Category: literature

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Treadmilling

I tellya, dear readers: I’ve been in overdrive at the office for about 5 months now, and it’s been burning me out something fierce. I’ve been facing one big issue of the magazine after another, plus a ton of responsibilities for our annual conference. I think it reached a point where I didn’t know how to slow down. But I figure that’s a lot better than being unemployed.

On the plus side, it means I actually hammered the crap out of our November/December issue, wrapping it up today even though it’s not due at the printer till Tuesday. Our issues have been running late all year for a variety of reasons, so I was just hoping to get this one ish out by deadline. Even though I was early, I still sprinted to the finish line, working on news pages last night and spending the early morning gathering photos for the features.

The upshot? I got the last few files to my production manager by noon, which meant I could take a half-day and chill the heck out.

In my world, that means driving down to Montclair, picking up some coffee over at Bean’s, walking around town a little (cold and drizzly today, but hey), and hitting the Book Center for a little stochastic research!

Within a minute, I opened a book to a page that provided all sorts of grist for the imagination-mill. You can expect my novel sometime around 2020.

After that score, I browsed for books on my wishlist, and ended up finding a bunch of little treasures on the cheap —

Waiting for the Weekend – Witold Rybczynski

Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces – Frank Bruno (from the 33 1/3 series of books-about-albums)

Prince’s Sign O’ the Times – Michelangelos Matos (ditto)

Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. 3 – Robert Caro

The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia – Peter Hopkirk

— for a grand total of $35!

Now it’s on to a nice, relaxing weekend of wrapping up the annual NBA preview, reading Middlemarch, and, um, sleeping.

So don’t call, is what I’m saying.

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Yucky promotions

I think Wal-Mart’s “Hot Release Tuesday” may be the grossest name ever for a promotion, but today actually sees a couple of releases that I’m enthused about:

War and Peace – A new Tolstoy translation by Pevear & Volokhonsky! This pair jump-started the wave of new translations of the Russians with their 1990 edition of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the hardcover of which was the most expensive novel I ever bought (as far as I can recall)! Here’s a short essay from Richard Pevear on how he and his partner Larissa work.

Oblivion with Bells – A new record from Underworld! My wife better stock up on Lamictal or some other anti-epileptic drug, since those beats tend to mess with her head pretty badly.

Schulz and Peanuts – David Michaelis’ biography of Charles Schulz will likely be the first bio I read since David Guralnick’s treatment of Sam Cooke, proving that I have some pretty odd tastes, I guess.

I thought I’d try to make this a regular feature, but I discovered that

  1. I couldn’t come up with a single DVD release that would make this list, as I have no interest in Transformers, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip or A Mighty Heart, which convinced me that
  2. there aren’t enough new books, records, movies coming out each Tuesday that interest me.

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Barren-ness

One of my friends wrote me about yesterday’s Middlemarch post, essentially smacking me down for sounding like I “don’t want to be bothered getting into another time and place, which is something that most people think that novels do.”

Guilty! As I hit the “publish” button, I felt that this post came off as a whine, rather than the argument I wanted to make about living at hyperspeed and how difficult it is to slow down. If anything, I wasn’t trying to get into the merits or specifics of Middlemarch: only 125 pages in, I wasn’t in a position to judge it.

Living at hyperspeed, I was stuck for time. Given more of it, I would’ve contrasted the experience of reading a book like this with the experience I had reading Spook Country, an entertaining thriller that felt like it was made of now. Its McGuffin is pretty easy to suss out, unfortunately, but I enjoyed the book probably because of its utter now-ness.

What I was trying to say about Middlemarch, on the other hand, wasn’t that the particular time and place are like a foreign country (nor one that I’m disinclined to visit), but rather that the very experience of reading that novel is like a foreign country (or maybe one I was raised in as a child but forgot about).

Given my tendency not to extrapolate from my own experiences and tastes, I should’ve concluded that this is merely a symptom of my middle-aged shallowness, especially as the past 3-4 months’ workload has left me frazzled and constantly dealing with crises.

Humorously enough, the chapter I read last night begins with this passage about . . . how times are faster “now” and there’s less leisure:

A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in winter evenings. We belated historians must not linger after his example; and if we did so, it is probably that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a camp-stool in a parrot house. I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

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Book Barren

Before a trip, I usually find myself downstairs in our library, looking at 1,200-odd books and trying to figure out how much reading time I’ll have, what mood I’ll be in during the trip, how much weight I’m willing to carry in my bag, and what book will make me look unapproachably smart in the terminal and on the plane. This time around, I was too harried to think straight, and so, last week in Milan, I got stuck without a book.

This almost never happens to me. I knew there would be plenty of time to read on this trip, but I foolishly brought along only a brief (350 pages) novel I was halfway through (Spook Country) and a 110-page play (Rock n Roll), both of which I wrapped up by the second day of the trip. It was time to employ The Eco Strategy.

Unfortunately, the first two bookstores I checked out had no English-language section. Since I was on conference-schedule from then on, there was no time to look up and visit a specialty store (Amy sez there was one over by Castello Sforzesco).

I stopped in at one near our hotel and discovered a very small Inglese shelf. The books were mostly UK Penguin editions, and the most contemporary writer on the shelf was Beckett. So I found myself studying a collection of classics to figure out what the heck could occupy me for the rest of the trip and the 8-hour flight home.

I considered picking up Nostromo, but thought, “That book killed David Lean; there’s no way I’m going to make it.”

Trollope? I wouldn’t know where to start.

Bleak House? My cheap-ass stereotype kicked in, as I picked up a new copy a year or so ago, in the hopes of re-reading it.

A Room of One’s Own? Tried it on three different occasions and never got into it. (Tried reading Mrs. Dalloway twice: same result.)

F. Scott Fitzgerald? I’d be back in the same bookless boat a day or so later.

Then it hit me: Middlemarch! Sure, I had a copy at home, but it was mass-market paperback, and this edition was larger and more readable (I’m getting old, and mass-market typesetting is beyond my eyesight).

I started Middlemarch once back in college, but got derailed due to some piddling matter like coursework. But now it would be the only book in my possession! I’d be sure to get so far into it that I wouldn’t just bail partway through! Plus, it would make me look smart and out of step with the times! The back-cover blurb was from Henry James, fergoshsakes!

From the first chapter, as George Eliot relates the marriage prospects and religious tendencies of Dorothea Brooke, I got to thinking about the nature of sprawling novels like this one. Over its 800 pages, the book attempts to canvas the interweaving lives and classes of a town in 1832 England. I wondered how contemporary readers — outside of academia, that is — would devote themselves to this sort of project. Do people have the patience to read a book like this one? I find it charming in parts, and possessed of enough tension and engaging characters to outweigh the archaicness of some of the language.

But I also find myself facing a variant on the suspension-of-disbelief: that is, I feel as if I have to slow down, to reframe my perceptions to an era in which communications were slower and religious and ideological debates were of a different stripe. That’s not to say that it’s some sorta relic. Dorothea’s zealotry, Casaubon’s arm’s-length distance from the world, Fred’s slacker college-kid are all vivid characters and could easily transpose into the present. Still, a novel like this requires a different way of thinking than that to which I’ve grown accustomed in these past hyperaccelerated years.

Finishing Book One (about one-eighth of the novel) on the flight home, I felt confident that I could stick with this novel and its pace, that I can slow down from this frenetic pace.

Then I thought, “In eight hours, I’ve probably traveled more miles than George Eliot did in her entire life.”