Word Blur

Alternadad

As I was slowly reading Neal Pollack’s Alternadad (over the last two months), I felt mild annoyance bubbling up in me nearly as often as not. The whole clueless hipster “I just leave that to my wife and fire up the bong because I’m selfish” confessional bent that underlies the work is rendered only nominally less offensive because it’s self-aware. And honestly, it seemed a little rambling, although I definitely laughed out loud a few times and was happy to see a couple of my pals referenced in one way or another.

A funny thing happened when I finished it yesterday though. All of a sudden I found the whole work hopelessly moving. It perfectly captures the rhythm of contemporary parenting: you try so hard, and as often as not so wrong (finding the “perfect” Montessori school, buying organic whole wheat crackers, providing just the right kind of rock-and-roll education), to do the best for your kid until the pressure builds and you have to relax the whole enterprise (crank up the Elmo, escape to Chicago on a bender, meet the other parents’ withering glares head on while acknowledging in the back of your head that they might be right). Maybe this is just where I’m at in my own life, but I found his account of the desperate attempt to balance self and devotion surprisingly valiant.

In the end, my crotchety old judgments seem kind of lame measured against that.

The Original Fake Writer

I am currently somewhere between the first and last pages of the following books: The Omnivore's Dilemma, Loving, The Rising of the Moon, From Where You Dream, Alternadad (I'm not too proud to admit it), and the Francine Prose book I blogged about months ago.  It's pretty pathetic.  This will never stop me from adding more books to my to-read pile and now I'm all hot under the collar about James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips.

From the Boldtype review:

Science-fiction enthusiasts know James Tiptree, Jr. as a remarkable, energetic, and inventive storyteller who burst onto the scene in the late '60s with a series of stories that helped define the genre. His tales explored the role of sexuality and gender, and although told from a man's point of view, they were often sympathetic to women. Tiptree carried on lengthy correspondences with editors, as well as other sci-fi heavyweights (notably Phillip K. Dick and Ursula K. LeGuin), none of whom had ever met Tiptree in person. Then, in 1976, James Tiptree, Jr. was revealed to be a 61-year-old woman named Alice B. Sheldon who lived in rural Virginia.

Sound familiar?  Her story gets even more interesting (at various points Sheldon was a debutante, a painter, a CIA agent, and a chicken farmer) and ultimately tragic (she took her own life in a murder/suicide pact with her husband).  I'm so all in.

A few links, some commentary

Here’s an article about how the forthcoming Jane Austen biopic will be marketed to aggressively to teens, in which the director is quoted as saying, “There is a stereotype of Jane as a spinster obsessed with manners. But we are looking at her when she is 21, full of life and hope and kicking against the restrictions around her." Are we going to get a randy Austen, to go with our randy Bennets and Eyres?

It seems there is a full-fledged movement, a handful of revolutionary cadres around the nation, at work implementing my soup collective idea. And in the spirit of our new open source world, they share their blueprint for soup swapping.

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, it’s worth mentioning that I still love cupcakes. Nothing says Valentine’s Day like cupcakes.

Also, check out this extremely cool public [art?] project – a guy who sets up his sewing machine in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district once a month and sews whatever you bring him.

I'm So Gloriously Happy

You can open at random to any page of Rupert Everett's autobiography, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins and find yourself awash in a mind-blowing yet delicious combination of purple prose and dropped names.  I'd been reading it for less than ten minutes before encountering the following:

On the unreleased film Unconditional Love: “The shoot was in Chicago so I gave up the house in the Hollywood hills and moved a sulky and reluctant Martin back to New York where the only hard-on seemed to be the rigor mortis of our relationship.”

On Beatrice Dalle: “Her kind of beauty was definitely pre-Botox, much deeper than the cash-and-carry bargains of today. Its origins were the gaslit barmaids of Manet, and the Parisian demi-monde between the wars.”

On Paula Yates: “Then she had a beautiful neck. It was long and slender and inspired the same head rush -- a man could break it with one hand. It rose from her lovely boy’s shoulders and the flat chest of a Bloomsbury lesbian.”

From the chapter entitled “Donatella’s New Year’s Eve Party" : “Chairs peeled off in all directions in a swastika for intimate asides over cigarettes and crossed legs, but the undertow on this particular stretch of bitch was strong and soon, they had been swept back out to sea by the acid tongue of Madonna’s brother Christopher Ciccone, the glum monosyllabic reply of Guy Ritchie, or the polite but firm dismissal of Gwyneth Paltrow.”

Instant classic.

To-do list

A few things I’d like to start in 2007:

1) A company called “Ms. T-Shirt and Mr. Pillow” to sell my crafty wares. First I have to learn how to make pillows.

2) A soup collective where everyone makes huge batches of soup than gets together once a week and trades. You would have enough soup for the week and could freeze whatever you weren’t planning on eating. I’d probably start off with a delicate escarole and white bean concoction, just to set the right tone.

3) A series of writings based on Fred Astaire movies.

4) Middlemarch. Actually, more specifically, I’d like to finish this one. My friend Sarah was just visiting and we had this whole discussion about how we had both tried to read Middlemarch about ten times and stopped in the same place. She said she had heard that the thing to do was to just jump past the long sections on reformation politics, which sounds completely heretically, doesn‘t it? She got this tip from her friend’s wife who had heard it from her mother who is a Virginia Woolf scholar. There you go: Virginia Woolf scholars skip over huge sections of George Eliot novels. I was reminded of this because my mom was chatting it up with her friend Joan on the phone this morning and I was called over to give a consultation on how to get through the early novels in Trollope’s Barchester Chronicles. “Okay,” I told her, all business. “You’re going to hear a lot about ecclesiastical politics -- just skim these parts, or listen to the first few books on tape while you’re doing something else.” Then they started talking about Pepys’s diaries, which I’ve always wanted to read, so my mom passed the phone back my way. “Okay,” said Joan. “The way to do it is to just dip in from time to time. Of course, there’s a lot about naval affairs that’s really kind of a wash…”

So here you have a trifecta of literary advice. Politics, religion, warfare: just skip over it until you get to the good parts.

Hillbilly Gothic

One of the books I’m adding to my impossibly long to-read list is Hillbilly Gothic: A Memoir of Madness and Motherhood by Adrienne Martini, which was reviewed in the most recent issue of Brain, Child.  The book describes Martini’s own bout with severe post-partum depression and her Appalachian family’s dramatic history of mental illness, with what one reviewer describes as “comedic chops.”

Feelings are Facts; Yvonne Rainer is a Diety

So one of my all-time heroes recently published a memoir with MIT press. This is the book that I at this precise moment have the most burning, urgent desire to read, particularly as the prose in the new Phillip Roth I’m actually reading has unaccountably turned from impeccable descriptions of the ordinary and universal trudge toward death to a catalog of salacious sexual encounters and positions (think anal). Maybe my surprise at this denouement just demonstrates my lack of experience with Phillip Roth. Yvonne Rainer on the other hand has rocked my world since I was an undergraduate discovering her cerebral yet lyrical deconstruction of the world of dance. I still think of her “say no” manifesto (no to virtuosity!) as one of the seminal works I’ve read. Ever.

"Alice, Off the Page"

Read the most wonderful essay by Calvin Trillin in the new New Yorker last night, about his late wife Alice.

I’ve always liked Calvin Trillin’s food writing (more, I confess, then his short political poems).  It’s passionate, funny, and vigilantly unpretentious, but it’s at it’s absolute best when he’s talking about his family (and he usually is).  I remember a really amazing essay about his quest for the perfect pumpernickel bagel, which he hoped would lure his daughter back to New York from California.  The tale turned surprisingly poignant after it had made me laugh out loud several times and taught me a lot about the history and methods of baking bagels.

“Alice, Off the Page,” is different from anything else of his I’ve read.  The strokes are not so broad and his attempt to show us who Alice really was, not just who he’s told us she was in his past writing, is an incredibly moving undertaking.   You feel he really needs to get it right, and the impossibility of that task, and the nobility of the effort.  The writing is beautiful; it’s straightforward, honest, it never manipulates us.  Reading this piece made me feel like I had suddenly understood more about what compels people to write in the first place, to tell a story.

Recommended.

Publishing Scandals

So James "The Man Who Conned Oprah" Frey may not have as much time in prison as he claims in his best-selling memoir A Million Little Pieces.  And JT Leroy, the troubled publishing darling behind Sarah, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, and Harold's End is just about definitively unmasked as both a 40-year old "unfullfilled" musician (actually half of the couple who claimed to take him in and save him from a life of prostitution and drug addiction) and a young "actress" (actually the sister of the other half of said couple) in her mid-twenties.  It's all good.

Links: the smoking gun, gawker, powells (books), nyt

Truth and Beauty

I read Truth and Beauty, Ann Patchett’s memoir about her friendship with Lucy Grealy, quite some time ago now. This was actually something I read with my book club and the discussion it engendered was revealing. People had intense reactions to Lucy (her troubles, her demands, her neediness), which probably means that her character was strongly drawn. The language was beautiful, heartbreaking, haunting, and all those other things you expect me to say next. It’s interesting, because you know, Lucy Grealy had this incredibly moving and fascinating life: she suffered and survived cancer through much of her childhood; she endured countless surgeries to reconstruct the portion of her face the cancer had eaten away at; she wrote her own poetry and bestselling memoir about this; and she went on to experience both fame and drug addiction. No shortage of story there, for her or those close to her – but how does one shape the events of a life into a narrative, and in so doing, when do you get to stop telling the truth as you experienced it in favor of just the truth? This seemed, in my reading at least, to be the central question of the work.