random notes:
In August I read Pico Iyer, who is widely known as a travel writer, although he writes on a variety of topics, and often on globalism. He calls himself a “mongrel”: his parents were from India, he was born in England, raised in California and educated in English boarding schools, and now lives mostly in suburban Japan, but spends much of his time traveling the world.
Iyer’s work is interesting. His style is less personal, more journalistic than most of the other essayists I’ve read so far. He’s there in the essays, appearing in a paragraph here, a paragraph there, but he’s more like an extra sipping tea to the right of the screen than he is a leading man.
But as he sits off to the side drinking that tea, he’s also, presumably, scribbling in a notebook. Iyer is a master at noting details, so many details. He observes people and places like the outsider he often is–with care, with curiosity. Then he analyzes those details for the meaning that connects them. There’s plenty of insight in an Iyer essay.
There’s also that lyricism that I always admire in writing–a rhythm to the lines, an attention to the sounds. There are single sentences that gallop on for a paragraph, and analogies that make me smile for the ride.
Perhaps because so many of his essays reflect on varied cultures, there’s a focus on disparity in Iyer’s work. Disparity between the rich and the poor in Haiti; between the jet-lagged and the un-jet-lagged mind; between the English language of England and the English of India. That theme of disparity continues even in essays not focused on travel: an essay on Leonard Cohen, for example, studies the disparity between the Cohen of legend, and the Cohen who resides in a Zen center as “cook, chauffeur and sometimes drinking buddy” to a Japanese roshi.
I focused my reading on two works: The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home, and Sun After Dark: Flights into the Foreign. The subject matter in these essays is fascinating enough–the L.A. airport, the Olympic Village in Atlanta, shopping mall-hotels in Hong Kong from which people never leave, Angkor Wat, the Dalai Lama–but then there’s Iyer’s analysis, and his talent for crafting fine lines. It’s intriguing stuff. See for yourself.
a few lines to love:
“And suddenly, in a flash, I am taken back to myself at the age of nine, going back and forth (three times a year) between my parents’ home in California and my boarding school in England and realizing that, as a member of neither culture, I could choose between selves at will, wowing my Californian friends with the passages of Greek and Latin I’d already learned in England, and telling my breathless housemates in Oxford how close I lived to the Grateful Dead. The tradition denoted by my face was something I could erase (mostly) with my voice, or pick up whenever the conversation turned to the Maharishi or patchouli oil”
Such great details.
“I woke up one morning last month in sleepy, never-never Laos (where the center of the capital is unpaved red dirt and a fountain without water), and went to a movie that same evening in the Westside Pavilion in Los Angeles, where a Korean at a croissanterie made an iced cappuccino for a young Japanese boy surrounded by the East Wind snack bar and Panda Express, Fajita Flats and the Hana Grill; two weeks later I woke up in placid, acupuncture-loving Santa Barbara, and went to sleep that night in the broken heart of Manila, where children were piled up like rags on the pedestrian overpasses and girls scarcely in their teens combed, combed their long hair before lying down to sleep under sheets of cellophane on the central dividers of city streets.”
That’s a single sentence. Which is a brilliant construction, given that he’s writing about dragging oneself across the globe and how ”such quick transitions bring conflicts”. Iyer drags us along on his long-winded sentence, and as we try to make sense, we feel his disorientation ourselves. Then read the very last part of the sentence aloud, and listen to all the “s” sounds. Lovely.
“In the final winter of the old millennium, to see what the official caretakers of our global order make of all this, I accepted an invitation to go as a Fellow to the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The Forum gathers hundreds of “leaders of global security” in Davos each year–captains of industry, heads of state, computer billionaires, and a few token mortals such as me–to map out the future of the planet.
I had to include this as an example of the essayist’s “self-deprecatory cough” that Adam Gopnik writes about. A few token mortals such as me seems suitably self-deflecting.
The following is from a section of an essay called “The Empire”. Iyer writes about sitting at Cambridge with a friend, a fellow Indian, who has embraced England as his home and his lifestyle, but suddenly expresses disillusionment with his decision.
“I look at him and don’t know what to think. The punts are drifting past the shortbread-colored towers, and the late-summer light is gilding the fields and distant spires as in the kind of watercolors the Empire sent around the globe. My friend has a big heart, I know, and a quick mind, but both are so lost inside the character he’s chose to play that all I can hear, sometimes, is the sound of a lover disappointed, a boy who’s left everything he knows to pursue some ideal, unattainable woman, and arrives at her doorstep, only to find she’s given herself over to some mobster from Las Vegas.”
Ah. The “shortbread-colored towers”. The watercolored light. And then the mobster from Las Vegas at the end. Beautiful writing. (And doesn’t it remind you a little of E.B. White’s Corn Belt boy with “a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart”?)
On how travel can haunt us:
“When we sleep, as we do for perhaps a third of our days, we see not the places we know so well so much as somewhere we might have visited once, magically rearranged. Even when we’re lying sleepless in our beds, trying to will ourselves into the dark, what we meet, often, are not the people who surround us every day, but a stranger, perhaps, whose eyes met ours in a cafe in Reykjavik twenty years ago.”
I just like the idea he presents here. And that Reykjavik stranger.
From that essay on Leonard Cohen and his relationship with the roshi:
“It’s touching in a way: the man who has been the poet laureate of those in flight, who has never found in his sixty-three years a woman he can marry or a home he won’t desert, the connoisseur of betrayal and self-tormenting soul who claimed, twenty-five years ago, that he had ‘torn everyone who reached out for me,’ and who ended his most recent collection of writings with a prayer for ‘the precious ones I overthrew for an education in the world’– the man, in fact, who became an international heartthrob while singing “So Long” and “Goodbye” — has finally found something he hasn’t abandoned and a love that won’t let him down.”
Another one of those long Iyer sentences. I love how he carries us along.
On considering Singapore while jet-lagged:
“Along the shiny malls of Orchard Road–the new, official Singapore, where Barnes & Noble and Marks & Spencer and Nokia and Nike all share a single entrance (there’s a Starbucks on this intersection, a Starbucks on that one)–tall girls who weren’t girls when the day or the decade began flounce outside the Royal Thai Embassy, walking up the sidewalk, walking down it.”
These lines are all about the sounds for me: the rhythm in the rattling off of the “and” shops; the repeat of the words Starbucks and girls; the alliteration in day anddecade. And then the walking up and walking down. It’s almost singsong–a perfect way to convey the altered jet-lagged mind.
And more on jet lag:
“I feel, when lagged, as if I’m seeing the whole world through tears, or squinting; everything gets through to me, but with the wrong weight or meaning. I can’t see the signs, only their reflections in the puddles. I can’t follow directions; only savor the fact of being lost. It’s like watching a foreign movie without subtitles, perhaps: I can’t follow the story, the arc of character, but something else–the inflection of a hand, this unregarded silence–comes through to me intensely.”
Yes! This describes the state of jet lag so well. Such apt analogies. And again, the rhythm of the lines.
The essay “A Far-Off Affair” examines the English language in India. This particular essay has a more humorous tone than most of Iyer’s work; as a fellow wordlover, I ate it up.
“Indian English, when it is not overly formal, comes at you with the fatal tinkle of an advertising man who’s got his hands on the Ten Commandments: there’s always a trace of sententiousness in it, and yet the lofty sentiments are placed inside the jingly singsong of a children’s ditty. A decade before, traveling across my stepmotherland, I’d been struck by the signs that said LANE DRIVING IS SANE DRIVING and NO HURRY, NO WORRY, but now they had been joined by half a hundred others, trilling, RECKLESS DRIVERS KILL AND DIE, LEAVING ALL BEHIND TO CRY (or, a little more potently, RISK-TAKER IS ACCIDENT-MAKER). As I drove out of little settlements crammed with such instructions, the signs offered brightly, THANKS FOR INCONVENIENCE.”
And:
“But I always felt that I was speaking a language quite different from the English being spoken all around me (more Indians, of course, speak English than Englishmen), and came to feel that the one companion who’d been with me all my life, the English language, had stolen away into a corner and come back in a turban, a finger to its lips.”
There were so many funny examples in this essay; it was hard to know which to include. Just as it’s hard to stop reading Iyer. But it’s September and time to move on.
the plan for september:
I meant to read M.F.K. Fisher earlier in the summer–she’s summery reading to me. But here near the San Francisco Bay, the best summer weather is just now in full swing. So Fisher it is.
October 9, 2009: notes on m.f.k. fisher
random notes:
This has been a tough month for my essayist project. I’ve told you how I got distracted reading Spunk & Bite. I also have a seventeen-year-old applying to college this fall, so I’m suddenly busy with that, and reading books with ridiculous titles like How to Get Into the Top Colleges.
I seemed to get around to Fisher just as I was going to bed each night. And then fell asleep soon after. Which prompts the ageless conundrum: Did I fall asleep because the book was boring? Or was the book boring because I was falling asleep?
Part of the problem was that I stubbornly stuck with Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me. Philip Lopate, author of The Art of the Personal Essay and my unknowing mentor through this project, calls that book Fisher’s “best”. I’m going to respectfully disagree (and hope he doesn’t show up in the comments to argue). Turns out The Gastronomical Me was one of Fisher’s first books, and I found the writing uneven. There’s some fantastic stuff there (as you’ll see in the quotes below), but much of the book rambles, like stream-of-consciousness memory rather than shaped essays.
As October rolled around, I got desperate and picked up my sun-bleached copy of As They Were. I only had to reread the essay “Two Kitchens in Provence” to remember what I’ve long loved about Fisher. I suppose that’s sort of sappy and predictable. It reminds me of the time I told a landscape architect that I wanted to plant our front hillside all in lavender and he said, full of snot, “People are sosentimental about lavender.” Well, yeah. I’ll take my lavender hillside and I’ll take Fisher’s memories of food and Provence, no matter how cliche they may seem.
Lopate writes, “Stylistically, Fisher had a taste for aphorisms, sentences of compressed wit that boldly cut through any dithering.” I’d say, to use a word from my recent readings, that she wrote with spunk. Her writing voice was opinionated and direct, refreshing for a woman of her time. And while she’s known for her food writing, it’s her mastery of details that makes her writing memorable. Yes, she could reconstruct a meal from decades before, course by course, but she could also convey the feel of a village in winter, or the driver of a traveling grocery cart: “The man who jolted it around that rocky country had a good face, like a tired village doctor or lawyer.”
Fisher’s insight into people is one of my favorite qualities in her writing, as much as those recollections of meals and time spent in France. She was perceptive, in what seems to me a very female way. And she’d surely make the ultimate dining companion.
a few lines to love:
On recollecting food, from “Once a Tramp, Always…”
“It is said that a few connoisseurs, such as old George Saintsbury, can recall physically the bouquet of certain great vintages a half century after tasting them. I am a mouse among elephants now, but I can say just as surely that this minute, in a northern California valley, I can taste-smell-hear-see and then feel between my teeth the potato chips I ate slowly one November afternoon in 1936, in the bar of the Lausanne Palace. They were uneven in both thickness and color, probably made by a new apprentice in the hotel kitchen, and almost surely they smelled faintly of either chicken or fish, for that was always the case there. They were a little too salty, to encourage me to drink. They were ineffable. I am still nourished by them. That is probably why I can be so firm about not eating my way through barrels, tunnels, mountains more of them here in the land where they hang like square cellophane fruit on wire trees in all the grocery stores, to tempt me sharply every time I pass them.”
This essay was published in The New Yorker in 1968, thirty-two years after Fisher ate those chips. The particulars of the chips are impressive enough–but then there’s that description of modern-day chips that “hang there like square cellophane fruit on wire trees in all the grocery stores”. Dead food on dead trees–perfect.
Going back in time to her childhood:
“We spent our time in a stream under the cottonwoods, or with Old Mary the cook, watching her make butter in a great churn between her mountainous knees. She slapped it into pats, and put them down in the stream where it ran hurriedly through the darkness of the butter-house.”
I love the image of the churn between those “mountainous knees”.
On cooking for others:
“I was beginning to believe that is is foolish and perhaps pretentious and often boring, as well as damnably expensive, to make a meal of six or eight courses just because the guests who are to eat it have always been used to that many. Let them try eating two or three things, I said, so plentiful and interesting and so well cooked that they are satisfied. And if they aren’t satisfied, let them stay away from our table, and our leisurely comfortable friendship at that table.
I talked like that, and it worried Al a little, because he had been raised in a minister’s family and taught that the most courteous way to treat guests was to make them feel as if they were in their own homes.”
Gives you a sense of Fisher’s voice, her sass. She’s funny and practical and likable.
Here’s one of those character portraits that impress me so. She’s describing a waitress:
“She was very thin, and something about her was out of a drawing, out of an El Greco. Her eyes were bigger than human eyes, and slipped upwards and sideways; and her mouth was pale and beautiful. She was shadowy…a bad liver probably…but mysterious-looking. She wore black always, and her long hands picked up sizzling platters as if they were distasteful leaves from a tree. She had a light voice; and there was something good and fine about her, so that I always warmed to her.”
This is what I mean by Fisher’s female insight. Here we have a mix of the woman’s physical description, with those eyes and the way her long hands picked up platters, combined with the supposition about her liver, and the way Fisher feels about her. It reminds me of how a woman might talk with a friend over a cup of tea–if the woman had impressive gifts for description.
And here’s another waitress, only this time rendered in dialogue. This comes from an entertaining essay called “I Was Really Very Hungry” about a memorable meal that Fisher did not want, but which was thrust upon her by a maniacal waitress.
“‘You cannot, you cannot, Madame, serve old pastry!’ She seemed ready to beat her breast as she leaned across the table. ‘Look at that delicate crust! You may feel that you have eaten too much.’ (I nodded in idiotic agreement.) ‘But this pastry is like feathers–it is like snow. It is in fact good for you, a digestive! And why?’ She glared sternly at me. ‘Because Monsieur Paul did not even open the flour bin until he saw you coming! He could not, he could not have baked you one of his special apple tarts with old dough!’”
Funny. Fisher captures dialogue especially well.
And another portrait:
“One time we took Michel to the Raisin. He was the kind of short, virile, foxlike Frenchman who seems to have been born in a beret, the kind who is equally ready to shoot a wild boar, make love, or say something which seems witty until you think about it.”
It’s all good, but it’s the “seems witty until you think about it” surprise at the end that really does it.
And another, this time a girl Fisher’s younger brother has brought to visit, with whom he is obsessed.
“But the little blonde girl did not make a part of any of it. The game was too much for her, and the food was boring. She drooped wearily against the long crude table beside the alley, and whenever David seemed for a minute to forget her, she let her hand fall slowly toward him, let her soft pink fingers uncurl. It was wordless, and it was like the crack of a whip. He would drop anything…his bread and honey, the pins he was setting up, and come dazedly to watch her lift the fresh cigaret to her mouth and wait for him to light it.”
It’s all so carefully observed–I’m convinced of the girl’s dreadfulness. I especially like “It was wordless, and it was like the crack of a whip.”
On being driven home from the market in Provence in a taxi:
“Sometimes I would want him to go faster, for I could almost feel the food in the baskets swelling with juice, growing soft, splitting open in an explosive rush toward ripeness and disintegration. The fruits and vegetables in Provence are dying as they grow–literally leaping from the ancient soil, so filled with natural richnesses and bacilli and fungi that they seem a kind of summing up of whatever they are. A tomato there, for instance, is the essence of all tomatoes, of tomato-ness, the way a fragment from a Greek frieze is not a horse but horse itself.”
I love the analysis, especially the analogy in the last line.
Here’s her ending to the essay “Gare de Lyon”, about the restaurant in that train station.
“It comes down, I suppose, to a question of where one really chooses to be, and for how long. This is of course true of all such traffic hubs such as railway stations, but nowhere is there one with a second floor like that of the Gare de Lyon, so peculiarly lacy and golden. It has, in an enormous way, something of the seduction of a full-blown but respectable lady, post-Renior but pre-Picasso, waiting quietly in full sunlight for a chat with an old lover…”
That last line–and the whole essay–is a convincing argument for how much travel has changed. It makes you long for that respectable lady.
And one more, just because it’s the essence of M.F.K. Fisher, in three lines:
“There might be one lamb chop left. It would not be good by noon. I would eat it cold for a secret breakfast, with a glass of red wine, after the family had scattered.”
Now I wish I’d started As They Were sooner. I want to keep reading, but it’s time to move on.
the plan for october:
Next up is Scott Russell Sanders. Years ago I read two of his essays, and I still remember their lyricism. I’m starting with A Private History of Awe.
november 10, 2009: notes on scott russell sanders
If you’re new to this blog, let me give you a heads up: this is the monthly post in which I bore most of you silly by writing about an essayist that I’ve been reading. I’m calling the project My Year of Excellent Essayists, and you can read more about it here.
random notes:
I have an old, used copy of The Best American Essays 1987. I must have bought it around 1994, when I took a Prose Style Workshop in Portland and switched from writing short stories to writing essays. (Or attempting to write essays.) There’s an essay in that collection called “The Inheritance of Tools” by Scott Russell Sanders, and its lyricism wowed me. The same year I bought the collection The Art of the Personal Essay and found Sanders’ stunning piece “Under the Influence”, about his father’s alcoholism.
I never forgot those essays. It’s been fifteen years since I first read them, which I find rather unbelievable; still I remember their power. I wanted to reread them this month, and to read more Sanders. I chose A Private History of Awe, which is a reminiscence of his life–specifically a recollection of the times he was touched with awe. The book takes you through those charged moments chronologically, starting in Sanders’ childhood, while simultaneously weaving in current-day stories of his time with his mother, who is falling into dementia, and time with his newborn granddaughter. It’s a beautiful book.
According to Phillip Lopate, author of The Art of the Personal Essay, Sanders is “an accomplished nature writer”, yet I’ve managed to focus on his work on family and relationships. Even in these works, he writes with the watchful awareness of a nature writer. He’s a master of observing details and lingering over them, as I hope you’ll see below. There’s also something almost spiritual about his writing–although in Awe he dismisses the religion of his childhood. He writes of everyday objects, of people, of everyday life with reverence usually reserved for the sacred. His writing is serious and earnest and gracious.
I had no problem finding lines to highlight in Sanders’ work–I’ve nearly ruined his essays with offensive neon-green highlighter stripes. Sanders is also a carpenter–he learned his skills from his father, which is the subject matter for “The Inheritance of Tools”. He crafts his lines as he does his carpentry, with precision and care.
a few lines to love:
The first line from “The Inheritance of Tools”:
“At just about the hour when my father died, soon after dawn one February morning when ice coated the windows like cataracts, I banged my thumb with a hammer.”
Sanders always starts his essays with a strong, compelling line.
Here’s the start to “Under the Influence”:
“My father drank. He drank as a gut-punched boxer gasps for breath, as a starving dog gobbles food-compulsively, secretly, in pain and trembling. I use the past tense not because he quit drinking but because he quit living.”
The first line is as simple and frank as can be, conveying the essay’s tone right off. Then he hits the reader with the two similes, taking his father’s drinking from an abstract idea to a physical experience that the reader can understand.
More from “Tools’:
“As the saw teeth bit down, the wood released its smell, each kind with its own fragrance, oak or walnut or cherry or pine–usually pine because it was the softest, easiest for a child to work. No matter how weathered and grey the board, no matter how warped and cracked, inside there was this smell waiting, as of something freshly baked.”
I love the idea of the wood’s smell waiting like something baked. So true.
“I was taught early on that a saw is not to be used apart from a square: ‘If you’re going to cut a piece of wood,’ my father insisted, ‘you owe it to the tree to cut it straight.’”
Sanders conveys so much about the people in his essays through dialogue. It’s hard to imagine that he remembers all those lines verbatim, but the dialogue is convincing enough to make it seem that he has. His father’s charismatic personality, especially, comes across in what he says.
After hearing the news of his father’s death:
“For several hours I paced around inside my house, upstairs and down, in and out of every room, looking for the right door to open and knowing there was no such door. My wife and children followed me and wrapped me in arms and backed away again, circling and staring as if I were on fire.”
The notion of looking for a nonexistent door is such an interesting, accurate analogy for the frantic first feelings of grief. And then the image of his family looking at him as if he were on fire: I see it.
A longer passage on his father. This follows a paragraph of synonyms for drunkenness, and a description of how drunks are often portrayed as humorous characters in our culture:
“My father, when drunk was neither funny nor honest; he was pathetic, frightening, deceitful. There seemed to be a leak in him somewhere, and he poured in booze to keep from draining dry. Like a torture victim who refuses to squeal, he would never admit that he had touched a drop, not even in his last year, when he seemed to be dissolving in alcohol before our very eyes. I never knew him to lie about anything, ever, except for this one ruinous fact. Drowsy, clumsy, unable to fix a bicycle tire, throw a baseball, balance a grocery sack, or walk across the room, he was stripped of his true self by drink. In a matter of minutes, the contents of a bottle could transform a brave man into a coward, a buddy into a bully, a gifted athlete and skilled carpenter and shrewd businessman into a bumbler. No dictionary synonyms for drunk would soften the anguish of watching our prince turn into a frog.”
Wow. That’s a single paragraph that conveys a lifetime of heartbreak.
And then this short line:
“Mother watched him go with arms crossed over her chest, her face closed like the lid on a box of snakes.”
Aren’t his analogies stunning?
And a few from A Private History of Awe:
“On the threshold of sixty, I am no beginner. My mind churns with memories, notions, plans, like froth in a riffle on a creek. But occasionally the waves simmer down, the water clears, and I see pebbles gleaming on the bottom of the stream. Or rather, in these clear moments, the fretfulI vanishes, and there is only the pure gleaming.”
Isn’t that lovely? The metaphor, and also the rhythm of the lines. (That rhythm is there in nearly all of Sanders’ lines.) Plus, I love that word, riffle.
On his father, as a young man–note that this is a single line:
“At twenty, after his only year of college, on a whim one Friday night he boarded a Greyhound bus in Memphis and rode to Chicago and got a job slicing cheese in a delicatessen, where, in his butter-melting southern drawl, he asked a pretty auburn-haired customer to write down her name and phone number on the wrapping paper, and she primly declined, but the following day she returned for more cheese and wrote beside the phone number all three parts of her name, Eva Mary Solomon, which became in the mouth of this Mississippi charmer the refrain of a song he often crooned to her when they danced–a song, for all I know, he sang to her when they made the love that blossomed into Sandra, Glenn, and me.”
If you’ve been reading along on this project, you know I’m a sucker for long, long lines, well-wrought. This is a good one.
For five years, Sanders wrote love letters to his wife, whom he met at summer science camp while in high school.
“By the time Ruth and I exchanged our solemn vows, we had exchanged well over a thousand letters, all of which are stored in the attic above the room where I write these lines. That I am writing these lines at all owes as much to my apprenticeship in love letters as to any formal training.”
I love the notion of an “apprenticeship in love letters”.
And this:
“Outside my window, the red oak we planted a year ago to celebrate Elizabeth’s birth swells at every bud, thrusting out new leaves to lick the sun.”
I’ve never thought of new leaves as licking the sun. So good.
And lastly, a paragraph that shows how Sanders weaves together the stories of spending time with his aging mother, and his newborn granddaughter:
“Some days I would take baby Elizabeth for a ride in the stroller, telling her the names of the flowers we saw in the park, and then I would take Mother for a ride in her wheelchair, stopping to admire white impatiens, red geraniums, violet petunias, golden coreopsis, or purple asters, rehearsing names that Mother had taught me in my childhood, but that she herself could no longer recall.”
It really is a beautiful book.
the plan for november:
I’ve already started reading Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son. I couldn’t resist, after hearing him read from it at my local bookstore. I feel a little guilty, since I was planning to read Virginia Woolf this month. I’ll be reading Adam Gopnik next month, so I probably won’t fit Virginia into my excellent year. Oh well. There’s always 2010.
december 10, 2009: notes on michael chabon
For my little project this month, I read Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son by Michael Chabon. I loved this book. I think my copy now bears more blue and green highlights than any of the essay collections I’ve read this year.
random notes:
Judging from the blurbs and praises on the back cover of the book, Chabon’s prose is widely considered some of the best of his generation. His writing is smart, lyrical, and writerly. And it manages to be smart, lyrical and writerly while containing references to Squeeze Parkay margarine, Wacky Packages, and the Planet of the Apes television show from the 70’s. I find this irresistible. Chabon is a writer of my generation, and he writes about that generation like no one else. Look at what he has to say about Captain Underpants.
“If I withdraw my approval of Captain Underpants-if I tell my son I will gladly supply him with good books and comics but that if he wants to read those damned Captain Underpants, he’ll have to pay for them himself-that withdrawal creates a gap, a small enchanted precinct of parental disapproval within which he can curl up, for a minute, for the time it takes to read a crass, vibrant, silly 120-page book with big print, one that he paid for himself, and thrill to the deep, furtive pleasure of annoying one’s father.”
There’s something about the way Chabon combines his Pulitzer Prize-winning style with the most base cultural references that captivates me. In his essay on Legos-one that had particular resonance for me as the mother of two Lego-loving sons-Chabon writes, “Time after time, playing Legos with my kids, I would fall under the spell of the old familiar crunching. It’s the sound of creativity itself, of the inventive mind at work, making something new out of what you have been given by your culture, what you know you will need to do the job, and what you happen to stumble upon along the way.” That making something new of what you have been given by your culture is a big part of Chabon’s genius. It’s precisely what he does in these essays, again and again. (It’s the same sort of creative, culture-twisting that I love to see my kids fiddle with, that I’ve written about in my Waldorf Guilt posts.) Chabon gives hope to a woman of his age who aspires to write, but worries about the conceit of such an intellectual aspiration given the amount of time she spent watching Brady Bunch reruns as a child.
The parenting essays are my favorites here. Since I attempt to write about parenting myself, I don’t know how I’ve made it through almost a year of this project without reading essays on parenting (other than a little rereading of Anne Lamott). Chabon has now spoiled parenting essays for me: the writing of others, and my own work, especially, is now bound to wither when compared. He writes about the world I knew as a kid, with those Wacky Packs and Linda Carter as Wonder Woman and the De Franco Family singing “A Heartbeat (It’s a Love Beat)”; he writes about the world I know now, with Captain Underpants and crappy kids’ movies and neighborhoods where kids can’t wander alone and teenage daughters with blossoming bodies. Observing his kids and himself as a father, he is both scaldingly honest and sentimental. He looks at his world from quirky perspectives that seem to have a little or a lot to do with his childhood love of comics. He can be witty and crass and irreverent and still convey those pangs of the heart that only a parent can know.
There’s other good stuff here, too, some of which I can’t wait to have my husband read (especially the essay about men faking competence-I get fooled all the time, I’m guessing now.) I’m not sure I needed to know so much about Chabon’s sexual history, but then again it’s hard not to follow along when someone is sharing his or her sexual history. Especially when the sharer is a Pulitzer-award winning writer.
One of my measures of an essay is its ending. I want an ending to wow me, to take all that’s happened earlier in the essay and elevate it somehow, so I feel wind-blown and shaken up and compelled to pause for a minute and reread. I don’t want an essay to be straight memoir-I want art, and a carefully crafted ending is part of that. Many essayists seem to miss that point, or don’t care; their endings are just taped-on tying-ups. Not Chabon’s. He gets it. His endings wow. Every single time.
a few lines to love:
From his essay on how men can get labeled “good fathers” for mere meager acts of fathering:
“The father on a camping trip who manages to beat a rattlesnake to death with a can of Dinty Moore in a tube sock may rest for decades on the ensuing laurels yet somehow snore peacefully every night beside his sleepless wife, even though he knows perfectly well that the Polly Pocket toys may be tainted with lead-based paint, and the Rite-Aid was out of test kits, and somebody had better go order them online, overnight delivery, even though it is four in the morning. It is in part the monumental open-endedness of the job, with its infinite number of infinitely small pieces, that routinely leads mothers to see themselves as inadequate, therefore making the task of recognizing their goodness, at any given moment, so hard.”
I wonder if he came upon this insight himself, or whether his wife had something to do with it. Hmm. Well, I like it either way. And the particularity of the Dinty Moore in a tube sock, too.
In his essay D.A.R.E., he writes of his son asking if he has ever smoked marijuana. Chabon replies that he has.
”How many times?” my son said, eyes wide.
So far, even blindsided as I had been by the abrupt onset of this conversation, I hadn’t violated the guiding principle my wife and I had decided on for its eventual proper conduct: I had been honest. But now I had a moment’s pause before replying, unwilling to pronounce those two simple words: one million.”
Two more simple words: so funny.
On Lego people, properly known as minifigs, which hadn’t existed in Lego sets when Chabon was a kid:
“But what I most resented about the minifigs was the scale they imposed on everything you built around them. Like Le Corbusier’s humancentric Modular scale or Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, the minifigs as they proliferated became the measure of all things: Weapons must fit their rigid grip, doorways accommodate the tops of their heads, cockpits accommodate their snap-on asses.”
I can’t help but appreciate a writer who glides so easily from Le Corbusier and Leonardo to the snap-on asses of Lego people.
On the freedom of his childhood:
“I could lose myself in vacant lots and playgrounds, in the alleyway behind the Wawa, in the neighbors’ yards, on the sidewalks. Anywhere, in short, I could reach on my bicycle, a 1970 Schwinn Typhoon, Coke-can red with a banana seat, a sissy bar, and ape-hanger handlebars. On it I covered the neighborhood in a regular route for half a mile in every direction. I knew the locations of all my classmates’ houses, the number of pets and siblings they had, the brand of Popsicle they served, the potential dangerousness of their fathers.”
You know how I love details. Chabon does them better than anyone. Look at that description of the bike! His details are so precise that research must be involved. And don’t you like the Popsicles, and the potentially dangerous fathers?
From an essay on the father of his former wife:
“We spent hours together, cheering on Art Monk and Carlton Fisk and other men whose names, when by chance they arise now, can summon up that entire era of whisky and football and the smell of new Coupe de Ville, when the biggest mistake I ever made came to roost, and I briefly had one of the best fathers I’ve ever found.”
In previous installments of this project, I’ve written about how I admire long lines when written well. Chabon has lots of long lines. Lots of long lines. In fact, this one is rather short, relatively. (The first line of the essay “Normal Time” goes on for over a page. I would have shared it here, but I didn’t want to type it.) Convoluted, complicated sentences are part of Chabon’s style, and it’s interesting to study how he uses them. In this particular line, we start with the names of football players and then suddenly get whisked along a string of sensory details to a poignant ending we hadn’t anticipated. The line works just like memory does. (The last line of that essay works the same way. If you have the book, check out that ending. Definitely a little heart-breaking.)
Here’s one from that essay “Faking It” on how men fake competency. Exhibit #1: pretending he knows how to hang a towel rack. This is how he starts the essay:
“At one time there was a pair of hooks on the back of the bathroom door from which one could hang a couple of towels, but people used the towels as vines, webbing, and rope for games of Tarzan, Spider-Man and Look! I’m a Dead Guy That Hung Themself, and now, to serve four children there remained one wall-mounted towel rack with only two bars.”
Gee, I thought it was only my kids. I wonder if Chris will be pretending to know what he’s doing when he replaces the door stop that fell off the back of the bathroom door because Mr. T likes to stand on it and swing the door back and forth when he is Indiana Jones or Snorlax or Wolverine or whomever he is when he stands on that door stop and swings. I love Chabon’s last line of that essay too:
“By the way, the towels are still hanging from the rack in the bathroom. And I fully expect, at any moment, in the dead of night, to hear a telltale clatter on the tiles.”
The essay “I Feel Good About My Murse”, on how Chabon caves to carrying a man-purse, is hilarious.
“Three children followed the first, each with his or her diaper bag, and as fatigue, inattention and habit took over, I stopped noticing if I was carrying the Esprit or the Kate Spade or the (forgive me) Petunia Pickle Bottom in embroidered lime-green Chinese silk. I had the diaper bag over one shoulder and a kid in the opposite arm, and I was pushing a stroller full of groceries, and some other small child was dragging along behind me hanging from the back pocket of my jeans, and at that instant as I left the store, I felt like it would be a lot easier just to drop my wallet into the diaper bag with my keys, and my cell phone, and my New York Times Review of Books than try to shove it down into my pants.”
The Petunia Pickle-Bottom bag just cracks me up. And I’m exhausted myself as I get to the end of the second line; I get why he breaks the ultimate rule of man-code and doesn’t put his wallet in his pocket.
Here are a few lines from an essay on his wife. Another crazy, long set of lines to admire. (I can’t believe I’m typing all these in. None of my other essayists have tortured me so.):
“And since that afternoon in Berkeley, California, standing along the deepest seam of the Hayward Fault-no since our first date-this woman has dragged, nudged, coaxed, led, stirred, embroiled, mocked, seduced, finagled, or carried me into every last instance of delight or sorrow, every debacle, every success, every brilliant call, and every terrible mistake that I have known or made. I’m grateful for that, because if it weren’t for her, I would never go anywhere, never see anything, never meet anyone. It’s too much bother. It’s dangerous, hard work, or expensive. I lost my ticket. I kind of have a headache. They don’t speak English there, it’s too far away, they’re closed for the day, they’re full, they said we can’t, it’s too much bother with children along.”
And, of course, the next line is “She will have none of that.” I love how much fun he seems to be having with that string of verbs, and the list of instances. And then how he segues into his first-person litany of excuses.
Okay, one more, just because I don’t think I’ve captured enough of the poignancy that I admired in so many of these essays. Here’s one of those masterful endings, on an essay about throwing away his kids’ art:
“Every day is like a kid’s drawing, offered to you with a strange mixture of ceremoniousness and offhand disregard, yours for the keeping. Some of the days are rich and complicated, others inscrutable, others little more than a stray gray mark on a ragged page. Some you manage to hang on to, though your reasons for doing so are often hard to fathom. But most of them you just ball up and throw away.”
Whew. I could go on, but I’ll stop myself. Michael Chabon lives about five minutes from me; I’ve seen him, from a distance, at the farmer’s market, at a kiddie matinee, running down College Avenue. If I ever see him again, maybe I’ll get up the nerve to tell him how much I liked his book.
the plan for december:
The plan for December is to stop making myself so crazy with plans, and to stop writing such wordy posts that take too much of my time. I’ll end this project reading Adam Gopnik, because he’s the one who inspired the project in the first place. To cut myself some slack, I’ll just focus on his essays on Thanksgiving and Christmas, from his books Paris to the Moon and Through the Children’s Gate.
january 11, 2010 notes on adam gopnik
It’s time for the last installment in My Year of Excellent Essayists.
random notes:
If you’ve been reading here for a year now (and how lucky I am if you have), you’ll remember that it was my thoughts on Adam Gopnik that inspired this project. I started 2009 bemoaning the fact that after years of reading essayists, I hadn’t developed a real sense of which were my favorites and why. I’d read, but I hadn’t studied.
But I had this to say about Gopnik (to understand one reference in this passage, you need to know that earlier in the post I shared one of my Great Talents: to remember nearly every commercial jingle of the 1970’s):
“Well, I did study one essayist. A few years back I became smitten with the work of Adam Gopnik. I read his books with a green highlighter in my hand. I striped his books, you could say. I wrote down lines I liked in my journal, and went so far as to write down why those lines worked, and why they spoke to me.
And guess what? I can tell you a thing or two about Adam Gopnik’s writing. I can tell you that he writes like the valedictorian in your high school class–with smarts that force you to reread sentences, and occasionally make you want to tell him to stop showing off. He writes with a poet’s ear; sometimes his lines sashay and sing. And what I may love most: beneath his considerable brain beats a heart as sappy as a 70’s Kodak commercial (the ones that featured Paul Anka singing “The Times of Your Life.” And yes, I can sing it.) Gopnik wants to impress you with his smarts, but he also wants to knead your heart just a little–and he’ll do it, unfailingly, in the last lines of his last paragraph.”
I spent December rereading particular sections from two of Gopnik’s books: his Christmas journals from Paris to the Moon, and the Thanksgiving essays from Through the Children’s Gate. My rereading only reinforced what I wrote about him above (although I’m not sure I ever wanted him to stop showing off).
Since these particular essays were Gopnik’s reminiscences of his previous year, they often contain many disparate bits; a single essay might cover French fax machines, French pomposity, Christmas trees, Halloween, the carousel in the Luxembourg Gardens, French lunches, fact checkers, rude Americans in Paris, French subtitles, arrogance and courtesy in French commerce, infuriation at the Musée d’Orsay, and a pinball machine at the back of a café. Yet Gopnik manages, somehow, to gather all these bits into a single cohesive mass, and it’s deft and beautiful, like you’re watching a master baker form croissants. The fax machine errors become an analogy for pomposity; the wrapping of an éclair a symbol for pomposity’s opposite. Everything comes together in the essay’s last lines, as I mentioned above, and the result is more stunning than any French pastry.
a few lines to love:
On his second attempt at buying Christmas tree lights. The first time he discovered that French lights come in round garlands, not long strings.
“The trouble now was that the new white lights I got were white lights that were all twinkling ones. I saw the word clignotant on the box, and I knew that it meant blinking, but somehow I didn’t associate the wordblinking with the concept “These lights blink off and on.” It was the same thing with the garlands, come to think of it. It said guirlande right on the box, and I knew perfectly well what guirlande meant; but I am not yet able to make the transposition from what things say to what they mean. I saw the word guirlande on the box, but I didn’t quite believe it. In New York I believe everything I read, even if it appears in the New York Post.In France I am always prepared to give words the benefit of a poetic doubt. I see the word guirlande and shrug and think that maybegarland is just the French seasonal Christmas light-specific idiom for a string. The box says, “They blink,” and I think they don’t.”
Gopnik is always fascinated by the odd little idiosyncrasies in daily life, whether in France or at home in New York City. And he always seems happy to portray himself as hapless. To humorous effect.
After taking his son, Luke, who is three (I think), to see a puppet show of The Three Pigs in the Luxembourg Gardens, the two take a late-night stroll with the stroller:
“Luke, all the while was keeping up a running, troubled commentary onLes Tres Petits Cochons. “Why there were two wolves?” he would spring up, sleepy, from his pousette, to demand. (Actually, there was just one, but he would appear, with sinister effect, on either side of the proscenium.) “Why he wants to eat the pigs?” “Why that man knock him?” “Why that crocodile bite?” Why, why, why…the question the pigs ask the wolf, that the wolf asks the hunter, that the hunter asks God–and the answer, as it comes at midnight, after all the other, patient parental answers (”Well, you see, wolves generally like to eat pigs, though that’s just in the story.” “Well, hunters, a long time ago, would go hunting for wolves with guns when they were a danger to people”), the final exhausted midnight-in-the-lamplight answer, wheeling thepousette down the Quai Voltaire, is the only answer there is, the Bible’s answer to Job: because that’s the way the puppet master chose to do it, bcause that’s the way the guy who works the puppets chose to have it done.”
Here’s yet another example of an essayist using a long, complicated line to convey a long, complicated situation. Any parent remembers the whys of a three-year-old, and Gopnik reminds us how those whys go on and on, and even intersperses his (ultimately ineffective) explanations right in the middle of that long line, to complicate it even further. I especially admire how he gets across his that’s just how it is! point at the end: not once, but in two different ways. It gives his “final exhausted midnight-in-the-lamplight answer” the desperate impact it requires. Saying it twice shows how exasperated he is. It also adds to the rhythm of the line.
On Luke at four, noticing his father’s French:
“He recognizes that his parents, his father particularly, speaks with an Accent, and this brings onto him exactly the shame that my grandfather must have felt when his Yiddish-speaking father arrived to talk tohis teachers at a Philadelphia public school. I try to have solid, parental discussions with his teachers, but as I do, I realize, uneasily, that in his eyes I am the alter kocker, the comic immigrant.
‘Zo, how the boy does?” he hears me saying in effect. “He is good boy, no? He is feeling out the homeworks, isn’t he?’ I can see his small frame shudder, just perceptibly, at his father’s words.”
I like the drawn-out analogy here, the imagined scene. Zo, how the boy does? perfectly gets across just how cringe-worthy Gopnik’s French must seem to his son. It’s that haplessness, once again.
The first line of Through the Children’s Gate:
“In the fall of 2000, just back from Paris, with the sounds of its streets still singing in my ears and the codes to its courtyards still lining my pockets, I went downtown and met a man who was making a map of New York.”
I love the rhythm and the sounds of this sentence. All the s words–sounds, streets, singing, ears–then the hard c sounds–codes, courtyards, pockets–and then all those m’s–met, man, making, map. Read it out loud; isn’t it lovely? The poetry lures you right into the book.
From the Thanksgiving essay written after 9/11:
“Children don’t mind if their parents are worried; they expect it–parents are there to worry. But they notice at once if their parents are afraid, for that is what parents are never to be.”
Gopnik does this often–he boils down his observations into a universal statement. His phrasing makes it read like an aphorism. And there’s that wonderful rhythm once again.
After agreeing that Luke and his friend could have a two-night sleepover, but without any screen time:
“Once before, they had used a no-screen weekend imaginatively, to hold a fire sale of old Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. They both have outgrown the game in the past year and now view their beautiful old Rackhamish cards with disdain and the kind of disbelief about their enthusiasms of seven months ago that we have for pictures of ourselves in decades past–the haircut! those clothes! Childhood is just like life, only ten times faster.”
There’s that aphoristic statement at the end. And the exclamatory asides–the haircut! the clothes! Very Gopnikish. I took a particular delight in watching Luke and his friends, over the years and through the essays, become obsessed with almost exactly the same games that H and his buddies went through over the years, although H’s gang favored Pokemon over Yu-Gi-Oh! There were baseball cards, and Major League Baseball Showdown cards and eventually the Lord of the Rings game with painted figures. Gopnik writes this about Yu-Gi-Oh!, but it really applies to any of them:
“The game, when you play it, has mind-numbingly elaborate rules, but you never seem to play it. The goal is to collect the cards and plan to play it someday.”
Precisely. Ha! It baffled me with H and his friends, and it’s baffling me again with Mr. T and his, with their Pokemon collections. West Coast boys and East Coast boys–it’s all the same! Gopnik describes the Lord of the Rings game, which involves the painstaking construction of miniature plastic figures, which are then primed and painted in eye-crossing detail.
“The game combines, so far as I can see, the joys of being a Malaysian child laborer in a small-goods sweatshop with the excitement of double-entry bookkeeping.”
Maybe this is only funny if you’ve had a boy that has played this particular game. In which case I’m sure you are nodding and snorting in agreement.
And this, in an essay on worrying over Luke spending too much time on computers and video games:
“Considering the maze of screens and cards and pages, I ended up at last with a bitter, semi-Marxist conclusion: It is not that we want them free of screens, really. It is that we want them to be screen producers rather than screen consumers. We say that we don’t want them enslaved to screens, but what we really want is for them to enslave other people to them. We want them to be Steve Jobs or Steven Spielberg–feudal screen lords rather than mere screen peasants, screen serfs. We do not mind if they play games, so long as they grow up to write software. We will leave them alone for a weekend to write their screenplay, even if they have to huddle over a screen to do it.”
Adam Gopnik, how did you get inside my brain? This is my bitter, semi-Marxist conclusion exactly. (And please explain, if I think like you, why, oh why, can’t Iwrite like you?)
And one more, just because it kills me. This is from the last Thanksgiving essay, when Luke is eleven, and Gopnik asks every day after school, at 3:15, how school was, even though he knows he’ll get only “the high-shouldered shrug of the exasperated” in return. But then, every day at 3:30, Luke sends him an IM, filling in his father on all he hadn’t acknowledged.
“I understood what he was doing. To submit to the parental three-fifteen is to surrender autonomy; to send complete messages from your own computer is to seize control of the means of communication, allowing you to declare both autonomy and your essential goodwill. He was doing what children have to do: He was making me, his strongest tie, into a weaker tie, and then strengthening the tie again, but on his own terms. He is getting ready to go. He is putting his first shirt in the bottom of his eventual suitcase.”
Ah, that last line. Even more poignant when your kid is seventeen, and the suitcase is half-filled.
It was especially interesting to read these essays in succession, to watch Luke grow from a boy in a stroller to a boy with a shirt in his suitcase. Childhood is just like life, only ten times faster. I just love that Adam Gopnik.
So, what’s next?
Will I begin Another Year of Excellent Essayists? Will I finally get to Virginia Woolf? Will I find time to read some–any, a short story, a page, something please–fiction? Will I take a new direction and embark upon My Year of Excellent Egg Dishes?
Come on back for my next post when I’ll get all mawkish and misty-eyed about what this project has meant to me, and yammer on about what I’ll do in 2010.
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