18 posts tagged “book excerpts”

Yesterday I bought a collection of Bernard Shaw one-act plays (fuck Dan Brown, plays are the best things to read on airplanes) and something called 'The Jewish Century'. Together they cost 8 Aus-bucks.

The Jewish Century starts out like this:

Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible. It is about learning how to cultivate people and symbols, not fields or herds. It is about pursuing wealth for the sake of learning, learning for the sake of wealth, and both wealth and learning for their own sake It is about transforming peasants and princes into merchants and priests, replacing inherited privilege with acquired prestige, and dismantling social estates for the benefits of individuals, nuclear families and book-reading tribes (nations). Modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish.

The Jewish part I'm not so sure about, or at least I haven't read up to the author's justification of it, but the rest of that is a great description of the social history of this century. Eight Aussie bucks, man.

I'm reading Edmund White's 'States of Desire: Travels in Gay America', which I found in a bookstore outside of Sydney for $2. It was written in 1980, the final year of un-ballasted gay hedonism. It opens with a passage about L.A.:

The almost Oriental politeness of the West Coast is one of its distinctive regional features, in marked contrast to the contentiousness of the East Coast. On e may grumble at a television performer out West but never at someone appearing 'live'. So few human contacts in Los Angeles go unmediated by glass (either a TV screen or an automobile windshield), that the direct confrontation renders the participants docile, stunned, sweet.
[...]
The polite friendliness of Californians is an ambiguous quality. Within the first ten minutes a visitor is showered with affection and familiarity, but that may be as close as one is ever likely to get to someone out West. This openhanded but superficial civility, linked to an obdurate and profound reticence, is precisely the granite wedge that all those hostile forms of California therapy are trying to dynamite. There is, however, a great public if not personal benefit to be derived from uniform good manners. People are able to cooperate. They can accomplish things.

This reminds me of Seattle, how everyone you meet is instantly welcoming and impressed with you, but that's as far as you ever get. Denmark has poured some bitter black coffee into the sweet cream of my West Coast superficio-ductions, but I still catch myself doing this.

I also liked this part about a New York acquaintance moving out to LA.

His tenement pallor is giving way to a tan. His monologue pauses occasionally now for reflection or even for listening, and he has discovered in California that politeness I have mentioned, which he mistakes for acceptance.

I'm only on page fucking 21, and I can't stop quoting this thing:

'The real problem here,' [He's now quoting a gay psychotherapist in LA] 'is that smart people don't know each other. In a large nomadic population such as the gay group in this city, the rules must be kept very simple. In Los Angeles the one rule is sexual display and curiosity. Even the most brilliant man, once he is at a party, will succumb to the general vapidness. From nine to five these people are bright, clever, grownup, but after five they become emotional morons. At parties there are no serious conversations and little real warmth. People arrive an hour late (a sign of hostility) and leave saying it was a terrible bore. Of course they were disappointed; what they needed was companionship but what they thought they wanted was sexual adventure.'

You have to resist the impluse to nostalgize this period in contemporary gay life. It's tempting to reclaim the pre-AIDS period in 'those were the days' terms. But they weren't, objectively. A lot of these men were profoundly damaged. No one was out of the closet. The cops openly harassed gay bars and assaulted patrons. Legal and civil rights were nonexistent, as everyone in this book would discover in the next decade. Still, it's hard to not to find a wistful sigh on every page. 

How did I get through the '90s without this dude?

I've given a much less eloquent version of this speech to friends in various states of late-stage nightclubbery over the years:

The bald girl is emblematic of the problem. The problem is, for some reason you think you are going to meet the kind of girl who is not the kind of girl who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. When you meet her you are going to tell her that what you really want is a house in the country with a garden. New York, the club scene, bald women, you're tired of all that. Your presence here is only a matter of conducting an experiment in limits, reminding yourself of what you aren't.

I'm only on page 9 of 'Bright Lights, Big City' now. I wonder if it's gonna stay in second-person the whole way through.

The coda of a George Saunders story about a morbidly obese man who ends up in prison after accidentally smothering his boss to death. Like ‘Alice in Wonderland’, it’s all mirth and whimsy until the past paragraph:

 

Do I have a meaningful hobby that makes the days fly by like minutes? No. I have a wild desire to smell the ocean. I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes the weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a brainless dad as they run roughshod over the rest of us.

He gives us a need for love, and no way to get any. He gives us a desire to be liked, and personal attributes that make us utterly unlikable. Having placed his flawed and needy children in a world of exacting specifications, he deducts the difference between what we have and what we need from our hearts and our self-esteem and our mental health.

Maybe the God we see, the God who calls the daily shots, is merely a subGod. Maybe there’s a God above this subGod, who’s busy for a few Godminutes with something else, and will be right back, and when he gets back will take the subGod by the ear and say, ‘Now look. Look at that fat man. What did he ever do to you? Wasn’t he humble enough? Didn’t he endure enough abuse for a thousand men? Weren’t the simplest tasks hard? Didn’t you sense him craving affection? Were you unaware that his days unraveled as one long bad dream?’ And maybe as the subGod slinks away, the true God will sweep me up in his arms, saying: My sincere apologies, a mistake has been made. Accept a new birth, as token of my esteem.

And I will emerge again from between the legs of my mother, a slighter and more beautiful baby, designed for a different life, in which I am masterful, sleek as a deer, a winner.

I've been reading a collection of H.L. Mencken essays the last few weeks. I'm not one of those people who reads with a pen in their hand, but I'm finding myself whispering 'fabulous!' and scribbling in the margins at, like, three-minute intervals.
 

All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely. [...] The difference between religions is a difference in their relative content of agnosticism. The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.

fabulous.

I'm also reading Letters From America, a collection of Alastair Cooke BBC broadcasts from the late 1940s more or less to the present day. It's funny how many of his blogservations from 60 years ago are still true today.

There is not among Americans anything remotely resembling the uniform of the English businessman. They dress for themselves, with their own tastes in ties, shirts, shoes; and this gives to an American street a colour, often a garishness, and it makes it pretty impossible for a foreigner to guess at the occupation of the other men around.

With women, it is even more difficult. A flock of girls comes into a restaurant and you can't tell the debutante from the shop girl. I remember a Swedish girl on a skiing party watching the swirl of people in the snow and saying, 'Which are the nice people? Who are my kind? Give me a sign.' There are signs. But they are small and subtle and would take her years to learn. And if she stayed here long, she would insensibly shed the signs she sought.

The concept of the uniform-as-class-marker is something I really notice in the UK and the DK, and I imagine Cooke's Swedish girl would still have the same problem in a 2008 Aspen swirl.

I liked his 1952 essay, 'The European's America' too:

Americans who have not been in Europe tend to imagine what is best about her, Europeans who have not been in American tend to imagine what is worst.

In other words, I spend most of my cocktail parties defending America to Europeans and deriding Europe to Americans. 

because he reminded me of that friend everyone wishes they had, the one whose sniper-aim perspective on any conceivable topic reduces you to 'mmm hmm ... you're totally right, dude.' You might roll your eyes every now and then, at the almost unrealistic articulateness of it all, but you're glad you know someone whose hamster-wheel has a family of chipmunks in it.

I never get emotional over the deaths of famous people, and I can't say I felt my-cat-just-got-hit-by-a-car sad when I read that Wallace hung himself on Saturday, but it's just a fucking shame that we won't get any more books or essays from this dude. No, I couldn't finish 'Infinite Jest', just like everyone else, and yes, I thought the footnotes thing became a bit of a gimmick. But DFW was one of the best-ever observers of a crowded room, and one of the only New Yorker-style journalists still trying to write stories that weren't about what they said they were about. Like this 2005 Rolling Stone story on McCain, which started with

Since You're Reading "Rolling Stone," the chances are you're an American between say 18 and 35, which demographically makes you a Young Voter. And no generation of Young Voters has ever cared less about politics and politicians than yours.

and managed to squeeze this passage in between tour bus observarrhea

It's hard to get good answers to why Young Voters are so uninterested in politics. This is probably because it's next to impossible to get someone to think hard about why he's not interested in something. The boredom itself preempts inquiry; the fact of the feeling's enough. Surely one reason, though, is that politics is not cool. Or say, rather, that cool, interesting, alive people do not seem to be the ones who are drawn to the Political Process.

Think back to the sort of kids in high school or college who were into running for student office: dweeby, overgroomed, obsequious to authority, ambitious in a sad way. Eager to play the Game. The kind of kids other kids would want to beat up if it didn't seem so pointless and dull.

And now consider some of 2000's adult versions of these very same kids: Al Gore, best described by CNN sound tech Mark A. as "amazingly lifelike"; Steve Forbes, with his wet forehead and loony giggle; G.W. Bush's patrician smirk and mangled cant; even Clinton himself with his big red fake-friendly face and "I feel your pain." Men who aren't enough like human beings even to dislike — what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest, the sort of deep disengagement that is so often a defense against pain. Against sadness.

In fact the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us in ways that are hard even to name, much less to talk about. It's way easier to roll your eyes and not give a shit.

In my post about 'A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again,' Wallace's essay collection, I noted that most of his journalism consists of Wallace as an ambassador of Them, watching the in-crowd get down to business. That perspective, of never feeling completely in-place in a room, is one of the only themes I took away from that book of disjointed observations and experiences, and it's the core of what makes a good fiction writer or journalist. You can't note the absurdities of everyday life if you're a whistling participant in them. I would also imagine that it makes an unquestioning, fully satisfied life very difficult.

So I, in my sick haze, have been reading DFW articles all day. Here's four of the best ones. And between cups of tea and coughs and red-eyed blinks, I'll tip out some Pepto-Bismol to all the digressions I'll never get to devour.

It's a collection of essays, some of which discuss Important Shit, like literary theory and contemporary irony. The rest, though, are just journalistic articles that appear to be based on the premise 'Let's send a snooty New York novelist to the most Heartland thing we can find.' Here's part of the bit where they send him to the Illinois State Fair:

One big girl with tattoos and a heavy-diapered infant wears a T-shirt that says ‘WARNING: I GO FROM 0 TO HORNEY IN 2.5 BEERS’

Have you ever wondered where these particular types of unfunny T-shirts come from? The ones that say things like ‘HORNEY IN 2.5’ or ‘Impeach president Clinton … AND HER HUSBAND TOO.’

As with New Yorker cartoons, there’s an elusive sameness about the shirts’ messages. A lot serve to I.D. the wearer as part of a certain group and then congratulate that group for its sexual dynamism — ‘Coon Hunters Do It All Night’ and ‘Hairdressers Tease It Till It Stands Up’ and ‘Save a Horse: Ride a Cowboy’. Some presume a weird kind of aggressive relation between the shirt’s wearer and its reader — ‘We’d Get Along Better … If You Were A BEER’ and ‘Lead Me Not Into Temptation, I Know The Way MYSELF’ and ‘What Part of NO Don’t You Understand?’

There’s something complex and compelling about the fact that these messages are not just uttered but worn, like they’re a badge or a credential. The message compliments the wearer somehow, and the wearer in turn endorses the message by spreading it across his chest, which fact is then in further turn supposed to endorse the wearer as a person of plucky or risqué wit. It’s also meant to cast the wearer as an Individual, the sort of person who not only makes but wears a Personal Statement. What’s depressing is that the T-shirts’ statements are not only preprinted and mass-produced, but so dumbly unfunny that they serve to place the wearer squarely in that large and unfortunate group of people who think such messages not only Individual but funny. It all gets tremendously complex and depressing.  

 

• You gotta love the Corruption, Ineptitude & Alcoholism bureau. It’s seriously amazing how careless and shitty the CIA was during the Cold War. I’m pretty close to concluding that U.S. covert ops had about as much to do with the fall of the Soviet Union as improper dental hygiene.

 

• If you ignore all the torture stuff, all the failure adds up to something pretty funny. I’ve shamelessly giggled through the first three chapters, which reconstruct the hubristical plans to ‘roll back’ the Soviet Union to its pre-WWII borders. Officially, this was done by empowering Eastern European resistance leaders, but according to the book, it was really more of a ‘Let’s pay this weird Ukranian dude and see what happens’ approach. Hundreds of people died after being literally dropped into enemy territory and instructed to ‘find a nearby village and plant seeds of revolution.’ My favorite fubar so far was the two Polish expats who convinced the CIA to fund an underground movement within Poland. After five years and 10 million 1952-dollars, the leadership finally figured out that the movement didn’t actually exist. It was just a Polish address and a handful of Russian double-agents. Oh, the Trumanity.

 

• But you know what? Of course all the covert ops were failures. Think about how shitty you would be at your job if you performed it entirely in secret. Your boss would ask ‘So, what projects have you been working on this quarter?’ and you’d go ‘Shhhhh.’

 

• We kind of assume that competition is the only motivator of hard work and competence. In the private sector, the theory is that people at Nike work harder so they don’t lose market share to those cocksuckers at Reebok. In the public sector, though, the only proxy for competition is transparency. The only way that our government is going to work for us is if every single bureaucrat knows we’re watching them. You were on Facebook at work, Chertoff? I want my money back. Yet the only calls for government oversight consist of ‘starve the beast’, an ethos that just encourages the kind of secrecy and self-perpetuative scheming that the CIA pretty much invented.

 

• This quote, from former agent Bill Coffin, is great, and possibly even better devoid of context: ‘The ends don’t always justify the means, but they are the only thing that can.’

 

• This book might be the best possible argument against 9-11 conspiracy theories. Government twatocrats have shown themselves to be sloppy, impulsive and incompetent pretty much from Coolidge up to the current bunch of DCtards. Yet they managed to blow up the World Trade Center, shoot missiles at the Pentagon and down a passenger jet without fucking up or leaving a paper trail? I dunno, Rosie O’Donnell, that’s a little out there.

 

• I did like this passage, on a longstanding CIA chief.

Angleton was promoted to chief of counterintelligence when it was over. He held the job for twenty years. Drunk after lunch, his mind an impenetrable maze, his inbox a black hole, he passed judgment on every operation and every officer that the CIA aimed against the Soviets. He came to believe that a Soviet master plot controlled American perceptions of the world, and that he and he alone understood the depths of the deception. He took the CIA’s missions against Moscow down into a dark labyrinth.

 

• Is Torpid DrunkBoss one of those workplace archetypes that doesn’t exist in the real world anymore? These guys seem so grandpa to me now. I feel like there’s an unmarked grave somewhere, where TDB is lying peacefully next to Slutty Secretary, Teacher Who Cares and Nurturing Priest.

The arrival of warmth and sun in Copenhagen always completely re-introduces the city. I was biking the other day around sunset (8 pm now, and only latening until July), and I realized how pretty this place is. I haven’t been struck by the loveliness of my foster-city in eons, and I think it’s simply because I haven't seen it in six months. It’s been dark, or raining, or cloudy most days, and I’ve been walking around in my Gore-Tex burrito, trying to keep the climate out. The definitive image of winter for me is always the top of my front bike tire, because it’s often too cold or too windy to look straight ahead when I’m on my way somewhere.

 

It turns out, though, that Copenhagen exists above the first story. And I own clothes that perform more than heat-trapping mummification. And there are colors in this city beyond the gray and sepia. These things only strike me when we finally get all full-spectrumy in the spring.

 

I’ve been reading ‘Gilead’ by Marilynne Robinson the last few weeks. It’s a slow, dusty kind of book, one that should be read to you by your grandpa in a rocking chair. It starts out

 

I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren’t very old, as if that settled it. I told you you might have a very different life from mine, and from the life you’ve had with me, and that would be a wonderful thing, there are many ways to live a good life. And you said, Mama already told me that. And then you said, Don’t laugh! because you thought I was laughing at you. You reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look I never in my life saw on any other face besides your mother’s. It’s a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern. I’m always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsinged after I’ve suffered one of those looks. I will miss them.

 

I know, right!?

 

The book continues in this vein, a dying father writing to his adolescent son, through a few decades of the postwar Christian midwest. I’m not quite finished with it, but I feel a ‘Dancer in the Dark’ caliber moan-and-cry is waiting for me on the last page.

 

So this has been my spring so far. Long bike rides in the low-watt sun and droning geriat-lit. By the time summer rolls around, the only thing heavier than my mood will be my quadriceps.

is that they're all written by novelists. The amount of creativity and perception it takes to write a 500-page, made-up story requires a few lifetimes' worth of isolation and social rejection, and novels are always full of vivid descriptions of the sheer horror of interactions with others.

The other book I read when I was in Amsterdam was 'Out Stealing Horses', an old-school rumination on how your shitty childhood leads to your shitty adulthood, your shitty children, and your shitty death. Sounds pretty perky, huh? It was written by a Norwegian dude named Per Patterson, and is filled with passages like the following, on grocery-store small talk:

People like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings, not what your opinion is about anything at all, not how what has happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are. What they do is they fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours, and that lets you off the hook.
No one can touch you unless you yourself want them to. You only have to be polite and smile and keep paranoid thoughts at bay, because they will talk about you no matter how much you squirm, it is inevitable, and you would do the same thing yourself.
[...] I'm surprised at how unfilled my shopping baskets have become, how few things I need now that I am alone. I suffer a sudden onset of meaningless melancholy and feel the eyes of the check-out lady on my forehead as I search for the money to pay, the widower is what she sees, they do not understand anything, and it is just as well.
[...] 'Many thanks,' and I am on the verge of tears, for Christ's sake, and go quickly with my purchases in a bag and across to the filling station. I have been lucky. They do not understand a thing.

See how you feel all wistful and empty inside now?  Stretch that across 264 pages, and you have the sensation of reading this book. It's tremendous. Seriously.

Fighting, fucking and fantasy may work better in movies, but when it comes to the existential, everyday dread and misanthropy that make up the other 97 percent of our lives, nothing beats a good Scandinavian novel.