the milled steel then rolled on to the main assembly line where the cars were made. On that day we visited, it happened that the first Mustangs were rolling down the line. It might sound hokey now, but wow that car looked to us like it was from outer space, the design was so fresh, so different--and the colors! Orange! Metallic greens and blues! Colors never before seen on a car. Anyway, as you can see, when I got to the paragraphs that had a Mustang driving through, a Mustang that I know didn't exist in 1960, it broke my concentration and sent me off into reminiscence about when I watched Mustangs being built ... and then about my uncle Sam Saad who worked at another Ford plant and was for many years a UAW committeeman and later, when I was a bus driver in Ann Arbor and we went on strike was the only person in my family who was supportive and encouraging to me ... and then about Detroit, the ruined city of Detroit, the most impoverished, wiped out city in this country, and how the auto industry sucked billions of dollars in profit out of the workers of Detroit, how Big Auto sucked the lifeblood out of Detroit and then shut it down, just jettisoned the workers and the city and for that were awarded a zillion-dollar bailout of tax dollars from the federal government. ... But that's another book for another time.
Friday, October 30, 2009
And now, a word from our sponsor
OK, that heading is too precious by half, and yet it stays, because it does express something I want to express. The title and subtitle of this blog ought to be clear enough but I fear that what I write often isn't. I'm nobody's paragon of a communist reader and commentator. I am on the one hand too unschooled, utterly unschooled in fact, in literary matters; nor can I on the other hand claim mastery of the depths of Marxist thought in matters socioeconomic or artistic. Still I think I have an angle that's perhaps worthwhile. There are many analysts, many academics who style themselves as Marxist but, well I've just got to say it, none of them as far as I can see ever scuff their marching shoes, ever spend a night in jail, ever devote days and nights to stuffing envelopes or making phone calls or pasting up posters or taking union sign-up cards door to door or walking picket lines or blocking entries to struck factories or writing fliers or handing out fliers or confronting racist cops or blocking evictions. They never, in other words, do any of the thousand and one things that add up to the actual essence of Marxism: organizing the workers and oppressed, fighting the ruling class, doing the work, grand and petty, that must be done if the project of revolutionary socialism is ever to come to fruition. At the university where I work, for example, there are quite a few "Marxist" academics, none of whom has ever lifted a finger in serious, meaningful support of the workers when we've been on strike or in other confrontations with the bosses. They no doubt write great books, but they're writing for each other and it's hard for me to understand how such work contributes to the actual class struggle.
Wait. I hadn't meant to go off on a rant against left academics. It arises in part, I suppose, out of feeling defensive about my shortcomings as a literary analyst. I'll leave it here, though, while getting back to the point at which I was aiming. Which is that I blog here because, for all my shortcomings, I like to think that what I bring to the conversation--the viewpoint of a worker and activist who is also a reader and writer--is worthwhile. But the most important thing is the struggle. I read because I love to, it's my favorite thing to do in life; I write fiction because I have to, I'm somehow compelled to; I blog to spout off my two cents--but none of this matters the way fighting for socialism matters. Which is not to say there's anything wrong with it, and of course I hope that my fiction will eventually, should it ever start getting read by anyone, have some small impact, be some small contribution--but the main thing is the fight.
So. Took me long enough to get to it, but this is an invitation. As anyone who follows Read Red has surely inferred, I belong to a party: Workers World Party. Maybe in another post some time soon I'll write about why I joined WWP 28 years ago, what my life in the party has been and how it interrelates with my artistic life. For now, this: WWP is in my opinion the leading force for revolutionary socialism in this country; it has been in the lead in every major struggle, from anti-war and anti-intervention to anti-racist and pro-labor, over the last 50 years, beginning with staging the very first protest against the Vietnam war; it is the only left party that supports every country struggling to build socialism, every instance of resistance to imperialism, every movement for liberation, every outbreak of the class struggle at home and worldwide. It is in my view the place to be if you want to take your place as an active participant in the fight.
In two weeks WWP will mark its 50th anniversary and set the course for the coming period at a national conference here in NYC. I can guarantee this will be an exciting, invigorating gathering of folks from around the country, from many different communities and with varied experiences. I'm guessing there'll even be a touch of culture crammed in here and there--some music, some dance, some spoken-word poetry--for those of us who like roses as well as bread.
I invite you. Come to New York Nov. 14-15. If you need a ride, email me; chances are someone's coming from your neck of the woods. If you need a place to stay, email me and I'll try to hook you up. If you come to the conference, find me (yeah, we wear dorky name tags all weekend) and we'll do lunch or something.
Reading is great. Writing is wonderful. Fighting to fix the world--not just reading or writing about it, but doing the work--is best of all. Hope to see you in two weeks.
Wait. I hadn't meant to go off on a rant against left academics. It arises in part, I suppose, out of feeling defensive about my shortcomings as a literary analyst. I'll leave it here, though, while getting back to the point at which I was aiming. Which is that I blog here because, for all my shortcomings, I like to think that what I bring to the conversation--the viewpoint of a worker and activist who is also a reader and writer--is worthwhile. But the most important thing is the struggle. I read because I love to, it's my favorite thing to do in life; I write fiction because I have to, I'm somehow compelled to; I blog to spout off my two cents--but none of this matters the way fighting for socialism matters. Which is not to say there's anything wrong with it, and of course I hope that my fiction will eventually, should it ever start getting read by anyone, have some small impact, be some small contribution--but the main thing is the fight.
So. Took me long enough to get to it, but this is an invitation. As anyone who follows Read Red has surely inferred, I belong to a party: Workers World Party. Maybe in another post some time soon I'll write about why I joined WWP 28 years ago, what my life in the party has been and how it interrelates with my artistic life. For now, this: WWP is in my opinion the leading force for revolutionary socialism in this country; it has been in the lead in every major struggle, from anti-war and anti-intervention to anti-racist and pro-labor, over the last 50 years, beginning with staging the very first protest against the Vietnam war; it is the only left party that supports every country struggling to build socialism, every instance of resistance to imperialism, every movement for liberation, every outbreak of the class struggle at home and worldwide. It is in my view the place to be if you want to take your place as an active participant in the fight.
In two weeks WWP will mark its 50th anniversary and set the course for the coming period at a national conference here in NYC. I can guarantee this will be an exciting, invigorating gathering of folks from around the country, from many different communities and with varied experiences. I'm guessing there'll even be a touch of culture crammed in here and there--some music, some dance, some spoken-word poetry--for those of us who like roses as well as bread.
I invite you. Come to New York Nov. 14-15. If you need a ride, email me; chances are someone's coming from your neck of the woods. If you need a place to stay, email me and I'll try to hook you up. If you come to the conference, find me (yeah, we wear dorky name tags all weekend) and we'll do lunch or something.
Reading is great. Writing is wonderful. Fighting to fix the world--not just reading or writing about it, but doing the work--is best of all. Hope to see you in two weeks.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
My Diva
Well no, not mine. Sadly, I don't have a diva. But in the collection My Diva: 65 Gay Men On the Women Who Inspire Them we hear from some fellows who do. My Diva came out earlier this year, and thanks to great word of mouth and loving devotion from the folks at the University of Wisconsin Press, it's been getting the kind of respect it deserves but that might not have been expected. Sales, too: UWP recently came out with a second printing. This is by all reports* a compilation of sweet, sad, funny reflections--Publishers Weekly called them "very short, very tender essays"--on inspiration and its sometimes surprising sources.
The book's editor is Michael Montlack, a fine poet who I met two summers ago at the Lambda Literary Foundation's first LGBT writers' retreat in Los Angeles. He and several contributors have been drawing crowds at a series of readings, all of which I'm sorry to say I've missed.
(That's him at left, at a Barnes & Noble event.) I'm sorry to say I'll probably miss this next one, too, but maybe somebody reading this can make it there. It's this Friday, hosted by NYU's MFA program.
*No, I haven't read My Diva yet. I've kept meaning to make it to a reading and buy one and have Michael autograph it ... .
The book's editor is Michael Montlack, a fine poet who I met two summers ago at the Lambda Literary Foundation's first LGBT writers' retreat in Los Angeles. He and several contributors have been drawing crowds at a series of readings, all of which I'm sorry to say I've missed.
(That's him at left, at a Barnes & Noble event.) I'm sorry to say I'll probably miss this next one, too, but maybe somebody reading this can make it there. It's this Friday, hosted by NYU's MFA program.*No, I haven't read My Diva yet. I've kept meaning to make it to a reading and buy one and have Michael autograph it ... .
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Places to go, people to read
I'll head up tonight after work: to 777 UN Plaza for a 6:00 program called "Crisis in Honduras," featuring reports from members of the U.S. solidarity delegation that traveled to Tegucigalpa earlier this month plus Honduras UN Ambassador Jorge Arturo Reina and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark.
I want to head up tomorrow after work: to the Asian American Writers' Workshop, 16
West 32nd Street, 10th Floor, at 7:00, for "An Evening with Hwang Sok-Young." The Korean writer and former political prisoner, jailed by the U.S. puppet regime in the south for the "crime" of setting foot in the socialist north, will read from his autobiographical novel The Old Garden, recently published here in English translation.
I plan to head over Thursday after work: to the Brecht Forum, 451 West Street, at 7:00, for a presentation by Fred Goldstein, author of Low-Wage Capitalism, followed by what ought to be a lively discussion.
You'll note that I will go tonight, while I want to go tomorrow, and I plan to go Thursday ... because the week as it proceeds tends to have its way with me. So we'll see. But
I'll definitely swing by after work Friday and join the picket line: outside Billionaire Mayor-for-Life Bloomberg's campaign headquarters at 813 Broadway, 5:00 to 6:30. There are many good reasons for this protest, but one of the best is last week's racist affront when Bloomberg dredged up scumbag horror show Rudolph Giuliani to tell a group of religious reactionaries, in nearly so many words of a KKK-type "warning," that if William Thompson wins the mayoralty it will mean terror in the streets for white people. Thompson is African American. As is David Dinkins, former NYC mayor who Giuliani ousted from office in 1994 after an openly racist campaign whose low point came when Giuliani led a police riot that took over downtown and featured drunken cops carrying signs calling Mayor Dinkins "the washroom attendant." Giuliani and his racist following are Bloomberg's failsafe strategy, as if spending more than anyone in history isn't enough to buy him another (illegal, in defiance of the term-limits law passed by popular referendum) term.
Back with more bookish stuff soon.
I want to head up tomorrow after work: to the Asian American Writers' Workshop, 16
West 32nd Street, 10th Floor, at 7:00, for "An Evening with Hwang Sok-Young." The Korean writer and former political prisoner, jailed by the U.S. puppet regime in the south for the "crime" of setting foot in the socialist north, will read from his autobiographical novel The Old Garden, recently published here in English translation.
I plan to head over Thursday after work: to the Brecht Forum, 451 West Street, at 7:00, for a presentation by Fred Goldstein, author of Low-Wage Capitalism, followed by what ought to be a lively discussion.You'll note that I will go tonight, while I want to go tomorrow, and I plan to go Thursday ... because the week as it proceeds tends to have its way with me. So we'll see. But
I'll definitely swing by after work Friday and join the picket line: outside Billionaire Mayor-for-Life Bloomberg's campaign headquarters at 813 Broadway, 5:00 to 6:30. There are many good reasons for this protest, but one of the best is last week's racist affront when Bloomberg dredged up scumbag horror show Rudolph Giuliani to tell a group of religious reactionaries, in nearly so many words of a KKK-type "warning," that if William Thompson wins the mayoralty it will mean terror in the streets for white people. Thompson is African American. As is David Dinkins, former NYC mayor who Giuliani ousted from office in 1994 after an openly racist campaign whose low point came when Giuliani led a police riot that took over downtown and featured drunken cops carrying signs calling Mayor Dinkins "the washroom attendant." Giuliani and his racist following are Bloomberg's failsafe strategy, as if spending more than anyone in history isn't enough to buy him another (illegal, in defiance of the term-limits law passed by popular referendum) term.
Back with more bookish stuff soon.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
And yes, there are other books, so I shouldn't be so dramatic ...
... but they're not this book, this book that I'm reading, these lives, lots of them yet each one amazingly well drawn, that I'm so caught up in. So don't tell me to pick up some other book this weekend. I've got miles of them, tall tottering to-read piles, but it's unthinkable that I could break the grip of this novel by starting another. I can imagine starting some nonfiction, and perhaps I will, but a novel, no no no. That would be like taking a walk in Brazil, turning a corner and finding myself in Iran. My mind is immersed in Portuguese, how am I supposed to suddenly understand Farsi?
And yes I checked the Queens library and no there's no solution there. First thing this morning I got online in hopes there'd be an available copy of this novel at my branch library so I could run over there and check it out. Sadly, there isn't.
And yes I checked the Queens library and no there's no solution there. First thing this morning I got online in hopes there'd be an available copy of this novel at my branch library so I could run over there and check it out. Sadly, there isn't.
A tragedy of epic proportions
I left my book in Manhattan!
I left the novel I'm reading, the novel in which I'm thoroughly engrossed, the novel that I've been compulsively returning to every time I have even 30 seconds to move through another page or two, I left it in Manhattan!
I left the very good novel I'm reading, which I'd just been discussing with my friend, telling her I'm surprised I'm liking it so much, it doesn't quite fit my usual template, but that I'll think about all that, about why it works for me, later, for now I'm just reading it reading reading it, just utterly swept up in it, I left it on my friend's desk!
I was halfway to Queens last night when I realized I didn't have my book! I was in tears! Teresa was sweet as could be, offering to go back, offering to go into Manhattan today to get it for me. But no of course I would never ask such a thing. Nor am I quite that broken up enough myself, to make the trip I make every weekday whose not making on weekends is what makes weekends so special. No. I shall be brave. I shall get through today and tomorrow, somehow, without reading this novel that I'm smack-dab halfway through and had foreseen plowing onward toward the end over these two days. I've got lots of chores. I've got writing to do. I've got to organize my desk and get my act together, the latter a perennial and never accomplished chore.
I left the novel I'm reading on my friend's desk in Manhattan. I'm in Queens. I've got to hold out till Monday. I must be strong. I must think of other things.
I left the novel I'm reading, the novel in which I'm thoroughly engrossed, the novel that I've been compulsively returning to every time I have even 30 seconds to move through another page or two, I left it in Manhattan!
I left the very good novel I'm reading, which I'd just been discussing with my friend, telling her I'm surprised I'm liking it so much, it doesn't quite fit my usual template, but that I'll think about all that, about why it works for me, later, for now I'm just reading it reading reading it, just utterly swept up in it, I left it on my friend's desk!
I was halfway to Queens last night when I realized I didn't have my book! I was in tears! Teresa was sweet as could be, offering to go back, offering to go into Manhattan today to get it for me. But no of course I would never ask such a thing. Nor am I quite that broken up enough myself, to make the trip I make every weekday whose not making on weekends is what makes weekends so special. No. I shall be brave. I shall get through today and tomorrow, somehow, without reading this novel that I'm smack-dab halfway through and had foreseen plowing onward toward the end over these two days. I've got lots of chores. I've got writing to do. I've got to organize my desk and get my act together, the latter a perennial and never accomplished chore.
I left the novel I'm reading on my friend's desk in Manhattan. I'm in Queens. I've got to hold out till Monday. I must be strong. I must think of other things.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Another one bites the dust
All of us little kids of 1950s Detroit, where he got his first break on a local lunchtime TV show, loved him. Now, watching some old Youtube videos from those days, I see that he was basically a Borscht Belt comedian cracking himself up doing old shtick, lots of it with a blue tinge that flew way over our heads. Well, what did we know? Except that he took a pie in the face better than anyone, and that the Soupy Shuffle cracked us up.It feels pretty silly to end a week that was focused mostly on John Brown and crucially important historic events by plunging into nostalgia over a dead Vaudevillian and how his generation that my generation grew up laughing at is now mostly gone, but what can I say? Consistency is one of my virtues, except when it's not.
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