Library books:
Let's do something awful, part 2.

I first read this book, Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill, in summer 1993 when I was an intern at Macmillan in New York, proofreading and copyediting college English textbooks. The books were largely anthologies of short stories and plays, so I was proofreading things like True West and the Glass Menagerie. What could be better? And at $12 per hour I felt superflush (my rent was absurdly low -- I think $250/month -- due to an amazing subletting deal). I often ate lunch at one of those weird little midtown parks -- an empty lot on a normal street to which a waterfall had been added. I would eat my lunch (what did I eat? I somehow can't remember), read a bit, take a little nap, and return to work. That summer I read a lot of I don't know what fiction, books discussed in Shopping in Space, a book of criticism of so-called "Blank Generation" fiction -- a swath wide enough to contain, among others, Michael Chabon, Dennis Cooper, Catherine Texier, Bret Easton Ellis, Gary Indiana, and Mary Gaitskill. I guess other than Michael Chabon and Gary Indiana that's not such a wide range. Due, probably, to Shopping in Space, I read Gaitskill's Bad Behavior and Two Girls, Fat and Thin. Like me she had grown up in suburban Detroit, and she had gone to the University of Michigan, where I had just finished my junior year. A lot of Bad Behavior took place in areas I was sort of familiar with -- suburban places whose names I knew but that were a little grimier than the areas of the suburbs I knew well (that kind of suburban grime being, unlike Detroit grime, a little too immune to romanticizing to attract me).

And Mary Gaitskill really is grimy and spiky in a totally disarming way. "Let's do something awful," that great line from the Plot Against America, could be this book's epigraph. I was dazzled by Two Girls, Fat and Thin when I read it then. I still think Gaitskill is amazing -- completely in control on a sentence-by-sentence level. The plot fell apart for me a bit this time, and I seem to have developed a more delicate constitution in the past 15 years, as I found some of the sadism really sort of troubling in a way I know I didn't before, even though she's ultimately a very polite writer. Weirdly, I found the twinning of the characters annoying, even though I don't mind Martin Amis's overreliance on it. I know it's easy to make up a funny name, but the fat girl of the title's real name is Dottie Footie (I might be misspelling), though she changes it after she becomes a devote of an Ayn Rand-like figure. Dottie Footie.

Library books:
The dark side of the library.

I forgot that in the first batch of books I borrowed from the library was Foreskin's Lament by Shalom Auslander. First, a moment to contemplate one of the greatest names ever, especially for someone as alienated as Auslander. Hello Foreigner, it could be translated as, from Hebrew for Shalom and German for Auslander. Also, Goodbye Foreigner. (Also, Peace Foreigner, but that's not as good). I'm pretty sure it's not a pseudonym. If it were it would be kind of vomitous, but I think it's just serendipity.

I'd read some pieces by him in the NYer, and particularly remember the piece about him walking from somewhere in New Jersey, I think, to a Rangers game at Madison Square Garden in a slippery attempt to stay kosher. It was very funny. But the book. For one, it's a bit looser than the NYer piece(s), but not in a good way -- it's just not as tight. But more problematically, from a library user's perspective, is that it's just not the kind of book I want to read straight through. He writes just like what he looks like, and he looks like this:


That is, his writing is just a little too belligerent and intense for me to take at long stretches, even though it's very good. But I had to return the book to the library (it was unrenewable because someone else wanted it). So I sort of quickly picked my way through, reading short, disjointed bits. Just because of the due date I liked a book less than I otherwise would have. Caveat borrower, is all I'm saying.

Library books:
Call me shallow.

As I've said before (i.e., earlier today) I don't have anything against crazily hyped books, which is why I read the Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander and Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel. I read Englander's book of short stories, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, when it came out, but I don't remember much about it except that it involved a lot of illicit sex among Orthodox Jews and that I liked it (who wouldn't?). So the Ministry of Special Cases started really well. Englander is not at all a magically light writer -- you always see exactly how you got to where you are -- but he's competent in the best sense of the word. It started out pleasantly farcical -- I feel like he's writing in the I.B. Singer shtetl-humor mode, but maybe I think that only because I've never read Bernard Malamud or other such writers -- in Argentina in 1976, when lots of people are being "disappeared" by the military government. You sort of stroll through all sorts of darkly absurd scenarios until all of a sudden you realize you're in a serious political novel about the Dirty War. Then you -- er, I -- feel really stupid and morally bad for having been waiting for more funnies. But then I thought about it, and I think it's Englander, not me: the two halves of the book are really mismatched, and he doesn't seem totally in control of that. So maybe I'm wrong about him -- he actually did cause me to lose my bearings, and in a way that doesn't seem entirely competent. Still, the good parts are good.

Indecision also became serious when I least expected it or wanted it. At first I thought he was kidding with the epiphany and all that, but I think he actually wasn't. The book had a really appealing voice, though (don't be turned off by Michiko Kakutani's ridiculous Holden Caulfield-voiced review). But no one -- seriously no one -- wants to read about another person's drug experiences. Not so keen on reading about Americans having romances abroad either. Wait, so what did I like about this? I can't really remember any passages I liked, but I felt sort of constantly pelted by funny lines and startling phrasing. This is one of those books where you have to keep looking at the author's picture because you can't quite give yourself over to the book and you also can't decide whether you hate or love the author. It's rare that I wish someone would be more glib, but he's really nailed glibness and I wish he stuck with it throughout.

Library books:
Missing Persons

This book, Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, was crazily hyped, but I don't have anything against crazily hyped books. Actually, I like reading crazily hyped books because I like to read about what I've read, and hardly anyone writes much about books that aren't crazily hyped. A vicious cycle, it is. So this book was fine -- superentertaining beginning, OK middle slog, weirdly but pleasantly drawn-out end. The voice was really amazing though, and it was told in first-person plural, which worked surprisingly well. I remember when everyone went crazy for Bright Lights Big City, which was written in second-person singular. It seems like that should have created a mania for the exploration of the other pronoun forms, but it didn't. I mean, first-person singular and third-person omniscient obviously constitute pretty much all literature, both Western and non-Western, from what I've read. If Jay McInerney laid claim to second-person singular, all there was left were first-person plural ("we") and second-person plural ("you"), though I think a novel written in only third-person plural ("they") as opposed to general third-person would be really startling. So Joshua Ferris took "we," which worked really well to express the Borglike (if I understand what Borgs are [what the Borg is?]) mentality of the advertising agency in which the novel was set. It wasn't just a brilliant conceit, it was well executed to boot. Now all we're really left with is second-person plural (and maybe third-person plural), though there might, of course, be superfamous books written in these forms (and I'm sure there are lots of experimental pieces), but I just don't know about them. It's funny to have the idea of a frontier be so tightly contained. I don't know about the remaining forms, though. "They" might be OK for a superparanoid sci-fi-ish sort of novel, but maybe it's just too irritating. I'm trying to think of the tone of a "you" plural novel. It's hard because you'd have to keep emphasizing that you mean "you" plural and not singular. Maybe it would best be written in the south, and it could be expressed as y'all. Fuck All Y'all, it could be called.

Library books:
Let's do something awful.

I can't really write about Philip Roth, given that everyone else has already done so and I don't have much to add. I will say that I love him, I feel oppressed by him, and he disappoints me, but only because I love him so. I feel about him the same way I feel about Martin Amis: I can't believe how funny they are, but they're such grizzled old clueless sexists it's kind of often not worth dealing with them (the eventual death of all of such men [Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, John Updike, etc.] will feel really liberating, but I'll be pretty old and oppressive myself by the time that happens). As Roth and Amis slip into their dotage they get goofier and goofier (Exit Ghost? The Second Plane?), but at least P.R. has the excuse of being 75 and merely out of it, while crazytalk M.A. is only 57 and truly a paranoid nut. Oh, and they're both come across as really afraid of people in a way that makes them seem way too cosseted by their privilege and fame, but while M.A. is afraid of all poor and/or non-white people (he hasn't been afraid of Americans for decades), P.R. seems mainly afraid of his fans, which is more interesting. Also, obviously Roth is not as cold and soulless as Amis, but also maybe not as nimble. Or maybe he is -- he's clearly the better writer.

So: the Plot Against America. I love that line, "Let's do something awful." It's what the narrator's friend would say before doing some devious deed, like looking in his mother's underwear drawer. I feel like Portnoy's Complaint could have begun with that line. It suggests such a dirty, sneaky, totally controlled rebellion -- completely Rothlike.

In the novel Nazi-sympathizing anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh defeats Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election. Around the time I read it Lindbergh's daughter Reeve published a book about, among other things, Lindbergh's three secret German families, which included seven children. Who knew? Apparently lots of people, but I was scandalized. Let's do something awful indeed.

Not so much reinventing the wheel, more like rediscovering a very low-key form of fire.

After living in Chicago for nearly ten years I just got a library card fairly recently, which is weird because I've always really loved public libraries. I feel really au courant, in the know, etc. for having a library card, which is clearly completely misunderstanding the entire point of the library. I can't really remember what spurred me to finally get a card, maybe that I wanted to read the Plot Against America by Philip Roth and the thought of spending $20+ to buy another brand-new fresh book from a bookstore or Amazon (the receipt, the packaging, ugh) and then having to own it just felt really oppressive and sad. Now library books are nipping at my heels all the time and I feel a little bit oppressed by the stack of them that's always sitting around, demanding (unlike books that I've bought) to be read in a timely manner so I can return them so some other (possibly more worthy) reader can get them.

I've been trying to remember what books I've taken out of the library since I started, but it's kind of hard to reconstruct and the "myCPL" section of the Chicago Public Library website doesn't -- unlike netflix -- have a list of everything you've ever borrowed (presumably the civil libertarian librarians are protecting me from the Patriot Act, damn them). I know among the first batch of books I ever took out was indeed the Plot Against America by Philip Roth. I had it when we were on vacation with friends a couple months ago. Trying to pick sand out from between the library-issue clear plastic cover and the actual jacket, I wondered whether it's in bad form to bring a library book to the beach. My friend, who likely has not been to a public library since elementary school, suggested the library was probably thrilled that someone had actually checked a book out and would be downright ecstatic that the person then returned the book with signs of genuine use. I'm not sure the library feels that way, and based on how long I've been waiting for I Was Told There'd Be Cake and All the Sad Young Literary Men, it seems that they really don't need my business. I guess going on about the library is sort of like exclaiming, "Apples -- they're delicious!" But the thing is, apples are delicious and the library is awesome.

Here's what I can remember reading from the library so far:
The Plot Against America by Phillip Roth
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel
The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander
Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill
Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez
Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh
The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida
There are other books I've forgotten, I'm sure.

There have also been a few baby gear and baby care books (e.g., Happiest Baby on the Block by Harvey Karp), but my intention is to write a bit about each book and I just can't -- at this point anyway -- imagine writing about a baby-oriented book.

As my friend Heather says, more later and soon.

The fish eye

Up until yesterday there was a 2 or 3 inch layer of ice covering all of the dog park, except for a small area someone had cleared. Yesterday, though, the ice began to melt because it was finally sunny and fairly warm. Some of the water was running into the drain in the center of the park, but the majority had pooled up into small ponds. I got a bit of a bee in my bonnet about making channels for the water to run smoothly from the pools to the drain, first just kicking and tossing ice chunks out of the way, then digging fresh passageways with a shovel. I was pretty into it. After I'd been at it for some time and was nearly done creating a new canal, a guy started breaking up some of the ice with his foot, and the chunks of ice blocked the waterway. I told him that he was "messing up my channels" and asked him to stop. He smiled but looked at me like I was insane. Then I got really embarrassed -- messing up my channels? -- and left.

Today we took Bean to the park -- the same dog park she's been to twice a day nearly every day of her life, the same one where she saw me snap at the guy yesterday. She has some bad character traits, I'll admit: she too can snarl and snap, usually at the handful of dogs that are smaller than she. We have mental lists of the thousand things that can set her off: another dog is on a leash; Yorkies; she's on or just got off of her leash; she feels trapped under the bench; she just saw the dachshunds; she's guarding a squeaky toy; etc., etc. Today, though, she just crazily attacked a beagle for virtually no reason (well, she had just gotten off her leash and the beagle was waiting for her right inside the gate). But she attacked this little dog's face with relish and the obvious intent to maim and kill. The beagle cried and bled right near its eye, but it went to the emergency vet and was fine. I'm still giving Bean the cold shoulder, which is kind of unfair -- who holds a grudge against a dog? Still, I can't look at her the same way again -- therein lurks the heart of a killer, which just totally messes up my channels to think about.

Half-assery

I don't know, dear blog, but the fire's gone. Have you noticed? [blog nods solemnly] Somehow, knowing that someone might actually read what one writes can have a bit of a chilling effect. Also, I really haven't been doing many projects, and somehow once I began writing about projects it came to seem that that was the only thing to write about.

Whatev. Here's a shawl I made for my mom for Christmas:



It's made from vintage kimonos and obis and has a velvet back and edge. Here's a view of it laid out on my appallingly messy work table:


It's slightly wonky in places, but it was really satisfying to make; still, it's hard to imagine making something for myself with these fabrics (of which I have tons left -- I used only about a sleeve or so of each kimono).



My friend has a cousin who has some fairly severe developmental disabilities, but not so much that she can't live on her own (she's in her early thirties). She's always asking things like, can you tell by my earrings that I'm becoming more feminine? can you tell by my shoes that I'm indie rock? I'm all like, can you tell my blog that I am just so not up for it -- any of it -- these days?