Counterbalance

Millet Musings

Though I did not love Lydia Millet's Ghost Lights as a complete novel (How the Dead Dream set the bar oh so high...), it is littered with passages so achingly beautiful and insights about human nature so scarily spot-on, that I enjoyed it moment to moment for the sentences in a way I did not enjoy it for the plot.

One particular section keeps coming up for me again and again. I'm not sure if it's because of the sadness it carries, the truth it delivers with a punch or the fact that I am in contact with many dogs on most days by nature of my husband's work, but it seems a somewhat fitting way to begin a new year in which I want to cut all the bullshit out of my life and get painfully real about what matters and what doesn't:

 "People were like dogs and this was why they took pity on them--dogs alone all the hours of their days and always waiting. Always waiting for company. Dogs who, for all of their devotion, knew only the love of one or two or three people from the beginning of their lives till the end--dogs who, once those one or two had dwindled and vanished from the rooms they lived in, were never to be known again.

You passed like a dog through those empty houses, you passed through empty rooms...there was always the possibility of companionship but rarely the real event. For most of the hours of your life no one knew or observed you at all. You did what you thought you had to; you went on eating, sleeping, raising your voice at intruders out of a sense of duty. But all the while you were hoping, faithfully but with no evidence, that it turned out, in the end, you were a prince among men."

Just. Yeah. Sit with that a bit and see how it hits you. I've been sitting with it for weeks now and...yeah.

On the (Writing) Road Again

I've been traveling a ton this past month and it is the kind of travel that has put me in a very specific kind of mood: the writing mood. What kind of travel does that? Road travel does it for me every time. Sure there are characters in the average airport who make me curious. Fancy hotels have their story to tell, too. Yet there's something about the scenery rolling by out the window, the long stretch of highway, the bizarre little towns along the way and the people who inhabit them that I find utterly fascinating and oddly in need of closer examination.

I've lived in California my entire life. I've driven these long stretches of freeway from San Francisco to San Diego, SoCal to NorCal and back again and again over many years. When I travel these roads, they feel like my roads. The strange people in the strange shanty towns feel like my people, the towns feel like my towns. The passing of the same landmarks, the same red rock formations, the same snowy peaks through so many phases of my life gives me a history to refer to, a future to look forward to.

A trip up to San Francisco from LA, then, is not simply a trip. It is a chance to remember what that trip was like when I was 13. Then 24 and in love. Then 30 and single and full of ideas anew. Then that time we all fought in the car, alternately shouting and laughing and stewing in anger. Then that time we were headed to a funeral, silent and sad. I remember the albums I discovered with each trip. The songs I played on repeat until my heart stopped aching. The beats I tapped on my steering wheel drive, drive, driving along. With every trip I take up and down this state, I revisit all that I have been and all that I hope to still become.

I've been on three California road trips in almost as many weeks. I have a lot of stories, real and imagined, to tell.

Ignoring 1Q84

I guess it was inevitable. All that hype. All the lead-up. All the excitement around the release of Murakami's 1Q84 and reading it right away, even though we all know I never read big, important, much ballyhooed books right away. What was I thinking?

At least I re-read all his stuff. (Oh no, I used that DFW word to make you all think I'm not as smart as I really am and to seem all casual-like. Watch out.) And I'm finally reading other things. Which is an odd sort of relief mixed with guilt. Murakami guilt: it's all the rage, haven't you heard?

At the lovely #midnightmurakami event at Skylight Books (truly sweet to meet other Murakami fans who would otherwise never venture out of their homes to speak to people in a group publicly, over cookies & tea), I picked up a few distractions:

• Ether by Ben Ehrenreich (so used to his brilliant non-fiction, thought this would be a nice change)
• Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet (she is a genius. period.)

Don't get me wrong, I've been petting my gorgeous 1Q84. I've skimmed. I'm just not ready to commit with so many other novels to devour first.

At the start of this month, I spent time in the Bay Area for a host of events and meetings and family gatherings and managed to sneak in a few days in Napa. No Napa trip would be complete without a trip to Copperfield's Books in Calistoga, where I picked up a few more distractions:

• Naked Wine by Alice Feiring (oh the irony of reading this surrounded by big Napa cabs)
• Blue Nights by Joan Didion (she will be in LA next week!)
• Half Empty by David Rakoff (to counter the intensity of Didion!)
• The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh (hello, #49erfaithful !?!)

And so, you can see this fancy web of distractions I've carefully crafted. Support my indie bookstores, buy books that are not 1Q84, read those books and somehow subvert the blame all the while still suffering from acute Murakami guilt. Perhaps you are actually reading 1Q84 and have thoughts to share? Would love to hear them.

Alas, I've got another distraction to cultivate: 49ers/Giants in an hour.

12,000 Libraries, Room to Read & You

Nicholas Kristof has an excellent piece in NYT about Room to Read, an organization I am deeply committed to and believe in. I've recently started volunteering with the LA Chapter of Room to Read and have been struck by how difficult it is to convince writers, readers and booklovers to donate funds so this organization can continue to do the amazing work Kristof highlights.

In part, I get it. If you are passionate about building a library, you may want to build that library with your own hands. (Despite the fact that employing locals to do this and embrace what it means has a proven record of long term success for said libraries and communities.) If you care about children reading, you want to personally hand them a book and see the smiles on their faces. You want to contribute in a very tangible way that yields immediate results...for you. In our age of want it good, want it now, 30 minutes or less...I understand why this is the often unintentional desire: to feel good about doing good RIGHT NOW. In the moment.

Yet Room to Read needs a different kind of volunteer. A different kind of donor. Someone who is down for waiting to see results and understands those results may be much greater for the waiting. For the patience. For the long term vision vs. the short term smiles of handing out a book or two.

I've never been one to do things the easy way (friends and family, I feel you) and so perhaps it makes perfect sense that Room to Read is the organization that I've chosen to focus on and invest my personal time in. I won't give you the hard sell, because Kristof's piece does that quite beautifully. What I will say is that I'm quite tired of everyone in the bookish industry talking a big game about getting more people to read, but never really following that up with action. What good is all our talk of truly defining "social reading" or building the most beautiful digital books or creating easy publisher workflows if only a few thousand American readers benefit? Room to Read represents a powerful shift away from talking and is very much about the doing.

• Can you imagine the impact of 12,000 libraries built?
• Can you imagine the power of 1,500 new schools?
• What must it be like to finally read a book written in your own language?
• What is the power of keeping thousands of girls in school who would otherwise drop out?

Here are a few quotes from Kristof's piece I'm compelled to share to paint the picture:

"There are no books for kids in some languages, so we had to become a self-publisher,” Wood explains. “We’re trying to find the Dr. Seuss of Cambodia.” Room to Read has, so far, published 591 titles in languages including Khmer, Nepalese, Zulu, Lao, Xhosa, Chhattisgarhi, Tharu, Tsonga, Garhwali and Bundeli.

                                                &

The cost per girl for this program is $250 annually. To provide perspective, Kim Kardashian’s wedding is said to have cost $10 million; that sum could have supported an additional 40,000 girls in Room to Read.

                                                &

“I get frustrated that there are 793 million illiterate people, when the solution is so inexpensive,” Wood told me outside one of his libraries in the Mekong. “If we provide this, it’s no guarantee that every child will take advantage of it. But if we don’t provide it, we pretty much guarantee that we perpetuate poverty.”

Read Kristof's piece. Check out Room to Read's site. Get in touch with me. Stay tuned.

#midnightmurakami

A social media story in five parts:

• I'm obsessed with Murakami and tweeted my notice that WORD Brooklyn was doing a midnight event for his new 1Q84 book that becomes available for purchase in the U.S. on Tuesday, October 25th.
• Carolyn Kellogg retweeted with a question and included @skylightbooks as a possible place for me to check about a midnight event. Alas, I had already checked and there was no event planned.
• Hours later, tweets from Skylight indicated they were trying to make it happen.
• The next day, it was confirmed.
• Tonight, they are hosting a #midnightmurakami event from 10pm - 12:01am in celebration of Murakami's new book.

Here's the thing:

THIS is what I wish everyone of my clients would do. THIS is what all the social media folk tell their clients to do. THIS is what every Mashable article is ostensibly about - connecting with your customers, finding a way to bring the online world into the offline world. You talk about social reading (yes, my much longer piece on this and its many definitions is forthcoming)? THIS. IS. IT. Facebook it if you will but I can think of no better way to show your customers how much you care about them than to pull together this kind of event, impromptu-style, from an online request to an in-person experience.

Crazier still:

On this very day, with the event only hours away, there's a piece in Publisher's Weekly about the trouble Skylight Books is having in these oh so scary for indie bookstores times. This bookstore, struggling to stay open, is doing it right. They care so much about their customers that they are staying open tonight for us. You can talk all you want about tech and how it is changing the digital reading landscape (it is) and how you lament your favorite bookstore closing - but it means nothing if you don't put your money where your mouth is. Have you visited your local "favorite" bookstore lately? Have you purchased anything? If you live in LA, please join me and many others tonight at Skylight Books at 10pm to do your part. Buy the Murakami book, buy several others. I'll see you there. Let's do this.

Out of the Silence: Murakami Linkage

I've gone quiet in my post-Murakami reading madness and I'm not entirely sure why. I'm certain it is related to Murakami. I've read no fiction in the interim but have managed to plow through nine different yoga texts for a work-related project. I'm treading lightly on my Murakami brain, tentatively flexing my Murakami muscle, or some such other horrible analogy that does not do his work justice or clarify my silence.

I will say this: I miss it.

Which is why: I've only read a few pages of After Dark so I can somehow hold onto this thing that I miss before the big wave of 1Q84 hits. I will savor it this weekend in prep for the release of 1Q84 next week.

Also: I have a feeling I should re-read Orwell's 1984. Overkill?

Until then, the Murakami marketing engine has produced some excellent linkage that I'd be remiss not to share:

• Knopf's Spotify list for 1Q84
• An interview with Jay Rubin, Murakami's longtime translator, in which he says: "I think it’s a pretty feeble pun, this whole thing, this Q." 
• The design for 1Q84 is more beautiful than I had imagined.
• The Harvill Seker UK version is also very lovely.
• Knopf Tumbled an intriguing "quotagraphic" from 1Q84
• Sonny Mehta says that "At its core, 1Q84 is a spectacular love story..." Hmmm.

A PDF about Long Books You'll Want to Peruse

Darby Dixon at Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks threatened to make a pdf with Endnotes about his nearly completed project to read books that are either very long in length or that are shorter in length but had somehow become gargantuan in his mind. Books on his reading list included The Recognitions, War and Peace, Life and Fate, Infinite Jest, and others. He's on his final book of the project, Against the Day.

He could have written a blog post about his reading experience. He did.

But then he made good on this threat. He made a lovely PDF of his thoughts with lots of extras. Who doesn't love extras?

When you can read a thing you might enjoy, it's a good day. When you can read a thing you might enjoy that is also a mini-celebration of type and layout and all things grid-y...well, it's a great day.

Make your day great. Read this PDF.

*"Reading a book..." graphical quote taken from the PDF in question.

Book Reviewing, The State Of...

So you know that post I spoke of yesterday, the one about book reviewing? That remains unpublished in my post queue? I should have published it months ago.

Alas, I may still, but Jane Ciabattari has a long piece at Poets & Writers that examines the state of book reviewing from many vantage points and mentions the role of literary blogs in how the landscape has changed.

I need to re-read it a few more times before I'll have cogent thoughts (and before I'll know if I should truly have published my piece first!) but I invite you to read it as well so we can discuss together.

To whet your whistle:

"The best of the feisty group of literary bloggers who began pushing the boundaries of traditional book commentary a decade ago have been woven into the mainstream, and their iconoclastic styles have freshened the form. This ongoing transformation has challenged our collective creativity and pushed all manner of innovation. This period will be seen as a benchmark in book culture. But it’s not the end of the book review."

Go. Sally forth. Read and report back.

Lit Bits and A Bit About Lingo

Lit Bits:

• Joan Didion will be in LA on November 16th. I cannot recall another time in my life when I've purchased a ticket so soon after opening an email newsletter.
• The UCLA Writers Faire is this weekend on the 28th.There will be mini-workshops and mini-panels.
• I'm in the last days of my re-read all Murakami novels project and I'm floundering a bit on many fronts. I don't really want it to end. I very much want it to end. I probably should have written about each book as I completed it. I should have taken academic-style notes. I'm glad I didn't do anything of the sort. More on this shortly, in a separate post.
• My Read More, Write More, Share More, Learn More project will launch next month, rather than in August planned. This month threw me a few curve balls of the family illness/funeral flavor so I'm a bit behind.
• I clearly like to deem my literary meanderings as "projects." Hmmmm...
• I'm casting about for another re-read project. With Didion coming into town and her new book out this fall, that seems an obvious one, no? Yet in light of the re-hullaballoo around DFW's language (and my obvious liking of and usage of it, much to others chagrin), I could just as easily be lured away from Didion in favor of DFW. Suggestions welcome.

A Bit About Lingo:

The bit about lingo became long enough that it made more sense for it to be a separate post.

A Bit About Lingo

I'm still thinking about Maud's NYT piece on David Foster Wallace's language and her take on how his language has permeated blogging syntax. As in, you know, this is how I'm thinking right now and what do you think and I can't be bothered to be precise in my language and that may be a reflection of my inability to be precise in my thinking or it may be an intentional style thing or whatever et al.

As I said this weekend, I'm guilty of this. I could be more precise in my language. I could be more convincing in my arguments. I often riff in an off-handed way because I'm writing quickly, or I am afraid you'll think I take myself too seriously, or I want you to enjoy books as much as I do, or because I'm very into the rhythm of how something sounds when read aloud or some odd combination of all these things and more.

But the thing is - I don't dislike my writing style. You may dislike it. You may deem me somehow less of an intellectual mind, incapable of rigor, as a result. I'm okay with that. There are many other places you can go for rigor-reading. I also firmly believe that just as wine appreciation can get snotty beyond all enjoyment, so, too, can literary banter. Life is short, wars are being fought, loved ones are dying every day...must we really be so intense about our books?

Ed has a more thought-provoking (see? perhaps there is something to my rigor-less thinking as seen in my rigor-less speech...) reaction to the piece and takes to task the idea that DFW's work in particular is to blame. Yet the thing that is still on my mind from the piece is that while I may be opinionated, I tend to shy away from being overly clear about my position on touchier literary-sphere subjects. I will get angsty about a thing, but I won't cite clear examples of what makes me angsty, if those examples involve my peers. That's not cool. I'm unimpressed with this tendency of mine. So the notion that my lack of clarity is in some way tied to my need to be liked (or, more precisely, not hated) is spot-on.

To cite an example (see that rigor?): I wrote a longer post about book reviewing a few months ago that remains unpublished in my post queue. I think it offers a decent look at some of the reasons we could celebrate books more vs. rail on them and their authors. Yet it is light on examples because I didn't want to piss anyone off. And what is that? That is a form of the very bullshit I often rail against.

So. I may or may not post that longer bit on book reviewing nonsense. I may or may not add examples to it before hitting Publish. Maud's piece has got me thinking on two entirely different tracks: on the one hand, I'm okay with my imprecise writing and on the other, I'm not. Whether it came from DFW is not my cross to bear (more precise minds will further this discussion, I'm sure) but it has given me pause in how my writing on this blog has come about and how its imprecision can at times serve me or discredit me.

DFW's Slacker-Lingo and Aw-Shucks Blog Prose

Maud Newton has an interesting piece at the NYT about the many linguistic gambits of David Foster Wallace and how such gambits made their way into blogging lingo. I read her piece with a smile on my face, but must also admit plainly: my writing on this blog is largely made up of many gambits she decries.

I could make excuses for this. I could point out that my day job requires a different, far more rigorous kind of writing. Or that I actually like that sort of writing in doses. Perhaps even large doses. Large doses in, say, the form of a David Foster Wallace novel. I suppose that makes me less academic-paper worthy, but I cannot undo six years of blog posts. You cannot unread them.

What did strike me, though, is that I could be infinitely better at these bits (emphasis mine):

"Even if you reject, as I do, the universality of her diagnosis, Smith has pinpointed the reason so much of what passes for intellectual debate nowadays is obscured behind a veneer of folksiness and sincerity and is characterized by an unwillingness to be pinned down. Where the craving for admiration and approval predominates, intellectual rigor cannot thrive, if it survives at all."

"But the idea is to provoke and persuade, not to soothe. And the best way to make an argument is to make it, straightforwardly, honestly, passionately, without regard to whether people will like you afterward."

Food for thought.

NOW Reading Redux via The Instructions

While I'm still thinking through NOW Reading (and perhaps crafting a more measured, less "I've had no sleep so let's just blog it and post it, follow-up post), I was pleased to read Darby's comment as well as Mark O'Connell's "The Kindle and the Inner Conflict Between Consumer and Booklover" piece at The Millions as I believe they are all valid points in the conversation I had hoped to revisit.

Of note, while I still mull it all over:

"My point is that I, like a lot of other people, enjoy books as objects. Despite the difficulties that can arise from their accumulation, I like that they occupy physical as well as mental space. In fact, I quietly entertained the futile hope that the whole idea of e-books and e-readers would prove to be a transitory fad, that everyone would just somehow forget that books were cumbersome and comparatively expensive to produce and not especially good for the environment and that they could very easily be replaced by small clusters of electronic data that could be beamed across the world in seconds without ever taking up any actual space."

"So I did the obvious thing, and decided to see whether I could download The Instructions from the Kindle Store. When I found that the e-book version wasn’t yet available, I was briefly seized by that most contemporary (and stupid) of irritations: that of being denied a convenience that didn’t even exist until very recently. Granted, Levin’s novel is an extreme example, but it got me thinking about the unassuageable forces that the book as an object, as a cultural artifact, is up against. The history of what we call progress is a catalogue of ways in which the desire for convenience has trumped almost every other concern."

While I could obviously take from this that my own NOW Reading irritation was a "most contemporary (and stupid) of irritations" I will choose instead to take comfort in the fact that yet another reader is struggling similarly, albeit with a slightly different twist.

I will also say that I purposely bought The Instructions in print form (as I do most chunky novels) because I feel that when the writer has written something hefty and you should literally bear the weight of such heft throughout your reading process. Whether the words and ideas and story rise to meet such physical heft is another matter entirely. For the record, I dragged the weight (physical and otherwise) of The Instructions through seven airports and had to answer numerous questions about what could possibly be contained in such a big red book. I even, on two occasions, had to state plainly that no, it was not The Bible. But lugging around a big book is my own affectation, one that may fall by the wayside should I purchase the next chunky novel in a digital format instead.

I am a lover of print. I am a lover of font. I am a lover of how a font smells printed on the page. I, too, open a book and smell it first. Yes, still. I am a lover of all that the books-as-physical-objects folks hold dear. I hold them dear too. Yet if a younger generation won't ever love what we love, but will read far more in a format they do love, who are we to stick our noses in the air or the proverbial sand? A story is a story is a story no matter what it's written on.