Homeless rifle dumpsters

"Homeless rifle dumpsters..."

How do you parse that?

Homeless can be an adjective or a noun. Rifle can be a noun or a verb. Dumpsters is a plural noun (like hipsters), but when preceded by nouns one might be tricked into believing the -s suffix signifies a verb in the third-person present tense.

But here's the full sentence:

"Homeless rifle dumpsters but so slowly, so leisurely, that poverty might be a pastime."

It's from Break-up, by Joanna Walsh, which disappoints me in exactly the way Sludge Utopia didn't. (Expectations.)

It's so fucking writerly. (Pretentious.)

Is it beautiful? Maybe. I'm just past the novel's half-way mark, and I find the prose almost unbearable. (Thematically, however, the novel is compelling. Required reading in the context of my year of love and loss.)

Subject, collective noun = "homeless." Typically an adjective, it's been nouned by abbreviating "homeless people." No article. (You couldn't substitute just any collective noun and achieve the same effect.)

Verb = "rifle." In the greater context — an urban post-Soviet landscape — the noun may be more expected.

But my brain doesn't yet categorize these words as subject and verb. My brain is still exploring the potential of the adjective-noun reading and wondering what qualifies as a "homeless rifle," until it realizes that "dumpsters" can't function as a verb. Try "rifle dumpsters" (dumpsters reserved exclusively for rifles?) that are homeless only to be left hanging verbless. Start over.

My psycholinguistic faculties take many milliseconds to understand that homeless people are rifling through dumpsters.

It may be beautiful, but it's unnecessarily demanding. The payoff isn't worth the effort. It's the kind of sentence I might have aspired to write myself some 20 years ago, for its gymnastic economy. Today when I read it I roll my eyes and scribble profanities in the margin.

Break.up in my head sounds like it was written to be the sort of thing writers read at readings, as performance, all pompous and breathy, even though it could be more satisfyingly and meaningfully read in an easy, natural manner. I wish I could find another tone in which to read Break.up; nothing about it sounds real. (Is literature performance?)

Things are surprising and mysterious

I have been feeling better, alive, and moved this week. There is a returned pleasure. There is a returned tone of pleasure that in depression I forget the feeling of. It is: that things are surprising and mysterious, and that I could happen to come upon some new or fascinating thing at any time. Sensual pleasures are of extreme value to me. I love soft lighting. I love psychedelic and strangely patterned music. I love being on the brink of focus. and I can feel it coming. I really can feel it! I don't know how to get this state back when I am unhappy, but you know what? I won't worry.

I don't have a desire to be dulled any longer like I did. I can return to a productive state without feeling as though I'm overbrimming or losing control of myself. I am changing what relationships I put my trust in, and who I'm willing to love. I am losing my desire to be with people to whom I cannot truly explain myself. Or I've lost it. I trust myself in ever a different way and my internal life has changed. Now it is a matter of rebuilding my external life to match it.

Sludge Utopia, by Catherine Fatima, is a weirdly compelling book with a fabulous title and very little plot to speak of.

In some ways it reminds me of Elif Batuman's The Idiot, only without the structure of the academic year, a much vaguer backdrop (making it therefore a more theoretical experience?). The narrator has her own Ivan and a summer abroad. She is more sexually experienced than the eponymous idiot, and for that perhaps she is more frustrated. From my more experienced perspective they are equally naive, and while I empathized with Selin, I desperately want to shake Catherine out of her own head.

I could almost write a book in response to this book, paragraph by paragraph (which in fact I was doing for a couple days, but I won't share that here). [Wouldn't that be awesome? Has anyone done that? A book-length response on a relatively micro level to a book that makes you want to scream at it and throw it across the room. Yes.]

It's about being in relation to an other, especially sexually. And being in relation to one's own sexuality. It's about confusing sensual pleasure with sexual pleasure. It also touches on the role of porn. The narrator (a 25-year-old woman) masturbates regularly (at some point, daily), and uses porn as an aid.

This fascinates me because it's been claimed that women are generally not visually stimulated (I fall into this category; porn movies don't turn me on — what's erotic is the imagination, and what's left to it), certainly not to the same extent as men, but I suspect that the advent of the internet and accessibility of porn has changed that, at least in the sense that it has for women normalized behaviours and established expectations of them. Women try to own it, be empowered by it, but I think it just reinforces patriarchical notions.

I have the sense that sex is rarer and less "natural" than it used to be. Certainly sexlessness seems to be a thing in Japan, and Western civilization's sexual satisfaction is increasingly virtual. Even while polyamory and nonmonogamy flourish, I suspect in part those behaviours have developed in an attempt to compensate for the decrease in quantity and maybe even quality of encounters. I should research this (how would I go about doing that?).

I guess that has nothing to do with the book ("auto-fictional novel" it's described as) per se. One blurb calls Fatima a female 21st-century Henry Miller. Definitely there's a similar frankness and an overlap in subject matter. It's been a while since I read Miller, but I think Fatima intellectualizes more than Miller does (both psychoanalyzing and philosophizing).

It's at times a frustrating read — 25-year-old Catherine is just plain wrong about so many things, says the 49-year-old — but it's unputdownable and both emotionally and intellectually provocative.

I suspect, as one grows, the need to bring everything to its climax recedes, and along with it the need to give yourself up and have it filled with someone else's self-offering. There are quieter, softer, and less certain ways of being with others.

You die for being available

In 1836, while rabbit-hunting on Arthur's Seat, a group of boys discovered 17 miniature coffins, each about 10 cm long, containing carved wooden dolls wearing custom clothes. The most reasonable theory behind their existence is that someone wanted to lay to rest the victims of Burke and Hare (who supplied the university with cadavers for dissection, by making their own), who without a proper burial would be denied entrance to heaven.

We saw eight of the coffins, with dolls, on display at the National Museum of Scotland.

The coffins are tiny and creepy and weird.

Stare at them long enough and you want to read a novel about them.

Thank goodness Ian Rankin wrote one.

Ian Rankin's The Falls is the twelfth Inspector Rebus novel. I'd read only one of them previously, the very first one. I'd absolutely wanted to read a Rebus novel before heading to Edinburgh. But having been, I needed to read The Falls, which incorporates the coffins of Arthur's Seat.

A new coffin doll has turned up near Edinburgh, clearly connected to a woman recently reported missing. The investigation follows unconventional paths, just under the radar of the official police authority, and turns to history as a key. The last few decades have in fact seen several more dolls and bodies, never connected until now.

Another line of inquiry goes online when it's discovered the missing person was in communication with Quizmaster, who led her on a kind of treasure hunt with cryptic crossword-like clues. Rankin notes in the introduction,

Cyberspace is the perfect haunt of creeps, charlatans and hunters. It's a place full of shape-shifters.

I thoroughly enjoyed reliving Edinburgh's fascinating gloom within these pages. I also really appreciated the mystery's resolution, landing solidly in that surprisingly difficult-to-achieve zone between eye-rollingly obvious and unfairly out of the blue.

"Interesting poem, this," he said, waving the book. It was more of a pamphlet really, pink cover with a line-drawing illustration. Then he recited a couple of lines:

'You do not die for being bad, you die
For being available.'

Rebus closed the book, put it down."I'd never thought of it like that before," he said, "but it's true."

Joy is an admirable goal

Canadian cover

"Joy is an admirable goal." Juliet said. "Completely unobtainable, of course."

I was so looking forward to a new Kate Atkinson book! Transcription satisfied. It bears her trademark sense of humour: dark, unfiltered, and self-reflective.

"Do you like art?" he asked abruptly, taking her off her guard.

"Art?" What did he mean by that? She had come under the wing of an enthusiastic art teacher at school, Miss Gillies. ("You have an eye," Miss Gillies told her. I have two, she thought.) She used to visit the National Gallery before her mother died. She disliked Fragonard and Watteau and all that pretty French stuff that would make any self-respecting sans-culottes want to chop someone's head off. Similarly Gainsborough and his affluent aristocrats posing smugly with their grand perspectives. And Rembrandt, for whom she had a particular disregard. What was so wonderful about an ugly old man who kept painting himself all the time?

Perhaps she didn't like art, in fact she felt quite opinionated about it. "Of course I like art," she said. "Doesn't everyone?"

"You'd be surprised. Anyone in particular?"

"Rembrandt," she said, placing her hand on her heart in a gesture of devotion. She liked Vermeer, but she wasn't going to share that with a stranger. "I revere Vermeer," she had once told Miss Gillies. It seemed a lifetime ago now.

US cover

Juliet thinks one thing, but says the opposite. She's perfectly suited to being a spy. And so she is recruited to MI5, initially to transcribe recordings of Nazi sympathizers reporting to their informant, but later she's awarded a mission of her own. When Juliet is first being interviewed, she's asked to choose whether she'd be a Communist or a Fascist (you know, if a gun were held to her head). I annoyed a lot of people while reading this book by asking them exactly that. (Funny, no one admits to choosing to be a Fascist.) So much depends, as Juliet notes, on who's holding the gun.

Choice, it seemed, was one of the first casualties of war.

One thing Transcription got me thinking about was personas and how we manage (or don't) to keep multiple personas straight. Juliet is coached to stick as close to the truth as possible; it's very easy — and dangerous — how one lie leads to another.

(How well do we really know anyone? We only know them insofar as they let us know them. Are we the same person to everyone? Surely my neighbour, my coworker, my friend from university would describe me in completely different terms. [And what do I make of my neighbours' visitors? I have concocted their stories from what I've seen and what I've heard.] To what extent do I manipulate their perceptions of me?)

Although the story is told in the third person, it takes the point of view of Juliet throughout the novel. We are treated to the running commentary inside Juliet's head, not anyone else's head. As noted in Slate:

She notices everything, judges most of it, says little, and is listened to even less. In this sense, Atkinson suggests, all women are spies; they appear to be what others need them to be and contain a secret world all their own.

UK cover

I like Juliet; she questions everything, she thinks things she's not supposed to think.

She fingered the strand of pearls at her neck. Inside each pearl there was little piece of grit. That was the true self of the pearl, wasn't it? The beauty of the pearl was just the poor oyster trying to protect itself. From the grit. From the truth.

One could say it's an unreliable narrator, and it's thanks to this that Atkinson pulls off the plot twists.

Somewhere along the line in her own past life she must have taken a wrong turning, Juliet thought. Why else would she be sitting here? Giselle came into Juliet's mind. Despite dying at the hands of the Nazis, she had never merited the soubriquet "poor." You had to ask yourself, which was better — to have sex with any number of interesting (albeit possibly evil) men (and some women too, apparently), to be glamorously decadent, to ingest excessive amounts of drugs and alcohol and die a horrible but heroic death at a relatively young age, or to end up in Schools Broadcasting at the BBC?

It was a relief when five o'clock came around.

Juliet never obtains joy, of course.

[The covers are so different! I like the Canadian one best; the title font wins it. The flamingo is a reference to a codename late in the story.]

Your eloquence was boring in the end

But You are not without fault, O Season. I shall tell You wherein lay Your fault. You did not wish, O Season, to confine Yourself to the boundaries of reality. No reality satisfied You. You looked beyond every realization. Not finding satisfaction in reality, You created superstructures out of metaphors and poetic figures. You moved about in the associations, allusions, imponderabilia between things. Every thing alluded to some other thing, and that one appealed another farther off, and so on, without end. Your eloquence was boring in the end. People became fed up with that coming and going on waves of endless phraseology. That's right, phraseology — pardon the word. This became clear when, here and there, a yearning for relevance began to awaken in many souls. At that moment You were already defeated. The boundaries of Your universality became visible, and Your great style, Your beautiful baroque, which was appropriate for reality during Your good times, now turned out to be a mannerism. Your sweetness and Your pensiveness bore the mark of youthful exaltation. Your nights were immense and endless, like the megalomaniacal sighs of lovers, but they were swarms of apparitions, like the ravings of hallucinators. Your fragrances were excessive and beyond the capacity of humans for rapture. Under the magic of Your touch everything dematerialized and grew toward its more distant, always higher, forms. Your apples were eaten while dreaming about the fruits of heavenly landscapes, and near Your peach trees people thought about ethereal fruits that could be consumed by the sense of smell alone. You had on Your palette only the highest registers of colours; you did not know the satiey and firmness of dark, earthy, rich brown. Autumn is the yearning of the human soul for materiality, for relevance, for boundaries. When for obscure reasons people's metaphors, projects, dreams begin yearning for realization, the time of autumn arrives.

— from "Autumn" in Collected Stories, by Bruno Schulz.

Summer's really over now; it did feel like wave upon wave, like megalomaniacal sighs of lovers. It was too much. "Autumn is the yearning of the human soul for materiality, for relevance, for boundaries." Is that what I crave now?

I am rereading Schulz's Street of Crocodiles (aka Cinnamon Shops). It's a book club selection, so I thought I'd give the new translation a go. This volume includes The Sanatorium Under the Hourglass and few other stories.

Like this past summer, it's overwhelmingly lush.

The terror of exposing herself

Julie wanted eternal reincarnation; she wanted to experience all kinds of existences, and from time to time enjoy a luxurious and beautiful life.

Here's a book I didn't much care for: Little Reunions, by Eileen Chang. I'd been trying to read this since March, and kept failing to find the right headspace for it. But now it's done. It bored me.

Too many characters I didn't care anything about — I had trouble keeping them straight. And I could never quite figure out the tone with which to read it. Is it funny or melancholic? Is the awkwardness in the translation (from Chinese) or in the characters, or is it a function of being a world completely foreign to me.

Julie, however, devoted little time to revisiting the past and so such thoughts about her family were fleeting. Memories, happy or not, always embodied a doleful note, which, no matter how faint, Julie felt a strong aversion to. She never sought out melancholy, but life unavoidably overflowed with it. Just thinking along these lines made her feel liked she was standing in the portal of an ancient edifice, peering through the moonlight and dark shadows that permeated the ruins of a once noble and illustrious household, which was now nothing more that scattered shards of roof tiles and piles of rubble from collapsed walls. That instant of knowing what once existed there.

The first half of the book deals with Julie's upbringing and extended family. There's a complicated family hierarchy of wives and concubines that's tricky to navigate. There are secrets and scandals — many of them not so secret at all. But for the most part, these secrets are only obliquely referenced.

Much of this novel reads like a gossip column, with all its tangents of who visited whom wearing what under what pretences. Julie's mother has a string of lovers; she is emotionally and often geographically distant from Julie. (Julie's father, meanwhile, is an opium addict — I would love to read a novel about the women that fell into his world.)

It's not until the second half of the novel that Julie falls in love (kind of) and gets married (kind of). I had to read between the lines not only to figure out what Julie felt, but also to piece together what actually happened.

At one point, in a seemingly complete disconnect, the story jumps for a few pages to New York City a decade into the future, Julie bathing while waiting for the abortionist.

At another point, there's this sex scene:

"Hey! What are you doing?" she asked, terrified. His hair brushed against her thigh — the head of a wild beast.

The beast sips at the eternal springs of a dark cavern in the netherworld, slurping with his curled tongue. She is a bat hanging upside down at the mouth of a cave. Like a hermit hidden withing the bowels of the mountain being explored, encroached upon, she felt helpless and hopeless. Now the small beast sips at her innermost core, small mouthfuls one at a time. The terror of exposing herself mingled with a burning desire: She wants him back, now! Back to her arms, back to where she can see him.

This is such a strange metaphorical paragraph that is completely out of keeping with the rest of the text. But! "The terror of exposing herself" — how telling is that?!

Maybe that's the thing, and the source of awkwardness, the terror of exposing oneself. Clearly Julie is brimming with feelings, with regard to her mother, her aunt, her husband, as well as lesser characters like her father and her brother, but is never given rein to express them.

So, as with many "young socialite"-type stories, it moves from comedy to tragedy in a flip of the hair.

Reviews

The following reviews gave me some context (Little Reunions is a thinly veiled fictionalization of Chang's life story), but very little insight...

Asymptote:

The endless network of cousins and concubines is less a loving family than a complicated business concern filled with unpaid accounts and threatened lawsuits.

Harvard Review:

Indeed, this is a novel about the varied independence of three women, and all the contingent thrills, sacrifices, and dangers of trying to live a life beyond a culture of submission.

Los Angeles Review of Books:

Chang, through her writing, was teaching me how to be seen in a large urban center, instructing me in the ways a person can come to be viewed among many, and how one’s individualism allows that person to become a part of the vast world around her.

See also "Before the Revolution" in The New York Review of Books:

Chang's equitable worldview, made possible by her bicultural background, does much to explain why Little Reunions sold so well when it appeared in 2009. Many middle-class Chinese readers, wealthier and better-informed than their predecessors but feeling morally adrift, hoped for a vision of enlightened forgiveness and dignified equality with the West. Such a prospect was a bracing alternative to the draining tantrums about national humiliation and payback that suffused the Internet and continued to appear in state-approved books like Unhappy China, another best seller in 2009.

Excerpt.