Small Town Girl

I wonder when you stop missing the lives you could be leading if only you weren't leading the one you are.

I Am Charlotte Simmons

I have a soft spot for books that go down easy. It's one thing to write literature. It's another thing to write a book that is, moment-to-moment, pleasurable to read.  And I Am Charlotte Simmons went down oh-so-smooth.
 
But let's not confuse pleasurable with pleasant: Tom Wolfe is never that. I am Charlotte Simmons is a rude, mildly-to-moderately misogynistic, 99.5% cynical indictment of the moral lassitude of today's college darlings, and it is a billion pages long to boot. Over the course of those pages Charlotte, the eponymous college freshman, arrives from the backwoods of Sparta, NC, to live the life of the mind at the famous Dupont University.

Once at Dupont, Charlotte, obsesses about her image, falls into and out of various social groups, and "gets the dust knocked off her" in the cruelest of ways at a fraternity formal. Charlotte is not particularly likeable, but it's still uncomfortable to watch her go through Wolfe's wringer and come out: not bowed or broken, but both.

It's a  jam-packed 600+ pages.  And yet, in the end, it's hard to intuit Wolfe's thesis. He makes some rhetorical stabs in the direction of "we are corrupted by our environment;" but if this was the thrust of the book, why not make Charlotte's pre-collegiate self more sympathetic? Pre-Dupont Charlotte, preoccupied by status and cool, doesn't seem so far-removed from the canny coed Charlotte becomes.

And for all its crudity- and that crudity is creative, voluminous, almost magical in its inventiveness- the book has a curiously puritanical underbelly. Charlotte sins, and she is punished.  As are her friends -punished- by themselves, by their compatriots, or through sheer authorial mischief. 

While the ax is getting around to falling, though, it's some party.

I Am Here

Home.  After Chicago, IL.  And swamped.

Sideber Sidebar

I've decided to retire my gratitude sidebar.  It was fun while it lasted.  That's a misstatement: it wasn't fun, not exactly, but it was fun's first cousin once-removed, and I figure that's good enough.  And heck, sometimes it even brushed up against joy.

But even gratitude -surely among the most grateful of guests- eventually wears out its welcome.  Log-term gratitude makes me nervous.  I have to follow it around, make sure it has enough towels.  It brings lovely hostess gifts, but there's something too snug, too smug, in the crook of its smile.

This doesn't mean that we're estranged, gratitude and I.  It just means I'm taking a...recess.  Yeah!  I had a sidebar, and now we're in recess!  (If only I could take a recess from constructing tottering towers of metaphor, though!)

I'll still be grateful.  But casually so.  Like: oh, hey, right, it's you.

Stroppy New Year

I am more than a little affronted by the passage of time.  It seems so personal, you know?  A giant f*ck you, you're one year closer to death and so is everyone you love from the universe.

Or maybe that's  narcissism speaking -according to an article I scanned this morning over breakfast, the only thing keeping pace with the growth of narcissism in our society is the obesity epidemic. (Possible NY Resolution: stop reading).

 So basically it's a giant, f*ck you, you're one year closer to death and so is everyone you love and also you are all fat.

Well played, universe, well played.

When presented with a universe-style fait accompli  -or a person who is much, much better than you at pool- you have two choices.  You can succumb, a gentlewoman to the end, dabbing on a chalk-colored smile as you dribble your balls, one by one, into the pockets (wait, who's winning here?  Possible NY resolution: figure out what the heck is going on in pool). 

Or, you can unclench your jaw, unloose a tigery howl, and slam that eight ball where the sun don't shine. (Possible NY resolution: do not assemble metaphors without instructions.  Or Ikea furniture.  Gingerbread houses also.)

For whatever reason (genetics, narcissism, crotchetiness, bad at pool), I prefer the contrarian approach.  Dylan Thomas, Walter Matthau, Oscar the Grouch: these are people, my partners in perversity, and we'll be damned if we go gently into the good night or 2013 or Walmart.  Rage, rage against the dying of the light!  (Possible NY resolution: order lightbulbs online.)

In recent years, I've tried to surrender gracefully.  But 2012 is almost gone, and I'm not going to take it anymore, time, you hear me? 

Or, of course I am going to take it, but I'm not going to like it! 

Take that, universe!  And by "that" I mean my pool cue.  It's not like I knew what to do with it.

Just don't take anything more.  Not yet.  Please.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Book it 2012!

Cold, but not as cold as you think it should be: the definition of a Southern winter.  I'm running through mine, guzzling its exhaust, gunning it dry.  No: it's already dry:  High of fifty degrees, brown ground, no snow.

In this middling purgatory of a season, a young girl's  human's thoughts turn to books!  Books will get you out of almost anything, and they'll do it with admirable extremes of temperature! Bring on the sere sentences, the heated dialogue, the boiling plot!

So here, without further ado, my least temperate, most absorbing reads of 2012!  Rescue me from Winter Lite and reply with your own!

1)Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel

I'm not done with this one so I probably shouldn't even list it, but OH HECK WHY NOT IT'S SO GOOD!  Mantel writes bleak, yet oblique prose -a handy trick- and there's nothing colder than the machinations of the Tudor court!  Mantel introduces us to Thomas Cromwell, a man for all seasons- oh, no, wait, that's Thomas More, who is depicted as a slavering self-scourger.  Everyone is named Thomas, or Anne.  Mix in hair shirts, a doomed lutenist, bastard sons, whispering women, London Rain, Oxford, the wool trade, and buns.  Oh, the humanity!

2) Freedom, Johnathan Franzen

I'd avoided Jonathan Franzen diligently for years, on the principle that he is an unmitigated whiner, and I had my quota of those in college  Reading Freedom was a lesson in humility -for me, not for Franzen, who can write the pants off anything.  And does.  Lots of pantsless Minnesotans in this one, folks!  Ignore the worst book title this side of "Fifty Ways to Leave your Llama-" I found Freedom so absorbing I went on to chug The Corrections, which is saying something.

3) Light in August, William Faulker

This was my first Faulkner.  Heretofore, I'd been of the opinion that classics were designated as such for their ability to render high school students comatose.  But Faulkner is a fabulous writer, sere and lush and bitter.

4) Wild, Cheryl Strayed

Wild is a novel about a battered wild child rediscovering her center via long-distance hiking. I found the premise, the press, and the authorial voice almost indescribably annoying, but you know what?  I finished it in forty-eight hours.  I spent forty-four of those hours wanting to brain Ms. Strayed, but do we not, after all, come to books in the spirit of self-expansion?  We do, and we should, and remind me never to hike that far.

5) Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn

I read a whole, whole lot of genre fiction, most of which goes in one lobe of the brain and out the other.  Of all the mysteries, I read this year, this one stuck.  It's a suspense novel, though not a particularly clever one: the twist swims into vision several miles out.  But it's also a meticulous catalog of the ways in which we hurt and twist and mar those closest to us, and in this capacity, Gone Girl is stupefyingly eerie: an outline chalked around the sprawled body of reality.  My most uncomfortable -and fastest- read of the year.

I Am Here

Love, IN