134. First Impression: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

I haven't actually finished this book.  Not even close.  But it's cracked on the shelf, and pretty high on the list of things to do with my free time (whenever I get some of that).  I'm surprised it took me so long to find it.  The first page was enough to get it "classic" status in my library.

The narrator starts out right away with something provocative but easy to digest.  I don't have to try to imagine the strange world he finds himself in or how he got there.  He's just telling me what he sees, and I'm seeing it.  And then he tells me what he thinks of what he sees, and I want to know more of it.  I want to know why he's in this place and what he plans to do with life while he's there.  I want to keep reading.

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       People come here, then, to live?  I should rather have thought that they came here to die.  I have been out, and I saw hospitals.  I saw a poor fellow stagger and fall.  People gathered round him: so I was spared the rest.  I saw a pregnant woman.  She dragged herself heavily along a high, warm wall, now and again groping for it as if to assure herself it was still there.  Yes, it was still there; and behind it--?  I looked for it on my map of the city: Maison d'Accouchment.  Right. They will deliver her; they can do that.  Further on, in the rue Saint-Jacques, an immense building with a cupola.  My map said: Val de Grâce, hôpital militaire.  I really did not need this information, but that does not matter.  On every side an odour began to rise from the street.  It was, so far as one could distinguish, a smell of iodoform, the grease of pomme frites, and fear.  Every city has its summer smell.  Then I saw a house curiously blind as if with cataract.  It was not to be found on my map; but above the door there stood an inscription still fairly readable: Asile de nuit.  Beside...

130. Bibliophile: Alfred Edward Newton

Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity... We cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance.

126. To Be Fair...

Today I came across a charming blog written by a New York City housewife.  She's 28 years-old, a college graduate, and spends her days at home cooking, cleaning, creating and blogging.  Don't tell anyone, but she kinda has my perfect life (maybe minus the married part).

Anyway, she has this post on how much she loves her Kindle.  As a sworn enemy of e-readers, I'd normally roll my eyes, make a gagging noise to myself, and keep scrolling.  But since she had already blessed me with this adorable post on the wisdom of dogs and this fritatta recipe complete with pictures, I decided to see what she had to say.

She made some good points.  And she inspired me to give a more generous consideration to the e-book.  For instance, if you read lots of books for fun, I can see the advantage of being able to carry a bunch of them around with you all the time without taking up any extra space.  Then if you're not gonna read them again, you don't have to trash them or bother trying to sell them.  And wouldn't we all prefer not to waste perfectly good trees on mediocre books?  And maybe people who read e-books also buy paper ones when they find something they love and wanna keep on the shelf.  I hope so (for their souls' sake).

So although I still don't expect to ever own an e-reader (someone recenly offered me one... I turned it down), I can understand folks who love them.  And no doubt there's a musical purist somewhere bemoaning the rise of the mp3 and the death of vinyl.  I don't own a single record, but I love music as much as the next person.  I guess the lesson is Judge not lest ye be judged, or something like that.  Go figure.

123. Bibliophile: Henry David Thoreau

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will tax the reader... Books must be read as deliberately as they are written.

- Walden

122. First Impression: The Bell Jar

 I read The Bell Jar the year after I graduated college.  I was much more inclined to read fiction then and was averaging a book a year.  That's a lot for me.  It caught me from the first page.

I had heard or read somewhere that it's the true-ish story of a young woman's breakdown shortly after she graduates from college and begins working in New York City.  For some reason that appealed to me.  I think I'm attracted to writing that seriously explores the thoughts and feelings a person has when they're in the midst of those rare but critical soul-shaking and defining moments we all have.  That kind of writing, when it's done well, is always so true to me.

So anyway I picked up the book and never put it down.  Though I felt that the second half was less remarkable than the opening, I'd say it's worth reading.  I should probably add a copy to the permanent collection.

Here's the opening page for your reading pleasure.  The entire book is available on Google Books using the link above.  Something about this first page still gets me.  I find my eyes racing from line to line faster than my brain can even sound the words out to itself.  The writing just moves.  All on its own.

Maybe it's just me.

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        It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions.  The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers - goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.  
       I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.
       New York was bad enough. By nine in the morning the fake, country-wet freshness that somehow seeped in overnight evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream.  Mirage-gray at the bottom of their granite canyons, the hot streets wavered in the sun, the car tops sizzled and glittered, and the dry, cindery dust blew into my eyes and down my throat.
       I kept hearing about the Rosenbergs over the radio and at the office till I couldn't get them out of my mind.  It was like the first time I saw a cadaver.  For weeks afterward, the cadaver's head - or what there was left of it - floated up behind my eggs...

119. Bibliophile: Virginia Woolf

Now then we compare book with book as we compare building with building.  But this act of comparison means that our attitude has changed; we are no longer the friends of the writer, but his judges; and just as we cannot be too sympathetic as friends, so as judges we cannot be too severe.  Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy; are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters, defilers, the writers of false books, faked books, books the fill the air with decay and disease? Let us then be severe in our judgments; let us compare each book with the greatest of its kind. … Even the latest and least of novels has a right to be judged with the best.

- "How Should One Read a Book?"

118. First Impressions

The other day I was browsing collections of the best book covers from the past few years.  I generally disagreed with the choices. But I like the idea of recognizing cover art as a critical part of the way a book is presented to the world.  Those of us who buy books in bookstores do, in large part, judge them by their covers, at least initially.

Book covers are invitations.  At least good ones are.  The colors and textures and layouts tell us that a certain kind of experience awaits us just inside.  They invite us to take part in that experience.  Once a book has caught our eye, and we've gotten past the blurbs on the back, it's time to dig in and see if what's inside is as promising as the invitation made it sound.

This is where I part ways with most books.  In academics, like in sales and writing and lots of other things, you hear a lot about the importance of having a good "elevator pitch" for your product.  Whether you're selling your research or a vacuum cleaner, you ought to be able to tell a stranger about it in the time in takes to share an elevator ride, in a way that makes them wanna know more.  We assume people are stingy with the time they'll spend listening to you pitch something they don't know they have a need for.

I'm this way with books.  My roommate once told me she would give a book a few chapters to catch her attention before she put it down and walked away.  Like getting to a party early and finding only a few people there.  You stick around because you expect it to get packed as soon as the clock strikes midnight.  I do that with parties.  But not books.

I'm just a hard sell with books.  Fifteen seconds.  That's all you get.  If you can't get me in the first page... if you can't make me want to turn the page, you're done.  Very rarely I'll force myself past an uninspiring first page onto page ten or twelve or sixteen.  This happens because I've heard that this book is magic, and that everyone who has eyes should read it.  But I've never finished a book that way.  They all eventually get put down.

In part I'm this way because, as I've said, I don't read for entertainment, at least not purely.  So there has to be something compelling about a book to keep my interest.  There can't just be the promise that if I stay with it long enough to become invested in the characters, something really interesting will happen to them.  And even then, I'm reminded of the best fiction I've read and how it captured my attention from the opening lines.

There's a stark difference (for me) between a voice that is telling me what is happening and one that is telling me what the writer wants me to imagine is happening.  The former makes for an effortless reading experience.  It's as if the author somehow managed to write in the native tongue of my imagination.  There is no need for translation.  The mind is scarcely aware that it is suspending any sort of rational disbelief at all.  What is there is simply happening.

This is very different than the way I experience most books.  I usually find myself trying to picture the characters - their hair, and bodies and facial expressions - just the way the author intends, so that I get the story they want me to get.  I put my imagination to work.  It feels like I'm doing the author a favor, in the short-run, expecting that there'll be some pay-off later on that makes it all worth it.  I'm never able to hold out that long.  Though I should say that I've long considered forcing myself through some well-loved work of fiction just to see for sure if I wouldn't enjoy it in the end and be glad I put in the work.  Maybe someday.

For now I hold out for the books that hook me with the opening line and pull me, almost in a trance-like state, from page to page, until I wonder where the last hundred pages went; the books whose pages turn themselves.

Over the next few weeks (and beyond that as I find new ones), I hope to share some of the opening lines/paragraphs/pages of my favorite books.  I can't exactly say what it is about them that makes them work for me.  Maybe me and authors shared a Myers-Briggs type or something, who knows?  But they are magic to me.  Maybe someone else will like them too.

116. Impossible Choices

*minor spoilers ahoy*

“Learn well Jake Sully. Then we will see if your insanity can be cured.”

~Mo’at, Avatar (2010)

Overwhelmed with the need to write about Wench, I began this post on my iPod Touch notepad, on a flight from from New Orleans to Chicago. New Orleans, a city where, once upon a time, “wench” meant, as Dolen notes, “a black or colored female servant; a negress” but also where the ritual of sexual access, sexual labor, property in human bodies, domination and re/production ground to its ultimate conclusion. By the antebellum period, New Orleans hosted the largest slave market in the continental United States, an attendant continent-wide sexual traffick in “fancy” girls or light-skined female slaves, and le plaçage, a sophisticated social apparatus which paired affluent white men with local free women of color as consorts.

For years, the ghosts of slavery walked the bend of the Mississippi, whispered from the balconies of the Vieux Carré and slipped up through the steamy cement in Uptown or Marigny (they still do even though Katrina washed many into the waiting arms of their kindred at the bottom of the Gulf). I finished Part One in this context, on a weekday and in one swoop.

Afterwards, I forced myself to take a break. It was tempting to keep going because it was easy to look, hope and pray for the happy ending. But if Dolen continues to tell a story true to American history, or true to black women’s relationship to said history, then a happy ending may be long in coming.

There is a scene of visceral brutality near the end of Part One. Normally, I remember these scenes for the pose they strike within a story, the carmine brutality my mind plays and replays over and over. When this happens, the cerebral vanishes and I find it difficult to recall emotion or personality. I feel dizzy, a heavy pressure at the crown of my head. Or I want to vomit.

But I don't remember this scene for that. The physical reaction remained, yes. But under Dolen’s careful and unassuming hand, the violence of the encounter became less about the contours of a particular moment and more about the impossible choices women as slaves, as mothers, as raced bodies, as workers and as lovers, were/are forced to make over the course of their lives. Instead, the betrayal erecting the scene took my breath away as much as the result--the terrifying and impressive power of a slaveowner's retribution.

That power being necessary to maintain a system--in this case slavery--against the daily permutations of resistance and rebellion enacted against it--breaking dishes, brewing love potions, running away--but which seen in its raw form is still shocking. And effective. I empathized with Lizzie. I know that she weighed every move she made against the threat of violence against her light-skinned son and daughter back in the South. But a part of me also felt deeply for Mawu and affirmed her desperate fight to escape the regime before her stamina for resistance faded. And I know I may never forgive Lizzie for her betrayal. But I will want to. To choose your owner, your lover, the father of your children over your colleague, your sister, your friend...but don’t some of us do that every single minute of every day without feeling any need to justify it? That slavery as a legal institution in the United States ended in 1865 is beside the point. Segregation ended as a legal institution in the United States in 1964. And a contract, a law, a signed piece of paper does not unravel centuries of customary relations between white and black, male and female, mother and father and child.

Just as New Orleans “stank of the arousal of rape,” an aroma resplendent throughout the institution and which climaxed within the city's boundaries, so does the history of slavery unpack our current gender relations, sexual relations, color politics; strip us bare, naked, and raw; break the fetish down into its constituent parts--bone, teeth, hair, blood, earth. Dolen’s Wench reminds us that sex across and within color lines is never devoid of politics, never left to some amorphous feeling called love. And kinship is work, forged against all odds to save your own life because the consequence of failure is brilliant in its savagery. Love itself is political, is contested and is a battlefield.

X-Posted at Nunez Daughter

112. A Day in the Life (Now Reading...)

This.

Hopped on the Black Pearl and watched Sunday's True Blood today. Great episode but I was surprised...normally that's a break for me. Normally, it's a little bit of pleasure in a long, stressful and heavy day.

But today it didn’t feel like that. It didn’t feel like anything. It felt like I lost an hour that I will never get back. In fact, I sat down in front of the computer and started to open up another movie almost as though I hadn’t watched it. As though I needed another “break.”

Weird.

But yesterday, as intense as communing with Alice was....it felt like pleasure to me. It felt like a break. It took me into sleep feeling fulfilled and whole and nourished.

Wonder why.

Hmm...New equation:

TV = cotton candy

Alice Walker = life

Conduct selves accordingly.

107. Now Reading: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Tonight, fueled by the coffee I should not have had after dinner, I picked up Rainer Maria Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. It was also published in English under the title The Journal of My Other Self.  That's how I found it.

Once, wandering through the books on a table at Borders, I came across a novel about which a reviewer had written that you could "open the book at any page," and a stunning sentence would leap out.  It wasn't true (for me) of that book.  It is true of this one.  I've never before recommended a book I haven't read.  I recommend this.

On deck: Everything else by Rilke

91. Hypothetically, of course...

If there were a legendary 19th century Austrian poet who published essays and correspondence on the art of solitude... And if he were to have written a book called "Journal of My Other Self"... And if there were a 21st century graduate student with a healthy interest in writers' journals... And if she spent her idle time wandering the 4th floor stacks of the school library... What are the chances that book and that grad student wouldn't find each other?

Not very good =).

84. Now Reading: The Wretched of the Earth

The 2004 Grove Press version. I admit it--I've never read Wretched all the way through in a single sitting. 

I'm only in Homi Bhabha's foreword and my brain is already shooting sparks:

"The landscape of opportunity and "choice" has certainly widened in scope, but the colonial shadow falls across the successes of globalization. Dual economies create divided worlds in which uneven and unequal conditions of develoment can often mask the ubiquitous, underlying factors of persistent poverty and malnutrition, caste and racial injustice, the hidden injuries of class, the exploitation of women's labor, adn the victimization of minorities and refugees."

Special Thanks to Booksfree.com for always being there.  xoxo.

41. Team Work

I told you my team was nice. One of the homies is reading a slave novel. She trips a lyric fantastic in her spare time:

I am [now reading] Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende. It’s like watching a car accident, a collision of metal, glass and soft, meaty human bodies, in slow motion. Into the blender, hit mix, tear flesh from bone, coat the glass red, hemoglobin run a muck under the relentless pressure of some outside violence, ignore the scream of the gears, the turning blades as bone matter resists, but, no, push through, taking, tearing, plunging forward simply because you have the power to do so. Rip apart, swirl together, then call it pacification, christianization, civilization, natural order of Man.

- Nuñez Daughter

22. Special Collections

There may be no better job for a lover of magical books than to work in the Special Collections of a library. The kind of goodness that comes across my desk on any given workday really couldn't be equaled or accessed in any other way I can think of. In the past few months, it was my "job" to catalog an autographed collection of Langston Hughes' poetry, a first edition of Countee Cullen's Colors, a set of newspapers from the 1800s advertising slaves for auction, and a copy of D.H. Lawrence's Love Poems wherein I found "Return", one of my new favorite poems.

But by far my favorite thing that has ever happened at my job is this:

Walking through the stacks one day I caught a glimpse of a book with a bright gold spine. It was about 14 inches tall and 3 inches thick. The book was gold velvet and was stamped "The Golden Book of Tagore" in gold leaf on the spine. Naturally I picked it up =).

It turned out to be a tribute to an early 20th century Bengali Nobel Laureate named Rabindranath Tagore. Mostly it included essays from friends and colleagues detailing his virtues as an artist and a man. There wasn't much of his work though. So later that day I checked out a handful of books - poetry and plays. Didn't get into the plays, but the poetry was very decent (I mean that as a compliment). I added him to my roll of Admired Writers.

A few months later I'm photocopying the archived papers of a woman who's name I don't remember for one of the library patrons. She'd requested copies of some of the woman's photographs and correspondence. In the middle of the assignment I notice the signature at the bottom of one of the letters: Rabindranath Tagore

It turns out, the woman (whose name I wrote down but don't remember), was the widow of a writer who had been deeply involved in the literary community of his time. When he died, she opened their home in Chicago to a community of writers around the globe who would come through the city for work. Artists like Tagore would stay at her home instead of in a hotel when they were in Chicago.

In the letters he wrote of his work, of the difficulty of writing well and living well among people, of winning the Nobel Prize and it's effect on his working life, of his travels and his lack of enjoyment of steam ships. And in one of the letters, as a gift, in appreciation for her friendship, he writes to her a poem, previously unpublished. It has always been my plan to go back, photocopy the poem, and frame it for my room.

In the meantime...

RETURN

Now I am come again, you who have so desired
My coming why do you look away from me?
Why does your cheek burn against me - have I inspired
Such anger as sets your mouth unwontedly?

Ah here I sit while you break the music beneath
Your bow; for broken it is and hurting to hear:
Cease then from music - does anguish of absence bequeath
Me only aloofness when I would draw near?

8. Green-Eyed Writing Monsters

As a writer who doesn't write, I spend a fair bit of time thinking about what I would write if I did. For prose and poetry, this is rarely a problem. I've recently come to the realization that I am not a poet, and I have never had a problem producing prose.

But for narrative, I am at a complete standstill. Some years ago I made up my mind to be a novelist. I've never put down that decision even though I've not nearly carried it out. The problem is that I am not particularly gifted at narration. Nearly every word in literally every sentence has to be wrenched from the deepest creative recesses of my brain. I can come up with some pretty good sentences. But it is a pain. There is no flow.

Then there's Jhumpa Lahiri. I almost never read fiction. I can count the fiction I've read in the last 5 years on one hand. But for some reason, I picked up Ms. Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies." I don't know how much time Ms. Lahiri spends on her sentences but they read like magic. Her writing is true from start to finish, and there is something effortless about it. She makes worlds. And after 2 or 3 lines you are in those worlds. Period. In rooms with characters really too real to be called characters.

And for the life of me I cannot figure out how she does it. Why is her woman standing at a stove so much more real than my woman standing at a stove? I find myself asking while (thinking about) writing, "How would Jhumpa Lahiri tell this story?"

She really is brilliant.