A book to give your sister

Over the holiday, I picked up a copy of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, one of the great Irish novels of the 20th century.
I can't stop laughing at the blurb on the front cover, from the poet Dylan Thomas:

"This is just the book to give your sister if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl."

Home review

I'm a little late blogging this, but here's my review of Home, by Marilynne Robinson. 

In Gilead, a sleepy little town in Iowa in 1956, the elderly minister Robert Boughton is dying, cared for by his unmarried adult daughter, Glory.

" 'Home to stay, Glory! Yes!' her father said, and her heart sank," begins Marilynne Robinson's latest novel, Home, which is a finalist for this year's National Book Award for fiction.

Interrupting the quiet procession of the pair's days together is a letter from Jack — the black sheep son and brother gone for 20 years. Now in his 40s, he has yet to live down the bad deeds of his youth: cutting classes, stealing and, most grievously to Boughton, fathering an illegitimate child with a girl he doesn't love. ...

These characters will be familiar to readers of Gilead, Robinson's 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner. Not a sequel nor a prequel, Home eerily chronicles the same events as Gilead, but this time told from the perspective of Glory as she muddles through the drama of her brother's sudden reappearance.

This was a tough review for me to write, because I really loved Gilead, and there were a lot of things I found unsatisfying about Home, more for emotional reasons than easily defined artistic and/or critical reasons. Anyway, read the complete review here.

Sad about smoking

I saw an op-ed piece in The Washington Post recently that said to the effect "Let Barack Obama smoke if he wants to."


(Actual headline: "Let the Guy Smoke. Obama Is Probably Fibbing About Giving Up Cigarettes. That's Okay.")


I used to smoke, a lot. It's a depressing, suicidal addiction. It's not good. When you're smoking, you think it's harmless and fun, but that's the addiction tricking you. That's the nature of addiction.


It made me really sad to see that op-ed -- and not because it's particularly about Obama. I'd say the same thing about anyone.


To me, it's like saying, "Let him kill himself, what's the big deal?"


Having said all that, quitting smoking is one of the most personal decisions a person can make. No one can do it for you, and you're not gonna do it yourself until you're 100 percent mentally committed to doing it.

Nonplussed and bemused, followed by meh.

Add bemused to the list of words -- like nonplussed -- that seem to be morphing before our eyes.

The Boston Globe found several instances of political reporters writing that Barack Obama appeared to be "bemused" in debates. The context seemed to mean he was wryly amused. But bemused acutally means confused or puzzled.

Nonplussed also means confused or puzzled or taken aback -- not "nonchalant" or "unperturbed," as it's often used. (And as this blog has noted before!!)

What does this imply? Some deep-seated, society-wide revulsion to being confused? So much so that we must expunge the notion from the very language? Maybe, but probably not.

In other lexiconic news, RF would like me to note that "Meh" has gained a place in next year's dictionaries. It's an expression of indifference or apathy, supposedly originating with "The Simpsons." Homer asks Bart and Lisa, who are watching TV, if they want to go on a day trip. They say, "Meh," and keep watching TV.

I suspect "meh" was in circulation long before "The Simpsons." It sounds to me like it could be Yiddish or Italian, but that's just a gut feeling. I have no linguistic evidence to proffer.

Yeats and the Wandering Aengus

My life is full of things poetical lately. My car pool partner moved away, so to make the commute go faster, I've been searching out audio educational material. Open Yale Courses offers an online class in Modern Poetry, and I started listening to the lectures on Irish poet William Butler Yeats.
Yale has a pretty impressive set-up, and it's free and on the open Web. You can download video or audio of the lecture along with worksheets and other ancilliary materials. I like it better than the ubiquitous, proprietary, complicated Blackboard, which is the educational software of choice at University of South Florida (where I'm in library school), and many other places.

The first Yeats lecture discussed the poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus," (1899) a new poem to me. Here it is in its entirety.

I WENT out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

The teacher of the Yale course, the marvelously named Langdon Hammer, says this is an example of the early Yeats, and we will see Yeats move toward a different aesthetic as we go forward. So this is all very interesting to me. Make no mistake, I think "Wandering Aengus" is a marvelous poem, whether it's modern, romantic or whatever. I find Yeats fascinating.

I strongly suspect Yeat's Aengus is of Dun Aengus of the Aran Islands, a site we visited on our trip to Ireland last year. "Dun" means "Fort", so Dun Aengus is the Fort of Aengus. It's an ancient cliffside fort that looks out over the Atlantic Ocean. It's kind of hard to show from our photos, but look at this one below. People are lying on their bellies looking over the edge of the cliff because it's just too scary to walk up to the edge. There's no fence or anything to keep you from plunging over the side to your death. This photo was taken by me in August 2007.



I'll have some more thoughts on poetry in upcoming posts ...

For the NYT fans out there.

This is only funny if you're pretty familiar with New York Times columnist Frank Rich ... an actual conversation at my house Sunday night.

Scene: Me and the spouse sitting on the couch reading the NYT. 

Me: "Hey, did you read Frank Rich today? Was it good?"

The Spouse: "Yes, I did. Frank Rich is always good." 

Me: "Hmm. Can you boil down this week's column for me, so I don't have to read it?"

The Spouse: (thinks for a minute ...) "The pundits are all wrong. The administration is all wrong. Only I, Frank Rich, can tell what is really going on."

Too much RSS ...

Do you use an RSS reader, like Google Reader? Do you know what RSS is? Basically, it's a way to scoop up all the postings from your favorite blogs and gather them in a single place. Each blog's new updates are called a feed; you use your reader to subscribe to feeds.

I often get carried away subscribing to too many RSS feeds. When my RSS reader tells me that I have "1000+" unread posts, I know things have gone too far.
So every so often , I just give up and delete all the unread posts and start over. In the stock market, there's a term for when the sellers accept the fact that market has bottomed out and stop waiting for an upsurge: capitulation. It's typically associated with with a horrible bear market. That's what the "mark all posts read" button is. Once, I even deleted all my RSS feeds. That's super-capitulation.

There were dozens and dozens of posts made in the 48 hours after the election. Most of them variations on this theme: "Obama won! What does it mean? What will he do now? Maybe this? Or this? Or how about this?"

I'm not trying to make any kind of political statement here -- this being a strictly nonpartisan blog and all -- but this was mostly low-information junk food. The actual news content was very, very low. Political reporting has become like sports reporting, in that reader interest exceeds new content by a significant margin. Hence the massive proliferation of commentary. In my line of work, I'm more of a "just the facts, ma'am" type.

So I junked all my unread RSS posts -- I capitulated -- and started over again. Deep cleansing breath! Ahhhhh ...

The specter of economic meltdown

When the economy goes south, I turn into a business news ADDICT. We may be in heading for the worst downturn since the Great Depression, so you can imagine what I'm like these days. I'm always looking around for the next good stuff.

My favorite sources:

• National Public Radio's Planet Money blog and podcast. Fun, frightening stuff: It's got a casual, shooting-the-sh*t-over-beers vibe to it, cool music and interviews with global economists.
• A triumvirate of big dailies: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal. These guys rock. I particularly like The New York Times series The Reckoning, and I particularly recommend their story on ostensible wise man Alan Greenspan.
• Slate Magazine's The Big Money. I'm particularly fond of a Depression-era diary they're running, written by a lawyer who lived through it in Youngstown, Ohio. Check it out here and here.
  

When I get scare of what's going to happen in the coming months, I comfort myself with this thought: the life of the mind is pretty cheap. Instead of spending money, I'll stay home and read The Brothers Karamazov.

Baseball and Man's Hubris

The baseball season ended this week, and no, my beloved Rays did not win, but they gave it a great try and I'm very proud of them. Way to go, guys! 

They had the worst record in baseball last year, so this year's efforts are quite an accomplishment. Also, the paper's book section interviewed Rays outfielder Fernando Perez about what he was reading, and he mentioned two poets that I will check out -- Robert Creeley and John Ashbery. 

But I'm very bothered about one aspect of this year's World Series. The weather was awful in Philadelphia, and it delayed one game to a 10 p.m. start, and suspended another game so that part of the game had to be played two days later.

This is an outrageous turn of events, due mostly to an extended schedule that now has the World Series played in Northern climes at the end of October. Baseball is  supposed to end in crisp autumnal air, not in the onset of winter, as is what happened in Philly last week -- rain and cold temps. 

It used to be, the World Series was played at the beginning of October (in the afternoon, no less) and that's really the way it should be. There are lots of reasons the season has been extended, which I won't go into here. But baseball management needs to find some way to shorten the season up. And they also need to start the games earlier in the evening; these 8:37 p.m. ET times are too late. It's not fun to have to stay up until 1 a.m. on a work night. 

But really, I'm most bothered by the idea that human beings can or should be playing the championship game of what is essentially a summer sport at the tail end of October. It's fine in Florida, but in the more established baseball cities with their outdoor stadiums-- New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, St. Louis -- it's insane. It's man foolishly saying he can overcome the turn of the seasons. It's just wrong and it makes me worry.

PS The spouse says he agrees but basically says, get in line. It's an old complaint and nothing seems to come of it.

DFW Memorial, Part IV

I've been reading the many tributes, memorials and critiques of David Foster Wallace since his death, and one of my favorite things so far is a map created by the Boston Globe that shows the city of Boston as portrayed in the novel Infinite Jest. It's just cool. It also would be a great starting point for someone coming to the novel for the first time ... Infinte Jest is like Joyces' Ulysses, in that it has a very interesting plot, but said plot is not easily apprehended at first look. So reading guides and tipsheets help immensely, if you like that sort of thing. (Which I do.)
Anyway, check out the Boston Globe's map. It really made me want to pick up IJ and read it again. Such a wonderful, mapcap, harrowing trip to an alternate universe where we begin our study of depression, loneliness, addiction and humor.

My intellectual Rays

I love baseball, which is very odd to my old high school friends who remember me as being very anti-sports. "I see you as the cool goth girl under the bleachers, smoking cloves, and making fun of the cheerleaders," my friend RF recently messaged me.
Well, yes. But I would submit that that image and being a baseball fan are not as incompatible as it might seem. There's a lot of diversity in baseball among its fans and its players. Which brings us to today's New York Times story on Fernando Perez, who plays in the outfield for my most beloved team the Tampa Bay Rays. (For you non-baseball fans, the Rays have made it to the play-offs this year for the first time after ten straight losing seasons.)

While classmates at his New Jersey prep school back in 2000 listened to the Dandy Warhols and watched “Survivor,” Fernando Perez had his own idols.

“I was big into Hermann Hesse,” he remembered proudly.

This would be less remarkable if Perez, who went on to major in American Studies with an emphasis on creative writing at Columbia University, had followed his dream to write short narrative prose for a living. But that plan has been shelved while he helps craft a fairy tale otherwise known as the Tampa Bay Rays.

Perez, a switch-hitting outfielder with wit as quick as his lightning legs, has emerged as a surprising contributor to the no-longer-surprising Rays. ...

Then it goes into his development through the Rays minor league system before coming back around to his writing.

He is committed to pursuing this career [baseball], but just in case, he keeps his writing skills sharp by working on short prose and some personal essays on his laptop. He does not care about being published, and if he ever is he will do so under a pseudonym.

“So that it’s taken on its own merits, not because I’m a baseball player,” Perez said. Meanwhile, he will gladly collaborate with 24 other Rays on baseball’s story of the year.

DFW Memorial, Part III

Salon has a story about David Foster Wallace's final days, with comments from his father, mother and sister. It confirms with more detail the return of Wallace's debilitating depression. It's sad reading, but it's also comforting to know that he had the support of his family and loved ones at the end. It helps explain.
I prefer this kind of straight-up reporting to some of the other things I've read about Wallace during the past days. Wallace's work over the years has consistently addressed issues like depression and suicide, and some critics now are looking back at his work for themes that might shed light on his death.
I think we have to be very cautious about this kind of reading for biography. We do authors and literature a disservice when we get carried away looking at the work this way. It trivializes the writing, which should be able to stand on its own. Yes, it is helpful to understand an author's historical and cultural milieu. And the author can and will use details of his or her everyday life, which biographers can document. But the author's artistry should transcend those details in ways that make the biographical details much, much less important to the active reader. At least that is what happens if the author is good, and Wallace was beyond good. He was great.

Adventures in second-hand book-buying, Part I (Peter Pauper Press)

My household is in austerity mode thanks to the recent economic downturn. So I've curtailed my book-buying. A few weeks ago, though, I was visiting a friend in Sarasota and we stopped by the very lovely Selby Library, which has a Friends of the Library used book store.
For 50 cents each, I picked up one reference book published in 1969 on modern world history (in retrospect, a dubious selection) and one very interesting copy of the Psalms.
I have several Bibles already, so I didn't need a copy. But what caught my eye was its charming design. Titled "The Psalms of David" and published by Peter Pauper Press, the small hardcover came in its own cardboard slipcase. The slipcase was frayed, but but it did its job of protecting -- the book inside is in excellent condition. (Book on left; slipcase on right.)




It has charming woodcut art by Valenti Angelo, and the paper is rich and textured. There's no information to identify the year of publication, but I poked around on WorldCat and figured out it could be 1936 or 1943.



I'm also fascinated by the fact that the Psalms are laid out in paragraph form, i.e. big blocks of text.



In the Bibles I have, the Psalms are laid out with many breaks between sentences, so that it resembles poetry. This mimics the traditional thought on the origins of the Psalms, which are said to be music lyrics authored by King David (of David and Goliath fame). David would sing the Psalms while accompanying himself on his lyre, which is a harp-like musical instrument. I love the image of the handsome young warrior king, moodily strumming his lyre under a shade tree, but taking a break every now and then to open up a can of whup-ass on someone.

I also looked up the Peter Pauper Press, and as I expected it was a budget imprint of yesteryear, specializing in inexpensive editions of the classics. I almost fell off my chair, though, to read that its first edition was ... Petrarch sonnets translated by J.M. Synge. Synge is a major, major figure in Irish literature, the author of the once scandalous play "The Playboy of the Western World." Why do so many things come back to Ireland? More evidence of Ireland's important place in my own narrative history.
I'll have even more thoughts on this copy of the Psalms in my next post.

DFW Memorial, Part II

The act of reading is so intimate and dear to me, that I have a constant fantasy that certain authors are my friends. Good friends, too. Intellectually, I know this is a fantasy, but on an emotional level, there is a certain kind of reality there. I think anyone who loves reading knows what I'm talking about.
I was so sad this week thinking about the death of David Foster Wallace. He was my favorite living author.
But he was not the kind of author I would whole-heartedly recommend to friends, because he was just so darn difficult. He wrote about off-putting, pathetic characters in his short stories. His two novels, by any standards, are long and verbose. His nonfiction essays appeared in popular magazines, though, and the collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster are brainy and accessible.
To talk about his fiction: it has to be Infinite Jest. That was his masterwork. It's on the same scale as Ulysses -- huge and complicated and daunting. But on another level, if you were willing to surrender to it and just go with it, it was remarkably funny and freewheeling, but serious and sad and touching, too. It was an inside look at the following: addicts who go to AA meetings, tennis-prodigy teens at a sports boarding school, what it's like to be a punter in the NFL, and wheel-chair bound assassins plotting next moves.
I can still remember vividly where I was when I was reading certain parts of it -- the New Mexico State Fair on a perfectly crisp and sunny late afternoon.
Wallace is often referred to as postmodernist, and I can see because Infinite Jest doesn't really wrap up its plot in any discernible way -- it just kind of stops -- and it has tons of creepy pop culture references. Also, Wallace would make these funny discursive asides about what he was trying to do as an author and whether or not he was succeeding or failing.
But he was also terribly traditional, and obsessed with moral behavior. Not ina binary good vs. evil kind of way, but a How-should-we-treat-each-other-in-the-world kind of way. His Kenyon College speech is a classic here. (If you haven't read it and have a few minutes, please do so.)
Many, many tributes this week. Here are my favorites:

• McSweeney's
  The literary Web site run by author Dave Eggers has posted a number of lovely, heartfelt reminiscences of people who met Dave Wallace, as he liked to be called. It really hit home with me what a good man this was -- a kind, caring person.
• A.O. Scott
  I liked this remembrance by A.O. Scott, especially its title: "The Best Mind of His Generation." How I agree with that compliment. Scott compares Wallace to Ezra Pound (my friend Ezra) but I think there are many more parallels between Wallace and James Joyce. Not just that they wrote big, doorstop novels with anti-plots, but also that they were concerned with the theme of exile of the mind, and fashioning your own belief system in a society in which the belief systems has become dessicated and hollow (Catholic Ireland under English rule and the corporate, consumerist United States, respectively).
  That latter point is really brought to the fore by ...
• Steve Almond in the Boston Globe
  Headline is "A Moralist of Hope." This gets at what a moral writer Wallace was, something I never felt like he got his just due for. Almond writes
  

  This is the crucial question of our historical moment: whether our citizens can
  rise above their doubts and anxieties and express a genuine idealism. And it's
  the very reason we should mourn Wallace's death. He was one of the few popular
  writers who threw himself into the maw of American life and challenged the
  reflexive cynicism he found there. He was a moralist of astonishing clarity and
  hope.

  
  Then he writes about Wallace's appreciation of Dostoevsky. I really need to read Dostoevksy soon. Too many signs and portents are telling me to read him.

David Foster Wallace archive at Harper's

Harper's magazine has posted all the stories David Foster Wallace wrote for them. Go there now and read one of my favorite stories of his, "Everything is Green." It's short, not even a whole page.
It begins:

She says I do not care if you believe me or not, it is the truth, go on and believe what you want to. So it is for sure that she is lying, when it is the truth she will go crazy trying to make you believe her. So I feel like I know.

Read the whole thing here.

NYT Obituary on David Foster Wallace

The New York Times has published a moving obituary:

A versatile writer of seemingly bottomless energy, Mr. Wallace was a maximalist, exhibiting in his work a huge, even manic curiosity — about the physical world, about the much larger universe of human feelings and about the complexity of living in America at the end of the 20th century. He wrote long books, complete with reflective and often hilariously self-conscious footnotes, and he wrote long sentences, with the playfulness of a master punctuater and the inventiveness of a genius grammarian. Critics often noted that he was not only an experimenter and a showoff, but also a God-fearing moralist with a fierce honesty in confronting the existence of contradiction.

Well worth reading here.
His parents confirmed that he was suffering from terrible depression, that he had been hospitalized over the summer and had tried numerous therapies, to no avail.

I hope and pray he's gone to a better place.

DFW Memorial, Part I

One of my favorite bits from David Foster Wallace was this little joke, which is featured prominently in his novel "Infinite Jest":

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

Wallace used this joke to begin a commencement speech he delivered at Kenyon College in 2005. He further explained:

The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

This really very quickly gets at what I love about Wallace.
And a bit later:

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth.

Read the whole speech here.

David Foster Wallace, RIP

I learned today that David Foster Wallace has died.

This is sad, shocking news. 

Regular readers will recall he is a particular favorite of mine. His novel Infinite Jest affected me deeply, and I would venture to say even changed my life in the way that only great works of literature can.

The news reports are frustratingly brief -- that he committed suicide by hanging at his home, that his wife found him, that he was 46. There is no mention of depression or illness or other explanation. I doubt we'll learn more -- the human response from his readers is a mournful, incredulous Why? -- but Wallace was an extremely private person.

I'll be gathering my thoughts on his passing and posting more soon. 

This is a very sad day for American fiction, and my sincere condolences to his family and friends. 

Biblical epigraphs

Epigraphs -- the short quotations that begin a longer work of fiction or nonfiction -- are rare in newspaper reporting. But this week's column by Floyd Norris in The New York Times about the takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac uses one perfectly.

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.

— Matthew 6:24

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were intended to serve at least two masters — the investors who put up capital and a government that wanted to help the housing industry and extend home ownership. In the end, they failed to serve either one very well.

Read the rest of the column here. 
It got me to thinking about epigraphs -- those short sentences that begin a novel. Usually they get their own page, setting the tone for the 200+ pages yet to come.

Now doesn't that seem like a great Jeopardy! category?

"I'll take Biblical epigraphs for $200, Alex."

Answer: " ... The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose ... "

Question: "What is The Sun Also Rises"

Alex: "That's correct, the novel by Ernest Hemingway."

"Biblical epigraphs for $400."

Answer: "For we are strangers before them, and sojournors, as were all our fathers."
Question: "What is Dreams from my Father."

Alex: "Yes, the memoir by Barack Obama."

But then I ran out of ideas for my Jeopardy! category ... . 

Begin tangeant: In the interests of nonpartisanship, I will note that John McCain begins his memoir "Faith of My Fathers" with a moving quote from the eponymous hymn by Frederick William Faber:

Faith of our fathers, living still,

In spite of dungeon, fire and sword;

O how our hearts beat high with joy

Whenever we hear that glorious word!

Faith of our fathers, holy faith!

We will be true to thee til death.

It's works well as an epigraph, but it is not strictly Biblical. I will soon do a separate post on hymns, because I have a lot more to say on that subject. End tangeant.

But then I couldn't think of any more answers for my Jeopardy! category ... 

But I was thinking maybe some of the more knowledgeable Spoonreader readers -- Mmm, I'm glancing your way, Drs. K and L -- might be able to help me come up with four more appropriate Biblical epigraphs! Hope so, anyway.

I have two more pieces of advice for authors about epigraphs.

1. Pick one epigraph, not two. One epigraph has punch and power. Two epigraphs make you look indecisive.
2. I would advise against using an epigraph in a foreign language. Most Americans only know one language. And if you use an epigraph in Latin or French, you'll seem pretentious and no one will no what you're talking about -- I'm sorry to say it, but that's just the way it is.

Confederacy of Dunces and my juvenile sense of humor

Walt Disney World, which is not far from where I live, puts on an annual Christian rock festival it calls Night of Joy.
In the great New Orleans novel Confederacy of Dunces, the Night of Joy is a French Quarter strip club where dim-witted Darlene works on her "exotic" dance routine involving a cockatoo; a tipsy Irene Reilly sells her hat to vintage clothing dealer Dorian Greene; Lana Lee masterminds her illegal porno ring; and janitor Burma Jones plots the sabotage that will bring this wacky house of cards tumbling down.
(Snicker snicker snicker.)