Crisis, Collapse, and Bailout

In an effort to help restore confidence in financial markets and heal our ailing economy, I think it's well past time that I came clean about my role in the global collapse of the BRLP (Brian Re-Literacy Project).

At the start of summer, I inveiled myself on the arduous, nigh-impossible project of reading one book a week (from the libary system's 7-day loan shelves) through summer, all while working full time, raising two toddlers, attending to household responsibilities, and becoming increasingly obsessed with electoral politics. Some will say that the project was doomed to failure from the start, and my response to such critics is: Spot-on prediction! Have you considered sending your resume to Lehman Brothers? They could probably use an insightful, forward-looking analyst like you.

The last update on the BRLP concerned a faltering attempt at getting through a book on the Works Progress Administration, along with a renewed effort that would begin with Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives. While certainly compelling and innovative in it's oral history-like style, it soon became clear that I wasn't going to finish the book within a week, or even two. We took a trip to Boston in early August, and I worried that I might lose or damage the book so -- since it belonged to the library and not to me -- I set the book aside to read up on some of Barack Obama's policy positions in The Audacity of Hope.

After returning home, I passed the halfway mark in Savage Detectives, but a weekend visit from my English Composition posse meant setting the book aside again to make way for certain hangovers. That Sunday afternoon, with a bloody mary in one hand and four aspirin winding their way through my bloodstream, I aimed to take up the book again. I didn't find it on my nightstand, nor in the office or the living room. It was not under the couch or under the kids' cribs, or anywhere in the house. The Savage Detectives was missing.

Monday, I found that the book was not on or in my desk at work, not left by the printer or the photocopier, not filed away with the spare pound of coffee beans or cough drops, not even in the drawer that houses a few remaining thank you cards that I never sent following my March 2005 wedding.

It was not in the car. It was not at the Student Union lost and found.

I thought for sure it would turn up. I avoided talking about the book, or saying anything more about it. I tried visualization exercises, trying to imagine where I was on Wednesday, August 13th, the last day I spent with the book. I read other things, including some stories by Samantha Clarke, the second half of David Mitchell's excellent Cloud Atlas, and The Essential Groucho.

Today, my long-suffering and put-upon wife finally took it upon herself to call up the library and arrange to pay late fines and the cost of replacing the book. So, you know, thanks for the bailout! I promise to be more fiscally responsible in the future, and only borrow what I know I'm able to give back.

(Meanwhile, I've taken full financial ownership of a copy of Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, which so far seems like a much more profluent and readable version of the last third of Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost. It includes the idea -- one I will fully support -- that men who wear mustaches ought to have some sort of special talent, like archery, card tricks, or palindromes. Seems to have merited it's National Book Award on that observation alone, if you ask me.)

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P.S. I presume that the Shorewood Public Library's copy of The Savage Detectives is either hanging out in Mexico City cafes (as in the first third of the novel), backpacking around Europe (as in the second third), or on the run from a murderous pimp in the Sonoran desert (third third). If anyone should happen upon this book, please know that I'd be grateful for the opportunity to finish reading the book. Also note that it no longer belongs to the Shorewood Public libary, but instead to American taxpayers. And, more specifically, my wife.

The Struggle Itself Is Enough To Fill A Man's Heart

In his excellent The Art of Fiction, John Gardner makes the argument that:

“To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write with the assumption that one out of a hundred people who read one’s work may be dying, or have some loved one dying; to write so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write, as Shakespeare wrote, so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on.”

I first read Gardner's book in my very-early twenties when I first started trying seriously to write, and that particular passage -- and its argument about one's moral obligation to humankind -- became incredibly important to me. I take Gardner to mean that one has a moral duty to be life-affirming, to suggest ways out of darkness, and to generally echo Albert Camus' solution to the "one truly serious philosophical problem." (This is not to say that art can't be dark, pessimistic, or immoral, or that it can't suggest that evil often wins or that darkness can overcome, only that art -- or in Gardner's rendering, art "with taste" -- ought not leave someone in greater pain or despair. Vonnegut, for example, was no cheerleader for the human condition, but his bleak humor and rationality were fireflies in the gloom.)

David Foster Wallace was a writer who had some impact on me in my Boston years and his death this past weekend has stuck with me. My initial response -- having heard of Wallace's death from a friend's e-mail on Sunday morning -- was probably too crass and dismissive, and tied into the problems I'd developed with Wallace's writing style. An incredibly smart and exacting writer, Wallace was also interested in formal and stylistic innovation which -- at times -- seemed a bit too clever for my tastes. There's a lot of Wallace that's worth reading-- particularly in Girl With Curious Hair and A Supposedly Fun Thing... -- but the cleverness, the syntactic exercises, and his headiness eventually wore out on me. Infinite Jest, while a book I thoroughly enjoyed reading while in the act of reading it, sort of lives up to its title too exactingly.

Since Sunday, though, I've been thinking a lot about Wallace's story "The Depressed Person" , which I read in Harper's Magazine when it was published in 1998 (strangely, it seems a lot fresher in my mind than that -- I would have guessed it appeared in this decade). While not a very dramatic story, Wallace establishes and cements a mindset of a depressed woman; all of the action of the story takes place in its footnotes. Depression, as the story presents it, is a kind of extreme self-centeredness, an obsession with self that washes out the rest of the world (including, within the story, the illness and death by cancer of the depressed person's closest friend). Wallace's story -- and the idea that depression is a malady of solipsism -- drew some heat in Harper's letters pages, but I think it ultimately adheres to Gardner's definition of writing with taste. It's idea is one that has helped me out of a dark spot or two, now somewhat complicated by Wallace's apparent suicide.

At an important time in my life, the right person gave me the right book. That book says:

At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

As Lou Reed said, my life was saved by rock and roll.

One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy

The last update on the BRLP (Brian Re-Literacy Project) appeared on June 23rd, or three weeks ago. For a summer reading plan in which I intended to read a book each week, this should signal bad news. It's probably important to note that June 23rd's post was somewhat hubristically titled "I Am Unstoppable." So Perspectaclus, the ancient Greek god of science fiction and eyeglasses, struck me down mid-way through American-Made.

I can't fault the book itself(*), which is just as much a page-turner as a book about 75-year-old employment policies could possibly be. In fact, there's a lot to understand from the WPA programs and their solutions to a ecomomic situation increasingly similar to our own, a situation which came about from the first and second-worst presidents we've had. The case studies included -- short chapters about people at work in the WPA-supported jobs -- are pretty compelling; someone (ahem) could make a pretty good historical novel about the librarians-on-horseback of 1930's Kentucky.

So I struggled not so much with the book but with getting to it. It's summer, and the weird documentaries are coming fast and furious in Netflix envelopes, and it's finally nice enough for the zoo or the park, or just sort of slumming around like a teenager. (And then this week, I've been watching this clip of Feist on next season's Sesame Street over and over and over -- you'll want to watch it over and over too, I bet.) Ultimately, I had to let the library re-claim American-Made, and picked up The Savage Detectives by Roberto Belano, an author who comes highly recommended by Bayard.

The Savage Detectives looks to be a complicated and compelling book, and I don't want to say too much more about it before I finish it, but I will say the first 100-or-so pages creates a world of mid-1970's Mexico City poetry-minded bohemian-ness that you really take to and don't want to end, kind of like a textual massage. And then, just like a massage, it ends, and you have to go on to other stuff that you worry may not be as fantastic as that massage. (I've only had three massages in my life, but I thought this would be a more widely-understood simile for something one wouldn't want to end than the things I personally wish were ever-lasting, like Deadwood, Ernest Ranglin's "Minuit," or James Robinson's Starman.)

I'm sure I'll have more to report in a week. Or two.

* Note: It does sort of bother me that the full title of the book -- American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work -- has two colons in it. As I think I've said before, titles -- like people -- should only have one colon. (I do like titles with options, so I would have gladly accepted American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA Or When FDR Put the Nation to Work. Titles that offer possible alternative titles (ie, Nabokov's Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle) remind me fondly of the Bullwinkle cartoon.

Advice for Aspiring Speedreaders of the Future

Dear Aspiring Speedreaders of the Future:

If you are setting out to read a book each week, a task which requires you to read upwards of 50 pages each day, it may not be a good idea to select as one of those books a 640 page hardcover on jobs programs and welfare relief in the late 1930's. And if you were to select such a book, it may not be a good idea to select it during a week in which you spend three days attending a family wedding in the bucolic thumb-shaped portion of your particular landmass.

Back to work,
B.

I Am Unstoppable

BRLP Book Six/Week Six:

If you're at the library searching for either a work of contemporary social critique or a fast-paced novel, you can do worse than to cross paths with Diary of a Bad Year, written by J.M. Coetzee. Most of its pages are divided into three sections, with short essays on contemporary issues (such as Guantanamo Bay, intelligent design, or The Seven Samurai and the origins of statehood) heading each page. The second third of each page forwards a story of the writer of these essays and his obsession with a woman he's hired as a typist, with the third section of the page devoted to the typist's discussion of this writer and his ideas with her lover.

These sections often don't fit neatly into the parts of the page devoted to them, so they sprawl onto subsequent pages, forcing some decisions by the reader as to how to read the book. Far too few books problematize the path through them, so there's an aspect of "Choose Your Own Adventure" to the work.

The author of the essays in the novel, like Coetzee, is a South African living in Australia; he earns the title Senor C as his typist early on mistakenly believes he's from South America. But while it's easy enough to see Coetzee himself as the "author of the essays," this complicates -- in an interesting way -- his being the subject of the third portion of the page. Add to this critiques and counter-arguements in that third portion of the issues addressed in the essays delivered above some pages behind, and that all of this inter-textuality and authorship-questioning is done in a serious and successful way (as opposed to, say, the metatextual gamesmanship of Robert Coover or John Barth late in the previous century).

Because DoaBY is a short at 231 pages, and because I'll be on vacation this weekend, I've pre-borrowed book seven -- the long(er)ish American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work by Nick Taylor. While I prickle a little bit at the double-colon in the title -- sentences, like people, should be limited to just one -- I'm interested enough in the WPA, FDR, and other TLAs* to put that aside. Our country once paid artists to make murals, writers to write, and teachers to teach and you know what? We spent our way out of a Depression. Might be a strategy to keep in mind

Page-to-Date BRLP page count: 1,824
Days-to-Date BRLP calendar count: 35 Days
Page-per-Date BRLP reading rate: 52.11

*TLA=Three-Lettered Acronym

Tank Park Salute

I spend part of Father's Day attaching a stroller-carriage to my bicycle, which was one of those projects that tests my few mechanical and direction-following capabilities. The inaugural ride went okay, although Caleb spend the whole ride trying to remove his bike helmet.

I received from my wife a DVD she made of pictures of the kids from our first visit with them proceeding to how they look now. This was a fantastic gift, particularly since Kirsten is not the software nerd in the family (and Kirsten is even more direction-averse than her husband).

Here's the short version: The pudgeballs we first met.

The little boys we have to chase after now.

What tore me up, unexpectedly, were the pictures of the day they officially and legally adopted us as their parents. I'm not a person who believes in divine or karmic predestination, but it's hard to imagine that these two boys found their way into our lives simply by accident or a series of phone calls. As I often tell the boys, we're so lucky they found us.

And, of course, thanks to our Dads for their wisdom, humor, and counsel. And for making the moments above possible for us.

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BRLP Book Five/Week Five:

Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is written in an egaging creole of urban slang, Spanish, and sci-fi allusions. There's a heavy involvement with the last century of politics in the Dominican Republic, including footnotes for unfamiliar readers like me, and with the last 40 years of adolescent male speculative literature, the references to which go un-footnoted. Interestingly, the authorial assumption that we can catch off-handed references to the Lord of the Rings or Jack Kirby but will not catch similar references to the Parsley Massacre or Joaquín Balaguer adds up to an accusation, and a just one, about where we choose to lay our attention.

America 1908, meanwhile, does not contain any information about the founding of Wolski's Tavern, which was founded -- it is an institution, after all-- in that year. It was interesting to read about the Wright Brother's patent worries and Admiral Peary's need for fundraising -- we tend to think of inventors and explorers as altruistic types, doing what they do for the good of mankind or in the name of science, when they are just as interested as us regular schmoes in making a living. Also worth reading for coverage of the Great Race, Henry Ford's ideas about what a car should mean, and the Giants vs. Cubs National League penant race. The solution to the problem of transmitting real-time baseball action from New York to Chicago (or vice versa) in an era before radio is particularly cool. (Hint: telegraph wires + this.)

Also, as I say in a previous post, Theodore Roosevelt was totally coo-coo, looney-bird screwball crazy. But loveable all the same. I'm eager to read a biography, once the BRLP is over.

Page-to-Date BRLP page count: 1,460
Days-to-Date BRLP calendar count: 28 Days
Page-per-Date BRLP reading rate: 52.14

Three Hypothoses

I put forward these three observations in the hopes that they might be swooped up by scientists, theologists, or Y.A. genre novel kid detectives for further study. (If used, please mention me in your dissertation, sermon, and/or Scholastic Books author review page.)

1. The sound my work computer makes when I get a pop-up error message ("ba-ding!") is the same sound featured in the Naughty by Nature 1991 hit "OPP."

2. Tracy Chapman's 1988 "Fast Car" is the same song as John Cougar Mellencamp's "Jack and Diane" from 1982, only with different lyrics and a different tempo.

3. Shane, the blond kid on the latest season of "The Next Food Network" star, has the same mouth as Jaimie Oliver.


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BRLP Week Four/Book Four

The Yiddish Policemen's Union (464 pp) was the best thing I've read from Chabon, a profluent mix of alternative history and noirish dime novel. I liked it even better than Kavalier and Clay (656 pp), actually. YPU continues some themes of identity and alienation from that earlier book, particularly relating to Jewishness and homosexuality. It's kind of right and fitting, I think, that certain authors continue to track through and explore particular themes and tropes, as this sort of fits the way that we continue to construct and problematize our own lives. (A discussion along these lines with my friend Bayard led to him suggesting that Chabon may not let go of these issues, "the way that some people never get over Vietnam, or opening for Nirvana.")

Having read Phillip Roth's The Plot Against America (416 pp) earlier this year, I'm ready to re-enroll as an undergraduate English major so that I can write a 3 and 1/3-page term paper with this title: "It Could Be Worse: Alternative History and the Jews." (Or I could skip it, and save myself the B-.)

After three novels, I felt BRLP Week Four was high time to investigate some recent non-fiction. I was hoping for The Age of American Unreason (384 pp) or Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine (720 pp), but neither were available. I had a false start with a book of J.M. Coetzee's book reviews, which I recognized would be hard slogging and dry, so I returned to the library on Saturday for Jim Rasenberger's America 1908.

So far, fairly interesting, both for the comparisons between now and then, and for all the weird exploration stuff (flight, polar expeditions, the New York to Paris automobile race) that just aren't part of the culture anymore, seemingly. For one thing, I wasn't aware of the speculation in the press about Theodore Roosevelt's sanity. And let's face it, hunting bears and having that moustache and using exclamations like "Bully!" and "Capital!" and starting a Bull Moose party? Crazy. He went blind in one eye after a boxing match with one of his White House subordinates, and was an early proponent of simplified spelling. I'm a fan of his daughter Alice, though, of whom T.R. said: "I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both."

You'll also recognize Theodore as the only president to have a toy named after him, at least until someone develops a doll that garbles speech, mongers fear, and starts interminable wars for personal profit.

Down By The Riverside

BRLP Update: Third Week, Third Book.

I heartily recommend Exiles to anyone interested in Jesuits, shipwrecks, nuns, or Gerard Manley Hopkins. It's a really interestingly composed short novel about alienation and lives devoted to God, with some very beautiful writing and the calamity of the shipwreck is rendered in a way that is simultaneously horrifying and graceful -- a quality I've admired in Ron Hansen's writing before.I'm now on to Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which is insanely fun. Word is that the Coen Brothers are putting up a movie version for 2010, which makes perfect sense -- there's a lot of Fargo in here. Aside from the conceit, in which the mid-century relocation of European Jews happens not in Israel but in the Alaskan islands, there's a noirish detective story with really crackling (not to say Coenic) dialogue. It's too bad Bogart can't star as the down-at-his-heels, existentially lost Detective Landsman.

I also snuck in Bryan K. Vaughn's Pride of Baghdad, a graphic novel based on a true story of lions that escaped from the Baghdad Zoo at the start of the current Iraq War. It's one of those rare talking animal comics for adults, and strong-hearted adults at that, since it doesn't end well. As an evening's read, it has a lot to recommend it, but its lessons were ones I feel I've learned already: war is savage, dehumanizing, monstrous, hell. I'm going to put on my long white robe, ain't going to study war no more. (Given the rules of the game, this book isn't counted as a book...)

Page-to-Date BRLP page count: 775
Days-to-Date BRLP calendar count: 15
Page-per-Date BRLP reading rate: 51.66

"No Matter How New Age You Get, Old Age is Gonna Kick Your Ass" -- U. Utah Phillips (1935-2008)

Utah Phllips, folk-singer and train-hopper and old-timey socialist agitator, died last week. He was a fantastic story-teller; Ani DiFranco made a great record in the nineties by putting backing music to recordings of his between-song stage banter and stories.
Here's some lyrics to Talking NPR Blues. Like Phil Ochs, Utah kept no sacred cows, even if meant wagging fingers at his own audience.

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I have a summer project. Since the twins came, I've been lax on reading, and have started far more books than I've finished. So, this summer, I intend to read at least one book per week, chosen from whatever books might happen to be on the 7-Day Loan shelves at any particular branch of the Milwaukee Public Library. (I'm a plodding and deliberate reader, but I respond well to deadlines.) I have to rule out books over 500 pages, as 70 pages per day is about all I can reasonably commit to, and only actual prose will count, since poetry and comics are quicker reads for me (because I don't pay sufficient attention to the former, and I eat up the latter like the adolescent geek I truly am). After Labor Day, I will donate an appropriate amount -- say, half the price of each book -- to the library system and/or literacy related causes. (I will also accept sponsorship.)
In the inaugural week of the Brian Re-Literacy Program (BRLP), even before anyone -- myself included -- knew it was the the inaugural week, I read Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible, a fun book that gives a literary* and "real world" treatment to Super-heroes and -villians. This week, I'm reading Ron Hansen's Exiles, which concerns German nuns, a shipwreck, and the poet Gerard Manly Hopkins. Ron Hansen wrote the novel that was the basis for the recent Jesse James movie (starring Brad Pitt, and not bad!) , and is also the author of one of the more brutally beautiful stories I've ever read: "Nebraska" from his story collection of the same name.

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Early this morning, I received a call on the emergency red phone in my basement, a phone which only rings when the words "robot" and "monkey" appear in the same New York Times article. (Most of you already know that I'm associated with an underground group working to prevent the coming Cyborg Monkey Apocalypse. I mean, I'm all for technology that might help disabled people move better, but if I've watched the Terminator movies correctly -- and I think I have -- technology sometimes has its down side. See also: Toffler, Alvin; Postman, Neil; Pitt, Brad.)

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* I use the word "literary" here only to agitate my parents. "What does that mean?" they ask. All it means is this (particularly when said in the slightly derogatory way my grandmother would have used the word): fancy.