Your heroine has been recovering from a surgical procedure for the better part of a week. I’ll be back with regularity soon, because I figured a chronicle of all the daytime TV, medications, and naps would be too much for you all to handle.
Cannonball #15: Smiles to Go by Jerry Spinelli
February 5th, 2010
Jerry Spinelli still captures neurotic youth in bloom better than almost any writer, and has done so for many years, but I’ve found that many of his books lack a solidity and complete package. Like Eggs (reviewed here / here), Smiles to Go features a solid, finely voiced main character surrounded by an odd plot and a lot of one-dimensional secondary characters. Whether the book is worth reading depends on whether you’ll relate to the main character.
Will Tuppence (stupid name alert — there are only six Tuppences listed in the phone book anywhere and they’re all in one city) is an earnest know-it-all with no emotional IQ. He’s a freshman in high school, with both a male and a female best friend and a family from whom he keeps his distance for some reason. He thinks everyone is out to annoy him or drive him crazy, and he has to think very carefully about almost all the everyday emotional experiences in the book.
The specifics of the story are not that important, and they’re symbolic and metaphorical in a way typical of YA fiction. The ending feels a little forced and abrupt but satisfies Will’s little journey.
I don’t know, I don’t know. This review sounds negative but I really did like the book, and Will reminded me of myself as a freshman — going through the motions of growing up and behaving responsibly, but lacking complexity in realms that were a little less concrete. Will is a very smart kid and the book begins with his fixation on the idea of proton death, which seems more important to him than any of the people I know. I hope Spinelli’s lesson here is not that the smart kids shouldn’t be so smart, but rather that our personalities and angles must exist in harmony.
Cannonball logo font: Bleeding Cowboys. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.
Cannonball #14: Zastrozzi by Percy Bysshe Shelley
January 31st, 2010
Most people aren’t very familiar with Percy Shelley, a Romantic poet whose talents are counterweighted by his ego and biography. His most famous poem is Ozymandias, a compelling work for a variety of reasons: its intensely visual language and vivid diction; Shelley’s implications as to the staying power (or lack thereof) of political glory; the fast-life-early-death tale of Shelley himself, and the surpassing fame of his one-hit-wonder second wife (daughter of pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft) whose legal name may as well be “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.”
For me, the most important takeaway from “Ozymandias” was always the more permanent nature of art and the influence of its creator on the legacy of its subject. When you trust your image in the hands of your court sculptor, in a vaguely phrenological sense, that person holds complete control over what the future will hold for you and how your character shows in the pose, expression, and demeanor of the sculpture. In this case, Shelley’s vision is completely fictional, but speaks to our feelings of impermanence in the temporal world. Like Yukio Mishima, Shelley studied the place where action and art merge.
Zastrozzi is one of Shelley’s earliest works, a short Gothic novel published when he was an 18-year-old student at the Eton School. In it, aristocratic Matilda (a blend of Annie Wilkes and Kathryn Merteuil) steals both the man she loves and the woman he loves, and does so with the help of her bosom friend Zastrozzi.
Matilda pulverizes her true love Verezzi by swearing that his lover Julia has died, and when Verezzi takes the news so badly he nearly dies, she has to step up her game in order to win him to her side. She sweeps him off to her estate in southernmore Italy so the warm weather may revive him; she acts a particular way in order to cultivate his dependency and gratitude, with intentions to somehow alchemize these feelings into love. Matilda pursues and manufactures the moment when action becomes love: she alters the circumstances of Verezzi’s life with her resources and her bare hands until he turns to her out of Stockholm syndrome.
The book strikes comical notes, and often. Young Shelley was aware that Gothic horror was a spit-upon and lauded genre, but embraced it anyway and did so with art and moxie. I’m guilty of some descriptor-slinging in my life as a lady of letters, and I recognize a fellow slinger:
She again went to Verezzi’s apartment, but as she approached, vague fears lest he should have penetrated her schemes confused her: but his mildly beaming eyes, as she gazed upon them, convinced her that the horrid expressions which he had before uttered were merely the effect of temporary delirium.
I count eight adjectives or adverbs in that one sentence, not to mention the thicket of helping verbs. Temporary delirium indeed!
The book is short and fast, and its characters say such ridiculous things I couldn’t help but love it. The ending takes a characteristic Gothic twist, and also, it is very fun to say “Zastrozzi” over and over. Zastrozzi. Zastrozzi. Leave the gun, take the Zastrozzi.
Cannonball logo font: Bleeding Cowboys. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.
January 26 Miscellany
January 26th, 2010
1. Today is my parents’ 25th anniversary. My goodness, that is a long time. They are the best.
2. I heard you bought a pair of really tall pants for $17 at the Gap today. Oh right, that was me.
3. Look forward to a review of a sweet little Percy Shelley novel in the next few days. Did you write Gothic novels when you were 17? Me either.
4. Today’s calorie shock comes from the Corner Bakery’s tomato mozzarella sandwich, which has 700 calories, twentysomething grams of fat.
5. After some inspiring suggestions on Pajiba, I picked up a few Jane Austen novels and fully intend to read the smithereens out of them.
6. There is a YMCA in Niles, Illinois, featuring a half-scale model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It is called the Leaning Tower YMCA.
Early: a definition
January 25th, 2010
In a city of millions of people, I am always surprised by how un-crowded many places are, how entire times of day are so empty as to feel completely private. In a city of millions of people, there is frequently no line at the grocery store; my prescription can be ready in five minutes; I can drive from here to downtown in about ten. I am the first and only car at the red light, with no one waiting to drive through the intersection on the perpendicular street.
In the suburbs this feeling only intensifies, fewer people per square mile and more whole areas made up of stores without any residential. Where the city feels peaceful during the empty times, the suburbs feel a little bit alarming, desolate. Instead of enjoying having everything to yourself, you wonder why no one else is there.
But I love the stolen time, the feeling of accomplishment. Completing tasks in less time with no lines or traffic; freedom to look around and think. As it starts to turn light on these short January days, I watch the streetlights switch off in the blooming near-sunlight.
Overheard: Trailhead
January 23rd, 2010
The January 25 New Yorker fiction is Trailhead, an account of the life and times of an ant queen and the colony she establishes. Ants are kind of gross, and some of the details are kind of gross too, but it’s compelling stuff and doesn’t romanticize the ants:
First, however, she had to take a few minutes to shed her wings. To do that, she simply bent her middle legs forward, pressed them against the base of the wings, and snapped them off. This mutilation caused no injury to the rest of her body; it caused no pain. The Queen was a parachutist who slipped her harness upon landing. Now she could move more quickly to avoid the ants, spiders, and other predators hunting around her in the grassroots jungle.
The same issue has a long profile of Neil Gaiman and this insane piece on cryonics. It’s definitely worth picking up.
Sad news.
January 20th, 2010
My sweet, precious little cat was put to sleep on Monday because of a giant, growing, inoperable mass in her throat. She got very sick over the last few months and she started to suffer a great deal as the tumor obstructed her breathing and eating, which made this the only humane and decent thing to do. She was 7. I loved her so much, and I am so, so sad.
Green: a definition
January 19th, 2010
My workplace now houses an environmentally friendly tankless water cooler. It taps into our main water line, filters the tap water, and dispenses it hot, lukewarm, or cold. It is marvelous (literally) to press a button and have water hot enough to brew tea within a few seconds.
Our ongoing conversation here about ways we can be more conscious is almost a matter of company policy more than moral fortitude, and the natural manner in which we all assume we will move toward a smaller carbon footprint and less waste is one of my favorite things about working here. Of course, in homes and in personal lives the dialogue can play out very differently. The New York Times ran a tragicomic piece on the rise in green issues among reasons to visit a therapist, like one California couple:
Mr. Fleming, who says he became committed to Ms. Cobb “before her high-priestess phase,” describes their conflicts as good-natured — mostly.
Even being a vegetarian has opened my eyes to how sensitive everyone is to feeling like they’re on the receiving end of someone’s judgment. “I don’t care what you eat, I’m just choosing for myself,” I hear myself say constantly. And sometimes I forget how easy it is to be a vegetarian in a huge city, or how understanding my parents or other people from previous generations have been for me. Imagine if this were your life, from the NYT piece:
If Ms. Petso prepares a vegan meal for the family, her parents prepare hot dogs to go alongside. Her parents serve on throwaway Styrofoam plates; she grabs a plate that can be cleaned and reused. Her mother, who says she prefers the way food tastes when it is served on Styrofoam, notes that washing dishes has its own environmental costs.
“She prefers the way food tastes when it is served on Styrofoam”?!
Cannonball #13: Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
January 18th, 2010
Let me stall a bit while I think of what to say.
Nearly two years ago I devoured John Steinbeck’s late-in-career travel memoir Travels with Charley and, later that year, took a road trip across America’s northeastern quadrant. Steinbeck’s prose walks a line between the all-out terseness of Hemingway and the more ornamental nature of other writers, and because of that he embodies my favorite writing rule: Don’t let your writing distract from your point. (Maybe you remember this from when I read Flowers in the Attic?)
I read all but the last ten pages of Of Mice and Men while waiting for a wake. The son of one of my dad’s oldest friends died at age 25 after a difficult and terrible cancer battle, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and even now completely lack vocabulary to describe how I felt or feel. This book took my thoughts away and replaced them with a similar sadness that somehow felt more complete, less ragged, because Steinbeck puts his characters in the middle of situations where they must grieve and, more importantly, gives each of them the words and the breathing room they need.
George and Lennie work as transient laborers on various California farms and ranches; in my mind they resembled Jonesy and the other rousties from HBO’s truncated epic Carnivále. Lennie has a mental disability of some kind, and has a damaged or impeded sense of his surroundings as he lumbers through them. At the book’s beginning he has killed a mouse by petting it to death, and he and George have new plans after somehow finding trouble in their previous locale.
George cares for Lennie, and while the other characters describe George as smart, his most relevant trait is his bottomless kindness toward his friend. George realizes he relies on Lennie just as much as vice versa, and by watching out for him George remembers what family means, how people can matter to each other, and the value of another person who shares your backstory and everyday experiences. The other laborers gravitate toward the pair because they don’t understand the bond George and Lennie share; why would George weigh himself down with this big galoot who doesn’t have any sense? They particularly draw the attention of the story’s wannabe alpha male, the boss’s son, who shares an actual legal partnership with his wife but spends his time trying to impress and pick fights with his underlings.
The story is short, and reads fast. Explaining even a little bit in detail would take something significant away, because the momentum and well-paced storytelling are like another character, an observer at the ongoing campfire. In fact, the prose and plot structure make the story feel like it’s been kept in the back pocket of one of its characters, carried from one job to the next, and pulled out during the first card games and conversations with fellow laborers. The story seems significant not only to the reader but to the other men in the story, and their respect for each other and the difficulties of their situation in the Great Depression makes this one of the most compassionate pieces of writing I’ve ever seen. There is no pity here, but there is enormous compassion.
News: Dumpy Brit hates fashion
On Friday my tutee and I went over the word “refuted.” I realized I got into too much detail and nuance when describing the words to him, which I can’t help, but refute was especially tricky.
“So you argue for something?” he said.
“No, not really. You argue against something someone else said, and back up your point,” I said. “So, yeah, you do kinda argue for something, but only because you’re proving something else wrong.”
We used it in a sentence, which I think was about the President and the Senate. Then real life presented me with a much better example. Tanya Gold wrote a regrettably stupid, bitter-sounding piece on why fashion is the worst, including — no, really — blaming high heels for a sixteen year old’s fatal fall between subway cars. In it, she makes a lot of straw-man arguments about thinness and unhappiness and blah blah blah.
One of the first commenters on the post swiftly refutes Gold’s claims. But the best answer came from Tavi of style rookie, who shoots the straw men down with one sentence:
Plenty of people have enormous style that isn’t tied to any era, any designer. To imbue your appearance with verve and personality has nothing to do with thinness OR sexiness unless you want it to. And to completely give up on your appearance, as it seems Gold has, isn’t making any statement against fashion. Most everyday people don’t participate in fashion, and even those who follow it don’t necessarily buy or wear any designer fashion at any point. She mentions feeling nauseous or something when she passes the Banana Republic, which is one of the classiest and most classic chains around and which has only occasional ties to trend.
I think Tanya Gold actually hates clothes that fit properly, and where that comes from I can’t say. Listen, friend Tanya. I am 5′11″ and 200 pounds, several standard deviations away from the average, and I diligently rifle through LOTS of wrong things before coming up with a right thing. And yes, on those days when I dress like a bum, I know that’s what I’m doing. In other words, here’s a quarter: Take your frumpadump “I hate fashion, t-shirts and broomstick skirts forever!” and call someone who cares.
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