“…I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair”

“I don’t want to write about myself. If I wrote about myself it would be a book about me sitting on my arse in a New York apartment, a middle-class white man with a wonderful wife and three fabulous children. But as Montaigne says, ‘Happiness writes white.’ It doesn’t hit the page. So we have to search elsewhere.”

As McEwan immerses himself in various worlds for his books — wartime battle in Atonement, medicine in Saturday, science in Solar – I can’t help but to think that some of the knowledge gained from an earlier book seeps into later ones. In Solar, a description of a running Beard, late to a speaking engagement, has a distinctly medical observation, as if some prose has held over from Saturday:

Inside a minute, he was troubled by a narrow stab of pain in his chest, deep in some neglected lower region of his left lung, among the less frequented alveoli, and he slowed.

I’m going to end with a poor baseball analogy: While sharp observation of human flaws and relationships remain central to McEwan’s writing, much like a batter with a good eye, his meticulous research and penchant for the technical, something not present in his earlier work, has become his steroids — his stories now go more in-depth and further into areas that less committed authors might shy away from, allowing for some richly developed worlds and, sometimes, some showboating.

“The robots have become self-aware and self-loathing. Now all they do is write novels.”

I really liked this article in the New Yorker by Ben McGrath about spring training. It centers on two prospects, Jason Heyward and Stephen Strasburg, and the buzz they've been generating in the media. Growing up an Atlanta Braves fan — a byproduct of being overexposed to TBS as a child — it was nice to read about an exciting young player breaking into the big leagues. Not too long after I started reading the article, I saw an ESPN highlight of Heyward homering on his first ever Major League at-bat. 

After a few months of job rejections, and with Strasburg Spring looming, Zuckerman asked himself how much it would cost to cover a baseball team solo. He couldn’t bear to miss the possibility of a Strasburg save. He’d start with spring training: six weeks, no planes. He figured if he drove his own Honda (eight hundred fifty miles, with a stopover in Savannah) and got a good deal on a hotel (sixty-nine bucks a night), he could make it work with five thousand dollars. Credentialling was no problem—the Baseball Writers Association covers members who are between gigs for up to a year—so he established a Web site (NatsInsider.blogspot.com), announced his intentions to go it alone, and asked for reader donations. With the help of some timely plugs from former colleagues, he had reached his goal in twenty-nine hours. By the end of the first week, he’d more than doubled it. Zuckerman’s was a grassroots kind of campaign, with contributions averaging forty dollars. To those readers willing to pledge sixty dollars or more, he offered the opportunity to submit a question, through him, to anyone on the team. (For the third baseman Ryan Zimmerman, from Katie Edwards, age eleven, of Herndon, Virginia: “Can you explain the differences in the structure of spring training under Jim Riggleman vs. Manny Acta?”) His target readers knew their baseball.

To be an effective communicator, a President needs a strong world view, a fundamental vision of why things are the way they are and how they ought to be, which can be simplified into a few key ideas and images–in short, an ideology. For Obama and his advisers, there is no worse pejorative. Their distaste for ideology sometimes causes them to sand down the sharper edges of their own proposals…

A year in, Obama’s Presidency resembles, in uncanny ways, Ronald reagan’s at the same point. The public has rejected a previous President, and has attached inchoate hopes to the new one; an ambitious domestic agenda is being forged amid economic misery and widespread discontent. Thirty years later, it’s easy to forget how perilous Reagan’s situation was in 1982… Reagan spent his second year negotiating with Democrats in Congress while urging the country to give Reaganomics a chance. For Washington, he continued a rhetorical offensive in televised speeches and in midterm campaign appearances, always drawing a distinction between his views and those of the Democrats, between his future and their past. He directed supporters to pressure vulnerable Democrats in their districts. Reagan could recover from battlefield setbacks because he was fighting a larger war. His talent for phrasemaking and anecdote derived from having a strong worldview: unlike Obama, he began with a set of ideas and found the evidence to match them and the words to dramatize them. “Our current problems are not the product of the recovery program that’s only just now getting under way, as some would have you believe,” he said in his first State of the Union Message, in 1982. “They are the decades of tax and tax and spend and spend.”

And an interesting bit coming from Congressman Barney Frank:

…[Frank] said that Obama “would have been better off with a more adversarial approach” toward pharmaceutical firms, insurance companies, and banks. “Reagan, to his credit, had an ideological agenda,” Frank said. “Obama was trying to be favorably viewed by seventy per cent, and Reagan was willing to settle for fifty-seven percent. He understood an intense fifty-seven percent was better than a sort of feel-good seventy.”

With the Health Care Bill finally passing–with zero Republican votes–Obama will hopefully begin to take a more aggressive approach towards pushing through legislation and figure a way establish a resonating message that’ll stick.

Note: Trying to post more frequently again. Set it up so I can post directly from my iPhone now.

I really liked how Krystal describes the complex character of Fitzgerald, an idealist trying to be many things and all the while pleasing to everyone. I particularly enjoyed this passage (some parts condensed):

Fitzgerald’s scripts were hobbled by the same quality that lifted his fiction above the superficial: the complicated nature of his mind. He had started out thinking he had genius and a special destiny, and it was this belief in an ideal version of himself that, when transmuted into narrative form, won him both a wide audience and critical esteem. But that idealized self in all other respects eluded him, not because he drank too much or behaved badly but because he was a writer at war with his own inclinations. A self-professed “moralist at heart,” he also wanted to be a hero and an entertainer… And it was this dichotomy — the receptiveness to life’s most profound lessons coupled with a need to win over the world by the force of his personality — that made him capable of being, in equal measure, aesthetically rigid and blatantly manipulative….

He said that he knew more about life in his books than he did in life, and he was right. In life, he simply wanted too much. He wanted to be a great novelist and a Hollywood hot shot. He wanted to box like Gene Tunney and run downfield like Red Grange. He wanted to write songs like Cole Porter and poetry like John Keats. He wanted the trappings of wealth but was drawn to the social idealism of Marx. He wasn’t so much a walking contradiction as a quivering mass of dreams and ambitions that, depending on how he was feeling and whom he was talking to, created a dizzying array of impressions.

The way that Fitzgerald so confidently marched into Hollywood believing that he had the talent and the determination to succeed there made me think for a bit about my own dizzying array of aspirations. As the years go by, my feelings of “special destiny” (if you could call it that) seem to dissipate more and more. And I often find myself still wanting to do everything — grow a successful business, write a great story, launch a helpful non-profit, become athletic again — all while unable to focus and looking for quick wins rather than hunkering down for something more substantial. It would have been a happier story had Fitzgerald just stuck with writing short stories and novels, but then again, a Fitzgerald without a Hollywood wouldn’t be as interesting of a character, just like a life without follies probably wouldn’t be as enlightening.

It’s been a while since I read a novel. I tried to read Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale earlier in the year but gave up about 300+ pages in because all the fantasy and romance stuff stopped resonating with me and the characters were too starkly good vs. evil.

I wanted something easy to read, so I picked up Tom Perotta’s The Abstinence Teacher, which, from what I can tell from reading the inside cover and the first 150 pages, tells the story of a controversial sex ed teacher (a divorcee) and a former rocker/drug addict born-again Christian (who happens to be the soccer coach of the sex ed teacher’s 11-year-old daughter) against a suburban backdrop. I haven’t read Perotta’s Little Children but I did see the movie and this book seems to carry more humor and takes a lighter approach to life in the suburbs. Whereas Little Children was about the suffocating life of a young woman and man raising their respective children with gloomy personal prospects and cold marriages, The Abstinence Teacher has more elements of satire and a less sombre tone.

What stuck out to me is the way that Perotta describes clothing, especially the way the women characters wear them.

A few examples:

On the first day of human sexuality, Ruth Ramsey wore a short lime green skirt, a clingy black top, and strappy high-helled sandals, the kind of attention-getting outfit she normally wouldn’t have won on a date–not that she was going on a lot of dates these days–let alone to work.

Allison stood in the sunlit, two-story entranced foyer… looking sweetly disheveled in a gold silk robe that Tim had never seen before, tied just loosely enough for him to get a tantalizing glimpse of the sheer black nightgown underneath.

In the name of facing temptation, Tim met Deanna at Starbucks the following Thursday morning. She wore a skirt, high heels, and a shirt with a plunging neckline, and he couldn’t keep from telling her how good she looked.

She stepped inside, wearing sneakers, Lycra shorts, and a pink-and-purple sports bra.

I don’t think it really applies, but I kept thinking about the “male gaze” and how these descriptions, in some ways, sexually objectify women. Maybe not so much in the old classical Hollywood way, but what these women wear seem to reflect their agenda and the effect they hope to have on men.

Maybe that was a real lame way of trying to bring up something I learned in college, but I thought it’d be fun to review (thanks Wikipedia) what I remember about the “male gaze”:

In considering the way that films are put together, many feminist film critics have pointed to the “male gaze” that predominates in classical Hollywood filmmaking. Budd Boetticher summarises the view thus: “What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.” Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (written in 1973 and published in 1975) expands on this conception of the passive role of women in cinema to argue that film provides visual pleasure through scopophilia, and identification with the on-screen male actor. She asserts: “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness,” and as a result contends that in film a woman is the “bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.” Mulvey argues that Freud’s psychoanalytic theory is the key to understanding how film creates such a space for female sexual objectification and exploitation through the combination of the patriarchal order of society, and ‘looking’ in itself as a pleasurable act of voyeurism, as “the cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking.”

I remember reading Mulvey’s essay for a class and feeling a bit guilty since the movies I seemed to enjoy the most almost always allowed me to identify with the on-screen male character, who, most certainly, always had a beautiful, sexually-charged counterpart.

Maybe I’ve done more to describe the male gaze that I personally bring to reading rather than anything Perotta does in the book. I now realize that Perotta does describe, in similar level of detail, the way the men wear their clothes and do their hair and the effect it has on a female character. I probably saw nothing sexual in such a scene and moved quickly through it, but perhaps a female reader may think differently. I should ask my girlfriend.

In 1966, Clyde Haberman, the young City College correspondent for the New York Times (with a very promising future), was bored while filling out three columns with City College student awards. To amuse himself, he came up with:

BRETT AWARD to the student who has worked hardest under a great handicap– Jake Barnes.

Not too long after his editor found out, he was fired.