How do you say, "thank you"?

With books, of course!

To share some of the awesome literary love I've been experiencing lately, I'd love to give away a couple of books to a couple of readers: The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño, and 2666, by Roberto Bolaño (in the newly released 1-volume paperback format).

Both books are brand new, fresh from the publisher (Picador). They have been thoroughly sniffed and have the feline paw of approval (the cat's a bit of savage detective herself). Since I already have well-worn copies of these, I'd like to pass these on (but I'm keeping the cat).

Here's a non-exhaustive list of some of the awesomeness that abounds:

The ARCs I've been receiving as a result of Twitter announcements and contests — I actually don't really understand Twitter, or how people use it, or how I should best make use of it, but will love it for now for at least this thing. The contest I won at Bookeywookey (Ted has weird and wonderful literary interests, happily sometimes intersecting with my own). The love from Susan at Pages Turned. The great group of people I stumbled upon who have been reading 2666 this summer, and their respective blogs. The dramatic spray of raspberry pink gladiolas on my kitchen shelf, which has nothing literary about it — I just love them and they make me happy! The Infinite Summer and how it (along with the subject of its attention, Infinite Jest) has sparked heartfelt conversations in both blogland and real life. The book drive I kind of got roped into organizing at work after I not so seriously proposed the idea, never expecting anyone to actually like the idea, as a means of not only raising some money for charity but also clearing some much-needed closet space; the fact that coworkers are bringing in their books to contribute to the cause (and I am trying very hard not to judge them by their cast-offs); the fact that other coworkers are actually buying these books; the fact that, being that I'm kind of in charge, I kind of get first dibs, and in this way I came to have an unread copy of Geek Love, which a bunch of people say is like their favourite book ever and now maybe soon I'll maybe be in a position to understand why; the fact that it turns out that Tony is not representative of my coworkers' mentality when he says, "Are you guys only selling, like, reading books?" (by which it turns out he meant something like, "as opposed to reference manuals"); the fact that it seems more coworkers read, and think, and breathe outside of this office space than I previously imagined; the fact that I had a conversation with a near stranger about Anna Karenina. Also, the fact of Generosity, by Richard Powers, the reading of which brought on my own kind of quasi-spiritual breakdown in recent days. Thanks, you crazy, messed-up world — even when I feel like I'm getting the raw end of the deal and times when work is stupid crazy and times when I want and can't have just 10 quiet minutes all to myself and times when I wish my sister lived around the corner so we could go out for wings and beer, somehow everything always turns out OK. Rather mysteriously, really.

If you are interested in receiving either The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño, or 2666, by Roberto Bolaño, state your preference in the comments section and tell me why you want to read it for your name to be entered into the drawing. This giveaway is open to anyone, anywhere. You have until midnight, October 2, 2009, to state your case. I'll announce the recipients shortly thereafter.

By that time, I should be finished reading my own copy of 2666! I fully endorse both these books as being worth the time and effort.

The Savage Detectives
Comments.
Excerpt: Stars like holographic projections.
Excerpt: Two islands.
Comments.

2666
Excerpt: Separate and interminable suburbs, with comments.
The part about the critics.
The part about Amalfitano.
Excerpt: A walk on the beach.
The parts about Fate and about the crimes and a vast introductory digression in which I compare and contrast 2666 and Infinite Jest.

Thanks!

Love is cheap

Helena tells me she's going to remember yesterday forever!: It was the best day of her whole entire life! And I'm the best mommy ever!

Because!: after an un-fun morning of broken-down-refrigerator clean-up and unenthusiastically embarking on a previously planned shopping expedition (the girl needs pants! and she's really picky about her pants!) in the only time window available in the foreseeable month, I agreed that we could allow ourselves (I mean, her) a few fun minutes to browse the dollar store, and there I actually endorsed and funded the acquisition of a bow and arrow for a whole buck twenty-five.

I suspect she'll forget this day well before I do.

First time

She was at least 75 years old, a frail stick figure with a punk shock of white on top and an orange lipstick to match her jacket.

Some days more than others, inexplicably, the métro platform is more zoo than the quiet order of harmless commuters still half asleep and on their way to work. This was one of those days.

I navigated the hub, the point of transfer to another line. She was frantic to latch onto a face, and she chose mine.

Does this train go to...? Her voice trailed off, unable to maintain the volume her eyes bespoke. I had to ask her to repeat the question, the place names. Yes, I assured her.

Oh good, she smiled. It's the first time I ever take the métro. The train pulled up and we squeezed into the car.

I nodded her a reassurance when I disembarked a few stations later. She was still smiling, with all the nervous trepidation of a child on her first day of school.

I've been taking the métro for years. I'd like to believe that I'm pretty good at not letting adventures pass me by, but I'm hoping there'll be something left for me to try for the first time when I'm 75.

A day of no labour

We took the cat out of the city to put the chat in chalet.

Dinner theater

Mason Mason asks the obvious. "Why don't we write online? Aren't journals just dead blogs?"

Russell has prepped three days for this question. He defends private writing against writing for any stranger with a search engine. "I want you to think and feel, not sell. Your writing should be an intimate meal, not dinner theater."

— from Generosity, by Richard Powers.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

The parts about Fate and about the crimes and a vast introductory digression in which I compare and contrast 2666 and Infinite Jest

I left off from Roberto Bolaño's 2666 in order to read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest along with a couple thousand other people in the Infinite Summer reading group project. Plus, I really needed the breathing space, after all the rape, murder, and mutilation of part 4.

Weirdly, there are various unpleasantnesses to contend with in IJ as well. But they are deeply human and emotional, and so kind of cathartic. The murders in 2666, on the other hand, are numbing.

Right. So. I'd actually started in on the next and final part, and wanted and still want to speed ahead. But this is a weird little exercise in restraint for me, cuz I'm more about the go with the flow whatever feels right when it comes to reading, yet I want and feel it's important to think a little about what's going on in 2666, to figure it out, to draw it out — not in the sense of prolonging the experience but rather more to engage in conversation with and see it become itself. And it feels right to do so, so I'm going with that.

Also a bit weird w/r/t reading 2666 interlaced with IJ is this urge to compare and contrast these 2 books, or at least the experiences of reading these 2 books, when really they're almost not at all alike apart from their size. As part of an Infinite Summer roundtable, Kevin Guilfoile said, "During the Tournament of Books I said about Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 that in order for a novel to be a masterpiece it probably also has to be at least a little bit terrible. I said that with some tongue in my cheek, although compared to Infinite Jest I found 2666 to be a lot less ambitious and a lot more terrible." I found myself feeling a bit defensive about this, being as I was pretty fresh off a deep immersion in 2666 and at that point still well behind the IJ schedule. But I've had a very different kind of engagement with the books. And I'm temporarily thinking he may be right.

There was a tipping point with IJ: there came a page when something clicked, it made some kind of sense, I got it, and everything that came before was richer and being informed by what came next. I am still waiting for such a point in 2666, fully expecting it never to come. 2666 is definitely the more cryptic of the 2 novels. It started with a fairly heavy mood, and this has been maintained to the two-thirds mark, which is what necessitated my need for a little breathing space away from it; something hangs over this book, some impending doom, and that's fine — great actually — it's lofty and poetic and mysterious — but to what end?

Where does this leave me? Recognizing that the ambitions of these books are different (I think). Apples and oranges. Un cheval, une patate.

They are both, I realize now, somewhat surreal — in that kind of slippery, Lynchian sense of the word — and dreams figure quite prominently in both, with that vaguely nightmarish hint of something slipping between the known realm and someplace generally left untapped. Ironically (and let's ignore whether I'm using that term correctly), while IJ is set in the near future, or an alternate now, I found it much easier to relate to, to accept these characters as real; 2666 is based in our world (and inspired by true events), yet I'm not connecting with the characters, our view of which is quite controlled, filtered, distant (and the same could be said w/r/t its plot) (and this distance serves its own purpose — I merely comment on the fact of it).

Also, a Lovecraftian horror, as Jonathan Lethem pointed out:

As the four become sexually and emotionally entangled, the puzzle of their devotion to a writer who declines their interest — declines, in fact, ever to appear — inches like a great Lovecraftian shadow over their lives.

In IJ there's a face in the floor, and the black, billowy triangle-ish shape of horror, as easily attributable to Lovecraft as to Lynch.

IJ has earnestness, and a fair bit of humour. 2666 has... I want to say poetry, but I don't think that's quite true, not the way the language in Bolaño's short novels sings with awe about our nobler purpose or the dirt under our fingernails. But, OK, it has this "quality" about its language, and this other admirable thing I can't think of any other way to describe but mood.

The Part about Fate
I didn't much like The Part about Fate, being part 3 and one of the smaller parts of 2666. There's some good stuff in there, which I'll get to in a minute, but this is the way I feel about this part and let me see if I can figure out why that is.

It's not about fate as destiny; it's about American Oscar Fate, whose real name is Quincy Williams, and I don't know why they call him Oscar Fate at work, but they do — maybe it's his chosen pen name as a journalist. Well, maybe you could say the whole thing really is about fate, the name must've been chosen deliberately, symbolically, and I wonder whether it was Fate in the original Spanish or whether the name was translated.

It starts with the death of his mother. Then there's the death of a coworker. He has odd dreams, and starts to occasionally vomit, here and there fairly randomly. Aggressive snippets of movies, of television, or other people's conversations seem to accidentally infiltrate his consciousness, which for the most part is pretty blank, or maybe numb (with grief? exhaustion?) or lost. Something about rap music and suicide and misogyny.

Fate is on assignment to interview Barry Seaman, a former Panther who did some serious prison time and published a book of ribs recipes. Seaman now mostly gives lectures, one of which Fate attends, and it discusses Danger, Money, Food, Stars, and Usefuleness in a fairly random, disconnected way; Seaman stretches to segue very clumsily from one topic to the next — it's almost a stream of consciousness, and I have the impression some of his audience may perceive his mental workings as profound, but I think it's merely primitive. Seaman has the air of a prophet about him, and I don't mean to diminish how "interesting" his speech is, but the lecture as a whole doesn't really fit together; as is the case with many prophets, maybe it's for the audience to find their own significance in it. Seaman does, however, profess an apreciation of metaphor and love for reading, with a deep fondness for An Abridged Digest of the Complete Works of Voltaire.

Fate is reading The Slave Trade. He heads to Mexico to cover a boxing match, the story his dead coworker was supposed to be on. Fate witnesses a couple of Camaros (which I now know figure in the part that follows) and starts hearing about the killings in Santa Teresa.

In the nineteenth century, toward the middle or the end of the nineteenth century, said the white-haired man, society tended to filter death through the fabric of words. [...] Most human beings existed on the outer fringes of society. In the seventeenth century for example, at least twenty percent of the merchandise on every slave ship died. By that I mean the dark-skinned people who were being transported for sale, to Virginia, say. And that didn't get anyone upset or make headlines in the Virginia papers or make anyone go out and call for the ship captain to be hanged. But if a plantation owner went crazy and killed his neighbor and then went galloping back home, dismounted and promptly killed his wife, two deaths in total, Virginia society spent the next six months in fear, and the legend of the murderer on horseback might linger for generations. [...] [They] weren't part of society [...]. What happened to them could be written, you might say, it was legible. That said, words back then were mostly used in the art of avoidance, not of revelation. Maybe they revealed something all the same.

Absolutely Santa Teresa is the fringes of society. (Fate wants to do some reportage about the situation, but his editor's not interested.) So this, finally, is the heart of Bolaño's ambition: to reveal the avoidance.

(As I'm sitting here rethumbing these pages, I realize how many hints there are of things to come, characters and scenarios we will meet again. Of one personage, a suspect: "He has the face of a dreamer, but of a dreamer who's dreaming at great speed. A dreamer whose dreams are far out ahead of our dreams." I'm suddenly seeing all sorts of commonalities with IJ — the fragmentation of the narrative, a cubist view, an other-dimensional perspective, the problem of the speed at which we process experience. This part about Fate is in fact much more vital to the whole than I'd initially given it credit. Oh, and: both writers reference David Lynch quite extensively.)

They talk about the end of the sacred, which I take to mean something like intimacy and connectedness in the way we engage with our world.

And so Fate is immersed in the seamy underbelly of Santa Teresa. I'm not sure whether the boxing match serves a purpose other than as a plot device to bring this journalist to Mexico.

I see now that The Part about Fate begins with its end:

When did it all begin? he thought. When did I go under? A dark, vaguely familiar Aztec lake. The nightmare. How do I get away? How do I take control? And the questions kept coming: Was getting away what he really wanted? Did he really want to leave it all behind? And he also thought: the pain doesn't matter anymore. And also: maybe it all began with my mother's death. And also: the pain doesn't matter, as long as it doesn't get any worse, as long as it isn't unbearable. And also: fuck, it hurts, fuck, it hurts. Pay it no mind, pay it no mind. And all around him, ghosts.

(Aztecs turn up again on page 473: “The Aztecs cooked posole with pieces of human flesh.”)

The Part about the Crimes
The Part about the Crimes is a grotesque and fairly disjointed inventory of the gruesome crimes occurring in Santa Teresa.

The following passage is from early on in this lengthy part. I love the way it dances around the space, the focus flitting from the two people engaged in dialogue to the figurants (a word I would not have used before having read IJ) in the room, wafting through the subject of the conversation itself and describing (the way you describe a geometric figure) the relationships within that space.

What is sacrophobia exactly? Juan de Dios Martínez asked the director. Teach me a little about it. The director said her name was Elvira Campos and she ordered a whiskey. Juan de Dios Martínez ordered a beer and glanced around the bar. On the terrace an accordion player, followed by a violinist, was trying to attract the atention of a man dressed like a rancher. A narco, thought Juan de Dios Martínez, although since the man had his back to him, he couldn't say who it was. Sacraphobia is fear or hatred of the sacred, of sacred objects, especially from your own religion, said Elvira Campos. He thought about making a reference to Dracula, who fled crucifixes, but he was afraid the director would laugh at him. And you believe the Penitent suffers from sacraphobia? I've given it some thought, and I do. A few days ago he disemboweled a priest and another person, said Juan de Dios Martínez. The accordion player was very young, twenty at most, and round as an apple. The way he held himself, however, made him look at least twenty-five, except when he smiled, which was often, and then all of a sudden it was clear how young and inexperienced he was. He doesn't carry the knife to hurt anyone, any living thing, I mean, but to destroy the sacred images he finds in churches, said the director. Shall we call each other by our first names? Juan de Dios Martínez asked her. Elvira Campos smiled and nodded. You're a very attractive woman, said Juan de Dios Martínez. Thin and attractive. You don't like thin women, Inspector? asked the director. The violinist was taller than the accordionist and she was wearing a black blouse and black leggings. She had long straight hair down to her waist and sometimes she closed her eyes, especially when the accordeonist sang and played. The saddest thing, thought Juan de Dios Martínez, was that the narco, or the suited back of the man he thought was narco, was hardly paying any attention to them, busy as he was talking to a man with face of a mongoose and hooker with the face of a cat. Weren't we going ot call each other by our first names? asked Juan de Dios Martínez. You're right, said the director. So are you sure the Penitent suffers from sacraphobia? The director said she'd been looking through the archives at the asylum to see whether she could find some former patient with a case history like the Penitent's. She hadn't come up with anything. If he's as old as you say he is, I'd guess he's been institutionalized at some point. The accordion player suddenly started to stamp in time to the music. From where they were sitting they couldn't hear him, but he was making faces, working his mouth and eyebrows, and then he ruffled his hair with one hand and seemed to howl with laughter. The violinist had her eyes closed. The narco's head swiveled. Juan de Dios Martínez thought to himself that the boy had finally gotten what he wanted. There's probably a file on him in some psychiatric center in Hermosillo or Tijuana. It can't be such a rare case. Maybe he was on medication until recently. Maybe he stopped taking it, said teh director. Are you married, do you live with anyone? asked Juan de Dios Martínez in an almost inaudible voice. I live alone, said the director. But you have children, I saw the pictures in your office. I have a daughter, she's married. Juan de Dios Martínez felt something release inside of him and he laughed. Don't tell me you're already a grandmother. That's not the kind of thing you say to a woman, Inspector. How old are you? asked the director. Thirty-four, said Juan de Dios Martínez. Seventeen years younger than me. You don't look more than forty, said the inspector. The director laughed: I exercise every day, I don't smoke, I drink very little, I eat right, I used to go running every morning. Not anymore? No, now I've bought myself a treadmill. The two of them laughed. I listen to Bach on my headphones and I almost always run three or four miles a day. Sacraphobia. If I tell my colleagues the Penitent is suffering from sacraphobia, they'll laugh at me. The man with the mongoose face rose from his chair and said something into the accordionist's ear. Then he sat down again and teh accordionist's mouth screwed up into a pout. Like a child on teh verg of tears. The violinis had her eyes open and she was smiling. The narco and the woman with cat face bent their heads together. The narco's nose was big and bony and aristocratic looking. But aristocratic looking how? There was a wild expression on the accordionist's face, except for his lips. Unfamiliar currents surged through the inspector's chest. The world is a strange and fascinating place, he thought.

The Penitent is a desecrator of churches, probably unconnected to the murders, but it's all connected, isn't it? I bookmarked this passage when I first read it more than a month ago, but I think it might highlight yet another theme, which is somewhat illuminated, I see now, by the conversation in part 3: What is sacred?

But the murders! Bolaño took as his basis for 2666 real events in Ciudad Juárez: According to Amnesty International, as of February 2005 more than 800 bodies had been found, and over 3000 women were still missing. Bolaño gives us a repetitive forensic detailing. I lost count of how many murders (rather, murder victims) he describes, but there are many. To read this was a mind-numbing experience. I found myself more than once thinking, oh, another murder, just like all the rest, I'll just skim this bit, it's just another body, which is kind of the point Bolaño is making, that these women and girls have been dehumanized, by their killers and by the authorities, not to mention the society as a whole that brought the bulk of them to live on the fringes of society in the first place, and it's a startling revelation as a reader to realize that I also am guilty for failing to see each victim as uniquely human.

Bolaño at least offers us occasional glimpses of the lives they led when they were last seen. He is giving them a kind of voice. (It is the lot also of Florita Almada, television seer, to be giving the girls of Santa Teresa a voice. She appears alongside a ventriloquist.)

There are patterns, there must be patterns, but they are hard to discern. Then there are murders that break from the pattern and establish new patterns. More murders, they follow an old pattern. Newer patterns emerge that are a combination of previous patterns. It's clear no one person is responsible.

Surely some investigator must see patterns too. You'd think. (The very young and ironically named Lalo Cura — la locura, lunacy — is perhaps the clearest-seeing of the lot.) But no investigation lasts more than a few days. Most (all?) of the cases are shelved. No one seems to care.

Could all these men, could this whole culture of men, in separate and multiple incidents, of their individual accords, and maybe some of them conspiratorially, could they be killings their own wives, sisters, daughters?

Are the murders simply being ignored, or are they being covered up?

Adam Kirsch writes the following in his review, "Slouching Towards Santa Teresa: Roberto Bolaño's utterly strange masterpiece":

At the same time, Bolaño manages to suggest that the violence in Santa Teresa is something much more than a local crime wave. One of the characters who looms into individuality, out of the anonymous crowd of the dead, is Klaus Haas, a German-born American citizen who is imprisoned by the Mexican police as a scapegoat for the murders. He may or may not have killed a woman — Bolaño never lets us know for sure — but he is certainly not "the Santa Teresa killer," if only because the murders continue after he is arrested. Yet when Sergio Gonzales, a journalist reporting on his case, calls Haas in jail, Bolaño writes that over the phone line he "heard the sound of the desert and something like the tread of an animal." It is an understated but clear allusion to Yeats' "The Second Coming," where the poet sees "somewhere in sands of the desert/ A shape with lion body and the head of a man," and asks, "what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

In this indirect fashion, Bolaño hints that Haas is, if not an anti-Christ, at least a sign of the times: a beast whose advent signals some cosmic realignment. It is just one of countless moments in 2666 that suggest the metaphysical dimension of Bolaño's vision. The attentive reader will be reminded of a remark by a minor character in the novel's third section, some 200 pages earlier: "No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them." And then she might remember a strange dream that Espinoza, one of the critics, had in Part 1, in which "he could see the still, bright desert, such a solar yellow it hurt his eyes, and the figures on horseback, whose movements — the movements of horses and riders — were barely perceptible, as if they were living in a world different from ours, where speed was different, a kind of speed that looked to Espinoza like slowness, although he knew it was only the slowness that kept whoever watched from losing his mind."

While the title "2666" is often thought to refers to a year, this review reinforces my impression that the "666" portion of it is critical, as in a 2nd coming of 666.

Clearly Haas is a scapegoat, but he's also very creepy.

In his dreams he saw himself walking the corridors of the prison, the different cell block, and he could see his eyes like a hawk's as he strode that labyrinth of snores and nightmares, aware of what was going on in each cell, until suddenly he could go no farther and he came to a stop at the edge of an abyss (since the prison of his dreams was like a castle built on the edge of a bottomless abyss). There, unable to retreat, he lifted his arms, as if beseeching the heavens (which were as dark as the abyss), and tried to say something to a legion of miniature Klaus Haases, speak to them, warn, them, impart advice, but he realized, or for an instant he had the impression, that someone had sewn his lips shut. (p 488)

More dreams!

What are you trying to say to me? asked Sergio González. That here in prison they know I'm innocent, said Haas. And how do they know it? asked Haas. That was a little harder for me to figure out. It's like a noise you hear in a dream. The dream, like everything dreamed in enclosed spaces, is contagious. Suddenly someone dreams it and after a while half the prisoners dream it. But the noise you hear isn't part of the dream, it's real. The noise belongs to a separate order of things. Do you understand? First someone and then everyone hears a noise in a dream, but the noise is from real life, not the dream. The noise is real. Do you understand? (p 450)

There's a psychic connection between Florita and Haas. I'm thinking the book she describes (pages 431-433) that faithfully depicts the shepherding experience was written by Haas (aka Archimboldi?).

Haas like to sit on the ground, against the wall, in the shady part of the yard. And he liked to think. He liked to imagine that God didn't exist. For three minutes, at least. He also liked to think about the insignificance of human beings. Five minutes. If pain didn't exist, he thought, we would be perfect. Insignificant and ignorant of pain. Fucking perfect. But there was pain to fuck everything up. Finally he would think about luxury. The luxury of memory, the luxury of knowing a language or several languages, the luxury of thinking and not running away. Then he opened his eyes and contemplated, as if in a dream, some of the Bisontes, who were moving around the sunny part of the yard, the other side, as if they were grazing. The Bisontes graze in the prison yard, he thought, and that calmed him like a fast-acting tranquilizer, because sometimes, though not often, Haas started the day as if his head had been pierced with the point of a knife.

There's some recurring imagery: the crater, the abyss.

Shortly after they left the ranch they passed an enormous black stone. On the stone Lalo thought he saw a Gila monster, motionless, staring into the endless west. They say that stone is really a meteorite, said Pedro Negrete. In a gully, farther to the north the Río Paredes curved, and from the road the tops of trees were visible like a green-black carpet with a cloud of dust hanging over them were Pedro Rengifo's cattle came to drink each afternoon. But if it was a meteorite, said Pedro Negrete, it would've left a crater, and where's the crater? When Lalo Cura looked at the black stone again in the rearview mirror, the Gila monster was gone. (p 399)

This oasis of horror in the desert ("The desert is an endless sea." p 559), as if by meteor a great evil embedded itself there in the earth.

If it had been up to her, everyone around her, the shadowy figures on the edges of the photograph, would have disappeared instantly, and so would the room, the prison, jailers and jailed, the hundred-year-old walls of the Santa Teresa penitentiary, and all that was left would be a crater, and in the crater there would be only silence and the vague presence of the lawyer and Haas, chained in the depths. (p 591)

I lost track of many character's names and their backstories: druglords, reporters, government officials. In my brief re-skimming of this part a month after my first read-through, different portions are jumping out at me as significant. I suspect this truly would be a book much richer on rereading, being informed by the knowledge of how it all comes together.

A favourite sentence: "The scarred moon still shone in the sky" (p 401).

Generosity abounds

Every day, the last few weeks, I rush to check the mailbox. I've been waiting and waiting and waiting.

Amid the usual bills and flyers I've had a couple nice surprises — for example, review copies of Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked (I like most of his other novels better than this, but still breezy and delightful) and Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood (slowgoing, so far — I'm not in the right headspace for it, but maybe the upcoming cottage weekend will resolve that).

But I've been waiting for something in particular. And yesterday it came!

I pulled it out of the mailbox, and when I recognized the publisher's address, the world ceased to exist. "Oh my god oh my god oh my god" as I carried it reverentially into the house. Bag dropped off my shoulder, I let other mail slip to the ground. Child babbling incoherently in an auditory distance (she's right beside me, but she sounds like I'm underwater). My fingers fumbling at the pull tab. J-F said "You look like a junkie who just scored 10k of crack-cocaine. Do they send that by mail?" They do. It is.

Richard Powers' Generosity, about the genotype for happiness.

The blurb asks us, "What will happen to life when science identifies the genetic basis of happiness? Who will own the patent? Do we dare revise our own temperaments?"

I've been grappling with the problem of happiness for some 30 years. I think this feeling — when you open the mailbox and find an advance reading copy of a novel with an astounding premise that taps one of your own life obsessions by a guy who wrote one of your favourite books of all time — is something akin to it.

Peaches

So yesterday, yesterday an urge came over me, an urge to buy a record album (do people buy those anymore? a CD? what if you download it, what do you call it?) that I've been thinking about for some time, and it's ridiculous how much I've had to think through this purchase — a $20 purchase! — I mean, I'm a grown-up with a decent income etc, I spend more than that on coffee in any given week — thinking about how I could get it cheaper if I ordered it online, except I'd have to wait days for it to be delivered, which is extra dumb, cuz I've been contemplating this whole thing for weeks already, or how about I just download it and have it instantaneously?, but though I buy some songs that way it's just so ephemeral and what if some faceless corporate power decides I'm listening to the wrong sort of music and having remote access to my music library decides to modify my behaviour by removing some potentially subversive influences?, and besides, I need a CD for the car, right?, cuz this is a great roadtrip type of CD, so even though we have one of those iPod adapter thingies to play it in the car, the couple times we used it for some reason it wasn't so easy because like you can't charge it up and play it at the same time or something like that, so I decided finally: CD it would have to be, and yesterday, well, yesterday afternoon I decided I wanted it now — I'd been sitting there all day, at my desk, and all through lunch, I ate my sandwich at my desk, powering through this project, and so I needed a break and I wanted this CD now, now was the time, so I stepped out over to the record store (do we call them that anymore? music store? entertainment needs centre? you know, the HMV) and I headed downstairs and there I saw the most amazingly beautiful and truly weird thing: there's this guy at a listening station, which is more like a semicircular customer-service counter with like maybe 5 plug-in set-ups, and he's a fairly small man but taking a lot of space; he's like 50-ish, wearing a faded red t-shirt, ballcap, and salt-and-pepper beard, and he's totally rocking out to whatever it is he's sampling at the listening station, playing the most vigorous air guitar I can ever recall witnessing, and you got the feeling he wasn't sampling a new release out of curiosity, he was in for the duration, with some classic album by his favourite band, he couldn't possibly be here on his coffee break, he was so fully in the music, it was a sight to behold, and so I picked up this album I'd so been wanting, being, by the way, Peaches: The Very Best of the Stranglers, which truly does represent their very lovely best, and I browsed a bit, and tried to find out what song was playing overhead, but I can't remember the snippet of lyrics now that had me in thrall, and I daydreamed a bit, or loitered really, just figuring out which route I should take back to the office so I could pick up a good, not average, cup of coffee on the way, and I paid for my CD, and on my way out Mr Air Guitar was still going strong and completely oblivious to the fact that he was at a listening station on the lower level of a chainstore, and this is a beautiful thing.

There was a chill wind, but on my return walk, the sun was at my back boring a hole through my shoulder, it felt like, even while my arms were bathed in cool.

The workday finished, toute la gang headed across the street for the annual company-wide summer 5 à 7. A cocktail this and a caesar that, it was well after sept that The Project took hold, to amass (from, eg, early leavers, pregnant women) sufficient drink tickets (44) in order to be able to order a bottle of champagne, but so we (well, mostly I — I admit, The Project was totally of my conception) negotiated this to a lesser number (23) for a bottle of French vin mousseux but not of the Champagne region, with even enough tickets (2) left over to get someone else a martini, and I had an interesting chat with a heretofore unknown coworker about Infinite Jest.

And I've been listening to my new record album CD all day.

What ever happened to Leon Trotsky?

Reading in transit

We are all of us pressed against the metro door. I am between a bongo-playing bongo player, with his bongo, and a robe-wearing, Krishna-reading Krishna. He is reading about spiritual development.

I am reading Maud Newton's suggested reading list with regard to doubt.

I see someone at the next door reading Firmin, in French. I want to shout out, Hey, I think I know you. Are you a rat too? But I don't.

We are all of us travelling in the same direction — for five minutes our lives follow the same physical path — but we are going to different places.

Infinite speculation

So at some point, about a week ago, I was ready to say this is an awesome book, this Infinite Jest, and while I spent much of the first couple hundred pages admiring it, I was also somewhat confused and not really relating to it.

But I'm done now. (I checked the Infinite Summer reading schedule at about that point and freaked out to find that I was a whole week behind, what with having forgone other reading in a concerted effort to catch up and stay the course, but then I realized I'd gotten my dates wrong and I was in fact a week ahead of schedule, by which point, being page 600+, I was kind of hooked and felt compelled to barrel through to the end.)

So but, right, I'm done now, and yup, awesome book.

To those of you who think it's an intimidating read (and it does have that reputation, and its imposing physical size adds to this perception) and demands a serious time commitment and intense mental focus I say, yeah, whatever. For me, well, I just don't have 3 weeks of uninterrupted time where I don't have to go to work and interact with my family and make sure the child is sufficiently clothed and fed and watch some dumb movie and have this dental implant procedure over and done with once and for all and shop for school supplies and hang out at the community pool and drink pisco sour on the balcony (not necessarily in that order). Because, life, you know; you gotta do those things. And as much as some nights I'd like to stay up and read till 4 in the morning, as engrossing as any book is, it's rare if my eyelids can stay propped open beyond midnight, and then well I'd still have to get up at 7(-ish) and my day would be totally fucked. So, if not now, when? I'm glad to read 3 pages on the way to work, and 3 more on the way home if there's room enough to hold open the hardcover without jabbing some stranger's shoulderblade, and maybe as many more with coffee after lunch on a slow day at work, with a few minutes to check the Infinite Summer forums to see how my impressions measure up against others' and maybe more importantly to check that I haven't missed the significance of some scenes (or missed a scene altogether) what with having to change metro lines, and it's worth lugging this heavy, heavy book around (though some days I did think it was stupid to do so when there's this other novel, a slim little paperback, I've been dying to read), but hey, I really did want to know what the hell was going to happen to Gately (et al). Two pages or 5 minutes at a go does not mean not being able to be immersed and attentive. It doesn't take time or space to give yourself over to something or take something out of it; it just takes now.

Bits of this book are very funny, and it's undeniably clever. The cleverness, with the vocabulary and the footnotes and the historical references and literary allusions, may rub some people the wrong way, as I think it did me the first time I picked the book up, like all it's about is David Foster Wallace writing look-at-me-I'm-so-clever. But at some point (no, I'm not sure what that point is) it dawned on me how desperately earnest it was; I don't know how he did it (how do you convey earnestness? can it be feigned?) — not plot, or even character, more like tapping into something essential about how the mind works with all its messy body and emotion — and you can't (shouldn't) fault something just for being (or even obviously trying to be) smart when that's just a byproduct of representing something real. Also, some bits are horrific. And on the whole, Infinite Jest is overwhelmingly sad.

It's about tennis and Quebec separatism and mass consumerism, but mostly it's about addiction and about being trapped inside your own head.

(People have been speculating about whether Infinite Jest will be read 100 years from now. It's already dated, very firmly grounded in the 1990s. And it's quite unique in being a world that's so now. I can't think of many big sprawling (re-)imagined worlds that weren't written with the perspective of hindsight. Maybe Dickens. But then there's this near-future element. Umm. What was I getting at? It's unique and rich, and people should (will) continue to read it. It's not my favourite book of all time, but it ranks high on the gut-wrenchingness scale.)

On the whole, I don't find this book to be very quotable, at least not in any meaningful kind of way. There are vast sections that could be held up independently for appreciation (like pages 157 through 169, particularly the bit about Brando — and I get the feeling DFW wholly embraced a kind of Stanislavski method of writing) but it's not easy to distill just a few sentences that embody the whole of the humour or the poignancy.

But if there's anything like a single point to this book, maybe this is it:

It is now lately sometimes seemed like a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring that way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately — the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of plunging into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose? This was why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws. It was kind, in a way.

How the novel ends is a bit of a puzzle, and I hope it's not a spoiler (avert your eyes now if you care) to say that, what with the fragmented chronology, the end is given to us at the very beginning. And once having reached the end in state of befuddlement, I had to start over again.

To those of you who've read the book and/or those who find my rambling on some level entertaining I address the following disjointed thoughts and questions:

Mario's first birth is described on page 312. What the hell does that mean? It's implied there is a second birth of the Incandenzas' second son. There is no "rebirth" of Mario later described. Or is it that Mario ("Booboo") was dismissed by the family, being so physically deformed as to not be a son at all, in which case the later-born Hal might be considered the real second son? But glimpses into their family life doesn't bear this out at all.

I love that a quarter of the bus was yellow-highlighting copies of Abbott's Flatland (p 281). That's a fascinating little work of dystopia, and I think here it's a nice little clue about how the ghost/wraith works, but also kind of allegorical, that there's always another dimension, or layer, or step, or goal, beyond this one, that realization on this plane, actualizing in the moment, is nothing when viewed from another angle.

Orin needs women "to fall so terribly in love with him they'd never be able want anyone else" (p 634). This need develops sometime after his break-up with Joelle, and it's akin to the power of Joelle's own beauty and the compulsion of the Entertainment. Did some one event trigger it? Death of his father, some realization about his mother, what?

What was the first emergency room incident Hal refers to (p 16) about? This would've taken place a year back, he says, about the time the novel leaves off. Plain old breakdown, or to do with Pemulis's stash? Does it matter? Is this when he meets Gately? Do he and Gately really dig up Himself's head, or is this something that happens metaphorically or on another plane of consciousness? Does it matter?

"I have become an infantophile" (p 16). I don't think that statement can be taken literally. But. Lover of infants. Hal stumbled on the men's meeting, and while I found this scene uncomfortable (as did Hal) and didn't much see the point of it except for Hal's continuing circling around his addiction problem, I now see it as pivotal. This is the thing that makes him start to regress. This is where he starts to get inside Himself's head. (And that's where the Entertainment is, inside Himself's head, whether literally or metaphorically. He killed himself to destroy the master copy.)

In the Year of Glad, Hal has become what he'd feared (p 694):

Hal, who's empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he's really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.

In the end (the novel's beginning), Hal becomes human.

He thinks of the Grief-Therapist ("Something smells delicious."), the Moms, the soups over the microwave. What if Hal ate Himself's head? (I mean metaphorically, I suppose.) At least, it's something he wanted to do (but couldn't let himself do?).

"Call it something I ate." Metaphorically this is exactly what he did when he came home from the men's meeting and immersed himself in viewing all his dad's cartridges.

This is Hal finally grieving.

The waterless flood

Margaret Atwood has a new book coming out in a few weeks, The Year of the Flood, the website for which launched this weekend.

The new novel is a simultaneouel in relation to the dystopian Oryx and Crake, featuring some of the same characters in an overlapping timeframe. I look forward to reading it, and I expect I'll be revisiting some of O&C as I do so.

(Read an excerpt from The Year of the Flood.)

The new website is a marketing marvel. Beyond promoting the book, a CD of associated "hymns" (lyrics by Atwood, and which figure in the novel), and related merchandise (t-shirts and totebags), it's selling environmental awareness.

Part of me is sceptical. Ultimately, it's all about selling books. But it's commendable that Atwood is taking her message (whatever exactly it might turn out to be) quite seriously, and putting her money where her mouth is.

For example, in embarking on tour to promote the book, she's publicly pledging to keep her carbon footprint to a minimum (she's taking a boat to England!), stay only in hotels that have environmental policies, and avoid bottled water.

Among the many links of interest on this website, two in particular caught my eye:

Victimless leather. Grow your own! Not sure how I feel about this. We've so much moved away from adorning ourselves with leathers and furs that being able to grow your own brings us back to a world where it's valued. I can see this encouraging poaching among those who can't afford the genetic synthetics.

Ecoburial. This is totally the way I want to go. Turned into dry pink crumbs, for easy and safe composting! Read about the environmental drawbacks of both cremation and traditional burial on the Promessa website.

Atwood will be blogging while she's on the road.

(You can also follow her on Twitter, where she repeatedly proves just how funny she is, in 140 characters or less: "I made a typo [...] 'Imperonating' is pretending to be Evita." "Good thing not me in charge of world!")

Now just to see what The Year of the Flood is actually about...

Remote control

Bedtime is a confessional state. Individuals praying to their Gods. Between lovers. For Helena when I tuck her in.

"You know how some boys like pink? And they play with dolls?" OK.

(In theory, we are a generation enlightened beyond such stereotypically gendered roles; but in reality, today as always, boys gravitate toward some things, girls toward others.)

"Well, I really like cars."

"..."

"I'd really like to have some cars to play with."

"..."

"Like Nicholas. Nicholas has hundreds of little cars."

"..."

"And a garage. I'd like a garage to keep the cars in."

*****

We'd been together a little over a year — J-F and I — when another birthday of mine rolled round. It was quite evident from an afternoon phonecall that he'd forgotten. I don't know who finally clued him in — maybe a coworker, or maybe I dropped the hint myself.

Unusually that day I got home from work before he did. Doubtless he was scouring every inch of every store on the 7-block route from office to home for a suitable gift.

He arrived finally with a large package. I don't recall if it was wrapped. I do remember examining the box, and even as I was opening it hoping the box was just a box, a decoy, and despairing that it wasn't.

Not many interesting shops between the office and home, I know, but of all the options available at RadioShack, I wonder that he couldn't find something more sentimental than a pair of remote-controlled sports cars. (Any gadgety lusts I ever have harboured weren't of an automotive variety.) He thought they'd be fun for playing with the cat. Only one of the car–remote sets came equipped with batteries, and the trial run, on carpet, was less than stellar.

I kept the set boxed and untouched for days, thinking he might exchange it. He did not. Finally I closeted it, along with my anger. I never did tell anyone what he got me for my birthday; it was just too ludicrous.

*****

Almost a dozen years and at least three domiciles later, the cars are out of their box and freshly batteried, and the anger has dissipated. The new cat is about as impressed as the old cat, but the girl is ecstatic.

Delayed gratification

I am finally on schedule and, according to the page count set out at Infinite Summer, 52.something% of the way through Infinite Jest, and inching forward.

And being that a good portion of the novel is set in a tennis academy, and a good portion of those scenes actually has to deal with the philosophy and psychology of tennis, and that in my associated literary travels this week, I had the good fortune to read for the very first time The Federer Essay, I am truly unreasonably excited to know that Roger Federer will be in Montreal for the Rogers Cup this week and I might be able to witness, albeit through a TV screen, a Federer-Nadal showdown similar to what DFW described.

But the book. Is thoroughly entertaining! I'm loving this experience. I'm a far way off from calling this the greatest piece of literature the world has ever seen, and at this juncture I firmly doubt that I will ever reread it in its entirety (although I concede certain sections are worth coming back to, for their hilarity or their clarity, whether vis-a-vis the world at large or as a key to the book's intracoherence). Maybe this really is a novel for this generation (my generation? one slightly younger than my own?).

To this point, the book offers some powerful insight into the addiction-addled mind. I particularly appreciate Gately's God problem: what if the Higher Power in the 3rd of AA's 12 steps to which one is supposed to turn oneself over is one you have absolutely no concept of, let alone believe in? (Which extended passage, starting at p 442, also leads us to a "What the fuck is water?" moment, later retold again in that awesome commencement address.) I mean, how does an atheist deal with all the God-crap in AA? Do atheists not go to AA? Or do they go through the motions, lying to others and themselves? Neither course of action really seems viable in terms of kicking an addiction. What if you're addicted to God? Is there a support group for that? (But I guess a lot of people don't see God-dependence as a kind of problem.)

(Here's a tangent: Did you know some people actually get unbaptized? Really, I know a guy. Which paradoxically maybe attributes more importance to the ritual than the unbaptizee intends. It's not like a pact with the Devil that must needs be broken. If God's a nonentity, the whole thing's kind of null and void already.)

It's Marathe and Steeply's quasi-philosophical mountaintop discussion that really holds the book together for me. It makes clear the wider political backdrop as well as some of the themes (ah yes, delayed gratification, recognition of the thematic importance of which is itself a kind of delayed gratification) through which most everything else slowly comes to make some kind of sense. There's this fabulous exchange regarding America's pursuit of happiness, and freedom, and the reader is well aware that there's a difference between "freedom from" and "freedom to," so there's no earth-shattering insight proffered — the gist of these discussions has been voiced in countless homes, classrooms, dorms, automobiles, grocery-line checkouts, dentist offices. But it's made kind of hilarious through the Separatist's use of a hypothetical problem of two individuals vying for the only-available single-size serving can of Habitant soupe aux pois.

I've had opportunity to reflect this week on the nature of the group reading experience — a local journalist interviewed me w/r/t my participation in the Infinite Summer project. And my conclusion, which should come as no surprise, is that I mostly love it.

Sure, some forum participants go on about (or namedrop, at any rate) Wittgenstein, but whatever. The book is not about Wittgenstein, and I don't know that DFW meant for it to be read about Wittgenstein (Who knows? Maybe he did. He was undoubtedly an Extremely Bright Guy, with knowledge of Wittgenstein, but whether he consciously meant to represent what all Wittgenstein was about...?) But hey, go ahead and point out whatever scene of Infinite Jest as the ultimate illustration of Wittgenstein's linguistophilosophical thought; it's just that at some point the conversation stops being about Infinite Jest, which was kind of the original point, so it can get kind of tiresome.

(Did anyone ever see Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein? That made way more sense to me than anything the kids, or the profs, ever said about the big W at school.)

Yeah, I don't know. The journalist asked me whether the forum was an opportunity for showing off, and whether it was elitist. Mostly no, mostly it's a support group. And I'm grateful for being made aware of connections I might not otherwise make on my own.

I don't see this reading as a chore or as a homework assignment; I'm not hung up on page quotas or having to contribute meaningfully on an Important Topic. But I do acknowledge that I'm reading more carefully than I've read many books this year (even if I'm not writing any more articulately on the subject), and that's a good thing to do sometimes.

Tomato

Today Helena plucked one ripe little tomato off its vine — the first of the season — and popped it in her mouth. Her face radiated with exquisite ecstasies.

Here are two of our monstrous tomato plants pictured with the tall, silly 6-year-old in question for a reference point of size:



Our little balcony garden doesn't yield much — we have a basket of strawberries (which fruit is almost exhausted), a couple herbs (for sprinkling on salads), and six such tomato plants (haul to come!) — but it manages to provide one mouthful of pleasure (whether it's destined for her mouth or mine is a complicated matter, the politics of which I won't discuss here) on a near daily basis, and that's plenty.

Monsterpiece Theater presents

Hamlet! Words, words, words:



It don't get classier than this. Me love Danish!

My ambiguous position

So I've been trying to read a poem here and there, to keep my mind, my life, you know, poetic and all, and I have this volume of Janusz Szuber, whose work I'm strangely attracted to, that I keep turning to over the last couple months, and I'm stuck on this poem:

Caught in the Net

For supper I ate my favorite goat cheese
Sprinkled thickly with pepper and covered with onion slices,
From a jar I forked pitted olives,
Meaty, dripping aromatic brine.

Chewing and carefully mixing all those ingredients
I felt more and more acutely my ambiguous position
Of one caught in the net, the trap, charmed by the bait,
Not even trying to possess the ideal object.

So I love this poem. Not sure why. I think mostly because I'm a big fan of olives. And it makes me hungry, and a little hungry for something more than food. But also it confuses me, because I think it's saying the olive, or any portion of this glorious meal, is not the ideal object, even though I rather think it is, but I can't help but wonder if not this, then what? This food is a distraction of some sort. And I feel like I'm being chastised for even thinking about olives, even though he's the one who brought them up. So what's this ideal object I'm supposed to be after (well, the narrator thinks he ought to pursue it, and it's implied that this is a most worthy goal all of us should aspire to)?

What is baiting us, trying to catch us out? How can this meaty olive not be the ideal object, end in and of itself? As if it's freedom from the olive that is to be desired.

Feral jest

It's absolutely feral. Of a feral imagination is Infinite Jest.

Listed in the filmography in endnote 24 (p 991, referenced from p 64):
A documentary (Stand Behind the Men Behind the Wire) of a hunt for an outsized feral infant.
A movie (The Desire to Desire) featuring an attack by an oversized feral infant.

We learn of herds of oversized "Feral Infants," formed by toxicity (endnote 304, p 1055, referenced from en 39, referenced from p 89).

There thundered a herd of feral hamsters (p 93).
Earlier(?) (YDPAH), a house is stripped as bare as a post-feral-hamster meadow (p 58).

Tennis and the feral prodigy (p 172).

A feral and flux-ridden state with respect to talent (p 173).

I know I read feral potential and feral genius in there somewhere.

Another feral infant (p 211).

A couple weeks ago Kevin Guilfoile puzzled over how Tarantino might've come into the text, how in 1996 (or earlier, following the argument of the background below) he merited mention among other film greats:

There is an almost unbearable (for the author) amount of time between the day the manuscript is "finished" and the day it is published. I’m not sure when Wallace handed in the complete manuscript to Little Brown, but with a book as big as Infinite Jest — both in terms of heft and hype — you could easily expect a couple of birthdays to pass through the edits and the copyedits and the sales efforts and the marketing push. This period can be pretty anxious for writers, and one of the fears that can obsess a novelist during this time is that some part of his book he thinks particularly clever or original is going to be preempted by a similar plot or character or conceit in another book, film, or TV show. Or real life, even.

So but about Tarantino, how could DFW know?

Which brings me to my own bugbear: Gilles Duceppe.

The thing: Endnote 304 refers to "newly elected Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe" (p 1057). According to Wikipedia, IJ was published February 1, 1996 (and give or take a few days, or weeks even, I think my point stands). At this date, Gilles Duceppe had been BQ leader for only a couple weeks and not elected, but serving as interim leader until an election could be held (Duceppe did not in fact win leadership till about a year later). Millions of copies of IJ already printed and shipped by the time Duceppe took the interim reins. Perhaps the Duceppe name was a truly last minute blank filled in according to how the political breeze blew that day the book was sent to the printers. How could DFW possibly know to what prominence Duceppe would rise in BQ's history?

"[...] What all do you know about Separatism?"

Hal stopped for a moment. "You mean in Canada?"

"Is there any other kind?" [p 137]

The wiki entries for Meech Lake and Charlottetown, mentioned in Hal and Orin's phone conversation in endnote 110, need fleshing out. The geography is unimportant; the names are used as shorthand for the accords pounded out there and the national discussion about them.

Maybe this book will bring me, in sorting out DFW's fictions from actualities, to finally get all my facts straight regarding Quebec's histories.

For the record, the Montreal Tulip-Fest (p 59) does not exist, nor can I imagine it ever coming into being in this city that while clean and even on occasion sculpted is not particularly gardened, although there is one in Ottawa.

I hate the fact that I'm still way behind schedule. The page number I daily set as a goal fails to take into account the possibility of running into an 18-page endnote.

"Pemulis makes his face very long for a while and then very short and broad, then all sort of hollow and distended like one of Bacon's popes." I love this description. I know those popes.

I love that I am acquiring many exotic new facts (p 200–205), pages of them:

That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them. That if enough people in a silent room are drinking coffee it is possible to make out the sound of steam coming off the coffee. That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible fall asleep during an anxiety attack.

"That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that."

Parsing

I particularly like Helena's hair when done up — braided to crown her — in the fashion of a medieval princess, and I tell her so. She takes offense at being called an evil princess.

I'm revelling in Helena's language lately. It is an endless source of both awe and amusement.

We no longer simply use language; we can talk about it.

Helena named her stuffed cat toy "No-one." I can't decide whether it's more weird or clever.

I've corrected Helena's "human bean" to "human being." "What's a being?" I'm not sure my explanation hit the mark. Days later we're talking about Batman, for some reason; she tells me he's human, but stipulates he's not a human being — because he doesn't exist.

From time to time I worry that her English isn't as good as it should be — some odd vocabulary choices, and still trouble with irregular verbs — but hey, I remind myself, she's completely bilingual! So what if she misses a conjugation here or there!

(Some errors are initially mystifying. I puzzled for some time over "He's not being have" (pronounced "hayv"), finally to realize she meant he's not behaving.)

I'm in no position to judge her French, but I suppose it must be similar. (Certainly for some time now her French is superior to mine. I almost trust her when she supplies a missing word or assures me that I have the correct construction.)

I've favoured reading English books to her only because it's far easier for me. At school, her books are in French, of course. Helena herself doesn't show a consistent preference for one language or the other. When she suggests a book to read, she does not readily recall what language it's in and has occasionally recalled incorrectly (my point being that the language in which it's communicated is secondary to the story being told).

So. Completely bilingual. Which has tremendously complicated the reading situation.

I explain that certain sounds are represented by these letters in English, but the same sounds in French use different letters. Times I've thought it was hopeless, and hoped it would sort itself it out. And it mostly has.

I'd say she can read now, finally. Helena won't say it yet, cuz she's a bit of a perfectionist, but she'll say it soon. In two languages.

Children do become bilingual easily, and scientists are starting to understand how:

"You're building a brain architecture that's a perfect fit for Japanese or English or French," whatever is native, Kuhl explains — or, if you're a lucky baby, a brain with two sets of neural circuits dedicated to two languages.

It's remarkable that babies being raised bilingual — by simply speaking to them in two languages — can learn both in the time it takes most babies to learn one. On average, monolingual and bilingual babies start talking around age 1 and can say about 50 words by 18 months.

Italian researchers wondered why there wasn't a delay, and reported this month in the journal Science that being bilingual seems to make the brain more flexible.

Helena's brain is flexible indeed; she plays with English, with French, and various combinations thereof. But bilingualism, and the problem of translation, brings its own class of errors.

Helena persists in flatting the kitty — the kitty likes to be flatted, we should all flatte the kitty. Flatter is to pet, but the English "to pet" just won't stick. We have French roots with English inflections.

Helena tells me a story, posits an alien, from another planet, "like March." Since the French month mars is March in English, quite logically she assumes the planet would be translated in the same way.

When something does not go according to Helena's expectations — be it a person's reaction, verbal or physical, or the work of the cat or of gravity — she regularly stops to remark, "C'était pas prévu." In recent weeks she's come to translate her commentary to English: "That was not prévu." And refined it further, "That was not previewed." I've explained that that simply doesn't sound natural in English, no one would say that, "preview" just doesn't work. With my input, she's modified her translation, and uses it often. "That was not foreseen." Which is just interminably cute coming out of the mouth of a 6-year-old.

Spare parts

I've taken quite a break from 2666, to break away from all the rotten death of part 4 (The Part About the Crimes), and just to be able to read something — finish something! — less than 1000 pages long. But I find myself starting in on the last volume (The Part About Archimboldi), and I'm wildly excited about this, I want to take notes as I go, things are gelling.

(Really, I shouldn't read more than one book, or maybe two, at a time. I'm no good at it, never have been. It makes me feel uncentred.)

(Especially when there's no time, there hasn't been any time, where does the time go?, my sister came to visit, and J-F went off for a camping weekend, and the kid and I play and play (she's off to day camp next week), and the weather's shitty rainy the whole time so we can't just go to the park where she'd play and I'd watch and read, we have to do indoor things, which takes a lot more ingenuity and patience, plus you have to clean up, meanwhile work is a little crazy, and there must be 83 loads of laundry to do, the closet shelving is falling down, and I think the bathroom is starting to smell, there's just no time.)

I am currently playing catch-up on the Infinite Summer project; I've re-read the first 80 odd pages of Infinite Jest, which I'd read a couple years ago, and some beyond, but I'm not quite up to schedule yet.

Also, for some reason I thought now would be a good time to finish up The Adventures of Amir Hamza, which I'm not even half-way through, and I can't begin to estimate just how many bathroom trips it might take.

So, between volumes of 2666 seemed like an excellent time to squeeze in some actual reading, of the kind where you actually get to close the book after a few days, maybe feel a faint sense of accomplishment in so doing.

Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Sun Over Breda, which, sadly, bored me, in the way that I'm just not into the minutiae of battle, no matter how glorious the language, but it was quick and it's over. (He's an interesting writer for being so visual. Very obviously he's knowledgeable about fine art and greatly inspired by it.)

And I closed Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night, which was nice — just in that kinship you feel with Manguel, that love for and comfort in books and libraries.

(I never did write about my brief encounter with him, my seeing him deliver one of the Massey Lectures. Apart from the lecture itself, which was fascinating and for which I still have notes lying around somewhere, he's a lovely man. He signed my book for me and I asked him what he was reading back then in November 2007: He smiled shyly and apologized before answering. "It sounds so pedantic." Locke's On Tolerance. Yes, for pleasure. But his face lit up in telling me he'd just finished the latest Reginald Hill, Death Comes for the Fat Man. Manguel highly recommends Dalziel and Pascoe: "You must start at the beginning. They're wonderful!" (I've never read them, but I might.))

And poetry! I'm making my way through a volume of Janusz Szuber, and while I can't say it gives me a sense of accomplishment exactly (poetry causes for me something more like befuddlement), my brain feels stretched in all the right places for it.

Things are gelling. I mean ideas are, in my head.

I whipped across the street to Indigo at lunch yesterday to hear Lewis Black, shilling for his latest book (Me of Little Faith). He didn't read from the book, but talked quite soberly (albeit entertainingly) about the craft of writing, his basic advice being, Just write. Don't think about it. If you start thinking, you realize it's crap, and so you don't bother to write it down cuz it's crap, you feel you have to think it through, and so you go have a think and before you know it you're napping, and you wake up and give up on the whole crap idea of writing. But if you write it down, at least you know where it might go, even if you have to rewrite everything to get there. Basically.

Also he noted that he thinks differently whether he's typing or writing longhand — a different process entirely. And then he answered questions for half an hour.

But about things gelling. I guess I mean associations are gelling. Cuz the whole time I'm listening to Lewis Black, I'm thinking about Infinite Jest. Particularly as Black rants about the fact that television and computers haven't been fully merged yet — it's the same screen!, the problem is money, they haven't figured out how to distribute the money they'd make yet — and I'm thinking teleputers! Wallace had the TP all figured out. And Black goes on about this human urge for entertainment, and really, whether you're flaked out on the couch watching Comedy Central or lolling away the afternoon reading Chekhov, it's really the same thing. And I'm thinking, yeah. And I think about asking Black for his thoughts on Wallace, but I realize I know next to nothing about either Black or Wallace to be able to gauge whether I might be on to something so I discard the impulse, but some kind of neuronal connection has already been made and I can't shake it.

Worth murdering a world

It occurred to him suddenly that she might even get up and leave him, go back to Snow's with her secret for the first comer who questioned her kindly: he had to conciliate her, they were walking out, he'd got to do the things expected of him. He put out his hand with repulsion; it lay like a cold paddock on her knee. "You took me wrong," he said, "you're a sweet girl. I've been worried, that's all. Business worries. You and me" — he swallowed painfully — "we suit each other down to the ground." He saw the colour go, the face turn to him with a blind willingness to be deceived, saw the lips waiting. He drew her hand up quickly and put his mouth against her fingers: anything was better than the lips: the fingers were rough on his skin and tasted a little of soap. She said, "Pinkie, I'm sorry. You're sweet to me."

He laughed nervously, "You and me," and heard the hoot of a bus with the joy of a besieged man listening to the bugle of the relieving force. "There," he said, "the bus. Let's be going. I'm not much of a one for the country. A city bird. You too." She got up and he saw the skin of her thigh for a moment above the artificial silk, and a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness. That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape — anywhere — for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.

"It's beautiful here all the same," she said, staring up the chalky ruts between the To Let boards, and the Boy laughed again at the fine words people gave to a dirty act: love, beauty . . . All his pride coiled like a watch spring round the thought that he wasn't deceived, that he wasn't going to give himself up to marriage and the birth of children, he was going to be where Colleoni now was and higher . . . He knew everything, he had watched every detail of the act of sex, you couldn't deceive him with lovely words, there was nothing to be excited about, no gain to recompense you for what you lost; but when Rose turned to him again, with the expectation of a kiss, he was aware all the same of a horrifying ignorance. His mouth missed hers and recoiled. He'd never yet kissed a girl.

— from Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene.

OK. Wow. I didn't think much of this book when I first cracked it open, but it got intense fast.

I feel so sorry for Pinkie! I mean, he's only 17. And his Catholicism is of no help to him at all. He believes firmly in Hell, there's evidence of damnation all around, but he can't commit to the idea of there being a God, because, well, I'm not really sure why, but things seem pretty hopeless.

I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say there's a murder committed in the early chapters of the novel, and the rest of book follows Pinkie (yes, Pinkie) as he tries to cover his tracks. Guilt, and possibly the first inklings of tenderness or love, is chipping away at his hardened gangster-wannabe exterior. But it's fear and paranoia that lead him on a reckless and devastating path.

[If you don't like spoilers, don't read JM Coetzee's introduction — thanks goodness I didn't till just a few moments ago.]

Oh, and poor Rose! She really believes he loves her! Reading what Pinkie recorded for her on the gramophone was like a punch in the gut. I can't bear to imagine how her life will crumble when one day she listens to it. Poor Rose... Talk about rose-coloured glasses!

Aside from Pinkie and Rose, there's a lot of pink in this book. Little shots of pink throughout the noir, a paler shade of the blood on Pinkie's hands that occasionally comes to surface. (His full name's Pinkie Brown.)

There are no words or dialogue that don't need to be here. It's a tight little novel about grim circumstances, complex characters grappling with the differences between right-and-wrong and good-and-evil, shown to vary according to age, experience, religion. Great book!

Gipsy girl

"I suppose I shall have to tell you," I said slowly. "I'm not ashamed of it. You can't be ashamed of something that just — happens to you. That's what he did. He was detestable — rude and ungrateful — but that I think I understand. It's like a dog that's been chained up — or badly treated — it'll bite anybody. That's what he was like — bitter and snarling. I don't know why I care — but I do. I care horribly. Just seeing him has turned my whole life upside-down. I love him. I want him. I'll walk all over Africa barefoot till I find him, and I'll make him care for me. I'd die for him. I'd work for him, slave for him, steal for him, even beg or borrow for him! There — now you know!"

Suzanne looked at me for a long time.

"You're very unEnglish, Gipsy girl," she said at last. "There's not a scrap of the sentimental about you. I've never met anyone who was at once so practical and so passionate. I shall never care for anyone like that — mercifully for me — and yet — and yet I envy you, Gipsy girl. It's something to be able to care. Most people can't. [...]"

— from The Man in the Brown Suit, by Agatha Christie.

I'd forgotten what a pleasure Christie is to read.

The part about Amalfitano

It's been some time since I read part 2 of Roberto Bolaño's 2666 (I'm near the end of part 4, and reading some books alongside this one). I made some notes as I went along (from which most of the below is constructed), but this section, to judge by the vividness of it in my memory, seems not to have made as much of an impression on me as The Part about the Critics.

While this part has more "story" to it, it's also somewhat more surreal.

Memory
Lola has assimilated what she learned from Amalfitano into her own memory. She believes the poet is a former lover of hers, but it was from Amalfitano that she first learned about him.

It's never clear if her letters to Amalfitano relating her history with and her meeting with the poet are complete fabrications, or whether any portion of it is grounded in her actual experience.

Amalfitano himself becomes increasingly unreliable as a narrator, casting double doubt on Lola's story.

Greek
A handful of allusions again in this section, again that I'm unable to make anything of.

- "Sometimes she [Lola] felt like Electra, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, wandering in disguise in Mycenae, the killer mingling with the plebes [...]
- Other times the mother of Medon and Strophius
- Pylades, Orestes stand for the faces of many men

Amalfitano and Duchamp
Amalfitano finds a book in his possession and goes through some mental contortions to place it. (I can relate: Imagine finding a book that you have no inkling how it got there! It would drive me crazy!)

On the front flap, the reader was informed that the Testamento geométrico was really three books, "each independent, but functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole,' and then it said "this work representing the final distillation of Dieste's research on Space, the notion of which is involved in any methodical discussion of the fundamentals of Geometry."

Much the same could be said of 2666's first 3 parts, triangulating on Santa Teresa.

Amalfitano hangs the book out on a clothes line, in the spirit of a readymade conceived by Duchamp, who meant for the wind to go through the book and find (and deal with) its own problems or, as Amalfitano interprets it, to see if the book learns anything about real life.

It's Art, I guess, but I don't think Amalfitano's intentions are artistic ones, exactly. The act has the feeling of an I Ching. It seems to affect Amalfitano via osmosis, in that he starts producing drawings, quite unconsciously, diagramming, possibly, relationships between philosophers.

At which point it appears that Amalfitano is losing his mind. He considers that the voice in his head may be a product of telepathy.

Telepathy
Lola imagined she was establishing telepathic contact with the poet.

Amalfitano relates the voice in his head to telepathy and reads about the Araucanians, who had refined telepathy as a viable means of communication, as well as sending messages by the movement of branches.

Morini in his dream (in part 1) faced Norton "and she said: 'There's no turning back.' He heard the sentence not with his ears but in his head. Norton has acquired telepathic powers, Morini thought. She isn't bad, she's good. It isn't evil I sensed, it's telepathy."

Literature
Mostly I think this passage is funny:

One of the employees was a young pharmacist, barely out of his teens, extremely thin and with big glasses, who would sit up at night reading a book when the pharmacy was open twenty-four hours. One night, while the kid was scanning the shelves, Amalfitano asked him what books he liked and what book he was reading, just to make conversation. Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who in another life might have been Trakl or who in this life might still be writing poems as desperate as those of his distant Austrian counterpart, and who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pécuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential words, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and tench.

However. There's something going on here: refusing to take on literature (or reality?) head on.

Magic
There's a lot of magic in this book, in different forms. The magic of dreams, telepathy, superstition, art and literature.

Boris Yeltsin — "last Communist philosopher" — appears to Amalfitano in a dream, with wisdom to impart:

And he said: listen carefully to what I have to say, comrade. I'm going to explain what the third leg of the human table is. I'm going to tell you. And then leave me alone. Life is demand and supply, or supply and demand, that's what it all boils down to, but that's no way to live. A third leg is needed to keep the table from collapsing into the garbage pit of history, which in turn is permanently collapsing into the garbage pit of the void. So take note. This is the equation: supply + demand + magic. And what is magic? Magic is epic and it's also sex and Dionysian mists and play. And then Yeltsin sat on the crater or the latrine and showed Amalfitano the fingers he was missing and talked about his childhood and about the Urals and Siberia and about a white tiger that roamed the infinite snowy spaces. And then he took a flask of vodka out of his suit pocket and said:

"I think it's time for a little drink."

(This dream sequence really stood out for me, and weirdly, there's a bit in part 4 that I just read that makes reference to it: a highly respected serial killer profiler "dreamed of a crater and a man pacing around it. That man is probably me, he said to himself in the dream, but it didn't strike him as important and the image was lost." So I'm thinking it's not the identity of the man that matters so much as the existence of the crater (or latrine — Amalfitano considers that it may be a latrine), some void left by a force of destruction, something blatant, which still they circle, as if to stare into that abyss, or acknowledge it, would negate their existence.)

Summary
Lola spends her time circling the poet, daring to meet him only twice (or was it more than that? either way, I think my point stands). She seems always to be waiting for a sign (sign of her friend Imma) before taking action, or taking for signs some mundane thing to justify her action. Amalfitano has his own disconnect from reality, circling round his career, his daughter, the city he lives in without daring a head-on confrontation. Is he waiting for the book to give him a sign? Or the voice? Bolaño certainly is circling round the murders at Santa Teresa.

The epigraph of 2666 comes from Baudelaire: "An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom." I'm beginning to see what this means.

From nowhere

It's a disconcerting feeling to watch the blue arrow leave the road, the only road, on the GPS, watch the road drop out of the bottom of the screen, and know that you are that blue arrow, with no point of reference, moving, or not moving, across a vast plane of nothing, a screen that looks like it's waiting for images to load, a landscape that's waiting for civilization to tame it.

We stayed not long. Armies of insects laid in wait for us. Helena complained of the itching and I lifted the hair off her neck to inspect the damage. I had to stifle my horror at the trails of blood from the dozens of bites, trying not to alarm her.

The fish weren't biting at all.

Then it rained; it stormed. I slept, and read.

********

I finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson). I'm still puzzled by the decision to use this title for the translation over something more literally accurate (something like "Men Who Hate Women"); a marketing decision, no doubt, but curious that the English-speaking world should be deemed to have a unique sensibility in this regard.

It's a most interesting experience to have read this alongside part 4 of Bolaño's 2666, because really, they're both about men hating women, making the point about a certain kind of woman, foreign or transient, socioeconomically disadvantaged, psychologically predisposed to victimization — someone marginalized so that no one much notices her absence, any investigation would be half-hearted, no one much cares. This is our horrific reality (see Pickton).

********

The kitten came with us. It seems a good idea to accustom her to car travel at young age. She travels well.

Helena has renamed the kitten. Her name is now Action.

To defend its honour

The Angel's Game, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, is already destined to be a bestseller — it doesn't need my help in the slightest.

You should know: I hated The Shadow of Wind. I thought, and still think, it's one of the most overrated pieces of crap I've ever read. Sure, it starts of with a lovely bookish feel but it quickly fell apart for me: the characters, the plot, the language — everything about it was a bit too farfetched.

I don't know what possessed me then to accept an ARC of The Angel's Game. I fully expected to hate it. Though The Shadow is now but a shadow in my memory, I very clearly remember fuming about reading it and the time I was wasting reading it (while continuing to read it).

Maybe because my expectations were so low... I found myself loving this book and unable to put it down.

"You have more zeal than good taste, Martín. The disease afflicting you has a name, and that is Grand Guignol: it does to drama what syphilis does to your privates. Getting it might be pleasurable, but from then on it's all downhill. You should read the classics, or at least Don Benito Pérez Galdós, to elevate your literary aspirations."

"But the readers like my stories," I argued.

"You don't deserve the credit. That belongs to your rivals: they are so bad and pedantic that they could render a donkey catatonic in less than a paragraph. When are you going to mature and stop munching the forbidden fruit once and for all?"

I would nod, full of contrition, but secretly I caressed those forbidden words, Grand Guignol, and I told myself that every cause, however frivolous, needed a champion to defend its honour.

This book is full of exuberance. The reader is propelled forward because of (not despite) its Grand Guignol elements. While the plot does spin out of control (and the body count climbs), the author has much better control of his material here than in The Shadow. The writer knows he cannot do the reader's job. He is smarter to leave things unanswered and ambiguous than to supply tortuous explanations that couldn't possibly hit all the right notes. Those are the things this reader revels in.

One thing really bothers me: Isabella marries and has a child and never writes again. The headstrong girl who essentially stalked an author, who went to great lengths to extract a critique of her work and for writerly advice. She just stops. Her son becomes her everything. I don't know if this is meant to be realistic, or if this is the author's thoughtless brushing aside of the character once her purpose had been served. But it strikes me as wrong.

Incidentally, my sister went to hear Zafón a couple weeks ago. He came across as personable and had entertaining anecdotes to share regarding his first forays into publishing as a youth. He named a couple authors whom he reads, respects, admires: Joyce Carol Oates and China Miéville, the latter in particular for his defiance of genre stereotypes.

My final verdict: The Angel's Game was wonderfully entertaining and makes for a great summer read.