A Caricature

Daily Dose

From Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

HERE

"And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment."

From Chapter IX, the Sermon

Daily Dose

From Am I Alone Here? Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live, by Peter Orner

PLOT

"Plot's got to do what plot's got to do.  But maybe that's why I've always been so wary of it.  It forces characters to do something, anything, when all they should be doing is heading home."

From Early Morning Thoughts on Ahab

Daily Dose

From Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

ALL

"All these particulars are faithfully narrated here, as they will not fail to elucidate several more important, however intricate passages, in scenes hereafter to be painted."

From Chapter LXIII, The Crotch

The Test of Affection

This is the last day at the bookstore for yet another of my friends.  His name is Matthew Simmons.  He's been working there for more than a decade and we've been friends for at least that long.  I will miss him.

When I met him, he was hosting events at the bookstore.  Good looking boy, not yet thirty at the time, very attractive; bright, blushing and clever.  One day he posted a note, a charming confession of certain deficiencies in his reading to date.  He'd finally mastered Moby Dick, I think it was, and had determined to do more in that line; the great unread classics.  In the note, he'd asked his coworkers, a fairly literate bunch as might be imagined, to provide him a list of the books he most needed to read.  Delightful, and absolutely earnest.  As I remember it, it came to quite a list and so far I can remember, he read every book on it.  My nomination was Daisy Ashford's The Young Visiters, or, Mr Salteena's Plan, easily the greatest novel ever written by a nine year old, but hardly required reading.  It was a fatuous suggestion, a not entirely nice poke at a young writer's supposedly "late start."  Matthew read the book.  What's more, he enjoyed it.  And he appreciated my joke more than it, or I, deserved.  Makes my face burn now to think of it.  Nonetheless we became fast friends.

Since then Matthew has become the company's copywriter, an editor and a published author of some reputation.  I've had the privilege of reading what he's written as it's come.  From the first story of his that I read down to his most recent published book, Happy Rock, I have been a fan.  This is of itself odd, despite our now long-established friendship, as Matthew writes, and writes superbly well in a style so unlike anything I might otherwise read as to make my genuine appreciation of his work well neigh miraculous.  The clear inference would be that either my judgement has been clouded by my affection for the writer, or that he is just that good at what he does.  He is just that good at what he does.

What he does is write the most fantastical modern nonsense; witty, elliptical, loopy, but always grounded in an acutely concrete and recognizable, very American, reality.  His is not the sort of thing I would normally read.  Moreover, and most amazingly, in stories seemingly made up of nothing more than long car rides, dreadful metalhead music, dull suburban driveways and thwarted conversations, sometimes with the dead or just the dull-witted, stories with more than sufficient darkness in them, some of them, he manages an elegant play of serious ideas, good humor, and sincere emotion.  No idea how he does it.  None.  He's never written an awkward sentence in his fiction.  His essays and occasional pieces have never been less than delightful.  He's never been cruel.  He never fails to surprise me.  There is just so much we do not have in common, generationally and personally, particularly when it comes to contemporary literature and music, and yet I can honestly say I have happily gone wherever he decided to take me. I look forward to where we'll go next, wherever that might be, god help me.

He has, as it turns out, an exceptional talent, a sound head, a great ear.  He has a good heart.

And now he has a new job.

It isn't the writer I will miss.  What he writes, I'll read.  I will miss his dear face, his bright eyes and ready giggle.  I will miss him popping up -- he does actually seem sometimes to pop -- at my desk on the sales floor, just to say "hello," or to bump me with his dear, shaggy head, like some affectionate cat.  I will miss our conversations on the fly about this and that, about books and whatnot, our jokes and absurdities, our rare shared miseries.  I'll miss the very sight of him.

I wish him of course nothing but good things.  It's time he moved on, time other people and other places had the benefit of him, his talent, his good sense.

When he confided in me that he'd got this new gig and would be gone in a week, I was genuinely happy for him.  I am still.  But miss him I will.  And proud of him I am as well.  What a good writer he's become in just the time I've known him!  What a good man, and a good friend.

(I'm reminded of yet another friend from work, himself now a published novelist, also moved on, largely, to other pursuits and about whom I was not even able at the time he left to write so much as this, as it was just too hard to think of the bookstore and my day without him.   I regret that, though I tried to say something publicly thereafter.  Still.  I determined this time to be a bit less self-pitying and mark the day.)

I admit, I will probably get a bit misty when I see Matthew, later today, for his last day working at the bookstore.  Ridiculous, really, more my sort of thing, I should think, than his, the Byron I'm reminded of.  Such a drama queen, me.   At it's full length it's far too much for the occasion -- nobody's died here, people -- and it is a bit silly, but the first stanza, at least, by way of farewell, then, to ward off some even more maudlin or worse, if sincere, demonstration:

When Friendship or Love 
Our sympathies move;
When Truth, in a glance, should appear,
The lips may beguile,
With a dimple or smile,
But the test of affection's a Tear.


Now, go kick the world right in the ass, Matthew, my dear.

Great Turkeys of Literature: One

Quick Review

The Event of Literature by Terry Eagleton

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I don't do the crossword puzzle.  I'm not much for games, generally.  I enjoy a hand or two of rummy once in a long while, but the friend who tried to teach me bridge eventually gave up in tears.  In junior high, the basketball coach taught me chess during practices.  I was the team manager.  We were bored.  I was never very good at it, but at least it was more interesting than boys running drills -- for the coach, anyway.  I had my own interests there. 

Reading Terry Eagleton is sudoku for me.  Just as sudoku uses numbers but doesn't actually involve arithmetic, so with Eagleton and literature.  Oh, the name of a novelist may pop up now and then, but it doesn't signify.  One no more has to have read Melville to enjoy Eagleton than one has to remember algebra to play sudoku.  (If you want to know who actually matters in Eagleton, who the writers are he's reading, other than Marx who always comes out on top for citations, check the index. More importantly, who are the writers with whom Terry Eagleton is arguing?  Just check the index for critics, familiar and otherwise.  Pretty safe bet that if the name's unfamiliar, Terry's got his number.  Ultimately, you're more likely to find Stanley Fish served up than Moby Dick.) The game Eagleton plays happens to use literature, but I don't doubt he could play it just as well, and every bit as divertingly with The Old Farmers Almanac, or reports from the Department of Agriculture.  Books are the clues, but substitute "crop yields" for "semiotics," and what might be lost in meaning wouldn't be so very much, and the result would be just as much fun.

Really what this particular puzzle book is meant to be I suppose is something of an elegy for the faded charms of theory in general, which Eagleton seems to feel have lost their rosy glow.  Hadn't noticed.  Still, he would know, wouldn't he?  Now, the Professor never really approved of all that stuff anyway, it seems.  There's a right way and a wrong way.  Every game has its rules, and so on. Seems all those theorists were atheists or something.  Who remembers?  Doesn't matter.  The game, and great fun it is too, is all to do with the logical progression of Eagleton's argument, not with whom he's having it, what it might be about or whether it matters to anyone else.  Trying to guess Eagleton's next move is always fun, but frankly I'm no better at this game than I was a bridge.  Doesn't matter.  Terry Eagleton's a grand master of this nonsense.  Every performance is about equally dazzling.

In fact, Terry Eagleton is the Will Shortz of this kind of puzzle-making.

It doesn't really pay to study this kind of book with the idea of understanding how Moby Dick -- just for consistency's sake -- works or doesn't works, why one ought to read it in preference, for instance, to any other novel, or why one ought to read novels at all, for that matter. (I don't know that Professor Eagleton thinks we should. Don't know what Professor Fish would say.)

Meanwhile, at least between novels, for the exercise if to no other or better purpose, I will now and again find myself sucked in by the goofy magnetism of Eagleton's witty, giddy gamesmanship.  I can't recommend it highly enough for those long winter afternoons, by the space-heater.  If there's no one around for backgammon and you're not ready for your nap, give the old boy a try. 

Perfectly harmless fun.



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A Bookstore Doodle

This is actually about the level of wit actually produced during any given hour spent working at the Information Desk in the New & Used Books Department of a Saturday.   Don't want anyone thinking we are nothing but sparkling.  Still, if we giggle, that's not a bad thing, is it?  Who knows where this one started, but here we are.

Hip Check

Everyone has an uncle who dances at weddings. He is well past his dancing days, and any sense of decorum after a drink or two, and yet not so ancient as to be thought "adorable" for attempting the Electric Slide while quite properly sidelined with a bum hip. No. This is that peripheral relation whose presence is little noted and or explained with tight smiles at most family functions, invited sadly as a matter of course, but about whom the bride and her intended know mostly only what they've heard, and of whom all but his otherwise nearest and dearest have heard little and remember less. An inoffensive person, naturally shy in any other circumstances, he has but the one fault really, other than his age. Often as not, the bar has been warned. As has the DJ, who however, forgetting who has paid him for the night and not really seeing the harm, after much research, strikes up the otherwise unremembered and distinctly unavuncular number specially requested. All is amazement, at first, as Uncle busts moves unseen in a generation. Sharp looks find their targets even in the haze of general confusion and amusement. Fraternal heads are hung in weary resignation to the inevitable, even as the dear man finds his feet and shows the youngsters "how it's done." Only then is he really remembered from high school, recognized by distant cousins, and made familiar to the rising age. As he gyrates inappropriately near the the other dancers, all becomes clear, including the dance-floor. The previously uninstructed young offer giggly imitations from the safety of the doorway of his unfamiliar if all too imitable steps and the toddlers are barely restrained from joining him. The waiters stop clearing to watch. Some dotty old party claps him arithmetically on. Surprise turns to smug disapproval among the matrons his own age when he pulls the least attractive and most loaded of the bridesmaids into his performance, and his masculine contemporaries can't help but admire, however grudgingly, his unexpected upper-body-strength when he lifts his giddy partner off the floor where she's fallen and almost above his head. To conclude this exhibition, the DJ, now much mortified and remembering the other half of his fee, will have sensibly and seamlessly transitioned into something irresistible to the general run of wedding guests, by Kool & The Gang, or Louis Prima if the crowd is older and Italian. Relief will bring even bride and groom and their footsore parents back to the floor. Anything to move things along. The bridesmaids move in quickly to rescue the stray, and hold her loose hair back as she loses more than her share of the wedding cake and all memory of her moment in the spotlight.

And the dancing uncle? His shirt-tails out, what there is of his hair displaced and damp, is forcibly retired, still steaming, from the field, draped in dry napkins, and forcefully offered a cigarette and coffee in the parking lot by some musical nephew and an imposingly built friend or two of the groom.

Blessed be.

In reading a Washington Post piece by Monicca Hesse," As books go beyond printed page to multisensory experience, what about reading?" I was much reminded of just such inevitable incidents and the humane instinct to turn us from the folly of all such undignified attempts at the resumption cultural relevance in a moment not our own. For any not old enough to remember the first infancy of the electronic or "e-book," I will recount my first exposure, back in that long ago of independent bookselling when the marketplace still had urgent need of us and we still took meetings with unfamiliar sales reps.

At a conference table headed by a forward-thinking manager of mine, in gathered the representatives of all the bookstore's departments and branches to listen to a pitch. The young man in short sleeves and a tie, after a somewhat confused introduction, proudly displayed the latest thing in new technology, and launched a rather dry, if cheerful, explanation of the wonders of "software books." Moby Dick might be read with "authentic" whale song! Little Women could at last be enjoyed with "an interactive feature" that allowed for the playing of childish games from the Civil War era, otherwise lost to any but scholars! With the click of a button, Jane Austen's country balls could be brought back to merry, musical life! Now perhaps I may have made that last sound even worse than our presenter did, but such was the true nature of the young man's bright enthusiasm and misjudgement of his audience that it is hard even now not to exaggerate his naivete or overestimate his failure to anticipate the bemused outrage of his listeners.

Having been peppered with interruptions about the relevance of musical accompaniment to reading, the authenticity of his texts, the weight in the hand of his machine, and the intended, if as yet not existent audience for all his bells and his whistles, and having been questioned closely as to the motives of his employers, the young pioneer retired, obviously rattled and without a sale. The fledgling company he represented has no doubt long since gone the way of all such premature innovation.

But times change, or rather, those of us still concerned with books continue to hope. And so, with the enormous advances in technology since that far off pitch, there are now again it seems, publishers ready to make another go at making books "interactive." No longer forced to tinker in the public domain, the nerds have now the money and wherewithal to hire hacks of their own, make "projects" of their new books; adding egg-hunts and incorporating "definitive" video dramatizations in embedded clips, that will make of the traditional book... what, exactly?

Sadly, from the evidence offered thus far, the result is not so much the promised new hybrid entertainment with prose at its core, as yet another misguided attempt at revivifying the supposedly antique and moribund custom of reading a book, by making it other than satisfying of itself. This time, the latest "digi-books" are aimed primarily at young readers. A generation at least has come up since Moby Dick was made to sing at that conference table. A generation and more of middle class children have been read to relentlessly from before birth. Indeed, reading has been bureaucratically endorsed, educationally analysed and promoted almost out of existence as a leisured pursuit among the educated classes. Bombarded throughout their adolescence with well intentioned, carefully catered messages from parents, librarians and the publishers of children's pap, meant as relentless reinforcement of their unique individuality and value, and the unassailable virtue of being young, these "young adults," have been raised to read as a duty, and yet seem inexplicably resistant to reading a book for pleasure. Denied nothing but a quiet afternoon and an unscheduled hour, they seem, most ungratefully, to prefer the conversation of their peers to the literature of their ancestors.

They must be wooed back to books, mustn't they? And so... they are being offered what again? Simpler stuff in brighter colors and with louder noise. Books must be made more like, well, other things, things the kids actually like, like movies and Youtube and this whole Internet business. And so the whales must be made to sing again! Only this time, the prose shouldn't be so hard, maybe. And so we get "vooks" that are immediately recognizable to those of us who remember the last attempt to make books "interactive," books that are little more than the latest Hellzapoppin' sideshow from the gray sages of corporate publishing: books that are not books, but bastardy video games, half-assed puzzles and lazy narratives plucked up and painted from the discard bins of fiction. The new, completely original "digi-books" thus tarted up and made to dance, have all the rather quaint if more than a little embarrassing fascination of a Fat Lady attempting to crunk.

Or put it another way, dear old uncle is dancing at the wedding again.

When will we learn to act our age?

A Nudge

It may sound unlikely, but I rather enjoy confused customers. I don't mean those who can not find the bathrooms, or think they are receiving messages from imaginary third parties to our conversation, or even to those unaccustomed to book shopping in an actual store -- a growing population of the young -- rather, I refer to sound, healthy readers who come to the bookstore not this time to browse or to fetch their next book, but from an uncharacteristic desperation. These customers may have just unexpectedly finished a book at the bust-stop, having mistimed the pages they had left when they left the house that morning. I've done that. They may have lost a book, or left a book behind them and realized this fact too late or too far from home. I've done that as well. Then again, they need not be without a book, to require another. Perhaps what they've been reading no longer suits them, or the hour's commute, or they may have just begun with a book and found attention wandering, the style bad, or the content unpleasant. They may have been forced, finally, to abandon all hope of ever finishing Moby Dick. For whatever reason then, these customers are either book-less, badly matched, or bored, and having come into the bookstore in hopes of better days, they find themselves either overwhelmed or just blinking. They stand stock still in the middle of the sales-floor and just look helplessly 'round, waiting to be told what to read next. Their confusion is temporary, most often needing just a title or two to shake off the mood, but somehow, this once, unable to do so unassisted. Perfectly capable of seeing to themselves most times, for whatever reason, they are lost between books.

I do sympathize.

To help such customers in the usual way is impossible. The known will not do; for that they might better have been left alone. Neither will bestsellers or familiarity of genre answer. What's needed is something unlike, unusual, unexpected. It takes a bit of diagnosis, but if what ails is not to be cured in the routine way, I find a slight shock the best way to jar loose an unexpected enthusiasm. Nothing outlandish. I don't recommend James Ellroy to a Romance reader, or suggest Angela Thirkell to someone stymied by Céline. More a prodding than a push, what's required is a book, or kind of book, like enough to interest but unlikely to have been considered.

Whatever I'm meant to be reading just now -- and there is plenty that I should -- I find I simply can not concentrate enough to read fiction. Novel after novel, for good reasons and bad, has lately been by me let drop, so that the pile of unread fiction by my bed grows too high, the books already in my bag, too heavy to carry on. Story suddenly bores me. My mind refuses narrative. Characters wander off. Nothing pleases, nothing works. Favorite authors, favorite books, provide no sense of relief. It is just a mood, I understand, but when it is on me, all that will do is -- history. Now that may be an odd fact, but it is a fact of my reading. When I can not otherwise read, I can always read history. Familiar history or periods, places and or persons unknown, there is in history, for me, is a refuge.

Nothing relevantly topical or themed, you understand, nothing politically challenging or intended to do anything but tell. I don't so much want to learn, or to be lectured as to watch a parade. The instinct is passive, it calls for pageantry and people watching, whole lives, rounded already, "with a sleep." When fiction fails me, or I fail it, I think this may be why; I have no room left in my head for the allusive, the indefinite, the suggestive. I do not wish to work, worry or wonder. I want only to be told, and told the whole; beginning, middle and end. Popular history -- meaning written as literature rather than polemic or for purposes of academic promotion -- provides, even more than biography, the assurance of resolution. Many lives will pass in history, one need not know them all so well as to have more than a passing sympathy. I do not need a friend, I need a crowd, anonymity, events.

Lately, the mood to disappear being on me as my vacation approaches, I root out yet another little volume of Green's History of the English People. With relief, I find the Stuarts following the Tudors. just as they should, to be undone in turn by the Puritans, just as they so richly deserved. For me, this is perfect relaxation. I did not think to read again any of this long story. My hand just found this little book, Volume VIII, for me, and I am content. Why had I not thought of this before?

And yet, I never do. Instead, history waits patiently for just this mood.

And now I want nothing else. Having come to Cromwell, I want more. Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England, by Sir Charles Firth, finds me too. Published in a little Oxford Classic, it is the right size to match the Green. I own it, but have never read the book before. And Lisa Jardine's Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory, catches my eye. She's quite good. I've read Jardine before, but this one came into the store unnoticed by me last August.

It seems, I have a topic.

History may not work for the next lost soul. Might be anthropology. Might be genetics. Might be Buddhist meditation. Might be... anything. Anything, so long as it isn't whatever it was I had, or lost, or ought.

And what's less likely, I ask you, than warty old Oliver and Co. tonight? Perhaps the landing of the Orange? Ah, possibilities again.

Unnecessarily Reluctantly Recommended Reading

I am a little taken aback at the number of perfectly nice people willing to tell me what I don't read. I will admit that as I've gotten older and fatter, so have the books I prefer to read. I do, however, read new books, of necessity, both for my job and for the committee on which I serve, and I am no more averse to having recommendations made me than I am to making. But my prejudices I freely, perhaps too freely, admit, and these, in common with my known preferences, tend to make people shy of putting their favorites in my way. Yet, when I ask a friend or a stranger for the name of the book before them, my curiosity is sincere, despite my evident reputation as a bully. On the rarer occasions when a recommendation is offered me, even by a friend, it is usually prefaced with an apology -- something I do myself, more often than not, and with better cause, as no one need like what I do -- it's just good manners. More frustratingly, lately, the books proffered me come with a warning, usually something like, "I love this book! But I know you won't care for it." Now that is no recommendation at all, is it?

People can be shy of telling others what to read. This is true, even or specially among booksellers, who, every working day, tell strangers what they ought to read or might like. Again, I have no illusions, when happily burbling, for instance, some anecdote recently gleaned from my wonderful new, two volume set of Johnsonian Miscellanies, that the polite smiles with which this sort of thing are usually met are anything other than what they seem. I am indulged, affectionately, by my weary audience, from loyalty and, I suspect, because it is easier, as it were, to simply accept the slobbery tennis ball dropped at one's feet and pat the beast. When given the slightest encouragement, though, like any friendly mongrel, I will want to play on, so indulging me in yet another Johnson story can lead to rather lengthy trials of patience. I know this. My friends and coworkers know this, as does my long suffering, and not bookish husband, and yet I am let off leash often enough that I believe I must be loved. There is no better explanation. But I understand that while my enthusiasms are kindly accommodated, they are rarely shared, so I tend to tell stories from my books rather than press the books themselves into the hands of those that love me best. I think this may be the best compromise I may expect. I don't know just how infrequently these often muddled excepts have actually led anyone to the good books from which I made them. I don't know that I want to know. Actually, I am sadly aware of the limits of my influence, and my admitted eccentricities of taste, and prefer, like most chatty old parties, to imagine myself, if no evangelist, at least no preacher either. I hope to amuse and hope I don't, too often, bore.

When a friend at the bookstore, with whom I was at the time less well acquainted, was compiling a list of recommendations of the best books he had never had the opportunity of reading, having been an English major, there were many of the usual classics, Moby Dick and the like, (a book, by the way I've never been able to finish,) and my contribution, from the top of my big pointed head, was a little known gem by Daisy Ashford, The Young Visiters, or, Mister Salteena's Plan. Written when the author was all of nine years old, and published, in 1919, with a preface by no less than J. M. Barrie, this wonderful book has my favorite opening line:

"Mr. Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking people to stay with him."

It would be hard to improve on that, but Miss Ashford's book, so far as I'm concerned, just gets better and better. “My life will be sour grapes and ashes without you,” for example, is a line I have quoted, too often, and is but one of too many wonderful lines from this book. “Bernard always had a few prayers in the hall and some whiskey afterwards as he was rather pious,” for example, or “I am partial to ladies if they are nice. I suppose it is my nature. I am not quite a gentleman but you would hardly notice it,” which, again, I once dropped into any conversation I could. So for me to recommend this little book as not only a favorite, but a model, I think, of the best kind of English prose, for which, after all, he had asked, seemed quite the right thing to do. I offered dear little Daisy to my young friend, himself a writer, as the perfect antidote to the kind of BFA/MLA seriousness to which his list seemed otherwise inclining. Made perfect sense to me. Don't know that it made any sense to my friend, when he read it, though I know he did in fact do so, bless 'im, or that I explained my enthusiasm well enough to justify setting Miss Ashford down in The Pantheon next to Mr. Melville, but such is the danger of asking others for their best books.

I have read with great pleasure so many books otherwise unknown to me, based on no better authority than just such whimsical council. I believe, for the most part, I am at least polite, and I will try almost anything, once -- save perhaps heroin or morally instructional children's books. (A very different thing from a book by an author who happened to be a child, let me point out.) So I am a little hurt when told I will not care for something I haven't read. This may be true or it may not. Try me. You don't know until you do.