Death of the Author*

I finally (thanks Instapaper!) got around to reading the thoroughly excellent profile of Ian McEwan in The New Yorker. Things of note:

1.
McEwan tells a story of his son writing a paper on Enduring Love. Totally awkward situation, I wonder if the teacher knew.

“Poor Greg had to study ‘Enduring Love’ in school. He had a female teacher. And he had to write an essay: Who was the moral center of the book? And I said to Greg, ‘Well, I think Clarissa’s got everything wrong.’ He got a D. The teacher didn’t care what I thought. She thought that Joe was too ‘male’ in his thinking. Well. I mean, I only wrote the damn thing.”

2.
It gives away the ending of Atonement! Though I guess anyone reading a 13,000 word profile on McEwan will have already read his most famous work.

3.
Mad props to McEwan and his respect of science.

All novelists are scholars of human behavior, but Ian McEwan pursues the matter with more scientific rigor than the job strictly requires. On a recent hike through the woods surrounding his new country house—a renovated seventeenth-century brick-and-flint cottage, in Buckinghamshire—he regularly punctuated his observations about Homo sapiens with the citation of a peer-reviewed experiment.

*Cf. Roland Barthes, who interestingly enough, died after being hit by a laundry van on the way back from a party held by François Mitterand.

Trading Cities 2

In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping.

A girl comes along, twirling a parasol on her shoulder, and twirling slightly also her rounded hips. A woman in black comes along, showing her full age, her eyes restless beneath her veil, her lips trembling. A tattooed giant comes along, a young man with white hair; a female dwarf; two girls, twins, dressed in coral. Something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment, and other characters come on to the scene: a blind man with a cheetah on a leash, a courtesan with an ostrich-plume fan, an ephebe, a Fat Woman. And thus, when some people happen to find themselves together, taking shelter from the rain under an arcade, or crowding beneath an awning of the bazaar, or stopping to listen to the band in the square, meetings, seductions, copulations, orgies are consummated among them without a word exchanged, without a finger touching anything, almost without an eye raised.

A voluptuous vibration constantly stirs Chloe, the most chaste of cites. If men and women began to live their ephemeral dreams, every phantom would become a person with whom to bring a story of pursuits, pretenses, misunderstandings, clashes, oppressions, and the carousel of fantasies would stop.

- From Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

Literary Interlude

I’m joined not one, but two, book clubs today. After a semester of math/science, it feels good to be literary again, but also a little scary. I haven’t written a paper all year, and I’m not sure I can BS my way out of a paperbag anymore. But why worry? I can still read (sometimes even in German) and right now I’m reading:

• J.G. Ballard’s Vermillion Sands — I almost never read sci-fi, but this collection is fascinating. True to its genre, it’s set in the future, but there’s an elegiac quality to the stories.
• Le Corbusier at Work — Not the new Le Corbusier biography, but an old musty tome about the Carpenter Center, Harvard’s visual arts building and the only Le Corbusier building in the US. Someone once described it as “two pianos humping.” As much as I can tell, the building never lived up to its initial promise, and I get the impression certain details were redacted from the book for political reasons. There is also a lot of French in this book (which I can sometimes read too).

I am thinking about suggesting The Unfortunates for both book clubs. The book is nonlinear, literally — it comes as pamphlets in a box and you can read them in any order. A commentary, perhaps, on how each of us reads differently. Would the resulting discussion be especially fruitful or chaotic?

O Suburbia!

If modern television (Mad Men) and Hollywood (Revolutionary Road) are to be believed, suburbs were troubled places even at the height of their idealization in the 1950s. The women were just more elaborately coiffed and divorces a tid more scandalous. Like the 50s, suburbia today is still all about repression and broken dreams. At least according to creative types in the media.

Tom Perotta is probably our best chronicler of modern suburbia. I crack open his books with such relish because his writing hews so closely to my life. He lives in a Massachusetts surburb 20 mins from mine and, at one point taught, expository writing at Harvard.* The “Official Tom Perrotta Chronology” includes this snarky passage:

When he tells his Harvard students that [Election] recounts a cutthroat race for the “meaningless post” of high school president, the audience of ex-high-school-chief-executives reacts with visible shock and dismay.

Election, the first Perrotta novel I read, was wickedly funny, and it did remind me, a little painfully, of the characters that populated my surburban high school. His latest novel, The Abstinence Teacher, falls on the more disappointing side. The ecosystem of suburban characters — overzealous soccer dad, middle-aged math teachers — is again magnificently sketched  but the scope of the book is greater, taking on the culture wars between liberals and evangelicals. The downside to this approach is that the actual ongoings of surburbia — the small but oh-so-accurate details that make this novels so great — are overshadowed and seem banal in comparison. Pastor Dennis, whom I found to be the most intriguiging but underdeveloped character in the book, is given only a brief, mysterious backstory.

My other quibble is that Perrotta seems to write for the screen rather than the page. Sexual repression is a major theme of his books — they drive the plots forward, and the characters are described to be uncharacteristically attractive. Maybe not Don Draper handsome or Kate Winslet gorgeous (which they of course will become when his novels make the predicted leap to the screen), but certainly above average. On the upshot, his novels do make excellent movies (Election, Little Children).

*My freshman expository writing preceptor is also a writer, and according to Amazon, his first novel is to be published in less than a week. I do not have any scoops on this novel because when we inquired about his novel in class, he replied curtly, “It’s not about anything.” The early reviews, however, look quite splendid. If he does become famous, all I have to say is that I once took a course with him but didn’t even do especially well.

Sarah is an Irreverant Gossip

If Proust was a Neuroscientist sounds like a heady book to read on vacation, I assure it is not. Yes, it’s chock full of things I love (marrying science and humanities, neuroscience), but the real reason I’m sneaking out this book while in line for Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular is because it’s so damn gossipy.

The premise of the book is simple yet ambitious: examine how a group of 19th and 20th century artists anticipated modern advances in neuroscience through their art. Walt Whitman, George Eliot, August Escoffier, Marcel Proust, Paul Cezanne, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf get their own chapters, while Picasso, Schoenberg, and especially the brothers James (Henry the novelist and William the psychologist) make memorable appearances. And the gossipy footnotes make clear - these luminaries sure led interesting lives with each other. A small sample.

On George Eliot and Herbert Spencer:

Shortly after breaking Eliot’s heart,  Spencer wrote two cruel essays on “Personal Beauty” in which he extolled the virtues of prettiness. In his autobiography he had the audacity to brag of his own shallowness, and wrote, in veiled reference to Eliot, that “Physical beauty is a sine qua non with me; as was once unhappily proved where the intellectual traits and the emotional traits were of the highest.

On Paul Cezanne and Emile Zola:

Flush with his success, Zola decided to write a book about a painter. He called it L’Oeuvre (The Masterpiece) because he said he could think of nothing better. As required by his method, Zola based his fiction on a story stolen straight from real life. The life he stole this life was based on the life of his best friend [Paul Cezanne]. After the novel was published in the spring of 1866, Cezanne and Zola never spoke to each other again…While Claude [Cezanne’s doppelganger in the novel] is a stereotypical struggling artist, his best friend, the thinly veiled writer Pierre Sandoz, has achieved great literary acclaim, writing a series of twenty novels documenting “The truth of humanity in miniature.” But the real insult came when Zola described Claude’s artl. His abstract paintings, Zola wrote, were nothing but “wild mental activity…the terrible drama of a mind devouring itself.”

On Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and the Fitzgeralds:

How painful is The Rite? Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald used to make their dinner guests choose between listening to a scratchy recording of The Rite or looking at photographs of mutilated soldiers. Apparently, they thought the two experiences were roughly equivalent.

The book is ace, by the way, for reasons independent of its juiciness in gossip. (It’s juicy with ideas too.) I’m surprised I put off reading it for so long. It is actually reading about this book and Q and A with the author Jonah Lehrer that led to reconsider science. Yay for life-changing books.

Thanksgiving Turkey

I didn’t eat any turkey meat today but I did chomp chomp chomp my way through 200 pages of Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma. Began hopeful and ended up horribly disappointed, so I’m calling this book a turkey.

Though I suspect that if I had been a Coupland fan before, I wouldn’t have disliked Girlfriend in a Coma so much. The premise was what hooked me — 17-year-old Karen goes into a coma and wakes up 17 years later — and I expected the novel to be an exploration of Karen’s integration into the “future.” What the novel was instead was, I gather, a classic Coupland — wallowing in the lethargy and failures of Karen’s friends, ye of Generation X. Still, Girlfriend in a Coma didn’t turn me off of Coupland but rather made me curious for more.

The thing about reading depressing books like this on Thanksgiving is that it gives you a lot to be thankful for. I’m thankful that I am not like the characters in this book. (I felt the same way about Prep.) With a combination of luck and hard work, I sit on the brink of extraordinary promise, much like these characters at the beginning of their respective novels. I’m thankful I haven’t screwed up like them. Yet.

Also, just the pure joy of being alive. What is like to wake up one day to find your limbs immobile, your friends changed, and your youth gone? I mentioned this to my roommate, and she replied, “Question: do they shave your legs when you’re in a coma? Or pluck your eyebrows? Oh my god, wouldn’t that suck?”

I knotted my brows and gaped at her. Unable to muster anything in response.