I’m trying to patiently wait for Spring to arrive, for warmer weather. For some reason, this reminds me of Spring.
I’m spending the weekend getting caught up on my currently reading pile which is a bit out of control at this point. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace is priority right now.
Here is my reading pile currently:
It’s a pretty heavy pile and I haven’t made it very far into any of them. It’s somewhat overwhelming considering I also have a couple if to-read piles that take up my desk as well as a couple piles on the floor.
Currently listening and obsessing over.
Something analogous happens, I think, with unfinished novels: we always end up finishing them with something. We fill in the blanks, unconsciously, with what is closest at hand: the gestalt, the legend, the vibe, the tone, the aesthetic of the author in question. This is, after all, part of what a great author does: he trains us not just to receive his vision but also to extend it — to read the world (its landscapes, people, events, texts) in the peculiar way that he would have read them. He infuses the world, almost like a religion. (After a few Dickens novels, everything starts to look Dickensian.) So it makes sense that we would carry that vision through to an author’s own last work.
This explains an uncanny aspect of unfinished novels: the way their real-life back stories usually seem like something the authors themselves might have written. Max Brod’s famous nonburning of Kafka’s unpublished writing, for example, only reinforces one lesson of the unincinerated work: that the suffering individual is no match for the big bullying system of the world. Similarly, Nabokov’s “Original of Laura” (the blockbuster unfinished novel of 2009) played out like something out of “Pale Fire”: a mysterious manuscript written on index cards, squirreled away from the public for decades, then released with an elaborate apparatus that makes you wonder, slightly, if the editors were actually crazy. The publication of Roberto Bolaño’s “2666” (the blockbuster posthumous novel of 2008) mimicked a Bolaño story: porous and unresolved, with the tantalizing possibility that there’s still more of it secretly out there somewhere, getting ready to leap out at us and unsettle everything. It’s as if an author’s unfinished work is his last and best (or the least improvable) fiction.
— Sam AndersonCurrently Reading
Taken with my iPhone
I’m still reading The Alienist as well as The Finkler Question. I did finish The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch and I’ll have a review of that posted shortly.
I only bought one book this past week, but that was for The Rumpus Book Club. I did acquire a few books.
- The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch
- Beautiful and Pointless by David Orr
- The Anti-Romantic Child by Priscilla Gilman
My to-read pile is still out of control, but I plan to slowly work on that in the coming months.
Web Reading
- The amazing Zadie Smith makes her debut at Harper’s. She reviews Harlem is Nowhere by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, My Prizes by Thomas Bernhard, and While the Women Are Sleeping by Javier Marias. Harlem is Nowhere is currently somewhere inside my to-read pile.
- It’s a hot month for Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts because Kaiama L. Glover reviews Harlem is Nowhere for the NYTimes.
- The National lists their 10 most overrated literary classics. I’m not a fan of their list at all, in fact I only agree with a couple of their picks, but I do enjoy their suggested reading.
- A web reading classic: Instant Message, Instant Love. I was blinded by the common belief that somehow a relationship forged on the Internet isn’t real. When I saw that fated text message — “I love you” — I realized the truth. The Internet is not a separate place a person can go to from the real world. The Internet is the real world. Only faster.
- Meaghan Winter interviews Dean Spade for Guernica. The average life span of a transgendered person is twenty-three years. The statistic is shocking, until it begins to make sense. Gender non-conformists face routine exclusion and violence. Transgendered people are disproportionately poor, homeless, and incarcerated. Many of the systems and facilities intended to help low-income people are sex-segregated and thereby alienate those who don’t comply with state-imposed categories. A trans woman may not be able to secure a bed in a homeless shelter, for example. Spade writes that just as the feminist movement tended to “focus on gender-universalized white women’s experience as ‘women’s experience,’” the lesbian- and gay-rights movement has focused primarily on a white, middle-class politic, centered on marriage and mainstream social mores. This really is a shocking statistic, even for me. I’m trans and I’ve been out for eight years now. I had no idea that the average life-span was so low.
- I posted a write-up of Oregon Bike Trails and Lord Huron at Music Mind Zone.
- Bookslut has an interview up with Deb Olin Unferth. A memoir is about time and the imperfectness of memory and the invention of the self. And it is from those considerations that you find your tensions.
- Going For A Beer by Robert Coover is probably one of the best short stories I’ve read this year. You can read it online over at The New Yorker.
- Speaking of short stories, Roxane Gay has a new one up at fwriction:review called Girls With Eating Disorders.
Currently Reading
I broke down and bought a Kindle. I’m going to mostly use it for travel purposes; it will be much easier to carry around a Kindle than it will be to carry around 4-5 books. My back is getting old. The first book I bought was The Finkler Question to get ready for the Tournament of Books, which begins today.
Taken with my iPhone
I still haven’t decided if I like reading on a Kindle. Maybe I just don’t like The Finkler Question enough to like reading it on the Kindle. I had to start reading one of the many books in my to-read pile in order to feel like I wasn’t losing my mind (or soul). I’m also reading The Alienist.
Taken with my iPhone
I’m only 30 pages into this but I am sort of into it. I’ve never really been able to get into Historical Fiction so much, maybe the only exception was The Lacuna.
I also finished a collection of poems this week — Things Come On. I won’t say too much about it other than I wouldn’t recommend it.
Taken with my iPhone
Books I Bought
I think I am going on a book buying moratorium starting ASAP. I have too many books in my to-read pile and I could use the extra cash. I have a problem and that problem is buying books. I did buy some books this past week though.
- Consider The Lobster by David Foster Wallace
- Model Home by Eric Puchner
- The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
- The Alienist by Caleb Carr
No more books for awhile. At least until The Pale King is released in April.
Web Reading
- This post of mine was linked over at The Morning News and also over at Coudal Partners which are two of my favorite sites (and have been for some time).
- I found this gem of an editorial by Stephen King on the short story: Last year, I read scores of stories that felt … not quite dead on the page, I won’t go that far, but airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers. The chief reason for all this, I think, is that bottom shelf. It’s tough for writers to write (and editors to edit) when faced with a shrinking audience. Once, in the days of the old Saturday Evening Post, short fiction was a stadium act; now it can barely fill a coffeehouse and often performs in the company of nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a mouth organ. If the stories felt airless, why not? When circulation falters, the air in the room gets stale.
- An excerpt of Pacazo by Roy Kesey is up at The Collagist. You can read my review of Pacazo over at The Rumpus.
- Roxane Gay writes one of the best reviews I’ve ever read and it happens to be a review of the next selection for The Rumpus Book Club, The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch.
- The Rumpus Book Club had a chat with author Jim Shepard about his new story collection You Think That’s Bad. You can read my review of the collection at The Rumpus and you can view my notes from the discussion at my tumblr. Shepard had a lot to say about empathy and writing.
- David Foster Wallace on grammar. And is a conjuction; so is so. Except in dialogue between particular kinds of characters, you never need both conjunctions. “He needed to eat, and so he bought food” is incorrect. In 95% of cases like this, what you want to do is cut the and.
- An excerpt of The Late American Novel: Writers On The Future of Books was posted at The Morning News. Who the hell doesn’t share books they own with other people? I can’t be friends with those people.
We added a new member to our family this weekend. Say hello to the new puppy.
Taken with my iPhone
Currently Reading
I’m currently reading To A Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thubron, a travel book based on Thubron’s journey to Mount Kailas in Tibet. So far, the book is beautifully written.
I still have a book pile, one that didn’t grow this week. I resisted the urge to buy more books. I know that I’ll have a big list come next week.
Currently Listening
Go Ahead by Banjo or Freakout
Web Reading
The New Yorker has published an excerpt of David Foster Wallace’s forthcoming book, The Pale King, under the title “Backbone.”
Chuck Klosterman thinks we’re all zombies. He’s probably right: “This is our collective fear projection: that we will be consumed. Zombies are like the Internet and the media and every conversation we don’t want to have. All of it comes at us endlessly (and thoughtlessly), and — if we surrender — we will be overtaken and absorbed. Yet this war is manageable, if not necessarily winnable. As long we keep deleting whatever’s directly in front of us, we survive. We live to eliminate the zombies of tomorrow. We are able to remain human, at least for the time being. Our enemy is relentless and colossal, but also uncreative and stupid.”
My review of The Bigger World by Noelle Kocot has been posted over at The Rumpus.
Vol1Brooklyn has started a literary trading card series. The first card is David Foster Wallace. I’m fist-pumping.
Sonya Chung writes about writing across gender lines over at The Millions: “The writing of good fiction requires, among many elusive talents, empathy and imagination. Put another way, the fiction writer must be like a trained actor, inhabiting the minds, emotions, and bodies of people whose essential makeup and experiences are quite different from his own. Write what you know has its limits, and many of us write to discover what we know, or to experience something of what we don’t know. Not to mention the fact that those empathic and imaginative muscles can get flabby; when we stretch them and work them, we stretch and work our whole intelligence.”
Over at MusicMindZone, I review Adele’s new album 21, which is spectacular.
Taken with my iPhone
I’m sick. Living in the North East this time of year means you get sick. One day it’s 60 degrees and the next day it’s 12. Not to mention that I live with teenagers that carry not only their own germs but the germs of everyone they come in contact with.
My new bed arrived today. I never want to leave it.
The mail arrived and Pank was waiting for me in the mailbox. I don’t remember buying a subscription, but I know I at least thought about it. That’s alright though, I’m pretty sure I did. I have a horrible memory and I often forget things. Even if I write things down, I forget.
I keep thinking about my life in terms of connectedness. I’m connected to everything all the time. I have my iPhone on me at all times unless I lose it, which happened last night at the show. It dropped behind one of our amps and I didn’t find it until this morning when we went to clear our stuff out. I don’t remember what happened last night after the show, but normally I’m always on my phone. I check email, I text, I check my buddy list. I look up directions and read restaurant reviews. I scan bar codes to see if I can find a product I want cheaper at another store. I take pictures of my niece.
A few years ago I couldn’t get enough of the Internet. I was always in my computer. My life wasn’t my own, I didn’t have a life. I was lost in a virtual world that didn’t really exist. But now I’m connected in another way, different from before. I have a life outside of the Internet and being connected isn’t a bad thing. I think I take it for granted, that I have access to these things. I know people that don’t and they don’t want them, they don’t care about them. I wish I could be more like them. I don’t like having my life out there for the world to see. I don’t like Facebook but I have a profile. Mostly I keep it around to stay up to date on family. If I didn’t have Facebook, I wouldn’t know that my cousin will vein from San Francisco next week.
I wish I could go back and use a fake name for everything. My name isn’t really Josh, but everyone I know calls me Josh, even in my real life. So if someone were to search my name on Google, they would search for Josh. I go by this name for a lot of reasons but it isn’t because I’m hiding anything. My parents call me Josh sometimes.
When I started blogging it wasn’t anything like it was today. I sort of miss how it used to be. People didn’t follow each other, we couldn’t tweet about a new blog post. I remember when RSS feeds didn’t exist. How we found out about each other was word of mouth, forums and message boards. Sites like twitter and tumblr changed the way people blogged about their lives, but that started happening before twitter and tumblr were even thought about.
What people don’t understand is that once something is on the Internet, you can’t take it off. You can delete it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist anymore. You can find it if you know where to look. I didn’t use to know that, I thought I could post whatever I wanted and I could delete it whenever I wanted to. I’m more careful about what I say now, I don’t talk about every aspect of my personal life and I don’t usually post my thoughts on political and social issues. Sometimes I do, but not as often as I used to. The things I say on here are my personal views, but someone from my company could read this and they might get upset with what I have to say. Or I could apply for a new job and they could search for me on the Internet.
My point is that the things I say online do impact my offline life. I didn’t always get that, I didn’t realize that. Now I do. I don’t have anything to hide so I don’t feel like using a fake name, there’s no point. I know where the line is, where offline and online begin and end.
I was talking about this with my sisters, which is why I brought this up on here. They are applying to colleges, to transfer to or as freshman, and they don’t seem to understand the power of the Internet and how it can impact them in their offline life. They post everything to their Facebook profiles. All of their emo, teenage angsty crap. They don’t care how a stranger from a college will perceive them from their profiles. It isn’t something they think about. They should. Not all colleges do this, not all employers, but a lot do. It’s becoming more common. I know because people ask me how to do it.