writer
Scene: A small room in the process of being redecorated, due to excessive boredom on the part of its owner.
Participants: One woman, one dog (hers). Dog is excitable, barks at random intervals for no discernible reason, except possibly malice. The woman is easily startled.
Result: One dropped, broken picture frame.
Ironic: Picture is of dog.
Progress report: I am almost done with The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
You guys.
I broke my bed this week. STRICTLY speaking, this is not a books-related post, but I do almost all my reading in my bed, so tangentially it totally is.
This is how not to read in your bed. These people don't even have their backs to each other for warmth and alienation. Can they even read? Amateurs.
I don't really know how it happened, because I am not an extraordinarily heavy person, and even though the bed was previously in my grandparents' house where many children probably jumped on it or something, and the bed didn't break on the side I use, my sense is REALLY?
But actually, I do know why it happened. In college, I had a roommate (shared common room, separate bedrooms) named Tina, and she was a fan of the sextatorial arts. Every night, I would wake up to the sound of Tina screaming her little head off and also other noises that were very suspect and made me wonder if possibly she was demolishing things in her room with her vagina. Later, she would scream really charming, tender things at her boyfriend like "EW BABY IT IS RUNNING DOWN YOUR LEG" and I would hear the bathroom door slam and make a mental note to burn everything I owned that was in the bathroom and eventually I would cry myself back to sleep, because that's the kind of phase I was going through at the time. Sorry, college buddies!
Anyway, one day, I came home to find Tina and a handyman from the dorm looking at the broken, sad remains of what had been her bed. The handyman was in awe. "What happened?" he asked. And Tina said "I don't know", and in that moment, as I stood there watching them and holding my little tongue, my intense schadenfrorgasm birthed into the world the inevitability that someday my own bed would break.
And now it has. Where, oh where, will I read my books now? Every other place in the house is the worst place in the house, so long as I am in it trying to read. I will have no choice but to deploy my carpentry skills in service of fixing my stupid bed and also, can someone please let me know how to countersink a screw?
I recently subscribed to both One Story and the New Yorker, because it was CHEAP (I paid like 60 for two years of the NYer!). Last year, I got a useless travel magazine that I read a lot and a food magazine that I didn't read at all. But I love this year's magazines! I'm so pleased! They're providing me with just the kind of reading that is perfect for when I take myself out on a burger date. Oh, you don't take yourself on burger dates? Some people are afraid of being out in public ALONEOMG, but I sort of enjoy the quietude I feel when I can observe people, which is delightful, while simultaneously not having to entertain anyone, and being able to retreat to the comfort of my reading. I feel like a small island in a river, or whatever, I'm not trying to write a poem up in this blog.
Anyway, speaking of burgers, I've been reading a lot of mormon hipster housewife blogs ever since that Salon article*. Maybe something that happens when you spend a lot of time in your house is that you begin to crave junk food, because they talk about burgers and donuts a lot. I identify with this very deeply. To the point where I've started to wonder if maybe I'm a Mormon at heart, which is maybe a sign I should pull back. However, all my favorite personal-life blogs have sort of petered out over the last year. This funny lady got a novel, and this person got married. So, yay, Mormons, for being available to my busybodyness.
So, my favorite by far is Nat. She's adorable. And she's funny! Then there's this girl, who has a really pretty life. I'm telling you this in case you needed something to read that was basically the literary equivalent of candy, which, who doesn't? Duh.
*What happened was one of those really unfortunate things where you laugh at people who are exactly like you, except that they have some weird obsession or behavior, and then some ten minutes later, you yourself have acquired that obsession or behavior and are totally puzzled by it. HOW CAN IT BE THAT WE HAVE SO MUCH IN COMMON AND NOW ANOTHER THING...oh. I think this pretty much explains all of hipsterdom and why nobody likes hipsters.
Put your hitchin’ hand in the air, ladies, Anthropologie has gone and gotten itself a wedding website! Finally, a place for us women to buy things for our weddings that look homemade and possibly water-damaged but actually cost hundreds of dollars. At long last, we can convey our antiquated-but-not-really style, charm, and quirkiness with mass produced items on the most important day of all our lives, bar none. I could not be more excited! Not because I’m getting married, but because I have EYES and a HEART.
I give you the latest episode in the ongoing Adventures of Lucinda and Peony: Lucinda’s Wedding.
***
Lucinda: Oh honeyboocakedarlingscrumptypie! You’ve come back from St. Petersburg for my wedding!
Peony: Oh, Lucinda, I hope this makes up for last time’s little gaffe. It seems like no sooner had I left on my round-the-world trip than you announced you were getting married the following week!
Lucinda: Let’s not even speak of…the gift you brought me last time. Let’s just be grateful that mummy’s pet exotic Siberian gerbils were replaceable. That hateful owl! I can’t even bear to think of it! Do you know we’re still discovering fecal pellets hidden all over the house? SUCH a furtive creature.
Peony: I wasn’t…aware. Oh, look at this! Did you use a wedding dress as a vase?
Lucinda: Yes! Isn’t it sweet? My wedding planner assures me that no one else has ever had this idea, ever. It's unique! Anyway, welcome to my pre-wedding! We can both change into our dresses for the actual ceremony in my room later.
Peony: Oh, I wasn’t planning on…
Lucinda: SURELY, you can’t have intended to wear white.
Peony: It's not even CLOSE to white...
...it’s a beige-y sort of cream.
Lucinda: I see.
Peony: I don’t know what I can do about it now, Lucinda. I sent my driver to do laps around a distant field, and I don’t have his number. As you know, I don’t use cellular phones, because mine was giving me cancer. I could literally feel it giving me cancer.
Lucinda: If you do not find something else to wear, I’ll have no choice but to exclude you from my wedding.
Peony: Well, it’s not as if anyone would have brought an extra dress, so I don’t see what you can expect me to--
Lucinda: As it happens, I have the perfect thing. It’s very Laura Ashley as a flapper. Very flattering to women with problem areas below the waist, you know, which don’t SO many women have those? I worried someone might show up in something totally inapp…easily soiled.
Peony: Did you? I really do think you're overreacting. It's not as if I wore a full veil.
Lucinda: I’ll have one of my bridesmaids show you where the dress is. They’re very helpful, although I rather tire of Elisa bumping into things. She has no depth perception since she lost her eye in that skiing accident.
Peony: (silence)
Lucinda: Go try it on! I’d offer you a better pair of shoes as well, but Elisa packed the shoes and...you'll see. It really is a shame about that eye. Sometimes, I think she's doing it on purpose...
***
Lucinda: Oh, Peony, it’s perfect!
Peony: Yes, perfect. I can’t wait for you to open presents!
FIN
Till next time, my people of the internet! Play me out in the note of twee!
Some exciting news for nerds everywhere who have been hypnotized by George R R Martin (like Molly: so sad…all she does is sit in front of a stack of his books, whimpering): A Dance With Dragons (and yes, I DID cringe while writing that, it’s not a great title) has a publication date. July of this very year! Between now and then, Molly plans to totally earn her enormous indulgence by reading some Important Books:
She WILL get to The Unbearable Lightness of Being
She WILL buy and read In Other Rooms Other Wonders, because once, she sat in a bookstore and read the first ten pages of that and it was luminous and delicious and available on Kindle.
She WILL read all the books from my MFA reading list. She never quite seems to get around to the stage and screen texts, because she secretly hates The Theatre, but she understands that this is stupid and makes exceptions for Shakespeare and Martin McDonagh.
She WILL finish Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand.
She WILL get The Emigrants back from my father and read it.
She WILL continue to listen to PD James’s and Tana French’s excellent mysteries, because nothing else gets one through a long car ride in such style.
She WILL, once again, try to read Swann’s Way. Her yearly exercise in futility and boredom is once again upon us. One of these years though, she’s totally going to GET IT and just read right through to the end without nodding off every three lines.
Molly’s recently done a little bit of obsessive, frantic googling online research to figure out when the next book in Martin’s series comes out, and discovered that many people have been complaining about the fact that it has taken George R R Martin like six years to finish a thousand page plus book. And by complaining, I mean hurling fiery words of hatred like “you’re old and fat and you need to finish this series before you die”. These people need to stop. First of all, look at him:
People are yelling at a teddy-bear-person, and Molly, for one, is not ok with that. She could bite someone’s face off! Or bark a lot and cower behind her Ana! Whichever! Secondly, George is clearly a writer with ambitions and talent that transcend his much-maligned genre. Molly has the sense that he wants to write something of lasting quality, rather than a disposable book that will have been totally forgotten in a year, displaced by whatever stale iteration of boy-with-magic-sword somebody comes up with next. And that kind of thing takes time. Which Molly is happy to wait.
Seriously, come on.
2011. Ok. Yes.
Molly has made a list of resolutions: in the New Year, there will be no more cage-matches with raccoons that end in torn-out whiskers, or eating frozen deer poop, or gleefully spreading bathroom trash all over the house. Molly will be five in March (probably), which we are all excited about, because we keep hoping age will mellow her out, despite all evidence to the contrary. She’s looking forward to sharing a NY apartment with me sometime this year (fingers crossed); just her, some humans, eighty pounds of dog hair a week, a rat or two, and incessant whining and barking. Exciting!
Recently, I took Molly’s doggy-bank (a real object that exists) to the Coinstar machine, and while I warmed my hands at a trashcan fire with the other hobos, it counted out a whopping forty-four dollars, which were returned to me in the form of an Amazon gift-card. God forbid I donate it to a worthy cause, or give the change to the Salvation Army Santa standing two feet from the machine, looking me over with his gimlet eye. I mean, take your bell and stuff it, right?
Because of our book-buying freeze, Molly couldn’t immediately blow it all on books, as is her wont. Instead she’s making a list of how she wants to spend it when the long winter of our discontent is over. What I’m saying is, if you have something amazing you think Molly (ahem) should read, I’d like to know.
My residency is next week, and Molly’s agreed to help me express how I feel about 2011 right now:
It’s hard to do such a sprawling book any justice in just 200 words, but let’s try: young French noble (Olivier) is kidnapped and put on a boat to America by order of his parents, survivors of the French revolution, in order to keep him out of (political) trouble. He is accompanied by a reluctant English servant he hates (Parrot). Hijinx, romance, and personal growth ensue. We become (extensively) acquainted with their complicated histories. The two reluctantly become friends and achieve different understandings of America as a country and an idea.
It was beautifully written, with the kind of luscious language that makes me wish I made more time for poetry, and there were arresting set pieces along the way, but I was occasionally bored because there wasn’t a clear sense of what the point was. It never comes together to form a whole that is greater than the sum of its many beautifully moving parts. The last few pages had me thinking it was all about the American experiment: the way the country’s character (like a person's) is both its luck and its doom, but that felt a little tacked-on, a little like an after-thought. There was an idea in there somewhere about how our origins mark us (but, you know, duh). The whole thing felt rough, like somewhere in there is the story that wants to be told, but Carey hasn’t quite got a hold of it. So: it’s not a great novel, but it’s still worth a read, especially if you’re a fan of historical fiction. As Ursula Le Guin put it in her review: “Are there hidden significances? I don't know. It's a dazzling, entertaining novel. Should one ask for more?”
The last time we saw Lucinda and Peony, they'd had a falling out over some egregious accusations Peony made. They've since made up.
How good was Ship Fever?
You guys, it is about scientists. I have always wanted to be a scientist*.
If someone had told me that she was intending to write a series of short stories about the “mysterious allure of science” (as Kakutani would have it), I would have been all “what does that even mean, are you smoking crack again?” I’d never noticed how the desire to collect and to understand—to truly, intimately know—some particular thing is so much like an enchantment. Barrett is like an alchemist: she takes these people—discoverers, explorers, scientists—and under the heat of their fallibility, their imperfect loves, and their consuming ambitions, the cold substance of scientific discovery blossoms into magic. At other times, she seems to work her spell in reverse, and science is (always imperfectly) applied to understanding the nature of human relationships. In Barrett’s world, science seems less like a field of study and more like a particular turn of mind. Something to call people who can’t stop seeking, even when they can barely understand the impulse. Even when it can only lead to ruin. I think I read somewhere that Ship Fever is about the love of science, and the science of love, and honestly, now that I’ve read the book, I can’t think of a better way of putting it.
*Statement may not be factual, true, or accurate.
Happy almost-Halloween from Molly, you guys.
We weren’t going to do anything dressing-up-wise for Halloween, but then Molly was staring at herself in the mirror and realized that she kind of looks like a bear.
Right?
So that wraps up the costuming portion of this post! It’s the thought that counts. We Googled bear-ears, came across a website we won’t link to, and stopped. Some fetishes seem a lot like inside jokes. Suffice it to say that we were never sexually traumatized while holding a teddy bear, and we’re thankful for that on the regular.
Anyway, Halloween is always a stressful night for Molly, because every time a child steps on our planet property, Molly feels it necessary to let said child know that he or she is not welcome by barking until he or she drops dead from old age. I wish there was a way to let her know how ineffectual her barking is, like maybe have an intervention where a series of strangers just drop a cold beverage on her head whenever she barks.
Oh, is the idea of doggie-abuse making you sad? Just picture her as a person who I’ve locked in my house who yells “SCREW YOU” 46 times every time a person walks by the window she is so generously allowed to spend her day in front of. Did you picture it? RIGHT? I am Norman Bates and Molly is Mother.
Molly isn’t a huge fan of creepy books, so she really had to rack her little brain to think up some Halloween-themed recommendations beyond Poe, Lovecraft, Stephen King, or anything written by a Scandinavian (Let the Right One In is actually a children’s movie in Norway). She decided to go with a recent bestseller, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, as well as Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, and The Walking Dead comic books, ahead of their being turned into a hopefully-awesome zombie series on AMC.
Molly would like to leave you all with this: zombie squirrels. Would anyone notice?
I listened to this on my way down to Florida, the sunshine-induced-headache state. Chandler thought it was just ok, but that’s because he reads mysteries for the suspense and surprise, while I read them for food and place descriptions. I mean, I love a puzzle and some DANGER, but the ambiance is what really makes it or breaks it. The setting was $money$, even if you could see the ending coming from, basically, page 3. I’ve been to Sicily, where I stepped in dog poop 134,986 times, and I kind of disliked it, but this book makes me want to give it a second shot. Right in the head!
Sorry, the book was full of that kind of humor. Something happened when I heard this book read out loud: the dialogue became super-embarrassing. I don’t know why it didn’t bother me in print; it’s all either corny or melodramatic. After a little while you get used to it, though, like living with someone who farts in public. It’s kind of catching, actually. I mean the language, not the farting. I think at one point I was like “We’re low on gas. What has become of us? We’re the empty shells of the people who left Charlotte. GET IT? IT IS A PUN. I AM PULLING INTO A SHELL STATION.”
This book was about as charming as an orphaned kitten playing with a ball of twine while it’s adoptive mother, a goose named Roger Snorkelbaum, looks on. I wish this book were a vacation that I took, or a room in my house that I could go to when writing goes badly (every day). As the cover promises, it is very romantic. Although that is not why I bought it. I bought it because Dodie Smith also wrote 101 Dalmatians, and for that alone she should have been made some kind of saint.
You know what? I don’t have any bad things to say about this book. Except about Rose, the sister who gets all the men and attention, and is generally just a huge asshole. The story’s one failure, I think, is that we never understand why someone hasn’t taken the initiative of pushing her out a window. Oh, and I suppose that bear episode isn’t exactly…plausible.
Part of the wonderfulness of the book is that it’s so familiar: it’s a fairly conventional story told in a vibrant voice. I guess it says something about a book when you feel so much affection for everyone in it (except Rose) that your main reaction is just “I want to hug you”. Recommended for sick days and just-kinda-blegh days.
I loved this story. And it's totally free online.
I want to read The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears immediately.
Tomorrow, I'm going to get my fall reading list for school, and then you'll get nothing but close, careful readings (not really) for like two months. I have so many books I'd planned to read before this happened. I think I have time to read at least one more thing before my books actually arrive in the mail, what with my procrastination and the USPS. Here are the books that I am considering maligning and misinterpreting before The Great Reading descends upon me:
"I Capture the Castle"
"At Swim-Two-Birds" (I started this, but I'm not fully committed)
"The Unbearable Lightness of Being"
A mystery, which might be either "The Terra-Cotta Dog" or "Death at La Fenice"
Oh, and I still need to read "Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper"
This reminds me that I own a whole lot of stuff I haven't read. I think this begs the questions: why do I still buy books?
I don't have an answer, except to say that I'm definitely going to get to "The Charterhouse of Parma" someday. And "Magic Mountain". And if I don't own them how can I get to them? What am I, a list-making magician?
You guys, I have been having a really hard time figuring out what the lyrics to that newish Jay-Z/Usher song are. Because as I was listening in my car for about the 44th time today, I thought, “Surely—SURELY—these men are not singing an ode to the traditional Scottish cold-remedy.” But they were. Except it’s a euphemism for sex. Of course it is. I cannot wait for the day that I am sick and when I try to google a cold remedy, I get a bunch of results like “Baby dancing to hot toddy” and “Dog drinking whiskey HOT TODDY!!1!!!” and “Hot Toddeez EXPOSED vol. 17”, which is a porn (you don’t say!). In the spirit of helping artists stay away from my colds, I have come up with a list of other things that are not currently metaphors for sex, but could be:
Typing her keys.
Taking the snooze off the alarm.
Lunchbox full of goodies.
Making a deposit in the piggybank. (Piggybanking it).
These are just the things I have come up with looking around my room for 15 seconds. Are they all winners? Absolutely.
To recap, if anyone writes a catchy song about vaporub or Kleenex and it is a euphemism for sex, I will be extremely disappointed in all of you.
Also, for those of you who are nerds like me, the chorus from “Hot Toddy”:
I’m like oh Kimosabe
Your body is my hobby
We’re freakin’
This ain’t cheatin’ as long as we tell nobody
Tell your girls you’re leaving
I’ll meet you in the lobby
I’m so cold, yeah I need that hot toddy
Hot toddy (hot toddy)
Hot toddy (thought I’d never fall in love, thought I’d never fall in love)
I could hardly believe it when I realized that it's been a whole month since my dog made some book recommendations. Since it's almost my birthday, Molly would like you all to read Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice”, “The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis” by Jose Saramago, and “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I see that she’s trying to bring me down during my b-day week, and I guess all I can say is that if my breath smelled like a corpse all the time, I’d be a bitter, old bitch too. Why not “The Death of Ivan Ilych”, Molly, or “Death in the Andes”? I mean, Mann over Tolstoy? Really?
But let's be real for a second: mortality is depressing to think about. When I feel sad, I like to just look at Molly and think "You'll probably die first." It's all about perspective, you know?
Bonus: I tried to think of a way to celebrate my birthday, pictorially, by pimping out Molly's picture, but I didn't want to do something banal like put her in a birthday hat. My original idea, which I shared with my brother and with Chandler, was to stick some bunny ears and baby legs on her with Paint, because in real life, if I had a baby with a dog's head and bunny ears, I would be totally into that and think it was cute squared until the scientists took it away from me and put it in an institution where they later developed a dog-human hybrid slave-species (the Anubians) that eventually takes over the world. No one that was sober agreed.
So then I started having this dream of dressing her up as something better than a dog that likes to eat its own butt all the time continually every minute of the day. I have decided that every year from now on (read: never again) I will dress her as a literary character. And so, I present a photo shoot with Shermoll Holmes.
Happy birthday to me.
Ijust got the newest Anthropologie catalog! It's super-exciting! Because I really enjoyed imagining a conversation between Ikea ghosts last week, this is going to keep happening to you, reader!
(Click on a panel to make it bigger.)
The good: This classic of Caribbean literature is set before, during, and after Haiti’s independence. It’s an early example of magical realism, somewhere between historical fiction and voodoo-inflected myth*. I found the whole thing pretty interesting in terms of understanding the Haitian national identity.
The bad: I decided to read this in Spanish, and about two pages in I thought: I’ve made a huge mistake.
The problem is that the book is in Cuban Spanish from before 1950, and I only speak Dominican Spanish from the mid-90s. Even though Alejo Carpentier died in 1980, he really should have worked this out. Also, the skips in time can be confusing on first read.
Carpentier works at creating a sense that shifts in power and the passage of time mean little to the always replaceable, and always exploited, Haitian peasant. It can all become wearying**. That the main character, Ti Noel, is going to end up in basically the same place he started is a foregone conclusion. Plus, Carpentier emphasizes the crushing oppression of the colony and later the Republic by stripping him of a lot of his individuality, which can also make the novella hard to stick with. Still, it’s a beautiful book, and well worth the effort. VOODOO!!!
*I feel like putting voodoo in a book is like putting a chase sequence in a movie or hot pepper flakes on pizza. Instead of being a Historical Novel it’s a Historical! Novel! Goat sacrifice on page six! Someone will definitely turn into a lizard!
Obviously, I read this book for the man-lizard.
**I mean who wants to read a tragedy that just stays that way!? Ew! I hoped there was going to be a party and everyone was going to pull a goat out from under their seat, like on Oprah. And then they would be like MOVE THIS BUS! and the Citadelle Laferriere was going to be a swiss chalet with a hot tub. But I digress.
A regular feature in which my dog recommends a book or two. What's that? Oh, how can a dog recommend a book (that's ridiculous!)?
I'm glad you asked, so I can tell you that you ask too many goddamn questions. Suffice it to say that Molly's overwhelming cuteness, her shnugglewussity if you will, deserves an outlet. And this is the least creepy one I could think of. The last thing any of us want is for my dog to have to wear a bunny costume in this hot, hot weather.
And I'M SORRY I don't have Photoshop.
This time around Molly is recommending Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a novel which she considers to be a mean, hilarious classic, and Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country, which is a melancholy meditation on wasted love. She thinks these are two flavors that would taste better together. She's probably wrong. She once ate a box of cookies.
No...the actual box.
Yes. I am reading an enormous, déclassé fantasy series. These books are probably, on average, 700 pages long, and there’s fourteen of them, and when I first noticed I thought ‘Whatever, I read A Suitable Boy. I read Tolstoy. I can handle this nonsense.’ I was wrong, because I’m on book five now, and I’m exhausted.
The good: A fully realized world very much in the spirit of Lord of the Rings, so it’s perfect if you’re looking to relive your childhood. You should probably not attempt to relive your childhood.
The bad: I’ve read about 3000 pages and one measly year has passed in the story. The characters are flat. SO flat. And dense to the point of stupidity. That’s ok for the first book, but by book four, you wonder why these people can’t seem to have more than about five different thoughts, which are:
-“Is Rand going mad?”
-“Light, no! [description of something already described 57 times before in the exact same words]”
-“Who understands women/men?”
-“I will keep this vital fact a secret from everyone, thereby extending the plot by a completely unnecessary 300 pages.”
-“I am tired.”
Me too, guys! Me. Too.