Citizen Reader

Free at last, free at last.

I know. One should not use the words of Martin Luther King Jr. frivolously, especially during Black History Month. But I can't help it. Yesterday I finally finished listening to Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence on CD, and all I can say about it is thank God almighty, I am free at last.

Well, okay, that's not ALL I can say about it. And my apologies to those readers who like Edith Wharton, and feel she can a) really tell a story, and b) wield language well. Those things may be very true. But I can't help it: I hate her. And I think I hate her because I hate her characters.

For those of you not familiar with the story, Wharton's classic is set in the 1870s (it was published in 1921) and concerns the upper level of moneyed New York society. The two principal characters are Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska; Newland is a prosperous and proper young man who is about to become engaged to May Welland, who is the daughter of another prosperous and proper New York family. Ellen Olenska, also known throughout the narrative as Countess Olenska, has recently returned home to the bosom of her family after leaving her scoundrel of a European husband. She is also May's cousin. Of course, Archer falls in love with Ellen, who he can never have (even if she were to get a divorce, it wouldn't be proper), and Ellen falls in love with him, but he goes ahead and marries young May anyway. Lots of portentous tragedy ensues.

Now. It may be true that the writing is beautiful, and after someone commented on that, I did try to listen more carefully to the words and sentences of Wharton's tale. But all too often the narration was drowned out as I listened and muttered "Newland, you're such a dick," "You can do better, May," or "Oh, Ellen, you're leaving forever, blah blah blah" (or countless variations thereof). Mr. CR was a little afraid of me, I think; he never likes to hear muttering coming from the kitchen. But I couldn't help it.

At the end of the day, I couldn't take the problems of rich people who have their health seriously. Good lord. Another fairly simple rule of thumb should be, if you love someone, don't get married to someone else. And if you do, don't expect me to think it's high tragedy. I'm just going to think you're a dick.

Monday odds and ends.

We had a successful weekend, I think. I enjoyed the Super Bowl, although I didn't watch the whole thing, having to switch over to Emma on Masterpiece Theatre during its last hour. I did make artichoke dip, and it was spectacular (thanks Katharine--great recipe! Marmota, now that I understand canned artichoke hearts, your recipe with spinach is the next one I'm trying). I made a total hog of myself with it. And the conclusion of Emma? I really enjoyed it. Not as much as I would have enjoyed it if PBS wasn't cheap and hadn't deleted scenes that were shown in the British version, but still...Below please find a clip from the ending with a nice extra scene between Knightley and Emma.

In reading news, I started the collection The Best Creative Nonfiction vol. 3, but I really only enjoyed the opening two essays by Sean Rowe and Julianna Baggott (about prison food and the novelization of her great-grandmother's operation of a whorehouse, respectively). I also started Malcolm Gladwell's collection of journalistic pieces titled What the Dog Saw, but was not in the mood. Finally I just gave up and started reading the actual novel of Emma, which I've never read before. (I know: gasp!) I thought maybe I should wait until after the movie isn't so clear in my mind, but what the hell. I'm enjoying it immensely anyway.

Friday odds and ends.

It's Friday, and I'm ready for the week to be over. I never, ever get cabin fever, and I think I've got cabin fever. All week I wandered around grumpy, started about twenty books, and couldn't get through any of them. My need to develop some other hobby that isn't reading is becoming more apparent--but the sad fact remains that when I don't feel like reading, I don't feel like doing anything.

But that is neither here nor there. There were some high points during the week. When my New York magazine arrived (a gift from my sister--thanks Sis; I LOVE it!) I was pleased to find that they had noted on their final-page "approval matrix" that "Jonny Lee Miller as a hubba-hubba Mr. Knightley in Masterpiece Theatre's Emma" falls in the region of both highbrow and brilliant. Hubba hubba, indeed; can't wait for Sunday night's final installment.

In keeping with that theme, one of the books I didn't finish this week was the collection A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen. Some of the essays were intros that people had previously written for Austen's novels (which aren't real fun to read, separated from the novels) and some were just a bit scholarly. But I did enjoy a line from Martin Amis's essay:

"The first challenge you face when writing about Pride and Prejudice is to get through your first sentence without saying, 'it is a truty universally acknowledged...' With that accomplished (with that out of the way), you can move on to more testing questions." (p. 83.)

In other news, I read a kids' book titled Olivia Kidney, by Ellen Potter, that I had read about somewhere and thought my niece might like. I started out liking it, but then it got kind of weird. Like scary weird. I don't know that I'll want to pass this on to her. So I wondered...have any of you read this book? Even though it weirded me out, would a kid like it? Reading this book just reminded me why I was always vaguely nervous in the kids' half of the library: I have no idea what kids like, or why.

And that's all she wrote. Have a good weekend, everyone. My plans? Well, they're exciting. I'm thinking about trying to make an artichoke dip to have while watching the Super Bowl. I have never made anything with artichokes, but I am hungry for artichoke dip. Wish me luck!

Not so funny after all.

I'll admit it. I checked out Going Rogue (Sarah Palin's autobiography) from the library because I thought it might be kind of a hoot. I don't know why, really. Something about her bright smiling face on the surreal cover just gives me the giggles. (And, on the inside cover, it notes that the book design is by "Got Moxie Design." This also strikes me as funny.)

But then I got to all of page 2, when she is sharing how her daughter Piper was shown in a poster used by the organization Alaska Right to Life, and I just got sad. Primarily because I started wondering why so many pro-life people are also so pro-war. It was too depressing a thought for words, and it was really a deeper philosophical question than I wanted dredged up during the reading of what I thought might be a pretty ridiculous political autobiography.

I did persevere for about forty more pages, but I don't have much to report other than a) it's standard political autobiographical fare, with, one can only guess, massive whitewashing of Palin's idyllic Alaskan childhood, and b) it's actually not the worst-written thing I've ever read, which was a bit surprising.

I'm going to return it now, so the next person in line can get it in a timely fashion. I hope they are a member of the Tea Party, otherwise paragraphs like this are just going to make them chuckle:

"One part of athletics I really appreciated was our local chapter of Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which I co-captained under the leadership of the Wasilla Warriors' wrestling coach, Mr. Foreman. At least sixty of us met in public school classrooms for Bible study and inspirational exchanges that motivated us to focus on hard work and excellence.* In those days, ACLU activists had not yet convinced young people that they were supposed to feel offended by other people's free exercise of religion." (p. 28.)

In other Palin news, Bookninja posted a link the other day to a story about her PAC purchasing numerous copies of this book (however many copies $63,000 gets you), and paying for her photography and book tour travels.

*Because Jesus was all about the "excellence." 

You go, Jane Jacobs.

The book which has held me captive since Sunday night is titled Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Too On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City, by Anthony Flint.

The reasons I love this slim history are legion. I had never read anything about Jane Jacobs (a longtime New York City resident and activist, and author of the architecutral and urban planning classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities), but she is a fascinating woman. Through the 1950s and 1960s she fought against City Hall (and "master planner" Robert Moses, who was responsible for building numerous bridges, highways, parks, and residential buildings across the city for decades through the middle of the twentieth century), primarily to save Washington Square Park from having a highway built through it, and against the construction of an elevated ten-lane highway across the tip of Manhattan.

I also loved this book because it is a great slice of history. In a succinct 195 pages, it provides information about the history and planning of New York City, controversies about urban renewal and development, the remarkable career of Robert Moses, and the even more remarkable career and personality of Jane Jacobs. Of course I loved this book because it is about New York City, and I wish I had a cool author name like "Anthony Flint." But the front and center attraction of this book is Jacobs herself. Consider her conduct at a sham city hall meeting to gather community feedback about the proposed elevated highway:

"Though the ostensible purpose of the meeting was to collect opinions about the project, it had been hurriedly scheduled--to make sure testimony was gathered before legislation passed that required an even more extensive public approval process...The manner in which the meeting was being conducted--the microphone faced toward the audience, not the officials the residents were nominally addressing--suggested that state officials were just going through the motions...

From the seat she'd taken near the front of the auditorium, Jane Jacobs made her way up the stairs and onton the stage. 'It's interesting, the way the mike is set up,' she observed tartly as she reached the microphone. She was calm, and her expression was matter-of-fact. 'At a public hearing, you are supposed to address the officials, not the audience.'

The chairman of the hearing, John Toth of the New York Department of Transportation, bounded down from the statge and turned the microphone around. But Jacobs turned it right back.

'Thank you, sir, but I'd rather speak to my friends,' Jacobs said. 'We've been talking to ourselves all evening as it is.' The crowd roared with laughter." (pp. xii-xiii.)

From there she went on to call for a silent protest march across the stage, during which the stenographer's rolls of tape documenting the meeting were destroyed (which meant there was no public record, and the meeting couldn't be counted), called it a "fink meeting," and was arrested.

It's a great book, and it has spurred me to consider, again, reading Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I always used to shelve it at the used bookstore, and wonder if I should read it, and then for years I would shelve it at the public library and give it some more thought (it went in and out quite regularly); but it was so thick I never got around to it. Maybe now is the time.

A disappointing reading weekend.

I couldn't really find my reading groove this weekend.

First I looked at a book called How Patients Should Think: 10 Questions to Ask Your Doctor about Drugs, Tests, and Treatment, by Ray Moynihan and Melissa Sweet (as I firmly believe that where the medical establishment is concerned, your best defense is a good offense). It had some good information, and I liked their philosophy that "asking questions needs to be seen as an essential and valid part of seeking health care," but I just cannot read any more health or medical books right now. I will have to check it out some other time.

I also started Greg Grandin's Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, but was completely bored. I don't think it's a bad book, just a very detailed history, and something for which I wasn't in the right mood.

I also started Alison Weir's The Lady in the Tower, about the fall of Anne Boleyn, which is okay, but didn't quite hold my attention the way I wanted.

So, all in all, a meh reading weekend, and I hope yours was much better. I did start a new book last night that I'm excited about (always at the end of the weekend, I find them). Further bulletins as events warrant.

The entirely predictable post about J.D. Salinger.

A late post today, and a short one, as I have been even lazier than usual today.

You know, I'm a little bummed about the passing of J.D. Salinger. Not just because I loved The Catcher in the Rye (which I did; I read it in college* and still have my old copy, which I earnestly highlighted on the second or third pass through so I could easily find all my favorite Holden moments), but because the man was such a puzzle. Have you ever read his novel Franny and Zooey? No kidding, along with Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It, it is one of my primary secular religious texts. His stories about the Glass family are also wonders of family dynamics; I have multiple older siblings myself, and although I love them all (as Franny does, in Franny and Zooey) sometimes they can be a little over-interested (in the most kindly meant ways, of course). If I hadn't loved Holden, my love for the Glass family would have made me a Salinger fan for life anyway.

But it did always puzzle me that the man who could write so beautifully and yes, profoundly**, could also be such a jerk. It is probably not fair of me to think he's a jerk, and I haven't even read his daughter Margaret's memoir (Dream Catcher, which evidently gives some scary evidence of his jerk nature as well), but I did read Joyce Maynard's memoir about her ten-month love affair with him titled At Home in the World, and that was quite the eye-opener. I can't even remember what he did that was so jerkish, but I do remember thinking after I read it that he may not have been the kindest man.

Anyway. That's all I've got. Rest in peace, anyway, J.D. In other news, Howard Zinn (author of A People's History of the United States) died this week as well. I don't know very much about him, but I can steer you to a fabulous and recent interview he did with Bill Moyers.

*Thinking about The Catcher in the Rye makes me miss mass culture a little bit too. Remember whenever you saw the red paperback copy with its yellow title, you knew just what book it was? In fifty years, what will be the book we all, even high school and college students, will have read? The Da Vinci Code just isn't quite the same.

**I'm pulling out all the big lit crit words today.

No one should feel like this in their twenties.

My goal for the weekend: I have got to find some lighter reading material.

Last night I was looking for something new to read on my pile of library books, and my glance fell upon a slim book titled The Two Kinds of Decay. I had requested this book at some point, but I couldn't remember why I had asked for it or what it was about.

Turns out it's a memoir of a young woman in her twenties, who suffered from mutliple bouts with a rare disease called chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy (CIDP), which (as far as I can understand) is a disease in which the immune system attacks the healthy myelin around nerves, leading tingling and numbness of the extremities, and eventually difficulty breathing.

The author, Sarah Manguso, is also a poet, and that sensibility can be seen easily throughout her memoir, which is comprised of short chapters of short paragraphs, all displaying a masterful use of language. What's disturbing are the procedures she's often describing (such as apheresis, in which the plasma in her blood was replaced) with that economy of language:

"The fresh frozen plasma was thawed before it was infused. The four half-liter glass bottles of albumin were left at room temperature.

For the first twenty or thirty apheresis sessions, I lay under several blankets, which didn't help the cold but helped me think at least I was trying.

The temperature in blood vessels is warmer than room temperature, of course, by about thirty degrees Fahrenheit. I was very clowly infused with several liters of fluid that was thirty degrees colder than the rest of my body." (p. 39.)

And that's one of the less scary descriptions; it only gets worse from there. This is an unsettling book, and I won't tell you how it ends or what happens (although, mirroring my thought when reading the above of, "Christ, they can't warm the albumin up a bit first?", they do eventually address that issue). But it's quite different from anything else you'll read, and I would recommend it. I must say that I for one am impressed at Manguso's lack of hysteria, considering that she is a woman who knows a little something about idiot doctors and half-ass nurses.

But the fact remains: I need to find something lighter going into the weekend.

The problems with "more for less."

I have been reading Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture,* by Ellen Ruppel Shell, for a hundred years.

Okay, not really. But it was starting to feel like it. Make no mistake: that's not because it was a bad book. It's because it was a really good book. It was everything nonfiction should be: interesting, detailed, well-researched, and thorough. It was also as depressing as hell.

Shell describes the American (and to some extent, world) love affair with "cheap," and how our identification with consumer culture, rather than working class or production culture, is leading to a breakdown in many of our social and business systems. She does so systematically, discussing the history of discount stores and pricing in America (starting way before Wal-Mart), and she does so convincingly, examining all aspects of the "cheap" worldview such as pricing strategies and global trade imbalances. She covers a variety of retailers and products, from IKEA to our food supply. Really, it's an incredible book.

She's also upfront about how much we all enjoy bargains,** and how that might have to change if we really want to improve working conditions and wages and lifestyles worldwide. Honestly? There's so many and interesting and sad things to quote in this book, I wouldn't even know where to start. Oh, wait, I did stick in a couple of bookmarks; heres one paragraph I found interesting, from a labor scholar Shell interviewed:

"'Corporate giants have become our heroes,' he continued. 'We are so focused on the dream of wealth that we identify with billionaires, with whom we have nothing in common. Where fifty years ago we had labor identity that pit workers against management, today we have a system that pits worker against worker. And that includes workers in the United States against workers in the developing world.'" (p. 203.)

The book's also jam-packed with scary statistics about how much the overall price of food has dropped since 1970--and what that says about what we're eating--as well as numbers showing how real wages for the majority of Americans have mostly gone down, especially in the face of out-of-control health care costs.

It's a sobering book. Make some time to read it, and then read it. I think it will make you wonder just a bit about where bargain prices come from and how much they actually cost us.

*Please do click on this link, and read the review of this book listed there from The Washington Post. Now THAT is a review--and is right on. Although I liked this book, it did have its shortcomings. Reading that review highlights how my little blurbs here are not really "reviews" but are instead light "opinion pieces."

**I recognize this. The other day I was excited to find pork chops on sale for 2 for $2. I love pork chops, so I snapped some up, but when I think about it...how is that even possible? And this coming from a person who will not shop at Wal-Mart and mostly tries to avoid shopping at all. So the desire for cheap really is in all of us.

Go find a reader to hug.

In the next few days a friend of mine is leaving town. This is a good thing for him, as he is starting something afresh. I am happy for him. But I am also bummed, because, in addition to being a very nice guy, he is also a reader. It's always been a pleasure for me and Mr. CR to go out with him, because he reads nonfiction (for me) and science fiction and fantasy (for Mr. CR). He also worked in a bookstore, so we got to hear all the trends the bookstore workers wished would die. ("We all thought this Twilight thing would be over by now, but it just keeps going on!")

So: my only suggestion for today is that you appreciate and cultivate your reader friends. They're becoming increasingly rare, but when you find one, never let them go. And if you see any of your reader friends today, give them a hug. Then ask them to rip into James Patterson or Thomas Friedman with you.

And, a small aside to my friend: You will be much missed. "What falls away is always. And is near. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go." (Theodore Roethke, "Words for the Wind."*)

*I know, Kurt Vonnegut quoted it first, and better. It's still a fabo poem.