two umbrellas

When I was in college I started quilting. I went to a small state school in rural PA and was surrounded by Mennonite and Amish communities. I was always impressed by the simplicity and beauty of their quilts. I never really thought of their lifestyle because I was so used to seeing plain clothed men and women in horse and buggies. They were part of our larger community. It wasn’t until I moved to Philadelphia where I thought more about how they may have felt living with us. In Philadelphia, the Amish would come to Reading Terminal Market with farm fresh food or they would have stands at the city-wide farmers markets. I can’t imagine what it was like for the kids (many of the stands were run by teenagers – or younger) who went from the farm to the city on the weekends.

I was very interested in learning about going from the city to the farm when I saw Sue Bender’s Plain and Simple. It always seemed to me that ‘taking away’ was a harder lifestyle change than ‘adding’. With a second baby on the way, I am in the mindset of taking some lifestyle things away while adding a lot more personal complexity. I wanted a glimpse into a world where people lived with a lot fewer things but still led full, complicated lives. Bender’s was also drawn to this lifestyle through the beauty of Amish quilts. She herself was a quilter and saw some quilts hanging in a store. Something pulled her to them and she continued to visit the quilts until she realized that she needed to go live with the Amish.

I am still amazed that she was able to find an Amish family who would allow her to live with them. Bender grew up in New York City and lived in Berkeley, CA. She knew no Amish people but had some friends that lived near Amish communities. She didn’t know anything about how the Amish lived other than that they live in isolated communities without electricity. At this point, in this short book, I should have begun questioning this woman. What could she have gained by infiltrating the lives of an Amish family? But, then, I really wanted to know, too. Does this unknown culture, that has been living within my known culture, have the secret to a happy life? What can I learn from this woman’s experience, if anything?

Unfortunately, very little. The book was structured in an odd fashion: like a patch-work quilt with little vignettes about her experiences before, during, and after her experience with the Amish. It didn’t read fluently (unlike a patch-work quilt that comes together to form a congruous whole). It read more like pieces of a quilt haphazardly put together in order to show off the more important pieces (in this case, the author). In other words, I got the impression that this book was more about her and not about the Amish. Aren’t memoirs supposed to be about the authors? Yes, but there was a lack of perspective that made the author seem a little too self-absorbed – so much so that I was beginning to dislike her. At one point she criticizes one family she visits for what they eat (lots of sweets, white bread, and butter*) because it wasn’t what she expected even though she based her expectations on little to no knowledge of the Amish lifestyle. Her criticism of this and other small things showed how little tolerance she had for her hosts and revealed how exploitive her journey into the Amish community turned out to be. Truthfully, I think the only reason I finished it was because it was so short and I wouldn’t have felt good about myself for not being able to finish a book that was around 120 pages.

*Being from Pennsylvania Dutch country, this did not come as a surprise to me. Even just one visit to Lancaster, PA (which the author does do) should reveal the region’s love of refined sugar.

For some reason I have avoided reading John Updike. I don’t have any real reason other than it just seemed so obvious to read him, like reading Joyce Carol Oates (another confession, I’ve only ever read her essays in the New York Review of Books and none of her fiction for similar reasons: I’m sure she’s good and I’ll get to it someday, maybe). At any rate, I had been realizing how many books on my bookshelves that I haven’t read (I used to be a compulsive buyer; now, I’m a compulsive library patron) and Rabbit, Run was one of them. I have read some of Updike’s short stories but not many and that was quite some time ago. I guess it was time to read something more substantial and I was in the mood for a novel, plain and simple.

I can’t help but talk about where it takes place, the fictional town of Brewer, which was based on Reading, PA. I grew up in Wyomissing, PA, a small suburb about five minutes outside of Reading and a beautiful bike trail away from Updike’s hometown of Shillington, and had family that still lived in the city. I have visited places where many books have taken place but there was something eerily familial about reading Rabbit, Run. I can only imagine how New Yorkers and Londonders feel to have their hometowns constantly immortalized. Reading, PA is no NYC or London; in fact, it’s anywhere (or nowhere), really, as it probably felt to Updike then.

It’s hard to tell whether or not Brewer had a strong influence on Rabbit. It felt that Updike spent a lot of time describing places: the streets – even street/road/route names (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve driven Rt. 422 to and from Philadelphia), Mt. Judge (or, Mt. Penn, if you could really must call it a mountain – it’s more like a hill, which is a lot easier for me to say now that I have views of both the Cascade and Olympic Mountain Ranges), the golf course, the Pinnacle Hotel, etc.; but, it could have felt that way to me because I have such a strong connection to them. I will admit I was looking for the bits and pieces about my hometown, which certainly put place as a literary function in my reading, but I do believe that a lot of the detail of place was intentional. Rabbit seemed like a man who was caught in the ‘big fish – little pond’ syndrome’: stuck in the past, no real future, hoping the familiar will carry him to a good life. It doesn’t and he gets caught and needs to run. I can appreciate that feeling – the feeling that in order to improve, one must leave and start over.

It is easy for me to say that I didn’t like Rabbit. He was immature, irrational, and simple. I found it hard to sympathize with him but willingly accepted his discontent.There was an intimacy with the characters that I haven’t read in a while – and something I greatly appreciated. It could have been very easy to attempt to elicit pity but I never felt that way. Somehow Updike was able to create enough distance, through intimacy, that I felt no obligation to the characters – even when they needed it the most. I will never forget when Janice gets drunk after she gives birth and she ‘knows that the worst thing that has ever happened to any woman in the world has happened to her.’ How simply put. How tragic.

I find that often intellectual simplicity appeals to my reading sensibility. While Rabbit seems like an immature and simple man, Updike does not tell the story that way. He doesn’t try to capture the moment of what it’s like to be a restless, married, twenty-something, small-town man, which I find plagues some contemporary writing. He attempts to capture how Rabbit is a restless, married, twenty-something, small-town man. I am not sure why I’ve held out on Updike’s novels before because I was truly amazed at how well he framed his characters.

So it’s been a while since I’ve posted. I’ve even debated whether or not I should continue this blog but I’ve have twoumbrellas for five years now and I just can’t part with it. Besides I really like writing my thoughts down about the books I’ve read and (as I’ve said many times before) I’m forgetful – sometimes even forgetting what I’ve read over the last few months. So on that note, here’s a list of my reading over the past few months (which may or may not be complete):

• Netherland – Joseph O’Neill
• Let the Great World Spin – Colum McCann
• The Hospital for Bad Poets – J.C. Hallman
• Look At Me – Jennifer Egan
• Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
• Tender Is the Night* – F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Road* – Cormac McCarthy
• Love and Obstacles* – Aleksandar Hemon
• The Master Bedroom* – Tessa Hadley
• The Other City – Michal Ajvaz
• What the World Will Be Like When All the Water Leaves Us – Laura van den Berg
• The Interrogative Mood – Padgett Powell

*unfinished. Seeing that this list has four books that I did not finish, it hasn’t been the most productive few months in reading. I can list excuses: moving across the country, being pregnant, renewing a hobby, and freelance work – but they would just be excuses.

I really wish I would have kept up with writing about each of these individually. There is much to say about all of them – even the ones I haven’t (or won’t finish). I will say that my favorite (surprisingly) was The Other City but I think that has to do with my mood. Moving to Seattle, while being pregnant, has become quite an experience – generally positive, sometimes surreal, and utterly different – I’m continually amazed how much the East Coast is ingrained in my psyche. I am constantly evaluating my perspective and The Other City somehow captured these feelings. It was the right book at the right time, as they say.

So I am hoping to get back on track with my current read (Rabbit, Run) and stay that way. I miss writing about reading; in fact, I miss writing in general.

I can’t believe after writing 17 (!) books, I had never read Percival Everett. Where have I been?? What else have I been reading?? And why?? I know I’ve taken myself somewhat out of the literary loop, but, I was really embarrassed to not have read any of his books or, worse, had ever heard (gasp)* of him. Shameful, yes, I know. Fortunately, after reading I Am Not Sydney Poitier I no longer have to admit that.

I Am Not Sydney Poitier tells the story of a boy named Not Sydney Poitier who just happens to look a lot like Sydney Poitier. When his mother dies, he goes to live with Ted Turner and has to struggle with his identity of being Not Sydney**. While I Am Not Sydney Poitier is about Not Sydney’s coming of age, it’s also about race and class, which transcends it from being considered a ‘coming-of-age’ novel.

The best part about this book was that it made me laugh. It’s been a while since a book made me laugh out loud. A few times, I thought to myself: Should I be laughing at this? Everett’s pointed satire always seemed to answer Yes! Here’s a bit of a conversation between Ted Turner and Not Sydney (who Ted Turner calls Nu’ott):

‘You know where the name of the Ouija Board comes from, Nu’ott?’ Ted asked. ‘It’s from the French and German words for yes. Could have easily been called the non-nein. Of course that just one theory. There are probably many. I find it simply strange that the skin they pack sausages in is edible. Edgar Cayce thought they were dangerous.’

‘Sausages?’

‘No, Ouija Boards. Why would Edgar Cayce care about sausages? Maybe he did. He was a weird dude. And sausages are everywhere.’ Ted looked at his bare feet at the end of his chinos. ‘Let me ask it a question. Why can’t the Democrats come up with decent slogans?’

‘I think that might be a long answer,’ I said.

‘My point exactly. Republicans run around chanting ‘America, love it or leave it’ and ‘Freedom isn’t free.’ ‘

‘The board can’t handle that,’ I said.

‘We ought to market a better one. Pigs are really smart, you know.’

The dialogue made this book phenomenal and perhaps I was so taken by it because dialogue is something that I have trouble writing; but, Everett captures idiosyncrasies and eccentricities, which seem accentuated around the unsure Not Sydney, who often just flows along with the strong personalities that surround him.

Everett’s characters stand out. Since this is the first book I’ve read of Everett’s, I don’t know if that’s his style – to create strong characters and let them carry the book – but it works brilliantly. Not surprisingly, Not Sydney is not the most interesting character. The supporting cast: his late mother and his guardian, Ted Turner, and a Percival Everett makes a cameo, too, help to define Not Sydney by being, well, what he is not. Of course, that may be obvious when the main character is trying to make an identity for himself; but, I rarely felt attached to Not Sydney but I was able to completely sympathize with him.

*That is certainly enough parenthetical exclamations for one post.

**Having a strange name is something I can relate to. With a name like Season, it is easy to feel how much simple words can be part of an identity – there are too many associations. When your name is a noun, like mine, you have to compete with those associations, particularly at introductions. I have often wished for a more common name but then realized I couldn’t be named anything else. It’s who I am.

It is rare when a book affects me. Yes, each book I read is an experience, per se; there is a relationship between two sensibilities. Often, that relationship fades as time passes as new books are read and new voices heard and some are just, well, forgettable. However, reading William T Vollmann’s Poor People was like getting a good slap in the face. I had a previous experience with Vollmann’s writing before with Rainbow Stories and was not expecting to be this moved.

Before I can even begin about the content, I must address Vollmann’s writing and voice. (I don’t know much about him although I’ve been reading some interviews now that Imperial is out.) WTV pulls you in with his sincerity, keeps you there with his eye for raw subject matter, and then leaves it up to you to judge – if you must. Something seems soft and quiet, even when he’s describing the homeless people that use his building as a toilet or a town – once beautiful and handcrafted with pride – that is soon to be demolished:

“Under the road, where time is slower and cheaper, not only does the division of labor sometimes insist less on itself, but so does the division between labor and art. Well, goodbye, goodbye! Simple, crownlike flowers on short-plucked diagonal stems spread their angled wings and hovered darkly on a house’s pale wall, under-the-road blossoms awaiting the happy day when oil’s thoroughfare, preceded by its herald, the wrecking ball, would uplift everybody into superior normality.”

His ability to juxtapose this soft sincerity with the harsh realities of poor people’s lives paradoxically takes WTV himself off of the page and yet makes it strikingly personal: Will it be a ‘happy day when oil’s thoroughfare, preceded by its herald, the wrecking ball, would uplift everybody into superior normality“? It depends on who you ask.

I almost forgot Poor People is a very long essay. It doesn’t feel like editorializing but that’s what it is. He deftly states: here is the situation and (with paragraphs like the one above) subtly asks: now what do you think of that? However, there is never a time when he asks: what are you going to do about it? In fact, he states that he is not writing to tell people how to fix the problem of poverty. He is writing to tell you about poverty and what makes someone poor.

WTV chooses to write about poverty that most people never see and rarely understand. If you know WTV’s writing, then you know the prostitutes, the drug addicts, the downtrodden, the drunks, the sick, the forgotten. Somehow, in Poor People he is also able to find compelling stories – but, then, with this subject matter, maybe they all are. I can’t help but think he finds the compelling stories because he seems to look for them without fear. In Japan, he searches for the elusive and extremely dangerous Snakeheads (people involved in human trafficking), knowing that knocking on certain doors could get him killed – fortunately, and even he recognizes this, these doors are not answered. There is story of the Thai woman who works to get drunk and take care of her daughter. There is the story of the two beggars in Russia: one an epileptic and one who is in her eighties, supporting her family. (I found this story amazing: the son-in-law was sent to work to clean up Chernobyl – when he started they were initially only allowed to work 5 seconds a day due to the radiation. Now he is too sick to work. His exposure was so great he has the potential to make the rest of his family sick by being around them – his two daughters rarely leave the house due to illness.) There is the story of the oil town in Kazakhstan whose town officials are ordering everyone to move – there are rumors that the refinery is making everyone sick and that the entire town has anemia. There are the stories of Afghan women who are poor but invisible under the strong arm of the Taliban (it is illegal for women to beg, among many other things). So many stories. So much poverty.

The beauty of WTV’s book is that I didn’t find myself pitying these people. He was able to make them human. Of course, they are human! However, I find that often when people write about these kinds of stories they patronize and pity to the point where these stories become sentimental simulacra of themselves – almost cartoonish, as if it couldn’t/doesn’t really happen. (The best example I can think of is most of the Katrina coverage.) WTV writes in such away that you don’t want to turn away, you are not embarrassed, or nervous, or scared of (most of) these people. Some are just like us. Just poorer. A lot poorer.

But are they? That is, I think, what WTV really wanted to know. What makes someone poor? Is it how much they have? How much money they have? Or is it something else? For each person it is different, a different story, a different sadness, a different hope. And hope is what WTV thinks is the best thing you can give these people. Let them drink, smoke, do drugs, as long as it gives them hope and makes their lives a little better. I am not sure I agree with this at all times, especially when the behavior can affect others. But, hope, in itself, I can believe in.

It’s been awhile since I’ve read some non-fiction until I recently read Mary Roach’s Bonk. Well, I shouldn’t say ‘read’ because I didn’t finish it. This was a recent find at my local library and I thought, “What the hell. I’ve heard of Mary Roach. I like sex. This could be interesting.” I realized three library renewals into it that I was then saying, “What the hell was I thinking?!?” After the ‘Penis’ chapter, I called it quits.

This book has so much potential: “The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex” reads the subtitle. I am a curious person. I enjoy sex. Maybe I could enjoy it on another, possibly objective, level. Not that I had any great expectations – I wasn’t expecting Anais Nin or anything – there would be science involved after all. However, I was not expecting to be grossed out (and I do not consider myself a prude). Nor was I expecting to feel like Roach was at my bedside.

I think it was the aforementioned ‘Penis’ chapter that did me in. I wish I had quotes (I’ve long since returned the book to the library) but, really, on second thought it’s probably better that I didn’t. Let’s just say she witnesses a penile implant and let’s also just say I’m so glad I don’t have a penis. (To be fair, I didn’t read the ‘Vagina’ chapter so maybe I wouldn’t want to have one of those either.) I now know too much how penile implants work and the how much physical agony those guys have to go through to get one.

I’ll admit there were some interesting bits. There is still a stigma attached to doing sex research, even in this Cialis-in-the-tub age. There are often lots of euphemisms used in presenting research topics for grant moneys and to universities. I guess there can be a fine line between objective and perverted (think Kinsey – also very interesting). However, these few gems were intruded by footnotes and asides that constantly took me away from the original topic – usually something tangentially related to the main text. This happened so often that I felt I was reading two books: the one Roach was writing and the one with random factoids that Roach wanted to write. 

Needless to say that science plus sex should not be disappointing. Roach’s voice is jovial, like a friend is telling you something funny that she read in the tabloids in the grocery line. But I don’t want to constantly read about the boy who was born a bat. I don’t need to be shocked to be entertained – even only mildly. Roach started out with a great topic but didn’t realize that you can have too much of a good thing.

There is something intriguing about delving into the secrets of art. That’s one of the reasons art is so attractive to humans: its inability to be explained. Somehow it has the ability to interpret our surroundings and give some meaning to our reality. Of course, there is also art that completely destroys our notions of reality and challenges us to rethink our perceptions. The creative process breaks down to reinvent. Or does it?

In Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist, certain artists are heralded as being the precursors to scientists. They could feel in their art – whatever form that may be: novels, poetry, food, music, painting – what scientists are struggling to understand: how the brain works and how do we feel. In a sense Lehrer is breaking down the art to recreate the science. This approach is quite alluring. Artists’ secrets revealed! Granted, that is not the premise or promise of the book. The book is really about art and science and how enmeshed they are. Yet, it feels written as though he is revealing secrets and that, to me, lacks authenticity. I lost interest in his interpretations of the artists’ work and his thin transitions between the art and science.

Unfortunately, there were no moments where I thought “Oh, so that’s what happens!” Simplicity, not brevity, are the keys to pop-science. Or, possibly, I just didn’t find neuroscience to be that interesting. The chapters on Auguste Escoffier and Gertrude Stein were the most intriguing because these were the most accessible and practical – why food is delicious and the structure of language. I eat food and use language everyday, well, not like Escoffier or Stein, but I have a particular interest in food and language (sometimes even together).

Lehrer’s book disappoints because he is writing a pop-science book without the practicality of popular science. Neuroscience is interesting, or at least could be. Both art and neuroscience are things most people don’t understand. If you put them together they could equal a beautiful book. However, there was little practicality and a lot of Lehrer.

On an somewhat unrelated note: While the subject has been written about many times, I also was intrigued to read how the William and Henry James weaved themselves into so many aspects of art and science. They are like the Benjamin Franklins* of the 19th century.

aside Living in Philadelphia comes with accepting Ben Franklin as a national hero (besides the Phillies, of course!). If you’re using it; BF invented it! We, Philadelphians, are not short on exaggerated pride.

On the surface, Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project is about a writer, Vladmir Brik, from Sarajevo who is living in Chicago. He is working on writing a book about a Jewish immigrant, Lazarus Averbach, who was killed in Chicago in the early 1900s. (Hemon in real life is a writer from Sarajevo who is living in Chicago.) The novel tells both of their stories and both are quite different.

I was drawn particularly to Brik’s story as he travels back to Sarajevo with his friend Rora, who is an expert story-teller, or rather he is a man of stories – almost mythically so. We become enchanted by them, as Brik does, and we find that we need stories, we can’t wait for the next, whether it’s Rora telling about the war, or the story of Lazarus and his sister, or Brik and his wife, or Brik and Rora’s travels – anything – as long as we are all connected by the stories to something larger than us. As I read the sections with Brik and Rora, I was constantly reminded of the first line of Joan Didion’s “The White Album”: We tell ourselves stories in order to live. It seems that most of life that is in these two characters is in the stories that they tell.

When I first began reading The Lazarus Project I breathed a very deep sigh of relief. In his words and sentences I was comfortable. Each sentence was a full and complete sentence in that no words or phrases were superfluous, everything fit and was necessary and was beautiful. I reached a sense of familiarity as if with an old friend – a good book. While reading Faulkner is reading good books, it doesn’t have that sense of newness and discovery and relaxed enjoyment; in a sense, I often feel like I am working – I am reading with a purpose. I am beginning to think that I should be reading more for enjoyment than for purpose; maybe I would learn just as much or even more.

Times Online excerpts Backwards in High Heels: The Impossible Art of Being Female by Sarah Vine and Tania Kindersley, where they outline five little lies that parents will sometimes say to non- or soon-to-be parents:

1. It doesn’t matter if she gets fat, the weight will drop off afterwards, especially if she breastfeeds.

2. The birth itself isn’t that bad, and anyway your body is biologically programmed to forget the pain.

3. Breastfeeding can be a little tricky to start with, but in the end she’ll get the hang of it.

4. You get used to not having as much sleep as you used to.

5. The experience of looking after a newborn can really bring two people together.

I shouldn’t say they are lies, per se, maybe just not the whole truth…

I didn’t read Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End until many months after I had worked in an office. I think if I had still been in my work situation I would have a different opinion about the novel. I would have laughed out loud – maybe – and further dug my heels in frustration at the injustices of the corporate hand. I had distance and this distance turned me off to the (sometimes) excruciating minutiae of this book. After my much needed break from Faulkner, I thought this would be just the thing to make me laugh: I’d be part of the group. Isn’t that what it’s all about? I read the first paragraph and I was hooked. This is exactly like working in an office. Ferris has got it.

The problem for me was that pages, chapters later he’s still doing it. I don’t find it interesting what kind of computers or software people are using. Nor do I find it particularly interesting all of the little details, quirks, nervous ticks, and rituals people have while they actually work. I don’t want to read about work. While I do concede that a lot of these details are necessary for creating that office milieu, the first half of the book was mostly exposition. It got tiring.

What was compelling was the use of ‘we’. The ability to sustain the first person plural as a narrator was remarkable. I could become cynical and say that it was an easy choice: there is no commitment to character if we are all the narrator and there is great freedom of omniscience in this elusive voice. But I want to believe that it was used to make us feel like part of the group – like reality TV on the page. We have all been part of the politics/antics of the workplace and we can watch (read) it before our eyes, even feel privy to the characters’ secrets.

Here’s where I think I disliked the book (and I wanted to like it so very much – again, I have fallen victim to too much hype): it feels written to become a movie. It was entertaining, at least enough for me to finish it.