October 15, 2009

A Tyrannical Poltergeist

“There is a sense in which all novels are ghost stories: fictional characters are translucent phantoms, which readers believe in (or don’t); readers lurk in the presence of characters, spying on their most intimate moments, eavesdropping on their innermost thoughts. And however thoroughly the novelist establishes her characters’ motivations, however robustly she forges her chains of cause and effect everything that happens ultimately does so at the whim of the writer. Certain things have to happen for the narrative to progress… Every novel is haunted by a tyrannical poltergeist, in the form of its plot.” from “Poltergeist: The Little Stranger” by Thomas Jones, London Review of Books 9 July 2009

October 1, 2009

Why I love the LRB

As a person who loves driving but hates cars, I found Andrew O’Hagan’s “A Car of One’s Own” the very best thing I read today. From the London Review of Books, 11 June 2009. Read the whole thing. Excerpt as follows:

“I could easily say I loved my car – I missed it when I went to bed at night. On that first long drive from London to Wales and thence to Inverness – which took 14 hours – I believe I discovered my autonomy. As with all illusions, I didn’t care that others found the enchantment funny: the feeling was new, and its newness is something that millions of people express rarely but understand fully. In American fiction, a great number of epiphanies – especially male epiphanies – occur while the protagonist is alone and driving his car. There are reasons for that. One may not have a direction but one has a means of getting there. One may not be in control of life but one can progress in a straight line. When your youth is over and definitions become fixed, even if they are wrong, it might turn out that the arrival of a car suddenly feels like the commuting of a sentence. It may seem to give you back your existential mojo. That is the beauty of learning to drive late and learning to drive often: it gives you a sense that life turned out to be freer than it was in your childhood, that time agrees with you, that your own sensitivities found their domain in the end, and that deep in the shell of your inexpensive car you came to know your subjectivity. Of course, one may find these things in the marriage bed or in a gentleman’s club, but those places have rules and your car is your own bed, your own club. Music? Yes. Tears? Yes. Singing? Yes. Stopping under the stars? OK, if you must. And here is Tintern Abbey. And there is Hadrian’s Wall. And should I stop in Glasgow for a drink? If you read the novels of Joan Didion, you will see there can come a time in anybody’s life, women’s as much as men’s, when they climb into their car and feel that they are driving away from an entire kingdom of dependency. The motorways don’t offer a solution: they offer a welcome straitjacket. Your car will get all the credit for bringing you home to yourself, for showing you the only person you can truly depend on is not merely yourself, but yourself-in-your-car, a somatic unity. Those who spend most of their lives being alert to the demands of others – and that’s most employees, most husbands, wives, parents, most believers – will know the rhythmic, sedative pull of the motorways as the road performs its magic, pulling you back by degrees to some forgotten individualism that the joys and vexations of community always threatened to turn into an upholstered void. Virginia Woolf was almost right: all one really needs is a car of one’s own, the funds to keep it on the road and the will to encounter oneself within. Though most of those men aren’t listening to Virginia Woolf – they’re listening to Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited.”

September 26, 2009

Wash the Poodle

“I suspect the real attraction was a large library of fine books, which was left to dust and spiders since Uncle March died. Jo remembered the kind old gentleman, who used to let her build railroads and bridges with his big dictionaries, tell her stories about the queer pictures in his Latin books, and buy her cards of gingerbread whenever he met her in the street. The dim dusty room, with the busts staring down from the tall bookcases, the cozy chairs, the globes, and, best of all, the wilderness of books in which she could wander where she liked, made the library a region of bliss to her. The moment Aunt March took her nap, or was busy with company, Jo hurried to this quiet place, and curling herself up in the easy chair, devoured poetry, romance, history, travels and pictures, like a regular bookworm. But, like all happiness, it did not last long; for as sure as she had just reached the heart of the story, the sweetest verse of the song, or the most perilous adventure of her traveler, a shrill voice called, “Josy-phine! Josy-phine!” and she had to leave her paradise to wind yarn, wash the poodle, or read Belsham’s Essays by the hour together.” –from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women

September 16, 2009

The very best thing

“We all might have burst into hysterical laughter, and we probably would have if a sleeping child weren’t propped in the middle of the dining room table, next to two candlesticks, a Stengal sugar bowl, and some salt and pepper shakers. Adoption, I could see, was a lot like childbirth: Here she is! everyone exclaimed. And you looked and saw a pickled piglet and felt nothing, not realizing it would be the only time you would ever feel nothing again. A baby destroyed a life and thereby became the very best thing in it. Though to sit gloriously and triumphantly in ruins may not be such a big trick.” –from The Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

August 27, 2009

Alternate Endings

“You know all those blank pages they have at the end of books? I always thought they were there so that if you didn’t like the way the book ended, you could write your own ending. I wrote rediculous alternate endings on those pages to pretty much every book I ever read as a kid… I pretty much made everything a happy ending. Leslie dying in Bridge of Terabithia was just a dream; Winnie decides to drink from the spring and run away with Jesse in Tuck Everlasting; Elizabeth returns to Frobisher Bay forever in The Other Elizabeth; Walter’s death in World War One was just a case of mistaken identity in Rilla of Ingleside. Oh, and the end of every one of my Nancy Drew books now features a love scene between Nancy and Ned. I was so frustrated that he was supposed to be her boyfriend, yet we never saw them kiss!”– Amy Jones from “Amy Jones in Conversation” by Katia Grubisic, in The New Quarterly

August 24, 2009

Define "tuffet"

“The conventional wisdom is that a precocious reader is a child in possession of a prenatural grasp of both the facts and features of the adult world. This may well be true of some, but was not true of me. My reading list didn’t grant me access to the particulars of adult life, but to its moody interstices, the dark web of complex feeling that apparently suffused life after grade school. Like a child reciting nursery rhymes, I was consumed by the music of the words, not the circumstances surrounding Miss Muffet and her actual tuffet. (Well, can you, even now, define “tuffet”?)” –Lizzie Skurnick, from Shelf Discoveries

August 21, 2009

Not an alternative

“It is not that I think every person should become a parent, or would claim that childbearing enhances one’s creative capacities (although I do think such an argument could easily be made given that childbirth, perhaps even more than other life-changing experiences, broadens one’s sense of meaning as well as being). It is that being a parent — a mother, especially — should not be narrated as an alternative to having an engaged, creative life, as if one must choose one or the other or be crippled by both.” –Amy Lavender Harris, “Pure Light”

August 3, 2009

No one told me how crazy

“No one told me how crazy you can become in those first few months, when your body chemistry is changing, when your entire life has been altered from the moment the baby was born and nothing will ever, ever be the same again. People don’t talk about these things, perhaps because they don’t want to scare you. Perhaps they don’t tell you because these things fall away so quickly after the baby arrives that those who would tell no longer remember. And if they do tell you these details before you have had a child, they have no meaning, and no context. These are truths you must seek and know alone, in the quiet late-night hours when you are rocking the baby, breathing in the tender newborn scent.”– Christy-Ann Conlin, “Wired at the Heart” from Between Interruptions: 30 Women Tell the Truth About Motherhood

July 25, 2009

Going to get a quart of mik with William Blake

“Part of the Romantic sensibility, a part we inevitably share at least a little, was to grieve over the loss of this childlike clarity and its replacement by the more mundane duties and obligations of adult life. Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; the things which we have seen, we now can see no more. It may seem that the Romantic view we are articulating sees ordinary adulthood as a loss, a falling off, only briefly stemmed by a few adult geniuses.

But that neglects the other half of the equation, the part that is our uniquely adult gift. In particular, when we take on the adult obligation of caring for children, we don’t give up the Romantic project, we participate in it. We participate simply by watching children. Think of some completely ordinary, boring, everyday walk, the couple of blocks to the local 7-Eleven store. Taking that same walk with a two-year old is like going to get a quart of milk with William Blake. The mundane street becomes a sort of circus. There are gates, gates that open one way and not another and that will swing back and forth if you push them just the right way. There are small walls you can walk on, very carefully. There are sewer lids that have fascinatingly regular patterns and scraps of brightly coloured pizza-delivery flyers. There are intriguing strangers to examine carefully from behind a protective parental leg. There is a veritable zoo of creatures, from tiny pill bugs and earthworms to the enormous excitement, or terror, of a real barking dog. The trip to 7-Eleven becomes a hundred times more interesting, even though, of course, it does take ten times as long. Watching children awakens our own continuing capacities for wonder and knowledge.”– from The Scientist in the Crib, Gopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl

July 16, 2009

A Perfectly Adjusted Organism

“Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence. Inside the cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend. There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim, ‘I do enjoy myself’ or ‘I am horrified’ we are insincere. ‘As far as I feel anything, it is enjoyment, horror’– it’s no more than that, really, and a perfectly adjusted organism would be silent.”– from E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India