an English author visits California to discuss the adaptation of his novel and is rather appalled. such a trying experience. what have they done with an English author visits California to discuss the adaptation of his novel and is rather appalled. such a trying experience. what have they done with this place? and why is everyone so casual in their style of dress and in their mode of conversation? these Americans are simply absurd. but the brave little lord makes do. per this gentleman's journal: "We have trained the waiters in the dining-room not to give us iced water and our chauffeur not to ask us questions. There is here the exact opposite of the English custom by which the upper classes are expected to ask personal questions of the lower."* egads, this place sounds barbaric. but the English are justly famous for stiff upper lips, and so an Englishman must soldier on.
the author does find "a deep mine of literary gold in the cemetery of Forest Lawn and the work of the morticians" and proceeds to pen a satiric novel once he returns to the damp and chilly embrace of Mother England. the novel is competently written and scores some light points in its spoofery, particularly when its barbs are aimed at the community of English expats ensconced in Hollywood. the book's worth rises or falls on its reader's willingness to see all Americans as ugly or ignorant or perhaps both. as well as the ability of a reader to find amusement in the wacky suicide of its most sympathetic character, during the novel's closing. unfortunately, this provincial American found that plot twist to be rather tasteless and even worse, distinctly unfunny. this is an occasionally droll novel but also quite a cheap and shallow one. and such pat nihilism. one expects better of the sophisticated English upper crust! I assumed the least I could hope for from such a class-conscious subset of the human race would be... a little class. well, I suppose that is what I found: little class. and little humanity.
Envy is the most embarrassing of the deadly sins, the one sin of seven that few would admit to, let alone identify as ruling their lives. But envy is Envy is the most embarrassing of the deadly sins, the one sin of seven that few would admit to, let alone identify as ruling their lives. But envy is a widespread disease: an abiding force within social media, gossip, work; often framing how a person looks at and presents themselves to the world. Kudos to this book and its author for creating a protagonist who so fully embodies envy's toxicity, in how it can dominate a person's goals and their perception of who they should or could be.
Jhanvi is a trans woman who has returned to San Francisco after a few years in Sacramento. Her mission: marry someone in the tech industry, use their workplace's healthcare benefits to pay for feminization surgeries, and then hopefully flourish in her newly updated body. A friend and fellow Stanford graduate - and a sexting buddy as well - is her first mark. And so on his doorstep she arrives, ready to convince him of her plan. Unfortunately, she hasn't reckoned with his roommates, or his own ambivalence to this project, or the distance between a goal and reality.
The book provides windows into the mind of an independent lady desperate to upgrade her life and into the world of wealthy young tech workers, idealistic and performative and superficial beyond belief, with money to burn on the most insubstantial of ideas. These techies are at first incredibly easy to mock; sardonic Jhanvi is just as easy to root for. At first. Slowly, my allegiances began to realign... these pretty idiots may be laughable, but Jhanvi herself is revealed to be just as unappealing. Perhaps even more so. Her mission and her envy consume her. Her new, rather unwilling roommates are operating from an embarrassing combination of social justice-induced liberal guilt and starry-eyed sex-positivity, but Jhanvi is coming from a place of almost complete self-absorption and a near-total disdain for the inner lives within nearly everyone inside of her orbit. A shallow techie still deserves agency and still needs understanding, despite their shallowness; a broke and lonely trans woman can still be monstrous, a grifting manipulator, despite how genuinely sympathetic her cause may be. It can be a challenge to root for anyone who thinks the world revolves entirely around them and their needs.
I was impressed with how ugly Naomi Kanakia was willing to make Jhanvi; she's so understandable and yet so completely awful at times. My God, the vicious things she thinks about the people she is trying to grift. This is a brave, highly intelligent iconoclast who has redefined herself in an unfriendly world; this is also an often thoughtless liar who has carelessly abandoned her supportive Sacramento community in order to manipulate a social circle that isn't her own. And yet I continued to root for her; I love an arrogant underdog. I appreciated the dark night of the soul (and body) that the author gives her, during one extended and grueling sequence. From which Jhanvi returns unbroken and even more determined. She may be a villainous person in so many ways, but she remains the heroine of this book, never the villain. There are no villains in The Default World.
Kanakia also scores numerous points in other directions: the way race and outsider status can be weaponized, used to guilt-trip; the marshmallow-like traits of certain well-meaning, tediously passive men who find it impossible to say the word "no"; my least favorite privilege, Pretty Privilege; the unspoken disqualifying rules at sex parties; the mindless group-think of some progressives. I particularly enjoyed the novel's take on how identity is often formed in opposition to other identities; how an in-group is often defined by how it is different from the out-group. Jhanvi sees her new tech friends as the default world that she yearns to enter; those friends define themselves as outside the default world of conformist normies.
The story reminded me of the decade in my life that started in the mid 90s, living with a bunch of friends in a wholesome anarchist collective that gradually turned into a loathsome hipster party house. So many people, so much performative grandstanding; visions of how to build a better society; rejection of the mainstream, of normies. The drugs the sex the music the parties, the random interlopers, the fun. Of course, there were many differences between my scene and the scene within this book (just as San Francisco then is so different from San Francisco now): although about the same age, my friends were struggling punks and broke activists, not overpaid and overworked technocrats; my deadly sin as a grouchy outsider with a 9-to-5 job wasn't Envy, it was Wrath. That said, the many similarities between this world and my old world were haunting. Both worlds decidedly rejected the default world, yet lived in it still.
Erskine Caldwell, a Southern writer who sympathized deeply with the working class and who often wrote about racism and poverty, is seldom read. DespitErskine Caldwell, a Southern writer who sympathized deeply with the working class and who often wrote about racism and poverty, is seldom read. Despite being an acclaimed, bestselling author in his day. Alas, the vagaries of fate, or at least of enduring literary acclaim. "Where the Girls Were Different" is a Steinbeckian collection of weird, sad stories. Small-town and rural life are examined, often in a rather off-puttingly coy and ambiguous way e.g. the title story made little sense to me, other than perhaps as a caution for boys who long for loose women - apparently, the girls are not much greener on the other side, and boys should never trust the tall tales of other boys. I felt similarly about other stories detailing a medicine-seller scammed into a marriage, a neglected wife found drowned while her husband was busy flirting with her friend, a woman who receives an out-of-town visitor who appears disinterested in her despite her hopes, a boy who finds himself unable to propose to a girl he likes, a paralyzed man who wishes he wasn't paralyzed because his wife can barely support him. Etc. The humor was weird and off-putting; the narratives depressing.
I appreciate that Caldwell channeled his disgust at anti-black racism into a couple of his stories, but oh man, those stories were hard-going. "Savannah River Payday" has two subhuman rednecks traveling around with a black man's corpse on the hood of their car as they argue, fight (one loses an ear; he is surprisingly nonchalant about it), drive into town to get rid of the body, and then forget about that task after doing some drinking and more fighting in a bar. And "The People vs. Abe Lathan, Colored" - about an elderly black man who is first evicted, then brought up on false charges when he pleads with his landlord to change his mind - was about as hopeless an experience as one could imagine.
Overall, I admired Caldwell's politics so much more than the actual stories he wrote to express those politics. Much like with Steinbeck, his talent at crafting memorable prose is undeniable, despite the near-constant bleakness on display. But man, the difference between the cover of the book and what lies beneath! My copy:
famed entomologist Ruth Rendell delivers another cold-eyed treatise on how human bugs will stubbornly cling to the unhealthy trajectories they have sefamed entomologist Ruth Rendell delivers another cold-eyed treatise on how human bugs will stubbornly cling to the unhealthy trajectories they have set for themselves. she has some sympathy for her collection of insects - especially the protagonist bug Inez and even the serial killer bug dubbed by the press as "The Rottweiler" - but bugs they were born and bugs they usually remain. I've always admired the formidable Dr. Rendell's scientific rigor when it comes to the study of these creatures, and the depth of characterization on display is, as usual, very well done. but are these sad little beasts truly the sum of their patterns and limitations, and no more? this uncharitable researcher appears to think so....more
oh to live the life of the Ivory Tower, Tower of Babel, such freedoms such explorations such openings of the mind and spirit and body. all
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oh to live the life of the Ivory Tower, Tower of Babel, such freedoms such explorations such openings of the mind and spirit and body. all of the body's openings, always opening, dilating, expostulations outward and penetrations inward are par for the course. a course on microscopy, the lens focused on the viewer, its participants both students and professors, all of them horny and big-mouthed. but big-minded? maybe not so much. language and identity are both tools and weapons, to be wielded or discarded per each project's demands. the old die, the young live, and all of them want to fuck or be fucked. and yet there is a certain asceticism, an austerity present as well. at least when it comes to the messy world outside of that tower; heaven forfend such gross things should intrude on cloistered lives. the life of the Ivory Tower is an insular, incestuous one, the whole family of friends and foes and colleagues and lovers all together in one great big bed. oh to live in such a place!
simply read The Rebel Angels and you shall! Robertson Davies is an ingenious writer, full of wit and verve and occasional bits of genuine compassion. but only occasionally. The Rebel Angels is a book of the mind, but only if you consider pornography to be art of the body. these petty little people, I loved reading about them. such silly creatures, mainly useless but certainly eye-catching, like ornate and fragile Christmas ornaments kept up year-round, gathering dust. only the student Maria Theotoky felt fully real to me, dynamic, someone who could actually learn and grow, someone I could actually know. she is the flame around which all these clumsy moths fly, hopelessly and helplessly drawn to something bright and warm. I fell in love with Maria. I guess I am just as bad as any horny, big-mouthed professor, just as prone to temptation as any typical Ivory Tower denizen. perhaps these residents of the tower are human and relatable after all, no matter if they themselves feel otherwise. okay, I feel for them, I can admit it. but they do go on, don't they. they babble on and on in their eccentric little Babylons. shall they ever escape such closed circles?
I disliked this book, but the book itself is blameless. It does well what it set out to do: (1) a portrait of a lonely, well-off widow is created, herI disliked this book, but the book itself is blameless. It does well what it set out to do: (1) a portrait of a lonely, well-off widow is created, her life shrinking after her husband's death and her children's moves into creating their own lives; (2) an appalling grift is detailed, engineered by a very handsome and very short teacher who moves into a cottage on the widow's property. Bad enough, but even worse, her new tenant isn't just a grifter who tapes their lovemaking in order to blackmail her, he's also a schizophrenic sadist who wants, above all, power over women.
Gretchen Travis is an excellent writer. Outside of the vindictive young man's psychosis, nothing is made melodramatic. The widow, her children, her friends, others in her orbit - all are persuasively characterized, made alive. Especially the widow - by the end of the book, I knew not only who she was, but what she'd do in most situations. How the story unfolds, how the cottage is remade, how the love affair turns into a nightmare, her outlook on life, her financial situation and her attempts to find money for her blackmailer and to make him see reason, her emotional highs and all of the many lows... everything is excruciatingly realistic. Emphasis: excruciating. This was a grueling read. Such a short book but I took many long pauses when reading it because I. just. didn't. enjoy. the. experience.
Even the semi-satisfying ending managed to drain the enjoyment out of a situation that could have been pure satisfaction. To be fair, I suppose it is petty of me to want orgasmic schadenfreude instead of minor-note nihilism....more
An ideal vacation: the isle of Capri, warm and sunny; a community of idiosyncratic expats, amusing and lively; ferocious natives, sardonic and sly; coAn ideal vacation: the isle of Capri, warm and sunny; a community of idiosyncratic expats, amusing and lively; ferocious natives, sardonic and sly; colorfully dressed religious cultists, rustic and merry. Conversation and parties and conversation and art forgery and conversation and natural disaster and conversation and a deadly street battle and conversation and murder and so many conversations on all sorts of fascinating subjects. Art forgery is fine if it becomes a reason for a billionaire to hand money over to a proud friend. Natural disaster is fine if it's only ash to be dealt with; the volcano's eruptions mainly harm those boring mainlanders. A deadly street battle is fine if it's natives versus cultists, plus it gives everyone something to talk about for a little while. Murder is fine if the victim is a swindling louse and the murderess doesn't make a bloody fuss about it. A history is delivered: the island once ruled by an eccentric despot; his eccentricity has become the lifeblood of the island itself. A visitor arrives, an Anglican Bishop of Africa, already shown a different way of living in Africa; now ready and open to new ways of thinking. This rather stuffy but kindly gent finds his mind suddenly opening to all sorts of new possibilities. Now rename the isle of Capri: it shall be called "Nepenthe". The south wind blows hot, dry, and strong in this beautiful place; it causes all sorts of minds to expand in all sorts of directions.
The author was a scandalous man and an expat himself, on the island of Capri and elsewhere. He wrote lauded travel books and was friends with a variety of fascinating people. A suave perspective on the vicissitudes of fortune and life, an exciting interest in exploring all the different ways of thinking and being. Prose that is deliciously descriptive but never overcooked, sophisticated and ironic, pitiless and empathetic, amused and always highly amusing. I think this was his only book of fiction. Or should that be "fiction"? No doubt much of this was cribbed from his own life, the actual people he knew and the actual place he lived. Either way, the book is perfection; why bother writing more fiction if you've said all that you need to say?
This is a dream of a book and I wanted to stay dreaming, so I prolonged the experience as much as possible. The wit, the elegance! It gave me so much to smile at, be shocked at, and above all, to think about. So much food for thought. I love being around smart, individualistic people and I love being around people who enjoy life and I love being in a setting that is warm, breezy, colorful, surrounded by water. Full of things to do, people to meet, and above all, ways to relax. I love when something makes me both think and feel. I want to live in this book.
"Something had been stirring with him; new points of view had floated into his ken. He was no longer so sure about things. The structure of his mind had lost that old stability; its elements seemed to be held in solution, ready to form new combinations."
"They produce a new kind of public, a public which craves for personalities rather than information... Men cannot live, it seems, save by feeding on their neighbour's life-blood. They prey on each other's nerve-tissues and personal sensations. Everything must be shared. It gives them a feeling of solidarity, I suppose, in a world where they have lost the courage to stand alone. Woe to him who dwells apart!"
"That venerable blunder: to think that in changing the form of government you change the heart of man. For surely we should aim at simplification of the machinery. Conceive, now, the state of affairs where everybody is more or less employed by the community - the community, that comfortable world! - in some patriotic business or other. Everybody an official, all controlling each other! It would be worse than the Spanish Inquisition."
"What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? Take fifty of our current proverbial sayings - they are so trite, so threadbare, that we can hardly bring our lips to utter them. None the less they embody the concentrated experience of the race, and the man who orders his life according to their teaching cannot go far wrong. How easy that seems! Has any one ever done so? Never. Has any man ever attained inner harmony by pondering the experiences of others? Not since the world began! He must pass through the fire."...more
gay misery porn. the writing is polished and sophisticated, no surprise given that it is by the massively talented Gore Vidal. also, why aren't more pgay misery porn. the writing is polished and sophisticated, no surprise given that it is by the massively talented Gore Vidal. also, why aren't more people named "Gore"? this was absorbing despite also being boring and depressing, if that even makes sense. sometimes, strong writing can carry me through a maudlin experience. and it is interesting as a historical document. I had heard that the ending was dark but I didn't realize it would be that kind of dark. yikes! well, at least no suicide. sorry if that's a spoiler for you and you wanted the kind of tension in a book that is all about whether or not a depressed closet case will kill himself.
synopsis: handsome straight-acting gay guy can't find love and can barely accept himself and maybe those two things are linked, you know?...more
well at last I have read something that could be considered The Great American Novel, while also being um incest porn? a surprising book!
Who was Earl well at last I have read something that could be considered The Great American Novel, while also being um incest porn? a surprising book!
Who was Earl Thompson? This portrait of America during the Depression, and its author, were complete unknowns to me. I actually have no recollection of how my mildewed and battered, torn and tattered paperback even came into my possession. The book was apparently A Big Thing when it came out, yet I've read nothing about it. Why is that? The author's talent with the prose is amazing: as poetic and as earthy as Steinbeck, with an interest in the same themes, the same era; but Thompson is somehow more empathetic, more alive in how writes about people, places, and times. There is no remove, no distance between author and subject, of the kind that I've experienced with Steinbeck. Thompson is right there in the dirt with his characters. The book feels beyond lived-in; it reads like an autobiography that was written while events were actually occurring, rather than being reminisced about when older and wiser. There is a palpable energy in this book, a livewire sort of aliveness that makes every description sing and sting, every person both Dickensian grotesque and fully recognizable, every horrible occurrence feel like something out of a rural gothic horror and also like something the author personally experienced, full of the kinds of details and character traits that make each and every scene feel completely authentic.
On top of all that, despite all of the despair on display, all of the broken lives and crushed dreams, this book is really, really funny. Sometimes the humor is meanly sardonic, other times warmer, based on recognizable human foibles and physical flaws; never in a way that feels like the author scorns who he is writing about or even the repulsive places where they struggle to eat, let alone get ahead. To me, the ability to illustrate the tragically humorous folly and smallness of life, while not actually being contemptuous of those lives, is the mark of a truly brilliant book.
...and yet, this masterpiece is impossible to recommend. Just have to get this out of the way: besides the over the top sadistic violence that occurs frequently, I'd say fully a third of this book details the extremely explicit fantasies or actions of our pre-pubescent hero and his sexual desires for his mother. Emphasis: extremely explicit. Wild to imagine this book being reprinted in our modern times. Jack alternately hints, begs, pleads, and demands the satisfaction of both his curiosity and his needs. He's constantly ogling her or finding ways to place his hands or mouth on her belly, breasts, groin, anywhere, when she's awake, when she's asleep, most usually in the twilight state in-between. He guilt trips and scolds her, molests her when she's out cold, he practically assaults her on more than one occasion. For a period of time he sleeps with an oversize makeshift pillow that has been fashioned into a pretend-person, fucking it furiously whenever he can as he imagines it as his mom. At one point, his degenerate step-father aids him in his goal (an especially grueling sequence); more frequently, stepdad gets in the way of young Jack's dreams, much to the boy's chagrin.
SPOILER ALERT: lil' Jack's dreams come true.
...and yet, the boy is indeed the book's hero, not just its protagonist. Take away his demented obsession with his mother (a hard thing to subtract, I know) and we are left with a portrait in pragmatic courage, dogged individualism, and the refusal to be cruel despite the cruelty surrounding him. This is a boy who is at first abandoned by his mother to the care of his grandparents, then taken up by her and her ne'er-do-well alcoholic husband in the second half of the novel as they traverse America, a boy with no education, very little in the way of guidance (his grandparents do try; they are the book's most genuinely positive and kind characters), constantly neglected and abused and lied to and barely fed and forced to not just survive with next to nothing, but often to support his parents... and yet he retains his intelligence, empathy, strong opinions, an ability to see beauty in life when it does appear, and most of all, a drive to achieve happiness throughout it all. "Scrappy" does not begin to describe him. "Ferocious" is a better adjective, but it is still one that makes him sound harder than he is. I'd use "spunky" but that is just a little too cutesy for a kid who makes it with his mom before he even reaches his teens.
One is tempted to see the relationship between mother and son as an allegory for America at its lowest point. Say, the boy representing the stubborn optimism of an American people that will always cling to its hopeful dreams in the face of their struggles, despite those ambitions being, essentially, the longing for the obliterating comfort of a return to mother's embrace, to the womb itself? Perhaps that would make the incestuous activities so fervently described easier to handle? The author places their actions and the many depredations occurring around them within the specific socio-political context of farmers-turned-itinerants living in the heartland of a supposedly liberal country; a country that dehumanizes its own people, reduces them to beggarly recipients of public welfare or scorns them as deplorable trash, but never deigns to view them as actual human beings. Certainly the portrait of an America hopelessly divided between an elite minority and everyone else, where everything is commodified including the smallest of spaces and especially the bodies of women - an almost Marxist analysis that upbraids the flaccid "good intentions" of liberalism while detailing the evils of capitalism at every turn - all of that critique is front and center. Often coming directly from the mouth of Jack's pro-union yet anti-New Deal grandfather. The story may be the story of America trying to find itself and failing, writ small. Mom & son could very well be metaphors for all I know. But I'm not a particularly deep thinker, so I didn't spend a lot of time trying to see them or their story as such.
Instead I saw a portrait of a woman both weak and strong but mainly weak, a kind-hearted person whose unrealistic dreams of a better life than her parents lead her on an inexorable path to larceny and prostitution, and finally into the arms of the only person who has persistently declared his undying devotion, her son. Instead I saw a portrait of a boy who refuses to buckle under the yoke of a society that embraces fixed identities and destinies, a boy who sees through all of the bullshit, who refuses to be fooled, and yet who maintains his own secret idealism at his core, insisting to himself that he will create his own destiny - society and those who would stop him be damned. The narrative of the book is teeming with human insects, praying mantises eager to mate and to kill, but the book itself is teeming with human life and the need to be alive, the struggle to survive, making a life wherever and however one can make it. The book despairs but somehow, magically, does not depress. It is too busy being alive to be depressed....more
Alberto Moravia was an Italian novelist and journalist. His novels explored matters of modern sexuality, social alienation and existentialism. Thank yAlberto Moravia was an Italian novelist and journalist. His novels explored matters of modern sexuality, social alienation and existentialism. Thank you, Wikipedia, for providing that handy summary. The entry on this author continues by saying that Moravia has a "factual, cold, precise style"... uh, you got that one quite wrong, my good friend. The style displayed in this book is breezy, chatty, casual. Stories are told by very human and often relatable voices, despite the multiplicity of perspectives on display. Those perspectives come from lower and working class youth, mainly boys, predators and prey and often both. The book is deceptively fun and easy going down, specifically due to its semi-comic and rather bright tone, despite the many degradations and predations on display. It is that merry tone that I blame for encouraging me to read over 100 pages of this well-written but mainly nihilistic bullshit.
I cannot stand misery porn! Especially when written by such a condescending author. My buddy Wikipedia also notes that the author came from a wealthy, middle-class family, and oh boy that shows up in spades. This is the kind of book that looks at all human beings from a certain class as bugs living in a gutter. No joy, no love, certainly no satisfaction, life is all a big nothing, nada, a void that is looked into and that looks back, laughing at your so-called dreams. It is intended to illustrate something "important" about the proletariat and about the itinerant but all it illustrates is Moravia's complete inability to recognize that happiness and kindness can exist in even the most diminished of lives and his refusal to illustrate that such human lives have more dimensions than his basic two. If you are a middle-class sort who wants to study the world of human insects so that you can feel good about feeling sorry for their pathetic so-called lives, then this is your book. Enjoy!...more
Last night, when talking to God again, I posed a question atypical for its lack of fawning, begging, or pleading: "Why do You make such a j
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Last night, when talking to God again, I posed a question atypical for its lack of fawning, begging, or pleading: "Why do You make such a joke of us?" The ceiling throbbed dimly above me, all shadows and cobwebs and barely seen whiteness, only slightly illuminated by the yellow of the streetlights staring blearily through the dusty windows, the tableau of small little shapes embedded in the ceiling could hardly be seen let alone differentiated, these misshapen pimples of paint frozen like a depressed and lackadaisical swarm of sleepy insects covered in cream, or cloud, or whatever color the paint was once named, the little bumps of stucco like small, barely sentient beings whose movements were so slow they didn't appear to move at all. A fitting vision, or at least it felt that way in the moment. Sensing a reply would not soon be forthcoming - so like Him, I thought, resigned - I continued on: "You sprayed Yourself upon this fertile egg Earth and so we were born from this heavenly shower, if that's not too salty a metaphor for You, we motile things moving hither and thither, created by the divine yet living our lives of mundanity, betraying each other, projecting our needs onto each other, hating each other while calling that hate love, hating each other while calling that hate change, hating each other while calling that hate law or freedom or safety, injecting ourselves into each other like You did to this poor Earth who never asked for such parasites infesting her body, infecting each other with ourselves, replicating more of us as is our imperative, or perhaps Your imperative, an imperative to always keep breeding and hating and breeding some more... You created us, but why didn't You just leave us after that? Why stay to laugh, to mock, to create a long-winded joke for which the punch line is not just a shaggy dog, it is a hairy ape, the ape that is man that will never get that it is not just the butt of the joke, it is the head and heart and genitals of the joke as well. Why Lord why? Why not just hit it and quit it, why stay to laugh at what You wrought?" After finishing my appeal, I realized that God had fallen fast asleep while I had rambled on. As He is often prone to do during my more lachrymose musings, sigh. God knows I can sometimes be a bore.
I turned to the typically attractive faun asleep at my side and roused him with an urgent shake. At least he would hear me if He would not. As he was fairly used to this behavior, he woke slowly but with a minimum of grumblings. "What now?" he asked with only faint surliness and the beginnings of an erection. "I have an important question to pose," I said self-importantly. "And put that away please. The question is this: Our existence is depressingly ephemeral as is, must it be made a joke of? Our souls are fragile as is, must they be so aggressively manhandled by the State, by the Media, by the Community, by Old Men, most of all by our oh so humorous Creator and His private little jokes at our expense?" My companion smiled sleepily, his surliness but not his erection now gone, and said: "Oh, so you think we have souls? That's adorable." This was neither the reaction I expected nor the path I wanted to walk on, and certainly not at this late an hour. The fact of our soul's existence must be sacrosanct, sacred, or at least an ironic given, otherwise these jokes of God lack even humor to recommend them. And so I responded: "Of course! Don't you think we have souls? Are you such a godless pagan that your lack of faith has rendered you unable to acknowledge the intangible soul within this all-too tangible bag of skin, bones, hair, muscles, blood, semen, and brain matter?" He replied, horned and horny,
"Ano, máme duši. Ale skládá se z mnoha malých robotů."
And so I experienced another upsetting joke. If you like such jokes, you should read The Farewell Waltz. It is full of them! Eight characters in a comic roundelay, among them a doctor injecting his sperm into hapless women, a little God himself, creating a whole world of people who look like him and think like him, a whole world like him and the seven other characters who live in this angry joke of a novel, a whole world of characters fucking each other and fucking each other over, sometimes dying, sometimes loving, sometimes fooling each other, always fooling themselves, a whole world of insects except of course insects don't do such things.
the poor delicate soul, a lotus in the mud, reaching higher and always getting ground down, ever down, into the muck and grime of confined, earthly lithe poor delicate soul, a lotus in the mud, reaching higher and always getting ground down, ever down, into the muck and grime of confined, earthly living. the poor morbid soul, dreaming of the past and of escape, dreaming himself away and into strange places where he will be lord or victim, dreaming of bacchanalia and decadence, or of a more refined way of living, or of childhood and a place where he was comforted, given succour. the poor forlorn soul, his love has left him, that love that was his gateway to bliss and to dreaming, but no he doesn't care, he really doesn't, an outsider like himself doesn't need such earthly things as love, he is better on his own, he can focus on his dreams when he's alone, his dreams of death and madness, of places and times past, and of being alone, always alone.
(view spoiler)[I had to take a longish break from the book due to life/work and also, honestly, lack of interest. I've picked it back up tonight. I'm about two-thirds of the way through and hope to finish it soon.
Unlike most, I was completely enchanted by the first chapter. Reading the descriptions of nature on my back patio, looking at treetops and hearing birds around me, while mulling over the strange, almost hyper-real images described on the page... it was such a relaxing experience. I was quite ready to love this book the way I've loved similar pastoral/hallucinatory exercises written by Algernon Blackwood. I'm a big fan of the period voice of these writers.
But what followed was... not so great. The hallucinatory qualities certainly increased but in way that did not engage me, there was no bridge between reality and not-reality. Falling in love with Annie caused these strange flights, really? The descriptions of English country life could have been written by Dostoevsky or Bierce, they were so scabrous and full of too-pointed pitch-black humor and so incredibly one-sided to a degree that I was more annoyed than anything else. And the mortifications of the flesh by thorns - those images of him lying on his floor on a bed of brambles, reading by candlight - have to admit that I rolled my eyes when I should have been, what, aghast? I dunno. The strange mix of those elements should have sparked my interest, and as Dan mentioned, the writing is not bad. But it just didn't coalesce for me, it grated. And I really didn't need that self-indulgently long depiction of the puppy being tormented and murdered. Why exactly? To further prove that humans are gross barbarians? Sigh.
The move to London (and Lucian's surprising hand-wave aside at being deserted by Annie) sparked things a bit more for me. A bit. The descriptions of London were predictably morose but I found myself a bit interested in how much the book was turning into a treatise on style versus substance, or form over meaning. Or I guess form equaling meaning? I didn't expect such lengthy musings on the art of writing.
Anyway, I guess I'll see if the remaining third leaves me as unimpressed as most of the first two-thirds. (hide spoiler)]
One thing that did make me smile: letters from his nagging but well-intentioned cousin make Lucian imagine a happy, homey bourgeois existence with his relatives, which in turn becomes an inspiration to keep living his life his own miserable way, because he wants nothing to do with such bougie homeyness. LOL! Oh, Lucian.
☄ ☾ ☼
message 35: by mark May 29, 2021 12:23PM
(view spoiler)[Finished it last night. Not the most edifying way to spend a Friday night but at least I have the rest of the weekend.
There is a lot of brilliance in this book. So much going on! Machen is writing about being unstuck in life, an outsider along the lines of what Colin Wilson would write about decades later, dreaming of other places and other times. Those dreams and longings can be about fairly benign things, like natural landscapes or a well-used home... or more gothic, more dark and even violent things, like a sinister Roman fort or a decayed house or revels in the street... or things and ways of living that we can never have, because we weren't born hundreds or thousands of years ago and those things are probably more imagination than reality... or for things most people once had, like living in the happy memories of childhood when we perhaps felt most held and loved, except of course, as the saying goes, you can't go home again.
He writes all about that while also upbraiding both conventional life and the life of the outsider. He writes about all of that while also writing about writing itself, how to do it, how to make music with words, how to use words to sell your pieces, how to sell out, how to write things only for yourself. He writes about the loneliness of someone outside of the mainstream and the temptations and indulgences and hermetic self-flagellations that sort of person could fall victim to. He writes about love in the most exalted of ways and he writes about sensuality in the most decadent of ways.
There's just so much going on and it is all written in prose that was, for me at least, pretty amazing at times.
Unfortunately, all of those things that Machen writes on just ended up feeling like self-indulgent misery porn. There were a number of highlights but overall this was a pretty disagreeable experience for me. Tedious and pretentious and so navel-gazing it made me want to scream, many times.
Still, the prose was great, so much talent on display. And the ideas were absorbing. At least when I considered those ideas afterwards - not when actually reading them. (hide spoiler)]
All that said, I really enjoyed that one scene where a lesbionic orgy fails to get a reaction from an unimpressed young man. Totally been there....more
synopsis: pirates can have a heart; children, never.
I have a shelf called "World of Insects" where I put literary novels whose perspectives on human nsynopsis: pirates can have a heart; children, never.
I have a shelf called "World of Insects" where I put literary novels whose perspectives on human nature are cold and detached; these stories often function as dissections. They provide examples of how humans lack a moral compass and follow predictably selfish behavior patterns. I have another shelf called "These Fragile Lives" with books that illustrate how humans are a complex and delicate web of emotions. These warmer stories depict human nature with a certain empathy. A High Wind in Jamaica belongs on both shelves. This off-putting but still quite absorbing anti-adventure has a dual perspective. The writing is both sardonic and sunny, at once disturbingly realistic and gorgeously poetic; the tone is light that conceals darkness; the narrative is a wonderful series of surprises yet is also one that is bleak, deterministic. The pirates are sympathetic until one is reminded that some men want adult things from a child. The kids are delightful until one is reminded that some children aren't overly concerned with truth or kindness. Remind me to never go on a pirate adventure with either children or pirates!
Angela Carter depicts a range of women (and one fluidly-sexed hermaphrodite) striving to be - or just simply being - fully themselves. Sometimes that Angela Carter depicts a range of women (and one fluidly-sexed hermaphrodite) striving to be - or just simply being - fully themselves. Sometimes that self is passionate and loving, other times murderous, animalistic. Sometimes men are important to them, sometimes not so much. These women have little in common with each other, outside of their disinterest in conforming to conventional notions of femininity. Atypical examples of strength. The feminism is not subtext, it's the whole point. But this is not friendly or easy feminism: no saints are in sight.
Mostly fabulous, with some eh. 3.5 stars, rounded up. Even when the stories aren't top notch, the writing always impresses. Favorites are in bold.
"The Fall River Ax Murders" - Lizzie Borden is a woman with problems; she solves those problems with 40 whacks, and then 41 more. This is a portrait of misery: a miserable family, a miserable town. Rather a miserable read as well.
"The Kiss" - The women of Samarkand are a dreamy lot, as was Tamburlaine's wife. This is a slim, elegant trifle. I'm not sure why it needed to be written, but it's quite pleasant.
"Our Lady of the Massacre" - A Lancashire whore finds acceptance and a new life within an Algonquin village. But the English will do as they did: the tribe is massacred, and so a third life must begin. This was a marvelous tale: the redoubtable, no-nonsense heroine was impressive and Carter's portrait of the Indian community was sensitive and real. I wanted this story to go on much longer.
"Peter and the Wolf" - A girl raised by wolves causes different sorts of feelings to arise in a cousin aiming himself towards priesthood. An absorbing tale that ends with a strange epiphany. Carter touches lightly on the natural world vs. the civilized world, sexuality, faith, and how we turn our memories into stories.
"The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe" - Carter muses at length on the unconscious influences Poe's actress mother and later his child-bride may have had on him. This is a very meta story and the creativity is often dazzling. Unfortunately, it is all rather... unconvincing.
"Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream" - More musing by Carter, this time on grouchy Oberon, maternal Titania, a surprisingly shaggy, horny Puck, and the unnamed changeling in Shakespeare's play who is at the root of the Oberon-Titania quarrel. The changeling is given an identity here: the Golden Herm, a hermaphrodite, and much of this exceedingly postmodern anti-story is about how the Golden Herm enchants all. This was a fascinating plunge into gender deconstruction. I love how Carter takes ostensibly loveable faerie characters and makes them fearsome, alien. The story also features an enjoyable mini-treatise on the contrast in fairy tales between enchanting English woodland and forbidding German forest.
"The Kitchen Child" - And so life is created in the kitchen of a great English manor: someone has poked the rotund cook while she prepared her lobster soufflé! Nine months later: a child! But who was this secretive poker, who is the kitchen child's father? Perhaps it was the just as rotund visiting Duc who enjoyed not just the soufflé, but its maker... Man oh man, I loved this one! Not since the author's equally cheeky, witty, and life-affirming version of Puss 'n Boots have I smiled so much during one of her stories. Smiles and good cheer from beginning to end. Thank you, Angela Carter!
"Black Venus" - Carter imagines the life of Jeanne Duval, Creole mistress to the transgressive poet Baudelaire, and provides it a refreshingly upbeat albeit still syphilitic ending. This is perhaps the author's most well-known short story. Gender and race collide, a crash made all the more disturbing due to sexuality and colonialism, and because of paternalism, all the more inevitable. Never has a woman calling her man "Daddy" made me twitch more. The author's prose is at its most gorgeously purple and overripe; her points remain carefully aimed and deadly sharp....more
High school life apparently sucks. So does this book.
10 Things I Hate About You, Skippy Dies
(1) Nihilistic misery porn is never my favorite. Too bitteHigh school life apparently sucks. So does this book.
10 Things I Hate About You, Skippy Dies
(1) Nihilistic misery porn is never my favorite. Too bitter and sour to the taste, and lacking richness. Strange that people love to eat this stuff up. Isn't the world grotesque and maudlin enough to satisfy any hunger people may have for dying-inside despair? Ugh. Obnoxious books like this one are only looking at the trash side of the world, refusing to see anything that doesn't fit into their points of view. Joyless novels that pretend to portray real life make me break out.
(2) I get it that high school really sucked for a lot of people. I get it, I get it. My experience wasn't everyone's experience. But was it and is it truly hell on earth for everyone involved, students and teachers alike - literally all the time? That's the perspective of this epic (fail). It's some kind of achievement to be able to write a 600+ page book that manages to remain so one-note. Reverse-kudos and a Pelosi clap for the author. Paul Murray, I'm sorry that you hated high school, but I also don't think you needed to write an entire book about how much you hated high school and how you think everyone else did too. And how you think both high school and life itself are just a real waste of time. When your thesis is that high school - and being alive - is pure torture for everyone involved, that unimaginative thesis gets an F.
(3) The supporting characters are flat caricatures. It's like the author decided to give them one attribute and then ran with that attribute for 600+ pages. There's the kid who is cynical, the kid who speaks in a zombie voice, the kid who is Italian, the kid who insists she's pregnant. Etc. For a book so big, its ability to bring to life what should have been a vital supporting cast of teenagers is so, so small. Small talent at characterization and a large amount of small-mindedness.
(4) Apparently the entire purpose of the co-protagonist - a pathos-ridden teacher - is to portray a man who never does the right thing because he is so pathetic and weak. This is the opposite of an interesting or dynamic character. This static cardboard cutout is nearly half of the book. Whyyyyyyy
(5) Skippy dies deluded. Skippy is the most vibrant, good-natured, and fully realized character in the book. It must have pained the author to write about him, so he punishes Skippy mercilessly. Skippy gets to fall in love with a girl who doesn't love him, he gets to have a mother with cancer, he gets to have a distant father who doesn't support him, he gets to have teachers who don't understand him, he gets to have a principal who is his enemy, he gets to have peer pressure, oh and he gets to have a coach who drugs and molests him and then gets off scot-free. He gets to die in the opening pages and his last thoughts are about the girl who doesn't love him. And then his death becomes commodified. Skippy can't catch a break, even after he's dead.
(6) Okay I liked the teacher's live-in girlfriend, especially after she moves out. But other than her, the female characters in this book are a joke. I don't think the author likes women too much. Someone musta broke his heart :(
(7) The cruelty. TO ALL OF ITS CHARACTERS.
(8) The lack of empathy masking itself as empathy.
(9) The strong start that fooled me into thinking that this would be a big book full of life, despite the title. The realization that the book is as superficial and simple-minded as its title. Well, I can't say that the title didn't warn me.
(10) The author somehow thinks he's really, really funny. Strident repetition and joyless caricatures are not funny. Laughing at your own characters' stupidity and misery is also not funny. The author has no discernible sense of humor, despite his insistence that he is a really, really funny guy. Which really, really annoys me.
So William Faulkner made Tennessee Williams his woman who then gave birth to James Purdy. An unusual author and this is an unusual book. The twisted rSo William Faulkner made Tennessee Williams his woman who then gave birth to James Purdy. An unusual author and this is an unusual book. The twisted repressed southern gothic psychodrama is sliced thick, y'all. Normally, I'd be very let's say "excited" about this.
Insane camp that doesn't know it's camp is sometimes the best kind of camp, but sometimes it's not because it can get kinda tiring, you know? The tongue is not in cheek, it has been swallowed. I'm choking on the not-camp because it is a huge pill to swallow without any alleviating humor to make it wash down easier. This book doesn't understand that layers of irony are required to make this bearable. This mother doesn't seem to realize that she's basically a drag queen, a diva of the old camp school, her writer writes her like she's Joan Crawford and Bette Davis rolled into one, all the suffering and the sadism do not a character make, it makes Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. These brothers don't seem to realize that they desperately want to fuck each other, they are either grovelling or lording it over each other in every other scene, muscles rippling and eyes blazing and eyes going blind and so much begging and bodies bleeding and spurting out all sorts of fluids; but they'll never admit attraction, that's a secret the author is keeping to himself and maybe from himself. This father gets the book's title - a mispronunciation of "magnate" by ignorant townfolk - but he gets little else; despite his supposed centralization in the plot, the author's just not too interested in him or his life.
Indeed his death is where the book starts, before the extended flashback that is the bulk of the book takes place. But the lonely magnate/solitary maggot was never where the book's interest lies. Nor is it about that so-called mother. The book is about those monstrous, tormented brothers: a selfish silent screen star, an ostentatiously manly horse-tender, and the moony little bottom who is vapidly obsessed with them both. This is a book that is desperately trying to say something about loneliness and emptiness and family and belonging and I want to know what love is, I want you to show me. But sadly, this book does not appear to actually understand the genus & species homo sapien, let alone the homo sexual. Because it does not recognize queerness; it prefers its closet and writing about so-called straight people. So strange that the book feels so closeted - Purdy was known at the time for writing about gay lives! Maybe trying to write about straight people broke him. The only true enjoyment to be had is the appeal of Purdy's stylized, often hallucinatory prose - wonderfully overripe, on the verge of rotten. House of the Solitary Maggot is bizarre and brazen; sadly, it is also all kinds of terrible to the taste. It wants to be a serious novel, oh so serious and tragic. But instead it is a book where a maid whines about the semen-coated boxers she's to wash and an outraged mother takes those boxers and rubs them in the maid's face because how dare she. It is a book where a character gets their head blown to bits and another character promptly scoops up the eyeballs and eats them because apparently that's what grief looks like.
Well I suppose it was a good thing that the friends Truman Capote chose to publicly betray and humiliate were mainly a bunch of high society matrons (Well I suppose it was a good thing that the friends Truman Capote chose to publicly betray and humiliate were mainly a bunch of high society matrons (including one on her deathbed from cancer) because otherwise I think someone might have gotten his ass kicked. Deservedly.
Name dropping. Name dropping. Name dropping. Name dropping. Name dropping! Reading this was like being forced to spend a weekend with some long-winded, pretentious air-quoter who glories in dropping the names of all of his famous friends and acquaintances - most of whom I've never heard of - while also doing his gossipy, petty best to trash each of them completely, on the most repulsively personal of levels. I've had to deal with such weekends, it's not fun. Just like this book: not fun. I wanted sparkling, somewhat malicious wit, not an open-mouthed deep dive into the sewers led by a person who loves talking shit.
This was a particularly sad and frustrating experience because prior to this book, Capote had talent to burn. Some of his stories are amazing. I read his classic In Cold Blood way back in college and it still stays with me, his ability to get inside a head, that calm mastery of his effects, the indelible prose. The intensity, the tension, the restraint.
But burn that talent he did, and how. Capote certainly didn't do things by halves. There is the ghost of a vaguely intriguing idea in this incomplete set of linked novellas, but it is totally lost in the toxic crap. The last one "La Côte Basque" is possibly the single most tediously bitchy story I've ever had the displeasure of reading. It is also the story that ruined Capote: his friends all understandably turned their backs on him after being vilified in print, and he sunk into a pit of alcohol, drugs, and a particularly Capote-esque stew of megalomania and depression. Karmic payback's a bitch, much like Capote. I shed a theoretical tear for the talent lost but certainly not for the man himself....more
The problem with the book is that these three siblings aren't parasites, they're trash. Well, that's not exact. Two of them are garbage people, the thThe problem with the book is that these three siblings aren't parasites, they're trash. Well, that's not exact. Two of them are garbage people, the third is a self-denying loser. Parasites only take and these three actually do a lot of giving. Two are symbiotes: a brother who is a writer of catchy tunes and a sister who is a famous stage actress, creepily dependent on each other, both literally giving the world pleasure with their talents. A third sacrifices her entire life to serve others, especially her father. I suppose du Maurier was trying to say that superficial rich artists full of angsty white fragility who don't have healthy relationships with other people are... parasites? Um, no. So many other words can be used. To be kind, I will just say that these three are Sad with a capital S, but certainly not parasitical. Anyway, for such an exact and exacting author, the misuse of that word is strange and disappointing.
Fortunately the book itself is a mainly absorbing experience. du Maurier is a superb writer: her characters dense with inchoate ambitions and inarticulated emotions, her prose all the shades of gray but somehow still entirely vivid, scenes carefully set and dripping with atmosphere and detail, small tragedies and big moments all delivered with subtlety and finesse, and she serves up the whole bitter feast with such marvelously dry detachment. In general, du Maurier does leave me cold - possibly because she has ice running through her veins - but her skills are entirely admirable.
For much of the novel, the narrative switches back and forth in time, portraying the present when the siblings are shattered and ruminative after being called parasites by the husband of one (c'mon, get a grip everyone) and also portraying the past, mainly their lives as the children of two fey artists with rampant egos, growing up all around the world in various luxurious hotels and rentals. These narratives are in alternating chapters. Honestly, I found myself rushing through the chapters set in the present because they were so full of navel-gazing, while the chapters set in the past are dazzlingly vital. What lives these kids had!
Although du Maurier is far from generous with her characters, she paints a picture of a lifestyle that is both completely alien to me and completely real. Their hopes and dreams, the whirlwind of locations, the eccentric characters coming in and out of their world, their relationships with each other and their parents - I wish the whole book was set in this enchanting past. Unfortunately, the more we stayed in the present, the more moralistic the book became, and so it also became rather stultifying. I'm not interested in the grown-up lives of an unloving mother, her brother the self-absorbed twit, and her sister the tedious doormat. That said, the most lively chapter occurs late, when these so-called parasites and their plus ones are invited to a weekend at a country manor, and turn the whole thing into a humiliating debacle for everyone. Old Money should never invite self-centered artistes over for the weekend, hopefully lesson learned. Stay in your lane, Old Money; those types will only mortify everyone's delicate sensibilities, including the staff.
synopsis: three rich kids live their lives and are sad about it....more
Darlings, you simply must witness the Mayoral Melee in Tilling! Watch in delight as Rome burns and Co-Empresses Lucia and Mapp fiddle away. And with sDarlings, you simply must witness the Mayoral Melee in Tilling! Watch in delight as Rome burns and Co-Empresses Lucia and Mapp fiddle away. And with such zeal, such zest! This finale will be your final opportunity to enjoy these razor-witted human lawn darts in stiff competition against each other, and against the rest of Tilling, and against all notions of good sense and human decency. Yes, darlings, we have come to the end of Benson's Mapp & Lucia Saga!
E.F. Benson finishes his 6-book poison pen letter to English village life with a squeak and whimper rather than an unseemly roar. He presents to his devoted readers not a devastating conflagration but instead a colorful yet still deadly easy-bake oven. 'Tis sad but only fitting: the Mapp & Lucia novels, despite the perfection of a couple books and the near-perfection of three more, were always a minor affair. Brittle constructions. Dainty old knick-knacks arranged on an aunt's shelf that you may long to sweep aside and smash underfoot, but you know will eventually be packaged up carefully and perhaps sold at a public market, or stored in a dusty attic or damp basement. But don't smash those cherished antiques - they still retain value!
Benson was clearly, as the hoi polloi say, "over it" when he wrote this volume. Despite the potentially momentous tragicomedy of a duel between Queen and Queen, Mayor vs. Mayoress, he instead chose to ramble a bit and rework old bits, as if he were perhaps a bit bored with his monstrous adult-sized cabbage patch kids. His formerly comic confection Georgie - now the Mayoral Consort and still cutting a striking figure in a ruby-colored velvet suit - is less a figure of fun and more of an author stand-in. Poor Georgie is rather bored now of all of Lucia and Mapp's royal antics. Alas, boredom will strike us all at some point! Could it be the inevitable default and terminus of the human condition? We shudder and perhaps perish at the thought.
But darlings, I do hate to end on such a plaintive, pathos-ridden minor note myself. The book is still a worthy creation, a painless slip-n-slide that you can glide merrily upon while fully dressed. Even a Benson who is rather bored and at his most in need of a nap on the garden room chaise and then perhaps some light refreshment with friends after, is still a Benson who is a raconteur of the first form. Although the first five novels in the series can be enjoyed at any time and at any place and in any state of mind - as long as that mind is poisonous and petty, like mine - the sixth can be enjoyed as well. But perhaps it should be enjoyed after tossing back a generous flute of champagne. Better yet, the whole bottle. Why not? Everything is better with champagne! Indeed, these novels are the literary equivalent: fizzy and light, sparkling and fun, and an absolutely necessary dietary supplement for bored dilettantes, society climbers, gossipy matrons, provincial Karens, and every other sort of malicious, self-absorbed queen. Ah the pretty-ugly things. Lucia & Mapp are the queens of such queens!...more
a boy can dream, and so he does. he dreams and dreams again. he dreams he is a young man of means, in France between the world wars, living a life of a boy can dream, and so he does. he dreams and dreams again. he dreams he is a young man of means, in France between the world wars, living a life of leisure, a frequent guest in the salon of a certain Frau Anders. ah, my mistake, that is no dream, that is his reality. this moneyed young gent does dream though: dreams of an older woman who wants to control him and who he wants to control, dreams of an older man in a sinister one-piece bathing suit who also wants to control, and debase, and to turn him into a puppet. he dreams these dreams again, and other dreams as well. he makes the interpretation of these dreams his life's trajectory. Question: what happens to a boy who builds his life around obeying his dreams' ambiguous dictates? Answer: the boy becomes nothing much, a hollow shell obsessed with his own navel mind. he thinks a lot. he talks a lot and he walks a lot. he makes friends and loses them. he takes his mistress Frau Anders abroad, and when her neediness bores him, he casually sells her into sexual slavery to some random merchant, where she will be raped, abused, and disfigured. the boy doesn't think on that too much: at least she's out of his life, and now he can go back to pursuing his dreams. spoiler: Frau Anders shall return, repeatedly.
this is a beautifully written, often haunting, always rigorously intellectual book. it left me utterly cold.
ironically, while I enjoy books with a dreamy flavor and I appreciate the occasional dreamscape, I often become very bored very quickly when hearing someone recount their dreams at length (unless that dream features me, of course). and so I became very bored very quickly throughout roughly half of this book - the important half. Sontag was obsessed with the psychology of dreams when she wrote this, and it shows. I am... less obsessed with such things.
ironically, while I am sometimes seen as a sort of intellectual by the people in my life, especially my family, I often become very bored very quickly when surrounded by genuine intellectuals. I remember a recent dinner party with some old friends. the party included me and the wife of another guest, both of us professionals at the top of our careers and reasonably intelligent, in our ways. the other guests were a high-powered trade lobbyist, an international union organizer, and the CEO of a company focusing on cutting edge science. three of the most intelligent people I know. the three of them yammered on tirelessly - about the responsibility of the individual to their society & government and the responsibility of government to the individual & society - in a way that was fascinating but also distancing. intense but also boring. the wife and I exchanged many pointed glances; our attempts to steer the conversation towards other topics consistently failed. The Benefactor reminded me of that endless conversation. it was excitingly intellectual and much of it flew over my head and much of it delved into topics in which I haven't the faintest interest.
I guess, in the end, I'm just not too interested in a boy's dreams. or at least this boy's dreams....more
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