from Jonathan Franzen's Purity

Regarding Pip's relationship to her mother:

'No phone call was complete before each had made the other wretched.  The problem, as Pip saw it -- the essence of the handicap she lived with; the presumable cause of her inability to be effective at anything -- was that she loved her mother.  Pitied her; suffered with her; warmed to the sound of her voice; felt an unsettling kind of nonsexual attraction to her body; wished her greater happiness; hated upsettting her; found her dear.  This was the massive block of granite at the center of her life, the source of all the anger and sarcasm that she directed not only at her mother but, more and more self-defeatingly of late, at less appropriate objects.  When Pip got angry, it wasn't really at her mother but at the granite block.'

Quite.

After heartbreak (complete with humiliation):

'Nothing could end it.  Pip couldn't leave her bed, let alone leave her room, let alone go outside, where the strong sunlight of another hideously perfect day might honestly have caused her to die of shame.'

Did find the poem 'Muttersprace/Mother Tongue' that changed Andreas Wolf into a famous person truly annoying, for it having been half in German, with no translation in sight, and SORRY, but I don't have a fucking iPhone or Kindle to do it for me, so whole thing went over my head.  Mighta been nice to include an appendix, Jon?  Athan?

Regarding journalism, Leila says:

'In reporting, as in sex, Leila had always been a caller-back.  The only way she could morally tolerate her seductions was honestly to be, at some level, the person she was pretending to be.'
(To the point of still getting mail from the Unabomber in jail!)

Taking care of her disabled, novelist/teacher husband, she comes home with Pip and he says:
'The soul is a chemical sensation.  What you see lying on this sofa is  glorified enzyme.  Every enzyme has its special job to do.  It spends its life looking for the specific molecule it's designed to interact with.  And can an enzyme be happy?  Does it have a soul?  I say yes to both questions!  What the enzyme you see lying here was made to do is find bad prose, interact with it, and make it better.  That's what I've become, a bad-prose-correcting enzyme, floating in my cell here.'  He nodded at Leila. 'And she worries that I'm not happy.'

'Over the years, Leila had come to believe that politicians were literally made of special stuff, chemically different stuff.  The senator was flabby and bad-haired and acne-scarred and yet completely magnetic.  His pores exuded some pheromone that made her want to look at him, keep hearing his voice, be liked by him.  And she did feel liked.  Everyone he wanted to be liked by did.'

Re discussion about feminism:
'Tom was a strange hybrid feminist, behaviorally beyond reproach but conceptually hostile.  'I get feminism as an equal-rights issue,' he'd said once.  'What I don't get is the theory.  Whether woman are supposed to be exactly the same as men, or different and better than men.'  And he'd laughed the way he did at things he found silly, and Leila remained angrily silent, because she was a hybrid the other way around:  conceptually a feminist but one of those women whose primary relationships had always been with men and who had benefitted professionally, all her life, from her intimacy with them.'

'Have you ever been tempted to leave a thought unspoken?'
'I'm a writer, baby.  Voicing thought is what I'm poorly paid and uncharitably reviewed for.'

'...she kept alienating people with her moral absolutism and her sense of superiority, which is so often the heart of shyness.'

'I stroked his head and held him close.  If he'd been a woman, I would have kissed her hair.  But strict limits to intimacy are the straight man's burden.  He pulled away and composed himself.'

Then there was this -- to me -- hilarious 'exchange of information/one-up-man-ship' that guys are able and WILLING to to engage in, for up to forty, NAY, seventy-five (and longer, trust me) minutes at a time about (in this case) 'the rate of caloric transfer is proportional to temperature differential -- ... Andreas tried to fight me with integral calculus, but I remembered the basics of of that, too.'
(brag much?)
This the kind of thing modern men use (sitting in the front seat on a double date, having met only through their girlfriends) while the women in the back are confiding in each other about abortion.
p. 429

'Don't talk to me about hatred if you haven't been married.  Only love, only long empathy and identification and compassion, can root another person in your heart so deeply that there's no escaping your hatred of her, not ever; especially not when the thing you hate most about her is her capacity to be hurt by you.  The love persists and the hatred with hit.  Even hating your own heart is no relief.'

Here's one of the best descriptions of addiction I have ever read:

'It was only much later, when the Internet had come to signify death to him, that he realized he'd also been glimpsing death in online porn.  Every compulsion, certainly his own viewing of digital images of sex, which quickly became day-devouringly compulsive, smacked of death in its short-circuiting of the brain, its reduction of personhood to a closed loop of stimulus and response.
... The brain reduced by machine (paper, pipe, straw, glass tube, needle -- all utilitarian tools, ultimately) to feedback loops, the private personality to a public generality:
*(ie YOUR NAME: JUNKIE)*   a person might as well have been already dead.'
*content mine*

Later...: as he gets an unsavory source to delete the selfies he took with himself (Andreas),  is 'reminded of the day, in a different decade, a different life, when he'd scrubbed the porn from his computer, and of his favorite lines of Mephistopheles:
'Over!  A stupid word.  How so over?  Over and pure nothing:  probably the same thing!  "It's over now!"  What's that supposed to mean?  It's as good as if it never was.'

(And that will bring/us/back/to:
Faulkner (whose dialect I have to be willing to master):  'the past isn't dead.  It isn't even past yet!'
What is that they say about great artists?  'They don't plagiarize...they steal outright.')
sic
(c'est moi)

Bit of great stuff re dogs later.  Cain't go wrong with dog stuff.  Even just stupid dog stuff is great:
(re tennis balls Pip uses to replace the Ativan when it runs out; ie, hitting dead ones against a garage wall): '

Could a more perfect manufactured object than a tennis ball be imagined?  Fuzzy and spherical, squeezable and bouncy, its stitching a pair of matching tongues, its voice on impact a pock in the most pleasing of registers.  Dogs knew a good thing, dogs loved tennis balls, and so did she.'

Next tiny down-turned corner'ed page for this, re flying in turbulence:
'She expected death the whole way.  What was interesting was how quickly she then forgot about it, like a dog to whom death was literally unimaginable, while she rode in a cab.  Dogs again had it right.  They didn't trouble themselves with mysteries that could never be solved anyway.

And my penultimate fave:
'Pip nodded , but she was thinking about how terrible the world was, what an eternal struggle for power.  Secrets were power.  Money was power.  Being needed was power.  Power, power, power; how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?'

Beautifully said, Jonathan Franzen.  I thank thee for that.

Okay so here's the last and then we have to quickquicklikebunnies give tome back to libe, or be charged!  Because other people are waiting!  (surely among the sweetest words to any writer's published ears!)  yeah yeah yeah don't copy edit that just let it be.

Of course, deadline having been stated, am just going to say how lyrical he is on the subject of the California twohead (towhead?) bird.  I would like to write out nearly all of page 555 and the first para of 556.  But/cher (whoa) gonna have to read that one for yourself.
And if you're not an animal and/or total bio-diversity lover, 't'won't be your fave.

I did like the note (and the deeply honest cynicism of the last page).

Thanks for writing books, JF.
I feel the way Jeanette Winterson once put down:
'I write so that I will always have something to read.'

Ouehhhhh, c'est moi aussi.

Paris Red, & The Hand That Feeds You

From Paris Red, a fascinating and very modern re-telling of Edouard Manet's relationship to his best muse  (told from the point of view of his mistress/model, a seventeen-year-old who 'wears the green boots of a whore'):

'He pulls me to him then, and I must be just as crude as he is because whatever he says, I say it back.
'Le joujou, le chat, d'un cote(accent egu).
'Le vit, la lance, de l'autre.'

Re the girlfriend she ditched when she met the man, they meet briefly and she says to her friend,
'Je pense fort a toi.'

                                       *                          *                           *

Okay, now from The Hand That Feeds You, by A.J. Rich
(A standing for Amy, as in Hempel, J standing for Jill, as in Ciment, and Rich, I believe, for not reason at all except that I'm a writer, too, stands for what they hope this book will make them).

It's a wonderful mystery/thriller set in the 'dog' world (shelters, institutions, pitt bull fosters, etc) and deals with sociopaths (and psychopaths -- the difference wherein seems to be violence; the latter prone, the former not so much).

So I just wanna recommend it.
It's ridiculously like the other novel I just started, so NO SPOILER ALERTS.
But it sure do give these gals a chance for some gallows humor.

All I really want to say is GIT these books, READ these books, PASS these books on!
They make excellent gifts and even better present(s) and if you, like me, cannot afford to buy them, you can just ask your library to order them...
(and they will!!)

Dancing and libraries -- doubtless I will be repeating myself on these two things until I'm DEAD -- best things Man ever legalized!

Just read em.
(You won't be sorry).

From the incomparable Dara Horn's In the Image

Here's a writer whose scholarship is so deep, and yet so human, whose sense of the past is so close, whose characters are original enough to be truly intriguing, yet so much part of our human family that we cannot help but empathize, comes one of her earlier books (before the brilliant The World to Come, and A Guide to the Perplexed), In the Image.

The only warning I'd give any reader is be prepared to be surprised, and the hope that you become involved enough to follow her down wild ravines of thought, into multiple ways of being that came before us, the link between languages (Hebrew) and slang (Yiddish), the effect immigration has on all of them...

But please don't let me bore you with abstract synopses, let me just show you some of the lines that lifted me right up and out of myself:

'Once, years earlier, searching for something in the dictionary, Leora's eye had come to rest, by accident, on the word "translate."  One of its definitions, she remembered ... was "to bring over to the afterlife, without causing death."'

(wait, wait, I thought, am I reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead??)

I also liked getting firm definitions of what I consider to be NY slang (& its correct spelling -- nerdy, yes, I KNOW):

'Mentsch means 'person,' literally, but it's used to mean a really good person.  Someone who shows the world, through his actions, what it really means to be a person.' 

At a zoo (hey!  Prison for animals!), she and her boyfriend are checking out the seal exhibit where a trainer is showing the difference between seals and sea lions:

'Sammy the Seal received the usual number of laughs as the zookeeper coaxed him out of the water to tease him, showing all the things that Sammy couldn't do.  Yet Sammy the Seal bore it like a humble martyr, ignoring the crowd as he waddled his way onto the demonstration rock and sometimes not even accepting the sardines thrown his way as reparations.  Sammy knew who he was, Leora thought, and [watched him] as he dove into the water, soaring, with a grace the sea ions would never have, beneath its depths.'

And speaking of war (particularly the WWII), she says 'rewrite the script so that was was lost is what really was lost' -- by which she means not beautiful things, gorgeous apartments, precious jewels, 'but a language, a literature, a held hand, an entire world lived and breathed in the image of God.'

At another point in the book she's in a strange curio shop, one that features, among many other things, bones, human and otherwise, and it includes a series of the 'skulls of people...grinning from earhole to earhole. ... She began to notice that she wasn't watching them as much as they were watching her.  The grins disturbed her most of all.  How strange, she thought, that one needs to be alive in order to frown.'

(So perhaps death really will be one long frolic!)

She also comes across earlier 'commandments' and notices that they are written in an 'if/then' manner.  IF you sacrifice enough goats, keep the sabbath, etc etc, THEN rain shall fall on your crops, your children won't die, etc' -- and it occurs to her how absolutely conditional must God's love be, to follow such a formula!

(Yes there's a lot about God, and religion, and Judaism, old and new, but this book is more like a mystery, compelling the reader to find out what unheard-of ends these characters come to -- and no, I don't mean -- necessarily! -- grisly ones).

And while I studied Philosophy in school, and read Spinoza, I never truly understood how wildly different his conception of God was -- 
'He deduced that the entire universe was formed from one type of matter, which one could call God, and through a series of logical statements he determined that this meant that all God's creations, and in fact the entire world, was simply an extension of God.  This meant that God couldn't interact with his creatures, so to speak, since God and his creatures were one and the same.'

How prescient, how futuristic, how -- can I just say this again?  Tibetan of him!

'Leah wanted a life made up of moments, not minutes.'

Later, 'Leah cried and cried until she forgot what she was crying about, which was of course the purpose of crying in the first place.'

Here's a theme close to my heart -- or rather, my head:
'It was torture, not being able to sleep.  And what was even more disturbing was the realization of how easy it is to forget to sleep.  Sleeping isn't natural, she thought.  Babies have to learn how to sleep through the night, mastering it only after many months of agony.  During her nights of sleeplessness, Leora had discovered that sleep is a delicate gift, so delicate that even the slightest thought before bed can knock it out of place ... and soon thoughts would begin piling on top of each other, one after another, her mind grinding and groaning like the cogs of some unstoppable machine.'

How precisely right!

And later, on a slightly similar theme:
'Once you forget how to tell time, you realize that telling time is only the beginning, for time is the one thing that binds us to everyone else in the world.'

And an old man driving through Manhattan finds that:
'The city...seemed to be teeming with young people.  It was as if there had been some law enacted forbidding anyone over thirty-nine from living there.'

Okay, I'ma stop there.
But let me tell you, the last chapter -- it's a stunner.

THANK YOU, DARA HORN, for your brilliance, your amazingly life-like characters and their seemingly random lives, and for your capacity to scrutinize the moment, and come up with its meaning.

Because she can still nail it: that's why I remain an Anne Tyler fan.

From A Spool of Blue Thread:


Here's a one paragraph character portrait that is so vivid, so succinct, so spicy and so full of all the right things, you could just put it in a wok and stir-fry!

"As a girl, whe'd been a fey sprite of a thing.  She'd worn black turtlenecks in winter and peasant blouses in summer; her hair had hung long and straight down her back while most girls clamped their pageboys into rollers every night.  She wasn't just poetic but artistic , too, and a modern dancer, and an activist for any worthy cause that came along ...

Her school was her (step-sister) Merrick's school, private and girls-only and posh, and though Abby was only a scholarship student, she was the star there, the leader.  In college, she plaited her hair into cornrows and picketed for civil rights.  She graduated near the top of her class and became a social worker, what a surprise, venturing into Baltimore neighborhoods that none of her old schoolmates knew existed.  Even after she married Red ... did she turn ordinary?  Not a chance.  She insisted on natural childbirth, breast-fed her babies in public, served her family wheat-germ and home-brewed yoghurt, marched against the Vietnam War with her youngest astride her hip sent her children to public schools.  Her house was filled with her handicrafts -- macrame plant-hangers and colorful woven serapes.  She took in strangers off the streets, and some of them stayed for weeks.  There was no telling who would show up at her dinner table."

Or the odd, but so daily thing we all find ourselves going through:

(Having already looked there), "they headed for the stairs anyway, like people hunting their keys in the same place over and over because they can't believe that isn't where they are."

God, yes.

"Other people showed love by offering compliments; Abby offered pity.  It was not an attractive quality, in her children's opinion."

Yes, but how close is pity to empathy!   And to be -- suddenly or not -- understood, is so deeply affirmative.  It lifts you out of the certainty of your solitude and tells you wait, wait -- I've lived there too.  I have felt that, too.

Sharp line that differentiates the two.  The main thing, I think, is just to move toward someone... and reach forth.

writer, writing (the druid saps up) -- this accent brought to you by Red in Orange is the New Black.

Which is more positive, everything can happen, or anything can happen?

(Don't worry, this is only a question which helps determine your capacity for sociopathy.  I am working on my own, extremely specific, definition...)

I keep smelling yellow-zest icing...
ain't that weird...
(considering I don't think I ever had any)

All this Appalachia witchy shit Josie gave me to read *(Dimestore by Lee Smith and (an appropriately well-weathered Witches on the Road Tonight)*...I do actually appreciate all that holler-billy worming up into me.  WHO KNEW??)  Not I).

 I woke up in serious tears about this guy -- dark-hared, my kind of beautiful face --his name was James & he was very much a JAMES,  so clearly his own self, so much so, I knew/know this guy, he's got a southern drawl but he's talking, thinking fast,  v urgently, the minute we get upstairs he grabs me and says he loves me -- says it like it's got him by the throat, like he's terrified, like he's confessing -- and I feel the same way --
then so unhappily was I torn up from the dream I was crying, no, no, and then I was awake, still clinging, I couldn't stop fucking
crying.
Torn out of my arms, it's got to be a memory, a sometime-incarnation time when you grab him and he's gone -- he's already gone --

feel like I've lost them all, sometimes.  Every last brother father son lover husband friend, every uncles and all my baby nieces, nephews & cousins.  Why risk that kind of loss again?  No matter how lonely I get, I do not have a child to hand over/
OVER MY DEAD  BODY.

zis time,
ees tru.

Oui.  J'exagere, mais c'est pas ca.

Having recently finished Paris Red (loved it!) am now u-tubing directions to the beautiful podcast recorder I was given/lent (way too many months ago -- did I mention tech and I not best  buddies? Which bothers me because I have always been excellent at logic --)

SO fascinating, thus far, yes??
(See My Struggles for more slog, if that's what you're into).


BE YOURSELF, everybody says that!  WHAT IS THE POINT OF THAT IF NOBODY LIKES YOUR SELF?

What else do They say?  'Don't be a fuckin people-pleaser!'
What a crock.

How stupid is that to say, to even think!

If you can't please the ones you love/
then ya got to please yourself

(but how are not at least some of them intricately intertwi-need...?)

No you can't please everyone, but it's nice to please one.
Or two, or five, or eleven.
(And you can't count the four-leggeds.  Or the Dalai Lama).

9th of January
Thor's 90th birthday
2016

From Language Arts, by Stephanie Kallos

From Language Arts, by Stephanie Kallos:

About a couple who have a child, developing delightfully then suddenly regressing until all he can say is Gaaah!  'On the spectrum,' as they say now.

"I  love my daughter dearly," Eulalie repeated, "but she has a tendency to let hope outlast the truth.  I believe that in modern-day psychological terms, t his would be known as denial."

Then, just as Cody, the child's father, turns to his mother-in-law to ask, what do you think is wrong with him --

"Before she could answer, Cody exploded into view, rounding the corner of the house, completely transformed from the child they'd seen only moments before:  joyful, laughing, anointed with garden soil ad jam as all young children should be, bounding toward his grandmother looking like any other toddler who hates getting a haircut.
     "There he is, Charles thought.  There's Cody."

A description of weather that says everything about the narrator's inner life:
"The rain had stopped and started several times in the past hour, sudden downpours followed by sudden cessations, as if there were a poorly sutured incision in the sky that kept opening up, being restitched by the same incompetent surgeon, and then tearing open again, a perpetual malpractice suit.  "I'm fine," Charles repeated.

How many times have I -- have we all -- felt life to one ongoing malpractice suit!
What a heart-ripping, gorgeous piece of writing.

And later, speaking to and re his wife:
Why is it possible, Charles wondered, to recognize certain doomed conversational choreographies -- especially the kind that occurs between spouses -- and yet remain incapable of changing the steps?
He'd pondered this for years.

And what married person has not.

Regarding a nun with dementia, who is now working on an art project:
'Yes, this is definitely a new story.  It lacks a title.  The whole is not yet clear.  There are many white spaces.  But Giorgia has faith.  What is needed at such times of confusion and uncertainty is what is always needed:  patience and prayer.'

Spoken like a true artist.

Primates of Park Avenue, by Wednesday Martin

From Wednesday Martin's fascinating socio/anthropo-logy point of view (and she just moved from downtown to the Upper East Side -- UES):

Really interesting stuff, drawn in a MOST amusing (if not terrifying) way:

'...competitive signaling, as biologists call it [such as marking turf with urine], is costly.  It takes energy and time to secrete those proteins, energy and time that could otherwise be expended by females on maintaining good nutrition, optimizing fertility, seeking nesting materials, being pregnant, lactating and caring for one's young.
'Because aggression is potentially dangerous and competitive signaling is costly, it is now believed, female mammals, including primates, have learned over the eons to compete "under the radar."  That is, they inflict social rather than physical violence through coalitions, subtle signals and nonphysical aggression.'

Mean girls!  Shite, they still rule.

I also loved this:

Speaking of the cabal of uber-worked out, double-zeroes, charity ball-thrower bitches from hell of the UES (Upper East Side), she says, 'they couldn't have been further from the Efe and the Aka people of the Ituri Rain Forest in the Democratic Republic (wow there's that's an oxymoron, said the blogger!) of Congo, of the !Kung San of the Kalahari desert.  These hunter-gatherers are radical egalitarians, meaning they live in groups without hierarchy or socioeconomic stratification, as humans did for nearly all our evolutionary prehistory (itals mine).  Among these tribes, no one owns anything and no one's status is any higher or lower than anyone else's.  The notion of property is unknown (again, itals etc).  This state of affairs is reinforced by several mechanisms.  One is object demands.  It is common for one woman to walk up to another and demand her beads, for example, or for a child to approach an unrelated adult and demand a portion of their food, or for one man to demand and receive another's spear tips for hunting.  SAYING NO IS UNHEARD OF (caps mine).  These 'gifts demands' reinforce the notion that nobody owns anything.  Self-effacement and downplaying one's own achievements and those of others is another way to ensure no sense of hierarchy develops.'

Even when meat is hunted/killed, nobody takes credit, though of course everybody knows exactly who's responsible.  But 'the man supplying coveted meat cannot take or receive meat.  Everyone and no one killed the meat, and so everyone is and remains equal.'

WOW.  Wow wow wow!

Can we go back to our long long long history of prehistoric evolution now, PLEASE?

Thank you Wednesday Martin.
(I might be biased because I was born on Wednesday -- but I doubt it).

I absolutely believe this woman sociologist/biologist/human being has a unique and fascinating take on men, women, the market, relationships, an ethos, and the world.

And I just bet it worked a hell of a lot better that !Kung way.