Well I’ve been home (by which I still mean “the house where my parents live” because this is still home to me) for three weeks. “The house where my parents live,” among other virtues, does not have any access to the internet other than over a phone line, which would make updating this blog a Sisyphean task (quite literally–as soon as I’d get a post mostly posted, the computer would crash or disconnect from the internet because it wouldn’t feel like being connected anymore. Modern parables!)
Done with the excuses and flashy but unskilled linguistic gymnastics, I move on to: Books I’ve Recently Read and What I Thought About Them.
While I was home, my mom recommended to me The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery. She’s a French author, so I started reading with a teensy bit of trepidation. Much as I love them (and the language) the French have a tendency to write very Frenchy prose, and when it comes out in English prose it can be a bit overbearing to my English-accustomed brain. But, either the translator (Alison Anderson) foresaw that problem and took care of it in the process, or Barbery doesn’t write very Frenchy prose, for the book, while clearly not a book written first in English, was stylistically consistent with English Word-Art Conventions.* The clever and beautiful novel revolves around three people–a concierge in a posh Parisian apartment building, the 12-year-old daughter of one of the families, and a new tenant, who moves in after one of the old ones, a world-famous food critic and heartless person, dies. All of these people, however, have something to hide.
The concierge, Renee, is a brilliant autodidact who uses her genius mainly to hide her true intelligence from the insufferable bourgeoisie who inhabit the building. A shuffling, lower-class concierge do they expect? A shuffling, lower-class concierge they get. She acts her part with a glassy stare and down-at-the-heel slippers, carefully choosing her vocabulary as to not cause alarm and only wincing occasionally at the grammatical errors of the building’s residents. Her musings range over subjects as disparate as Japanese film, recent developments in semiotics, and the pleasures of whiskey tarts, and she has a true appreciation for the finer things, contrasted with the harried and falsely superior tenants in her building.
The twelve-year-old girl, Paloma, is a child genius who’s decided that life is not worth living and that she’s going to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday. In the meantime, however, she keeps a journal, recording things that make life worth living, and, more often, things that make it unbearable.
The third character is a mysterious Japanese gentleman who sees both of these people for who they truly are, and allows both of them to be themselves.
The novel itself is a beautiful rumination on what makes life worth it–the shocking moments of truth and love that make us human, beyond our bankrolls or even our pontificating.
All that to say, you should read it.
New subject! On the train ride down here I read The World to Come, by Dara Horn. Instead of giving you another insufferable book review, I’ll just say that it’s about an art theft, Marc Chagall, Jewish eschatology, what happens to babies before they’re born, Soviet Russia, plagiarism, and love. It also contains one of the best depictions of heaven I’ve ever read, a place where one drinks books and eats art, where one can bask in the steam-rooms of friendship or plunge into an icy bath of hate. There’s a bridge made of mistakes, and a broken ladder that’s supposed to go from hell to heaven. So, read that one too.
And, if you don’t already have enough to read, read this review: http://therumpus.net/2010/06/complicit-with-everything/
Apparently the thing in American poetry is realist poetry, so here goes:
Britney’s Pre-Concert Interview
the skin on my thighs is peeling,
skyscraper thighs, cherry-pie thighs,
i peel the body composite
(an Escher print hangs above my bed,
apple-headed man and wife)
the vegetable gardens of the rich
and middle-class: tomatoes tomatoes tomatoes.
salad for dinner on california lettuce
heads. dandruff.
no,
heads. roll. guillotine. revolution.
hell no.
heads. up. st. louis arch, my legs.
eat this america.
*I just made up this technical term. In short, it means what The Academy** means when it talks about “good” style in any of the arts involving words and their use, written in English. Naturally, were I to have read this novel in French (would I had the skill…), I would not include the above paragraph at all, because I’d be evaluating it by French Word-Art Conventions (les conventions stylistique du mots artistique). I’m sure Barbery is quite good at writing in French.
**sorry not going to define that for you
books, bottles, and broomsticks 
Fantastic. You’re one of those authors (so few of them exist – two diverse examples come to mind in the form of Stephen Fry and Flannery O’Connor) who have great things to say, and yet don’t need them. You have a second genius on your other shoulder that allows you to make ice from words. I can skim a paragraph, listening to the cubes pop and snap in the glass of cool water, or read a sentence, cautiously repositioning it in my mouth and applying hesitant molar pressure until it crunches most satisfactorily into a pile of edible diamonds. Please, for the love of God, never stop writing.
Also, thank you for the comments on my recent posts. We need to talk. An email will be on its way when I finally figure out what to say. But I think you’re right – it’s all somewhere in between. My brother and I were discussing politics and the judicial system yesterday (we’re just alike, except that all of our similarity is balanced by violent differences when it comes to societal ethics), and he said, with a broad sweep of his hands, “everything is black and white!” I sat for a second, stunned, and then said “so is gray.” Nothing can be one thing or another. We’re all made of stars – we can be from completely different galaxies, but we’re all elementally the same.
I think Lyotard fits in here somewhere quite wonderfully – and Cicoux. And aesthetics, which is the study of…something. Hmm…as I said, an email is in the works.
And lastly – if Berman’s ass isn’t sore from all the time he’s spent sitting on it and not writing new blog posts, then I’ll eat my hat. The felt one. Feather and all.
PS – why let dial-up squelch your creativity? Let it shape what and how you write. I’m not a writer, so I’m curious – how does the fabric of the blog shape itself around retro-tech?
Both books sound delightful. I can only imagine what the journal of a twelve-year-old convinced that the world is meaningless must look like.
As for the second, a synesthetic heaven sounds spot on. And with that, the expansion of our current senses as well. It’d be nice to echolocate.
For the poem, the subtle nod at Whitman made my insides happy.
Sounds like things are swell, and that is swell.