Words, Words, Words

I have held off on a number of movies so I can read the book first, and not out of some puritanical belief in the superiority of the book. Okay, not JUST because of a belief in the superiority in the book. Reading asks more of its audience than movies do, a story comes alive in the minds of readers. In reading we translate descriptions into images, sounds, emotions; movies do all that work for us. Keeping the movie out of your reading experience is much harder than the reverse.

I read that Ken Kesey was upset by the exclusion of Chief Bromden's voice from the movie of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and I spent a good deal of time considering the conflict through my reading. Voiceover tends to be a crutch in movies but the story is changed substantially when moved from the perspective of the Chief. Bromden himself nearly disappears in the movie. On the other hand, Stanley Kubrick tended to succeed as a filmmaker in spite of source material, not because of it. He saw that a great movie is a different creature than a great book, and though a surface description would be identical for both, I tried to separate them while I was reading.

Of course, the associations were still there, I wanted to picture Jack Nicholson as Randle Patrick MacMurphy, but the more I read, the further these characters got from the movie—I felt like the book's MacMurray was more of a fighter and more self-important, I saw someone like Mickey Rourke. They were crueler, the patients had greater agency than their movie counterparts, MacMurray was more dangerous-seeming and the stakes felt more real, particularly in terms of the struggles with mental illness. Chief Bromden's voice makes the story more immediate, it takes us out of the bounds of the ward and introduces a subplot of his own dealing with his young life and the move of the American government into tribal grounds. 

The book struggles with a question that still hangs over our mental health system today: are we working towards optimal health (whatever that means) or simply minimizing conflict? One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest also achieves something rare in stories about mental health, the people come before the diagnosis. It isn't a story about depression or schizophrenia, it is a story about people and those are some of the challenges they face.

Best of all, it is a counterculture story that goes beyond the window dressing. No hippies, drugs (okay, some drugs, mostly prescription and mostly construed as negative), no concerts, no road trips, no discourses on poetry, no dabbling in Buddhism. It is a story about the ideas of the counterculture and how they come to affect people.

A portrait of censorship in our own country. Our own legal and cultural moment has swung so decidedly in the way of free expression (though challenges persist) and our national story has been one  of freedom contrasted with the tyranny of fascist countries. I knew Ulysses was once banned for over a decade in America and I assumed it was a bureaucratic matter, a negotiation between the government and publishers, something like television today with the FCC. 

What it actually took to get a modern classic into America, and the risks many took along the way to make that happen is the subject of Kevin Birmingham's The Most Dangerous Book: the Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses. A good bit of set-up is required for the story, and much of  the book details the operations of early 20th century publishing house and their challengers in the vice societies which policed obscene material, along with biography of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Beach and other colleagues in the defense of literature. Birmingham writes about the sting operations on bookshops, publishers going to jail, publications shut down over the printing of shit or fuck or descriptions of bodies and sexuality. It is, at times, accidentally comical how joyless the societies are in how reluctant they are even in carving out exemptions for classics. Birmingham quotes a decision by Judge Augustus Hand asserting the authority of the US Postal Service to declare material obscene and take action which exempts classics, "because they have the sanction of age and fame and usually appeal to a comparatively limited number of readers."

It seems amazing today that a man who had to watch his own eye surgery while awake(a spine-chilling episode in a book which dwells on Joyce's litany of health problems) would face a decade-long court battle over frank discussions of the body and sex. In a world with real problems (throughout this book I thought  back to the show Scrubs where the character Turk, while getting ready for the birth of his daughter, warns his coworkers not to tell her that she has a vagina until she is 18).

The Most Dangerous Book is an interesting story and a good read, particularly for fans of Joyce. It does a good job answering the questions it wants to address, but that framing is very specific. Birmingham is definitely more interested in the biographical elements than in constitutional history. He provides the required background the context we are given for battle for Ulysses is the development of Modern literature more than the legal battles toward free expression.

I was listening to Radiolab on the drive home from New Jersey, the episode, "23 weeks 6 days," in fact, one that has received much attention and praise but after a long day on the road and seeing extended family, it just exhausted me. I knew where it was going and as much as I wanted to be glad things ended well for the people themselves I could not bear the form any more.

Here is the dirty little secret, for all the crime and horror that comes through in the news, features like "23 weeks 6 days" and specifically podcasts, seem to be almost exclusively positive. In the particular, of course you hope for the best, but at the same time the shows are addressing issues of major consequence nationally and situations that frequently turn for the worse but do we really understand the weight of a situation when we only get one side of the story?

Of course, Joan Didion did not have a story scouted for her, she was writing from her own life and she did not get to choose the ending. Her husband John Gregory Dunne died December 30, 2003. This simple fact dominates The Year of Magical Thinking. Didion writes about grief in a way that is heartbreaking, but also familiar and, somehow, refreshing.

The book is a frank and uneasy look at grief as we experience it. She makes efforts to put her grief in a larger context, to understand her husband's death and her daughter's near-death in medical terms, but she connects most strongly in the details. Little, inconsequential thoughts, fantasy, magical thinking, that we all do. Something we don't throw away, or move or erase. We don't tell ourselves the story, if I take down that note it means she is really dead, but we can't quite give away the last of his clothes even though John Gregory Dunne is dead and will not be needing his shoes. 

If podcasts choose to feature hopeful stories, it is only in the grief of established authors like Didion that we learn what the other half experience, what we all experience eventually. The life expectancy of all lifeforms hits zero at some point. John Gregory Dunne died on December 30, 2003. Joan Didion will die too, and so will my parents and siblings, friends, lovers, and myself. Didion's account of grief, is as cutting as any of her essays. Writers like to intellectualize, but Didion's strength lies in how she resists that temptation. The way she finds the universal in the specific. Grief arrives in memories, not of the great moments but of misadventures, funny anecdotes, actions that reveal something of a larger character. Moments that have ended.

So I do find relief in The Year of Magical Thinking, not in Didion's grief, but in the connection, however one-sided, that I can find in her account of it. Good teachers and apologists for youth sports will emphasize the importance of learning how to lose. The Year of Magical Thinking asks us to consider what it is to really lose and what comes next. Didion offers no answers, doesn't suggest she even has any to offer, except that we are not alone in our loneliness. Not those who lost parents, nor those who have lost children, not those we've seen claimed by cancer, nor those whose babies were not viable at 23 weeks. Sometimes the worst happens.

Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

Hunter S. Thompson’s Gonzo take on the 1972 presidential election was such an obvious choice for this year I thought I’d have to start bribing some young journalism majors who snagged it for class back in September months before we really thought the chaos would endure past Iowa and New Hampshire. I’m sitting on a pile of to-read books and put in an order for one of the few copies at the Free Library of Philadelphia figuring by the time it worked its way through everyone who wanted some context for the apocalyptic panic gripping our country’s leading television correspondents and party leaders I’d be in the market for a new read and it might even align with the conventions which could get into some very ugly business.

I don’t harbor a belief that any voice from the past would have kept this election on the rails—and I have to imagine Thompson would just be lumped in with the heated rants writ large—but when the dust clears in 2017 who else could describe the freakish and ugly nature of the 2016 election? Who else will have the language to describe “Bernie bros,” Clinton’s duplicity, the Republican clown car, and everything and anything about Donald J. Trump?

Few memories of the 1972 election survive. The 1968 Democratic convention was much more dramatic and even the crook Nixon was old news, he’d already been in power four years and things kept chugging along. Two Rolling Stone  writers emerged with new insights on the process even during what seems to be a pretty tame election. What would a gonzo journalist make out of 2016?

Somehow Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 makes this all seem familiar, even Trump... almost even Trump. Before he even gets out of the primaries, which is really most of the action is in '72, we see all the molds in which we cast candidates to this day: The Shameless Politico, the Radical Bigot, the True Believer, the Zodiac Killer, the Ibogaine Freak. At times it seems eerily prescient and has made me question my  own stances in the election—not the big obvious stuff like opposing a guy who has taken multiple op-eds out against innocent men suspected of a brutal crime and one against them even after they were proven innocent but about what we can or should aspire to—and how I look at the politics and the process. Plus, when he levels an insult he commits.

“Hubert Humphrey is a treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a bottle and sent out with the Japanese Current. The idea of Humphrey running for President makes a mockery out of things that it would take too long to explain or even list here.”

The 40th Anniversary Edition comes with a helpful introduction which, good as it is, I can't help but think it a shame that we need Matt Taibbi to explain that Thompson isn’t a mere drug-addled frat-boy sent to freak out the squares, but an original voice with insights that are important to explore. A letter from your younger self except more clever, more cutting, more daring and, perhaps for those reasons, less able to just cope with the compromises we have deemed necessary for the adult world. Maybe that’s what draws him to McGovern.

What’s the importance of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72? Same as any historical book, perspective. Seeing the pitfalls ahead, and maybe making it a bit easier to know that shit has gotten strange and dark before. We should stand up to it, but we don’t have to panic. Also it’s hilarious and well written. It does feel long for what it is, but then it’s a collection so that can’t be helped (it originally ran serialized in Rolling Stone during the election).

Read. Enjoy. If your city has better sense than Philly and it is hard to get, it will still be valuable later. Thompson's guy lost so there is a whole lot on coping and several post-mortem interviews. Good luck in November.  Unless you’re voting for Trump. The man has been scum my entire life.

Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

The Flamethrowers is a shape-shifter, a slinking fire-lizard, spectacular and formless. It's lines are curving, colorful and deceptive, you can't tell where it is going and I wouldn't care to anyway. I assume it was my own fault that this book was so far to the limits of my radar but Rachel Kushner should be on the lips of many discussions in the lit world.

Kushner's opening scenes in The Flamethrowers are electric. I picked up the book cold, it was a good deal used and I felt guilty about leaving the store without buying anything for the second time in a week. I tried a couple pages and there was no turning back. War, motorcycles, deserts the 70s art scene, it's the stuff that fueled Hunter S. Thompson, Denis Johnson and Joan Didion. Then, just when you're buckled in, Kushner downshifts, turns down a different road.

The story moves to New York and we get our share of art types, caricatures, people who speak in code and have no names, but then we're learning about them, then they do have names and worries and bills, relationships, friends. It was jarring at first, like if Sal Paradise moved in with Dean Moriarty and they actually had to face domestic problems and wax poetic on life to people who have heard their bullshit before instead of fucking of to shoot guns with whatever alter ego he came up with for William Burroughs, but it came to seem necessary, overdue even, to break up this myth of the art monster, stylish, witty, cool, plugged in, distant from the rest of us. We who say the wrong thing, who fail, fuck up, get rejected and it doesn't mean anything most of the time. Still, she never loses that identity at the core of it, the flamethrowers, she just makes them human.

There is a lot of space in 383 pages to play with form and characters and the story changes shift several times. In the paperback I found--one that looks like it has been properly kicked about which suits this story much better than a pristine new copy--she added an essay at the end about how it became timely by accident. How she was writing about riots and movements already when Occupy was coming into it's own, but the echoes in Black Lives Matter seem even stronger.

I really liked it, I'd say the silly thing of it has a bit of everything, because it feels that way, and it challenges everyone. Maybe you shouldn't be so sensitive and be a bit more daring and artistic, or maybe you need to be checked and realize other people exist and deserve some consideration. Maybe it's just a great, dynamic story and you should read it and come to your own conclusions.

Post Script:

I mentioned I picked this up cold, and I want to reiterate that I knew nothing of the book, New York is mentioned on the back but not the era, so it's a particularly bizare coincidence that I read this right after Patti Smith's Just Kids which was also set in the 70s art scene, but about 5 years early for the most part. Why didn't I give five stars? I don't know. If you're making your decisions because of a stars ranking you can probably skip my page anyway.

There are not a lot of winks in Just Kids, no nods or quips, it is not self-deprecating or apologetic at all. Patti Smith writes one of the most outlandish coming-of-age stories I could imagine, from teaching college to the streets of New York to the Hotel Chelsea in about two years, then rising in the worlds of art, poetry and music. She has cool artistic friends who actually go on to change the world. Janis Joplin, Bob Neuwirth, Sam Shepard, these are the people she encounters at parties, concerts, or while sketching in the lobby of the Chelsea--real encounters, not the "Hey it's you!" "Yeah, I know" variety--but she plays it all straight, with heartfelt appreciation for the part each played in her life.

There is name-dropping, but how could there not be? She doesn't have to mention her brief conversation with Jimi Hendrix, but that is as much part of the scenery as anything else, as much as St. Marks or the Gotham Book Mart, every city has a cast of characters but hers have names we recognize. The story of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, the two of them finding a place in the world and finding a voice and doing all this at such an exciting moment cannot be told without acknowledging that the people whose work they and everyone else bought and adored and discussed were just downstairs at El Quixote.

Smith captures beautifully that moment in life when friendships mean so much because the world has suddenly gotten so big and they don't know what to make of it. They are sure they can make an impression on it even as they struggle to make rent. I like also that she hasn't tried to place herself in that world but tried to show us how she saw the world then. They're around her, the Manson killings, Woodstock, but she's not reporting she's telling her story. 

I didn't have to tell you how good this book was. A National Book Award winner and strong recommendations from your cooler friends were probably enough, but if you--like me--for some reason have not picked it up, this is your chance.

Light in August  is the final book in my Faulkner set and one, in some ways, grander in scope than the previous volumes.

Unlike As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury this story is not beholden to one family. We follow a daisy chain from character to character in narrative that  incorporates all the themes Faulkner had been writing about in the other novels in this set: sex, family, piety, church, small towns, long roads and racism.

We start with Lena Grove, walking across states to find Lucas Burch the fled father of her unborn child, she finds her way to Byron Bunch instead who unwittingly informs her of the father's presence, he now going by the name Joe Brown and rooming with Joe Christmas in a shed behind the house of Joanna Burden. Bunch also seeks the advice of disgrace former minister Gail Hightower.

Reading Faulkner is like visiting a friend in their small hometown diner, where everyone has a story that goes back generations, colored by who is telling it. The story itself moves along incrementally as we get one step further then leap four decades back. We learn about Hightower's family in the civil war, how the Burden family came to Jefferson and why they had been seen with suspicion, and so on.

The backgrounds always brought me back to the James Joyce quote, "History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Fate and history seem always to be closely tied in Faulkner's work. You aren't necessarily doomed by your history, but it is going to come up and there are not a lot of cheery endings.

See: Joe Christmas. He fought against his ambiguous racial background - though he usually passes for a foreigner its believed by him and his grandfather that he is part black, which others tend "discover" when he has broken the law - as well as an exceptionally cruel stepfather. Early accounts portray him seem something of a man's man: quiet, tough, hard working, keeps to himself. He sees himself that way too, mostly after his adoption. In the orphanage the race question made him an outcast, but he still sough comfort from other children, after a few years of abuse he's been made hard and is confused and angered by sympathy and - perhaps more appropriately - religion.

 Race itself could launch a thousand essays, particularly on this novel. Christmas's relationship to his ambiguous heritage and how he uses it to punish others is particularly fertile ground and the way language turns after the murder and it starts to circulate that he is part black. It wasn't merely Jim Crow, the legacy of slavery and the subjugation of an entire race was a legacy that lived on in the south and throughout the country.

The south in this novel, and Faulkner's others, appears like a frontier the country skipped over. Nothing is new here, the land has been settled and the few new arrivals are treated with suspicion and malice - see Hightower and especially Burden. Still, there remains an atmosphere of cruelty, the flip side of the hearty frontiersman that has given politicians stiffies for over a century. Parents visit it on children who grow up and visit it on their own. The weak (physically or morally) are judged harshly as are those that associate with them. 

We make our own way out, as unlikely as those routes may be, and none as unlikely as the travels of our hero Lena Grove, but you'll have to finish the book to learn about her.

Reading progress update: I've read 170 out of 507 pages.

I am not adding anything shocking or new to literary discourse in noticing that authors return frequently to the same themes and images across different stories, but it just strikes me how specific Faulkner's tropes tend to be. Now these are part of a set, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a bias here in what Oprah selected but it is still notable. What would a Faulkner Bingo board include?

"Ruined" women: This was the most obvious and specific. Though it could be placed under a larger umbrella of sexual mores in religious communities, each of the  three novels has a central female character facing the crisis of a pregnancy out of the realm of marriage. I am surprised he hasn't just had a woman named Mary turned away from an Inn.

Pocket Watch/Time: Quentin's reflections on time and the pocket watch made for some of the most moving passages of The Sound and the Fury and I found Light in August returns to the pocket watch, with Christmas's stepfather, his pocket watch, and his cruel reliability. I can't recall anything so obvious in As I Lay Dying though I am drawn to Cash and the regular pace of his saw fashioning Addie's casket.

A wagon journey: As I Lay Dying is mostly about a journey and Light in August begins with Lena's journey to Jefferson, much of the part we see is in wagons. And key parts of The Sound and the Fury come back to wagons even though it  is a family that moved on to cars.

Jefferson: This may be a cheat, Faulkner returns to his fictional Jefferson as regularly as James Joyce to Dublin or Joan Didion to California or Jack London to Alaska. 

Hysterical Laughing: There is plenty of laughing in Light in August though I am yet hesitant to include it with what I noticed in the other two, where laughing seems to be the last resort of the most sensitive character to the cruelty around them, whether Quentin in response to his sister being abandoned, or Darl being betrayed by his family.

Fallen ministers: I was thinking of saying religion here, though that seems inescapable and broad. In AILD we have a minister involved in an affair with Addie, though he seems to escape any repercussions, while Hightower  in Light in August has been punished not even for his own failings but his wife's. 

What would you add to the board? 

I am just realizing now that the Faulkner set I own (Oprah's Book Club Edition) is not chronologically arranged, so though I first read As I Lay Dying it evidently came out a year after The Sound and the Fury, which I just finished.

Though I tend toward the more straightforward organization, I can understand why this order was chosen. The themes and style present in As I Lay Dying seem to be deepened and even more present in The Sound and the Fury. Stream of consciousness is common through much of the book and brings us suddenly backwards in time to different scenes talking around the action, bringing description and emotion to paint a picture where a less bold writer might have spelled out the action for us. Difficulty comes along with this structure as, moreso than the previous read, it can drag during the early pages of a new section while you try to acclimate to a new voice.

Early in each of the four sections, but especially the first three, we get the bones the different scenes to which we will return over the next 100 pages or so, but they are fungible and tend to change meaning as we come back and more of the scene emerges. In this way, the information of the plot is insufficient to understanding the story, you have to go through the work of trying to understand the characters, of being pulled this way or that based on what we understand of different events, often to be dropped somewhere else entirely, years down the line with the knowledge of a new character in the next section.

I was more cognizant of symbolism and patterns in this story, though I can think back to some very rich images in As I Lay Dying now that I've caught that line. Most glaringly the narcissus, a broken one at that, Benjy is holding at the end, seeming to represent his house and line in its evocation of narcissism and the way it seems Dilsey and the servants are the ones holding the family together like the twig Luster ties the flower to despite its destructive tendencies.  I return to the sense of rhythm in his writing as well, such as that set in the title, The Sound and the Fury, which finds a response in scenes like that at the Easter service with repetitions of  "the power and the glory" and "the recollection and the blood."

The Compsons, like the Bundrens seem trapped in their own self-interest. Within the family everyone assumes the others are acting directly in response to him- or herself. Jason constantly rails against his niece's behavior as the cause of his woes and a mark on his reputation even as he steals from her, his mother speaks almost exclusively in complaints and speaks of the woes of her children as curses visited upon herself.

Faulkner also appears to be having fun with the Shakespeare quote from which he took the title:

... It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

(Macbeth V.5.6-8)

We can start with the fact that the first section is from the perspective of a man with a mental disability. Faulkner is no more simply giving us an idiot to tell the tale than he is setting out to tell a tale signifying nothing, he is brings the passage into the story but plays with it, turns it around, ponders what it means in the context of this family. 

Book Three, the final of the set,  is Light in August. Let me know what I missed about The Sound and the Fury below.

As I've gotten older I find I am more receptive to the comedy in canonical authors such as Faulkner and Joyce. Early on the impression I worked from was one of reverence that event their wordplay was poetic and meaningful and should evoke awe, which is part of it, but I've come to understand that a chuckle is a legitimate response, especially in As I Lay Dying.

Watching internet fail videos at the bar is an odd place to be reminded of this literary classic, but there seems to be a direct line between those videos and the misadventures of the Bundren family, who from the moment they set to raise a few more dollars before their mother dies, make a series of obviously terrible decisions. 

This isn't to make it out as a farce, As I Lay Dying is also a study of a failing family, the one folks in town talk about, what personal failings are driving them to ruin.

The perspective shifts from person to person, mostly within the Bundren family but also jumping into some of the people they encounter on the way, people who usually wind up the worse for offering a neighborly hand. The voice is always in the vernacular which can be difficult, and I would imagine constraining, but he weaves something beautiful out of it.

He writes around the events of the story, what happened is not immediately clear, details emerge and you start to piece together what happened. It can difficult but it brings you in to the writing. If you want to make a friend you ask them for a favor, if you want to engage people with your writing make them think. I can see how he and Hemingway represent opposite ends of a spectrum, it's not that Faulkner is flowery where Hemingway is terse, it's that Hemingway is linear where Faulkner is elliptical. 

Darl is reliable as the sensitive soul to reflect on the world of the Bundrens but he's not a crutch. Faulkner seems to thrive under the constraints of other characters. Vardaman, the youngest, still doesn't understand all that's happening around him and the family is little interested in educating him, so while we are trying to figure out what has happened through what the other characters tell us, Vardaman is trying to make sense of what he has seen without the help of his father or older siblings. It cuts through the literal and practical accounts of the other characters and his exchanges with Darl early in the book provide for some bizarre insights.

Cash stands out as well. He closes the book even though his presence in the beginning of the story is largely limited to the ever-present sound of his saw as he prepares the coffin for Addie. He starts showing up intermittently, usually with a practical concern, the coffin is not balanced correctly or why it is better to bevel the edges even if it takes some extra time in the rain. It takes a while for him to be explicitly tied to music in the way of  his interest in buying a record player, but there is a musicality to him from the start, the sound of the saw, the repetition. 

FAULKNER POSTS WILL RETURN with The Sound and the Fury

I have started looking into meditation and one of the things every video and article has conveyed is the idea that you are going to fail. A lot. You won't keep your mind clear for more than a second or less, but you shake it off, try again to clear your mind. Lose focus. Start again. Repeat.

It is a feeling I am familiar with.

Unless you really bind yourself, say to one author, you're going to fall behind on reading, and I have this perpetual feeling--especially with the classics, however you define that--that I am catching up, what I am reading now is something I should have read already and so are all those other books people have recommended or I have seen referenced.

Part of that, to be sure, is a fools errand; I read more than most people I know but I can't outpace all of them. There will always be someone who can't believe I haven't read Margaret Atwood yet or Dostoevsky or Proust, or, in this case Faulkner. So I add it to the list and read another book, then repeat. I'll never read them all but that is what's great, reading and learning--one in the same really--are lifelong projects.

Which brings me to Faulkner.

I haven't read him since high school and even then it was a passing look at "A Rose for Emily." I was expecting something pretty or sweet based on the title and intrigued by the strange and morbid tale I got--and maybe pretty in its own way(?) this was a while ago and the twist is about all I remember. He is right up my alley, I love to unpack the more daunting writers, the ones who challenge readers and scare many off, but I've been borrowing a lot recently and my own pile has stayed pretty much as it was a few months ago.

I picked up this three-book set used from the bookshop--where I used to work--in my New Jersey hometown and lieu of making a New Year's Resolution, a famously fruitless venture, I've decided to take the trio on as a project for the first month of 2016.

It is something I have done before and I think it is a good idea, the holiday season has just passed and that's a good chance to ask for a book--if you're as much of a nerd as I am, you're probably getting a few anyway, let people know what you want. There is nothing much going on in January, winter hits its stride in much of the country, there are no holidays until MLK Jr. day, even at movie theaters January is purported to be a place to drop some duds, so settle in with some book with heft that's been languishing on some shelf or list. I've read Don Quixote and Moby Dick in this manner and think I'll make it a tradition.

What books have you been waiting on that would make a good new years project?

This book was sitting on the staff picks of my local bookstore for over a month, even at just $4, I suspect because of the title. Which makes sense, though seems odd after reading since the book never touches on the controversy of the procedure, it's simply a thing that happens in the story. I suppose putting abortion right on the cover filters out people who would take offense. It is hard to know what the climate was like he was releasing it into in 1971.

What the book is, is beautiful, slow moving, and quirky. Brautigan does not seem interested in experimenting with plot, but he revels in the feel of language. Everything goes according to plan, I kept expecting for things to go terribly wrong as things are wont to do in stories. There is tension, but the kind that arises naturally from traveling, medical procedures, a change in job, and many other events that will probably be okay but worry us.

The focus is on the writing. Brautigan spends whole sections building the settings: who is there, what they are doing, what the space is, what it means to the characters.He flirts with indulgence but his style is straightforward enough that he never quite crosses that line. Plus his world and his writing are just off-beat enough to justify the approach. 

The Abortion is set in 1966, which is incidental since it mostly takes place in a "library" that takes in any book that anybody wants to write and add to the collection, any time, day or night. The librarian, whom I don't believe was given a name, bears the naivete of that era convincingly. Meditations on the beauty of Vida--his girlfriend whose attractiveness and the constant, unwanted attention it brings, has become a burden, a forerunner of Madame Psychosis in Infinite Jest--come off as endearing, genuine appreciation in a world that constantly wants to own and ogle and grab.

It is a quick read, and a pleasant one, for anyone coming off of a long project or anytime you could use a read that points out the beauty around us, which is really what the book deals with: his beautiful girlfriend, the beautiful moments that make up a life, appreciation for what was and hope for what is to come.

I really enjoyed this book, the second Eugenides I have read this season, and I was glad I did not hear about the "twist" (for lack of a better word) in The Virgin Suicides. I am not sure how I avoided hearing about it considering the book is now over 20 years old and has been hanging just on the periphery of my reading life, I actually walked out on friends watching the movie in college but I was a stupid then and wanted to go get drunk instead of sitting around watching some movie with a group that has since become my closest friends.

It is not really a twist, and that explains why I never heard about it, when you've set out in the title the fact that five teenage girls are to commit suicide, everything else fades into the background. Eugenides sets us up for the hit, hiding the narrator in plain sight. He happens to be, well, whoever he is, but, as it starts, you get the feeling it could just as easily be written by Ms. Perl, Uncle Tucker, Peter Sissen or any of the others from the cast of small town busybodies that feel familiar in a way that makes me uncomfortable--much of this book makes me feel uncomfortable, but in the way it should, challenging the way I look at the world. As it moves on, however, the narrator starts to appear less a quiet observer and more a Humbert Humbert, the story itself being misshapen through his perspective and manipulated through his writing. It would be/will be interesting to read again, knowing the role the boys play in the end and watching for that dynamic, but I am happy I got to feel my way through the first reading deciding and then second guessing my feelings on certain characters, trying to guess how it all goes down, then being lulled, like the boys, into a shock.

Something in how we never quite see the girls clearly. The narrator insists his clutch know them better than the other townspeople and journalists, but we see the Lisbon girls through the narrators reaction, which is that of every adolescent boy. They are mysterious. The boys are very aware of the Lisbon girls' bodies down to odors and facial hair, and they are transfixed by them. The whole book they see  the girls the same way they did when Peter Sissen peeked around upstairs, enthralled by the ladies undergarments, makeup and Tampax, and in a demonstrable way, like Sissen, who grabbed the brassiere off the crucifix, they are, decades later, still swiping ephemera from the objects of their desires.

Actually the later collection, which we learn about first, is less weird seeming to be part of an investigation of the suicides. It is when we learn that the boys have already started a collection that I really started to question the narrator.

The Virgin Suicides will dump you right back into the hormonal throes of adolescent love, but it does  so in a way that gives it weight, that respects the pain and damage we can do even in our most foolish years and leaves out the nostalgia. 

I warmed up some on Edith Hamilton knowing what to expect in this one. I had gone into her hoping for a sort of primer on the ancients, to see if I might want to read further and where to start, but she was not the best choice for that. What Hamilton's books are good for is an introduction of sort. The Roman Way  and its predecessor on the Greeks both read like something that assumed a reading of the discussed works either coming or just finished. She is reluctant to translate some of the writers and spends a great amount of time grading writers against one another, and I get the whole point of conveying the spirit of the two ways, but it definitely serves better as a lens to consider in your reading of Roman (or Greek) writers than it does at sharing useful knowledge about them. So, take my grade with a grain of salt, its heavily biased by my own aims.