Bookstorm

I love philosophy, and though I don't read much Plato these days--Friedrich Nietzsche is now my poison of choice--I still like to re-read the Symposium dialogue, which is the best dating and relationship advice anyone could ever hope for. It examines the ethics of love and desire, and explains why being sexy isn't necessarily a good thing.

A base man is that common lover who loves the body rather than the soul; for he is not lasting since he loves a thing not lasting. For as soon as the flower of the body fades, which is what he loved, 'He takes to the wing and away he flies,' and violates any number of vows and promises; but the lover of good character remains faithful throughout life, since he has been fused with a lasting thing.

"Brandon!"

"Amy."

"Do I have an annoying accent?"

I was lining up my shot--I'd already sank most of the solids, while Amy, a self-confessed "shitty" pool player, had left most of the stripes scattered across the table. We regularly played ping-pong at 2:30, but today, I challenged her to a game of pool. Don't worry, I'll be gentle. I stood straight and gave her my best "what the fuck are you talking about?" look. She was sitting on one of the stools, cradling her pool cue and looking completely bored. She kicked her foot at me. Her flip-flop went sailing over my head, and she laughed loudly. Then: "Well?"

"Who told you you have an annoying accent?"

"Everyone says it's annoying."

We've been friends for almost a year and I'd grown accustomed to her thick Southern accent. In Amy parlance, Brandon became Brain-den. Amy became Ay-may. Crazy became crahy-zay. No was broken into two syllables: no-oh.

I shrugged. "No, it's not annoying." I leaned over and once more lined up my shot. "It's just clear you're from the South." I took my shot. "That Southern hospitality." She was always bringing me food and, considering how thin both of us are, we always joked about appearing on The Biggest Loser. I remembered how difficult it had been to understand her when we first met. Now, her accent barely even registered. "You know who has annoying accents?"

"Who?"

"Fuckin Bostonians." Annoying enough for me to hate on any author, living or dead, from Boston. Annoying enough for me to swear off ever reading Henry James's The Bostonians.

She grinned and kicked her other foot at me. I caught her flip-flop, and she jumped from the stool and took her shot. Her pool cue clattered off several of the pool balls. "Fuckin Bostonians," she said.

I love postmodernism, so I got a kick out of this passage from Ma Jian's Beijing Coma:

A few days later, the People's Literature magazine published Stick Out Your Tongue, an avant-garde novella by a writer called Ma Jian. The Central Propaganda Department denounced it as nihilistic and decadent, and ordered all copies to be destroyed, then proceeded to launch a national campaign against bourgeois liberalism. ...

The postmodern kick is given extra heft because that's what really happened when Jian published Stick Out Your Tongue:

In 1987, the five stories of Stick Out Your Tongue made their debut in a small Chinese literary journal and were immediately outlawed by the Chinese government. Jian's writing was deemed "vulgar" and "obscene," and he was charged with representing an "image of Tibet ... that has nothing to do with reality." While the threat of imprisonment forced him into exile, black-market copies of the stories circulated, and Jian became famous as both writer and dissident.

I've been reading Ma Jian's Beijing Coma at the office, reading anywhere from ten fifteen pages a day, and and though I'm only seventy pages in, it's turning out to be a good book. A damn good book. Jian has a beautiful, careful way with detail that sucks me into the political culture of Cold War-era China. His storytelling is utterly fascinating. Beijing Coma is told entirely from the random, unconnected memories of a man who's only vaguely aware that he's in a coma, which gives the book a very dreamy-nightmarish aspect. The atrocities committed by China's ruling communist party--ranging from genocide to forced abortion--are horrifying. He describes a populace that lives in a state of constant paranoia, where mingling with wrong person (an American music conductor, for instance), or reading the wrong books can earn someone a beating by the police, or twenty years of "rehabilitation" in a hard labor camp (where starving laborers are often reduced to cannibalism and eating each other's feces), where praising the party is done merely to keep up appearances and avoid being branded as a "rightist."

Sound a little familiar? George Orwell's 1984 may read like a parody of life under communist rule (which serves to drive home Orwell's point), but Jian's book, while similar in many respects, doesn't give you the comfort of an entirely make-believe world. By blurring the line between past and present, Jian closes the distance between China and the West with frightening ease, and reveals a China that's eerily similar to Oceania--but ruled by a regime that's far more brutal than Big Brother's Party.

It's approximately T-minus three hours till I head out tonight (now it's 3:43 P.M., with scattered showers here in Tampa), and I find myself in a bit of a stressful situation: I'm not confident that the bookstore I'm going to actually carries Ma Jian's Beijing Coma. You see, my intention is to enter (win?) the Virginia Quarterly Review's "Young Reviewer's Contest," but to do so requires that I review a book published this year. Which is fine. I'll also be picking up a copy of the Virginia Quarterly Review, just so I can get all my ducks in a row--the last thing I want is to be disqualified for something other than my writing--but when it comes to books, I'm a "wait for the paperback" kind of guy, so I'm always a year behind. (I also figure it's prudent to pick a book, by a relatively obscure author, that hasn't been getting a lot of coverage. I mean, who wants to read another review of--I don't know, say: a novel involving vampires and teenage romance?)

So: Beijing Coma. It better be there. Or I'll have a lot of browsing to do. Because I don't have a back-up choice.

Actually, come to think of it, browsing would be fine, too.

From the (relatively obscure) Journal of Jules Renard: "You can do what you like: until a certain age--I don't know what--there is no pleasure in talking to a woman you cannot imagine as your mistress."

Ladies: this is true, at least in most cases. Sure, I talk to women I wouldn't sleep with, but when actually given a choice, and regardless of her marital status, I'm more likely to gravitate towards the women I'd sleep with. This isn't to say I'd actually suggest sleeping together. Fact: a man will glance at every woman and, either consciously or unconsciously, decide in fewer than three seconds whether or not he could have sex with her. In rare cases, his opinion could change--she might turn around, for example--but generally, our minds are made up: yea or nay.

If she's reading, however, she becomes fair game. And--beware, Boyfriends and Girlfriends Who Don't Read--the literati are much better in bed. Trust me.

Here's a sneak peek at what Cormac McCarthy's The Road will look like when it hits theaters. Looking at the slideshow, I think the temperature in my apartment dropped twenty degrees.

When I had journeyed half our life's way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.
Ah! It is hard to speak of what it was,
the savage forest, dense and difficult,
which even in recall renews my fear:
so bitter--death is hardly more severe!

In the explanatory notes to the first canto of Dante's Inferno, poet and translator Allen Mandelbaum writes, "... the forest precedes the journey through Hell. It is the dark wood of life on earth when lived in sin; it is Dante's interior wood; and it is the wood of political darkness, of Florence, of Italy, of papal corruption, of the absence of imperial authority." Sure, the Inferno is a political work, with Dante condemning a number of politicians to hell, but one of the most interesting things about it is the way in which it can be interpreted. (I think the Inferno being an allegory for the nine months of pregnancy is a long stretch, but I'll entertain the idea. You can't really argue with the ways in which people make literature personal.) Admittedly, I've never given much thought to what the Inferno means to me--I tend to take what I read at face value, without really gleaning anything new or insightful about myself--but, while flipping through A. Alvarez's The Savage God, I suddenly hit upon the answer: maybe the Inferno, and particularly the first lines, is about depression and suicide.

I'll let you chew on that for a bit.

I finally finished Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and every time I think about it, it makes me feel tired; the book is dense, with Tolstoy stringing out multiple storylines and introducing the most realistic cast characters I've ever come across. It's not the most rewarding novel, but it's interesting to note Tolstoy's observations on society and human nature; he dissects his characters' psyches and exposes their motivations (which are often contradictory) and feelings with a depth that almost makes the book unenjoyable. It may boil down to psychological masturbation (or psychological rape, depending on how well you really want to know someone), but it's hard to fault an author who can show his characters as they truly are, not as he thinks they should be. The book--which is badly-written and exasperatingly digressive--is as flawed as its characters, and this, interestingly enough, only enhances the overall portrait.

Granted, I've never been married, but if you really want to know what married life is like, Anna Karenina has an answer. And it's not as appealing as you might think. (I could be saying this because I'm always looking for reasons not to get married.) It's an institution, for all its declarations of purity, that's easily ruined by human nature, by jealousy, infatuation, and rash decision-making. In fact, after reading this book, you may not want to get married at all. Tolstoy explores his themes of jealousy and adultery with the sort of intimacy that would make even the most secure person uncomfortable. The temptation is always there, and can manifest itself in seemingly benign situations; all it takes is for you to give in to it. And as Tolstoy shows, giving in is easier than most people would care to admit. The consequences can be absurdly disastrous. Here, he uses jealousy to remind us that we're human, and that bad things can happen to good people, despite best intentions (or no intentions, as the case may be). But when emotions have spiralled out of control, when revenge, out of pure selfishness, seems to be the only solution, clear thinking might only come in retrospect.