How to be Literary

I've followed the hubbub over Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics with vague interest; here is a book whose heroine is the "daughter of an itinerant academic," whose setting is "a series of picturesque college towns," and whose construction, according to Publisher's Weekly, is "modeled after the syllabus of a college literature course—36 chapters are named after everything from Othello to Paradise Lost to The Big Sleep—that culminates with a final exam." Despite the fact that this appears to be a campus novel--a genre I personally feel should be eliminated from the earth with extreme force--the meta-narrative-loving nerd in me found herself dialing up the local library to add it to my hold list.

Then I read the article in the New York Times about, among other things, whether or not Pessl's hotness was a factor in book sales/reviews/buzz/blahblahfishcakes. Then I saw this post at Gawker deeming Pessl only "book hot", (okay, it's kind of old, but who can keep up with reading Gawker regularly? That thing is like a full time job, in an industry I don't even work in), and then the followup, announcing her upgrade to "TV hot" (but only in black and white,) and then Gawker's link to New York/New Zealand's great new parlor game of "How Much Can You Doctor Your Author Photo."

Result? I'm thoroughly exhausted by both the existence of Marisha Pessl and her novel. Yet the original NY Times review gives me some hope. "[Pessl's] talent and originality would draw wolf whistles if she were an 86-year-old hunchback troll,” Liesl Schillinger wrote. As an 87-year-old clubfoot ogre, with a nearly-finished campus novel in hand, I'm thinking things are really looking up.

Reading Selections for the Sedate

It seems a lot of my recent book choices have been rather feverish, and I didn't help matters by going to see the late show of A Scanner Darkly. (At least I wasn't one of the shrieking girls who had to leave during the first five minutes after getting freaked out by the bugs-crawling-all-over-the-skin scene.) It was time for something cool, refreshing, expected yet not boring, tightly plotted yet never overly suspenseful--in short, an Arturo Perez-Reverte mystery.

This time it was The Nautical Chart--I've already read The Seville Communion and the one about chess--and it didn't disappoint. As usual, the hero was a Spanish man, thoughtful yet not particularly intellectual, sexually lustful but not lascivious, and the (anti?)heroine was collected, tanned, and given to emotional distance and (possibly) betrayal, but never conventional romantic love. Along the way, there was something valuable that was vaguely discussed as worthy of finding, though the actual act of finding it was apparently not worthy of narration, and some murders got tacked on as kind of an after-thought in the last five pages, though their inevitability was apparent for most of the book. And there was a brief attempt at an odd outside narrator as minor character device, which, whatever, narratology.

Maybe it's partly because of the translation that I feel a sense of remove from Perez-Reverte's writing--I appreciate its quality even though it never exactly bowls me over--but sometimes that's just the ticket. I tend to read only a very few authors in the mystery genre, mainly because I like to keep that form of writing as a soothing retreat from either boring but important stuff I have to read for work, or emotionally wrenching stuff I have to read in general, or, you know, books about sentient trash-heaps that I obviously don't have to read but still end up reading and getting scared by anyway. Historical mysteries work especially well for this purpose, and probably that's where I'll go next in the Perez-Reverte oeuvre.

Right after I finish my current selection, P. D. James's The Children of Men, which depicts the near-future in which the human race can no longer reproduce. (This is causing some cognitive dissonance, since James's Adam Dalgliesh mysteries are currently some of the most boringly uneventful yet well-written books on the market; the perfect soothing bedtime reading for any misanthropic Anglophile like me.) I read this book, I must note, solely out of duty to Clive Owen, who will soon be starring in the (judging from the trailer at least) highly dubious movie adaptation. Oh Clive, is there anything I wouldn't do for you? Besides watch Sin City all the way through?

Girls, Unpowered

Say you're a parent. What wouldn't you do to protect your children? If you're a parent like Maurice Clarett, you load your car with a semi-automatic, various other guns, a hatchet, a bulletproof vest, and a bottle of Grey Goose, and call up a bunch of sportswriters to tell them about how you're going to defend your baby daughter. But that's a whole different tragedy.

If you're a parent like me, however, it's more a matter of deleting the Sesame Street season pass from the Tivo. (The Grey Goose comes later.) Okay, maybe I'm overreacting, but I'm having a hard time getting past the initial nails-on-a-chalkboard level disgust I feel at the triumphant introduction of a new Sesame Street character: Abby Cadabby. According to various news releases, including a New York Times report, executive producer Liz Nealon explains the need felt for more of a "girly-girl" character.

We have our wacky, and we have our gentle,” Ms. Nealon said in a recent interview. “But we wanted a lead female character. If you think about ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ some girls relate to Rhoda, who’s our Zoe, and some girls really relate to Mary, who’s a girly girl. And we didn’t have that girl.

In the rest of the article, it's explained that, in addition to her modeling makeup and glitter-wearing behavior, having Abby be a fairy will help thematize immigrant issues without actually having a character from "Indonesia or India," (because, you know, a brown-skinned puppet would totally clash with Elmo.) Implicit to this entire endeavor is a feeling of competition with a certain big-headed, monkey-befriending girl who has a talking backpack and lives in a computer (that's Dora the Explorer, for those of you who are toddler-deprived). I'm not going to hold up Dora as a model of self-possessed feminism, but you know, she does go on an awful lot of adventures all by herself. And as a catch-phrase, I'll take "Vamanos" over "That's so magic!" any day.

Edited to add: It has been revealed that Elmo is a brother. That doesn't make me any happier about Abby.

My Insect Brain

In the department of processing events through the narrow lens of my own experience: I read the news of the latest terrorist threat and couldn't help being overwhelmed by the horror...of making a transatlantic flight with small children and absolutely no carry-on luggage. Sure, they're saying that on most flights formula and juice are allowed, if the parents take a sip first, but what about those flights where you can only carry on a passport and cash in a plastic bag? Please tell me that there's room for a diaper or two in that bag as well.

Of course, given that I both read Perdido Street Station and watched V for Vendetta yesterday, I may be suffering from an inordinately high level of paranoia already, and my brain is just focusing on these practical indignities as a kind of self-preservation. Neither work can I especially recommend or condemn; both suffer from a surfeit of aesthetic sophistication and a generally weakened plot. This is especially true of PSS, which has perhaps the greatest differential of interesting set-up to profoundly boring and skimmable pay-off of any book I remember reading. At its best it only appeals to a certain narrow sphere of horror/fantasy/alternative history connoisseurs: the plot follows the travails of a maverick scientist and his lover (who just happens to be of a race called khepri, with a female body and an insect head, causing much icky sex scene description involving the words "carapace" and "head-legs"), who accidentally release a giant moth that destroys human consciousness using its psychotically attractive wing-patterns and can only be stopped by a combined assault from bio-engineered humans with their heads on backwards, frog-like water people, cactus people, a disgraced and de-winged bird person, a trans-dimensional spider, and a sentient rubbish-heap, and....did I mention the perpetual motion machine that gets invented along the way? The setting has been identified by critics as a "Dickensian London," which, given the previous plot summary, should be understood in only an extremely general sense: a lot of people are poor and beleaguered, some people are rich and corrupt, and a very few are mad as hell and not going to take it any more.

Right now, for various reasons, I'm interested in what happens when people take Victorian fiction and sprinkle it with crazy juice, but PSS was a bit over-marinated, I'd say. According to the book jacket the author was a grad student at LSE when he wrote this, and a lot about the book feels kind of grad-studentish--bizarre for the sake of it, not for any reason of social or narrative interest. Which is not to say that I find sentient rubbish heaps inherently uninteresting, just that, if a book is going to give me (or anyone) the strength to live through a time when mothers are forced to drink a sample of the breast milk they're carrying to prove it's not a liquid explosive, my fantasy literature needs to give me a little more to go on than the relentlessly odd. The nightmares I can conjure all on my own now; it's the way out of them that I need more help with.

I'm Back?

Well, not really. Having already attended one week-long camp on a single novel, I am still enough of a glutton for punishment that I am ready to go to another one--though this time I'm just showing up at the tail end of things, and not really joining in the real fun of dancing around in Victorian dress and such. But for right now I'm really supposed to be working, not dallying in the blogsphere.

Still, being interested both personally and professionally in words and their origins, I couldn't resist re-posting the following Mel Gibson quote, issued as a second apology for his alleged anti-Semitic tirade after his weekend arrest for drunk driving:

"I am in the process of understanding where those vicious words came from during that drunken display," he said.

Wait, wait, don't tell me, I know this one! They came from the alien messages that are being beamed to your brain via the fillings in your teeth! No? Well, where then?

Full story at BBC Online.