Twelve Twelve Ten: March 2010

If you came looking for John Smolens’ The Anarchist, I’m sorry to say that I must disappoint. Given my abbreviated time schedule (having finished Middlesex near the middle of the month), I decided to jump ahead to Vonnegut’s Look at the Birdie so that I would have the entire month of April to focus on The Anarchist. To make it up to y’all, I have a two-for-one Vonnegut month with reviews of both Look at the Birdie and Galapagos. For new comers to the 12/12/10 project, read about it here.

Look at the Birdie
by Kurt Vonnegut
251 pgs.

My love for Kurt Vonnegut is perpetually in flux, directly proportional to the rollercoaster quality of his work—in college, I was addicted to Slaughterhouse-Five, I loved Timequake, Man Without a Country seemed largely like unnecessary repetition, Armageddon in Retrospect reaffirmed my belief that there is a reason early and unpublished stories remained uncollected. I love him. I dislike him.

For this reason, I began his latest posthumous collection of previously unpublished stories, Look at the Birdie, with a fair bit of caution. As Sidney Offit explains in the book’s foreword, “It could be that these stories didn’t appear in print because… they didn’t satisfy Kurt” (x). To prove this hypothesis, Offit offers a memory of Vonnegut’s workrooms, which were covered in “rolled up balls of paper in the wastebaskets” (xi). And though some of the stories seem underdeveloped and many of the entries feel like kindling for a bigger fire, this collection is far less unnecessary than Armageddon in Retrospect. While not his best, the collection does help to illustrate some of Vonnegut’s hidden talents in the area of suspense and crime drama writing hitherto unknown, at least to me, and largely unexplored in his novels.

The opener “Confido” is typical Vonnegut: an innocuous science experiment threatens to ruin a family and wreak wide-spread havoc on society at large. Henry, a tinker in all things mechanical, invents a machine to satisfy humankind’s most basic desire—the need to have someone to talk to. Everything works fine at first until the machine, which they named Confido, until it begins voicing “the worst in us,” the suspicions, the self-pity, the insults. At that point, Henry and Ellen decide to stop listening. For a story most likely written well before the 21st century, I couldn’t help but wonder at the social commentary the story could offer on our present reliance on cell phones, the need to constantly communicate, and the corrosive effect it can have. Even from the grave, Vonnegut can point out our flaws with his compassion and biting wit.

An undercurrent in “Confido” could also be the relationship between the sender of the message and the receiver. Read another way, the story could be Vonnegut’s veiled way of working through the complex relationship shared by author and reader, a conflict that takes center stage in “Shout About It From the Housetops.” This story chronicles the effect an author’s writing can have on a relationship, the danger of connecting an author’s work to his life, which is a sort of strange warning to get from Vonnegut, an author who didn’t take too many pains to mask the parallels between his life and his work.

The line between fiction and memoir in Vonnegut’s work has always been vague, whether its his novel/memoir/vignette hybrid Timequake, the glimpse we are offered into Vonnegut’s insecurities through his alter-ego Kilgore Trout, or his direct intrusion into Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut’s later works seems as interested in exploring himself as it is in narrating a plot. Even Slaughter-House Five, if the introduction can be believed, was written, at least in part, as a way for Vonnegut to process his eye-witness account of the bombing of Dresden.

Here though, Vonnegut seems to be worried about the disastrous effects of reading one’s work as a diary of one’s life. In the story, a woman writes a thinly veiled romance novel that centers on a man who greatly resembles her and a woman who shares much in common with the author. The author lampoons and caricaturizes people from the her town in the novel, which leads to her husband's firing from his job and puts a strain on their marriage. Although the two end up reconciling, the story ends on an ominous note: the narrator of the story, a window salesman who stumbles upon the husband and wife as they argue over the book, hears that the woman has penned another novel, though this time, the main character is a window salesman.

These opening stories are what we’d expect from Vonnegut, but the collection quickly moves on to a different aspect of Vonnegut’s work: the crime drama, starting with “Ed Luby’s Key Club,” and continuing with “Hall of Mirrors,” “The Honor of a Newsboy,” and the title story, “Look at the Birdie.” “Ed Luby’s Key Club,” the 52-page centerpiece, is the first story in the collection to see Vonnegut venture into the psychological thriller. The near-novella follows a Da Vinci Code-esque sequence of events after Harve Elliot and his wife Claire are framed for a murder committed by Ed Luby. Luby, a former member of the Mafia, is protected by the city’s police force (his brother is the chief), and he controls the rest of the city with his massive wealth. To clear his name, Harve will have to take down the corruption of an entire city. That is, if he can make it out of the city alive.

The collection follows “Ed Luby’s Key Club” with a trio of thrillers: “Hall of Mirrors,” a story about a murderous hypnotist, “The Honor of a Newsboy,” a relatively generic and undeveloped murder mystery, and “Look at the Birdie,” perhaps his most interesting of the trio. In “Look at the Birdie,” Vonnegut combines his interest in psychological thrillers with a broader discussion of societal conventions. The story opens with the narrator talking loudly and half-heartedly about wanting to have an enemy killed when a man sidles up next to him and offers to do the job. Very shortly, though, it’s the narrator who finds himself in danger.

The book is subtitled: “Unpublished Short Fiction,” and perhaps some of the book should have remained this way, at least in its current form—“Confido” feels like start notes for a much longer novel, “Ed Luby’s Key Club” verges on novella length, the ending of “The Honor of a Newsboy” seems tacked on—but we cling to Vonnegut and rejoice in new work, whatever state its in, because we want to live a little longer with his wry, self-deprecating, fatherly voice.

His present day equivalent could be John Stewart in one key aspect. Of course, both offer social critique, both point out absurdities, and cloak their messages in humor—many satirists do this. What connects them, though, is what made me love Vonnegut and now John Stewart: they aren’t disconnected social critics. Readers (and viewers) can perceive the hurt, the sadness over the “human condition” behind their words. We don’t want someone like Vonnegut to give up on us. Thankfully, we have these stories, even if they vary in quality, as comfort.


Galapagos
by Kurt Vonnegut

After Look at the Birdie reignited my love for Vonnegut, I decided to deviate from my reading schedule and knock off one of the final few Vonnegut novels I have yet to finish. Galapagos has long been a fascination ever since I first stumbled upon a hardcover, first copy of the novel on the dusty shelves of a used bookstore. Back then, the twenty dollar first copy price tag sent me instead to old copies of Jailbird or one of his other lesser novels, but I never lost that desire to read a book that listed this enticing tagline on the back cover: “Kurt Vonnegut takes you back one million years to A.D. 1986—and the beginning of the human race.” He uses this retrospective perch to lambast the prevailing mentality of the 1980s (especially the abuse of the environment, uncontrollable greed, and the mistreatment of the poor—sound familiar?). So what is his criticism? Humans fall victim to their giant brains, which tell them to lie and to act mule-headedly out of shame and devise elaborate ways of killing one another. Here’s one of the problems the narrator of the book has with our big brains:

That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time big brains: They would tell their owners, in effect, ‘Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course. It’s just fun to think about.’ And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it—have slaves fight each other to the death in the Coliseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, and on and on. (266)

Eventually, Mother Nature says enough is enough and sends mankind some mysterious virus that keeps everyone from conceiving. Everyone, that is, except for a small community of refugees from Ecuador, who have run aground in the Galapagos Islands and inadvertently "restart" humanity. It is an intriguing premise made even more intriguing by the narrator of the story (who I will purposefully leave unnamed) and the narrator’s perspective. By placing him a million years in the future (from 1986), Vonnegut can use him to show that our accepted view of the direction of evolution might just be misguided.

Before entering this book, I had my clearly defined list of Vonnegut favorites: Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, Timequake, Slapstick. Now I have another book to add to the list. If you haven’t yet stumbled onto this one, make time for it. I guarantee it will find its place in your top three.

***

After my poor showing in February, I am back on track with my (now revised) schedule. In April, I will read The Anarchist by John Smolens followed by The History of Love by Nicole Krauss in May. I’m hesitant to forecast my schedule beyond May, since I read books, most often, on whims. But by the end of the year, I’d like to tackle Catch-22, One Hundred Years of Solitude, a mess of Faulkner, and a trio of Toni Morrison books: Song of Solomon, Beloved, and The Bluest Eye.

Check back at the end of next month for my review of The Anarchist by John Smolens.

Twelve Twelve Ten: February 2010

Editor's note: This review is the opener of my Twelve Twelve Ten project. (Props to Nick Lantz for the idea.) The basics: I will do my best to read (and compose short review/responses to) one book per month for the next ten years. My reviews are not meant to be overly critical. Instead, I hope to help generate a discussion around books that I find interesting, baffling, enjoyable, maddening, uplifting. In short, books that beg for a response. I am willing to take suggestions, though ideally, I want to work through books I own before taking on more, as my secondary goal is to clear off my bookshelf by getting through novels I've neglected for far too long. If you have a different "take" on Middlesex, please share it below. I'm curious to see how other's responded to this book. And while I began this project with Angela's Ashes, I decided against reviewing it. In truth, the depression brought on by that book made it hard to consider anything beyond its utter despair--not a good ingredient for a review. So, without further ado...

Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Soft cover
Publisher: Picador
2002, 529 pp., $15

My philosophy on resolutions is that there’s no better way to start than by taking one of the biggest bites right off the bat. This is how I find myself turning the last page of Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex in the middle of March, about two weeks overdue. (I promise to right myself this month). Despite overlapping a bit into March, I’ve gotten through the book. But that’s probably the wrong way to put it; I sound like reading the book wasn’t a pleasurable experience. In reality, Middlesex is simply incredible: an epic, historic (even Homeric) literary novel that is somehow still a page-turner (similar, in my reading experience, to E. Anne Proulx’s The Shipping News). It’s so stunningly poetic, I’m finding it hard to resist devolving into a muttering pile of superlatives. Wonderful! Brilliant! At times, orgasmic!

Instead, I should let the book show you what I mean. To describe the burning Greek city of Smyrnos, Eugenides’ narrator Cal describes the flames reflecting on the water, the water brightening as “though a school of phosphorescent fish had entered the harbor” (56). Later on, there’s this passage, an illustration of the book's mix of imagination and conflict over language and culture, of the inability to express emotion in a meaningful way:

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy." … I’d like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for the "excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever. (217)

The book is full-up with these kinds of imaginative flourishes—a man woos a woman by playing a clarinet against her thighs, another man drives his car through the ice only to reemerge chapters later in a Mosque, an awkward teenager is turned into a mythological god in a dunk tank—and most of these images, the “life” of the book, is supplied by the first-person narrator, whom The New York Times described as a cross between Tristram Shandy, Ismael, and Holden Caulfield. The voice of the narrator is unquestionably vibrant and unique, but sometimes, such a classification—“strong voice”—can be an underhanded slight against technique. (Think performance poetry). I’m here to clarify that there’s no loss in technique, that as a poet, there were many moments that I wanted to tattoo the text into my brain because it’s just that well-written. This, for you writers out there, is a book to learn from.

While completing my Bachelor’s, I stumbled upon Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides in the dusty stacks of UW-Green Bay’s Cofrin Library, and because I remember this book lodged in the backpacks of all the “cool” and “enlightened” girls in high school, I decided to read it. While the three-person narration was interesting and the book on a whole is competent, The Virgin Suicides is nowhere near the level of Middlesex, which isn’t to disparage Eugenides’ first book. Instead, it’s incredible to witness the growth from one book to the next. It won the Pulitzer Prize, and it’s not surprising to see why. This is a book that’s whittled a permanent place on my bookshelf.

My goal of getting rid of books is starting to fail miserably (though on second thought, Middlesex is too good to hold onto. I must, instead, send it on to someone else who’d appreciate it). Of course, it has its faults, particularly, the imbalance between the story of the Stephanides family and the more immediate story line of Cal's present struggle with sexuality. The craft, however, masks these (minor, in my opinion) issues with plot. Then again, as a poet, I probably read fiction for different reasons than the general populous. Lovers of words, take up the book. Those looking for Dan Brown thrillers, look elsewhere.

Two months down. Up next, John Smolens’ new novel The Anarchist. Check back at the end of March (or maybe, the first week of April).

Rainy Day Teacher #1

Days like these days--intermittent bouts of rain, sky the color of steel--make it hard to get excited about anything beyond sweatpants, coffee, and Lifetime movies. Adding to this malaise, I've just finalized the grades for my first quarter at ITT Technical Institute and am struggling with the strange mixture of relief and disappointment that often follows final grade submission. Did I do enough to help my students? Did they do enough to help themselves? Did I make class interesting? Did activities trump learning?

Teaching is a strange profession. Perhaps there are wonderful teachers out there who can tame the lion when thrown into the den, but I have found in my (admittedly somewhat limited) experience, that the effectiveness of my classes are in large part determined by the make-up of the class, the commitment of the students (both in regards to attendance and to how they conduct themselves while in class), and the spoken or unspoken expectations communicated by the school at which I'm teaching. In short, I've held the opinion that a lot of a class's effectiveness is determined by factors outside of a teacher's power. Sure, a good teacher can motivate the apathetic and can set a standard of expectation separate from the school, but I've always thought that good teachers needed students who had, on some level, the will to learn. Perhaps that's why a recent article in The New York Times caught my attention. (You can find the article in its entirety here.) It's subject: teaching teachers to teach. Its thesis: good teachers can be made.

We hear this debate all the time, especially with writers: are good poets born with some innate talent or do they develop it through intense study? Putting that issue aside so that we can move past an endless nature vs. nurture debate, the article brings up some great, concrete ways to turn your sluggish classroom into an industrious factory of learning (perhaps a poor metaphor, but check out the videos linked to the article for the proof). The biggest observation brought up in the article is that in many education programs, very little time is devoted to teaching teachers effective teaching methods. (How's that for repetition?) I flash back to my teacher training and think about how helpful it would have been to learn classroom management techniques, such as Cold Call. I'm not disparaging my training nor saying that I should have expected to be trained this way. (From what I hear, many TAs are tossed into the classroom without the two-week training and sustained support over the course of the first semester that I received.) It's just articles like these and the work that these teachers are doing infuses me again with excitement to get back into the classroom, even on dreary days. Teaching, for those who feel at home in the classroom and are looking for more than a pay check, is a constant process of development, of introducing new techniques, of cutting exercises that flop. These kinds of articles give me a new set of tools to try out. Like an angler with a new fly rod, I'm eager to see what I'll hook.

Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!

Last fall, I faced the unfortunate let-down of having my bicycle stolen, a dose of frustration mixed with a large amount of embarrassment due that fact that I had played a significant role in the series of events: I hadn't locked it up. Instead, my bike lock hung like a heavy necklace around the frame as whoever had stolen it, (presumably) wandered out of the bar around the corner from our apartment, stumbled down the sidewalk and happened to glance into the alleyway between our house, spotting a quicker way to get wherever he was going. The lock clanking against the metal frame as he lugged himself onto the seat, the squeaky pedal that I hadn't yet had the chance to oil screaming out with every rotation as he turned onto the street and pedaled away, all of the noise from the ruckus tugging at the pant leg of my sleep but failing to wake me, to get my attention.

The next few months had me eyeing every bike rack, every cyclist zooming by for signs of my blue Schwinn road bike wrapped in reflective tape. I imagined spotting my bicycle down the street, the rider stopped at a street light, and off I'd be running to catch him, to throw him off my bike, to kick dirt in his face. But it never got to that point. I never found my bike. And then when the thaw came and bikes started emerging from the banks of snow like prizes from a cereal box, I thought of rusted chains, flat tires, rims warped by baseball bats wielded by drunken, bored college students. In one harrowing vision, I imagined my bike at the bottom of Lake Mendota, the chain woven with seaweed, the seat gnawed by fish and bleeding foam.

Now, my bike has returned to me.

This is how it happened: Leslie and I, on the way to meet a caterer this past Thursday, happened to drive down a street not six blocks away--one we had driven down many times on our way to church--and there it was, sitting pristinely on the top of a snow bank, resting against a telephone pole, practically waving, "Hi!" I could say nothing more sensible in that split second of recognition than, "That's my fucking bike!" I knew it the way a mother knows the cry of her child. The best part, the bike still worked. Practically better, in fact, than before it had been stolen.

Which leads to my point about writing. In falling asleep, my brain used to come up with "brilliant" and "indispensable" lines for poems, lines that I feared I'd lose forever if I didn't pull myself out of bed, find a pen and notebook, and write down. I used to be so frightened of losing thoughts that I'd carry a notebook around in my pocket. What I realized slowly, after months of reading these "brilliant" lines the next morning, after years of filling reporter's notepads with scribbles, was that most of this "brilliance" was junk, stuff that seemed significant in the moment only to reveal itself as pointless on the page.

I rejected my notebooks and filled my pockets instead with keys, loose change, sales receipts, chapstick. I stopped worrying about losing lines, letting them come and go like old friends. What I found out was that most things worthy of keeping around come back. It's not the naive "If you love something, give it away" platitude. It's not my conclusion that fate plays a large role in life. It's something simpler--that things will come back when they're needed. Like my bike, who left me in the fall a few weeks before I would've been forced to place it in storage only to return with the thaw, straight-rimmed and only slightly rusted. Or an image I hadn't written down springing to mind as the cursor in my blank Word document blinks and blinks and blinks and the pressure of being brilliant (or at least interesting) threatens to grind me down to soot. Off I am running out loose iambic pentameter. Off I am riding my bicycle to work, trying to beat the punch-in clock, my pedal singing out it squeals as we pull ourselves up the hill to the Capital and to the library beyond.