A question of food

Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher

Stick Figure by Lori Gottlieb

Bitter Ice: A Memoir of Love, Food and Obsession by Barbara Kent Lawrence

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Only Wasted had any redeeming literary qualities, and it is the one I would recommend to anyone curious about the psychology of eating disorders (curious to see a case study, rather than read a text book). It demonstrates quite effectively (so much so that it could cause an anorexic relapse, some reviewer say, and recommend it with caution) how easy it is to be seduced by irrationality or, more accurately, seduced by your own, special breed of rationality.

Was reading eating disorder memoirs for reasons of my own and usually like being helped to understand how another mind thinks, but Bitter Ice [the memoir of the wife of a man who had anorexia] was awful.

By which I mean terribly written.

But that’s not all.

The narrator came off as so weak and courageless; staying in an awful, joyless marriage for almost 30 years, and saying at one point that a husband should be stronger than his wife, and a few other careless gendered remarks, and some garbage about waiting until her kids were out of school, and miming the shackles of patriarchy nearly to perfection.

I know that the raw, unhappy truth of a memoir can have power, but this was just masochistic. The admissions of personal failure were too frequent, repetitive and devoid of the pathos necessary to inspire sympathy (crucial to the narrator’s immunity to reader annoyance). I was an annoyed reader.
Every once in a while I find it salutary to finish a really awful book. It cheers me up, somehow, that this really terrible book was published, and its author considered capable. It is bolstering in this curious way, without making me too despairing of the system that allowed it to see the light of the market. It’s not her fault I could spot her  two-bit metaphors 8-40 pages away.

I also find it interesting (if simultaneously annoying) to read something written in a perspective I really couldn’t get my mind around without some explicit assistance and explanation. The extreme lengths of this woman’s timidity and inaction, blindness and denial in the face of fear and stress and shit totally hitting the fan live…it’s like reverse inspiration.

Have until now read memoirs/biographies almost exclusively by authors and poets, however, and so she was, perhaps, doomed from the start.

The best part of the book (it was a library book) was finding a homemade bookmark in childish writing in it that read ‘To: Melissa From: Megan ::heart:: A book mark for the best sister ::heart::

Bet Melissa was sad to lose that one.

Next up: lexicographer memoirs…are there any?

So, I’ve been reading a lot…

…but it turns out I have no interest in blogging about it, or anything else, in the least.

Not right now, anyway.

For posterity, a quick list of what I’ve enjoyed recently. Saunders, Barthelme, Puig – all have great voices:

Donald Barthelme – Sixty Stories

Manuel Puig – Blood of Requited Love

Georgette Heyer – various

Jens Peter Jacobsen – Mögens and other stories

George Saunders  – short story ‘Victory Lap’, essay Tent City U.S.A.

John Cleland – Fanny Hill

Italo Calvino – Invisible Cities, Cosmiconics

A new author on the radar – Ian McEwan

Atonement

Ian McEwan

[2001]

There is no way to write about this book. Such a tremendous plot point would be spoiled with any attempt that I am simply not going to bother. Suffice to say that McEwan is a brilliant (recommend his various interviews *) writer**, and that if you crave a devastating (that is to say tragic and quite painful) read, have at it.

You only get to read it for the first time once…though maybe you already saw the movie, in which case I am sad for you.

*Although Richard Dawkins is quite annoying in this interview, going on and on about atheism. I think it’s a testament to McEwan’s intelligence and equanimity that he brings it off so well.

**There is that effect, so cherished by Montaigne and his ilk, of barely remembering the act of reading, only the fruit; the images conjured.

Confessions of a bored reader

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

Anne Fadiman

[1998]

Daughter of Clifton, but rather tepid except when writing on a few cherished topics. Interesting essays on arctic travel and on Charles Lamb & William Hazlitt in At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays. Recommend looking at her bibliographies for reading ideas, as she is, I imagine, a better reader than writer. That is, she has good taste in books, and has read a lot of them. She makes me want to read what she has read, though this is no difficult feat, with me.

This particular book is full of interesting trivia (ex. inscriptions are typically written on the flyleaf, the title page being traditionally left for author signing), though you’ve got to wade through dull pebbles of autobiographical prose to get to it. Not that she is stupendously bad, you know…just that she doesn’t hold my attention, or engender in me any readerly affection.

It is possible that I am so unenthusiastic about her writing because her writing (typically one essay contains one tame idea and, if one is less lucky, some boring footnotes), like her academic history (Harvard) and intellectual yearnings (vast, academic), is not unlike mine. She is what I must be careful not to become: a sturdy but uninspiring writer, with a good vocabulary and nothing to make one fall in love with the words on the page.

She does, though, at the end of Ex Libris, have a great list of books about books, and I am eager to check them out [of the library].

Here are a few:

Books About Books: The Anatomy of Bibliomania – Holbrook Jackson

Bookman’s Pleasure – Holbrook Jackson

The Book-Lover’s Enchiridion - Alexander Ireland

Bookworms – Laura Furman

Reading in Bed - Steven Gilbar

What is a Book? – Dale Warren

Bouillabaisse for Bibliophiles – William Targ

The Literary Gourmet – Linda Wolfe

A Gentle Madness – Nicholas A. Basbanes

The Common Reader & The Second Common Reader - Virginia Woolf

She also had some ideas I like the sound of; 1. having a bookshelf in one’s house dedicated to books by friends. 2. organizing the literature section of a personal library by nationality (mine hasn’t currently any organization at all, I regret to say).

I did like her cover very much and, finally, reading rather bad essays inspires me to go read good essays, so there is another plus. Thinking about the worn paperback of Montaigne’s essays I just retrieved from Maine…

Please, sir, could some lost manuscripts of yours be discovered soon?

Oliver Twist

Charles Dickens

[1838]

General spoiler alert for this entire post.

Check out Wikipedia for such interesting factoids as:

• its alternate title: The Parish Boy’s Progress
• it is [only!] Dickens’ second novel
• it is the first novel in English to center on a child protag [really?]
• it was made into a highly successful musical [!]
• it was very poorly received upon first publication, partly as it painted the criminal world with such dark and sordid accuracy

After reading the first 30 pages or so, I realized how little I actually knew about the plot of Oliver Twist. Basically I knew that he was an orphan who, at some point, wanted some more. How much more there is! Let’s just gloss over the academic acrobatics required to have avoided reading it for this long and get straight to the heartbreak.

Oliver Twist is depressing.

How did I not know this? I was finding it painful to read after a mere 10 pages. Little Oliver (and how often he gets these pathetic epithets; ‘little Oliver’, ‘poor Oliver’) is miserable, if not on the verge of death, for the first half of the novel or more. The characters that surround him are impressively repulsive. The descriptions of Fagin had me regularly grimacing at the book. Oliver gets shot and left in a ditch to die. Brave, irredeemable Nancy is brutally murdered. Sikes accidentally hangs himself in his frenzy to escape a vicious mob.

We are given the dreadful dirtiness of the criminal part of town, the arc of Sikes’ final swing, the spatter of Nancy’s blood on the ceiling,  Fagin’s lank, shriveled body; we are spared no awful detail. I found it terribly effective. Not my favorite Dickens but highly engaging and affecting. The narration is in the delightful tongue-in-cheek tone one expects when one opens any novel of Dickens.

See the original Cruikshank illustrations here.

Excerpt from Chapter II:

The members of this board were very sage, deep, philosophical
men; and when they came to turn their attention to the workhouse,
they found out at once, what ordinary folks would never have
discovered–the poor people liked it! It was a regular place of
public entertainment for the poorer classes; a tavern where there
was nothing to pay; a public breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper
all the year round; a brick and mortar elysium, where it was all
play and no work. ‘Oho!’ said the board, looking very knowing;
‘we are the fellows to set this to rights; we’ll stop it all, in
no time.’ So, they established the rule, that all poor people
should have the alternative (for they would compel nobody, not
they), of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by
a quick one out of it. With this view, they contracted with the
water-works to lay on an unlimited supply of water; and with a
corn-factor to supply periodically small quantities of oatmeal;
and issued three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a
week, and half a roll of Sundays. They made a great many other
wise and humane regulations, having reference to the ladies,
which it is not necessary to repeat; kindly undertook to divorce
poor married people, in consequence of the great expense of a
suit in Doctors’ Commons; and, instead of compelling a man to
support his family, as they had theretofore done, took his family
away from him, and made him a bachelor! There is no saying how
many applicants for relief, under these last two heads, might
have started up in all classes of society, if it had not been
coupled with the workhouse; but the board were long-headed men,
and had provided for this difficulty. The relief was inseparable
from the workhouse and the gruel; and that frightened people.

.

Read the full text online

An infinite summer ahead

The folks at http://infinitesummer.org/ are banding together to read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: June 21 to September 22 = 75 pages a week. Various literary types will be facilitating weekly discussion and hundreds if not thousands will be reading along. I will be one of them! I think this is so well timed, and such a great way to get people who have ‘been meaning to read it’ to actually open to the first page and get right down to it. As those who have read it before know, once you start, if you like DFWs fiction style at all at all, you’re not going to stop.

The site also includes useful links to other DFW resources and is a great way to see the thoughts of other admirers of his work. You can also follow the progress of the readers on Twitter, #infsum.  I was surprised to realize that I didn’t have anyone to tell this information – of my social web, I am the DFW fan…time to meet some more, I’d say.

T minus 11 days to page 1!

…

Surely.

Today is not the day that I write a post on Infinite Jest.

It is, though, the day that I link to the discussion of Slate’s audio book club on that tome.

I thought that there were several interesting comments in the discussion, particularly when the woman who loves his essays cannot bear not to talk about them, even though they are not on the docket.

The group did a fair job of find a jumping off point for discussing this book – quite a task in itself aside from finding anything to say – and of touching on many points without sounding entirely vague. [As I do here]

For those who have not read Infinite Jest but who are considering picking it up, the first 15 minutes or so of the recording present what it is ‘about’ and the major themes, from which one could cobble together a sense of whether it is of interest or no. I would recommend the book to those who already know they like his fiction.

Incidentally, I just bought A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and am studying it dutifully with an eye to becoming a lucid, cogent essayist.

You’ve seen the movie…

The Princess Bride

William Goldman

[1973]

I love this movie. Goldman wrote the screenplay, and wrote it very much in line with the text. The element that the movie cannot possibly convey, though, is the narrative voice, which is so far from a standard storybook voice that I am astonished to not have been told to read this book before: it is really funny.

Am forced to conclude that few have read it.

An excerpt:

Buttercup’s mother hesitated, then put her stew spoon down. (This was after stew, but so is everything. When the first man first clambered from the slime and made his first home on land, what he had for supper that first night was stew.)

[...]

Buttercup’s mother whirled on him. “Did you forget to pay your taxes?” (This was after taxes. But everything is after taxes. Taxes were here even before stew.)

These impish asides pepper the story from beginning to end.

The book is presented as an abridgment of a much longer work by S. Morgenstern – a pen name of Goldman’s, a device which pops up constantly in the story and upon which many strange transitions are blamed in italicized side comments. Of course, there is no original work, and this is all a fictional framework for the tale (which I did not realize until midway through, so complete is the illusion).

I would recommend this book to anyone who loved the movie.

Thanks to Mom, for recommending.

To Laugh Out Loud:

Me Talk Pretty One Day

David Sedaris

[2000]

———-

1. Acquire Me Talk Pretty One Day

2. Read it or, better yet, listen to David Sedaris reading it (better still, get the box set of all his audio books  -  it is worth it only to hear ‘Six to Eight Black Men’)

3. Laugh

4. See #3

5. Breathe

6. See #4

I was forced to read it, I swear

The Lightning Thief

[2005]

The Sea of Monsters

[2006]

Rick Riordan

Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians Series is pretty hot on the YA scene right now. How do I know this? My brother is twelve, and he made me borrow the first two books in the series. He cannot get enough of bad-luck magnet (suspect there is, as it were, mad resonance behind his sympathies) Percy Jackson, who just happens to be the son of Poseidon, destined for great and terrible things.

The premise is solid Harry Potter-style alternative universe fantasy- know how in Greek myth the gods are constantly mating with humans to create demigod/hero/monster offspring? Well, imagine that they are still doing that in the 21st century. And there’s a summer camp for the results… directed by a very cranky (grounded with no alcohol) Dionysus.

Riordan loads the stories up with 21st century gags [Medusa is an exporter of statuary, the Fates (and their one eye) run a cab service, centaurs have frat parties] and the result is a fast-paced (granted, it doesn’t take long to finish), amusing read. I can see why it is so popular. Who doesn’t want to suddenly learn that they have awesome powers and just enough gumption to save the world; just enough insecurity to do it humbly? The formula is tried and true.