So as you probably realize, I have been reading non-classics for the last couple of weeks, right? So right now, I’m reading this awesome book by Sam Taylor, called The Amnesiac.  It’s like the best book I’ve read since Mockingbird, but in a different way.  The author manages to get across his slackery philosophies (a la The Idler & co) in lovely prose.  It’s smart, it’s poignant, it’s a mystery!  Highly recommended.  This is a book I totally wish I had written.  Seriously.  Rent it from your local library immediately.

I think this is my favorite classic thus far.  I love the style, the mood.  The characters are immensely interesting.  The title is poignant in the context of the story.  There is an added depth because of who Lee uses as her viewpoint character.  There’s so much awesome in this book that I am rendered pretty much speechless. Suffice it to say that this is now one of my top five favorite books ever.

I’ve been far too busy getting a haircut to read anything:

Well, actually, I’ve been a little bit obsessed with Truman Capote.  Does it count that I’ve been reading about him?  My next book is totally going to be To Kill a Mockingbird.  Don’t laugh, but I’ve never read it.

Finished reading my second Capote - there’s no Moon River in the book, no Mickey Rooney in “yellowface”. If you’ve seen the movie, it’s a very loose interpretation.  The major plot points are the same, with enough variation to change the mood of the story completely in translation from book to film.  The film seemed hokey to me when I saw it in high school, but you may note that I am not an Audrey Hepburn fan.  (I prefer Kate).  The book, however, did not feel contrived or silly to me.  The story is about friendship, or throwing away the one thing you find too late that you really needed all along.  

Two out of two for TC.  Did someone say genius?

Truman Capote wrote Other Voices, Other Rooms when he was twenty-one.  I never did manage to finish his most famous work, In Cold Blood, but OVOR was easy because it was enjoyable.  Reading it felt like childhood, the way I felt reading The Little Friend by Donna Tarrt.  It evokes the languished Southern summers I remember, the New Orleans I once met, the native southerners I have known.  I finished this book in a single humid afternoon sipping from a pitcher of mint julep (sans the mint) on the bedside table.

The friendship between Joel and Idabel, in particular, reminds me of my cousin and I.  When we were elementary school BFFs, I’d make him play barbies and in return I’d have to play hot wheels; but mostly we skinned our knees, climbed rocks, played cops & robbers on rusty dumptrucks, crashed a tandem bike on loose gravel, helped grandma with the garden planting, shared superman ice cream, hung the flypaper for rummage sales, hid and sought, ran together from our bully of a cousin four years our senior…and then we grew up.  He became cool and I became awkward.  Twenty years later, he’s got 2.5 kids, a six-figure job and a vacation home.  Twenty years later, I’m not sure where I’ll be living 3 months from now, am still trying to write the next great American novel and have only (relatively) recently found someone I intend to happily spend the rest of my life with.  My cousin and I, we are nothing alike, but we’re still more alike than anyone else in our family.  There’s a kind of relief we each have in common at our withdrawal from the family drama: of twenty-plus cousins, we are the only two who left.  He and I communicate through our parents, our grandma.  We each ask about the other but never seem to think we’ve got enough in common to talk directly to one another.  This is the sadness of growing up: we develop a kind of self-consciousness that hinders us from really knowing people as well as we might.  We reserve our openness for very few people.  Other Voices, Other Rooms explores the kind of profound loneliness we have all felt at least once.

Rabbit trails aside, Capote’s first novel is about a child who goes looking for a place he belongs, and finds that where he belongs is the place he least expects to, and least intends to.  That he can survive in the throes of a household of broken people convinces him that he can survive in any way he chooses to, himself broken or not.

Capote also includes his own “what is art?” statement, via the following bit of dialogue:

The feeble-minded, the neurotic, the criminal, perhaps, also, the artist, have unpredictability and perverted innocence in common…Let’s compare them to a Chinese chest: the sort, you remember, that opens into a second box, another, atill another, until at length you come upon the last…the latch is touched, the lid springs open to reveal…what unsuspected cache?…[senseless, pointless, violent action] is the kind of thing that happens when you tamper with the smallest box.

All of the characters in this book have a single thing in common: they have an inability to love in a socially sanctioned way.  Their isolation is both a result of their particular “flaws” and an outcome of attempting to find love despite them.  In a way, the coming of the child Joel Harrison Knox to Skully’s Landing is the coming of a savior, an unloved isolated child who manages to transcend his losses and thereby bring hope to the devastated household.

What have I been doing in the last week?  What have I been reading?  Not classics.  I started, finished and forgot Chuck Palahniuk’s new book the day I rented it from my library.  I went out for drinks with some girls I hadn’t seen in months.  I read a book called “Pride & Prescience”, a Jane Austen meta-fiction mystery starring Elizabeth Darcy - palatable, but also forgettable.  I bought a mandoline to slice vegetables so thin you can see through them.  I read Kazu Kibuishi’s “Amulet: the Stonekeeper” (a comic book), which is awesome.  I went for a walk or two in the finally-nice weather.  I finished “A Short History of Anxiety”.

So, now I’m reading the Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie.  It’s not technically a classic.  But, on publication, it did earn the author a fatwa from the Ayatollah Khomeini, who called for his murder by any faithful Muslim with the means and opportunity.  So I don’t care if it’s a classic or not. Also, it’s really interesting and mysterious so far.

Since this is supposed to be a project in which I am reading works I want to emulate in my own writing, I am tweaking this project a little.  I’m not going to be as concerned with a book’s status as I am with its value.  My goal is to avoid complete boredom: 50 *intriguing* works of fiction in 50 (ish) weeks.  No chick lit, no action-movie plot lines, no predictable mysteries, and most of all, no more classics selected mostly for how quickly I can read them.  I’ll still try to give preference to classics, but if I scour the shelves and can’t find something that I want to read, I’ll pick something quality but not necessarily classic.  Deal?

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, by Mary Roach

This Common Secret, by Susan Wicklund

Snuff, by Chuck Palahniuk

Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure

The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie

A Brief History of Anxiety, by Patricia Pearson

Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make it into the New Testament, by Bart D. Ehrman

And, like 6 different vegetarian cookbooks

Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening” was more interesting to me this time around than it was in high school.  In high school, you haven’t had opportunity to make many serious concessions to your dignity.  I mean, the most momentous problem with compromise in high school occurred during freshman year when your guidance counselor insisted that you were suicidal because you wore your Suicidal Tendencies tee shirt to school once a week.  ”It’s a band,” you said.  ”It’s a uniform!” she said.  ”Don’t worry about me,” you said, considering not wearing the tee shirt again to avoid this kind of grown-up hysteria. The “considering” felt like a huge violation of your values, so you kept wearing the tee shirt.  After all, they were a pretty awesome band.

After high school I had planned to forego college and begin my writing career immediately.  The last high school article I wrote for the student page of our local paper was titled “College: Who Needs It”. However, it only took 5 rejection notices from publishers and magazines to make me panic and apply for spring semester classes. Going to college was my first Big Compromise, even though leaving my parents’ home turned out to be a necessary step to establishing my independence, not to mention that my degrees have helped me to get like…jobs and stuff.  So that worked out okay in the long run.

During my last year of college, I stumbled into a relationship with a person who tried to turn me into someone he liked, rather than really liking me much to begin with.  When I began to rebel against his image of me, it fell apart for very good reason, and to my betterment. Wasting a couple of years with a person who wanted to mold me into his image was my second Big Compromise. Fortunately, I got that kind of folly out of my experience early enough: my ~amor de ma vie~ is someone who helps me identify and pursue my own idea of myself, and I hope that my efforts at doing the same for him are efficacious.

The Great Compromise, the one I identify with Edna Pontelier’s stifling marriage, was my job.  I worked a job sitting in a 5×5 cube all day doing busywork…for six years.  I thought the job was okay when I got a raise or a promotion, but raises only satisfy a person’s psychic needs for a month or so, and you can coast on the thrill of promotion for only a few months beyond that.  Then you start retreating to the sick room for midday naps and no one asks where you were.  Then you spend 6 hours a day emailing or writing a short story or browsing for new jobs and otherwise avoiding work however possible.  After all, your real work can be finished in about 3 hours a day.  That leaves 5 that you either have to fill with shenanigans or made-up work.  Then your co-worker gets a promotion and her position remains unfilled for two years, which means you have to pick up all the work she can’t do anymore, which means you’re working hardcore 5-8 hours a day, and it begins to wear on you.  The trade-off for working in a soul-sucking office environment is that you have plenty of free time to make friends and relax, right?  You discover that your job, when it’s a full-time job with no time for play, is designed to drain you of your life force so you become a company zombie.  You have just enough free time to realize that you’re offended by this imposition on your humanity - glued to a chair and the telephone and email, getting paid what now seems like a pittance for the vast amount of unfulfilling work you’re doing. Then you begin coming home depressed every day.  Then you either implode or get out of there.  This was the third and final Great Compromise.  Now I make $50 (net) less per paycheck, come home stress-free, and spend my entire day with books and people who like books.  To me, this is what freedom from job tyranny feels like: going to work at a place where I’d enjoy spending 8 hours even if I wasn’t being paid for my taskwork.

So this book?  Edna Pontelier’s transformation?  It resonated with me.  It even included the discussion on art that I have been trained to look for in every story, delivered here by Edna Pontelier’s pianist friend, Madame Reisz:

“To be an artist includes much; one must possess many gifts–absolute gifts–which have not been acquired by one’s own effort.  And, moreover, to succeed, the artist must possess the courageous soul…The soul that dares and defies.”

In case you haven’t noticed, I have been reading books under an inch thick lately, playing catchup from Ulysses.  But I’m bored, which is the surest route to failure in my universe.  I’m finishing up “The Awakening & Stories” by Kate Chopin today.  Does anyone have recommendations that might restore my faith in classic lit again?

Washington Irving is a father of American literature.  He may also have been the inventor of the stereotype of the “nerd” in American culture, which is almost as good as electricity, the telephone and the computer, or at least as ubiquitous.  Everybody knows who Ichabod Crane is, right?  

I just finished The Sketch Book, which was a huge sensation in its time.  Washington Irving traveled extensively and earned his reputation as a ladies man; he was often found carousing and making trouble but he was popular, kind of like Paris Hilton.  In this book, there are several “stories” connected in that they are a collected by fictional character called Diedrich Knickerbocker, who provides occasional asides. The stories are what you might call light entertainment, and one or two of them reveal Irving’s strangely pathological hatred of Thomas Jefferson.  It just so happens that the non-fiction book I was reading parallel to this (Nerds, by child psychologist David Anderegg) mentions one of the stories from this book: the wildly famous The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.   

You remember the Disney version of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Ichabod Crane is ridiculous.  In the story, he reads too much (in Sleepy Hollow, “at all” being too much); he’s socially awkward; his strange appearance earns him a kind of muffled disrespect from the townsfolk; he’s completely oblivious to the fact that a guy like him will never get the girl he (and every other guy in town) crushes on.  When he is either killed or run out of town (no one knows which, and their indifference to solving the mystery of his fate reveals Crane’s devalued status) they simply burn his books and clothes and get on with their lives.  Brom Bones gets the girl and everyone lives happily ever after. Ichabod Crane?  Oh right, he was that annoying teacher who was always either reading or eating. Wonder what happened to him?  Oh well.

Washington Irving, obviously, didn’t create our modern idea of the nerd single-handedly.  He had a little help from  Ralph Waldo Emerson.  This is from “The American Scholar”:

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books…Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm.  

This dichotomous struggle, men of thought versus men of action, in other words, nerds versus jocks, made its appearance shortly after the establishment of the U.S. government. Thomas Jefferson was roundly condemned by his contemporaries as being “too French” (read: a bookworm).  John Quincy Adams was bested in the presidential election of 1828 by the uneducated Andrew Jackson, who won based on the idea that (as Richard Hofstadter puts it) “John Quincy Adams can write, but Andrew Jackson can fight.” Not much has changed.

In the much-disputed 2000 presidential election, Al Gore took a media beating for being too book-smart. No one ever denied that he had the brains and experience for the presidency.  It was just that he was such a dork.  I mean, Gore knew stuff that people had to *look up* if they wanted to know what he was referring to & stuff.  How lame.  And if Bush, with his perennial “jock” persona, had not been so affable, he would barely (if ever) have gotten out of the political gate, much less so narrowly winning (depending upon your interpretation of the contested outcome of Florida) the highest office in the U.S. - qualifications schwalifications: Bush was charming.  Gore was teacher’s pet.  Although they were matched in intelligence and capability, what the former Vice President could not do as well as Bill Clinton was to woo the media. The point being that people who come off as cool (read: not nerds) tend to get ahead in the American politics and entertainment industries.  You can be brilliant, but if you are *only* a genius, tough luck geek.

Washington Irving himself had this kind of nerd/jock duality playing out inside him, or so I suspect after reading his biographical details from the afterword of The Sketch Book.  When he was little, all the grown-ups around him took great pride in his remarkable intelligence, but by the time he came of age, he had shed his bookishness in favor of nice clothes, attractive women and a life of idle merrymaking.  Maybe more than he knew, this battle between intelligence and popularity played out in his stories and eventually in American culture itself.  I daresay that we all kind of live with this struggle, to be true to our inner nerd or to be the coolest kid on the block, and we most often end up with some kind of suitable compromise.