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Mary Ludington Kevin Kling Event This Tuesday at the Fitzgerald

Link: The Nature of Dogs - Events. Mary Ludington sees dogs as beings, not sentimental props, and her book of dog photographs is now available. There's even a little to-do at the Fitzgerald this week.  When I saw the book in manuscript, it also contained fascinating paragraphs, which explained how each breed came to be. Reading it makes you realize that dogs are not simply human companions, they are human inventions. To reveal my self-interest here, there may be a photograph of a certain charismatic greyhound. 

From Trish Hampl's new memoir, the Florist's Daughter: 

"Nostalgia is really a kind of loyalty–also a sin when it is misapplied as it often is.  But it's the engine, not the enemy, of history. It feeds on detail, the protein of accuracy. Or maybe nostalgia is a form of longing. It aches for history. In its cloudy wistfulness,  nostalgia fuels the spark of significance. My place. My people."

More so than any other of her books, which resembled fiction in how they used life obliquely, how they used a pinch of experience to serve as sour dough for a book,  this book says more directly: these people who did not seem important are important.   

Scenes and Sentences: on Kate Christensen's The Great Man

In my world, there are two kinds of writers: masters of sentences and masters of scenes. (Of course: they overlap.) I tend to love the former–Bellow, Woolf, Dickens; Kate Christensen’s The Great Man reminds me that I should read more of the latter–Tolstoy, Austen, Flaubert.   

The Great Man is built on the carefully chosen detail; the complicating new fact; the resonant, sometimes ironic bit of dialog. 

An artist’s biographer is interviewing the artist’s long-time mistress, Teddy. It’s relevant that Ralph the biographer is black; the mistress and artist, white.  Teddy is speaking: 

“He thought only a man could paint a woman with the proper sense of awe, lust, the sense of otherness, the neccessary distance.”
    “I see,” said Ralph with a dubious look at Teddy through his rather long eyelashes. He had eyes like a deer’s, far apart, elongated. Yet there was nothing deerlike about him. The animal he most resembled, to Teddy, was a dog: a hungry jaw full of strong teeth camouflaged by a domestic, eager-to-please smile. Was that a racist thought, she wondered? then ceased to worry about it.
    “I take it you’re already familiar with Oscar’s views on the subject of his fellow painters,” she said, “and you disagree with them.”
    “Frankly,” said Ralph,” I disagree with him on many points. It doesn’t in any way lessen my reverence for his work.”
    “No doubt you think DeKooning is a great painter,” Teddy said.
    “Guilty as charged.”
    “You’ll be taken out in the yard and kneecapped later,” Teddy said. “I’m an excellent shot.”
    Ralph laughed with his whole head and torso, as if this were very funny.
    She disliked overlaughter; it always irked her.

Christensen also keeps a nice tab on her inventory. Seven pages later, she writes: “Ralph laughed ruefully. This time, his laughter suited the scale of the joke.”

I probably won’t read any Austen or Tolstoy soon but some bright new book. I know me.  I am weak. 

The End of My Remarks on Then We Came To The End.

The passage I quoted earlier from Then We Came To The End goes on:   

“You do know, Joe,” Karen Woo finally said, “that it’s only nine-thirty in the morning, right?” Believe it or not, we are going to get to the cold sore spots today.”
    Joe looked genuinely misunderstood. “That’s not why I was asking, Karen,” he said. “I have every confidence you’ll get to it. I was asking because I was having trouble coming up with something myself.”
    We remained suspicious. He rarely had a hard time coming up with anything.
    “The difficulty I’m having,” he explained, “is that they want us to be funny and irreverent and all that, but at the same time, they don’t want us to offend anybody who suffers from cold sores. It seems to me those two things are mutually exclusive. At least it makes it hard for me to come up with an ad that’s worth a damn.”
    By noon, we knew that the son-of-a-bitch was right.

I admire this passage because it takes the tacky, hacky challenges of advertising as seriously as its practitioners do. I say, as such a practitioner.  The book also does one other really noteworthy thing well: it makes managers human, even heroic.   

We, Cubed

From Then We Came To An End

“By the way,” he said, “How are you all doing with the cold sore spots?”
    We were in the process of coming up with a series of TV spots for one of our clients who manufactured an analgesic to reduce cold sore pain and swelling. We took in Joe’s question kind of slowly, without any immediate response. We might even have exchanged a look or two. This wasn’t long after his second promotion. Doing okay, more or less, we said, in effect. And then we probably nodded, you know, non-committal half nods. The thing was, his question–“How are you all doing with the cold sore spots?”–didn’t seem a simple question in search of a simple answer. So soon after his promotion, it seemed more like a shrewd, highly evolved assertion of his enw entitlement. We didn’t think it was actual concern or curiosity for how we were progressing on the cold sore spots so much as a pretense to prod our asses.

The “we” here is  a distinct group, with a distinct viewpoint: they are Joe’s subordinates; they are in danger of losing their jobs. The "we" is also the consensus that forms 18 inches from a water cooler or at the hard to calculate midpoint between three people standing outside a cubicle. (Click through both intro pages.)

Note the genius of the sentence “Doing okay, more or less, we said, in effect” which might be the most hilariously, almost exponentially vague sentence ever written which is followed by, “And then we probably nodded, you know, non-committal half nods.”  Not nods, but “probable . .  non-commital half nods.  These sentences are both vague and exact.

(Pronoun)cements

One of the advantages of not reading anything for a few weeks is that you can gain an Olympian perspective on your past reading. Thus, I realized that I have read two books in the past year or so written in the first person plural. The “we” was a choice which threatened gimmickry but finally seemed essential and strategic.   

In Our Kind by Kate Walbert, the “we” dramatizes a kind of clutching to social class in women who don’t have much else.  The “we” is brittle; the “we” is desperate and this desperation shows in the book's touching three-legged race awkwardness: “We wrap our blankets around our shoulders.” But the pronoun is also very sad: “The children will not come home. We’ll have no tree.” Or, more evocatively: “Our blankets smell of dog and when no one’s looking we breathe them in, remembering.” The ‘we” itself is a kind of blanket, and the stories tug it away. 

Mourning Glories: More on Kurt Andersen's Heyday

She lingered in the mourning department where she had made a purchase a couple of years earlier–the fifteen pairs of black gloves for her mother’s funeral–and more than once pictured herself in the metal casket with the plate glass window at the head end, like the maiden in "The Glass Coffin" by the Brothers Grimm. Today there was a new model on display, a Mr. Trump’s Patent Corpse Refrigerator, with a false bottom that was to be filled with ice for the funeral–but filled now with hundreds of beautiful, clear glass marbles.

From Heyday

The rap I’ve seen on Heyday is that it is filled with “data” rather than character development. But don’t you have to be an absolute genre-provincial to not appreciate the humor (Mr. Trumps!) and delight (clear glass marbles!) of this paragraph? Or  the evocative oddess of "mourning departments?"  Just because something doesn't advance the plot doesn't mean it doesn't advance the book. The researched details in this book animate it.

Vacated Judgement

Summer reading is a marketing gimmick–which I'm all for--but not a real category.  But I do believe that there is such a thing as vacation reading, which is partly defined by what it is not. With that, the worst vacation reading ever: 

The Wasteland     T.S. Eliot
The Magic Mountain     Thomas Mann
The Stranger     Albert Camus

Surprisingly bad vacation reading: Kerouac, who never seems to be having quite as much fun as a proper beatnik should. 

Excellent vacation reading: Kurt Andersen's Heyday.

The plot, so far, is relatively simple and pivots on coincidence; what makes the novel live is the research; Andersen lavishes more care on esoterica than many novelists lavish on actual characters.  My favorite line from  an amazon reader-reviewer:  "Basically, nothing happens outside of our five main characters participating in American history."

Quotes and stuff to follow.

Light Humor: Then We Came To The End

People have praised Joshua Ferris's Then We Came To The End for its sympathetic portrayal of office life. But what's amazing is that, while the overall effect of the book is sympathetic, the details can be very biting.

A manager on his employees: 

"I listened to Karen Woo give an explanation of photosynthesis," he said. "God only knows why they were discussing photosynthesis. They hung on her every word, like she was a PBS special. Her explanation didn't even involve sunlight. These people will believe anything. They will say anything."

I have some theories about how the book accomplishes this, but am too tired to elaborate on them. I spent yesterday dealing with a lost passport, ultimately unsuccessfully. (We won't be going to Montreal.) I hope things calm down soon.

e.g.

An exuberant Wood, from an essay on Saul Bellow: 

This life-sown prose moves fast, logging impressions with broken speed. Rereading Herzog, one finds too many marvels to record; there is Herzog’s mistress, Reneta, sparkily described as “certainly not one of those noli me tangerines.” And there is a brief memory of Strawforth, a fat schoolboy with his “fat, curling thumbs,” and a rabbi, “short-bearded, his nose violently pitted with black.” And Nachman, who played the harmonica in the lavatory stalls: “You heard the saliva in the cells of the tin instrument as he sucked and blew.” And the lightbulb that Herzog remember at home, “Which had a spike at the end, like a german helmut.  The large loose twist of the filament blazed.” Herzog recalls his asthmatic brother, Willie, in the grip of a breathing fit. “Trying to breathe he gripped the table and rose on his toes like a cock about to crow.”