BlogLily

I’m going to be taking a bit of a break — for about four weeks — while I’m finishing up radiation (and getting some extra rest).   I’ll be back around Valentine’s Day.

xo, BL

2/13/07 — Hey all, I’ll be back tomorrow! 

There are tons of things I don’t want to write about:  people who bug me, movies I couldn’t sit through, fashions that strike me as ridiculous, ill-advised parenting decisions, and meals I haven’t enjoyed.  All are on my short list of topics I do not want to come home and say something about.  

There are a couple of reasons for this.  First of all, in my day job, I spend a lot of time reading the briefs of people who have real complaints about things that actually do matter.  That is why they have come to our court.  After a day spent thinking about whether someone’s truly been wronged, it seems a little silly for me to spend the evening yammering on about how much I hate it when parents let their children beat them at games.  (I do hate that, by the way.  I think what children really, really need is a worthy opponent so that when they finally do win a game of checkers they actually feel like they’ve accomplished something.)   

Of course, when I get home, it’s often to hear more grievances (you know the kind I mean:  he hit me, he won’t let me have a turn, he’s wearing my favorite shoes, how come you never let me beat you at checkers?).  As you can see, my second shift job is that of mediator and sometimes judge and occasionally jailer.  Yikes.  By the time I get to my blog I just want to say, good heavens, how about that Jane Austen? 

I finished William Boyd’s Restless a few weeks ago and although I flew through it, in the end I didn’t like it as much as I’d hoped I would.  So, I decided not to write about it.   And that got me to thinking about how you can write about the work of a skilled writer, someone whose work is much better than your own, without trading in the sort of whiny complaining ickiness I don’t want to involve myself in. This is my effort to do that. 

The reason Restless is such an appealing book is because it’s set at least partly in a time and place I find immensely interesting — Britain during the war.  And there are spies in it.  One of the main characters is a woman spy, which is even better than your usual guy spy. (Not that I have anything against guy spies, having written an entire book myself in which the main character is a guy who is, in fact, a spy.  Still.  I like women spies.) 

The trouble is that Boyd decided to share that really delicious narrative with another narrative involving a character I really didn’t care much about.  And then he put her smack down in a time (the late sixties/early seventies) he doesn’t bring to life with quite the same elegance as he does the war years.  That character is the spy’s daughter, who spends most of her half of the narrative being upset and irritated that her mother was a spy her whole life and never bothered to mention it, until now, when the mother is thinking someone from her past might be trying to kill her. I cannot imagine a better time to mention one’s secret past life than this, by the way. 

The daughter is not a woman who’s living a secret life.  She’s a single mom of a cute little boy.  The father’s one of those blow-hard 1970s academics (German in this case), who leads a bohemian life, but isn’t going to leave his wife to marry the spy’s daughter.  Which turns out to be fine, because by the time the narrative begins, she no longer really wants him to anyway, which is a good decision on her part, but doesn’t really give her much of interest to do (beyond being irritated by her mother for covering up her interesting past).  Anyway, the bits about the mother’s past — the story of how she is recruited and trained in the spy business — are great.  The daughter, alas, is not so interesting and the split in the narrative doesn’t, in the end, seem to serve any really useful purpose.  

I’d think that a trusted early reader should have said something like this:  Ditch the daughter’s narrative.  You can still place the story in the sixties, but it would read far, far better if the present was from the point of view of the spy character, looking back on her life.

There you have it then.  I read the entire thing, enjoyed it a lot, and only when I closed it did it occur to me that it could have been better than it was.  And that, dear reader, isn’t a bad reading experience.  It’s not easy to write a really good book.  I should know, having spent almost three years writing something I’d be delighted to have even recognized as resembling a novel.  Boyd’s written a really good book.  It’s just that it’s much harder to write a really great book.   (I’d still recommend it, and if you want me to mail you my copy, speak up and I’ll be happy to do so.  A sort of shortcut BookMooch, that will be.)   

I often find myself wondering, as someone’s talking to me, what the inside of their head would look like if it was a room in a house. Some people have minds that are so light-filled and clean and orderly that I wish I could take up residence there. And yes, I’ll admit that other times, I wish I could get in there with a feather duster, a garbage can, and a nice set of file folders.

Which brings me to Joyce, who must have spent a lot of time wondering what was inside people’s heads too, because he spends a lot of time showing you what he’s discovered in there. My guess is that he wasn’t drawn to the room in a house thing.

I’m only at about page 100, but even this early on, it’s pretty clear that Joyce thought of the brain’s activity as a sort of streaming audio, one that doesn’t always come in clearly or in your own language, an audio that’s been transcribed by somebody who really, really hates punctuation.

Still, despite the weird transcript of the inside of the heads of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, Ulysses has a coherent (in fact beautiful) narrative voice, one that’s not so different from the voice of the narrator of the The Dead. And so the beginning of this book is quite engaging.  And when you emerge from the free fall you go into every time the narrative voice falls silent for a minute and you find yourself disconcertingly, maddeningly and often confusingly inside somebody’s head, you find the narrator is still there, and still sane.

If you allow yourself to relax, and decide that it’s not necessary to understand everything you’re getting from the insides of these heads, you see that Stephen Dadelus’s head is quite interesting.  For one thing, it’s crammed full of languages. One minute it’s Latin, another it’s French. There are lots of allusions to things you think you might have read sometime, but you have no idea when or what. And sex, sex is never far away, which is fine, because at least you know a little bit about that topic, though you have no idea where the hell the bit of poetry Dadelus is ruminating over comes from.  Still, if you’ve relaxed, it doesn’t matter.  The worst thing you can do, I think, is read a book like this with a concordance.  I don’t like my literature to resemble a quiz.  If a book is going to work for me, it pretty much has to work from within its own pages.

As for Bloom’s head — well it’s quite different from Stephen Dadelus’s.  For one thing, it’s easier to follow, and a lot more fun, because he tends to be interested in sex and food, two subjects I do think about myself.  He’s an interesting, arresting fellow, and I’m not unhappy to be in his head.

And there are indeed plenty of ill-bred moments, involving the sorts of material (snot, flautulence, to name two) that form the basis of many jokes in our house. It seems that inside the heads of grown men, the seven year old self is strong. I know there’s more to Joyce than what I’ve just said, something more grand and summing up, but I haven’t yet gotten to a point where I can do that.  I’ll be posting on some other subject next (maybe sex or food, come to think of it), and then when I get to the end of Ulysses, I’ll let you know what else that might be.  It might be April when I do that, but I’m guessing every single one of you can probably wait.

I’m well into Ulysses (which means, I’ve started it and have yet to run shrieking from the room) and might even have some things to say about that in a day or so or more.  But I also have two other books underway and wanted to tell you about them because of one simple fact they have in common: I’m not actually reading either one of those, if by reading you mean holding a book in your hand and sitting down with a cup of tea and maybe a cookie, or just sitting on a train with the book on your lap which, if you don’t know by now, are the two ways I read.

The first book I’m not reading is The Aeneid. Although Virgil wasn’t an oral poet like Homer, (I looked that up to make sure I wasn’t just manufacturing that statement — here), it’s a poem that’s written in the oral tradition and is well suited to being read aloud. So I went over to audible.com and discovered that there’s an audiobook of the Fagles translation I got for Christmas and I listened to the sample, and on came this guy with one of those wonderful, delicious British voices that could make a reading of the California Code of Civil Procedure a thing of wonder and mystery and before I knew it I was a lifetime member of audible.com, and the head of delish Brit’s fan club. And yes, it’s true, when he starts talking I find I can barely breathe. I wish his name wasn’t Simon Callow, though, but if I think of him as Delish Brit, I’m okay.

So far, I’ve gotten up to the point where Aeneas makes it to Carthage, and Dido is about to fall in love with him. Poor Dido. The whole thing is quite wonderful. I listened to it yesterday while I was on a walk around our neighborhood, and although I would sometimes drift off into a weird reverie induced by the beautiful voice of Delish Brit, I believe I was really only absent from the story for a moment or two because I do know what happened and I have some coherent thoughts forming about the gods, and about the structure of the story. There are hours to go, and I’m so glad, because I don’t ever want to say goodbye to Mr. Delish Brit.

And then there’s DailyLit (or litbit, which makes it a sort of cousin of delishbrit, see paragraph above). I read about DailyLit today on the 9rules blog. You probably already know about litbit, because it seems tailor-made for bookish sorts, but basically, they slice up great books (the ones that aren’t under copyright anymore and so can be sliced up) and email them to you in tiny, daily packages. I considered doing that with Ulysses for about ten seconds — until I saw that it would take about 322 days before I finished. I think I can read (and skim) faster than that.

But I did see something I liked the look of, something that’s a perfect marriage of the efficient litbit form and the book itself, somthing that looked like too much fun to pass up — an early 20th century self-help book, Arnold Bennett’s How to Live on 24 Hours a Day (which is actually part of a larger Bennett project called, simply enough How to Live).

And so today, I received my first bit of Bennett on the question of how to live on 24 hours a day, which is actually this question: how do you get a really huge number of things done every day. And the answer? You’ve got to stop sleeping so damned much.

Turns out (no surprise to me, but maybe he found it surprising), lots of people think they can’t do that. And in 1925, when he wrote this book, the biggest problem people had with getting up early was this: “I couldn’t begin [the day] without some food, and servants.”

Ah. Servants. Now, food, I’d have guessed, but there aren’t any servants around at 5 a.m. was not on my list of the top ten reasons why I can’t get up early. Still, Arnold Bennett has the answer for this problem of how on earth we can get up early if there aren’t any servants around and it turns out to be a pretty good answer, and one I’m going to try to implement myself:

“Surely, my dear sir, in an age when an excellent spirit-lamp (including a saucepan) can be bought for less than a shilling, you are not going to allow your highest welfare to depend upon the precarious immediate co-operation of a fellow creature! Instruct the fellow creature [in my case, I suppose this would be my husband], whoever she may be, at night. Tell her to put a tray in a suitable position over night. On that tray two biscuits, a cup and saucer, a box of matches and a spirit-lamp; on the lamp, the saucepan; on the saucepan, the lid– but turned the wrong way up; on the reversed lid, the small teapot, containing a minute quantity of tea leaves. You will then have to strike a match–that is all.

“In three minutes the water boils, and you pour it into the teapot (which is already warm). In three more minutes the tea is infused. You can begin your day while drinking it. These details may seem trivial to the foolish, but to the thoughtful they will not seem trivial. The proper, wise balancing of one’s whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.”

I’d like to repeat this and put it in bold italics because it strikes me as the most important thing I’ve heard yet this year: The proper, wise balancing of one’s whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.

Okay, I’m with him. I do indeed believe that a lot of things depend on tea. (In your case, this might be another beverage, and I am perfectly fine with that.) And if tea could be arranged at, say 5 in the morning, I might, just might, drag myself out of bed and read some more of Ulysses. Especially if there’s a nice tray already set out and waiting for me with a biscuit or two on it. Who knows, with tea and a biscuit or two I might even finish Ulysses before 2008.