BOOKS: The Time of Reckoning Is at Hand (part one)

Here's the thing about having an approximately 7-lb organism inside you:

It feels really, really weird.

How's that for stating the obvious? And yet all the parenting books and magazines and websites (oh, let's call a spade a spade... they're mothering books and magazines and websites because men have too much -- or too little -- sense to read how-to books about something as ephemeral as parenting) don't tell you this. They tell you that being pregnant is wonderful and/or magical and/or empowering, and they may even admit that it can be "uncomfortable", but not once have I read anything anywhere that antes up the fact that harbouring a large organism inside your own body is just plain unsettling, not to mention outright bizarre. (Yes, yes, I know it's "natural" and all that, but so are platypuses and, arguably, Anna Nicole Smith, and that doesn't make them any less strange.)

If you've never gestated a large-ish mammal before, here are some things that may surprise you:

• When said mammal "kicks", this event is not the charming once-every-so-often experience that sitcoms would have you believe, in which everyone gathers round with their hands on the gestatee's stomach while she smiles beatifically.
  
• Kicking is a persistent (i.e. sometimes dozens of times per hour) and frequently painful activity. Kicks can be directed at any number of your vital organs, frequently simultaneously. It is possible to be kicked under your ribs AND in the bladder at the same time, resulting in a having-to-pee-with-the-wind-knocked-out-of-you sensation that is not without a certain je ne sais quoi.
• Kicking is visible from the outside of your body. This is exactly 87 times freakier than you would think it is. Imagine it thusly: you are inside a large balloon. Whilst pressing your back against one side of the balloon, you are able to leverage both feet against two other sides of the balloon, and you push out, distending the balloon so that it looks like two little teepees where each foot is pressing. Just for kicks, you keep your feet in this position for a minute or two, ignoring the gasps of pain coming from outside the balloon. Whee!
• "Kicking" is actually a colloquial term for "fetal movement", which is a deceptively innocuous blanket term for a range of movements that would have made the Red Baron proud: loop-the-loops, barrel rolls, and possibly even the dreaded hammer head.
• Kicking does not subside at reasonable times, such as during important work meetings, while watching America's Next Top Model, or WHILE TRYING TO SLEEP.
  

This last point is by way of getting to my main point (yes, I have one): no sleep = lots of reading. So without further ado (I think, but I'm not making any promises), here's the beginning of my two-part round-up of the books I've read since I last posted:

Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Neil Gaiman (#12)
It's strange that this is the first Neil Gaiman book I've ever read. I keep hearing how great his novels are, and I keep meaning to pick one up (recommendations, anyone?), but after reading a glowing review of this book on Bookslut, it catapulted to the top of the list. And it did not disappoint.

(It's also kind of fitting that reading this book marked the beginning of my own writing dry spell, since one of its recurring themes is Adams's notorious issues with writer's block and deadlines. I can relate. Hoo, boy, can I relate. Did you know that Adams used to feverishly write some of the Hitchhiker radio scripts in one half of the studio, literally handing the pages off to the actors to read as soon as they were written? On one hand, it makes me feel sweaty and weird just thinking about that. On the other hand, you have to admire the dude's moxy.)

Gaiman's fandom is impressive. In addition to quoting liberally from the Hitchhiker radio and TV scripts, he's also interviewed numerous of Adams's contemporaries, as well as researched Adams's foray into video game and web site development in the early heady days of the internet. (Remember those? Sigh...)

If you're like me and you're jonesing for the new Hitchhiker movie (coming to a theatre near you on April 29th, which coincidentally is around the abovementioned fetus's release date... Acquilad tells me if my water breaks in the theatre, we must name the poor child Zaphod... pray for us), check out this book. It's a tasty little stopgap.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (#13)
Speaking of movies, I have to confess that my chronology in getting to Mrs. Dalloway was all wrong. First, I watched the movie version of The Hours, which I liked quite a bit. (Julianne Moore is so fantastic, I've even almost forgiven her for The Forgotten.) Then I read The Hours, and I liked it a lot, too, which is totally out of character, because I usually find that seeing the movie first ruins any book for me. So when I finally got my grubby mitts on a copy of Mrs. Dalloway, I thought I'd love it, too. And I didn't.

Don't get me wrong. It definitely didn't suck or anything, and there were many, many passages I outright loved. But the book just didn't didn't hang together for me, and now I feel like a total rube. A guilty rube, at that.

The Comforters by Muriel Spark (#14)
Perhaps you've judged me harshly for my non-love of Mrs. Dalloway, and perhaps part of your judgment has been of the "she just can't handle quasi-experimental mid-20th-century fiction" variety. To which I reply, "Oho, but how does that account for the fact that I looooved The Comforters?"

This book (Spark's first novel, incidentally) sort of reminded me of the lighter works of Evelyn Waugh, another favourite of mine. (And by "lighter" I don't mean trivial or non-serious; I'm thinking of Waugh's ability to deftly handle sophisticated themes with a light -- even absurdist -- touch, as he does in The Loved One and Scoop, both of which you should read, if you haven't already.)

The book's central conceit is introduced early on: Caroline, the main character (and a writer, natch, because if there's anything writers like to write about, it's other writers), begins to hear the sound of typewriter keys and a hidden omniscient narrator, who she realizes is narrating the events of the story as they occur. She is the only person who is aware of the fact that she's a character in a novel, so in the meantime all the other characters -- ordinary-seeming English folks -- get caught up in increasingly bizarre plot threads involving diamond smuggling, religious conversion, and suicide. I can't say that I'm 100 percent clear on the purpose of all this metaphysical wrangling, but that's what re-reading is for.

All righty. It's late. I have to hurry to bed and get started on my busy tossing-and-turning schedule. That's it for now. Thanks for reading, and don't forget to tune in for part deux.

ETC: Rumours of My Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

I humbly acknowledge my presumptuousness in stealing a title from a writer who's written at least three more classic novels than I have, but I was looking for a clever way to let you know that I haven't abandoned this site. (Apparently, as a woman, I'm statistically much less likely to do this than a guy would be. Deadbeat web daddies. Who knew?)

We're remodelling our home office to accommodate our much-ballyhooed new houseguest (aka "the baby"), so the computer there has been pretty much out of commission. And I'm not able to fluff off at work as much as I'd like, because we're hurtling toward the end of the TV season.

BUT I'm getting a new laptop and we're getting an airport device, so I'll be able to use it anywhere in my house... woohoo! And my work contract ends in two weeks... double-woohoo!

I think about this site with longing at least once a day. I can't wait to get back in the swing of things once all this pesky "having a job" stuff is over. Interestingly, I'm still reading as much as ever, just not posting about it, so you should know that my priorities aren't totally out of whack. I've got five (5!) books to add to the list, which I'm looking at posting about sometime in the next week or so.

I'll be back.*

*Start by quoting Twain, finish by quoting Schwarzenegger. It's a little rule I apply to all my writing: speeches, scripts, web copy, annual reports. What, you've never read my famous "It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt"/"Don't be economic girlie-men!" speech?

BOOKS: Mavis Gallant Made Me Cry

You know, I used to think that hating Dr. Phil was one of those knee-jerk behaviours expected of today's modern smart-ass media consumer. So, as with most knee-jerk things, I decided to rise above it and not hate Dr. Phil (because it's through tiny, trivial, pathetic declarations like this that I define my tiny, trivial, pathetic place in the cosmos). This was all made much easier by the fact that I'd never watched him on TV. Which I just did for the first time tonight. And I will never again doubt the instincts of today's modern smart-ass media consumer. And P.S. Now I hate Dr. Phil.

The episode I just watched (the first and only one I will ever watch, might I interject) was all about people whose wedding days were "ruined" by random acts of God/stupidity (e.g. drunk bride, freak storm, bride's dad punching groom so hard he had to go to the hospital), and as a result these people were so traumatized that they couldn't get on with their lives and their marriages were suffering. Apparently, you haven't experienced genuine trauma until you've been a privileged white middle-class woman whose wedding day has suffered some setbacks that any sane person would write off as being a great story to tell the kids a few years later.

And it occurred to me (work with me... I'm making it up as I go along) that maybe that's the problem with folks today in our woe-is-me culture: we no longer cultivate a love of good stories.

Oh sure, we watch record amounts of TV and movies, but I'm talking about stories, those little slices of life that don't follow a formula or espouse a clear moral or have a tidy beginning, middle and end. Think about it: how many people do you know who are great storytellers, who can tell you about some trivial happening and make it compelling and entertaining and perhaps even (dare we dream) poignant? Maybe the fact that we've lost our ability to see our lives as these kinds of stories is what's turned us all into such a bunch of whiny little crybabies who need Dr. Phil to humiliate us on national television.

Which brings me to my latest additions to the countdown...

The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories edited by Ben Marcus (#10)
It's been a while since we lived in the same city, so I don't know if it's good memory or serendipity, but Wing Chun and Glark sure kicked a goal with this holiday gift. I'm assuming that they remembered that I have a total hard-on for short stories, and this collection did not disappoint. (Okay, David Foster Wallace's "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" did kinda disappoint, but (a) David Foster Wallace is overrated, and (b) we can't all kick a goal.)

I was about to go off on a tangent about how bleak and nihilistic most of these stories are ("Sea Oak" and "Two Brothers", I'm looking at you -- you kept me awake, you bastards!), but then I realized that's actually a recurring motif in short stories written in any generation. There seems to be something about the genre that lends itself to giving you tiny paper cuts all over your psyche, so that before you know it you're covered in your own blood and you have no idea how it happened.

Don't believe me? Allow me to direct your attention to Exhibit B...

Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant (#11)
Okay, I'll admit it. Despite having heard nothing but praise for Gallant, and all kinds of stuff about her being the ex-pat grande dame of Canadian letters, I avoided reading her because I thought her stories would be too mannered and tame for a literary wild child like yours truly. Why did I think this? Oh, no good reason. Just because she's older and her name is Mavis. So there you go. Feel free to judge me.

So I finally picked up Paris Stories at the library, thinking that it would be full of charming, gentle stories about nice people living in Europe and, as such, it would be a balm for my poor wounded spirit (see above re: The Anchor Book). And boy howdy, was I ever wrong. If ever a book kicked me when I was down and then chuckled cruelly as it sauntered away with its hands in its pockets, it was Paris Stories.

The very first story in the collection, "The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street", about a middle-aged Canadian couple recalling the years of their marriage spent in Europe, is a deceptively simple ode to all the silences that surround missed opportunities in a relationship. "The Remission" illustrates how the structure of a once-close nuclear family can decay so slowly, and so permanently, that no one even notices until it is too late.

In all Gallant's stories there's this sense that, while no tangible tragedy has occurred, tragedy nonetheless is everywhere. What her stories also have in common is their focus on the mundane, making you realize there's no such thing as the truly "mundane"; it's all just life. Gallant has a stunning ability to gather up all these mundanities and use them to create whole universes as distinct from one another as the surface of the moon is from the inside of my cat box, each universe inhabited by an amazingly realized cast of characters that seem more real than the people you see every day.

Maybe if your average Dr. Phil audience member read more short stories -- if they could learn to discern good storytelling from bad -- they'd avoid the banal melodrama he churns out. And maybe if your average Dr. Phil guest could grasp the fact that our lives are full of meaty little incidents that don't have to have a happy ending, that just are what they are, they'd be better off. And TV-land would be a better place for the rest of us. And that's my Jerry Springer Final Thought.

So assuming that we're all on board with my plan to get Dr. Phil back in private practice -- prescribing painkillers to suburban housewives -- where he belongs, let's get this party started with a few other short story collections I enthusiastically endorse.

• Anton Chekhov's Short Stories
• The Egg and Other Stories by Sherwood Anderson (If you haven't heard of Anderson, don't blame yourself. Blame your stupid 20th century literature teachers and professors. Anderson was a god to writers like Hemingway, who considered him the father of the modern short story. He picks up where Chekhov leaves off.)
• Speaking of Hemingway, A Moveable Feast should be on everyone's must-read list. Even if you think you hate Hemingway, read it. It's okay to hate Hemingway (well, actually, no it's not, but I'm trying to win you over and I'm willing to lie). To hate A Moveable Feast, you would also have to hate Paris and books and delicious food and gossip about F. Scott's Fitzgerald's penis, and I know you don't hate those things.
  
• Anything ever written by Alice Munro, who has never written a bad sentence in her life. (For whatever it's worth, Jonathan Franzen agrees.) I would love to occupy the inside of Alice Munro's head for just an hour, because I imagine that it is an orderly garden of logic and truth and beauty and that afterwards I would come to a place of perfect comprehension and wholeness with the universe. Screw Being John Malkovich. How about Being Alice Munro? Imagine! Imagine how great it would be to live inside Alice Munro's head! (If you think I'm crazy right now, it's because you've never read anything by Munro, because if you have read anything by Munro, you're nodding your head agreeing with me... or you're not even reading any more because you're already beating a path to the shelf where you keep all your Munro collections.)
  

Got any recommendations for short story collections? You know where to find me.

BOOKS: It's Just a Book

If you've been following along from the beginning, you'll remember my earlier entry about the children's book It's Just a Plant, about a girl named Jackie who catches her parents smoking a joint, and how together they turn this incident into a badly illustrated "learning opportunity".

Apparently, according to this article in The Village Voice, the book has now found its way under the piercing microscopic gaze (there really ought to be an HTML tag for facetious comments) of the U.S. Congress:

During a February 16 House Drug Policy Subcommittee hearing on "harm reduction" approaches to intravenous drug use, the committee's chairman, Indiana Representative Mark Souder, held a copy of the book in front of him and denounced it as a "pro-marijuana children's book." The representative then read excerpts into the Congressional Record.

Whoa. Sounds like somebody needs to chill out, dude. Might I make a recommendation...?

(Via Bookslut)