The Man of My Dreams

Another disappointing second novel.

I quite loved Prep for the impeccable complexity of its sentences, the obsessively detailed realism of its milieu, and the thorough representation of its protagonist's subjectivity. In short: excellent writing and a narrative of class awareness and adolescent development that worked for me (I tag that on because my sister thought it was well-written but wasn't interested in the story, which I can understand).

Interestingly, in The Man of My Dreams, Sittenfeld writes very differently, and I give her points for not going straight into a stylistic rut. The only problem is that her simple sentences are boring. As is her heroine. As is the structure of the novel which episodically details bitter, mopey Hannah Gavener's romantic history (desire for desire, unrequited love, earnest boy, bad boy, more unrequited love, resolution), with none of the sharply-observed social and cultural context that made Prep such an intense read.

The difference between the novels' resolutions kind of sums it up: At the end of Prep, Lee Fiora realizes that much of her difficulty has been of her own making, a realization that reshapes not just her experience, but the reader's, for she suddenly becomes an unreliable narrator in a novel that has fully depended upon her narration. Then she does something stupid--or naive, or unconsciously wish-fulfilling--(the newspaper interview) that dramatically changes her status and understanding, and, again, both Lee and the reader get it, the reader because we have followed her through all the steps.

In The Man of My Dreams, on the other hand, Hannah tells us early on that she makes things difficult for herself, but then she doesn't do anything with this realization, just keeps on being her own passive, grumpy self (OK, she goes to therapy--and the last section of the novel is a letter to her therapist that is so un-letter-like that we are positively in the realm of bad writing). At the end of the novel, she too undergoes a dramatic shift, but she tells us (and her therapist, in the letter), rather than showing us, and it is not so believable. The utter narcissist, fixated on desire, moves to Albuquerque, starts teaching autistic kids, and realizes it is better to give? Uh, yeah, no, not so much.

In other words: not worth reading, though Sittenfeld contines to excel at the writing of mortification and awkward sex.

Again and Again

E got this book from the library. Again. (I guess I could write that title and not worry too much about the author googling it, given the title, but I'm still feeling delicate about negativity.) (Though that delicacy may go out the window when I finish--if I finish--my current novel.) (And sorry about the Amazon link, but sometimes Powell's just has insufficient information.)

Anway. The book. I tried to dissuade her ("We already got that book once.") but failed ("I love this book.") Which means I will be reading the book again, and not enjoying it, again. I mean, it's OK, but it's the kind of book you read once with some interest, to find out what happens, and then have no desire to read again. Except that your kid wants to read it again. And again. And probably again.

That book just isn't a very good book. But The Jolly Postman is a great book. Only my heart sinks every time E pulls it out. I think it might be all the little pieces that you have to take out of the envelopes and read. It takes so long, and I've read them so many times, and I just don't want to read them again.

One Morning in Maine is another. We haven't gotten on a serious jag with that one, thank goodness, and I love reading it--every six months. But two days in a row? Shoot me now.

And yet, there are books that I can read (and have read) every day for months, and enjoyed every single reading. To name just a few: Make Way for Ducklings, Chrysanthemum, Clementine's Winter Wardrobe, Madeline, Something From Nothing, Joseph Had a Little Overcoat (did you know that Something From Nothing and Joseph Had a Little Overcoat are the same book, and they're both fabulous?), Chicka Chicka Boom Boom (just linking to the ones that aren't the same old same old, because these are some great books, and if you don't know them, you should).

There's really no analysis here, just the point that some books are fine for reading again and again, and some aren't.

Wednesday Is for Food Reading

How can you not love Paul Newman? (It's about food, really.) (I just wish my husband had that gig.) (The chef's gig, not Paul Newman's gig.) (Then again, if my husband had Paul Newman's gig, would that mean I'd be married to Paul Newman?) (Of course, he is a little old for me.) (And I don't even know that I fancy him.) (But, after all, he IS Paul Newman.)

Sometimes All It Takes Is a Sentence

From an article about a coffee cake in today's Food section:

The firm-but-tender streusel crumble rippling over the silky cake creates a wonderful sweet, a cake that has a certain deliciously dependable, heirloomlike quality.

There's the general tendency toward the purpling of prose in contemporary food writing, and then there's the idea of an heirloom coffee cake. I don't know about you, but I'd rather inherit tomato seeds than a coffee cake.

The Year of Magical Thinking

Reading, like everything else, takes place in context. A great book will probably be great and a bad book bad whenever you read them, but the experience of reading a book is inevitably shaped by the circumstances in which you read: by the last book you read, by recent events, by whether your back hurts, by whether you devour the book flat out in one sitting late into the night or nibble it in bits and pieces at the bus stop and in ten free minutes before picking the kids up from school.

A friend lent me The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's memoir of the year after the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, maybe six months ago. Had I read it immediately, I wouldn't be comparing it to Sandra Gilbert's Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Way We Grieve, another literary widow's recent book about death, which I read this summer. Nor would Jenny's recent Didion post have left me slightly embarrassed at my apparently jejune affection for Didion's prose.

I might not have noticed that there appears to be a canon of death--Geoffrey Gorer, C. S. Lewis, Phillipe Aries, Sherwin B. Nuland--to which both Didion and Gilbert turn in the face of loss. I might not have wondered whether their books will enter this canon. I might not have been so aware that it seems impossible to speak of death today without referencing 9/11.

If I hadn't just read Gilbert's argument for the permeability of the barrier between dead and living, I might not have noted how acutely absolute that barrier is for Didion. On the other hand, if I'd read Didion's brief reflection first, Gilbert's lengthy exposition might have seemed not only unnecessarily long, but perhaps even unnecessary.

Six months ago, I might not have focused so intently on Didion's prose, probing, like a tongue in a dubious tooth, whether or not I do in fact like it. I might not have noticed that her sentences in this book seem different: simpler and less show-offy, more drastically to the point, and thus not a useful gauge.

Then again, I might have noticed, for if I'd read the book six months ago, I would still have been me. I would still have had my fascinations with death and disaster, with prose style, with glamour (for even, or perhaps especially, in the devastating wake of its loss, Didion and Dunne's life still comes across as enormously glamourous, and I must pinch myself in punishment for my envy of something whose loss has left someone else bereft) (I have a host of other fascinations, but those were the ones that primarily shaped this reading experience).

I think The Year of Magical Thinking is a very good book, and I think I would have thought so six months ago. The name dropping gets to be a bit much, though you could argue that it was simply her life (Jenny's comments about Didion's sense of her own preciousness poke at me), and at the end the circling back and repetition, which I liked for most of it (structure is always Didion's strength), starts to lose its power. But unlike the excerpt that appeared in the NY Times Magazine, the whole book does not seem arrogant and solipsistic, or even cold (I don't remember, now, why I thought the excerpt was so cold, except it had something to do with the absence of her daughter, who is a central presence in the book, and with the sense that she knew everything there was to know about how everyone grieves, which isn't so much the case in the book). I like, too, how she describes her fights with Dunne, refusing to fall into the everything-was-beautiful-all-the-time trap with which the dead are so often recalled. It comforts me, somehow, to know that other couples, famous writer couples, hardly speak for days after stupid fights.

As I was finishing the book (more context) I read Ron Rosenbaum's review of Daniel Mendelsohn's new book about the Holocaust. I'm not sure I can read the book. For all my obsession with death, the Holocaust is not one of my readerly preoccupations. It's too much for me. In fact, I'd been thinking, with reference to Didion, about how difficult it is to imagine the unimaginable--one's husband dropping dead across the dinner table--and how perhaps I read these books about death to try to get there, where I can't imagine, even though I don't want to go. Perhaps it's a kind of inoculatory effect: if I can know, from someone else, what it will be like, perhaps it won't be so bad, or perhaps I can at least anticipate the badness. And I was thinking, as I do, in my liberal guilt kind of way, how much easier it is to access the pain of a famous writer losing her husband, than a Lebanese grandfather losing his whole family in a bombing, or a Mexican mother losing her children in a mudslide. And I was thinking about boxcars, really, I was, and then I read this passage in Rosenbaum's review:

And if one thinks one has lost one’s capacity for horror at the depths of human nature, consider this, from an eyewitness deposition he finds about the second roundup of Bolechow Jews: “A terrible episode happened with Mrs. Grynberg. The Ukrainians and the Germans who had broken into her house found her giving birth. ... When the birth pangs started she was dragged onto a dumpster in the yard of the town hall with a crowd ... who cracked jokes and jeered and watched the pain of childbirth. ... The child was immediately torn from her arms along with its umbilical cord and thrown — It was trampled by the crowd and she was stood on her feet as blood poured out of her with her bleeding bits hanging.”

It’s an episode that raises questions about the limits of representation. After giving us an excerpt from another eyewitness account — of Jews packed in cattle cars on the way to the death camps — Mendelsohn writes: “Whatever we see in museums, the artifacts and the evidence, can give us only the dimmest comprehension of what the event itself was like. ... We must be careful when we try to envision ‘what it was like.’ It is possible today, for instance, to walk inside a vintage cattle car in a museum, but ... simply being in that enclosed, boxlike space ... is not the same as being in that space after you’ve had to smother your toddler to death and to drink your own urine in desperation, experiences that visitors to such exhibits are unlikely to have recently undergone.” Well intentioned as such exhibits are, the power of eyewitness testimony suggests that sometimes words are worth a thousand pictures.

If one reason we read is to get into another context, to understand another circumstance and another life, if we feel that we must go there, even if we don't want to, then Didion's book works, regardless of her preciousness or her prose.

[I am wildly dissatisfied with this post. It's been bobbing around in my head since I started the book on Friday night. There are too many bits and pieces here, and I didn't even include them all. But maybe that's why I can't just delete it. Sorry.]

Bunnies

E has a shelf of books at Grammy's house. The books used to be for Grammy and Grandpa to read to her, but now she reads them herself. The other day she wanted to read to me. She read I Love You, Bunny Rabbit. Which got me thinking about the number of picture books that feature bunnies.

At the top of the list, of course, are Pat the Bunny and Goodnight Moon, which are absolutely lovely books that just happen each to feature a bunny. But think about it: why a bunny?

Bunnies seem to be particularly lovable, as in Bunny, My Honey, or goofy a la Knuffle Bunny. Of course there's the distinction between the stuffed bunny, featured in I Love You, Bunny Rabbit and Knuffle Bunny, and the anthropomorphic bunny of Bunny, My Honey.

But any seasoned picture book reader knows where this is heading: toward the most horrifying bunny book around--nay, one of the most horrifying picture books around--The Runaway Bunny. I wish I could find the full text, but a superficial search does not reveal it. If you think there's a copy on your bookshelf, find it and take a good look. If not, you'll have to be satisfied with a few choice quotes:

"If you run after me," said the little bunny, "I will become a fish in a trout stream and I will swim away from you."
"If you become a fish in a trout stream," said his mother, "I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you."

"If you become a tree," said the little bunny, "I will become a little sailboat, and I will sail away from you."
"If you become a sailboat and sail away from me," said his mother, "I will become the wind and blow you where I want you to go."

Calling Dr. Freud, anyone? WHEREVER YOU GO, YOUR MOTHER WILL FIND YOU. YOU CANNOT ESCAPE!

The only book scarier is Love You Forever, in which the mother climbs through her adult son's window to snuggle him while he is sleeping. Let's not even go there.

But this all begs the question: why bunnies?

I can venture some answers: they're cute and snuggly; spring and Easter and rebirth all that; reaching back to our pastoral origins; um...I'm running out of answers.

The weird thing is: how many kids hang out with bunnies these days? Not a lot (though there is a family in our neighborhood that keeps bunnies in a hutch in their side yard). So bunnies have become some weird kind of fictional avatar for our snuggly, newborn, pastoral imagination?

Help me out here, people. Bunnies?

Jon Carroll

I'm a hopeless newspaper reader.

I know: newspapers are dying; nobody reads newspapers any more; newspapers are the mainstream media and you know what that means (what does it mean?); you can get anything you want online anyway; blogs are the future; etc.

Whatever.

I like the newspaper: it's a routine; it's there every morning; I don't have to turn anything on; it's quiet; I can hold it in my hand; I can skim headlines all at once; I can get funnies and the weather and the score and the news and Dear Abby (or whatever advice column that particular paper offers, because all newspapers have advice columns, and I'm not one to go out and seek advice columns, or advice, for that matter, out in the hinterlands of the internet, but like everyone else, come on, admit it, I like me a good advice column, if only to be reassured that I am not so badly off and, admit it again, stupid, as lots of other people out there).

I pretty much always read the local paper: in London I read The Guardian and The Independent (and The Sun or The Mail whenever I managed to pick up a copy on the Tube) (really, London is the best place in the world for newspapers); in New York I read the Times (OK, that one I read online wherever I am) (of course also the Post, if I can pick up a copy on the subway); here I read the local liberal establishment paper (and, yes, I will admit that it sucks) (and don't forget the local conservative tabloid, yes, whenever I can pick up a copy someone else has bought and discarded); and in the Bay Area I read the San Francisco Chronicle. And now I am having kind of a spelling/grammar/writing problem, because in London and the Bay Area I meant "read" to be past tense, whereas "here" and in New York, where I am more often these days, at least than when I lived in the Bay Area, "read" should be present tense.

This is important because you need to understand the context when I say that after I left the Bay Area, I kept reading the Chronicle online for a long time, first because I missed the Bay Area, but then because I loved Jon Carroll so much. Jon Carroll is simply the best columnist ever: he is funny; he makes sense; he nicely balances the big issues and the small, as a good columnist should; he has excellent politics; and, really, I think he should be president.

Eventually I had to embrace my life in Red State (where, yes, I read the Red State Capital City paper every day), so I gave up the Chronicle, but whenever I stumble upon it, I check up on Jon Carroll, and today, once again, he is so smart and sensible that I vow definitively to give up complaining about Vanity Fair.

Kate and Spence

Getting a pedicure at a fancy salon, I picked up this month's Vanity Fair (and, oh, how glad I am that I did not buy it, because then I would be forced to rail against this month's puff piece, the text, if one can deign to label it thus, though I suppose text is a better term than article, that accompanies the famous Suri Cruise photos, and basically consists of Tom and Katie talking about how great they are, and the author, whose name I will not look up, so as not to have to print it and embarrass her, talking about how great Tom and Katie are, oh, and what a great and loving--and did I say great and loving--big happy family the whole Cruise-Holmes melange turns out to be) (though you know, that author probably would not be embarrassed at all, and I really need to stop complaining about Vanity Fair being Vanity Fair, or, if I am going to be offended and complain, I should stop reading the damn magazine).

At any rate, because I did not buy the magazine, I need not offer a sustained analysis or critique (hmm, am I creating a new magazine-reading-blogging rule here? let's not...). Instead I can just comment upon (my, it is taking me an awful long time to get to this comment which is all I really want to make) the excerpt from William J. Mann's new biography, Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn.

It's one of those reads that makes you see everything in a new light that is immediately completely obvious, which is my absolute favorite kind of non-fiction read. We all thought of Hepburn as the ultimate in feminist New England authenticity, but she was a movie star, for god's sake, and Mann's argument that she invented and reinvented herself makes total sense, especially when you consider the complications of her politics and sexuality, writ against the history of Hollywood from the 1930s on.

But what I found really interesting was his account of how Hepburn herself participated in the sentimentalizing and romanticizing (they are slightly different things, especially in this case) of her relationship with Spencer Tracy. I remember reading Garson Kanin's Tracy and Hepburn (no links worth linking to) and being entranced by the stuff of tragic love story. Turns out it's not the case: the romantic part of the relationship ended in 1952, they both had significant same-sex relationships, Tracy's guilt was not just about drinking or his deaf son, but about gay sex, Hepburn's friends were shocked when, in the late 80s, she herself started trumpeting the relationship as tragic romance. Fascinating stuff, and much more commentary about current celebrities, celebity biographies, and the like could be vouchsafed, but I must go pick up authentic children at very un-Hollywood school.

Empty Pages

Here is a lovely essay by Jonathan Safran Foer about blank pages. It begins with a friend sending him the top page from a stack of typewriter paper Isaac Bashevis Singer left behind when he died, the next page, presumably, that Singer would have used. (Was Singer still writing when he died? I met him once. I was maybe 12. He told me I had beautiful eyes.)

Foer becomes obsessed with the sheet of paper, and then, more generally, with the idea of the blank page and all the potential it holds. He writes to other authors, asking them to send him the next sheet of paper they would have written on, and there follows a lovely description of all the pieces of paper he receives, culminating in a sheet of Freud's stationery which a guide gives him at the Freud house in London.

This is the kind of writing I can fall right into: the specific descriptions, the symbolic value of the material object, the touch of sentimental cliche in the blank sheet of paper as metaphor for the rest of our lives (is sentimental cliche redundant? I don't think so, but I'm not sure). Except, I'm a bit skeptical throughout, and my skepticism is confirmed by a sentence in the next to last paragraph of the essay: But I can remember, as if it were yesterday, turning on my laptop, knowing that I was about to start my first novel--the moment before life wrote on me.

Sure, some of us still write on paper, but most of us write right into the pixilated evanescence of the computer screen, where a word can be deleted as easily as it is written (I've deleted more than you can imagine as I've written this post, and I'm not even writing that carefully). By the time the words print out on paper, they are fully reified, several steps removed, by the mechanisms of technology, from us (where once the hand held the pen that touched the paper, now the fingers tap the keys that send the words to the screen from whence they disassemble through the printer cord to reassemble in the printer and be spit out, via the ink cartridge, onto the page; that the the hand also wields the mouse, or in this case taps the touchpad, to hit the Print button hardly affects the disconnect between hand, word, and page). This doesn't erase the power of the metaphor, but the injection of unacknowledged nostalgia does increase its sentimentality, perhaps too much for me.

Disappointing Summer Reads

Yesterday I wrote a long post about why I wasn't so crazy about this novel. To summarize: I have a soft spot for the author, because we have much in common, including some mutual friends, but while I loved her second novel, I wasn't so crazy about her other books, and I wasn't so crazy about this one either. Neither the prose nor the plot were that great, but then at the very end I realized that she was trying to rewrite Middlemarch, and it didn't work, because of some fundamental narrative and ethical issues. Anyway, I went on at some length, posted, and then saw that Jenny had just disavowed negative reviewing (albeit in the act of abetting it), and I felt bad, so I deleted the post. (Libby, if you want details on the Middlemarch thing, you can email me.)

I'd actually been planning a series of three posts on disappointing summer reads. There was to be that one. Then there was to be one on this novel which was nowhere near as good as its predecessor. The predecessor is one of my favorite books of the decade, beautifully written and plotted, but this one had unappealing characters, a kind of silly storyline, and a fairly leaden approach to 9/11 (I'm sure someone somewhere I haven't read has addressed the prevalence of 9/11 novels this season, what with Claire Messud and, oh there are so many, but since Jenny hasn't linked to anything, and she reads everything, maybe not).

Then there was going to be one on this memoiristic collection of essays, which I had also been looking forward to, and then found pretty unreadable. I have a bit of an obsession with the author and her sister, which I won't go into, because writing in this euphemistic mode is too hard for me and probably too annoying for you, but I realized when I got this book that in fact I haven't actually read anything by the author because I just find her writing totally annoying, which is too bad, because the topic of the book is quite interesting to me, but somehow she made it immensely dull.

The annoyingness of her writing was actually the occasion for more self-doubt (along the lines of reading Jenny's blog and then deleting my post), because the thing that bugs me most, before we even get to the dullness, is her long, digressive, parenthesis-and-semi-colon-laden sentence structure.

OK, you can laugh now.

But it's that very sentence I just wrote, I hope, that can justify my hypocrisy. I am very conscious about sentence structure, and I know when I am writing endless sentences, and I do it on purpose, and I believe I can say I have a fairly good grasp of grammar, so my sentences generally work. Except when they don't. And then hopefully it's funny. Or maybe not.

And there I'm doing it again: varied sentence structure, people. Sentences that match your content. Parentheses and semi-colons for a reason, not just because it's what you always do.

Exceptions, of course, for Henry James and Dave Eggers.

My point is not that long sentences are bad, or even that writing always in long sentences is bad (note, again, Henry James and Dave Eggers), but neither are long sentences necessarily good, and I guess the bottom line is that I just didn't like her sentences, and I didn't like her book.

Now I think I will go find something I like to read so I can blog about it, because, really, it is not so pleasant to be so negative all the time, nor is it pleasant to read things one doesn't like.

The Callahan Cousins

Last night M and I finished the first Callahan Cousins book. M decided she didn't want me to read to her at bedtime over a year ago, but when Grandpa gave her the Callahan Cousins, we decided to resume reading aloud and it's been nice. M devours all her books, so eking out a chapter a night has definitely been a challenge for her, but we've come to enjoy the suspense and it's nice to have the time together snuggling in the big chair (OK, so it barely fits the two of us, especially last night when we were both in sleeping bags, but we still sit there, because that's the place to sit for bedtime reading).

The Callahans are four twelve-year-old girl cousins spending the summer at their grandmother's summer house on Gull Island (read Block Island) (read enormous privilege that it is quite enjoyable to read about--M and I are both bedazzled by enormous summer houses with sailboats, swimming pools, private beaches, and housekeepers who make delicious food appear regularly). There appear to be four books--the fourth comes out next month--each focused on a different cousin with a different adventure. In this one, Hilary, whom we might also call Sporty Callahan, convinces the others to revive their dads' childhood competition with another island family and try to plant the family flag on Little Gull Island. Not a lot of drama, but some nice relationships, plus all that summer house life. We liked it; we're planning on reading the rest.

But what got me thinking (as opposed to just salivating) was the whole disparate cousins motif, as subtly hinted at in my characterization of Hilary as Sporty Callahan (please, someone, reassure me that you got the allusion, which should become obvious in a moment). Each girl, of course, has one distinguishing characteristic: Hilary is sporty, Kate is a mini-Martha Stewart, Phoebe reads, and Neeve is wild and crazy. Which got me wondering about the origins of the one-characteristic-per-girl model.

Let's see, there are, of course, the Spice Girls (last night at dinner we managed to remember them all--kind of like the time when I was a kid and we tried to remember all the seven dwarfs and it took us days to come up with Bashful, except this time we got them all in about three minutes: you remember: Sporty, Posh, Scary, Ginger, and Baby). I remember I used to read Camp Fire Girls books when I was a kid, and I'm pretty sure they were all typed. Maggie Tulliver*, complaining about Madame de Stael's Corinne, laments the type-casting of the blonde heroine (who would be her cousin, Lucy Dean, destined for sweetness, light, and boys), and the dark heroine (i.e. Maggie herself, headed for tragedy, and though Eliot critiques, she nonetheless enacts), and I believe Maggie mentions Rebecca and Rowena,** but if she doesn't she should. And what the heck, let's just go all the way back to the original virgin/whore dichotomy with Mary Magdalene and Martha.

So, one question is: is this girl-specific? Unfortunately, as child and adult, I have read mainly girl books, so I don't know. Is there a smart Hardy Boy and an athletic one? Do Frederick Exley novels revolve around a sensitive guy and a tough guy? Of course there's Ashley and Rhett***, but that's still a girl book.

Then there's the question of what this modeling does for girls. S argues that there are in fact two different things going on here: that in the Maggie/Lucy/Rebecca/Rowena model, type is destiny, but in the Spice/Camp Fire Girls model, type is just descriptive. I'm concerned, though, that the second model still sets girls up by suggesting that they can only be one thing: you pick a character to identify with (because, obviously, all those characters are there so that as many girls as possible can identify--hmm, this is getting a little chicken and egg, but I'll just keep going with it), and that's who you are.

Case in point: M, who is ecstatically convinced that she is Neeve. Neeve is short (check), has short dark hair (check--M just got her hair cut), and loves wild fashion (check, check, check, and this is the heart of the identification, because M is very into wild outfits these days, and she is very excited to have Neeve as a model--she even tried on the old dress-up tutu, because one day, in the book, Neeve wears a tutu, but, alas, it was too small) (just to illustrate: today M wore a white and red Serena Manish t-shirt [they're another band you've never heard of], a knee-length black satin skirt with embroidered flowers and a light brown ruffle, a thigh-length purple cardigan with a collar, white socks, and red Chinese shoes).

Now I'm very happy that M has Neeve to validate her fashion choices, but in fact, M is really a combination of Neeve (wild, fashion), Hilary (spunky leadership), and Phoebe (books, books, books), and when I pointed this out to her, she agreed. And then we agreed that she was not at all Kate.

And, in fact, this points to a point I have made many times, which is that readers are often smarter than books set them up to be. So perhaps I just need to have confidence in the ability of girls to construct complex identifications, even in the face of simplistic character types. After all, I'm Rebecca** and I didn't die in a flood*.


* George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
** Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
*** Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (duh)

Vanity Fair and Key

Who can be surprised that the NY Times has launched one of those Sunday magazine supplements about real estate (for as long as I can remember there was the fashion one, then it was joined by the home one and the travel one, and more recently the sports one, which I have never even cracked open, though I do keep the others in the bathroom for weeks, until I find myself flipping them open to articles and blurbs I have already read)? I can't seem to find a link on the website, but it is called Key and as soon as you open it (hard copy--aha, this may be the reason it can't be found on the website, because you couldn't appreciate the ads in quite the same way) it is quite obvious that the purpose of this new supplement is to provide even more space for those advertisements for luxury apartment buildings that have recently been clogging the front pages of the regular magazine. You know, those advertisements that make you wonder who on earth lives in such buildings, like the one designed by Ian Schrager, or the ones for really rich people with kids (who apparently have different household needs than ordinary people with kids--I would settle for one more bathroom). There are also articles about things like teeny-tiny houses and cohousing which, you know, have never before been covered by the mainstream media, not ever (that is the sound of sarcasm), but you have to have some kind of copy to hold together the advertisements.

At any rate, one cannot be surprised, but if one has been plodding through the September Vanity Fair and has just read Michael Wolff's piece on how the Times has lost its path and is trying to be a national luxury newspaper, a dubious goal at best, one is nodding sagely at this latest piece of evidence thereto. Of course, for Vanity Fair to chide the Times on such a count is a bit pot/kettle/black, given that the line between editorial and advertisement in Vanity Fair seems to get thinner with every issue, and while exposes on Iraq and Gaza are all very good, it's hard to take them seriously when they are surrounded by girl-on-girl high-fashion action and an apparently infinite number of Kate Moss product promotions.

And while we're talking about the NY Times, real estate, and luxury goods (which is the implicit subject of the end of the previous paragraph), I'll just take a moment to offer a contained version of last Friday night's rant upon reading Judith Warner's latest blog post, alas available only to those with Times Select and I am too lazy to fiddle with programming below the cut so I can cut and paste the whole thing (one point of this blog is ease and lack of anxiety). Anyway, Warner talks about the month she just spent in Normandy and what a great break it was and I think that's just super for her.

Because, you know, some people are privileged and that's fine. I really do think it is. What's not so fine is denying privilege, like those people I went to college with who dressed in ratty sweaters and always nitpicked over the bar bill and then you went home with them for the weekend and discovered they lived in mansions. So this paragraph just made me explode:

It sounds grand, doesn’t it; vacationing for a month, every summer, in France? But picture this: our house in Normandy – a thatched-roof, half-timbered chaumière that we bought when we lived in Paris – sits on a field that is flooded nine months of the year. In its entirety, it is the size of most people’s bathrooms in Bethesda. Speaking of bathrooms – it has just one, with pencil marks on the walls where the light fixtures I bought five years ago ought to be. And the guest room is accessible only by an outdoor stair, unless you’re a mouse or a spider, in which case you can come right in through the charmingly exposed bricks behind the bed.

Judith, repeat after me: I have a house in Normandy. I get to spend a month there every summer. That is a very nice thing, I am very lucky, and I appreciate it. In fact, I wish everyone could have this opportunity that I am so lucky to have.

That's all you need to say, really. And then people might not hate you so much. Until you say that some of your best friends are black.

The New Yorker: September 4, 2006

The New Yorker arrives every week. Generally I look at the table of contents and then put it down. OK, that's not quite right: generally I look at the table of contents, flip through the Goings On About Town to find Tables for Two, read Tables for Two, because the wife of a chef must keep up with restaurant doings, and then put it down. Occasionally, though, I read some articles, or even the whole magazine, and even more occasionally, I blog about it.

But when I flipped through the table of contents of the most recent New Yorker, The Education Issue, I was pleased to be taking an airplane to California the next day, because I actually wanted to read it. And read it I did, most of it, at least. Fascinating article on the Duke lacrosse/rape story, though I'm suspicious of the "objective" tone and I take issue with the implication that "the coarsening of undergraduate life" is specific to Duke, when I would argue it is generic to the contemporary college experience. Liked the article on Deep Springs College because I'm always drawn to self-sufficient models of alternative education, even when they tend toward pretension and homo-eroticism (not that there's anything wrong with pretension or homo-eroticism) (OK, pretension isn't so great, though, let's face it, anyone reading this blog has probably been guilty of it at one time or another or many, but homo-eroticism is quite fine). Liked the piece on school lunches in Berkeley, especially because it pierced the Alice Waters idealism, and much as I love Alice, I love pragmatists even more, especially when it comes to the public schools.

Did not, however, so much like the Antonya Nelson fiction offering, "Kansas," yet that story is what I keep thinking about days after I put down The New Yorker and picked up the September Elle which M made me buy and which bored me to tears. I guess I don't get why this story is in The New Yorker (which comment presumes that if fiction is in The New Yorker it is somehow worthwhile, a presumption which is obviously ridiculous, especially given how utterly skeptical I am of the poetry in The New Yorker, and how pleased and surprised I am by the extremely occasional appearance of a wonderful poem therein).

Basically the story is about a dysfunctional family held together by its cellphones: seven of them, each number separated by a single digit, i.e. a family plan. There are two sisters (one pregnant), their husbands (an old psychiatrist and a young, abusive drug dealer), their mother, and their daughters, the one's teenager who abducts the other's toddler (and then returns her, and life goes on). The story is completely preposterous, in both situation and plot, and the cell phones felt way too gimmicky: FAMILY plan, FAMILY narrative. Yet the story was eminently readable, which is to say I read it, even as I was annoyed by it in the very act of reading.

I wonder if I'm missing something. I wonder if I'm incapable of appreciating the sophistication of contemporary fiction. I wonder if I should try to find out more about Antonya Nelson. Maybe not.

A New Blog

I used to blog every day about a lot of stuff. Now I blog when I feel like it about what I read.