Bookstorm

My favorite living writer, Michael Chabon, is back in The New York Review of Books, this time with an essay on "the wilderness of childhood":

The sandlots and creek beds, the alleys and woodlands have been aban- doned in favor of a system of reservations--Chuck E. Cheese, the Jungle, the Discovery Zone: jolly internment centers mapped and planned by adults with no blank spots aside from doors marked staff only. When children roller-skate or ride their bikes, they go forth armored as for battle, and their parents typically stand nearby.

There are reasons for all of this. The helmeting and monitoring, the corralling of children into certified zones of safety, is in part the product of the Consumer Reports mentality, the generally increased consciousness, in America, of safety and danger. To this one might add the growing demands of insurance actuarials and the national pastime of torts. But the primary reason for this curtailing of adventure, this closing off of Wilderness, is the increased anxiety we all feel over the abduction of children by strangers; we fear the wolves in the Wilderness. This is not a rational fear; in 1999, for example, according to the Justice Department, the number of abductions by strangers in the United States was 115. Such crimes have always occurred at about the same rate; being a child is exactly no more and no less dangerous than it ever was. What has changed is that the horror is so much better known. At times it seems as if parents are being deliberately encouraged to fear for their children's lives, though only a cynic would suggest there was money to be made in doing so.

I'm only sixty-three pages into David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest--which keeps me right on schedule--and I keep wondering what drugs Wallace was ingesting while writing this mammoth book.

There's a lot going on here: Wallace is stringing out multiple plotlines and introducing numerous characters--none of whom seem to have any relation to the others--and it's easy to see how Infinite Jest can be immediately off-putting. Let's face it: I have no fucking clue what's going on.

But that's okay: being a little lost isn't necessarily a bad thing. Infinite Jest is certainly one of the weirdest books I've ever read, but Wallace writes with confidence, and I get the sense that, for all his juvenile vernacular (which veers dangerously close to the teen-speak in the film Clueless), he knows what he's doing. He has a great eye for detail (which is exhausting at times), especially when it comes to nineties culture, and Infinite Jest reads like a book caught in a time warp. Wallace, partying like it's 1996, has a sardonic, postmodern sneer, the kind of sensibility that's both critical and darkly humorous. Imagine James Joyce's Ulysses transplanted into the mid-nineties, and you'll have a very good idea of what it's like to read Infinite Jest.

Clearly, this isn't a quaint book. It's a mess. It's repetitive. Wallace is throwing everything he has at me, but I can sense a twinkle in his eye. He'll help me pick up and arrange all the pieces, I'm sure.

Ryan tells me that she subscribes to numerous "spice up your sex life" email newsletters, so when she sent me this link--"7 Outrageous Sex Positions"--she couldn't figure out whether or not the images should be taken seriously. (I wondered what, exactly, she was subscribing to.) She later decided it was a joke: these positions are ridiculous and, according to her, probably very uncomfortable in a normal bedroom setting. (I think "The Three O'Clock Appointment" is particularly funny.) But if any of you wild and crazy kids attempt of the portrayed sexual acrobatics, let me know how (if?) it worked out.

By the way, Sarah, I voted for you. I think you'd make a great "commie hippy love-in" ninja.

Someone just alerted to me to the film 2081, which is adapted from Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron." Admittedly, the trailer doesn't offer much, but I think the movie looks interesting.

Harold Bloom is talking about Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, but I liked his cranky-old-man response to his being critical of "politicization of teaching literature":

Critical, young man, is hardly the word. I stand against it like Jeremiah prophesying in Jerusalem. It has destroyed most of university culture. The teaching of high literature now hardly exists in the United States. The academy is in ruins, and they've destroyed themselves.

Replace the periods with exclamation points and add some flying spittle, and that's how I imagine Bloom really responded.

Before you start celebrating today, take a minute to consider James Joyce's intent with Ulysses:

Another way to read this novel is as a story about Dedalus searching for a father. Or as a story about Bloom searching for his home. But these readings, as with the one by the founder of the run Spokane, are in essence positive. Searching for the father, searching for home, finding mythic meaning in your ordinary life--not only are these the sorts of things you'd find in self-help books, they avoid the destructive and dark side of Ulysses, which happens not at the level of the story but at the level of words, sentences, syntax. It is here that Ulysses reveals what it is really about--a massive attack on an institution that oppressed the Irish for centuries: the English language.

That explains a lot, actually. It certainly explains Finnegans Wake--not as a practical joke, as some have contended, but as a sneering Fuck you to the English and their language.

In any case, tip back a pint of Guinness and re-Joyce. Happy Bloomsday.

I work with a woman whom I refer to as the Creepy Cat Lady. She often wears a baseball cap and an oversized tee shirt to the office, and has a loud, buzzing voice, like that of a hyena. She seems like a nice lady, despite her eccentricities.

Normally, I don't find cat ladies to be any more threatening than, say, Ron Paul, but this lady is weird: she brings framed pictures of, by my estimate, seven or eight different cats, and places them strategically around her computer. And when I'd once made the mistake of asking her for something, she noticed me looking at the pictures (I probably looked horrified--people always say they can read my mind through my facial expressions), and informed me which of the cats were still living. The sad thing is, aside from the fact that two or three of the pictured cats are dead, no one knows her name. Co-workers refer to her as the Cat Lady, usually with an uncomfortable laugh and a slight shudder.

Yet, when I think of the Creepy Cat Lady and what she does on her downtime, I imagine her participating in a book club, sitting with other Creepy Cat Ladies, in a house that smells like cat piss, and perusing ratty Jan Karon novels. (Disclaimer: I have nothing against Karon's novels, as I've never read one. [Disclaimer the second: nor have I ever wanted to.])

I've never read a Gabriel García Márquez book, either, and though I own One Hundred Years of Solitude, it's unlikely that I'll get around to it any time soon. I know I should. It just hasn't quite tickled my fancy quite yet. But Rachel is starting a book discussion (Ryan: "Book club! Book club!") on García Márquez's Living to Tell the Tale, so I thought, I might as well start now.

In any case, this book club is way fucking cooler than the Creepy Cat Lady's book club (there, Ryan--happy now?). Sure, she haunts my ideas of what a book club must be like. But we can pull this off. We're young, hip, and modern, and so can you! The discussion starts some time in July. You're on board, right?

(In case you missed it, the discussion on Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian has started.)

So much has been made of the violence in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian--not even Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, for all its misogyny and postmodernism, is this violent--that it's easy to overlook how humorous all of it really is. The Bible, of course, is the same way: the sheer ridiculousness of God's bloodlust--matched only by his fits of jealous rage--is what makes it so funny. And like the Old Testament's Jehovah, McCarthy casually marches his characters through a desert wasteland, visiting them with horror upon horror, and almost never offering an explanation. Those who like books in which all actions have a reason--some higher purpose, serving the ur-god Plot--will be confounded by Blood Meridian.

But looking for meaning--especially twenty-first-century meaning--in Blood Meridian's violence is, I think, to miss the point entirely. Blood Meridian's world is on an entirely different plane. Its morality--and yes, it's a moral book--is almost unrecognizable to our modern culture. Yes, one could argue that this is a reprehensible book, gratuitous in its depictions of murder, rape, and genocide, but McCarthy isn't trying to shock us. No, the violence in Blood Meridian transcends shock value--lifted, in part, by McCarthy's gorgeous prose--and, instead, becomes a part of the portrait. This was simply the way things are done here, without question or explanation. Blood Meridian's lawlessness becomes the law.

None of this is more apparent than in the character of Judge Holden. Like Satan in John Milton's Paradise Lost, he's a man convinced of his own infallibility, a demigod whose pride will lead to ruin. We watch Holden with equal parts fascination and disgust: he's a charming, frightening man, a parody of religious superstition, a high priest who, despite speaking in tongues, seems to have solved all the riddles of the universe. Perhaps we're not meant to take Holden seriously, but he's convincing, in the horrifying, freakish way that Pentecostal preachers can be convincing. We believe them not because what they say is true, but because they believe what they're saying.

And therein lies the heart of Blood Meridian's mystery: what is McCarthy selling? We know something is lurking just under the surface, teasing--yet it never comes fully to light. Blood Meridian makes us appreciate the beauty of the unknown, of not having everything explained. It all seems pointless, and it probably is. But McCarthy is a minimalist: the style here is far different from the experimentation in No Country for Old Men and The Road, but Blood Meridian only tells us what we need to know. Not only does McCarthy ask for our trust, but he places a lot of trust in his readers. Of course, this can make for a frustrating book. But McCarthy's prose (mirrored by the slow, steady gait with which Captain Glanton leads his party) carries us along, sometimes trickling, and sometimes roaring like the river at the novel's climax. It's an ugly book, a dreamscape that dares us to wake up. But we'll never want to.

"The Dreaded Question": this is exactly why you don't ever ask an author where his or her ideas come from.