A hand to reach

Last night I went to the library with my parents and got a bunch of weird books. One book about cooking and two about biology. Also, I bought two books: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and James Joyce’s Ulysses. I actually already have a copy of Ulysses, but this one was beautiful and leatherbound and $1. So you know. 

Anyway, I read the Joan Didion yesterday/this morning. It was good. Couldn’t stop reading it, really. It’s about the year after her husband died unexpectedly, suddenly. It was really a beautiful account of her grief and mourning. Very sad, of course, but very literate. So much poetry. I really, really liked it. And I love her writing style. So clear and concise and simple. 

The other thing I did yesterday was get really into podcasts. Do you guys listen to podcasts? I don’t really, except for This American Life. But yesterday I went on a search for others. Stranger, edgier ones. Something in the same vein, but different. Here is what I found: Love and Radio, Catalogue of Ships, Radio Lab, StoryCorps. There are others, too, but I haven’t listened to them yet, and so don’t want to recommend them quite yet.

I am having a love affair with radio.

OK, you guys, that is it for me today. I am feeling a bit off–sort of strange and desperate and unsatisfied. I think it is because of the road stretched before me.

Take me away

I haven’t been a very good friend to my blog lately, and I am sorry. It’s just that I haven’t been reading much. I ordered a bunch of zines from Ciara, and yes, I read them all, but as far as books are concerned, I haven’t been making much progress.

I did, however, convince my dad to buy me the new Salman Rushdie novel with the beautiful cover–The Enchantress of Florence–and I have been diligently reading through that for the past few days. I truly believe that Salman Rushdie is one of, if not the, greatest living storyteller. He is able to weave so much information and magic into every plot line that it really just blows my mind. 

This isn’t my favorite of his books so far. It’s sweeping and beautiful and there are lots of wonderful things about it, but I like some of his other books better. This one doesn’t have as much magic, nor has it had any of the passages that make me stop and reach for a pen to write it down and remember it forever. But it is moving along nicely, carefully, and I really like it.

Oh. I am tired. It’s only 8:30, but I was up so late last night, and I think it might be my bedtime.

And everything in between.

I came across this blog post at The Millions today, which is a link to a video of Junot Diaz being interviewed, and of course, I watched it because I sort of have a crush on Mr. Diaz, but it was really weird. I mean, I heard him speak about a year ago at a book reading when his book first came out, and he was so animated and awesome and charismatic, and in this interview, it felt really flat. It seemed like he was really tired, and there wasn’t much energy behind it. Anyway, maybe it was just the environment, or maybe it was the interviewers, or maybe he just stayed up too late. Still worth watching, though, as it does touch on the relationship between reading and writing, which is one I am very interested in as well.

I bought a bunch of zines a few days ago (which I am NOT supposed to be doing, seeing as how I am supposed to be DOWNSIZING not collecting more stuff). Anyway, I’ve read through a couple of them so far, and my favorite has been Otaku #5, which is by Jeff, who now writes Ghost Pine zine, and oh my god, I really love his zines, I do. Otaku is Ghost Pine before he renamed it, and this particular issue is several years old, but it is just bursting with fantastic passages and beautiful metaphors, and wow his writing is top-notch. Thank you, Jeff, for writing. 

Speaking of which, I have a story to write for work, and it is just taking so long. I am often reminded of a conversation I had with a colleague in the kitchen of the office one day. “I hate writing,” she said, “but I love having written.”

Exactly.

Life vs. Lit

I have not been reading much. Not sure what it is except for the fact that I am back in my parent’s house, hanging out with my friends from high school, and I guess I would rather be hanging out with them, or with my family, than reading books. There is always a strange balance that has to be struck between reading about life and actually living it, which is the argument against reading that I hear the most. “I would rather be actually doing things than reading about other people doing things,” say my non-reading friends. OK, I get that, and I struggle with it, too, but at the same time, if you’re using that argument, then you also shouldn’t enjoy watching TV or movies because they, too, are mere representations of what it is to live. 

Anyway, I think another part of the reason I haven’t been reading is because I checked out this huge book from the library. Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet. I want to read a Rushdie, but I am realizing that I am not ready, and I cannot make that commitment at this point. I read it for one night and have not picked it up since. Too daunting. Too huge. Too much. I think I need to be a little less ambitious at this point.

Sometimes it’s really important to embrace your limits.

Everything is a cycle.

Last night, I finished Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries. Overall, I really liked it. I mean, I wasn’t head over heels for it the whole time, although there were a few parts that I thought were extraordinarily touching and poignant, and I always wanted to start reading it again. It was one of those books that I would pick up and start reading, thinking that I was going to read one or two pages, but then end up reading twenty or thirty. So that is a good thing. 

Perhaps the most striking thing about this novel to me was the abundance of terrible sex. Not terrible in the incestuous or rape variety, although I guess you could argue that it was abusive in a way, but just the complete lack of passion and enjoyment by the vast majority of the women described in this novel. I suppose I should not be too surprised. It was just sad, in general.

Did I ever tell you what this book was about? It’s about a woman. Her entire life. From her birth to her death. And of course, other people’s stories are interwoven into her own–creating this huge web of family history and experience. I find myself very fascinated with “ordinary” lives, so this book was right up my alley. To me, ordinary people’s lives are all about being human. We are one in our humanness.

Anyway, there’s something else I wanted to talk about briefly, something I haven’t ever written about before, but I think about often, and that is the moment after you finish a book. For me, it is such a strange moment. You’ve just finished taking this long journey, which often lasts days if not weeks, with a whole set of new characters who you often feel empathy for, excitement with. And then it’s over, there is no more nagging obligation to pick up the worn cover and keep reading, and the book is closed, and you lie there on your bed, the book lying flat on your stomach, and stare at the ceiling for a minute. You are reading and then you are not. It is just a second, just a moment, and yet it is something more. And maybe you immediately get up and wring more information about the book out of google, or maybe you just sit there and stare, and it is quiet and there is a pause as your attention drifts from the people you’ve been thinking about so much for days back to your own life, on your own bed, in your own house, in your own place and time. A breath before you walk to your bookshelf and pick out something else.

Neither here nor there

So it is July, and I have misplaced my notebook with my list of books in it, so I’m not going to do my monthly wrap-up for June yet. Besides, I don’t even know if I read any books in June. If I did, it was early on in the month because I gave up on reading after the first couple of weeks–of that I am sure.

Anyway, it’s July, and I’ve read one book so far. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. I am always surprised at how much I love Toni Morrison, and although I rarely think to pick up her books on my own, if I pick one up and hold it long enough to read through the first page, I just can’t put it down. Which is what happened on Friday while I was going through my books and arranging them on shelves and trying to empty out boxes, and then I lifted the cover and read the first sentence and then the first paragraph and then the first chapter, and before I knew it, I was lying sprawled on my bed fifty pages in with no desire for anything else but to read. 

I finished it yesterday as I stood outside in the rain on the national mall while I waited for the fireworks to start, surrounded by people in ponchos and umbrellas camped out in the mud. It was sad and lovely and touching, and I especially loved the afterword that Toni Morrison wrote for my edition because it talked about her criticisms of the novel and her view of it after thirty-some years. Toni Morrison is a genius, genius, genius.

Now I am a reading a book called The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. It was the 1995 Pulitzer Prize winner, which is the only reason I picked it up at the library book sale a few months ago. As I’ve mentioned before, I think Pulitzers vary. Sometimes I think they’re great, and other times I am unimpressed. But this one, I am enjoying it very much. I’ve only read the first two chapters, but it is absolutely fascinating from my perspective to read about the women in this novel, which begins in 1905. Sad and eye-opening and inspiring. 

There’s a passage I would like to share for you which has nothing really to do with women and their lives, but everything to do with time, which is something I think about a lot but have never seen put into words so precisely as in this novel. Here it is:

It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity. Even the sentence parts seize on the tongue, so that to say “Twelve years passed” is to deny the fact of biographical logic. How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced–and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to the onslaught of sensation. For twelve years, from age fourteen to twenty-six, my father, young Cuyler Goodwill, rose early, ate a bowl of oatmeal porridge, walked across the road to the quarry where he worked a nine-and-a-half-hour day, then returned to the chill and meagerness of his parents’ house and prepared for an early bed.

The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course; I admit the truth of this; even our own stories are obscenely distorted; it is a wonder really that we keep faith with the simple container of our existence. During that twelve-year period it is probable that my father’s morning porridge was sometimes thin and sometimes thick. It is likely, too, that he rubbed up against the particulars of passion, snatched from overheard conversations with his fellow workers or the imperatives of puberty, or caught between the words of popular songs or rare draughts of strong drink. … My father was not blind, despite the passivity of his youthful disposition, nor was he stupid. He must have looked about from time to time and observed that even in the dead heart of his parents’ house there existed minor alterations of mood and varying tints of feeling. 

Oh, I like it. Yes, yes, yes. 

Okay. I guess that’s what I’ll leave you with tonight. I am happy to be living with my parents right now. Happy to spend time sitting in the living room, all three of us reading books. Happy to be in the middle of a book I want to read. Happy July.