oh what a world we live in

I bought this book because there was a great Vonnegut quote replacing the descriptive paragraph that is usually found on the inside of the book jacket and that intrigued me. It ended up being about a future version of our current world where bees are thought to be extinct until five people are all stung within a few days of each other. From there, it's a vision of a world not too far from ours, where people take drugs to mimic the effects of reading a novel (a comforting grey solitude mined from brains of people reading James Joyce) and shut out the world around them. The phrase "eat your brains" came up more than once. I'd like to say I'm entirely disturbed by the prospects of our crazy technological future, but I'm writing this from an airplane with wireless internet, so maybe I should put my money where my mouth is.

The Inmate With The Mop

The problem with reading books by Tao Lin is that his prose style is so similar to the way thoughts sound that after you're done, it's impossible not to write/think as though he is inside your brain writing your life as you live it. I don't know how he does this but it scares me. There's no real story here. The book is more like an extension of his blog and general online persona. I am going to see him give a reading tomorrow at Book Soup, maybe. This is my favorite thing he's ever written. Bed is also very good.

Okee Dokee Artichokee

There is something about being from the Midwest that I appreciate the farther I get from the Midwest. Years 0-18, in Cincinnati, OH, I was depressed that I wasn't hip and chic and from Manhattan or San Francisco or London or hell, even Toronto. No, I was from a city that realized raw fish was tasty roughly around 2002 and found jumping back on the leg warmer bandwagon easy because they'd never jumped off. Then I went to college in Chicago which is like Midwest for Dummies. Sure, we're friendly and enjoy a big hunk of cheese, but we eat salads and wear Burberry trench coats. As I encountered more non-Midwesterners, I suddenly found myself grateful for what is construed elsewhere as being overly polite and for the random colloquialisms that peppered my speech. And then Los Angeles. Oh Los Angeles. Perhaps as a reaction to the tan people with faces younger than my car, I have embraced my Midwestern roots full on. I can pontificate about the beauty of the Ohio River, happily ignoring the fact that I can still smell the stench from performing on a riverboat for two summers. I can ramble about the friendliness of the people, even though this means the line at Starbucks is out the door with people chatting it up as they order their mochas. My glasses are always rose colored when pointed towards the Midwest, because when you leave the Midwest, everybody's are. On either coast, it is considered a magical land where people talk to their farm animals and nobody has a door because we're all just so darned trustworthy. Whereas when you're there, it's just as boring and stupid as I thought it was when I was 16. Somehow, Lorrie Moore has captured all of this in one book taking place in Illinois and for that, I love her and I love this book. I also love Tassie, our heroine, and I would gladly follow her on another meandering journey again, were she not fictional.

Falling in Love With a Swede

Benny and Shrimp starts up where the majority of romantic comedies end. It's about the argument Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks had in the cab ride away from the Empire State Building about whether they'd live in Seattle or Baltimore. Or the moment when Richard Gere sighs and tells Julia Roberts it's about damn time she learned which fork to use and stopped safety pinning her stupid boots and buy some new ones. Benny and Shrimp meet cute at a cemetery (...did I say cute? maybe it's creepy?) and spend the next 200 pages dealing with the fact that he's a farmer who wants somebody to make him meatballs and needlepoint kittens onto his pillows and she's a librarian who wants somebody to go the opera and restaurants with her. Somehow, this isn't annoying, it's endearing in a we've-all-been-here sort of a way and you find yourself wondering if there's a way Shrimp can crochet while she's at the opera with Benny. The book doesn't really end, which would be annoying if it weren't so metaphorical and emblematic. Also, the book was translated from the original Swedish which means people have really fun names and there are lots of umlauts. Just sayin'.

Speaking of books that change your life (although I suppose they all must, in some manner. Imagine how many buses you've avoided stepping in front of because instead of going out you stayed home and read on the couch) here is one that purports to.  Either you like Alain de Boton or you don't. He is much like 50 Cent and certain types of cheese in that way. If no, this book is a good way to feel like you've read Swann's Way if you have not and don't plan to, but would still like to reference it at dinner parties. 

Towards the end he offers a piece of good advice which is that sometimes it is a good idea to put books down. Like most people who read, I often use books as a way to avoid real life. Finishing a difficult book is a good way to convince yourself you have done something important and that you are a substantial and productive member of society. At a certain point though, bosses and graduate school applications and landlords and mothers and others indifferent to your solitary accomplishments refuse to be ignored. You can't hide behind these paper walls forever, as much as you would like to. At least, this is what I keep telling myself though I have yet to take my own advice. 

A Sudden Urge To Break Out Into Hives

I am moving to New York in less than two weeks. I went there this weekend to find an apartment and somehow, a can-do attitude cultivated by too many viewings of "The Sound of Music" actually defeated the New York Real Estate Monster and landed me in a cozy new home somewhere between the Village and Chelsea and a Pinkberry. This is exciting and scary and awesome and horrible and like I said, hives. So I spent a lot of time reading, partially because you can do that on the subway, as Miss Labrie so eloquently reminds us, and partially because it's nice to think of other people when thinking of yourself makes you want to do cartwheels and vomit simultaneously.


Books I Read in New York, In Order of Importance:
Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck
The Romantics by Galt Niederhoffer
The Big Rewind by Nathan Rabin

This is a good time to be reading a book that reminds us, "Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it."

I'm certainly not a blown-in-the-glass bum but I'm going to do my best impression as my world collapses and rebuilds itself over the next few weeks.

One Way To Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself

The Last Lecture is a farewell speech written by Randy Pausch, a computer science professor who died from pancreatic cancer. He wrote it when he had six months left to live, in part to give his kids and students something to remember him by. The lecture, Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, is cheesy and full of stupid dad jokes and other jokes that are only funny if you are a computer science professor obsessed with DisneyLand but, still, it is a good read if you're looking to put your own life in perspective. Like, say, for example, if you are stuck on the subway with an hour to kill and no clear idea of where you are or how to get to where you are supposed to be. Reading about Pausch's tumor-riddled pancreas somehow makes that type of problem seem much less important. I got this book as a gift, by the way. It is that kind of book. You can watch the lecture that inspired it here.

Lost

At this point, I've probably squandered about 50% of my waking life on unsuccessful attempts to get from point A to point B. Lostness inevitably leads to lateness-or maybe the two problems arise from the same source?- in any event I'm also that girl whose friends assume "I'll be there at 2:00" means 2:30, or maybe 3, or maybe "Wait, didn't we plan that for Tuesday? No? Shit." On vacation this week I rediscovered the fact that Lost in New York means something entirely different than Lost in Los Angeles. Trying to get from Harlem to Brooklyn, I took two wrong trains and spent about 3 hours bumbling about underground. I also finished three books. Three! Just riding back and forth on the train. Most likely, this had a lot to do with why I kept missing my stops but, whatever, it was raining and I had nowhere pressing to be.

Lydia Davis writes stories that aren't so much stories as they are collections of thoughts, ideas for plots, gatherings of information organized according to the Scientific Method, and mathematical analyses of everyday situations. The pieces in Varieties of Disturbance are often about grammar, marriage, maids, and fraught relationships but however improbably she sidesteps sentimentality to create tiny, compact bits of impeccable prose. She also blurs the line between fiction and poetry in a way that makes the whole concept of genre seem futile. She's got an infectious prose style, so if you pick up this book don't be surprised when you start thinking in straight lines. Reading it on the train made me feel less like I was lost, per se, and more like I'd just suddenly decided to surprise myself and go somewhere other than originally planned. Like, um, Queens.

When the Op-Ed Page and Literature Collide

Upon finishing The Tortilla Curtain, my first thought was, Is this what people who read Grapes of Wrath when it was current felt? Not to suggest this book will reach those canonical heights (also not to suggest it's not a great read), but when it comes to reading about issues we're still so tangled up in, like the immigration debate, is there enough distance to appreciate somebody else's thoughts or does it just add to the knot? So if I were some random easterner reading the latest Steinbeck, would I have loved Grapes of Wrath and foretold it being assigned to ninth graders as summer reading everywhere or would I just have been annoyed by Steinbeck's proselytizing?

As for this book, the story was compelling, but I kept being dragged out of it by my own opinions which isn't why I read fiction. The most interesting contribution Boyle brings to the immigration debate by approaching it in literature is his comparison to nature. Our caucasian leading man loses two small dogs to coyotes in his mountaintop community. He believes it's because fellow community members feed these wild animals and encourage them to come around and sniff for food, then stealing said food (or puppies) when there's none being handed out. Whether or not you agree with the comparison, it certainly brings up some thoughts worth thinking.

You've Just Quit Your Job, What Are You Going To Do Next?

If you're me, the answer is to finally finish that stupid 600 page biography of Marc Chagall that's been taunting you since you read the review in the NY Times and bought it online without realizing it weighs more than your head and let it sit in your To Read Pile for a few months. And then you realized it was pretty dry and somehow managed to make Chagall's crazy life (an illegitimate child! an oedipus complex! france!) kinda boring. But the pictures were really pretty, so here are a few.











yayyyy!

Brain Vomit

Four espresso shots deep and reading The Exquisite by Laird Hunt.  "I used to slice the water like a serrated spoon," says the narrator. Serrated spoons are pretty awesome though, right? Like for eating pudding with, or some sort of mousse? I feel like they get way less attention than they deserve. Also, I am thinking this blog should be funnier. The other day I tried to convince a friend that I can be funny, which I guess is a pretty sure bet that I'm not. "I can name 5 people who think I'm funny," I said. "Produce them," said he. I came up with four, one of whom I was sleeping with when the sentiment was expressed. "That doesn't count," he informs me. "It also doesn't count if they think the things you do are funny, like being late all the time or leaving your keys places." I don't remember where I was going with this- a techno cover of Spiderwebs just came on in the cafe I'm sitting in and all my attention got completely redirected.  Anyway, hey.