Home Safe: An FAQ

I'm going the passage route this week. From Home Safe:

She thinks of the time Tessa was six and so ill with a violent flu she would not eat for days, and the pediatrician who called to check on her said that if she didn't eat today, he was going to have to hospitalize her. Helen sat at the bed beside her feverish daughter and held up a spoonful of red Jell-O and told Tessa that her bear, Snugs, had come in the middle of the night to speak to Helen, and he had said he felt really bad that Tessa wouldn't eat and in fact had had bad dreams on account of it, and he really hoped Tessa would eat some Jell-O so he wouldn't have bad dreams like that again tonight, they were dreams of those flying monkeys that Tessa also once feared. Tessa looked closely into the face of the bear lying next to her and then picked him up and put him in her lap. And then she ate some Jell-O, one shuddering bite and then another and one more, and Helen thought, I will never know such gladness and relief again.  But of course she did, because that's what children are capable of: creating freight train feelings in their parents with a bite of Jell-O, with a single glance, with a sigh that they make in sleep.  Helen stands in the darkened classroom and sees Tessa stirring mud puddles with a branch of blooming forsythia, pointing to a setting sun and saying, "The sky's coming down." She sees her posing in her first high school dance dress, her braces glinting, her corsage wildly off-kilter. 

On a few occasions in her life, Helen has felt deep happiness as a kind of pain. The day she married Dan.  The day Tessa was born. Now comes another such time.  She sits down and puts her hand to her chest and rocks.  Thinks of all she has lost and will lose. All she has had and will have.  It seems to her that life is like gathering berries into an apron with a hole.  Why do we keep on? Because the berries are beautiful, and we must eat to survive.  We catch what we can. We walk past what we lose for the promise of more, just ahead." 

In Time For Mother's Day

Generally, I tend not to care who authors' favorite authors are, but when one of my favorite writers, someone whose books I anticipate, says they read "anything by" another author, well, color me intrigued.

This is how I discovered Elizabeth Berg. Augusten Burroughs—author of Running with Scissors, Dry and a really depressing memoir that I didn't love but read anyway—said in an interview that he reads anything of hers. Anything! I mean sure, I like a lot of writers, but narrow the list to those entire oeuvre I've consumed and the pickings get slim. Five, maybe ten tops. (That list is a post for another day.) So Home Safe is my inaugural Elizabeth Berg book.

Home Safe is one of those books that's kind of about nothing. There's no tangible conflict (the main character's husband dies, but the book starts after that), just emotional ones. Writing about these kinds of issues, this ennui that seems endemic of being upper-middle-class Americans with the liberty to feel things like general sadness, isn't always my cup of tea—sometimes I find myself waiting for the sex and explosions. But there are a lot of authors who do it right, and Elizabeth Berg is one of them, at least based on this book.

The narrative of Home Safe follows Helen, a recent widow (and ugh, don't spontaneous and inexplicable husband deaths just fuck with your whole perception of the world) and her 20-something daughter Tessa. There are other characters—Helen teaches a writing class whose students we meet; Helen's friend Midge, Helen's parents—but the book isn't really about them. It's about grief, and the way we deal with grief, and it's about mothers and daughters. It's especially about mothers and daughters.

The User is the Content

The sad thing is, I actually read a book last week! I just never got around to writing about it, instead hoping that the e-mail of review-related notes I'd sent myself sometime around Tuesday would perhaps magically transform itself into several paragraphs of coherent thought, and then post itself online. Funny how that didn't pan out. 

My book for last week (again, we're like six days late here) was Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!, a brief biography of the 1960s media theorist (Marshall McLuhan) by tech/future/dystopia-focused fiction author Douglas Coupland. I picked up this particular book for three reasons. First, both Coupland and Chuck Klosterman (the latter one of my all-time favorite nonfiction writers) were speaking in New York at an event focusing on McLuhan and his contributions to our understanding of the media landscape (which undoubtedly included questions like "What the fuck would he have thought of Foursquare?") Unfortunately, work prevailed and I wasn't able to make the event (I'm still bitter) but by then I was halfway through the book and I am not (anymore) the type to give up. Second, among his many other teaching posts, Marshall McLuhan for a brief time taught at Fordham University, my alma mater, and for this reason (plus, you know, his general fame) was brought up with some frequency by my professors at Fordham, some of whom knew him personally (yes, I majored in media theory, let's all just deal with it). Third and finally, it was short. Like 200 pages short. 

For those who don't know, Marshall McLuhan was a 1960s media theorist known most commonly for the little gem "the medium is the message." He based his understanding of the media environment (and far more importantly, on how media transforms the way we behave and think) on literature, the Renaissance and other seemingly unrelated topics, which made his ideas at the time (again, '60s) seem more batshit than prescient. But prescient they were. Here are a few choice McLuhan quotes, most from 1962.

The next medium, whatever it is—it may be the extension of consciousness—will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual's encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind. 

We shape our tools, and afterwards our tools shape us.

 

The user is the content.

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction.  And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.

[Terror] is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time ... In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.

Sincerely, Craig Ferguson

A departure from Kira's Favorite Awesome Quotes' standard format (a list of my favorite awesome quotes) this week. It's been bugging me for a few days that I perhaps didn't do Between the Bridge and the River Justice in my review, or at least didn't succeed in giving any indication what it's about. Lo and behold, at the end of the novel, Craig Ferguson himself provides a "reader's guide," which turns out to just be a letter to readers, full of questions.

Still, this letter actually does more to explain Between the Bridge and the River than my review even came close to doing. So, for your enjoyment...

Dear Readers,

If your group has decided to discuss my book then let me first of all thank you for your attention and time.

Here are a few random thoughts that may stimulate your discussions.

I began the book with five statements. Apologia, History, Confession, Time, and Science. Why are these statements made so early? Are they rules for the world you are about to enter? If they are, are the rules followed? Are the statements truthful or accurate? Does this matter?

The first chapter of the book is entitled Alpha Wolves, the last chapter is called Omega Man. This is obviously a biblical reference. Do you think I'm drawing any conclusions about God in the book? Is this a religious work? What constitutes a religious work or act? Can writing, even if it contains dissension and doubt, be an act of worship?

Is all art an act of worship?

There are some sexual acts described in graphic detail. Is this salacious? Why is photographed sex "pornography" but written sex "literature"? Is that true? Is fictional sex better than the real thing?

Someone who read the book early on said that Carl Jung [ed. note: Jung appears to one of the book's characters in a series of dreams] was my father figure. I thought Jung might be an imagining of the Deity, or maybe just the ghost of Carl Jung.  What do you think?

A few characters in the book are already dead but this doesn't seem to slow them down much.  Does the continuance of life after death prove the existence of God?  If it does, then does the existence of life before death prove the existence of God? Is it a good idea to prove the existence of God? What happens to faith if you have proof? Do you need faith if you have proof? Is the existence of faith an admission that there is some doubt as to the existence of God?

Claudette believes that evil is born in the victim excuse.  Do people really use injustice committed on them in their past to justify their actions? Do you do this? Does your country? Your family? Your ethnic group?

Is it valid to use aggression or antisocial behavior on the descendants of those who persecuted your ancestors? If not, how are the wrongs of the past dealt with? Should they be dealt with at all? Is it enough to simply apologize? On a personal or even international level?

George attempts suicide.  Is he morally wrong to do so?

The church founded by Saul and Leon is built on lies and deceit, yet Fraser thinks that this ultimately doesn't matter because it helps some people.  Is he right?

There are many hidden literary references in the text. For example, the old Icelandic boatman who ferries Frasier across the underground sea is called Arne Saknussem, a lesser character in Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. Why do you think I did this? Was I just showing off or is there a reason for it?

What do you know of Jung's theory of the collective unconscious? Does it seem valid to you?

My heart was broken when I wrote this book. Is that the kind of thing necessary to stimulate creativity? Can a person be happy and creative?

I know the answers to maybe two or three of these questions. 

I wish you better luck figuring things out.

Peace and Love,
Craig
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More Than Just Talk

Yes, that Craig Ferguson.

This week I read a novel by Craig Fergoson. No fahreals, like late night talk show host Craig Ferguson. I know! I was surprised too.

Now, I don't watch the Late Late Show Craig Ferguson--for one, it's on mad late--but I do follow him on Twitter and in these postmodern times, I think that counts. In any case, his particular fame (televised) is what made me so intrigued when I came across his book in the store (also I am weak and easily persuaded by celebrity.) Luckily for us all, the book has proven--like chocolate, cough drops and Star magazine--a good impulsive buy. Between the Bridge and the River is a pretty sweet novel.

To clarify - it's not a sweet novel. I mean, not like "Aw, so sweet." It's actually pretty dark, NC-17 even, with the kind of choice descriptions that make you conscious of whether fellow commuters are reading over your shoulder. One gets the sense Ferguson, whose show is on CBS--the network of the elderly--saved up all the words he can't say, topics he can't broach and, well, nasty shit he would never dream of bringing up on television, and put it all into one book. Brutal crimes. Perverted sex stuff. Take that, elderly.

Stick to Inventing Democracy

This book was a waste of time.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of Arianna Huffington. She's incredibly well-spoken, fairly forward thinking, and generally impressive. Her status as a powerful 21st century woman doesn't hurt either. But Third World America isn't what I would call her crowning achievement.

To start, I find it somewhat odd that Arianna would bother to write a book in the first place. After all, isn't this the woman who undermined print journalism (itself a daily operation) in favor of the minute-to-minute coverage that is The Huffington Post? Third World America, though full of compelling statistics and arguments, can't help but already seem dated. Many of the numbers have no doubt changed in the year-plus since the book was published, and many of the topics have advanced, either incrementally or by massive degrees (the book predates the recent "shellacking" in Congress, as well as everything going on right now in the Middle East). Books on current events can't help but be felled by the rather slow process that is book publishing; it just feels extra odd that the woman behind such a huge disruptor of old media would have bothered with one at all.

In truth, I wonder whether the medium in general was a bit lost on Arianna (it shouldn't have been; this is her 12th book). As I mentioned, Third World America is chock full of facts and figures, but doesn't otherwise ever seem to find a level of depth I expect from nonfiction, and even more from nonfiction books presented as arguments. If you've been following economic news over the last two years, nothing in Third World America will come as a surprise to you, or even an "aha" moment. In fact, many of the numbers and quotations Arianna uses are from reports that have been covered by the press, or articles from the press itself (one may have been better served reading the New York Times' business section over the last 18 months). It's somewhat ironic that the founder of The Huffington Post, arguably an aggregate of other news, would have penned a book with such similar qualities. Or I guess not ironic at all.

A Completely Biased Book Review

David Foster Wallace

Here's the thing about David Foster Wallace, and the main reason I'm having such a hard time reviewing this book. In my experience, people either love, hate, or haven't yet read anything by DFW. If they love him, it's most likely for all the reasons I do—his unique outlook, his superb vocabulary, his singular writing style, his ability to pair poignant observation with subtle humor—and if they hate him, well it's probably for those exact same reasons. So the only scenario I can really think of to address is the one where you, as a reader, have against all odds managed to dodge his work. In the interest of providing some sort of service to my three-person audience, copied below is a passage from one essay in Consider the Lobster, which gives a fair (though woefully inadequate, in the grand scheme of things) idea of what  exactly it is to read an entire book of words written by DFW. (This particular essay, for reference, is an extremely detailed evaluation of Standard Written English, and the merits or disadvantages of enforcing its use).