Words, Words, Words

Thinking back on Station Eleven in an effort to summarize it I was struck by the ways it seems familiar in the apocalyptic tradition but the story had felt so new in reading. The sensation is like seeing a person from work out on a Saturday night, something so familiar made alien, and, in this case, wonderful. Station Eleven comes not to abolish apocalyptic fiction, but to fulfill it's promise.

It's familiarity shouldn't be a surprise, the collapse of civilization is well-trod territory and, unlike science-fiction proper, it is defined by loss, so the genre is bound to conform to certain strictures: reusable weapons like arrows and knives feature heavily, empty buildings, and danger on all sides. 

What does Station Eleven do differently?

Structurally, it jumps around in time--a lot--but in a way that is easy to follow; author Emily St. John Mandel is consistent in establishing the time in the first few lines when she moves us to a different setting. Juxtaposing the world in-or-around the year 2014 with the world twenty years after the virus, where the heart of the action takes place raises it above the level of a survival story. The effect is that Station Eleven seems to have a lot to say about lives today.

In "Year Twenty" after the virus, we are following Kirsten Raymonde and the Traveling Symphony which visits settlements along the shore of Lake Michigan performing concerts and Shakespeare plays. The central question of the novel is tattooed on Raymonde's arm and painted on one of the horse-drawn pick-up trucks used by the symphony, "Survival is insufficient." (Trekies may recognize this from a 1999 episode of Star Trek: Voyager, which is acknowledged, somewhat self-consciously, by characters in the book.) 

If survival is insufficient, what is? Mandel's image for the post-apocalyptic future is surprisingly hopeful but not very pleasant.  It's a pretty far down the line when we are looking in and there it is pretty clear that there is no rescue coming, but there is some stability returned to this world.

In the "present" we see the night the virus arrives in Toronto where Raymonde, at age eight, is in a production of King Lear with the famous actor Arthur Leander. It is Leander that stands at the crossroads of the various stories: his ex-wife Miranda working on creative project before the virus, the paramedic who ran on the stage to help him watching the world collapse outside his window, his oldest friend Clark Thompson, and Raymonde.

Miranda's stories provide some of the best passages of the novel, meditations on life, love, work, legacy, growing up and creativity. Her chapters belong to her alone. She is not in the major plot points, not in person anyway, though she has a presence throughout the story which is worth a post all its own.

We are told little about the violent first year, except that it was very violent. For those who made it through, there is a semblance of normalcy in year twenty, and with that people seem ready to wonder if there is more to life, if survival is, in fact, "insufficient."  One man has started a library and a newspaper he distributes in his town and shares with travelers to spread beyond. There is the Traveling Symphony, small schools have been organized, another man has rigged a stationary bike to power a laptop, even the cult they encounter suggests a thirst for something more to aspire to than making it through the next day.

I have encountered endings in recent years that have bothered me in a way I have had trouble articulating ... or writing, as the case may be. Station Eleven has proved a good counterpoint to those. Coincidences and unlikely situations come with the territory, and in Station Eleven they feel earned. That is not to say there is no surprises, just that those turns make you say, "Of course!" not "WTF?" The breadcrumbs are there through the story, otherwise insignificant details that make it a process of discovery and show forethought.

Four and a half stars, enjoy.

I forgot, going into Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, about the experimental David Foster Wallace. After some time away from his work, I remembered the most distinctive parts - footnotes/endnotes, long recursive discussions  about sincerity vs. appearance, elevated vocabulary - and forgot his abilities as a storyteller and the ways he played with voice and structure. Every feature we associate with Wallace and many that get forgotten are deployed in some story or another in Brief Interviews.

The story, "Datum Centurio," for example, is written as a dictionary entry (from the future). "Octet" starts as a collection of pop quiz/thought experiments that quickly breaks down into some confessional digression on the gulf between feeling and expression, what  the writer wants to say and what the reader perceives. Adult World (II) appears to be authors notes for what a story yet to be written and, of course, the titular series of interviews with men who have IDEAS about sex and power and relationships and what those ideas reveal (the inquisitors contributions replaced simply with "Q.," a method he used in parts of Infinite Jest as well).

Experimentation can, of course, be Difficult, and the rewards are not easy. There is a lot of melancholy in  Wallace's works and one need only read the list of titles including "The Depressed Person" and "Suicide as a Sort of Present" to understand that these stories will be plumbing some depths, but, if you can reckon with these subjects, you can find plenty of humor as well and solid storytelling, particularly (the storytelling) in the Interviews, I could not put the last one down.

Of the Wallace that I have read, the stories presented here are the most obsessed the viewer/performer hall of mirrors, the idea that the writer or character is trying to be honest and sincere and wants to get that across but can only do so by insisting that is what they are doing, which, of course, be seen as a narrative ploy and so the writer/character then sees how the reader is perceiving their attempt at sincerity as maybe not sincere and must try to convince the reader that really s/he is dropping all pretense, which can be perceived as etc. ad nauseam.

(This all adds an interesting fold to the ongoing debate about the conflation of the works of David Foster Wallace and who he was as a person, the constant stressing of sincerity and pieces such as "Octet" which discuss breaking that fourth wall and appealing directly to the reader. Is it that our culture that demands to know the man behind the art or that this man seemed to invite us to look beyond the art? That's all I will say on that.)

This, like all Wallace I've so far read, is a rewarding experience, but expect the difficulty both in thought and emotion that is a hallmark of his fiction. It can be work, but like exercise it is asking you to push beyond what feels good, to think harder and deeper so in daily life you will be up to the task. Brief Interviews does not rise to the height of Infinite Jest, a ridiculous mark to judge by in any case, but many of the same elements can be seen here making it good for those familiarizing themselves with his work or looking for more after reading his masterpiece. 4 Stars.

Hell's Angels is as much (maybe more) about the media as it is about the infamous motorcycle gang. Thompson hints at the gonzo character that would make him famous, but the strength of Hell's Angels is the clarity with which he writes about the gang-- a petty, brutish gang of violent losers, certainly, but little resembling the evil empire that capture the attention of news outlets and their readership.

Thompson teases the story along with the promise of lurid details to come (it starts with the subtitle, "A Strange and Terrible Saga") and they are there, but the scenes are less grand than you might imagine. The effect is an image more recognizably human. Cruel, but mortal, and kind of pathetic.

The news reports portrayed something mysterious and powerful, something that would require support for law and order in whatever strange new methods are demanded to keep the menace at bay. Thompson suggests that the menace is far more familiar than we want to believe.

I enjoy to read about bohemian types. Thompson's evocation of Horatio Alger at the end of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is pretty spot on. My adventure novels involve  irresponsible artist types blowing all their money on drugs and women in exotic locales. I am not especially proud of this but a dose of conviction is important in a form that leans heavily toward introspection.

Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer is particularly good in this realm because he makes you look at the outcast life for its ugliness as well as its appeal. He doesn't have Kerouac's interesting friend's or Thompson's budget to make things colorful and interesting. He has wild nights but he also has STIs, he has problems securing lodging and food at points, when he does have money he spends it on money and sex workers -- he calls women cunts throughout the novel so its no surprise that he hardly finds any woman to go to bed with him that does not demand payment.

It was mostly good reading as well. He gets carried away at times and can be hard to follow, but largely I enjoyed it. You probably won't love him if you are particularly formal but if you are that hung up on language you will probably be put off by his profanity and willingness to go into detail about anatomy in a less-than-scientific manner.

For all its harshness, I greatly enjoyed the book and would not be surprised if I come back to it again someday. 

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Jordan Baker p. 107 

2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas by Marie-Helene Bertino, p 101

The dystopian novel, recently a noted trend in YA sections and movie theaters, has been haunting high school and middle school halls for decades under the much less stylish guise of “assigned reading”. They are loved by teachers because they have a point to make about society, and because they do so with the subtlety of a brass band. In addition, they are full of exciting Sci-Fi futures and action beats to entice the reluctant readers of adolescence.

I had to read a few in school but somehow missed both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, the two giants of the genre. I have only this week gotten around to correcting the later of these gaps in my reading history. So, a decade later than most I get my first taste of Huxley, but what to think of his Brave New World?

Most dystopian fiction starts with a singularly evil incarnation of society, a world that is unsettling and evil. Brave New World starts very much in this vein. The first three chapters are spent explaining the cycle of genetic engineering, pharmaceutical social controls from just shortly after sperm meets egg (this and everything until adulthood happening in labs, of course), behavioral conditioning, and hypnotic suggestions that are used to subdue and control all citizens in this world. It is a very frightening vision that makes humans into manufactured products. Each is designed and treated for their specific function in society. Only a select few are unique, the others are incubated in batches of up to seventy genetic twins.

One of Huxley's greatest successes is crafting a government-corporate environment that gets around the threat of jackbooted thugs and achieves control by means of convenience and pleasantness. Thought and its corollary, resistance, are eliminated by taking away any opportunity or desire to indulge it. People are encouraged—in this case meaning conditioned and indoctrinated—to constantly pursue social activities including pornographic movies, complicated and expensive sports, and frequent sex with multiple partners. Solitude is undesirable and any downtime is spent either asleep or in a drug-induced bliss. It is an inspired turn by Huxley to see the inherent instability of thuggish regimes, but it is not without its own faults.

The means of control take us down a rabbit-hole of human psychology and biology. Even after three chapters learning their methods there are still many features of this massive control mechanism that are revealed as the story runs into some feature of human behavior for which he has not accounted. There are supplements to simulate the effects of violence and pregnancy, there is the sedative/mood improving “soma” pills, the fertilization and incubation processes that are singularly convoluted, and there is some new activity every chapter to account for every moment of every one's day. Every activity has to be intensely stimulating, as boredom leads to thinking and discontent. Also they have to be expensive. There is no appreciating nature taking a stroll, everything requires expensive equipment and facilities to keep people plugged into the endless cycle of pay and earn.

Huxley seems to come up against the reality of human experience that even if we sometimes appear to act like—I really hate this term—sheeple, it is only an illusion. Humans are masters of disturbance. Hardly do we seem to reach anything approaching conformity before someone, for good reason or not, throws a wrench into the works. Take a walk or drive through Manhattan sometime; even enforced rules of the road falter before some taxi driver who is not going to stop just because the light is changing, or a chatty businessman plugged into his phone and charging ahead over women, children, and anyone in his path. We chant together for our favorite sports team, then fight out in the parking lot. 

To override every one of our impulses toward individuality involves so many contingencies that you might as well be trying to blot out the sun with a collection of umbrellas. This is the risk of science-fiction though, it is nearly impossible to write science fiction without inviting criticism about your creation. What is established, unequivocally, is that this society, despite its cheerfulness and high consumer ratings, is wrong, evil, no good, awful, and rotten.

We get only cursory glimpses of our away team in those first chapters. We encounter Lenina first. She is the least inclined to rebellion, though she demonstrates unique tendencies of which she is only marginally aware: she tends slightly toward monogamy (we are told she has been seeing only Henry Foster for some weeks, for which she gets a gentle ribbing from her friend), and that she likes Bernard Marx.

Bernard is introduced as a weird and unattractive outcast. A bit of grump too. There are rumors that a mistake had been made during his incubation resulting in his slight build. A minor feature as literary deformities go, but in a society so marked by conformity it becomes important. It is serous enough to make him unpopular but not so bad to have had serious repercussions. He spends time alone, which, as mentioned, is highly unusual and cause for suspicion, and he chooses to dwell on his foul moods rather than dissolve them with a gram of “soma”.

His friend, Helmholtz Watson, plays a particularly odd role in the story. Unlike Bernard, whose individuality stems from being outcast, he is exceptionally well built and bright and has found uninterrupted success in every aspect of life. He is good at his job, popular, great at sports, and desired by women. It is the very ease of his constant prosperity that he finds unfulfilling. He has overshot the means of control to discover boredom and, with it, original thought. He explores these thoughts with a scientific curiosity, unlike the irritable Bernard. If it provides a more measured way of approaching the world it also makes for dull reading. He brings little to the story except to serve as a sounding board to the more dynamic characters.

Then there is John, the offspring of a woman abandoned in a reservation-type community completely cut off from this society. He has caused me the most trouble and appears to defy the tendencies of later dystopian heroes, and the hero he must be. John is the only one to come from outside of this society. He loves Shakespeare and appears, at first, to be bright and sensitive. He is the one who gives us the title Brave New World from a line in The Tempest.

Then John starts to display some troubling tendencies. Not that he does much to upset their society, which is what I would expect, but it becomes increasingly difficult for the reader to see him as a positive figure. To some extant, it is a reaction to a society that tries to strip your humanity from you, but that only takes us so far. From what he tells us of his childhood, he is less our model for a hero of individuality, and more a man stuck between two terrible worlds, both oppressive and dehumanizing, separated only by the sophistication of their technology.

Sexuality is a major factor throughout John's life as well as the book, but it is hard to see through the filter of time how Huxley means to portray this subject. The world government encourages promiscuity, though it has eliminated natural birth. Sex is stripped completely of its reproductive origin, it is prevented from ever producing children and romantic attachments have, like solitude, been effectively eradicated. Their endorsement of sex and promiscuity is an almost certain sign that this book means to challenge increasingly cavalier attitudes about sex. This certainly seemed the case in the early chapters where the children are being encouraged to engage in “erotic play”. Everything about this scene is creepy and terrible.

On the other hand, there is John. Many of his attitudes toward sex specifically, coming from the more traditionally structured world of the “Savage Reservation”—completely isolated from the new world and still practicing monogamous family units—are what we would consider unhealthy. Some of his other attitudes are closer to deranged.

He engages in a lot of disturbing behavior, starting in his childhood, that provide a dissimilar but equally disturbing attitude toward sex. John's mother, Linda, is a product of the world government that got impregnated then lost on a trip through the reservation. When she is taken in by the people of the reservation she thinks nothing of taking on multiple sexual partners. This gives her a bad reputation, particularly among the wives, and even extends to John. Linda incurs the wrath of the wives and gets a whipping for her trouble—as we see too often still, she gets treatment much worse than the husbands who actually betrayed their promise of fidelity. John is raised as an outsider, banished from the important rituals and marriage due not to his race, but his mother's sexuality. His relationship with his mother becomes, in a word, Freudian. It is fraught with jealousy, guilt, anger, a whole pack of issues that manifest in such violence as to seem hardly preferable to the pharmaceutical coma of the rest of the world.

He learns to read, and after some simple sentences and a science text, he is given a copy of the collected Shakespeare. I have a copy of the collected Shakespeare that I turn to in between books, so I believed this was a good step, one towards culture, towards striving and promise, but these hopes are disappointed. John draws from the negative models in Shakespeare, like the impetuous Romeo—who in the span of a week contemplates suicide over one girl, meets another, falls in love, kills a relation of hers, and finally does commit suicide so quickly as to not get news of his new love's death rush—the rash Othello, and Hamlet, whose psychoses are so numerous that I cannot fit them all here. Shakespeare's work itself is implicate through the thoughts of Helmoltz who draws a parallel with his own work writing and teaching—for conditioning and propaganda purposes, naturally— and Shakespeare who, he thinks, has created a “superb piece of emotional engineering!” (p 184)

Within a page of discovering Shakespeare, John finds the words of Hamlet to encourage him to stab his mother's lover—the same that gave him the book. “'When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage/ Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed' The magic was on his side, the magic explained and gave orders.” Its a scene that belongs to a serial killer in a movie, not to the man who saves us from an evil dystopia. Though he offers some moving passages about wonder and love—as when he is introduced to this, “brave new world”—he begins to absorb himself in the most rash and dangerous characters in his repertoire, Romeo and Othello.

Lenina takes an interest in John when they bring him back to England and starts hanging around, attending Bernard's parties and taking John to the “feelies”. John seems to be having an effect on her. She begins to form an emotional connection with him, and even starts to notice things like the night sky, but while she is drawn into the beauty of his world, John retreats further into its cruelest confines. She offers the only connection she knows when she shows up at his apartment to seduce him. He is horrified. Though he has been obsessing over her through readings of Romeo and Juliet, he is unable to cope with her as a person.

She says that if he was interested than he had only to say so. He counters that he had still to prove himself worthy, to, in a sense, earn her, by hunting a lion or vacuuming. 

I do believe that there is a legitimate statement to be made about the cost of things. Not in a monetary sense, but in a material sense. The idea that the sacrifice of time and effort, blood and sweat, imbues the reward with value. It is a lesson I was taught as a child, to do things the right way, and when you collect your just reward, you can be proud to know that you earned it. Though, in that case it was literally a reward, a Scout rank specifically. John is referring to a woman, not an object. It is hard to say what audiences would think at the time, but the old concept of winning a girl is creepy and dangerous.

Note how he has become enthralled, obsessed really, with her on only her looks, but she is expected to judge him on material worth. It also brings me back to a scene just as they were leaving New Mexico when John breaks in to their hotel room to find Lenina unconscious—having taken enough “soma” to induce a "holiday”—and just barely refrains from feeling her up. Lenina is more objectified by John than by anyone in England, just because he pictures her having a higher price tag does not make it any less demeaning.

John does not stop at the soft sexism of idol worship. In the face of her overtly sexual advances he turns violent. Lenina slips into his arms where he grasps her harshly, shakes her, shoves her, and, as she retreats to the bathroom, lands a resounding slap. He stalks outside the locked door repeating, “Impudent strumpet, impudent strumpet, impudent strumpet” (p 196) as she asks him to pass her clothes through the vent and does not dare open the door until he has left.

The next scene, with his dying mother, begins a long stretch where John is again sympathetic, but a later reference to Othello brought me back to this apartment scene. Nearly everything John says to Lenina is right from the mouth of Othello, a man so foolish and driven by jealousy that he kills his own innocent wife—not that it would be justified even if she were unfaithful. They centered on in an exchange in the fourth act where Othello berates his bewildered wife.

...O thou weed,

Who art so lovely fair and smell’st so sweet

That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been born!

…

Was this fair paper, this most goodly book,

Made to write “whore” upon? What committed?

...

Impudent strumpet!

(Othello Act 4 Scene 2, lines 69-83)

It is less an exchange than a verbal lashing. If the emotionless, prolific sex lives of Brave New World are meant to strike us as cold and unfulfilling, then John's are the stuff of overwrought melodramas. He fetishizes suffering, emotions, and subjectivity to the point of madness. He is utterly anti-social to the point where he cannot empathize. That he seems to be going mad should be the result of this faceless society, but it plays out like a man casting his own Shakespearean tragedy. He hates that they don't feel passion, but then he hates passion as well, escalating from impassioned readings of Romeo and Juliet to self-mortification to subdue his desires.

Other examples present themselves lending to this reading of the story. In the obligatory long discussion where the government representative argues against freedom, John never manages to mount a convincing counter. He makes some points about the price of things (discussed above), the greatness of striving and attaining, but it is undercut for me when the discussion somehow winds back to Othello.

The controller explains the Violent Passion Surrogate which is a drug meant to replicate the effects of aggression and risk to which we are otherwise drawn, “All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello without any of the inconveniences” he reasons; to which John responds, “But I like the inconveniences” (p 239-240). Meaning the part where someone is murdered? That could not have been Huxley's idea of a strong response. Of any combination of words in the English language to reply to someone who is offering an alternative to murder, suggesting that murder was just fine as it is, thank you, does not register any where in the realm of “good ideas”. and John, who earlier that day slapped a woman while quoting the lines of that murderer.

The monogamous, family and religion-centered community in Malpais—the reservation—is just as horrifying as the world government. That their society is built on pieces that we recognize from our own world softens the effect but perhaps is meant to bring some of the lessons home. John and Linda are treated with extraordinary cruelty, she being whipped and he shunned for her sexuality. Surely this is not our safer shore. It seems, if anything, to serve as Scylla to the world government's Charybdis.

The rituals and beliefs that John takes to the end present the photo negative to that of the world at large. In Kundera's terms: if theirs is a society operates under the sign of lightness, then his operates under that of weight, and one is just as horrible as the other. Like in the lashing ritual, suffering is not avoided but is actually sought. This can be enlightening, and learning to live with pain is a valuable attribute, but John goes too far. Faced with a society that costs nothing (making everything, in a sense, worthless) he seeks only to pay. So, he resists Lenina's advances—even as she is warming to his ways—and turns to self-mortification. He finds pain only for pain's sake and loses the meaning that makes the struggle worthwhile.

The men who defy the government come across as insincere as well, they are the most disappointing part of the book. Bernard Marx turns out not to be brave or particularly poignant at all. His deformity appears at first to have given him a unique perspective that later it turns out to be just a matter of jealousy. He is happy to avail himself of the popularity that being John's keeper, so to speak, brings him. When a row breaks out he tries to scuttle away, and when he is transferred to an Island he breaks into hysterics.

Helmholtz is tragically perfect, though utterly toothless. He is absent for large swaths of the story as Marx happily throws himself into the welcoming breast of society. His breaks from society are incremental but resolute. He happily springs to John's defense and quietly accepts his fate. In some ways he lives the ideal of Joan Didion's “On Self-Respect” but in others he is that guy you knew in high school whom you hated for having every possible advantage, and whom you hated all the more because he was really a good guy and made the most of every privilege. His only flaw was that he was actually too good, that he conquered his work, sports, leisure, and women so easily that he could not help but think there was more. Bernard acts like an ass around Helmholtz and I can't help but feel for him in that situation.

I mentioned earlier that dystopian fiction tends toward the heavy handed. It lines everything up clearly and distinctly. The “bad” is anything that the evil government/corporation/society promotes and manipulates. The “good”, then, is the cause of our heroes. Typically, the cause is art, and in this is implied emotion, knowledge, dissent, but art is a convenient material way to symbolize all this. I did not know what to make of Huxley's hero. Watching the treatment of women in old movies today can be extremely uncomfortable, but there is more to it here.

The overlords v. hero model, as I grow older, seems insincere. They rarely play a subversive role, even though it would seem the proper channel to do just that. They end up being communal, setting up a straw man for everyone to kindly jeer and thank our lucky stars that we have boldly resisted the forming of human farms and mind control drugs. Huxley slips this trap. He hands us the villain of an oppressive corporate-governmental conglomerate then produces a challenger but does not make him a hero. In fact, some of the most potent social commentary may not be in reaction to the society, but aimed at John, the holdover of our own society. It is only now, after my initial reading, that I am catching on to much of this, and the more I unravel, the more I respect this book.

The danger with dystopian fiction lies the temptations of luddism and conservatism. They show futures that use every technological advance to enslave their people, so it stands to reason that advancement should simply be stopped. No new technology, no new legislation. I encountered many opinions of Brave New World and they naturally tend to speak only of the society. They focus on prescription drugs, contraception, new laws (because, of course, mentioning dystopic futures is nearly as common as comparing a law to the Nazis), eugenics, genetic modification, and the like.

This misreading is not only dangerous, but boring. The success of Brave New World is that it understands that society is complex. What gives with one hand takes with the other, and vice versa. If promiscuity threatens to dull sex from one of the most beautiful shared moments of a loving relationship to a nice way to pass a rainy afternoon, then monogamy threatens to make us jealous, possessive, and violent.

This is a novel that is very wary of a world rapidly advancing technologically and culturally. It was written in 1932, and we know well what happened in quick order: jet planes, atomic bombs, nuclear energy, the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, the computer. However, I believe it is one that recognizes the difference between advancing cautiously and not advancing at all.

That or it is not cautionary at all, simply an acknowledgment that humanity dooms itself continually. Future, past, present, we don't know what we want, but we know it is not this.

Edit: I couldn't make out the thumbnail and originally associated this post with Brave New World: Revisited, a collection of essays by Huxley that I have not yet read. 9/4/13

Finally, a new set of (physical) shelves. Plenty of room for the books I have and loads of space for new ones.

Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Chapter 34

What is one to make of the book-as-artifact?

Since it is usually discussed regarding the superiority/eventual triumph of eBooks, I try to keep to practical considerations and try to avoid getting too sentimental about the book as an object, but the truth is I love books almost as much as I love reading. When I worked at a used book shop I enjoyed flipping through the volumes and finding boarding passes, pictures, postcards, and ephemera from any number of locations and events.

I write my names in the back of all my books and I enjoy the thought of the book telling a story. There is the copy of The Snow Leopard I was given by an ex-girlfriend who was not nearly as impressed as I was, a paperback Vampires in The Lemon Grove that I leant to a friend before I finished it and now resides somewhere in her apartment, or the copy of NW that had come damaged and that I appropriated even with the front cover torn off. Though I joke around about people disrespecting books, I love to find old dog ears and underlined passages—it is really best if you keep this to your own books and spare those of the school or library.

I was recently enjoying a day free of commitment and went for a stroll through Center City. I headed toward a place I had heard of during the Bloomsday celebrations. The Rosenbach Museum and Library, a modest place tucked among the row houses near Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, is the home to Joyce’s manuscript for Ulysses as well as a first edition copy. That is what brought me. They had an exhibit held over from Bloomsday about the Shakespearean influences on Joyce. That is the kind of thing I go for. Now you know why I have a blog on books.

The Rosenbach isn’t very large, there are three exhibit rooms, but their collection definitely makes it a cool stop. They have Maurice Sendak’s papers as well as a mural he painted in a friend’s home in one exhibit and the delightfully morbid collection of early American children’s books in another. The tours are the most interesting thing though. The free tours take you through the brothers’ house, not particularly compelling but certainly nice, then you get to the Library. Here are Joyce’s manuscript pages on display, here are Joseph Conrad’s papers, a first English edition of Don Quixote, John Ruskin, letters of Lewis Carroll, Dylan Thomas’s manuscript for Under Milk Wood, and more. There are some 400,000 volumes in all.

Marianne Moore’s papers are there too, also her living room. The whole room. Recreated and arranged just as it was in her East Village Apartment.

I went on a second tour. The hands-on tour gets you access to some of these materials in a guided presentation by the librarian. I hopped on to the hands-on tour of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The librarian talks about interesting features about the story behind the story. Bram Stoker’s terrible handwriting for instance, little drawings, reading notes from his research—mercifully typed.

There is something particularly appealing to writers in this experience. It brings things closer to life. Even biographies and apocryphal stories have plots, they are selling you a story, but the notes, the manuscripts, they are just chaotic enough to be real. Stoker was as methodical as anyone in his research, but then there are notes with a shaky outline of a castle, a phrase or two, something about a character that never makes the story, something about three characters that kind of merge into one in the final draft.

I think there is still something to be taken by passing a day considering art and books. It has an effect on us that is more than just clicking through images, it is a communal experience. The small museums especially are great for talking with intelligent, interested people. It was a day outside of the apartment, outside of myself.

I feel uneasy about reviewing Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem. That it is, the idea of writing an essay about a collection of essays combines with something in her voice that makes me very aware that I am creating a sort of Russian nesting doll of commentary, but I will attempt it all the same.

For a while I had known Joan Didion to be a giant in the field of creative nonfiction but only last year did I actually get around to reading The White Album. The writing itself is all very good. I think she is the kind of prose stylist one should read and re-read especially if one intends to write themselves. She embodies the clear and to the point writing that was called for by George Orwell. It looks you right in the face and you can see it plainly, describe it, but it escapes caricature, you couldn't pick it out of a lineup based on anything less than a full paragraph. Having since encountered an especially overwrought and meaningless essay in a popular literary journal, I have come to feel that a revisiting of her work should maybe become an annual thing for writers, a sort of spring cleaning for minds that have a tendency to climb up their own asses.

In a very limited sense, not every essay of hers works for me. I don't know that I have any real qualification for this except that she has honed this voice, and it seems to me that sometimes it just either catches you or it doesn't, and even when it doesn't, the results are still very good. The titular essay, “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” does a fine job of bringing the phenomenon now known as the “Summer of Love” into personal terms. What it meant to be there, who these people were (beyond the caricatures that people of my age have grown up with), and how they lived. That I fail to connect with it seems as likely my own problem as anything else. That she talks about it in the prologue as something Important could also have put me off it. Part of what makes her essays great is that she understands that the easiest way to miss the point is to aim straight for it. There is something mush more revealing in the vignettes, scenes of Joan Baez at a Community Board meeting or a note about the woman in the fur coat at the end of the bar that say so much more about the time, the author, and ourselves than could be formalized into a statement of fact.

When it does catch, which is often in my experience, the results are amazing, and it is easy to see how readers grow personally attached. To read “On Self-Respect”, “Goodbye to All That”, or “Where the Kissing Never Stops” is an experience. They have an ability take you out of your own head and spin you around a couple times, force you to look at the same place you just were as if it is something new that you have never seen before. “On Self-respect” is a wonderful one that I have been wrestling with since I first encountered it in college. At first I battled with it. She uses some unattractive examples which is kind of the point. She doesn't prescribe a set of rules, but asks us to find our own and to live by them. It is not nearly as easy a concept as it seems but it is something that readers should reckon with, an idea that you ought to think about whether you wind up accepting it or not.

“Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” is a study in the way we consume news as entertainment and how we understand true crime stories even as it sells us another crime story. It has an ending that drastically changes everything you had read. It is not a twist, though she writes it in a way that you would write a good twist. The last lines are revelatory, she gives you a peek at her hand and suddenly you catch on to all the subtle points she had strung along the way. She brings up doubts in the case but refrains from making accusations. Still, she leaves you with pieces of a puzzle, whose story wavered, who benefited or withheld information. The last sentence puts a cherry on it, but you feel as if you have done all the work yourself. As writing, it's impressively done.

That Joan Didion struggles with things like morality and the counter-culture is even more reason to appreciate her work. The scariest thing for any writer taking on current events with a wide lens—it is easy to miss as a journalist when there are immediate cases to attend—is the lack of answers. How does one move forward from this? Whether we talk about the schism in culture or the corruption in politics. It is easy to find the truly bad—forty years on and I can name companies that you and I deal with daily that are ethically abhorrent yet impossible to avoid—but how do we get from there to good? She sees the horror of the establishment but also the naivete of the reaction. She is the clear minded counterpart to Hunter S. Thompson. They are disillusioned and searching for answers, tired of empty shouting, and hoping to strike into something deeper.

The simple truth, Joan Didion is one of the greatest writers of the last one hundred years. Her work stands without a hook or gimmick, without a rallying cause or philosophy, it is just clear, smart, and direct. I think you would enjoy reading Joan Didion and I think you should read Joan Didion, especially if you are writing for an emergent literary magazine.  

How does one begin talking about this book? I had remembered on its release something of a battle along gender lines; there were men who thought it unbecoming and women who found it brilliant. It seemed appropriate to read something dangerous in the year of #ReadWomen2014, and Sheila Heti delivers something of a knuckleball. How Should a Person Be? is a confounding thing, bouncing and jarring but devastatingly effective, even if I make contact in this piece I am sure it will only be a glancing blow, but if a few more people read it and care to understand it then that much better for the literary scene.

Much of the story is told through dialogue—formatted not unlike a play—taken from Sheila (the character)'s tape recordings. There is a whole lot of ruminating; about the history of the Jewish people, about art and friendship. Much of it is between Sheila and her friend Margaux. Their friendship will provide the focal point to the novel and, even as an ugly art competition comes in to flesh out the lessons they take away, carries what How Should a Person Be? has to offer in the way of plot. The rest of the talks are split between talks with Sholem—Margaux's competitor in the ugly art contest—and a cast of cameos provoking discussions of religion, history, thought, etc.

There are trademarks of the coming-of-age story here, which I am sure will fuel more talks of arrested development even though the very label is flawed. We are all be people in the process of discovery, which is why these stories ring so true. People stop asking the broad, life encompassing questions with the same self-seriousness, or so they tell themselves. I think we never get past it so much as we grow more clever in our posing of the questions. A transformation that quietly happens here, with what-does-it-all-mean chats falling away as we approach resolution, and are replaced with illustrative stories.

Margaux and Sheila hardly ever approach touchy subjects in person. In fact, the stuff of real, personal weight in the story is always through writing. Sheila's high school boyfriend, in a jealous fit, writes a scathing play depicting her future of sexual degradation at the hands of Nazis. Her torrid affair with Israel is played out as much through sexual demands sent over email as it is in loving passages about his penis. The most important one, however, are from Margaux. They are the ones that push their relationship along, they challenge Sheila's ways of thinking about herself.

I highly recommend reading this book. After four completely new drafts and countless edits of this 500 word essay I am still reeling. I nearly fell into the trap of thinking the book was written for me—i.e. a cisgender, young, white male—but I believe it does raise questions about how we are, how we should think, and how we should be. For a book I believe to be important, it is also fun and quick. It's out now in paperback.

I finished up a couple of books last week and have been wavering on what to read next when I came across a post anticipating this week's second most confusing celebration, Towel Day. So I took the opportunity to finally get around to Douglas Adams's funny, clever, mind bending, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

For those who are unfamiliar, this was his 1979 novel in which Arthur Dent is narrowly saved from the destruction of Earth by his friend--an alien going by Ford Prefect--, a girl he once met at a party, and the guy who totally interrupted the conversation, President of the Galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox. That's where we start.

Much of the the story, and the appeal as well, lie in the building of this universe. Reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy  is a bit like watching Jeopardy! if it was run by Nickelodeon. The way he deploys concepts of advanced theoretical science demonstrates understanding and knowledge, but he is eager for the opportunity to pour slime on the whole thing. He starts out by knocking human's down a peg. Within pages it is revealed to Arthur Dent--and the reader by extension--that we're not alone in the universe, that we're only the third most intelligent species on our planet, and that we're minor enough that our whole planet is being destroyed for the sake of a galactic freeway. The opening lines put us in "the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy". Much of the first part of the book looks at life on Earth with the same bemusement we observe in poop-flinging apes and dogs that chase their tails. The entry for Earth in the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (the colloquial galactic reference device from which this book takes it's title) reads only "Harmless". Ford Prefect, after fifteen years on the planet has written a new entry for the next edition. It is to read, "Mostly harmless". 

This might be enough to put off some people of a serious disposition--the sort that take interest in watches--but as the book continues and Earth is left behind, it reveals that life among these more intelligent and sophisticated beings is every bit as trivial and silly as our own. They bicker and wage wars and are revealed to be every bit as small as humans in their concerns. One intergalactic war, inadvertently sparked by the words of Arthur Dent, lasts for thousands of years and ends with an attacking battle fleet being swallowed accidentally by a small dog.

In other ways, this book seems on a much more personal level than most Science Fiction. It's common for alien planets and species to serve as allegory for race and foreign relations, but the aliens in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are more interested in reflecting light on ourselves. My favorite are the Vogons. They are usually tied to the concept of bureaucracy, because they serve as the bureaucrats of the Galaxy, but it would be boring to stop there--is it really a revelation at this stage to see bureaucracy as cold and miserable? I really enjoyed the Vogon chapters, there is so much to read into and perhaps, after all that, nothing to read into at all.

At first I wanted to label them. Are they an allegory for big government? Do they stand for the joyless, old conservatives? Maybe it's just a guilty pleasure, and they are nothing but the projected personalities of the person who cut you off in traffic, the rude barista, the parking attendant, etc. Then I started to think they were the most human of all. Who of us doesn't smirk at the comeuppance of our enemies. I saw a scary amount of myself when the leader hopes his chair will break so that he would have an excuse to lash out. If nothing else, and it may well be nothing else, they are just a great, funny invention. Joyless and confounded, they make a fantastic foil and stand well on their own as curmudgeonly bickerers.

Oddly, (and why not, everything else about this book is) the strongest passages tend to be ones with almost no interest in the story arcs. There is a wonderful two-page bit following the thoughts of a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias that have been suddenly brought into existence several miles (an falling) above the surface of a planet. There is also the introduction, a page detailing the consequences of the next scene (as to relieve your stress and anxiety about the fate of the crew),a description of the best drink in existence, and, of course, a discussion on the importance of towels. 

Today, May 25, is Towel Day. I haven't bothered to look into how it started, maybe this was once a holiday about towels, it's not something I feel like applying much thought to. Since the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" has recommended always carrying a towel and celebrated it's many uses, it has become a sort of rallying point for fans of the work and the author. If you do find a Towel Day event in your area, it is recommended that you check it out, it may be one or more of many things but boring is probably not one of them. Or just follow the example of Ford Prefect and prepare yourself for anything this week with a handy Towel, and a copy of the indispensable, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 

Anais Nin has been hanging around the periphery of my literary awareness for some time now. Perhaps it is the stigma of erotica or maybe it's just that she is crowded out by the towering reputations of other writers of her period like Hemingway, Faulkner, and Nabokov but, though I heard something of her, opportunity and inspiration took some time before bringing me to her. It was finally #ReadWomen2014--something I've taken on as a kind of mission, as I've discussed here before--that I finally picked up a volume of her diaries and this collection published towards the end of her life in the 1970's. 

As it happens, I am very happy to have found her. I keep the diary near the bedside for intermittent reading and found it every bit as interesting as its reputation. I may yet write a post on them when I have read a more substantial share of it--her very take on the art of journaling deserves attention--but today the attention is on the essays.

In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays has some great writing in it. She writes with prescience on the subject of feminism and gender studies, even if these thoughts have since been bowdlerized to suit the post-sexism, post-sexism crowd (it is that fine line between advice and policy). My favorite may be among the travel essays. "Port Vila, New Hebrides" gives us a view of a certain few islands in the South Pacific. Their dynamic landscapes are well suited for her rich descriptions though and they are even better for the rich personality of Nicolai, the world traveler and her guide into the intimate lives of the indigenous population.

My only complaint, and it is a not-insignificant one, is the careless curating of the pieces. It has the feel of a collection of cast-offs. There are essays, there are book reviews and movie reviews, there are speeches, there are diary entries and there are interviews. They come from publications as diverse as the Massachusetts Review, the Village Voice, and Playgirl. I thought it might be a sort of yearbook, Anais Nin, all the writings, 1973-74, but they had, in fact been culled over some years. 

Take the first section, "Women and Men". Apart, they are very good works, but they are to similar to be read one after another. I liked the first essay, then the interview, which touched on some of the same points, nothing surprising. Then the next essay, and the next, and there is occasion to stay close to the topic, but when assembling a collection like this you expect a representative sample. You see it weekly on talk shows, where politicians do five or six shows in a week. Meet the Press, Hardball, The Daily Show, etc. Each interview can be enlightening and entertaining, but the topic and the message are the same. It is useful to reach out to each show's audience, but if one person to take one guest and put together a reel of each interview it would be unspeakably tedious. Though I did enjoy a taste that in the segment on  John Oliver's show, "John McCain tells the same Joke Six Different Times in Six Different Places". To a lesser effect, and with a better message, that is the feeling I started to get.

Some of the pieces did come across dated, as any work might. The movies and books she reviewed have fallen out of public awareness, as I am sure many I like and review may in some years, it is an unfortunate cast of the die but one that does affect the reading. More unsettling is the travel essays. Anais Nin is wonderful with scenery but too often it seems that people become part of that scene rather than characters, especially the native populations in Africa and Asia. She casually mentions how Arabs ave been banned from the French resort in Morocco and how she is let in to tour a local household, these tours allowed by the disabled resident who needs the money. I like to think I see hints of awareness, something in the tone, the way of description as a dog whistle to the readers of Travel & Leisure. I can't tell.

I have been there. Even in Hawaii, endemic poverty and a notorious sex trade hover in the shadows of massive luxury resorts. The history of American involvement of these islands adds to the unease. We all fall for the trick, we want to fall for the illusion, and travel essays are supposed to support that, which she does. It is a subject that bothers me, and she is not terrible offender, but I think it is important to recognize these patterns.

That said, I greatly enjoyed being introduced finally to this author and look forward to reading more Anais Nin, and to finding something that fits better as a cohesive work. Please leave suggestions in the comments!  

Sometimes you walk into the bookstore just to pass a few minutes. Sometimes, you already have a full shelf of books you have not read, but you are in the neighborhood and you don't see the harm in stopping for a minute or two. Sometimes, money is a little tight so extra books need to be seen as low priority purchases. Then, sometimes you find a first edition Nabokov and realize that groceries are overrated.