Monday

Weirdos at Readings



Last week I went to a reading by the wonderful and excellent Patrick deWitt, who was reading from his newest, The Sisters Brothers.

I've been to a lot of these. They all go pretty much the same way. The author gets up to a podium, reads something (which can be sort of disappointing as I don't think I would go see an author I wasn't a fan of, yet they are almost always reading something I've already read), and then goes for the Q&A portion.

This is where things tend to get fun.

At one memorable reading with Chuck Klosterman, who read an excerpt from Killing Yourself to Live that included a reference to the fact that Thomas Jefferson told Lewis and Clark to keep a sharp eye out for Mastodons during their trail time, a guy stood up with this "question": "Lewis and Clark did find something out in those woods that no one had ever seen before. Do you know what it was? Bears." After which he promptly sat down and let that one sink in on all of us.

I wish, for the life of me, that I could remember the answer because Klosterman did a really nice job of not saying something like, I don't know, "What the fuck are you talking about?" Because, though I am not an expert on bears, I am relatively sure that bears were discovered long before Lewis and Clark were even ovum exploring the fallopian tube trails of their respective mothers.

Also, what the hell kind of question is that? It reminds me of the times I visit grade schools. There is a certain age, maybe 3rd or 4th grade, when kids start to understand what a question is, what it's purpose is, and how to ask one in such a way that it can be answered. But when you visit a preschool, for example, and ask for questions, you're likely to get stuff like, "We went to California this summer."

Every reading, without fail, has a person like this, someone who comes up with a bizarre, strange semi-question that is very loosely based on one small thing the author said over the last hour. Something lights up a little part of their brain and the train is now rolling out of the station.

This last week was no exception.

Now, to be fair, the weird questioner was at least asking questions that were related to the material. She'd clearly read it, so she wasn't some berserk hobo off the streets who wanted to make sure we knew that bears were out there and that they could strike when we least expected, while our backs were turned because we were on the lookout for mastodons.

And, to be fair, Mr. deWitt did a damn good job of answering her questions even though they seemed completely insane to me. For example:
"Do you think Eli [the narrator] will ever settle down and have a wife and kid?"

Hmm...maybe a little explanation is necessary.

The book she was referring to is about two brothers who are assassins in the old west. They travel a long way to kill a guy, have some adventures along the way, and end at their mother's house. The entire book takes place over maybe the course of a couple months out of their entire lives.

So, to speculate on whether a character will do something not in the story feels like the thoughts of a crazy person to me. Because, truthfully, the answer is absolutely not. No, of course not, because that character will never do anything ever again because that is the end of his story. He will not do anything that hasn't been written in those pages.

I was completely blown away by the question and had no idea how one would answer it. I felt nervous, sort of like those times when you were watching other kids give speeches in class and you were waiting your turn, not really thinking about what was going on up front but just thinking about how it was almost your turn.

He answered it well, and clearly he thought of his characters as much more than just a few pages worth of a person, which is probably why the book turned out as good as it did.

Like a lot of these question weirdos, she asked several questions. Her last one: "Clearly you got your MFA somewhere. Where did you go and what did you think of it?"

What an odd question.

It turned out that no, in fact, he had never gotten an MFA, nor gone to college, nor finished high school. The answer turned out great because he told a long story of him not being interested in school, becoming interested in writing, working hateful jobs, and so on.

Prefacing can be everything, and why you would preface that question with a "Clearly you" is beyond me, especially when you could just say, "Did you/and if so" instead.

But, if I'm being honest, these weirdos are what make these sorts of things worth going to. I can hear some guy read from a book any day, and it's pretty rare that the author reads a book aloud better than you read it in your head. Even the audiobook, most times, is better read than it is by the author, which shouldn't be a surprise because one person is a writer who is used to writing things down and the other is an actor who is used to taking things written down and giving them expression and life.

If it weren't for these weirdos we'd just get a few words followed by the rote questions When did you know you wanted to be a writer? Who are your influences? and Are they making anything of yours into a movie?

The weirdos are what make it fun, make it an event. If you are unsure about going to a reading, I would say go and bring a really bizarre, obnoxious friend who can't keep his or her mouth shut. It'll be a party.

Wednesday

The Scarlet Letter aka My First Adventure in Cliffs Notes


It's great to finally get back to the classics. It's been far too long since I read a book with careful intensity, noting throwaway lines that are likely to show up on a multiple choice or short answer test that misses the main themes of a book entirely while managing to ask lots of questions like, "In the fourth chapter, what kind of shoes was [character you don't even remember] wearing?"

I was thinking maybe it would be nice to read a book like this without worrying about that stuff, just absorbing it for what it was and then moving on through my life drunk.

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

It's hard to know where to start with this thing.

The prose itself is almost unreadable. Let me give you an example of what a sentence in this book is like:

A man- who was born in a small town, which bore no resemblance to the town his parents imagined for him when they settled in the area over 40 years ago with every intention of starting a small business selling gift baskets online that sort of petered out after bigger companies like FTD caught onto the whole thing and ran the little guys out with predatory pricing- decided to go for a walk one day.

I shit you not. Whenever I saw a dash I'd skip down to find the second dash, and usually managed to cruise through half a page to find the relevant piece where the prose picked up again.

Word on the street is that Hawthorne, who published the book in 1850, actually wrote it to seem EVEN MORE old-timey than it was, which is pretty goddamn old-timey at this point. As far as I can tell, writing old-timey means:

1. Describing furniture and clothing in such exhaustive detail that royal wedding coverage appears shabby and underdeveloped.

2. Using commas wherever the fuck you feel like it.

3. Structuring the plot in such a way that you already know everything that's going to happen way before it does.

Let's talk plot while we're on the topic.

The plot is like Dynasty with all the juicy parts pulled out. I'm serious. All events could be summed up by video of a guy sitting in front of a sign that says, "Banging people isn't so bad" and winking from time to time. One of the characters is damned, and as she walks through the forest the bits of light that dot the trail through the canopy of trees literally vanish before she can walk into them. Now this would be fine in a book where the damned character was in the woods, say, leading an army of orcs. But in a book where the sexual and social mores of Puritan society are called into question, it kind of overdoes everything and kills the mood.

So it all begs the question: What the fuck is going on with these classics?

The Scarlet Letter, according to a recent study, is the sixth-most taught book in American high schools. It's very popular, and you can hardly enter a Barnes and Noble without seeing a new version with such awesome cover art that it almost tricks you into buying it.

I have a frequent argument with my brother regarding what makes things (movies, books, whatever) great. To him, for example, a movie might be great because it's the first movie to usher in a new era in filmmaking, really redefining an era while paying a loving homage to the past. Context is important to him, and reading the stuff on the IMDB page is part of the movie experience in his world.

For me, I don't really give a shit about context. Knowing that Hawthorne had certain feelings about Puritanism based on his ancestry doesn't really matter much to me. Finding out that the main character was based loosely on the author's wife doesn't really do a whole lot for me. In other words, I demand to be entertained on at least some level, and if the level of entertainment doesn't spur me on to dig deeper, I think that's a failure of the art and not an example of my own laziness contributing to my dislike of the art in question.

Furthermore, when the prose is TOO challenging I am constantly thinking, "This is a book I am reading and here is the next line of this book." I am not at all swept up in the narrative and therefore don't enjoy it nearly as much.

I like to think of books as being like magicians. Take a David Copperfield...the magician, not the book. His schtick is to do amazing tricks that appear effortless on his part, which is why they are, well, magical. David Blaine, on the other hand, performs feats that do not appear effortless whatsoever, and therefore far less magical. It takes a great writer to write a great book. It takes an even better writer to write a great book that appears nearly effortless.

One might accuse me of rarely reading challenging books, and maybe it's true. I find myself drawn to books that compel me to finish them as opposed to those that I feel I have to slog through while other books are sitting in growing piles around my apartment, calling out to me with their promises of genuine laughs, heartbreak that is relevant to me, and prose that doesn't challenge me to the point that it's more of a barrier to the story than anything.

Perhaps most telling, at the book club meeting we were discussing this last night, and an older lady asked a pretty decent question: "Why is this considered a classic?"

There are two answers, one that is what the Everyman Library will tell you and one that I would tell you.

Everyman would say that the book is a classic because it is an excellent snapshot of a historical period. It has a narrative set within a framework that allows us to better understand our roots as Americans. The issues of people's perceptions of women and rights of women are still very alive today. Overall, it gives us a chance to examine our own society through the lens of fiction, therefore re-framing the conversation to make it less personal and easier to examine without bias. Blah, blah, blah.

I would say it's a classic because it was one of the more palatable books that came out during the period when "classics" were made. I would also point out that the canonized classics are never revised. We never go back and say which books maybe have less to say about our lives than they used to, or which might still be relevant but have been usurped by something that is closer to the lives we live today. I would also say that it continues to be taught in schools because the kind of people who end up teaching high school English are most often people who have a deep and abiding respect for these types of books and identified with these types of books at around that time in their lives. I think there are a lot of people out there who never liked these books, and rather than making their voices heard about what they think people should read they just drop out of the world of books altogether.

My point is, I think this is a bad book. It's got low readability, even for adults. The plot is melodramatic. The characters are single-dimensional crap, the women being constant victims of the time and the men being weak examples of humanity. Also, a very serious story is halted in places where we are expected to believe that magic letter A's pop up in the sky like you might see in an episode of Sesame Street.

It must have been a very exciting book in its time, without a doubt based on its sales. And if this kind of book is your thing, good for you. I don't begrudge you your joy. It's just not a book that I would ever dream of foisting on someone else, nor would I recommend reading it unless you are absolutely required.

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Cover My Ass Time: This is all happening in a magical, fictional universe. Any resemblance to anything ever is strictly the product of a weak imagination, for which I apologize.