(no subject)
The Corrections was as minutely imagined and far-reaching as a Russian novel. The book, I'll grant, dealt in platitudes, and was overly precious, but my friends, my enemies, my stalkers, my disinterested sometimes-readers, it's a novel about the Midwest. A minutely-imagined, farcial sleight-of-hand too good to be missed. So much to love about the Lamberts and so so so much to love about Jonathan Franzen's totally exhaustive chronicle of the history of one single family, and all the hilarity and discomfort and trepidation and fear and potential and nobility therein. You should do it. It would feel really good.
Glass, Irony and God, after The Beauty of the Husband, was a little bit of a disappointment. A half-hearted mishmash of essays and Anne Carson's fascinating, essay-length poems, the central piece paled and fell apart during a second excavation. A woman returns to her mother's house in what she imagines to be the aftermath of a destructive love affair (but what is, the reader learns, probably years, possibly several years, later). The narrator is obsessed with Charlotte Bronte. She wants better than anything to understand the inertia that might lead to freezing, the steady removal from human contact that might finally make a person better than humanity (but more to the point, safe). But it's not even like, except for the premise, it's a great poem! Because it's jumpy, it lags, it's inconsistent. And don't make that wilfully inconsistent argument to me, sophomore-year workshoppers. Okay? The final piece, an academic discussion of women's silence in Greek culture and mythology and men's fear of ahem MOUTHS of all kinds, was pretty much the highlight. Is that weird? Yes? Moving on!
San Francisco: was just. We went to the pier and ate seafood and chased poaching birds away. We met up with Trevor and his sisters and played Blondie on the jukebox and drank expensive and strange beers. Four drunk straight women hit on Jonanna, then one of them disappeared into a back room with a cigar-smoking man where they made out so hard they broke a window. We met Phil and his brother at a trendy tapas place in the Castro called (in a breathy whisper) Lime. We helped a blind man get on and off the BART. Jonanna threw her subway map at my feet. We went to the MoMA and though the Olafur Eliasson exhibit had already closed we bounced gleefully through the permanent collection and taught Phil how to look at a Rothko. We went to lunch at a hippie health food restaurant run by a cult and careened around the crazy curvy street and up to Coit Tower and back down to Little Italy, where we went to City Lights Bookstore and then through Chinatown and Japantown. We ate at a little French creperie in the Mission and went to the Pirate store and to Good Vibrations and then we went to DD's house in Oakland where she was cooking 15 pounds of ribs and we ate until we couldn't anymore and then we smoked and drank and talked and played Scene It, a game about movies. And then we shopped and watched the Mavericks play the Lakers in our stuffy hotel room and ate dinner at an AMAZING italian restaurant with Meggy and Chris and then we climbed on the plane, world-weary, broke and happy and in love, and came back to Dallas.
We'll be back.
Glass, Irony and God, after The Beauty of the Husband, was a little bit of a disappointment. A half-hearted mishmash of essays and Anne Carson's fascinating, essay-length poems, the central piece paled and fell apart during a second excavation. A woman returns to her mother's house in what she imagines to be the aftermath of a destructive love affair (but what is, the reader learns, probably years, possibly several years, later). The narrator is obsessed with Charlotte Bronte. She wants better than anything to understand the inertia that might lead to freezing, the steady removal from human contact that might finally make a person better than humanity (but more to the point, safe). But it's not even like, except for the premise, it's a great poem! Because it's jumpy, it lags, it's inconsistent. And don't make that wilfully inconsistent argument to me, sophomore-year workshoppers. Okay? The final piece, an academic discussion of women's silence in Greek culture and mythology and men's fear of ahem MOUTHS of all kinds, was pretty much the highlight. Is that weird? Yes? Moving on!
San Francisco: was just. We went to the pier and ate seafood and chased poaching birds away. We met up with Trevor and his sisters and played Blondie on the jukebox and drank expensive and strange beers. Four drunk straight women hit on Jonanna, then one of them disappeared into a back room with a cigar-smoking man where they made out so hard they broke a window. We met Phil and his brother at a trendy tapas place in the Castro called (in a breathy whisper) Lime. We helped a blind man get on and off the BART. Jonanna threw her subway map at my feet. We went to the MoMA and though the Olafur Eliasson exhibit had already closed we bounced gleefully through the permanent collection and taught Phil how to look at a Rothko. We went to lunch at a hippie health food restaurant run by a cult and careened around the crazy curvy street and up to Coit Tower and back down to Little Italy, where we went to City Lights Bookstore and then through Chinatown and Japantown. We ate at a little French creperie in the Mission and went to the Pirate store and to Good Vibrations and then we went to DD's house in Oakland where she was cooking 15 pounds of ribs and we ate until we couldn't anymore and then we smoked and drank and talked and played Scene It, a game about movies. And then we shopped and watched the Mavericks play the Lakers in our stuffy hotel room and ate dinner at an AMAZING italian restaurant with Meggy and Chris and then we climbed on the plane, world-weary, broke and happy and in love, and came back to Dallas.
We'll be back.