Warning: plot spoiler

This is my second Philip Roth experience.  I read American Pastoral in grad school and completely fell in love with his grand, swooping prose.  The Human Stain is another Nathan Zuckerman book, so the tone and voice is the same, and I still like it very much.  He occasionally overwrites — everything is fraught with introspection and analysis, so no one is every just fishing or watching a symphony, but it all means something — but by and large I think he navigates his books very well.  I mean, the guy’s written thirty books, so we can assume he knows a little bit about what he’s doing.

The Human Stain began to drag just a bit for me after Coleman Silk’s death, and I wanted it to just end already.  I couldn’t understand why there were so many pages left.  But then I came to the last scene, with Zuckerman and Les Farley out on the frozen pond, and I understood that we needed to get to this point.  That long interaction between the two men was one of the highlights of the book.  It was really beautiful and nuanced.

I like the way Roth, through Zuckerman, always plays with POV.  He almost effortlessly melds a third-person voice into a first-person consciousness.  And when you get to the end, you have to wonder how much was true and how much Zuckerman just made up.  That uncertainty was even more palpable at the end of American Pastoral because Zuckerman wasn’t so present as a character in that book as he is in The Human Stain, in which we never forget that it’s Zuckerman telling us the story.  Good work, Zuckerman.  I liked it.

No. 1 thing I wish I had known before choosing my outfit today: my boots leak.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is considered Marquez’s magnum opus.  It won him the Nobel Prize in 1982, and some consider it the work that has most shaped world literature over the past 25 years.

I thought it was pretty good.

Much of Marquez’s writing inhabits a beautiful and fantastical dreamworld, and One Hundred Years read, to me, like nothing more than a long and lovely fairy tale.  Marquez has an amazing capacity for imagination.  But the repetition of names and histories (one of the major themes in the book) grew wearisome to me by the end of the novel (although it’s certainly impressive how he managed to keep straight all those Aurelianos and Jose Arcadios).  Still, my very favorite line came near the end.  The wise Catalonian packs up all his books and boards a train to return to his homeland.  He says, “The world must be all fucked up when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.”

I also started Kurt Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus, but, I’m sad to say, I may not bother to finish it.  I’m just not enjoying it at all, although quitting on a book doesn’t sit well with me.  I don’t like the way the narrative is chopped into small chunks, and oh my goodness, please tell me one more time about how your mother-in-law and your wife were certifiable, because I think maybe I missed it the first fifty times you told us.  Also, I find a great deal of the story boring, to be perfectly honest.  I don’t care about the long history of Tarkington College.  Unfortunately, Hocus Pocus is the only Vonnegut volume at the sad little Caroline Library.  Interlibrary loan, anyone?  Yes, please.

I have been out of work since Sept. 1.  My old office has been stripped and shut down, all of us laid off and left to fend for ourselves in the worst job market since the Depression.  I am loving every minute of it.  I love not working.  So hard.

So it seemed rather serendipitous that I stumbled upon Mark Slouka’s old essay “Quitting the Paint Factory,” (reposted from the Nov. 2004 issue of Harper’s on what appears to be a now-defunct personal blog) which only served to strengthen my resolve never to work again.  Provided we’re not in danger of starving to death.  Regardless of your views of the rat race, this is a beautifully written essay and bears reading.

I’m baaaack!  It’s amazing how much time a newborn takes up.  He doesn’t do anything but eat, sleep, and poop, so why is it that my hands always seem occupied?

Anyway, I finally made a trip to the library last week, and I finished two really swell books: John Dufresne’s collection of short stories Johnny Too Bad and Mark Haddon’s novel A Spot of Bother.  They’ve both written other books, and I’m excited to read more of their work.

Johnny Too Bad was fun because many of the stories were related, about the life of a writer named John (how coincidental) and his very animated dog Spot.  I’m not sure why writers love to write about writers, but it’s very common.  What’s not so common is how Dufresne handled the matter.  Because not only does his protagonist share his name and vocation, but the character’s own fictional protagonist also bears striking resemblance to the character John.  John says in the title story, “I told Dad that Spot was in the book, that he belonged to the central character, a writer, not so unlike myself.  I told him the writer’s father had vision problems, so naturally he assumed the father is him.  I did not tell him that the writer and his father have a problematic relationship.  I did not want my father hurt by his misperception.  Even if I told him now that he’s not the character, he’ll think I’m lying.  Spot’s Spot, after all.  The writer’s a pathetic little scribbler who left his loving wife, after all.”  Ouch.

Dufresne is just as good at the long story as he is at flash fiction, and both types of story are displayed in this collection.  “Close By Me Forever” is a very powerful story about memory and love, and it packs a great twist at the end.  “Based on a True Story” plays with the form and condenses part of the story into a numbered list preceded by, “And then what happens is this.”  As much as I enjoyed Spot’s antics in the stories about John, I think “Died and Gone to Heaven” may have been my favorite story; it’s the kind of story that once you’ve finished, you can almost physically feel the author’s skill in crafting the tightly wound threads of the story.  For starters, the story opens with this magnificent two-page sentence, the kind you have to go back and start over a few times till you pick up on its rhythm.  It’s about an old murder, a family of really despicable people, and a police officer who can’t leave well enough alone.  The last sentences are every bit as beautiful as the first: “And he looked up into the clear night, saw the Milky Way splashed across the sky, and realized how everything in the universe was so far away, and was, he knew, speeding away from everything else in the universe, speeding away from him, this place, this earth, this small patch of bottomland where he sat bleeding and remembering, getting smaller and smaller.  He sank his hands into the soft clay of the bayou bank, shut his eyes, and held on.”  Another of my favorite lines appeared in “I Will Eat a Piece of the Roof and You Can Eat the Window,” after a funeral: “And while they laughed and drank, they were able, I suppose, to forget that they, too, were dying.”

I haven’t read Haddon’s prize-winning novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, but I’ll be picking it up very soon because I loved A Spot of Bother.  It’s about a man named George who finds a lesion on his hip, convinces himself that it’s cancerous, and subsequently develops a debilitating fear of death.  He sees death everywhere, and he suffers panic attacks wherein the floor falls out from underneath him, and he wedges himself between the toilet and the bathtub and softly recites nursery rhymes to himself.  Meanwhile, the rest of his family is falling apart: his wife Jean is having an affair; his daughter Katie is getting married, then not getting married, then getting married again; and his gay son Jamie is desperately trying to win back the love of his life before it’s too late.  Haddon is a marvelous writer, and he makes his characters’ unhappy lives very funny while still poignant.  And poor, dear George.  He must be the most sympathetic character I’ve read in quite a while; you just want to give him a big hug and tell him everything will be okay.

I’m headed out to the library again today.  Hopefully, I’ll find another couple of gems as delightful as these!  Happy reading, all.

I haven’t had my Sirius radio since my Plymouth exploded, but the van we drove to Connecticut last weekend had XM Radio, and I was delighted to hear some of my old favorites, like Vampire Weekend, Spoon, Modest Mouse, Deathcab, Beck.  I tried to figure out why it felt so incredibly refreshing, as though I hadn’t listened to music in years.  Then I realized: I don’t share an office with Matt anymore.  Matt was my music man, constantly introducing me to new artists or showing me music videos or playing our stand-bys to help get us through the work day.  I’ll bet you $10 he’s listening t music right now.  I miss you, buddy.

Hello, dear reader(s)!  You must have thought something tragic happened to me, since I’ve been out of comish so long.  Well, the truth is, I ran off and had a baby, of all the ridiculous things, so life is a bit on hold for now.  I’ll get back in the saddle as soon as I can!  To hold you over, here’s a picture of the gorgeous little guy:

Holden

Clive Thompson reviewed Andrea Lunsford’s literacy project, the Stanford Study of Writing, for Wired Magazine.  Lunsford’s project is intriguing: it was a five-year study “investigating the writing practices and development of Stanford students during their undergraduate years and their first year beyond college in professional environments or graduate programs.”  She collected 14,672 student writing samples, including everything from in-class assignments to emails and blog posts.  I find it particularly interesting that they measured the students’ confidence in writing as well as the quality and volume of their writing.

According to Thompson, Lunsford thinks that technology, far from destroying writing and literacy, as is the oft-repeated lament, is reviving them.  But here’s where I find myself becoming skeptical: Thompson says that for starters, “young people today write far more than any generation before them.”  He claims, “Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.”  How can he possibly know that?  What about journal entries and the long-lost art of letter writing and pages and pages of bad poetry that’s kept private by the writer?  “Never wrote anything, ever,” is an awfully big claim to make without providing any supporting evidence.

Still, Thompson makes a good point (I suppose) when he says, “The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.”

I wonder if limiting the study to Stanford students affects the ability to apply its findings to the general American populace.  I’m not trying to say anything about Stanford in particular (I don’t know anything about the school, in fact), but schools generally have a particular identity, a certain homogeneity, that may have impacted the outcome of the study.  The Stanford Study of Writing was designed specifically to help augment the school’s program on writing and rhetoric and the writing center, but I’d love to see a wider-ranging literacy study of this nature.

Thompson also links to Marcus Berkmann’s New York Post review of David Crystal’s book txtng: the gr8 db8.  Crystal agrees that non-standard writing like texting actually challenges literacy skills because it demands sophisticated skills in reading and writing.  I know I’ve spent hours poring over enigmatic shorthand texts or facebook posts, trying to figure out what the heck the writer was trying to spell.  I love the playfulness and the mutability of language, which as Crystal points out is part of a long “European ludic (playful) linguistic tradition,” but I still think text-speak is irritating.  So there.

I find it no small coincidence that the day after I applied to teach English Comp at a local community college, I happened upon Stanley Fish’s article “What Should Colleges Teach?”  He discusses the alarming problem of American college students’ inability to write correctly and coherently, and he discusses the ACTA white paper on gen ed requirements.  He agrees with ACTA’s opinion that “credit for requiring composition will not be given for courses that are ‘writing intensive’ (there is a significant amount of writing required but the focus is on some substantive topic), or for courses in disciplines other than English and composition (often termed ‘writing in the discipline’ courses), or for courses in public speaking, or for remedial courses. In order to qualify, a course must be devoted to ‘grammar, style, clarity, and argument.’”  Some of the comments on the article make a good point, though, that these basic building blocks of writing should be taught in middle and high school, and if students still need this type of instruction at the college level, they should take remedial courses.  I don’t know which is the better way, but if I get this job, I suppose I had better figure it out!

I certainly agree with one commenter, though, a certain Robin T., who says, “Moreover, learning to write is learning to think: to describe, compare and contrast, reason, argue and persuade. Young people who can’t write can’t think analytically or critically, either. They have never used to use language to identify and develop ideas.”  Holla back, Robin T.

I love Chuck Klosterman.

I read an old Esquire article of his this morning, called “McDiculous,” about the documentary Super Size Me and the diehard fast-food-restaurant-goer’s waffling between the boundaries of corporate and personal responsibility (which, as Klosterman points out, is really quite a simple matter).  It’s a lovely article, full of Klosterman’s trademark wit, and it seemed an especially appropriate reminder for me, since all I’ve been able to think about lately are Yoo-Hoos and Cheetos.  Weird, I know.