OF A GOLDEN AGE

From Jane Smiley’s lovely, very personal novella The Age of Grief:

It used not to be like this. Time used to stretch and bunch up. Minutes would inflate like balloons, and the two months of our beginning acquaintance seem in retrospect as long as all the time from then until now. A day was like a cloth sack. You could always fit something else in, it would just bulge a little more. Routine is the culprit, isn’t it? Something is the culprit. The other thing about routine is that it frees you for a more independent mental life, one that is partly detached from the business at hand. Even when I was pulling out all of that guy’s teeth today, I wasn’t paying much attention. His drama was interesting as an anecdote, but it was his. To me it was just twenty-four teeth in a row, in a row of hundreds of teeth stretching back years.

Stephen King, personal hero, wrote the introduction for a new edition of Lord of the Flies, in which he discloses his feelings on the purpose of novels:

In the best novels, the writer’s imagination becomes the reader’s reality. It glows, incandescent and furious. I’ve been espousing these ideas for most of my life as a writer, and not without being criticised for them. If the novel is strictly about emotion and imagination, the most potent of these criticisms go, then analysis is swept away and discussion of the book becomes irrelevant.

I agree that “This blew me away” is pretty much of a non-starter when it comes to class discussion of a novel (or a short story, or a poem), but I would argue it’s still the beating heart of fiction. “This blew me away” is what every reader wants to say when he closes a book, isn’t it? And isn’t it exactly the sort of experience most writers want to provide?

I can’t speak to any writer’s intent, but as a reader (and English major), this is what I want to find in a book no matter what. Part of letting your taste mature as you get older is recognizing your limits — there are whole parts of literature from which I may never read anything, and the time in my life when I would punish myself for feeling that way is over. It’s behind me. That’s not to say there aren’t fifty (or five hundred? thousand?) books backed up on my “I want to read this next” list.

King’s oft-used fictional locale Castle Rock is taken from Lord of the Flies.

She told me how happy she was that they were open about things. How comfortable she was with him. How she couldn’t believe it herself. How she never thought she could feel this way. [...] Now that I knew, could I carry on a conversation with him without punching him in the face?

– Mother and guest-blogger Kathleen Volk Miller, in a Motherlode post titled “Teaching Teenagers About the Joy of Sex.”

It seems that during the Sexual Revolution we began a generational oscillation, wherein the parents are conservative and their children are radical, or the parents are radical and their children are conservative. And it also seems that now, in the age of realtime internet scrutiny of everything, the pattern is about to blow apart. Here’s a thought exercise: Decide something, tell the internet about it, and wait for the wildly overenthusiastic yeas and nays to roll in.

In this case, Motherlode commenters are 50% “Your open and trusting relationship with your daughter is so, so excellent!” and 50% “You could literally not be a bigger creep and worse mother if you tried.”

Oh, email, how often you frustrate us:

“The Internet is something very informal that happened to a society that was already very informal,” said P. M. Forni, an etiquette expert and the author of “Choosing Civility.” “We can get away with murder, so to speak. The endless amount of people we can contact means we are not as cautious or kind as we might be. Consciously or unconsciously we think of our interlocutors as disposable or replaceable.”

That New York Times article (which I recommend) focuses on why people don’t answer emails, but P.M. Forni’s comment on the informality of modern Western society is the real kicker. We ARE an informal society but I never thought of it so succinctly. There is some measure of old-versus-new involved in these complaints — “Why don’t you send thank-you notes?” may be the prototypical example for my generation (p.s. I do) — but is there a downside to losing even our vestigial traces of formality?

I don’t know, I don’t know. My inclination is always to let people live as they want to live with as little interference as possible, that they may distinguish themselves in whatever ways they see fit. Earlier a friend sent me to this topical piece on the threat new media poses to old, and the decline of a certain kind of traditional narrative. How can the world go on without clear beginnings and endings? Somehow:

This moment of anxiety and fear will pass; future generations (there’s now one every three or four years) will have no idea what they missed, and yet they will go on, marry, divorce, and own pets.

Perhaps we’re growing out of the denouement. My mean seventh-grade English teacher is already disappointed, I’m sure.

I lent a beloved book of poetry, Velocities by Stephen Dobyns, to my mom, who’s a voracious and openminded reader. She described his poems as “densely packed with free spiritedness.” I revisited a favorite Dobyns essay, Deceptions, and here’s a little piece of it:

A poem invites the reader into its room; with the novel the reader walks around the fence surrounding the house. With a poem one often creates a single experience, with the novel a body of experience. With a poem the connection with the reader is more physical. Because of the noise of the poem, its rhythms and music, because of the intensity of its emotion, the connection with the reader can feel more intimate.

But if I feel hostile toward the world and dislike its people, I can’t write poetry–there is nothing I wish to say to that reader on the other side of the page except Go Away. For me, writing a poem is to engage with the world; writing a novel is to escape from its immediacy. W. H. Auden claimed that people write novels because they have no lives of their own. Novelists, of course, deny this. While I deny it as well, I also feel that when I am writing a novel, I am stepping out of my life to enter another, while in poetry I am intensifying my life.

“The noise of the poem, its rhythms and music”!

The high price of movie tickets and inconsistency of even the most well reviewed movies drove me out of regular movie attendance years ago. THAT SAID, the Harry Potter books and movies totally suck me in for a lot of reasons. J.K. Rowling’s books feature some of the best storycraft ever aimed at young people, and the movies build over Rowling’s basic frame with a strong cast and even stronger photography and visual effects.

After this I might include some spoilers, so tread lightly.

I liked Deathly Hallows 1 the best before seeing Deathly Hallows 2, and while the second doesn’t exactly work on its own (even to the standard set by previous installments: the horcrux plotline has roots and its anchor in Deathly Hallows 1, while the Dumbledore/Snape saga begins and lives mostly in Half-Blood Prince), I really hope they edit Deathly Hallows 1 down a bit and issue a combined edition. How could they not?

Deathly Hallows 2 excels visually to the same magnitude Deathly Hallows 1 excelled at character development. It also brings back Harry’s secondary circle of friends (NEVILLE, Seamus, McGonagall) and Hogwarts, although the latter takes a beating so severe that it may never recover. As the Hogwarts faculty and the Order of the Phoenix combine their powers to protect the castle, and McGonagall looses the castle’s stone soldiers (!!!), I realized just how much the movies established Hogwarts as a character itself. It expanded, visually, on the workmanlike Rowling prose. The first few installments waved CGI effects around like a showpiece at a graphic-design convention, demonstrating every possible spell, showing us every flashing light and twirling everyday object; the last few installments learned to use those effects sparingly but flesh out the settings into photoreal palpability.

As CGI technology advances (revisit Jurassic Park then consider the Gringotts dragon flying through and destroying parts of wizard-tinged London), it gets easier to suspend disbelief when watching a movie like this. The margin between our collective literary imagination and what we can see on the screen narrows day by day, although, still, a movie draws a specific vision to replace each reader’s vision, each of dozens of millions of readers’ individual visions.

I admire the choices made by the HP filmmakers. They kept the universe clear, canon, and distinctive, blending it near-seamlessly into Rowling’s original texts and advancing the maturity with each installment. The characters grow more complex, the visuals more elaborate and complete, the emotions heightened and anchored in so-called real life. By the end of this installment, Harry earnestly offers himself up as a necessary sacrifice; Dumbledore clouds his own moral standing almost beyond recognition; and everyone Harry knows offers themselves up to fight and die on his behalf too.

Each book pulled young readers further and further into serious adult territory, culminating in this, the most high-stakes, majestic, Arthurian climax imaginable. Love and honor. Empowerment and troubling dilemmae. Loyalty, above all. Very good, very good.

Charles Bolden Jr., head of NASA and spaceflight veteran, on the surprises of space (via Parade):

My most unexpected sensation was emotion. Ten minutes into my first flight, I saw a huge island. It took me a while to recognize that it was Africa. It was beautiful but disconcerting — there were no borders or lines. I started to cry, because I couldn’t believe I was looking down on where my ancestors came from.

Amazing.

In my 60%-male workplace, we spend a lot of time talking about company sports teams in various states of incubation. Oh, and we’re not very good at sports, and all the teams we fully form end up in last place. The worst was the time the boys formed a basketball team in a specifically ALL MALE league, and even though I’m taller than all but one or two of the boys on the proposed team, I wasn’t allowed. How about that.

Now we have a bowling team, ladies welcome, and I’m pleased to report that we’re not in last place. Bowling is my kind of sport: You can eat a large meal beforehand and drink during it, and handicapping means you ultimately compete against yourself.

(Alley-Lujah! is our team name, featuring a bowling ball with angel wings. No offense, religion, it’s just an innocent play on words, although an opposing team once admitted they thought we were a church group.)

At work, my bread and butter is projectors, and I’ve been asking people about ambient light for over three years now. Can you dim the lights? Will there be a tent to block the sun? Sorry, no, there’s no projector that can compete with direct sunlight, because, you know, the sun is like infinity lightbulbs multiplied by infinity again.

Even the professionals sometimes have this problem: DJ Shadow’s set at Pitchfork Music Festival yesterday was disrupted by a failed visual aid (via Chicago Tribune critic Greg Kot — visit Kot’s post for the full details of DJ Shadow’s setup).

“You can’t see anything, can you?” [DJ Shadow] quizzes the enormous audience, already knowing the answer. “Trust me, it would’ve been really, really fresh.” The frustrated San Francisco electronics wizard is referring to what should’ve been a blow-out visual array. [...] Alas, due to a huge miscalculation on the part of organizers, it’s still too bright outside to see the light show at work. [...] Shadow even brought this potential problem up with organizers when he learned of his time slot and was reassured everything would be fine.

“Well, Mr., uh, Shadow, will you have a tent to block the sun?”

My mom knows I’ve always dreamed of having a round house. I still do! I still save pictures of them when I find them in magazines! There’s a giant round tower turret thing at this castle in my hometown and it’s lined with creepy, creepy murals but I still love it!

So one day I was driving around and saw this building:

It’s perfect, the narrow windows even resemble the thin slats you’d see in the fortified walls of a castle. Imagine if the inside were just a giant round atrium with a skylight at the top. I’d live in there for sure. I’d move in tomorrow.