Books: The History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell

In writing about Russell’s tome, it is not my place to address individually the thoughts of the philosophers whom he discusses. Instead, my goal is only to assess the degree of success the author achieves in his own assessment of these figures and their works, as well as to comment on some of the thoughts that the reading of this book inspired in me.

If those two sentences feel extremely lucid, logical, and measured, it is because I have spent the past month steeped in the style of the greatest academic writer I have ever encountered. Typically, the prospect of reading 750 pages of what appears to be something not unlike a textbook would be rather daunting, but Russell writes with such grace and wit that the book is a pleasure. In fact, I find myself wishing that he had written a companion volume—the History of Eastern Philosophy—as well as a History of Western Art, a History of Western Economics, a History of Western Music, et cetera ad infinitum. Ideally, I would like to learn the history of the whole wide world, according to Bertrand Russell.

He’s not perfect—in the chapters on Plato, for example, he very uncharacteristically shuttles back and forth between describing Plato’s understanding of both “God” and “the gods,” without ever clarifying what that difference means, and whether Plato is the first monotheist in western philosophy’s trajectory. Furthermore, he leaves out one of my favorite philosophers—Søren Kierkegård—but includes other thinkers (e.g. Byron) who were not, technically, philosophers—though he does make a strong argument for such inclusions. But, considering the scope of the task, he is near enough.

Not having read many of his primary sources myself, I cannot say whether the strong focus on metaphysics (as opposed, for example, to ethics, which, though it is in some cases discussed, does not receive equal attention, though a pragmatist like myself would deem it far more important) belies a personal penchant of the author, or derives purely from the primary interests of the philosophers whom he discusses. I can say that, after a cursory examination, philosophers, on the whole, have quite absurd metaphysical tendencies. I could not, in fact, bring myself to agree with the comprehensive propositions—metaphysical, ethical, or otherwise—of any philosopher discussed until I reached the section on Locke. I was quite taken by Locke’s measured relativism (which I found to be not unlike Russell’s own), and even copied out a quotation which would have been good reading for President Bush (W.) on the eve of his Iraq invasion.* But, as the chapter moved on to illustrate Locke’s metaphysics, I was again stymied.

When I was a small child, I used to ask my father, a scientist and an atheist, where people came from. My curiosity was no doubt due in part to what I was learning in kindergarten at my Catholic school. This question of mine would lead us, always, through a long chain of technically unsound but generally meaningful evolutionary derivations. “People came from chimpanzees.” “Where did chimpanzees come from?” “Chimps came from smaller primates, like monkeys.” “Where did monkeys come from?” “Monkeys came from smaller mammals,” and so on, through sea creatures, and invertebrates, and single-celled organisms. The last two questions were always the same: “Where did the single-cell organism come from?” “Energy.” “Where did energy come from?” “It was always there.”

It was always there. So, I would say to him, there is God, he’s just energy; but my dad would shake his head and tell me no, energy in its pure state is not cohesive, it’s not a being, and it hasn’t the will of the thing that people call “God.” For a time, I believed what I was taught in school—that there was God, a god who had created me intentionally because of his love for me, individually, and that he had a plan for me, which he would reveal to me, when I was older. Later, I looked at the world, with its panoply of religions and ethical structures, its countries, its economies, its starving masses; I looked at the sky with its billions of stars and felt how small even the starving masses are, relative to the scope of the universe, and I condemned my earlier beliefs as naïve, the product of my tendency to passively accept information provided by authority figures. Anyway, what had been there at the beginning, be it energy or otherwise, ceased to matter. In fact, nothing mattered. I don’t mean that in the depressive’s sense. I simply mean that, ultimately, when considered against the scale of the universe, and the necessary infinitude of space and time, our lives here on Earth, in fact the existence of the entire planet itself, were random and meaningless. Though this thinking terribly depressed my mother, I, having read the portions of Nietzsche in which God is proclaimed dead, thus freeing all men to become gods themselves, found it rather liberating.

Russell divides his History into three sections: the Greeks, the Christians, and the Moderns. I tried, throughout the first two thirds of the book, and even half of the final third, to understand the various thinkers’ metaphysics, be the world comprised of something as simple as fire or as esoteric as windowless monads. In discussing this with Aldo, we became engaged in a conversation about quantum physics (which has always hurt my brain, and which I’ve never liked), including Schrödinger's cat (which I refuse to accept, for the cat knows whether the cat is alive or dead, and it matters to the cat), and the proposition that, in a vacuum containing only a single electron, that electron could be measured as simultaneously inhabiting more than one position (which I also refuse to accept, although I accept that there is a possibility for that electron to inhabit more than one position, and that, as additional electrons are introduced into the vacuum, that range of possibilities decreases. Frankly, even if an electron does inhabit multiple positions simultaneously in a vacuum, it does not matter to me, because we do not live in a vacuum; thus, metaphysically speaking, the point seems to me moot).

Having had this conversation the night before, now sitting alone in our friend’s living room in the dying light of day, pondering the infinitude of space and time, I had a momentary lapse of reason. Everything is made out of electrons. As if I had smoked some drug that I have never smoked, this suddenly concerned me greatly. Why? I asked myself. Why are there electrons? I found this extremely disconcerting and, to the best of my understanding of the term, tripped for about ten minutes or so as the room went from orange to blood red to dark purple to black with the setting sun. Somehow, I was able to pull myself out of this upon realizing that electrons don’t actually exist per se, but only as a way that we measure energy. And I had long ago accepted that “Energy was always there,” after all, the Law of Conservation of Energy states that Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only changed from one form to another. And, since energy exists now, and it cannot be created, it was always there, Q.E.D.

Furthermore, I decided that, yes, at a most basic level, I am made of nothing but energy, and that the curtain hanging against that window, too, is made of nothing but energy. Metaphysically speaking, then, it makes no difference whether I spend the remainder of my life sitting on a couch, eating KFC from a cardboard bucket, and watching marathons of MTV’s The Real World on television, or instead move to Malawi to teach HIV-positive women and orphans organic farming. But this is absurd. Ethically, I know that there is a difference. Therefore, I can throw all Metaphysics out the window, for its truths are truths inapplicable to the scale of our world, our society, our lives. What matters is ethics—how do we know what we should do? For too long, people have tried to determine their ethics based on metaphysics (this is the mode of religion). A truly relevant and efficacious ethical system is based on a smaller scale: be there a God or gods, ideal ideas or things-in-themselves, our actions have consequences here and now that are far more relevant. This is my thinking, not Bertrand Russell’s, but I think that he would approve. I think that John Locke would approve as well.

*"We should do well to commiserate our mutual ignorance, and endeavour to remove it in all the gentle and fair ways of information, and not instantly treat others ill as obstinate and perverse because they will not renounce their own and receive our opinions, or at least those we would force upon them, when it is more than probable that we are no less obstinate in not embracing some of theirs. For where is the man that has uncontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he condemns; or can say, that he has examined to the bottom all his own or other men's opinions? The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than to restrain others. . . . There is reason to think, that if men were better instructed themselves, they would be less imposing on others." John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, Chapter XVI, Section 4, as quoted in Russell, page 555.

Clearly having taken this to heart, Russell writes, "In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held" (47). I would like to think we could substitute "studying a philosopher" with "negotiating with another party," and give this wisdom to the leaders of parties (from local to international) in conflict. In fact, as Russell concludes, writing in 1946, "To frame a philosophy capable of coping with men intoxicated with the prospect of almost unlimited power and also with the apathy of the powerless is the most pressing task of our time" (660). How prescient was this man! But who will take up this task?

Books: A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey

Pace Smoking Gun, controversy be damned, and as embarrassed as I am to have read a paperback with an Oprah's Book Club sticker pasted on the front cover, this is a damned good book. Ashamed nevertheless, I read it in the safety of my home - a copy found in my building's laundry room - because I wouldn't want to be seen with it in public after the brouhaha a few years ago. The irony in my fear of being judged is that far more people probably judge me by what I'm wearing and maybe the fact that I'm reading a book than by what book I actually am reading. But the people whose judgements might matter know. Unless you see what book I'm reading and you are about to judge me by what book I'm reading, I couldn't give a rat's ass about your judgement. That's pretty twisted, huh?

I had, I think, an extremely valid reason (i.e. excuse) for reading this book. As I've said before, I write (wrote?) semi-fictional memoir. I call it that. I actually consider all of my memoir "real," but I call it that - semi-fictional - for the same reason that James Frey ought to have called his the same: the reader machine (reviewers, columnists, Oprah, Larry King (as it turned out for Frey), and last but not least, readers, of course) doesn't discern between memoir and autobiography. I, however, do, and by my personal understanding of memoir, Frey did no wrong. I know (obviously) that "my personal understanding" of a word is meaningless and that words are defined by their uses in common. I can think that "cat" means what others call "dog," but it's moot until I can communicate dogness with the word "cat" to a group of other speakers. It is with resignation to this fact, then, that memoir is now a synonym for autobiography that I call my writing and his semi-fictional memoir, which seems redundant to me, but won't be to anyone else.

My understanding of memoir encompasses a retelling of and reflection upon one's memories. Memories are not facts. People mis-remember things constantly (hello, Scooter Libby trial). Sometimes people pretend to mis-remember things (hello, Scooter Libby trial) and they lie about it under oath and then the reader machine gets mad because the reader machine feels foolish for having been duped. But memoir is not the grand jury, affidavits, depositions. What happens in my head - only in my head - dreams I have at night, fantasies I have during the day, stories that I am told by others which may or may not be 10 or 50 or 100% true - is all equally valid, in my head, as things that actually happened (I sat at a desk all day). Because in reality I didn't just sit at a desk all day. My consciousness was where ever else it went. Traipsing across the Steppe with a grandmother I never really met - photo documentation to the contrary aside.

It seems as though I'm making a dangerous argument for the total subjectivity of reality, and I'm not - whether I believe that or not - and I don't (although there is something to be said for the existence of different layers of reality; I've not schematized it and I refuse to do so) - but in literature, we write what we write; what inspires us to write is real, and what we write becomes real while we write it and while it's read. The young author portrayed in You Can't Go Home Again committed the opposite sin of Frey - he wrote what he called a novel, based on the characters and essence of his hometown. People recognized portraits of themselves and their neighbors and became enraged, sent nasty notes and death threats to his apartment. Reviewers and columnists criticized him for drawing too closely on his personal life. Perhaps if he had called it a memoir, the reader machine would have let him off the hook. But his book, Frey's books, and my books (um, I don't have any books yet, but yeah) are NOT Bob Woodward books. They are about us and our experiences with the people we interact with and the things that happen inside our skulls. Henry Miller wrote. . . what? Novels? Memoir? Something half-way between? Bingo. Semi-fictional memoir.

Frey's book is potently honest in transcribing the inner workings of a certain sort of psychology. I can say this and know it's true because I know a Frey-like person very well. I thought of him all weekend while I read A Million Little Pieces; I felt like he had written the book, rather than this James Frey person. The undiagnosed pain that causes what Frey calls the Fury - the passionate, enraged, all-encompassing drive that comes over the book's narrator, inspiring violence, self-loathing, self-destruction, substance abuse, etc. - is a fury that I have seen again and again in this person that I know, and it is that fury that has repeatedly ended our relationship - this time for the last time, I'm certain, despite his calls last night. It's time for me to let go of him because, unlike Frey/Frey's narrator, this person is not working on controlling the fury. He is still making excuses for himself, blaming others, and manipulating. I told him to go to therapy, or to at least try yoga or meditation. We were on the phone, but if we'd been speaking in person, he would have spit in my face. I think instead he hung up on me.*

The psychology I am referring to is one most often seen in teenagers - even I, demure as I am, expressed it a bit toward the end of high school - and it therefore comes off as young. The book's descriptions come off as young; there is an intensity in the content, but also in the clipped styling of phrases - direct, spare melodrama - that recalls the anguish and drama of high school and college. I don't doubt that older people think and write like this (many of them in far grosser terms even less evolved), but still, the effect is that of youth. And in the vulnerability (Frey calls himself a sheep in wolf's clothing) lies the empathy, and in the vulnerability that inspires melodrama (Look at me, world, I'm important! World, I'm in pain; I suffer! World, look! Look at my pain and look at me!) lies the empathy. The very fact that Frey worsened his narrator's fate (a longer prison stint than his own seems to be the main issue the reader machine attached) enacts this sheep in wolf's clothing vulnerability, which demands attention at all costs, even the self. It's young, but it's real, and it's valid.

*Update: While I was writing this post, he sent another text message: "I am super sorry. Have a nice life. I am going to clean up." The problem is that his behavior forms a repeating cycle: apologize and promise to be good; actually be good; fuck up; rage and deny having done anything wrong; repeat. I've been through this more than three times with him now, and I'm done. I am tender to a point, malleable even, but I will not be manipulated and abused.

Books: A Deka-Log

I don't know if he knows it, but my father has OCD. He doesn't suffer from OCD, he just functions with it. Actually, I don't know if he could function without it. The astounding volume of information in and about our world is daunting to some and totally disabling to others. Others find it exciting, and still others never notice it, or, if they do, quickly do their utmost to forget they did. My father's OCD enables him to function amidst what would otherwise be a disabling amount of information, because he is of the scholarly type. He is an Intellectual, in the classical sense. He would have been sent to the Gulag had the timing been right (or wrong, of course).

For as long as I can remember, my father has worked obsessively on some project. The projects change every few years (his current dedication is the longest-lasting thus far), but each, to me, stems from the same impetus: an obsessive, compulsive need to organize the information around him into an order that is logical and consumable. For example, one project, when I was very small, was literature. I do believe that my father was always a lover of books. He wrote his never-published novel in his late 20s/early 30s, living in a by-the-week room rental in San Francisco's Chinatown, sharing a bath down the hall, eating ramen noodles, and drinking at Vesuvio. He's the original hipster. The way in which he approached literature, when I was very small (perhaps five and six and seven years old) is distinctly illustrative. Rather than choosing books at random, by mood, by recommendation, he chose to read each Nobel Prize winning Author's most famed novel. Additionally (and this is key), he kept spiral notebooks in which he would write (in those pre-laptop late 1980s) book reports - a summary, and, I imagine, a few thoughts and insights as well. To an outsider it might seem odd, then, that he now reads almost no literature, and instead spends his time marking historical events in various periodicals for inclusion in his leviathan website (which documents the history of the world in time line format: http://www.timelines.ws/), but I read this as a continuation of his life's work (which work keeps him "sane," which work keeps him "functioning," which work keeps his mind from wandering into the darker territory that often leaves Philosophers, Mathematicians, and all other brands of thinkers lying on their backs unable to turn over and get up (cf. Gregor Samsa).

Throughout my childhood (ages four to fourteen, at least), my father and I had a Saturday routine that included his dropping me off and picking me up from dance class, us having lunch together (nice days: picnic in Golden Gate Park; not so nice days: chicken chow mein and coke at Hung Yeung), and a trip to the library. Usually, he would sit in the research section, copying figures out of the newsprint volumes of Value Line (recall the pre-internet days) into still other spiral-bound notebooks (my mother once misdiagnosed his OCD in a rather Jungian judgement: "oh, he's just a scribe," not comprehending the drive behind his perhaps unconscious compulsion to copy the world into his little notebooks. This project). Meanwhile, I would wander the childrens', then young adults', and eventually fiction sections of the library, choosing a stack of five to ten novels to last me the week. I was a very quick reader, and with no siblings and few friends, I had usually digested at least half of my stack before the weekend's close.

My father repeatedly suggested that I keep a record of what books I had read; bulldozing through the library as I was, he doubted whether I would remember any of what I had consumed, and gave me notebooks in which to write book reports of my own. I hated book reports, however (perhaps, if in second and third grade, I'd been taught to write papers as I would later be taught in high school, I would have been more inclined to produce such interpretive documentation). I refused not only to write reports on my personal reading, I refused to even keep a list. When I was in high school, long after he gave up literature for best-selling books on tape, he again pushed me to keep a list of the books I was reading. When I was in college, majoring in English and reading on the average a novel a week per English class (and sometimes four classes per semester), he restated the importance of keeping a list. Not once did I heed the advice, because of one part rebellion, one part distraction, and one part frustration with the necessary incompleteness of the project (since I hadn't been keeping a list since birth, the list would not be all-inclusive, and would therefore be flawed).

As I age (and yes, despite the tenderness of my youth, I feel very old indeed these days, and at times the nostalgia is overpowering), I realize that I am growing more like my father. I do not share the necessity to document, but my hunger for information is deep, and he trained me, perhaps against both knowledge and will, to like documentation. I keep every bill in a tabbed section of a binder and start a new binder each new year. I file my emails in folders according to author, and wish Microsoft Outlook provided a way to label them by topic for cross-referencing. And now, I blog. I plan to write on each book I finish (and I almost never start a book without finishing - the list of books I've only partially read is short indeed.)*

Meanwhile, during a short (and rare) literary conversation at work, brought about by discussing airplane reading for my boss when I gave him his week's travel itinerary, he asked what I was reading (he knows that I haven't a television or internet at home and do little else but read on my evenings and weekends). He then asked for a list of my top ten books. Now, I've always preferred High Fidelity's Top Five to David Letterman's Top Ten. It's a bit of an apples v. oranges comparison, in that the first encapsulates the "best of" and the other simply strains at humor, but I think it's a relevant comparison nonetheless: the Top Ten strains so often not because of lame humor, but because ten is just too many. It was difficult for me to think of my "top ten books," as he put it, because first: are these the books I enjoyed the most, or the books I think are most important, or the books I think the establishment thinks are the most important; and second: well, ten is just too many. Within a list of ten, there will be two or even three tiers of greatness. One or two books will be what I consider "the best ever," a few will be "really amazing books" that I would be satisfied to have written, and the remainders will be well-written books that are fun to read. But I am an obedient employee, and it sounded like a healthy exercise, so I have complied. Here is my list, in the order I thought of them:

Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace
This is the best book ever. Yes, it is daunting at 1,100+ pages, some pages taken completely over by rampant footnotes, 200+ of which pages are dedicated to lengthy endnotes, and one needs two bookmarks at all times when reading it. But I reiterate that this is the best book ever. It will become an obsession. I didn't even want to see my boyfriend when I was reading it. I didn't want to sleep. I only wanted to read Infinite Jest. And four years later, the characters, the tropes, the various plots, the images, the details - everything about this book, really, is so potent, so indelible, so evocative - still present themselves in my thoughts, conversation, and writing. I cannot begin to enumerate further details, lest I never cease (that too, being a theme of the book.) It is the hallmark of postmodernism; it is postmodern literature's only masterpiece.

Terra Nostra
Carlos Fuentes
This is a sprawling and quite insane book. Like Infinite Jest, its page count is daunting. Like Infinite Jest, each page (unlike, say, War and Peace) is packed with thrilling writing. There is a bit more historicism in it, and (to be honest) the third section, which deals with a hero's journey in some Apocalypto-like, pre-historical-ish, dream-state journey is rather disappointing and ought to be skipped, unless the reader like that sort of thing (folklore, particularly Latin American, Wicca, earth/moon goddesses, etc. - I find it sort of annoying). The first two sections, though, are filled with crazy Spanish court characters, and it's not unlike a Velasquez painting come to life (not that I like Velasquez' paintings, because I don't - they are too murky and mushy in execution, and his color and composition are rarely interesting, and his portraits are ugly in an uninteresting way; but none of that means that the characters and tone Velasquez portrays don't make for good novels, especially when the writer is as masterful as Fuentes).

Vineland
Thomas Pynchon
This is one of Pynchon's least popular books. It was written in the late 80s, critically panned, and brought the word "thanatoid" into my vocabulary. Aside from The Crying of Lot 49 (which is a lot of fun, but much too short and a wee bit shallow), it is the most readable of Pynchon's books. The most famous of Pynchon's books would be Gravity's Rainbow (which I loathed), or perhaps it's predecessor V. (which I also loathed). I read it quite some time ago, and the characters and plot are far from crisp in my mind, but I remember details, and moods, and I am attached to these details and these moods. I am attached, intensely, to his description of the thanatoidal surf rock. It's not unlike a deeper darker Kurt Vonnegut, an author whose books, though I love them, don't make this list, perhaps because they are too readable.

Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole
A brilliant, hilarious romp (oh I hate to use that word and make this sound like a romantic comedy). There is a good story behind the publication of this novel, and I will not recount it here. That's what google and wikipedia are for. The writing, like the protagonist, is inflationary, caustic, and precocious in a paradoxical way, for although the protagonist is an adult, he lives still with his mother and is emotionally something of a bloodsucking child. I'm not a good enough writer to write about the brilliance of Toole's writing. It is satire, but it is tender; it is robust with (earthy) love and abhorrence for life, society, intellect. It is the funniest book I've ever read, but still one of the smartest.

The Bear
William Faulkner
This is a little book - a novella - found in a Three Stories volume long out of print. This is a work of mood and tone and darkness and feeling. It's not as difficult as other works by Faulkner. It's also (I think) more rewarding. It is, in a way, what Moby Dick ought to have been, or is said to be by those who haven't actually slogged through it, but set in the woods, of course, rather than on the sea. First published on its own in Harper's, Faulkner later included it in revised entirety in his novel Go Down, Moses, which I have not read, and probably should.

Sexus/Plexus/Nexus
Henry Miller
Here I may be cheating because these seem to be three books. They are, actually, three volumes in a series (The Rosy Crucifixion). Written later than the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, these books blend an increasingly philosophical curiosity with Miller's more well-known lusty habits of fucking, eating, and living beyond his means. Miller is the only author of semi-fictional memoir that I've encountered, and while I don't swoon for his language or tone the way I do for that of other writers on this list, the rawness and accessibility - the lusty plainness of it - echos loudly in my own writing.

The Tidewater Tales
John Barth
Another sprawling, brilliant, postmodern tome. A good knowledge of literature isn't mandatory for reading this book, but it helps. A love of literature and storytelling, however, is mandatory, if you are to enjoy the book at all. The protagonists are a literary couple of some breeding, pregnant, on their sailboat (I know, I know, it's a bit Lacoste and country club, and yes, it's a very white book, and yes, it is very, well, preppy. But try to let go of that. There's nothing inherently wrong with being 30-something, happily married and happily pregnant, from a bit of old money, and literature-obsessed. I think. Um. Yeah.) Anyway, the book does quite a bit of riffing on The Odyssey, Don Quixote, and The Arabian Nights. John Barth is a brilliant writer, if a bit overbred (if this book is just too stuck up for you, try The Sot Weed Factor. If that is too stuck up, try The Floating Opera). Hubby is an author, postmodernly of the postmodern variety, who has postmoderned himself into a hyperintellectualized version of writer's block. Mom-to-be is a professional, practicing storyteller whose personal history includes a terrible waspy marriage gone awry and a possibly symptomatic short stint in a monogamous lesbian relationship. The book is far from perfect, and I wonder whether I wouldn't like a crack at editing it, but ultimately it is the sweetest (and smartest) love story I've read. Yes, read it with your lover, or at least read the sweet, sweetly dirty parts aloud to your lover if your lover otherwise hates postmodernity in literature.

J R
William Gaddis
Gaddis may be known for being unreadable, and this book is indeed very difficult. I showed it to my mother and she couldn't understand why I would want to bother. It is quite a bother, but it is epiphanically worth the effort. In another postmodern urge, the book is nearly devoid of exposition, comprised completely of almost slavishly reproduced dialogue; discourse markers (e.g. "uh-") are all included, as are mid-sentence (and mid-word) breaks, interruptions, etc. The most challenging and most brilliant sections detail an executive conversing with two different parties on two different phone lines, a secretary (or two) and a guest in his office, all simultaneously (as he does in our real world). Further, the speakers are rarely if ever identified by anything other than their style of discourse. A new speakers' speech is flagged by a line break and an introductory dash. What emerges, though, are a myriad of distinct, identifiable voices, shining in comparison to the text of other books, where only the narrator's voice has a tangible particularly.

Mantissa
John Fowles
I wonder whether Fowles is as underrated in his native England as he is here. I never would have heard his name had my father not recommended The French Lieutenant's Woman. While lovely and poignant, that book is nowhere near as - yes, again; I'm sorry - brilliant - as Mantissa. This is - yes, again; I'm sorry - a postmodern - yes, again; ugh - romp, written by about a writer writing. I'm sorry. Maybe it's only because I'm a writer that I like to read writers writing about writers writing. (Did I mention that the obese protagonist of Confederacy is a writer himself as well? Actually, the stats are not so bad - only three or maybe four of my ten are writers writing books about writing. I expected much grosser proportions.) So, yes, this is another one of those, with a healthy dose of intellectual fantasy, Freud, sex, Greeks, and so forth. It's a smart, sexy, writerly book, and it's fairly short and easy and fun. If you think that Freud and Greeks and writing are fun, of course.

Fantazius Mallare
Ben Hecht
This books is very different than the others on the list. It's something of an "aht novel" ("art" with a breathy, haughty accent), written in the 20s, and banned for obscenity. It's extremely decadent (in content and especially diction), fantastic (phantasmagoric), and wrought (linguistically and psychologically). Minimalists: beware. Goth kids: please form a line starting here. The author, Ben Hecht, is the same Ben Hecht as the screenwriter for numerous mid-century films, including Hitchcock's tedious Notorious and Spellbound; please forgive him. He wrote other brilliant books on the same theme as Fantazius Mallare - the psychological tumult of the richly overinflated ego (cf. his semi-autobiographical novel Eric Dorn). There is a sequel - The Kingdom of Evil - which is good, but not as good. Bonus: the book features stunning - and I don't say that lightly - woodcut illustrations by Wallace Smith.

Fin.

or

Basta.


*It is, in chronological order:

1. A Wrinkle in Time (I checked it out of the library and never had time to start it, and for some reason I cannot remember, returned it rather than renewed it on its due date. I suppose it barely qualifies for inclusion in this list, as I never even actually opened it, but I think checking it out of the library ought to count.)

2. The Color Purple (I started reading a classroom copy of it after finishing a standardized test early, so couldn't, of course, take it with me when I didn't have time to finish it. It was far from compelling enough to warrant my ever checking it out from the library.)

3. Native Son (The first of three sections was assigned by my English teacher during my sophomore year of high school. The character's predicament was so absurd and frustrating that not only could I not empathize with Bigger Thomas, I couldn't bear to read anymore of his story.)

4. The Book of Disquiet (Pessoa's dreadfully slow, painstaking compilation of scraps slowed my usually brisk clip along my reading list nearly to a halt. I haven't any problem with slow or difficult books (after all, I've even read Pynchon's Mason Dixon, which is, basically, unreadable), but this, first, barely qualifies as a novel, and second, just became obnoxious. A collection of (depressive) never-completed (or edited) thoughts and aphorisms does not need to be read in a linear or complete manner, despite my usual insistence on linear and complete reading. Ultimately, this book is the crappiest waste of time ever. The first twenty-five pages or so are fun.)

Movies: A Streetcar Named Desire

Today is wet, gray, and drippy, recalling the suppressed and sticky indoor lunch hours of fourth and fifth grade when, supervised by eighth graders while teachers smoked their cigarettes under the peeling overhang of the school's back entrance, we were forced to play the popularity game of Heads Up, 7 Up. To play this game, we all sat at our desks with our heads down on a folded arm, hitchhiker's thumb raised, while seven of our classmates - chosen by the power-wielding eighth graders - that choosing the very conference of popularity - walked between us, choosing one person's thumb to press down (a second degree conference). Once each of the seven had turned down one thumb, they returned to the front of the room, an eighth grader called, "Heads Up, 7 Up!" and we seated raised our heads. Those who had been lucky enough to have their thumb put down had three guesses to decide which of the seven had blessed them with the gesture - if they guessed correctly, they replaced that person at the front of the room; if not, they remained at their desk and their thumb-turner at large. This game never interested me, because my thumb was not once turned down. Not once, in all of San Francisco's rainy days.

But that is a far digression from my topic today. Last night was movie night at The Big R's (who's catching up on his classics) and we watched A Streetcar Named Desire, which I don't remember having seen before. I don't really know where to begin a discussion of this. The film is so fraught with melodramatic neurosis that watching it, one teeters between falling into the moody melancholy (much achieved by the excellent cinematography's portrait-like close-ups - cf. the shot of Blanche and Stella intertwined, face-to-face like lovers), and recoiling from the loony absurdity of Blanche's big-eyed, mile-a-minute chatter. The melodrama exists in the play, certainly, but there is something (much explained away by the era - movies from the '50s are rich with overacting that tips the intensity scale in the favor of the in-credible) so hyperactive in Vivien Leigh's performance that our empathy is thwarted.

I wouldn't say the same of Brando, Kim Hunter, or Carl Malden. My grain of salt, here, and no pun intended, is that these three are Salt of the Earth-type characters. Raw, real, and responsive to visceral emotions with which we connect: pride, desire, and neediness - respectively, though interchangeably as well (Brando's Stan shifts from pride to neediness when he cries "Stella!" in the rain; Malden's Mitch shifts from neediness to desire when he woos a coy Blanche outside the nightclub, begging her to go somewhere with him, meanwhile relieving his sexual tension by embracing a wooden post and rubbing his body against it). Blanche's "reality" of magic (as she calls it), however, is a frantic fantasy structure of a constantly collapsing delusion. Her airs denote pride, but it's a put-on, poorly masking her a self-esteem vacuum. Her desire, too, is a sham - the coy flitting of a small pet bird, as opposed to the animal stare of Hunter's eyes as she slinks down the stairs in the rain, where Brando falls to her feet and buries his head in her stomach (Hunter wins for best descent of a staircase in film, ever). Her neediness is true, but it's not the neediness of the other three - a loneliness of the self that is completed by another "half." It is the neurotic neediness (the one that has earned all of women a reputation as "blood-sucking bitches" amongst many a hurt man) that isn't ever satisfied, that must be buoyed tirelessly by a lover/care-taker who constantly entertains her with complementary fantasies. Is Blanche actually crazy? Is she driven crazy by watching her life in Mississippi crumble around her? Is she unstable but sane until raped by Stan?

Blanche's melodrama - although I might need to say Leigh's melodrama, to be honest - hardens my resolutions against her, much in the same way she immediately hardens Stan. I would imagine that, based on dispositions, other viewers will react to her differently. We who are empathetic and given to agape will feel Stella's tender sorrow, and we who are swept up by the beauty and exoticism of her fantasies will be bewitched and betrayed, and ultimately bewildered, like Mitch, sitting and staring at her from the card table while she's led away on the arm of her stranger. But, staunchly in Stan's camp, I don't know if she's crazy, I don't know when she went crazy, but she is more than just a nuisance, and out of sight means out of mind. A major reason I quit my last job was because of what I at the time called the Chicken Little antics ("the sky is falling!") of my boss. What I now realize is that she was trained in the Blanche DuBois school of femininity.

And what of the very end, now, in which Stella, with new found resolution, insists to the infant she shakes in her arms that she'll "never go back. . . not now. . . never again. . ."? I don't believe her. Again, out of sight is out of mind, though we now are driven to wonder whether the love of a man trumps the love of a sister. Being an only child, I will never know, but if Stella left home once, she can forget the past again. The only thing that could change this is an awareness of Stan's transgression against Blanche's body, and it's arguable whether she knows or not.

After the movie, The Big R and I got into a discussion about melodramatic people and "crazy" women (a topic of choice for me, since I have something like a perpetual fear of being "one of those crazy girls," and therefore constantly rein in my actions and words around danger areas (i.e. people for whom I have unrequited affections). I commented on my difficulty relating to the way of life (drinking, brawling, break-up/make-up) the film depicted, and The Big R said, incredulously, "You realize this is how most people function. They have to create drama around their lives in order to verify their existence. So they have a story to tell their friends. So that they feel something." Do I realize it? Yes.* Do I like it? No. Do I want to be a part of it? No. As goes an expression my mom picked off her Southern girlfriend, "I got no dog in that fight."

He and I, though, are always a bit incredulous with regard to the way the average American lives (working to the point of breaking your soul to support a spoiled family that doesn't appreciate your sacrifice, and spending what little time you have to yourself medicating with television, liquor, drugs (prescription and non-), wandering around an ugly reality wondering how it happened - being locked in a present without awareness of how you got there, without a idea of how to get somewhere else, and not even knowing where you'd rather be.) Not that he and I operate in the same way. He has big goals, and big plans, and these (I think) distract him in a way from that existential crisis that nips at every one's heels. But he is driven, too, by a faith (in himself and in the universe, in meaning and in perpetuity) that I don't. To pursue a goal, one needs faith. But without goals, and without faith, I think I'm also doing okay.

*I used to do it. In a way, it was part of why I wrote. Some people fight themselves into a frenzy. My mom talks herself into a frenzy. I would write myself into a frenzy. I think (I hope) I'm done with that.