Yes, I do in fact spend a lot of time looking at other people's subway reading material.
I do sometimes bring my own. Really. It's just that a lot of times I'm too tired to feel like reading. Also, Mike usually goes to sleep on me in the mornings, which makes it kind of difficult to read.
But. I saw a couple of books recently (besides Watchmen) that caught my eye. The first one was Away, by Amy Bloom. It was the cover that arrested my attention. (You can see a picture of it here.) It's just...such a remarkable contrast, the still life and the landscape. I mean, the still life looks like one of those really, really old school paintings, with just the fruit and the bowl and the table and little to no background, only maybe some dark-colored drapes fading into blackness. Those were always associated, for me, with an extraordinary sense of confinement - not necessarily physical, but psychological. Something along the lines of the extreme propriety one associates with, for instance, Victorian times. "Things must be perfectly thus and so, and no other way." The fruit has to be shining and round and ripe and perfect, and there can be no breath of movement to disturb it. Still lifes like that always made me feel trapped in an amber stillness of suffocation and stagnation. The landscape, by contrast...it's true you don't really think of landscapes moving around, either. And in general, I'm not actually a big fan of landscapes, partly for that reason. But this one reminds me a lot of the Hudson River School. It's golden, metaphorically as well as literally. Looking at it, you feel like the artist is saying, look at this. Look how beautiful it is, look how boundless it is. Look at the possibilities stretching out and out into the hazy golden distance.
Probably most of this is just me. But really, just that image gave me this really weird feeling of cognitive dissonance. I wonder a lot if it was intended or not, or if other people experience it the same way. And if it wasn't intended, what was the thought behind the imagery? *shakes head. I dunno. Like I said, it caught my attention.
The other book that caught my attention was called Seasoned with Salt. (Quite frankly, I have no idea why it was called that. Possibly a reference I'm not familiar with, I don't know.) This one, though, it wasn't exactly the book itself that got my brain turning. It was the whole salt thing. Seasoned with salt. What the hell does that mean? I don't know, but someone entitled what looked like a fairly serious book that. Which got me thinking. Salt is kind of a weird...concept-bundle, in our language and culture. I mean, on the one hand, it's as common as clay. Everyone has some in their kitchen, you use it all the time, you throw it in your food without really thinking about it. You feel slightly nagged to eat less of it in the same way you feel nagged by some vague but pervasive "they" to eat less junk food, an injunction you've heard so much that it becomes background, like the irritating high-pitched whine of the television. Salt is less than ordinary.
On the other hand. You have things like books entitled Seasoned with Salt. Salt has a strange weight sometimes. We have phrases and ideas like salt tears and the salt sea. They resonate, even when if you look straight at them it's sometimes hard to tell why. Accumulated cultural weight, or sensitivity, or something. Tears, and the ocean, are...vital, both in the sense of being critically important, and in the sense of being powerfully alive. And yet - adding salt still adds something to them. An extra density. And there are other important things that are salty. Sweat. Blood. Salt also has this sense of worth or value. There's the phrase "worth his salt," for example, old and degraded as it is. The idea was still powerful, once, and may still be so. And one can also go back to sweat, and blood. They also have a sense of worth.
It's difficult to reconcile all these ideas and images to one object, difficult to think of one object meaning all of them simultaneously. It's one of the things that fascinates me about meaning, the complex and contradictory multiplicity of it. It seems...almost like the physical world, actually. Incredible complexity reaching both up and down far past the eye's, or the mind's, ability to perceive. With, in the world of meaning, boundless contradiction thrown in gratis. I love that world.
Maybe I'm mad -
- but I still love it.
But. I saw a couple of books recently (besides Watchmen) that caught my eye. The first one was Away, by Amy Bloom. It was the cover that arrested my attention. (You can see a picture of it here.) It's just...such a remarkable contrast, the still life and the landscape. I mean, the still life looks like one of those really, really old school paintings, with just the fruit and the bowl and the table and little to no background, only maybe some dark-colored drapes fading into blackness. Those were always associated, for me, with an extraordinary sense of confinement - not necessarily physical, but psychological. Something along the lines of the extreme propriety one associates with, for instance, Victorian times. "Things must be perfectly thus and so, and no other way." The fruit has to be shining and round and ripe and perfect, and there can be no breath of movement to disturb it. Still lifes like that always made me feel trapped in an amber stillness of suffocation and stagnation. The landscape, by contrast...it's true you don't really think of landscapes moving around, either. And in general, I'm not actually a big fan of landscapes, partly for that reason. But this one reminds me a lot of the Hudson River School. It's golden, metaphorically as well as literally. Looking at it, you feel like the artist is saying, look at this. Look how beautiful it is, look how boundless it is. Look at the possibilities stretching out and out into the hazy golden distance.
Probably most of this is just me. But really, just that image gave me this really weird feeling of cognitive dissonance. I wonder a lot if it was intended or not, or if other people experience it the same way. And if it wasn't intended, what was the thought behind the imagery? *shakes head. I dunno. Like I said, it caught my attention.
The other book that caught my attention was called Seasoned with Salt. (Quite frankly, I have no idea why it was called that. Possibly a reference I'm not familiar with, I don't know.) This one, though, it wasn't exactly the book itself that got my brain turning. It was the whole salt thing. Seasoned with salt. What the hell does that mean? I don't know, but someone entitled what looked like a fairly serious book that. Which got me thinking. Salt is kind of a weird...concept-bundle, in our language and culture. I mean, on the one hand, it's as common as clay. Everyone has some in their kitchen, you use it all the time, you throw it in your food without really thinking about it. You feel slightly nagged to eat less of it in the same way you feel nagged by some vague but pervasive "they" to eat less junk food, an injunction you've heard so much that it becomes background, like the irritating high-pitched whine of the television. Salt is less than ordinary.
On the other hand. You have things like books entitled Seasoned with Salt. Salt has a strange weight sometimes. We have phrases and ideas like salt tears and the salt sea. They resonate, even when if you look straight at them it's sometimes hard to tell why. Accumulated cultural weight, or sensitivity, or something. Tears, and the ocean, are...vital, both in the sense of being critically important, and in the sense of being powerfully alive. And yet - adding salt still adds something to them. An extra density. And there are other important things that are salty. Sweat. Blood. Salt also has this sense of worth or value. There's the phrase "worth his salt," for example, old and degraded as it is. The idea was still powerful, once, and may still be so. And one can also go back to sweat, and blood. They also have a sense of worth.
It's difficult to reconcile all these ideas and images to one object, difficult to think of one object meaning all of them simultaneously. It's one of the things that fascinates me about meaning, the complex and contradictory multiplicity of it. It seems...almost like the physical world, actually. Incredible complexity reaching both up and down far past the eye's, or the mind's, ability to perceive. With, in the world of meaning, boundless contradiction thrown in gratis. I love that world.
Maybe I'm mad -
- but I still love it.