Catch Up

I took last week off to have minor surgery. You'd think this would give me plenty of time to read^*, but mostly I slept, or lay in bed groggy and unable to focus my eyes. By the weekend I had flushed enough of the drugs out of my system and started reading something that didn't require a lot of attention: Ken Follett's World Without End. My Dad read it when it came out (unlike me, he enjoys books in hardcover), and mentioned it wasn't as good as its sort-of prequel, Pillars of the Earth, which we both enjoyed very much. I'm about halfway through right now, and he's right. I remember loving Pillars the first and subsequent three or four times I read it, but those readings happened many years ago. Perhaps Follett's writing style has changed, or maybe I've grown out of it, but I'm finding myself scoffing at some details (especially in the sex scenes, good grief), and not transported in time as I was when I first read Pillars. Perhaps I need to re-read Pillars and see what's really going on here, but I don't really have the time to devote to another 1000 page monster right now. Anyway, it's fine, it's mindless narrative, and that's about all I can handle right now.

Before surgery, I finished Torpor, the second Chris Kraus novel. It's not nearly as world-changing as I Love Dick, but the thoughtful, well-read, extremely observant, honestly struggling voice is still very much present. Kraus continues to inspire, and makes me want to build little shrines to her. For some reason, the scene in which she casually writes of hanging out with Félix Guattari, and his heroin addicted wife, in Paris while watching the Romanian Revolution on TV really stuck with me. Three paragraphs later she quotes one of my favourite authors, Angela Carter. Her life is an amazing literary theory/rock 'n' roll dream; an autobiography of a literary, feminist Nancy to Sylvère Lotringer's professorial Sid^**. Kraus, or the character Sylvie, is also my age in Torpor, dealing with the end of fecundity and the sexual magnetism that youth endows.

Sylvie remembers something her old acting teacher said when she was 22 and fucking him. She'd asked him why he left his wife and he'd replied, "When she was 35, she just became too bitter.

Once again, I tried to find an email, somehow, somewhere, but of course, no dice. I did, however, find a podcast of an interview and reading with Kraus, so the obsession continues. I feel a bit like Violette Leduc...

Sitting beside me, I have three magazines that need attention as well. I was tipped off to a Susan Faludi piece in Harper's by a friend who has a subscription. I do enjoy me some Faludi! As well, I went to Word on the Street on Sunday, and picked up the latest issue of Spacing, and subscribed to the Walrus, getting the October issue immediately.

And the library queue waits for no woman. Oy!


^*Or write. I still feel like my brains are a bit scrambled, and this entry took far too long to write, but since I'm off work today, still feeling so, so ill, I thought I'd post something.
^**This might not be nearly as weird as it sounds. Kraus was involved in the punk art community of New York in the 70s and 80s, and Sylvère is described as wearing leather jackets without shirts to teach classes, and constantly failing to meet publishing deadlines -- ie he's style over talent/substance. That said, they also marry, get a little dog, and own a house in a small town in upstate New York; I wonder how bourgeois Sid & Nancy may have become without the drugs...

Furious Love

I find it very difficult to allow my whole life to rest on the existence of another creature. I find it equally difficult, because of my innate arrogance, to believe in the idea of love. There is no such thing, I say to myself. There is lust, of course, and usage, and jealousy, and desire and spent powers, but no such thing as the idiocy of love. Who invented that concept? I have wracked my shabby brains and can find no answer. But when people die … those who are taken away from us can never come back. […] So I have decided that for a second or two, the precious potential of you in the next room is the only thing in the world worth living for.

You must know, of course, how much I love you. You must know, of course, how badly I treat you. But the fundamental and most vicious, swinish, murderous, and unchangeable fact is that we totally misunderstand each other. […] But how-so-be-it nevertheless. (A cliche among Welsh politicians.) I love you and I always will …. Come back to me as soon as you can …

BELOVED IDIOT. I MISS YOU TERRIBLY.

— Richard Burton

I suppose it's apt that I'm writing this post on day two of an epic hangover, given the prodigious amount of alcohol both Richarch Burton and Elizabeth Taylor are reported to have put down throughout their lives. I can't say as I've ever cared too much about Elizabeth Taylor, and Burton died when I was a child, so he was never in my consciousness. However, my favourite gossip columnist (I'm not going to pretend I'm above such things) raved over Furious Love for a month, and I'm always up for a good Hollywood story.

To get access to private documents, many of them not published before, I'm sure the authors of Furious Love had to promise not to do a hatchet job on the love story of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Then again, I never got the feeling that they were pulling back from wanting to be snarky. There's a feeling of real respect and goodwill on the part of Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, for the two actors. While Burton and Taylor created quite the scandal in their day, there's no judgement in the writing, merely a spirited reporting of the facts. This is not to say this biography is simply a dry retelling of events (which for my taste, too many bios happen to be). Furious Love has excellent narrative flow, and moves along quickly, even through the frequent details of film-making logistics. More than anything, I think the best aspect of Furious Love is that it avoids being melodramatic (in opposition to what the title would suggest). It would be so easy to make an overly flowery, purple-prose laden book from the subject matter, but Kashner and Schoenberger manage to strike a great balance of journalistic distance and sympathetic interest that reminds the reader that Burton and Taylor were real -- though extraordinary -- people. There's also an interesting subtextual theory running through Furious Love about how the modern concept of paparazzi perhaps started with Burton and Taylor, as they were arguably the first couple to be hounded by the press to such a degree.

One needs only to look at the recent Eminem video/song "Love the Way You Lie" to see that we still tend to conflate "anger" with "passion." Taylor and Burton did so, perhaps because of their booze intake, perhaps they were just fiery people, but it's often said in Furious Love that it was the fighting that somehow kept their connection strong. I've had a relationship that mostly consisted of fighting (though, let me be very clear, not violence), in its last year especially, and I can't say as that ever made me feel more passionate towards him. Quite the opposite in fact. Make up sex? Forget it. More like not speaking for days, or sniping passive-aggressively. That said, there's still a part of my brain that insists that "real" love is the way it's portrayed in the "real" life of Burton and Taylor, because media have always told me so. Burton and Taylor aren't much different from a romance novel couple, and of course that's what makes them interesting to read about. One wouldn't read 400 pages of "Burton ate some cereal, then washed and dried the bowl, replacing it in the kitchen cupboard where he had found it." The Fiery Couple is what books and movies are made of. Since life is, in general, really about the cereal bowls, and if they're left out dirty, we need stories of people like Burton and Taylor to relieve us of that mundane world. The distraction, I think, is what keeps us able to deal with the cereal bowls.

I Want to Care About Your Book

When you give your Dad the url of your book blog, it's inevitable you're going to write a post on said blog that might not be Dad-friendly. This is that post. Dear Dad, you may not enjoy some of the language or vague personal details in this post.

There was such a buzz, at least within nerd girl circles, about I Don't Care About Your Band when it came out. Finally! One of us! Julie Klauser is my age, judging by the stories inside; she's not a cheerleader or the popular girl, she's a "chubby" (?) Jewish redhead who's into Broadway musicals. She's a bit odd, she's smart, she's funny. Not stand-out odd, like the goth kids, or the troubled girls who wound up in group homes. Just odd enough that people forget she's there some of the time. She's that dorky kid I was in school, that no one thought would ever have a boyfriend, let alone engage in one-night stands and a series of flings. Julie Klausner and I figured out boys at some point, and we made up for lost time.

When Tiger Beatdown made a passing reference to Klausner a couple weeks back, that was all the motivation I needed to pick up a copy. Later, a friend Twittered about not quite knowing what to do with I Don't Care About Your Band. There was something vaguely wrong about the book for her. I felt it too, and having now finished the book, I have some specifics.

First, I found the overall tone to be a bit too Sex and the City. I loved Sex and the City, but there's only room for one Carrie Bradshaw. Carrie rides that line between awesome and annoying a lot, and any immitators will always fall on the "annoying" side, by virtue of not being first. While Klausner actually says something about not being Carrie, she actually kind of is. She lives in Manhattan with mystery money (her sketcky employment record does not say "apartment in the City" to me), she talks about about Manhattan as the centre of her world, and boys, and clothes, and fucking. Sure, she likes different boys and clothes than Carrie would, but the way she talks about sex is pretty similar. Yes, she throws in the references to Usenet and MST3K that the dorky girls will grok, and she likes Slater-Kinney so she's got the 90s cool chick band cred, but she doesn't show enough of this personality to convince me that she's something different than I've seen before. It's almost the same girl in new clothes (and Manhattan apartment, and boys, and fucking). All this is a shame, because when we get pure Klausner, she is really, really likeable, and probably someone I'd want to hang out with^*.

Klausner has some honestly weird and troubling things to say about gays and lesbians. She spends a chapter insisting that every straight girl procure herself a gay, as if he was a consumer product a girl simply shouldn't live without. She insists that straight girlfriends are too often fairweather, and friendships with straight men will often be complicated by sexual attraction (and activity). And you know, she's probably right about the relationships between straights. Thing is, gay men are still people and they should probably have a say in existing soley to prop up straight girls. As well, she has this weird idea about what sort of porn lesbians are into ^**.

I'm not saying I don't watch porn. Of course I watch porn, because I am not a nun. And I don't watch "erotica" with a "story" or "period costumes" in it, because I am also not a lesbian."

I realise this is an attempt at humour, Klauser being first and foremost a comedy writer. It just wasn't funny, and it rang false. It seems to me that the "erotica" is more aimed at that stereotypical middle-America minivan mom who enjoys a good Danielle Steel novel. Then again, I'm making judgments here as well. Who knows who that shit is made for. Let's just all agree it's dull, and not make anyone watch it. The point is, Klausner too often uses gays and lesbians as punchlines and props for her comedy bits, and I thought we had sort of gotten past that.

Also, little picky thing, but I hate Klausner's editor. I think they reined in her personality too much, while asking her to amp up the sex and preachy advice. In the meantime, [they forgot to correct her when she calls a verb a noun ("He was 'chill,' which is a noun that dicks have recently made into an adjective.")I stand corrected! One can catch "a chill." Still, it feels damn verb-y to me!!] they let her get away with strange anachronisms, like mentioning Miley Cyrus in the chapter where she describes being 15. Miley, my friends, was not even born then.

There's some really great stuff in I Don't Care About Your Band, like the part where she classifies vegans (Animal Rights, Anti-Chemical, and Anorexic), or her very insightful ideas on why some men want the plain girl ("The ultimate emo-boy fantasy is to meet a nerdy, cute girl just like him, and nobody else will realise she's pretty."), which she wonderfully dovetails into a warning about "nice guys." Ultimately, my problem with I Don't Care About Your Band is that it comes off more like a self-help book about ego and relationships, than a memoir. I would have enjoyed and identified with a memoir, but instead I felt like I was reading "The Alterna-Rules for Young Women." The target audience is likely younger than Klausner and I, someone who's in the midst of trying to navigate the crazy casual-sex 20s. I've lived this, and while I wouldn't mind laughing along with someone who lived it too, I don't need the slight pedantry and weird/wise older-sister vibe.

^*Except, she doesn't care about Star Wars, and that's kind of unforgivable.
^**I really wish I could remember where I read something about lesbians watching gay male porn, but I can't, and I'm SOOOOO not googling "lesbian+gay+male+porn" because I'm pretty sure I'm not going to find what I'm looking for... or will I?

Canada's Most Predictable Punching Bags

The Huffington Post piece on overrated authors didn't make Anis Shivani any friends. Jezebel had a rather good take on the article, with their rebuttal "Literary Critic Hates Vaginas, 'Ghetto Volume'". Similar lists were inevitable. I find these lists to be nothing more than opportunities for critics to unleash a hail of insults on those they deem unworthy, somehow, of praise, sales, and awards, and they do nothing to broaden the reading public's understanding or appreciation of literature. (I do, however, see great value in lists of "underrated authors" who can definitely benefit from exposure.)

Today, we get the Canadian list, co-authored by Steven W. Beattie, and if you read his blog That Shakespearean Rag or his other work at all, there will be absolutely no surprises for you here. The same old complaints about the same old authors appear. How Michaels and Ondaatje^* engage in overly complex tricks of language... oh excuse me, I mean "abstruse metaphoric language and self-conscious, sonorous prose." There are complaints about the derivative nature of Can Lit, which is funny in a third-hand copy-cat list, the details of which have been copy/pasted from previous reviews and blog posts, either verbatim or by rote memory.

Predictably, I want to give some love to Douglas Coupland. In the Canadian list we are also treated to complaints about Coupland's use of irony^** and pop culture, which is such a throwaway Amazon Review reading of his work. In my discussions of Coupland, I don't pay overmuch attention to these issues. Yes, these are elements of his work, but they're set pieces, not the characters or novel itself. I have always enjoyed how much pop culture Coupland puts in his novels, because that's the world I live in. I pay attention to all aspects of the world around me, not just the highbrow. I don't pretend to live in an ivory tower and I would never want to. That Coupland writes from down on the ground makes his novels work with me, instead of making me work for them. And sometimes that's okay. Every novel doesn't need to be A.S. Byatt.

To miss the attention Coupland pays to human interaction, and the consequences of the lack of that interaction, is to call Coupland "overrated." If you don't see his funny, weird, and often intensely lonely people for the recognizable human beings they are, then you're missing the point entirely. I haven't loved every novel^‡, but when he gets it right -- as in Eleanor Rigby or The Gum Thief -- Coupland can be devastatingly astute about what a commodified culture, overloaded with information, does to our psyche, and how this culture leaves some of us alone, alienated, and clinging to false talismans made of plastic and light.

Edit: I am remiss in not mentioning that Coupland can also be very funny, and has the ability to take our monstrous capitalist productions and turn them into Lego bricks of joy.

To call Coupland "lowbrow"^† is to be a self-apologist for not giving enough attention to a writer who would certainly do you the favour of close examination, should you appear in his work.

^*I don't find him completely unreadable, but I really don't enjoy Ondaatje.
^**Is it ironic that the word "lazy" appears in reference to Coupland, when this list is a pastiche of previously published opinions?
^‡Oh, jPod, how sad you make me.
^†Ondaatje is too snooty! Coupland is not snooty enough! Perhaps Canadian authors could benefit from a Snoot-O-Meter, to help them meet the exacting specifications of the critical establishment?

Open Letter to Jodi Picoult

Dear Ms Picoult,
I agree, the New York Times really, really likes white dudes from Brooklyn. I noticed a while back, and the reviewers there are not real subtle in their idol worship. Further, I'm pretty sure the reviewer of the new Franzen book, Michiko Kakutani, is predisposed to hate female authored books. All this can definitely get pretty annoying.

However, I complain as a reader. You're complaining as a writer, and I have to assume that you're complaining because your reviews have been less than positive. Here's the thing: you're a horrible writer. Your situations are cliche and contrived. Your characters are more than unlikeable, they're hateful and unbelieveable. You seem to be writing to ensure a TV movie option.

You sell a lot of books and I can't figure out why. Maybe all this is unfair of me, since I've only read about 50 pages of one of your novels. I can't remember another book I've hated so much I had to put it down and quit. There are books I don't like, having finished them, but yours was the only one that so disgusted me I had to stop and give it back to the library, lest it contaminate my house further.

So maybe I just don't know enough of your work. But have you read Franzen? He's really, really good. So is Lethem. Some of the Wonderboys the NYT loves aren't all that, but those two? They kinda are. You are not now and will never be in the same league.

I'm annoyed that you co-opted a very valid complaint for your sour grapes. You cheapen and lessen the point. It almost feels like Sarah Palin calling herself a feminist. Right words, wrong people.

Next time the NYT fawns over Tao Lin, though, feel free to lose your shit.

Sincerely,
Panic

Mind Unchanged

As an avowed grump, I looked forward to reading Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America.

The first chapter on cancer, and the relentless positivity patients are expected to embrace, is the most convincing. In fact, Ehrenreich has some very interesting things to say about cancer, and her own experience as a patient. She writes that

the rebel cells that have realized that the genome they carry, the genetic essence of me in whatever deranged form has no further chance of normal reproduction in the postmenopausal body we share, so why not just start multiplying like bunnies and hope for a chance to break out?

Ehrenreich goes on to write of studies that show a correlation between positive attitudes and immune system health. However, the Journal of Clinical Oncology notes "the immune system does not appear to recognize cancers within an individual as foreign, because they are actually part of the self." It's an interesting and factual take on cancer, lacking in sensationalistic scare tactics. Cancer is so often seen as something that can be wholly prevented if one just tries hard enough, cutting risk factors, being born with the "right" genes, and even thought away, as Ehrenreich reports. However, to think of a cancer as an organic part of the self is almost a radical approach, though scientifically it's a bit of a no-brainer.

The next chapters, however, are less convincing. Ehrenreich comes out against positive thinking methods involving the rubber band trick (in which you snap a rubber band against your skin when you have a negative thought), and positive thinking and list making to reprogram negative attitudes. While she doesn't mention it by name, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy employs these tactics, and is often successful in treating illnesses like depression. I find Ehrenreich's dismissal of these techniques (and later her supposition that the pharmaceutical industry prompted psychologists to prove their worth with these and other thought exercises) to be a bit heavy-handed. There's a lot of research out there that says we're way, way over-medicated for depression, and I expected some critical analysis of this. Instead, she glosses over medications, and indeed, there's some tacit approval of them.

Ehrenreich also makes some pretty tenuous connections. For example, she seems to be hinting that Positive Thinking practitioners had a part, however small, in the layoffs and corporate restructuring of the 80s and 90s. Seems to me it's more likely that entrepreneurs were taking advantage of a new market. This would actually have seemed more sinister and proved the point that motivational speakers and the like were really just wanting to cash in on a social phenomenon at the expense of people in a difficult situation, rather than having a part in creating hardship.

In her chapter on the rise of positive thinking megachurches that take sin and God out of the equation, Ehrenreich spends a paragraph snarking on the appearance of a couple of the new breed of (very wealthy) preachers. The female of the couple, Victoria, is just back from winning court case in which she was being sued by a stewardess she treated miserably on a flight. Ehrenreich is part of the crowd at the megachurch that day.

I look around cautiously to see how everyone else is reacting to this celebration of a millionaire's court victory over a working woman, who happened in this case the be African American. The crowd, which is about two-thirds black and Latino and appears to contain few people who have ever landed a lucrative book deal or flown first-class, applauds Victoria enthusiastically.

Instead of attempting to explain this phenomenon, which would be well within the scope of the book, Ehrenreich devotes only a couple sentences, almost a literary shake of the head, an "aren't these folks silly" sort of dismissal. There's also a weird point she makes about modern megachurches that I can't shake off: Church buildings used to be built to inspire and be seen as something outside of the mundane world. "Not so the megachurches, which seem bent on camouflaging themselves as suburban banks or school buildings." A look at church architecture in Canada (I can't speak for anywhere else) from the 60s and 70s, across denominations, shows this as a phenomenon of the 20th century, not of any one particular turn of faith, though the megachurches do indeed hold more people, and are less community/neighbourhood sized.

What I find most troubling, is Ehrenreich's "patron at the zoo" way of writing. I did notice this when I read Nickel and Dimed many years ago. Ehrenreich often treats the poor and working class in her books like caged animals, with pity and disdain, instead of understanding. As mentioned above, she looks down on the "black and Latino" congregation of a couple of rich, white preachers, instead of attempting to look at how a supposedly poor group would find solace in the message. (I say "supposedly" because Ehrenreich doesn't mention actually talking to these people, she judges them simply by looking at them.) She finds certain psychologists merely silly or annoying, and makes her personal dislike known, while skimming over facts. This will be the last Ehrenreich I read, because I really can't take her classism (and possible racism!)any longer. Ehrenreich has pretensions of journalism, but her books read like a long, and in this case poorly thought-out, letter to the editor instead.

* * *
In the "things that do not suck" portion of this post, the always amazing Kerry Clare has a great post on the Toronto Women's Bookstore, and her life with feminism over at Pickle Me This.

Isolation

I suppose it's become normal for "setting" (usually a city or a decade) to be a character in novels. What made me realise this, is how background the 80s are in Model Home. I was expecting lots of shout-outs to... well, everything I remember from my childhood. Instead, the references that tie the characters to a time are minimal, and a bit startling when they do appear. Because I'm so used to being bombarded by reminders of where/when a novel is happening, I wondered why the novel had been set in the 80s at all. Why not now? What makes the 80s special and integral to the storyline in a way that, say, the 90s could not have been? As part two of the novel opened, I understood the reason: The Cold War.

I was a kid in the 80s, and I basically accepted nuclear annihilation as fact. We didn't have the "duck and cover" drills of the early 60s (though I'm not sure they ever had those in Canada), but we were hyper-aware of the USA/USSR conflict, and the way it was "fought." We had Red Dawn and "Wild, Wild West"^* and "Land of Confusion" and probably about 1000 songs I'm forgetting, telling us we were just a step away from the earth being blown up six times over. Eldest son of the Ziller family, Dustin is also a product of this saturation of nuclear fear. When he awakens in the hospital, half-covered in third-degree burns, his first thought is of nuclear war.

When they told him he'd been burned, his first thought was World War III. The Russians must have attacked. He didn't remember the accident, but when they told him about it--the cigarette, the house exploding into flames--it seemed too ludicrous to be true.

The Ziller family, homeless from the explosion, and bankrupted by father Warren's investment in a non-starter of a desert subdivision, has no choice but to move to a house they own by default. The street is completely devoid of people, stinking from the garbage dump not far away, and full of scalding surfaces. Youngest son Jonas, who is blamed for the explosion in the former home, rides his bike "in a place with only one block [...] there were no pedestrians, the block was utterly, echoingly empty." They may as well be the last people on earth.

It's probably apocryphal, but there's a theory that bugs, roaches, would be the only animals to survive a nuclear holocaust. I began to think about this supposition, and the relationship of Mobile Home to Kafka's Metamorphosis^** after a couple mentions of the proliferation of roaches, and of feeling "buglike." The explosion that displaces the Ziller family to the desert also changes the Ziller boys into twin Gregor Samsas^†; hideous, unlovable, and alienated. Jonas' parents acknowledge that they no longer love their youngest child, who they assume is responsible for physically changing their eldest son into something unrecognizable from the rock 'n' roll, golden boy surfer they knew previous. The family purposely barely recognize Jonas in their midst, in an effort to keep themselves from outright hating him. For his part, Dustin retreats to his room. The life he had pictured for himself is utterly destroyed by the immense change not only in his appearance, but health and mobility.

Model Home does an excellent job of personalizing the cultural anxiety of the West in the final, escalating stages of the Cold War. The Zillers have The Bomb dropped on them, but only them. They are isolated not only within their community of no-one, but within themselves. Technology encroaches, and isolates even further. Dustin remains with his father, in the desert, watching movie after movie on his VCR. Jonas plays Joust for hours, with no possible end, as the game is unwinnable. The future's not so bright.


^*This video is as creepy as I remember it.
^**Which I'd not read before, but borrowed from the library immediately after finishing Mobile Home so I could make sure I wasn't totally off-base.
^†I'm not proposing that Model Home is at all a retelling of Metamorphosis. However, there are thematic similarities.

We Meet Again, Booker

Last year I decided to go ahead and read everything on the Booker Prize Short List, though after the prize had been given out. I've consciously read Booker noms before (most memorably Darkmans: amazing), but didn't really make an effort to make a reading list out of the prize nominees.

The 2009 stand-out for me was easily Simon Mawer's The Glass Room. I was completely invested in each character, and the ending, while a bit reliant on Victorian-style contrivance and coincidence, was completely satisfying.

Wolf Hall, winner of the 2009 Booker, was enjoyable but less moving. It almost felt like a "summer read" to me. I gifted it to my Dad for Christmas, since he loves a good historical novel. I certainly get that from him. It's not often these days that my Dad and I read the same book, so it was nice to have a bookish conversation with him again. He also filled me in on what happens to Cromwell after Wolf Hall ends. As one would expect from the court of Henry VIII, it's not good.

The Little Stranger was more enjoyable for me than Tipping the Velvet, which I found a bit heavy-handed. I'd read The Children's Book a good while before the Booker list was announced, because it's A.S. Byatt, and I am a slobbering fan girl. I don't really get Coetzee, and found myself hating the dreariness of everything in Summertime. I wanted to like The Quickening Maze more than I did, but as in the Coetzee, I found pretty much everyone unlikeable (perhaps I was too put off by the portrayal of Tennyson), and was thus unable to invest much feeling for the outcome of the characters.

Yesterday, the 2010 long-list was announced, and I've not read anything on it. Which means I'll have plenty of titles to add to my library queue come the announcement of the shortlist. I hope Lisa Moore makes it, because I keep meaning to read her, and keep getting distracted by shiny objects. I hope David Mitchell doesn't make it, because I really disliked Cloud Atlas. Hell, I didn't even finish Cloud Atlas and there are very, very few books I don't finish. I felt like I was reading Tristam Shandy again. Too convoluted and proud of it^*. Not my scene, man.

I'm really looking forward to repeating my Booker Shortlist reading series. Not all the 2009 books were in the "win" column for me, but I read books I might not normally pick up, and I suppose that's the whole point of these things in the end: exposure.

^*I realise the same could be said for critical theory.

I Think I Got a C- in Critical Theory Class

There's a problem with finishing a book I really, really love: I have a hard time starting anything else. I stopped and started about four different books before I was able to get into Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer, which I picked up at the big Ithaca book sale in May. No idea why I bought that particular book there, since it's available in multitudes in every used book store everywhere. I'm odd. And yet, even after that, I was still stuck on I Love Dick.

This is long (for a blog post, but extremely brief for a real analysis), and I'm trying to twist my way through some theory that's new to me. It's probably nonsensical because I'm still trying to grasp so many things. Critical Theory has never been my strong suit, but I'm so intensely fascinated with it, after reading I Love Dick, that I can't help but try.

I love I Love Dick so much that I bought my own copy off Amazon, just so I could re-read and annotate it. I love I Love Dick so much that I tried, and failed, to find an email address for Chris Kraus so I could tell her how much that book meant to me. I Love Dick makes me want to read everything else Kraus has written, go back to school, and write a Master's thesis on her. And I love I Love Dick so much that I felt I had to come back and write more about it, since I basically just used it to introduce my thoughts on Russell Smith in a previous post. Yet writing this post, I know I still can't do it any justice. I really would need so much more space, and time, and education to even get close. What follows is what currently has my brain spinning.

Early on, Kraus writes about herself in the third person:

Chris was not a torture victim, not a peasant. She was an American artist, and for the first time it occurred to her that perhaps the only thing she had to offer was was her specificity. By writing Dick [the person, or the book?] she was offering her life as Case Study.

Throughout, Kraus introduces the reader to other case studies in love, but what these studies really are, and what they become, are introductions to the lives of individuals. Some of these people are artists, and thus possibly recognizable to people -- unlike me -- who know something about the art world. Some are activists, or writers. Some are "regular" people. It's possible, too, that some are entirely fictional. Because I Love Dick is memoir-as-fiction, it's purposely difficult, within the realm of this text only, to guess at the "authenticity" of the accounts, and it's possible that one shouldn't. In writing this book, Kraus brings into existence lives unknown to the reader, including her own. In other words, by writing to Dick, she writes herself into existence.

In the afterword, Joan Hawkins notes:

And while Kraus doesn't quote Guattari until late in the text, his presence is already felt in the first letter. In fact, what's interesting is Chris' idea that you can somehow use Baudillard's notion of the hyper-real, the simulacrum, to get to Delueze and Guattari's notion of intensification. And that perhaps is the theoretical drive behind the entire project, as the letters and the simulacrum of a passion which receives little encouragement emerge as the truest and best way outside the virtual gridlock and into Deleuzian rematerialization of experience.

Simulacrum is a new concept to me, but if my novice (and rusty theoretical) reading is correct, Kraus plays with the notion that "real" lives might not exist until they become a form of hyper-real, lived through life, through the author, then finally reader. The Wikipedia entry on Baudrillard's theory of Simulacra and Simulation states that "today there is no such thing as reality" Our world is one "in which the dominant simulacrum is the model, which by its nature already stands for endless reproducibility, and is itself already reproduced." When Kraus writes about a life, in a fictional way, it is a reproduction of a life lived, which is made more real with every reading, by a stranger, of each or every life. Each printing, or reproduction, of I Love Dick is an affirmation of these lives. While it is Baudrillard's opinion that hyper-reality renders experience meaningless, I feel that in working with a text like I Love Dick, simulacra can create an authentically meaningful experience for a reader who might not have had the opportunity otherwise.

There's an interesting typo that happens repeatedly -- but not consistently -- which I have to think is intentional: Kraus often confuses "it's" and "its." There is, I think, a purposeful mutability between "possessing" and "being" throughout I Love Dick. Dick is angry that he has become part of Chris' story ("I found the situation initially perplexing, then disturbing") but does Chris not own Dick, if she brings him into being (as postulated above)? Only through her authorial ownership, do Dick and the others exist.


* * *
Speaking of ownership, I tweeted the following, which some viewers found disturbing:
"I love cracking a spine so the book can lay flat for me to copy from it."
I get that some people like to keep their books more pristine, but as I said in my next tweet "I live with books. I mark them, I crease them, I use them and they look it. Dog-eared and underlined. LOVED."^* I sometimes sleep with books beside me, and they get rolled on. I carry books with me, and they get banged up. It's interesting, the differences in how we treat our books, as book lovers. I don't think one approach is better than any other. The way we love books is as individual as the books we choose to love.

^*I do want to note, as I did on Twitter, that I only do this to books in my personal collection; I try very hard to keep library books in the condition in which they were loaned to me.

I Don't Hate Catholics, and Neither Should You

"The Vatican issued a new set of rules Thursday to respond to the worldwide clerical abuse scandal, cracking down on priests who rape and molest minors and the mentally disabled." The document also states that ordaining a woman is a sin on the same level. That's right, anyone who ordains a woman is, to the Catholic Church, as bad as someone who sexually molests children. The actual sin, is ordaining anyone whom a bishop^* has not given the okay to ordain, but since that permission will never be granted for a woman (and I use the word "never" consciously, given the context under which the action is described in the aforementioned document), that sin will always be as great as the destruction of a child's life. Of course, women and children always get lumped in together, and the Catholic Church has a pretty bad record with both. This is pretty offensive stuff, but it's unsurprising given that the Church is run by men.

Here's the point of this post, and weirdly, it's not to kvetch about the Catholic Church: I can't post this to Facebook. My first instinct on hearing the news this morning, was to put up a link on Facebook, and say "Oh look, The Dudes in Rome have done it again." I've done so before, when an American nun was excommunicated because she told a pregnant women that she was allowed control over her own body, to save her own life. I framed it as a feminist issue, because it is. I posted a link to an article about the case to my profile.

Catholics don't have a lock on denying women agency over their own bodies. In fact, most of the American anti-choice agitators are Protestant. Moreover, religious people aren't the only ones who openly practice misogyny. My point, when posting about the nun, is that anytime you have a group of (mostly) men running something, women are going to get the short end of the stick. That's the way it works. It could be sexual harassment in publishing, the Catholic Church, or the Canadian government. Of course, with a total lack of female voices in positions of power, the Catholic Church will commit especially egregious crimes against women. This does not mean that religious people are bad. This is one of the responses I got, however, on Facebook.

A dude missing the irony gene decided to tell me what is and is not a feminist issue. "I don't see this as a feminism issue at all," he said. "It's another notch in the RCC's hypocrisy belt. I still say draw the line: You either condemn the entire organization, or you endorse their behaviour." He went on to say "Focusing on the feminist slant only imposes a different form of oppressive discourse." Yep, if I'm interested in how women are treated, I'm imposing an oppressive discourse. The commenter's basic argument was that the Church, not the men who run it, are the source of oppression. Rather obviously, I disagree.

This went back and forth for hours but it's not isolated. I've seen people trash religion all over, even on the pages of people who are deeply committed to their faith. I've read of someone being "disappointed" that a celebrity they liked is an active Catholic. It's en vogue to paint people who believe in God (however you define that god) as stupid and/or evil, in part due to a mindset Terry Eagleton calls "Ditchkins" in his excellent Reason, Faith, and Revolution. The Dawkins/Hitchens school takes dogmatic -- and weirdly evangelical -- atheism as a higher calling. I have seen a form of hate spewed forth from Dogmatic Atheists directed to the religious, that I have not seen from those who are practicing Catholics, Jews, or Muslims (and yes, I count all these among my friends) in the other direction. Frankly, I'm fucking sick of it, and I call it out whenever I see it. Atheism and evil are not mutually exclusive.

I've been everything from a baptized COS Presbyterian, child atheist, LDS church attending friend, atheist again, Wiccan,^** possible Jew, to finally agnostic. The thread that runs through my life, is that atheism never lasts long. I always come back to knowing that there's something out there, and I think it's bigger than me. I don't know what "God" is, but I think it's a mistake to discount it because evolution is real. I also think some atheists make a huge mistake in engaging in a form of bigoty because it's fashionable. There are certainly horrible things done in the name of religion, but in the absence of God, a lot of horrible things would still have happened and continue to happen.

So I won't post this to Facebook, because frankly I don't feel like reading all the misdirected hate.

Fight the real enemy.



^* Archbishop? Cardinal? I'm not really sure who gets to make these decisions.
^**It was the 90s. I was 19. Most of my cohort was Wiccan at some point.