When I Have Nothing To Say, My Lips Are Sealed

I would apologize for not posting lately, but that sort of thing strikes me as egotistical and a waste of words. I trust you've spent your freetime wisely.

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Here's some small thoughts on the books I've read recently, each of these from the Golda Meir Library here on the campus of our mid-sized non-flagship state university:

David Foster Wallace - Consider the Lobster. Just as I'm saving William Faulkner's If I Forget Thee Jerusalem and The Mansion to read when I'm older, having burned through most the rest of his works in my formative years, I feel I should now be reading DFW only sparingly. The essays in Consider the Lobster kind of came on like a weekend spent with a lost friend -- you forgive the excesses and savor what was so fantastic and fresh about the writing. "Authority and American Usage" illustrates in a way that nobody else likely could the connections between clear writing, critical thinking, and democracy. (It almost -- almost -- makes me want to teach English Comp again, just so that I can use and explore that essay with actual English Comp students.) And "Certainly the End of Something Or Other, One Would Sort of Have To Think" pinpoints what's so insufferable about John Updike. It's sad and shocking to think that Wallace (9/12/08) beat Updike (1/27/09) to Dead White Male status.

Another reason to ration what DFW works I've not yet read:¹ his style of merging hyper-precise language with the whole inarticulate, ultra-casual, abbreviated jargon thing is super infectious w/r/t one's one writing. (Also a stylistic problem that comes from reading Faulkner.)

¹ : Oblivion: Stories, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, the upcoming and unfinished Pale King.
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Jack Pendarvis - Awesome. I picked this up straight from the 21st Century literature shelves (ie, I wasn't particularly looking for it or utilizing Dewey Decimals) based on its colorful kid's-booky binding and because Pendarvis is a friend of my local bookstore and folks I like who've worked there. It much improved three or four lunch hours spent in the otherwise and miserable space that pretends to be this university's cafeteria in the summer months.

Awesome concerns a giant (named "Awesome," which I say in place of "the titular giant," which would be twee) who's particularly skilled in building robots. You can take it from there. As Samuel Jackson said of the film titled Snakes On a Plane, "You either want to see that or you don't."

Awesome reads like a novelization of the world's weirdest 64-bit SuperNintendo cartridge, and I mean that in the most complimentary way. The plot involves a quest for improbable items, its dialogue marries the erudite with the down-home, and its general tone is fit for your more fantastical Roald Dahl or Kenneth Grahame child-lit if not for all the preoccupation with ejaculate and emasculated wieners.

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Nelson W. Aldritch, Jr., Ed. -- George Being George. It seems to me that George Plimpton had the kind of charmed life that, again like Snakes on a Plane, you're either going to envy or abhor. He was a dilettante, which I'd always understood to be a pejorative until thinking about Plimpton's life as presented here. To do a little bit of everything -- pitch for the Tigers, narrate a Ken Burns documentary, run an influential literary magazine, serve as Commissioner of Fireworks for New York City, host swank parties in your west side apartment, write a few respected books, wrestle a gun out of the hands of an assassin -- seems like the best of all possible modern lives. Luckily, Plimpton had the right kind of ancestral and social-economic background to be able to gain entry to this kind of life, and if you stand back a bit he seems like the perfect poster child for White Privilege, but at least he was polite and humble and good-humored about it all. It's hard not to like the guy, in biography as in life, apparently. (Sadly, no direct mention is made of George's commercials for Intellivision.)

This is an oral biography, assembled in the manner in which Plimpton assembled similar works on Edie Sedgwick and Truman Capote. It strikes me as the perfect kind of biography for Plimpton, both because it accentuates his proclivity for anecdotes and society life, but also because the format allows the editors to cut out all the boring stuff. It's fun, fast, and only a touch gossipy. The 50's Paris and 60's New York the book evokes seem really sort of magical, the kind of places were wandering into a coffee shop at exactly the right time might lead you to a career of editing fiction for a literary magazine. The kind of places where a third glass of scotch might either lead you into a month-long, continent-spanning practical joke or a wrestling match with Norman Mailer.

I've been made aware that the last book I reviewed does not make for good beach reading, as a lengthy description of decapitation can really melt the ice in your Mai Tai. This book, however, really demands to be read on vacation, as far as possible from your actual and ordinary life. You're not going to want to break away from the bit about Plimpton dodging bulls with Hemingway in Madrid in order to switch your whites from the washer to the dryer, which -- lets face it -- is likely one of the more significant things you've done with yourself today.