Book #8: The Louisville Review, Spring 2005

I bought this a few years back because it was edited by my favorite author. Surely it must therefore be a trove of wonderful writing, poetry and stories I would enjoy for years to come!

Sadly, no.

Last night I reread it, skimming over poems that didn’t grab me, sinking into the one short story that did, always with the standard question in the back of my mind: do I give it shelf space?

Shelf space is at a premium. So no - no, I do not give it shelf space. Out it goes.

In memoriam, here are the poems I liked:

• Maureen Morehead: Morning
• Brad Davis: Anticipating Retirement
• Jonathan Weinert: Blazes
• Amy M Clark: Do you want to hold the baby?

All of these appeal due to the sense of recognition I get from reading them: here is someone who has described something I encounter, something I understand, pretty much exactly. I think I recall reading somewhere that appreciation due to recognition is the lowest form of enjoyment - but a) so what and b) I’m not sure I agree anyway. If someone has put into a words a feeling I’ve had trouble pinning down, and reading it helps me understand it, why isn’t that as artistically compelling as opening up a new idea?

I also sank into one story: David Brendan Hopes’ “Night, Sleep, and the Dreams of Lovers.” This wasn’t great - it was a little contrived and the ending didn’t match up with what had gone before - but I liked the idea. I liked what I imagine the story could have been. General idea is that a painter, very skilled, has his paintings stolen by a fellow student (an MBA, amusingly) - but the fellow student is stealing the paintings and resellling them for the painter’s benefit. In the end, the two characters interact less & less, and finally the painter disappears - which I thought was a bit of a cop-out. I would have rather seen the two characters go at it. There was nothing in the story itself that precluded interaction, fireworks, etc. - so why not indulge the reader’s curiousity?

Book #7: Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home, by Lynn Freed

For about a year I have been searching out books about writing: Stephen King’s On Writing, one by Annie Dillard, a couple of workbook-y things that appear to be part of a series, and most recently, Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home by Lynn Freed.
I have no idea who Lynn Freed is. I bought the book because of the picture on the cover: a young woman with neat 1950s hair, wearing a green dress and carrying a typewriter.
A chapter in, I almost gave up on the book. It was all about the writer’s childhood, her reactions to South Africa and her family, ie things guaranteed to bore me. I find that books about place which are written by people with a strong emotional connection to that place almost always do bore me. There’s no element of discovery, only justification of why the writer is writing about this. Ugh.
At any rate, I plowed on. The book was a convenient size for tossing in my backpack and reading in bed. And I still liked the picture on the cover.
Partway in, the author finally got around to talking about writing: the frustration of false starts, the need to bury or immerse oneself in words to make anything work. “Fiction does not come out of ideas....” “I had deafened myself with thinking....” “A wonderful thing happened. I gave up.” “I opened the notebook and wrote ‘Untitled.’ Then I had to lie down on the bed and sleep for the rest of the day.”
And from talking about writing, to talking about travel: “I have always been a natural foreigner.”
And about the course of life: “still I was asking myself the question I had been asking for as long as I can remember: Is this what you want? ... only now did an answer arrive without a hint of prevarication: No.”
And finally, and most important to me currently, about writing programs, about workshops, about MFAs: a long chapter about the misery of teaching in such, about the inherent contradiction between an environment of incremental progress in a group setting and the solitary nature of getting words down on the page. I read this as justification for not studying what I spend time on, both visual and textual, for the arrogance of thinking I can churn out a manuscript in the next few months. I read this as a challenge, or, better-phrased (since my response to challenges is usually to glare and decide not to play) as inspiration.
Those parts of the book, I couldn’t put down.
I only wish those parts of the book composed more than half.
So I am left with a quandary: give it shelf space? Photocopy the chapters that matter to me and sell it off? Reread it again in a year and see what I think?
I still like the photo of the girl in the green dress, staring out so precisely with her typewriter in hand.

In case you're wondering ...

... why it took me so long to finish Microserfs, it's because I am currently also reading:

Snow, by Orhan Pamuk
--> artistic & cool, but it's taking me forever - something about its being a translation, I think. Sigh.

Temples, Tombs, & Hieroglyphs, by Barbara Mertz
--> Egypt is fun. This book is like gossip about Egypt.

Tim Gunn: A Guide to Quality, Taste, and Style, by Tim Gunn
--> lent to me by a coworker with whom I had a mind-clearing conversation about shoes & closets. I have decided my style mentor is Katherine Hepburn.

Write Away, by Elizabeth George
--> for inspiration; it's so like an instruction manual that I can't help but be seduced. Also a good read.

The Queen of the South, by Arturo Perez-Reverte
--> I want to like this book, so I'm still reading it, but I keep getting bored.

So there.

'Microserfs' is genius

... because it includes lines like this:

"What's truly freaky is realizing I'm vulnerable to identity changes because I'm so desperate to find a niche. I feel like Crystal Pepsi."

and

"People without lives like to hang out with other people who don't have lives. Thus they form lives."

and

"Letting go of randomness is one of the hardest decisions a person can make.... If you concoct a convincing meta-personality, ... then that personality really IS you."

This is one of the best 5 books I've read this year. Easy.

Microserfs

I am reading Microserfs, by Douglas Coupland, and it has occurred to me that there may be absolutely no difference between Microsoft in the '90s and my own Big Tech Company today.

I am not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it does give me a comforting feeling of being part of a tradition. Lately I have been thinking a lot about things lacking in the current version of my life, these being primarily 1) large sweeping vistas of scenery and 2) traditions (at least work- or geography-related traditions).

In a similar vein I had a conversation with my guy a couple of weeks ago in which we learned that a large part of my connection to Monterey relates to my sense of its history, and that that simply isn't something which he shares. Instead, he is aware of various aspects of Carmel which I had never even realized might exist.

Somewhat ironically, I think a large part of my sense of Monterey's history derives from my time doing community theater in its old buildings. I acted Shakespeare's Plantagenets cycle of history plays in the Memory Garden near the Custom House, and somehow wound up very aware of Monterey's several-hundred-years-after-Shakespeare Mexican and whaling traditions. This is where they stabled the horses, I thought, and here are the bread ovens, while I bashed enthusiastically away at various other community theater enthusiasts with a fake, badly-centered broadsword. It made sense at the time.