Tilting

Book club has chosen Don Quixote for August.  Here's an excerpt of the email by which I cast my fateful vote:

"Tough choice!  I think maybe The Forsythe Saga, though I have to say that Proust is also very tempting.  Really anything but Don Quixote- just not sure I can hack that."

Cue the universe's maniacal laughter.

July's a busy month for me: I'm making my first ever recording in the my-name-is-on-the-CD-and-not-buried-in-the-back-of-the-booklet sense, and I'm running scared.  The perfect time, it would seem, to have at those mills of wind.

But if I have to suffer, y'all do, too.  You know you've just been waiting for a DON QUIXOTE LIVEBLOG!  Oh yes.

 In addition, I hereby issue an open invitation to y'all to hop onboard and read along.  Please?  Where are you going?

Le sigh.

Thus far I've downloaded a free version of the book to my Kindle, tangled with the translator's preface, and skipped Cervantes's rambling prologue.  Now I'm on page 3.  Page 3, people! Bow down!

Though I have to say this sounds eerily familiar:

"In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits."

Quixotically Yours,
Anne

Newsroom

The first episode of Aaron Sorkin's newest coitusless interruptathon is out, and I like it way less than I'd like to.  Newsroom is a one-hour drama centered around a one-hour news show, which sounds as if it would inspire you to immediate narcolepsy were it not for your longstanding, inexplicable, and not entirely proper fascination with Jim Lehrer.

Not that you know anyone like that.

I wanted Newsroom to be both intricate and fast-paced, in the manner of a Robert Altman film or -hey, it's true- a Tina Fey sketch, and to some degree it is.  But it's also not cool.

You know what I mean.  You may pretend you don't, that you've forgotten Middle School and its attendant terrors, the maneuvering, like so many social battleships, of seventh graders though the stormy pubertal sea.  But you know who wasn't cool in Middle School?

You.  Because you cared.

Newsroom cares, too.  It projects an aura of coolness, with its snappy dialogue, its fashionably offbeat cast.  It's got the right clothes.  But as soon as you think, hey, this kid's not so bad, Newsroom invites you down to its rec room for a glass of chocolate milk an earnest discussion of climate change.

Climate change standing in, of course, for the colossal failure of television news networks to deliver, well, news.   It's not news, either, this failure.  Journalism is an onanistic industry, and Sorkin is more than a decade beyond the feverish burst of self-flagellation surrounding the rise (stop me?) of Fox News.  The waning of objectivity in Journalism is a story that's played out; yet Sorkin, curiously, seems determined to break it.

LOUDLY.  AND WITH MUCH SPEECHIFYING.

I'm not one for speechifying.  Or, truth be told, for network news.  There are too many constraints on TV journalism, and not enough space for investigation or imagination, those twin lodestars of print.

Instead of Newsroom, a show not even a deliciously nerdy supporting cast can save, I recommend an hour curled up on the couch with the latest issue of the New Yorker -its coverage ranging, in this issue, from the Guadalajara drug wars to a University of Chicago scavenger hunt.  I laughed.  I cried.  I turned the page.

I Am Here

Cullowhee, NC.  Working my tail off, I should note.

Salome! Salumi! Sartre!

Among the crueler facts of life (childbirth, unrequited love, snot) is the fact that, slowly and surely, your universe will disappear.

Oh, sure, you'll still be ambulatory.   You'll walk (for a while, at least), talk (for a while at least), wine, and dine (when eating goes, you're in trouble).  But the world you labored so mightily, in childhood, in young adulthood, to apprehend, begins, piecemeal, to slip away.

NPR runs an occasional segment on endangered sounds.  Recently, they featured that ubiquitous squawk/buzz of my youth, the sound of a modem connecting.  To me, the sound -twangy with an underlay of steel- conjures afternoons hunched at the computer  typing mad and terrible poetry, evenings yelling at my parents to get off the phone so I could check to see if my crush had written me back in the last three minutes (no).

It wasn't a particularly enjoyable world, but it was mine, and it's gone.

Encyclopedias: kaput.  I found a set by my bed a few weeks ago during my travels and was startled to be reminded of their browsable heft. We've gained Wikipedia, but we've lost serendipity: no longer do you flip to leprechauns and come out with leprosy.

The trick is, you don't notice it happening.  One minute you're staring at skeletons in volume S and the next moment you're an adult.   Car phones, phone trees, pagers, walkmen, card catalogs, summer jobs: poof! 

But what else is new?

It's worth taking the question literally; what's new is all you'll have, in the end.

Rose Hill

This is my favorite graveyard.  There are no roses, but there is a hill.  The graveyard, perched at the top but spilling over the sides, boasts a view that is sweeping without sweeping you under -gentler than the too-sharp, too-fierce vistas of the American West.  The graveyard is sizable but not overwhelming, well-kept without being fussy, pretty without being precious.  It embodies, in short, everything I love about the Midwest, with the added plus of hilarious signage.

Life is a dead end, and all that.

I try to make it out to the graveyard at least once each trip home.  It's a fair walk, almost two miles each way, and the route wends through the university I intermittently attended, the downtown in which I was married, and, finally a neighborhood of weary, gentrifying bungalows on the western edge of town, in which I wore through, pace by pace, the soles of a heartbreak or two.

I enjoy walking by myself, and the graveyard is always empty.  So there's that.

There's excellent coffee available on the way back.  So there's that.

But the real reason I come is to be reminded.  Slow.  Down.  No way out.

Last night, as I was battling sleep to read just one more page, someone died.  Someone dies with every inhalation, every release of breath.  This particular death came late but still too early, after head injuries sustained during a bike ride with friends. The deceased was a colleague with whom I was to teach in 10 days' time.  I knew him only a little.  He had a lovely smile; in any case, he's gone.

I'll keep wandering through the graveyard, but you should know I've opted for cremation.  At my end, let there be, at most, at least, a reception and some decent joe.

Home & Away

Home and Away is the name of a long-running Australian soap opera upon which a roommate from a long-ago summer internship shot to B-list glory.

(I have to add that walking around NYC with this woman, who is unequivocally, no-holds-barred beautiful in the manner of the Televised, was like entering a parallel dimension.  The gorgeous do not inhabit the same world as the rest of us.  And their world has way more free stuff.)

I've never seen the soap, but the name splintered and lodged.  I like the rhythm of it, a hop and a gallop. I like, too, the way it conjures, with a troubling yet pleasant vagueness, one of the central tensions of our lives.

Were home; we're away.   What's home shifts- our mother's arms, our bedroom, our hometown, our comfort zone.  Away changes, too.  It's the coffee table we toddle toward; the wilderness of the backyard; our first love; Alaska.   What's constant is the transit.  We're on the move, wandering somewhere between hearth and horizon.

At this point in my life, a lot of this is literal.  I've been home for about a week; in another few weeks, I'm leaving again.  Then home, then away, then home, then away, then home....later, rinse, repeat.   I've gotten used to it, which is to say I hate it and I crave it, both.  There's something essential in going away; there's something equally vital in coming home.

How will I find unearth these necessities when I'm homebound?  I say "when," not "if;" there will come a time in my life when I won't, or can't, travel anymore.  What's your home? What's your away?

And how come the rest of us don't get free drinks?

Jarred

 I'm rereading The Bell Jar.

This was a book club pick, not something I would have come back to on my own.  Plath's book is possessed of both brevity and wit, but there's very little soul here, and a great deal of the slough of despond.

[Sidebar: What better phrase is there, really, than "the slough of despond?" I will attempt to inflict this on all of my conversational partners in the next week or so. You've been warned, preschoolers!]

Not that it's not a graceful slough: Plath has a poet's eye, and the dark, hurtling force that propels her poems straight into your gut is present, too, in her prose.  But the despond is so erotically and exactly depicted, so lovingly rubbed up against, you tend to get sucked in.

Not a book, in other words, that leaves you better than it found you.

The first time I read The Bell Jar, I was 17 and suggestible.  Plath's oeuvre propelled me almost single-handedly into the only bona fide period of depression I've ever experienced.  (In retrospect, I can't pin the whole thing on Sylvia: I'd just quit ballet to concentrate on music, and thus for the first -and hopefully last- time in my life, I was getting no exercise.  That stuff about exercise acting as an antidepressant?  Totally true.)

In rereading, I can still feel the downward slurp of the thing.   Plath's insight, what makes her so dangerous, is that depression isn't abut sadness.  It's about revulsion.  The ordinary, intensely examined, is revealed to be sickening.  Fountains, mothers, boyfriends, pipes: the disgusting excrescences of the everyday.

She's right, of course.  Look at anything too long, too closely, and it reveals itself as foul.  But then you learn -as I had to, as Plath never could- to keep walking.