Did you see that movie (500) Days Of Summer? Two vastly different films depending on who you're talking to. If you asked a sane person about it, they would say it's about an immature, slightly gay dude who tries to force every woman into an impossible romantic box that they can't possibly inhabit in order to prove something about himself. If you ask a boy, he will tell you that it's about a girl who's almost perfect, but turns out to be a whore and a bitch.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
On working towards being a sane person
I've been reading Television Without Pity for a few years now, entirely because of the writer Jacob Clifton. He writes recaps for pretty much all of my favourite current shows and others besides, but my allegiance is not just about the teevee. His insights are profound and hilarious and deeply intelligent, drawing on philosophy and religion and psychology and pop culture and just about anything else that goes in the name of a university arts course--only (and I wish I knew how) he manages to skip right over all the potholes and pitfalls of academia and just talk about how people are. It's hard for me to explain but if you read his stuff you know. Which I recommend doing. I read the following passage in his recap of the last Weeds episode and I wanted to share it cause I liked it. For more context and a great deal more wisdom, read the rest of this page here.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Reading List: June/July 2009
1. In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
I seemed to be hearing about this book everywhere and had somewhat thought of it as yet another health/diet/miracle plan/talk show pseudo-phenom. This assumption was completely unfounded and unfair: good job, Meghan! Then I heard the author in a radio interview on CBC and he was saying interesting things, so I bothered to, yanno, at least google the book, because that's how we get Information and the interwebs never makes assumptions like I did. Nevertheless. I discovered he wrote a couple other cool books and the premise of In Defense of Food seemed rather smart, so I put a library recall on that sheeeit, yo.
Sadly someone recalled the book right back cause library patrons are cold like that, so if I say something inaccurate it's because I don't have the book in front of me. I'm even working practically inside a bookstore today but they don't have it either.
Okay. I was excited by this book. It said so many things I really agree with but had never been able to articulate before. He talks about the current time as an "Age of Nutritionism" where the combined forces of nutrition science and food industry marketing have made us all very anxious and obsessed with nutrients and diets and how this obsession is used as a marketing device. Like how we're buying omega-3-fortified chocolate bars and $2.50 bottles of vitamin water.
The history of how nutritionism and the overprocessing of food developed (especially in terms of economics and marketing) is fascinating and depressing; reading about it made me very aware of the intense bombardment of media related to eating and diet and 'health' that I am subjected to every day--which has very little to do with actual food or actual health.
He points out that North American society has a huge obsession with "healthy" eating, and is simultaneously one of the most unhealthy societies in the world (obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and so on). He talks about other cultures and how humans can eat a huge range of food and be relatively healthy, as long as they are Real Foods, whole and unprocessed and unrefined and fresh. C.f. our manufactured 'foods' stripped of their true essence and filled with corn syrup and hydrogenated oils and aspartame and random dyes and preservatives etc, a diet that makes us fat and sick.
He touches on the idea of eating as a cultural activity that can be about joy and tradition and social bonding. It seems like so much of our food-related time and energy is spent thinking about weight and body image and guilt and shame and "eating right" like there's some moral imperative directing you to skip the low-cal margarine on the low-gluten-omega-3-fortified-prebiotic-fibre-enhanced bread. Even if we are having meals involving joyful social bonding, how many of us will be thinking about which foods we ate were Bad and which were Good (both probably inaccurately) either during or after that meal? Sigh.
So the answer? Pollan is pretty self-aware about the irony of prescribing any one diet in a book about how prescribed diets are bad for us. He just tells us: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
"That anyone should need to write a book advising people to 'eat food,'" says Pollan, "could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion." And in the latter part of the book he talks about how to track down actual real food and stay away from the manufactured processed stuff.
I agree with so much of this book. Most of what's in our grocery stores is not food, and it's there to make money, not feed us or make us healthy or happy. I want to keep writing about all the points in the entire book because I really do find it intelligent and enlightening and kind of also a huge relief, but I'll restrain myself. It's also written in an engaging and very un-condescending style, self-aware and straightforward but not simplified. The hardest part for me is actually acting on this--convenience, dedication, money, time, taste (because I love me some KD)--but since I read it I have been a lot more conscious of the nature of what I'm eating (is it food? or food product?) and I have been trying to make choices based more on this consciousness and less on what the media/nutrition science industry tells me is right. Recall your library's copy and see what you think. The introduction can be found here.
2. Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson
Short stories. I luffed this book. "Go, Fight, Win" was my favorite, I think, though "Birds in the House" was close and the title story is surprisingly satisfying for the topic matter (quarterlife crisis ennui?). "The Shooting Man" just about broke my heart and did something clever with a 'surprise ending' that isn't (in my interpretation) meant to be a surprise at all but rather an apparent inevitability that plays against our hope (and the character's hope) right up to the end that it doesn't have to be inevitable, however irrational that hope. It's neat. This guy's smart, and the stories manage to fit into the contemporary American indie McSweeneys/George Saunders style of fiction while still feeling fresh and exciting. I'll read his next book fo sho. BUY this book, people, right now, from your local independent bookstore.
3. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
You might recognize her name from her comics and books about the Moomins. Another book by Tove Jansson came through the library a while ago and it had an introduction by Ali Smith, who is basically my Favorite, so that's what caught my eye, and I tracked this one down too. It's like nothing I've ever read before and makes me feel quiet and rageful and shivery and relieved all at once.
4. Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins
This won the Believer Book Award. It's not quite my preferred style, if that matters, but it's brilliantly written. There's this subversive first-person subjectivity that's pretty great (I'm consciously ignoring the gender issues because writing is an act of willed understanding and it doesn't matter who is what) and it's tense and, as the Believer said, the anti-escapism, and ambiguous. I love ambiguity in books because that's life. It's about, among many other things, never being able to inhabit another person's experience--including, maybe, a subversively subjective first-person narrator's? Mystery and pain and loss and paranoia and insecurity and I almost want to make a DFW comparison, not quite stylistically but emotionally. Most books that aren't quite my taste, I just don't get into no matter how well-done, but this one I did completely, which says a lot.
5. Open: Love, Sex, and Life in an Open Marriage by Jenny Block
Mm, it's hard to talk about this book without responding to its content instead of the book itself. But I guess that's the point of this one, I read it to analyze open marriage according to the author and/or society and/or myself, not to read. Like I do with many nonfiction books. Anyhow. She has a blog and it became a book deal, about living in an open marriage. I was bothered by some Sweeping Generalizations made throughout as well as use of euphemisms (if you're going to write about sex, orgasm, masturbation, etc, call them what they are). I don't know. Straight-up nonfiction memoirs entirely about the author's personal life are tough to comment on for me, because I'd be commenting on her life and not much else. Also I think I'm the not the Target Audience, wrong generation or something, a lot of the stuff about "what we all grew up believing about sex and love and marriage" is not what I grew up believing, so. Worth a look if you've never thought about open relationships, I guess, but it's no Ethical Slut.
I seemed to be hearing about this book everywhere and had somewhat thought of it as yet another health/diet/miracle plan/talk show pseudo-phenom. This assumption was completely unfounded and unfair: good job, Meghan! Then I heard the author in a radio interview on CBC and he was saying interesting things, so I bothered to, yanno, at least google the book, because that's how we get Information and the interwebs never makes assumptions like I did. Nevertheless. I discovered he wrote a couple other cool books and the premise of In Defense of Food seemed rather smart, so I put a library recall on that sheeeit, yo.
Sadly someone recalled the book right back cause library patrons are cold like that, so if I say something inaccurate it's because I don't have the book in front of me. I'm even working practically inside a bookstore today but they don't have it either.
Okay. I was excited by this book. It said so many things I really agree with but had never been able to articulate before. He talks about the current time as an "Age of Nutritionism" where the combined forces of nutrition science and food industry marketing have made us all very anxious and obsessed with nutrients and diets and how this obsession is used as a marketing device. Like how we're buying omega-3-fortified chocolate bars and $2.50 bottles of vitamin water.
The history of how nutritionism and the overprocessing of food developed (especially in terms of economics and marketing) is fascinating and depressing; reading about it made me very aware of the intense bombardment of media related to eating and diet and 'health' that I am subjected to every day--which has very little to do with actual food or actual health.
He points out that North American society has a huge obsession with "healthy" eating, and is simultaneously one of the most unhealthy societies in the world (obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and so on). He talks about other cultures and how humans can eat a huge range of food and be relatively healthy, as long as they are Real Foods, whole and unprocessed and unrefined and fresh. C.f. our manufactured 'foods' stripped of their true essence and filled with corn syrup and hydrogenated oils and aspartame and random dyes and preservatives etc, a diet that makes us fat and sick.
He touches on the idea of eating as a cultural activity that can be about joy and tradition and social bonding. It seems like so much of our food-related time and energy is spent thinking about weight and body image and guilt and shame and "eating right" like there's some moral imperative directing you to skip the low-cal margarine on the low-gluten-omega-3-fortified-prebiotic-fibre-enhanced bread. Even if we are having meals involving joyful social bonding, how many of us will be thinking about which foods we ate were Bad and which were Good (both probably inaccurately) either during or after that meal? Sigh.
So the answer? Pollan is pretty self-aware about the irony of prescribing any one diet in a book about how prescribed diets are bad for us. He just tells us: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
"That anyone should need to write a book advising people to 'eat food,'" says Pollan, "could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion." And in the latter part of the book he talks about how to track down actual real food and stay away from the manufactured processed stuff.
I agree with so much of this book. Most of what's in our grocery stores is not food, and it's there to make money, not feed us or make us healthy or happy. I want to keep writing about all the points in the entire book because I really do find it intelligent and enlightening and kind of also a huge relief, but I'll restrain myself. It's also written in an engaging and very un-condescending style, self-aware and straightforward but not simplified. The hardest part for me is actually acting on this--convenience, dedication, money, time, taste (because I love me some KD)--but since I read it I have been a lot more conscious of the nature of what I'm eating (is it food? or food product?) and I have been trying to make choices based more on this consciousness and less on what the media/nutrition science industry tells me is right. Recall your library's copy and see what you think. The introduction can be found here.
2. Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson
Short stories. I luffed this book. "Go, Fight, Win" was my favorite, I think, though "Birds in the House" was close and the title story is surprisingly satisfying for the topic matter (quarterlife crisis ennui?). "The Shooting Man" just about broke my heart and did something clever with a 'surprise ending' that isn't (in my interpretation) meant to be a surprise at all but rather an apparent inevitability that plays against our hope (and the character's hope) right up to the end that it doesn't have to be inevitable, however irrational that hope. It's neat. This guy's smart, and the stories manage to fit into the contemporary American indie McSweeneys/George Saunders style of fiction while still feeling fresh and exciting. I'll read his next book fo sho. BUY this book, people, right now, from your local independent bookstore.
3. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
You might recognize her name from her comics and books about the Moomins. Another book by Tove Jansson came through the library a while ago and it had an introduction by Ali Smith, who is basically my Favorite, so that's what caught my eye, and I tracked this one down too. It's like nothing I've ever read before and makes me feel quiet and rageful and shivery and relieved all at once.
4. Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins
This won the Believer Book Award. It's not quite my preferred style, if that matters, but it's brilliantly written. There's this subversive first-person subjectivity that's pretty great (I'm consciously ignoring the gender issues because writing is an act of willed understanding and it doesn't matter who is what) and it's tense and, as the Believer said, the anti-escapism, and ambiguous. I love ambiguity in books because that's life. It's about, among many other things, never being able to inhabit another person's experience--including, maybe, a subversively subjective first-person narrator's? Mystery and pain and loss and paranoia and insecurity and I almost want to make a DFW comparison, not quite stylistically but emotionally. Most books that aren't quite my taste, I just don't get into no matter how well-done, but this one I did completely, which says a lot.
5. Open: Love, Sex, and Life in an Open Marriage by Jenny Block
Mm, it's hard to talk about this book without responding to its content instead of the book itself. But I guess that's the point of this one, I read it to analyze open marriage according to the author and/or society and/or myself, not to read. Like I do with many nonfiction books. Anyhow. She has a blog and it became a book deal, about living in an open marriage. I was bothered by some Sweeping Generalizations made throughout as well as use of euphemisms (if you're going to write about sex, orgasm, masturbation, etc, call them what they are). I don't know. Straight-up nonfiction memoirs entirely about the author's personal life are tough to comment on for me, because I'd be commenting on her life and not much else. Also I think I'm the not the Target Audience, wrong generation or something, a lot of the stuff about "what we all grew up believing about sex and love and marriage" is not what I grew up believing, so. Worth a look if you've never thought about open relationships, I guess, but it's no Ethical Slut.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Flash of colour
Life has been a bit grey lately. The details are generic, unremarkable, but there it is: grey. During a downswing I tend to become most frustrated by the feeling of anhedonia, probably since I'm a casual hedonist the rest of the time. Like, being 'depressed' while doing something that is objectively kinda depressing anyway (e.g. going to work) is less frustrating than being 'depressed' while doing something that I'd normally enjoy (e.g. weekend activities). Obvs, I guess--anyway, it's what I think about, when things are grey.
I was reading Stephen King's Just after Sunset, a collection of short stories published last year. I haven't read him in years; I raced through some of his classics in my early adolescence and I think I've re-read Misery, It, and the book with "The Langoliers" in it once or twice since. A few days ago I saw this collection on a book truck at work and I'd forgotten to bring the book I was reading from home, so I took it.
What I like about these stories, and Stephen King in general, is that the qualities which could place the work in either the 'horror' genre or the 'speculative fiction' genre are present because they are being used to express basic human experiences. He writes about the universal-human-condition stuff that most of us aim for, only he takes a few hop-skip-jumps away from the realism that we're used to which gives him more range for exploration. The weight of the story is rarely in the genre elements, I find, but rather in the themes (mental illness, fear of death, grief, etc) which are, in some ways, opened up by those very genre elements and the imaginative mindset they require. The realism parts sneak up on me when I'm swept away by the imaginative parts, and sometimes that gives them more power. Like my brain relaxes in a way, knowing that it's going to be thinking about ghosts or demons which it doesn't really believe in, and then boom! -- I find myself weeping over a short story about September 11th.
Which isn't quite the point of this post, but I'm getting there. The story's called "The Things They Left Behind" (an homage to The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, I assume). At the end of the book, King provides some liner notes for his Constant Reader, short explanations of the various origins of the stories. I'd taken to flipping to the end after finishing each story, and when I read the notes for this particular piece I found this:
Writing is an act of willed understanding.
I've written some fiction myself, and the sense that some topics or characters or settings are out of bounds has arisen in me many times. The feeling that I have no right to try to describe something that I haven't come close to experiencing, especially when the thing is very meaningful to people that actually have. The idea of misappropriation.
And then today I read this little liner note, this idea put so concisely and sharply, and it just ... clicked. It doesn't mean I'm going jump into a first-person narrative about being a Jewish African-American gay man or anything (at least not tonight) but it's something to remember next time I feel that particular reservation while writing. There are a lot of reasons to go somewhere that feels out of bounds. This is the best one I've heard.
Which made me feel excited, cause I like it when something surprises me, opens up a door in my head, shifts my worldview a degree or two. When that hasn't been happening enough for me, things get kinda grey.
I was reading Stephen King's Just after Sunset, a collection of short stories published last year. I haven't read him in years; I raced through some of his classics in my early adolescence and I think I've re-read Misery, It, and the book with "The Langoliers" in it once or twice since. A few days ago I saw this collection on a book truck at work and I'd forgotten to bring the book I was reading from home, so I took it.
What I like about these stories, and Stephen King in general, is that the qualities which could place the work in either the 'horror' genre or the 'speculative fiction' genre are present because they are being used to express basic human experiences. He writes about the universal-human-condition stuff that most of us aim for, only he takes a few hop-skip-jumps away from the realism that we're used to which gives him more range for exploration. The weight of the story is rarely in the genre elements, I find, but rather in the themes (mental illness, fear of death, grief, etc) which are, in some ways, opened up by those very genre elements and the imaginative mindset they require. The realism parts sneak up on me when I'm swept away by the imaginative parts, and sometimes that gives them more power. Like my brain relaxes in a way, knowing that it's going to be thinking about ghosts or demons which it doesn't really believe in, and then boom! -- I find myself weeping over a short story about September 11th.
Which isn't quite the point of this post, but I'm getting there. The story's called "The Things They Left Behind" (an homage to The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, I assume). At the end of the book, King provides some liner notes for his Constant Reader, short explanations of the various origins of the stories. I'd taken to flipping to the end after finishing each story, and when I read the notes for this particular piece I found this:
... I was deeply and fundamentally affected by 9/11. Like a great many writers of fiction both literary and popular, I felt a reluctance to say anything about an event that has become as much as an American touchstone as Pearl Harbour or the assassination of John Kennedy ... I might still not have written it if I had not recalled a conversation I had with a Jewish editor over twenty-five years before. He was unhappy with me about a story called "Apt Pupil." It was wrong for me to write about the concentration camps, he said, because I was not a Jew. I replied that made writing the story all the more important--because writing is an act of willed understanding. (p. 363)
Writing is an act of willed understanding.
I've written some fiction myself, and the sense that some topics or characters or settings are out of bounds has arisen in me many times. The feeling that I have no right to try to describe something that I haven't come close to experiencing, especially when the thing is very meaningful to people that actually have. The idea of misappropriation.
And then today I read this little liner note, this idea put so concisely and sharply, and it just ... clicked. It doesn't mean I'm going jump into a first-person narrative about being a Jewish African-American gay man or anything (at least not tonight) but it's something to remember next time I feel that particular reservation while writing. There are a lot of reasons to go somewhere that feels out of bounds. This is the best one I've heard.
Which made me feel excited, cause I like it when something surprises me, opens up a door in my head, shifts my worldview a degree or two. When that hasn't been happening enough for me, things get kinda grey.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Reading List: May 2009
This post is inspired by Riese's "Stuff I've Been Reading" posts over at her blog, which I think were originally inspired by Nick Hornby's Believer column, which I bet was originally inspired by someone else who wrote about stuff they'd been reading. I'm planning on going into detail about one or two of my favorite books from a given month, and listing others I've read (& endorse, of course) as well.
1. Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston
A post on Bookslut led me to these short stories. I would like to recommend these stories to everyone because they are beautifully written and cut-throat and make your breath catch in your chest. They are about things like deserts, hunting, river rafting, and riding horses, none of which I have any particular attraction to, though I did while reading the book. But really they're about nature and love and sex and being female, all of which I have lots of interest in, so. Anyway, I am obsessed with Pam Houston now and I don't even like cowboys.
I will point out that there is not necessarily a lot of range in the stories, character-wise, but the thing they do is done so well that I don't care. Reading her essays (see next item) confirmed the twitchy ear-perking I get around 'autobiographical fiction' or whatever the fuck you want to call the writing people do that falls in a genre grey area, and that does explain the similarity amongst the stories somewhat. I say this with zero judgment, by the way.
(Digression, because this 'debate' will arise often if I'm going to write about reading and this is all I want to say about it: I don't care what label anyone puts on writing. I like to find out if 'fiction' is 'autobiographical' because it makes it interesting to me when the work itself is good. I am interested in where the writing and the thoughts and the feelings come from, whether the source is closer to reality ('reality') or imagination. Both interest me, but I don't put some moral value on the 'amount' of 'fiction' in your work, if you're really fucking awesome at writing short stories about your own life, in the sense that they speak truth about the universal human condition et cetera, I will admire that.
Also, I get writer crushes, so pretending that I know stuff about a writer's actual life is exciting for me, but that's a different topic. Also also, I should say I am more this kind of fiction writer than the imagination kind, probably because I'm really a nonfiction writer, so I am understanding.)
I would like to excerpt pretty much the whole book, but there are laws or something, so here:
So this is her nonfiction, mostly personal essay (yay!). The essays are loosely grouped by topic, in five sections: dogs, nature, men, women, travel. The topics, unsurprisingly, overlap quite a bit (and tend to elaborate upon) those covered in her short stories, though I get the sense that she can cut a little deeper, hit something more raw, with the stories than she can with the essays. Some essays are amazing and some are fine. I like nonfiction collections that show me how the writer's life changed over a period of months or years, and I like collections that riff on a couple of main themes, and this book does both of those things.
I loved this book not quite as much as Cowboys, I think because of the cutting-deeper thing, and probably also because I am a hypocritical person who writes nonfiction but loves fiction the mostest. However, I relate to the writing itself, as in the craft and process and what it means to have written personal essays, much much more--which counts for a lot. The tension of nonfiction absolutely fascinates me: the way writing down your life turns your life into a story; the way that version is only one version; the way that self-awareness and self-observation somehow, paradoxically (beautifully) coexist with the impossibility of objectivity. Which leads me to the next couple of items on the reading list.
3. Madness by Marya Hornbacher
Super intense memoir about having Type I rapid-cycle bipolar. There are so many articles about the connection between creativity and mental illness, and her writing certainly supports that hypothesis as far as I'm concerned. See previous rambling about the tensions of nonfiction.
4. A Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diaries of Anaïs Nin by Anais Nïn.
I read somewhat sporadically through Henry and June, Incest, and Fire. There is so much critical analysis of this work that I feel ill-equipped to comment much. I will say I was fascinated by the subjectivity of her diaries--which is ultimately the subjectivity any of us have regarding our own selves, our world and the people in it--as well as thinking about the idea of a 'diary' as literature, the performance/audience questions, that sort of thing.
5. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
I love good YA, always a fast read and likely to make me cry in a simple, not-t0o-heartachey way. I read about the plot of this one before reading it and wished I hadn't, so I won't describe anything! I loved the style and voice in this book, the dark humor, the depiction of pain without being too angsty.
6. The Progress of Love, 7. Open Secrets, and 8. Runaway by Alice Munro
I've read these before, for some reason I always re-read Alice Munro in the summer, a time when I often become solitary and contemplative. And so for me, her stories fit perfectly in a hot sunny day, lying in the grass, looking at the ocean. I am, as we all are, truly in awe of her.
9. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
Not as gimmicky as you'd think. Much like my relationship with actual Jane Austen novels, I thought it was rather brilliant and then I lost steam halfway through and didn't pick it up again.
I also re-read the first Dune trilogy (read them!) and a bunch of other library books I can't remember now, but if you made it all the way to the end of my short list I'm more than happy. What have you been reading?
1. Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston
A post on Bookslut led me to these short stories. I would like to recommend these stories to everyone because they are beautifully written and cut-throat and make your breath catch in your chest. They are about things like deserts, hunting, river rafting, and riding horses, none of which I have any particular attraction to, though I did while reading the book. But really they're about nature and love and sex and being female, all of which I have lots of interest in, so. Anyway, I am obsessed with Pam Houston now and I don't even like cowboys.
I will point out that there is not necessarily a lot of range in the stories, character-wise, but the thing they do is done so well that I don't care. Reading her essays (see next item) confirmed the twitchy ear-perking I get around 'autobiographical fiction' or whatever the fuck you want to call the writing people do that falls in a genre grey area, and that does explain the similarity amongst the stories somewhat. I say this with zero judgment, by the way.
(Digression, because this 'debate' will arise often if I'm going to write about reading and this is all I want to say about it: I don't care what label anyone puts on writing. I like to find out if 'fiction' is 'autobiographical' because it makes it interesting to me when the work itself is good. I am interested in where the writing and the thoughts and the feelings come from, whether the source is closer to reality ('reality') or imagination. Both interest me, but I don't put some moral value on the 'amount' of 'fiction' in your work, if you're really fucking awesome at writing short stories about your own life, in the sense that they speak truth about the universal human condition et cetera, I will admire that.
Also, I get writer crushes, so pretending that I know stuff about a writer's actual life is exciting for me, but that's a different topic. Also also, I should say I am more this kind of fiction writer than the imagination kind, probably because I'm really a nonfiction writer, so I am understanding.)
I would like to excerpt pretty much the whole book, but there are laws or something, so here:
Everything about sex, even the simplicity of an orgasm, seems to be made more complicated by all this gazing into each other's eyes. "High density" is a phrase I can't shake from my mind. (p. 132)2. A Little More About Me by Pam Houston
You wonder why there's no word for the opposite of lonely. You wonder if there's a difference between whatever might be truth and a performance that isn't a lie. In your life right now, you can't find one. (p. 151)
So this is her nonfiction, mostly personal essay (yay!). The essays are loosely grouped by topic, in five sections: dogs, nature, men, women, travel. The topics, unsurprisingly, overlap quite a bit (and tend to elaborate upon) those covered in her short stories, though I get the sense that she can cut a little deeper, hit something more raw, with the stories than she can with the essays. Some essays are amazing and some are fine. I like nonfiction collections that show me how the writer's life changed over a period of months or years, and I like collections that riff on a couple of main themes, and this book does both of those things.
I loved this book not quite as much as Cowboys, I think because of the cutting-deeper thing, and probably also because I am a hypocritical person who writes nonfiction but loves fiction the mostest. However, I relate to the writing itself, as in the craft and process and what it means to have written personal essays, much much more--which counts for a lot. The tension of nonfiction absolutely fascinates me: the way writing down your life turns your life into a story; the way that version is only one version; the way that self-awareness and self-observation somehow, paradoxically (beautifully) coexist with the impossibility of objectivity. Which leads me to the next couple of items on the reading list.
3. Madness by Marya Hornbacher
Super intense memoir about having Type I rapid-cycle bipolar. There are so many articles about the connection between creativity and mental illness, and her writing certainly supports that hypothesis as far as I'm concerned. See previous rambling about the tensions of nonfiction.
4. A Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diaries of Anaïs Nin by Anais Nïn.
I read somewhat sporadically through Henry and June, Incest, and Fire. There is so much critical analysis of this work that I feel ill-equipped to comment much. I will say I was fascinated by the subjectivity of her diaries--which is ultimately the subjectivity any of us have regarding our own selves, our world and the people in it--as well as thinking about the idea of a 'diary' as literature, the performance/audience questions, that sort of thing.
5. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
I love good YA, always a fast read and likely to make me cry in a simple, not-t0o-heartachey way. I read about the plot of this one before reading it and wished I hadn't, so I won't describe anything! I loved the style and voice in this book, the dark humor, the depiction of pain without being too angsty.
6. The Progress of Love, 7. Open Secrets, and 8. Runaway by Alice Munro
I've read these before, for some reason I always re-read Alice Munro in the summer, a time when I often become solitary and contemplative. And so for me, her stories fit perfectly in a hot sunny day, lying in the grass, looking at the ocean. I am, as we all are, truly in awe of her.
9. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
Not as gimmicky as you'd think. Much like my relationship with actual Jane Austen novels, I thought it was rather brilliant and then I lost steam halfway through and didn't pick it up again.
I also re-read the first Dune trilogy (read them!) and a bunch of other library books I can't remember now, but if you made it all the way to the end of my short list I'm more than happy. What have you been reading?
Friday, May 29, 2009
Things I learned at Sasquatch!
1. RVs do not fit underneath irrigation things.
2. An Escalade is not big enough for eight people.
3. Always check for all camp stove components.
4. Just because your pants don't button up doesn't mean they aren't amazing.
5. Festivals bring out random acts of kindness amongst strangers.
6. Mornings go like this: Step one, drag self out of tent. Step two, pop a beer.
7. Some water bottles contain vodka. Ask before you chug.
8. Clouds are awesome.
9. Margaritas cost $14 USD.
10. I love Sasquatch!.
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