Infinite Cthulhu

All the world's abuzz with I Write Like, a site that takes a sample of your prose and swiftly provides you with your literary soulmate.  Or doppelschreiber, as the case may be.  My friend JP told me about it, adding that I (apparently) write like David Foster Wallace.  Not bad, I think, although I blush to admit that I've never read any DFW.  When I went back to try the site for myself, it claimed I wrote like H.P. Lovecraft.  Hmm.  Grimmer and grimmer.

And that's my blog.  I dread to think what my dissertation* writes like.

But, of course, I can take comfort in the knowledge that Margaret Atwood writes like Stephen King.



*Notice that my dissertation apparently has consciousness and a writerly identity in its own right.  I am just waiting for the day when it turns itself into a scholarly monograph.

Jim the Boy: Close your eyes and step aboard as it passes

The air is warm and thick, a coat you couldn't take off. (55-6)

I finished Tony Earley's acclaimed first novel on the screened porch of my in-everything-but-laws' house in the eighty degree darkness of a Raleigh summer night.  As I read, bare feet kicked up on the wicker arm of the loveseat, a massive chorus of crickets pressed in on me, layers deep.  It was the very quintessence of summer, of indolence, and of the narrow, humid privacy of reading.


And of course, of the long North Carolinian evening.  Earley is a Tar Heel bred, and he cleaves closely to the landscapes of his upbringing.

The town squatted quietly in the sun as if tied to the ground by the web of crisscrossing power lines stretched between the houses. (25)

This is a small town world, a collection of loosely bound lives, drawn delicately toward and away from each other and their home.  The one great journey of the novel is to the South Carolinian coast, and it is filled with a mix of wonder and the urgent desire to be home.  Thomas Wolfe's themes, if not his elaborate prose, loom large.  Everyone drags the past, their home, and their knowledge of the necessities of the future behind them through the smallest daily tasks.

Near the road, a small herd of cows pulled their shadows through a pasture. (224)

Jim the Boy is a slow and careful bildungsroman of Southern childhood, destined to take its place on a thousand high school summer reading lists.  But to describe it in those terms (the coming of age tale, "slow" and "careful," fodder for required reading) belies the effortless grace of the prose, the joys of image that there are to be found on every page, and the vitality of the plot, which builds up complex drama from the simple microcosms that a child observes every day of his life.

 Uncle Al was in the middle of a story whose beginning Jim already knew; Jim closed his eyes and stepped aboard as it passed. (57)

Jim's father died before he was born, victim of a hereditarily weak heart.  He was dramatically alienated from his monstrous father - a patriarch who lives up the mountain from Jim's town.  Jim's mother has refused any contact with her father-in-law, and the boy is raised by her and her collection of brothers, all of whom seem torn between sheltering their nephew and nudging him into independence.  They are suspended between affection and the ethical tug of their responsibility to him - tethered, buoyantly, like the town itself.


Earley was a short story writer first, and, like some of Alice Munro's collections of small town tales and bildungsromane, this work book between the genres of the novel and the short story cycle.  It has that quality that I so often cite as the feature of really brilliant short story form - it is an art of subtlety, rather than boldness, so it leaves you with the cumulative sense of its brilliance, but without a clear sense of how the brilliant effect was achieved. I mentioned before how much I admire the way that Earley depicts the perfect lyricism of childlike contemplation and its free-wheeling, associative thinking:

[...] other questions began pulling into his head like trains into a station.  Only none of the questions had words, only empty places, followed by empty places where answers should have been.  They rushed past him like pieces of fog, things he could see but not grab. (98)

This effect does something extraordinary to the simile, revitalizing it by recalling a time in which I (at least) got lost in contemplation of a detail, and then swung away from it, moving from thought to thought like they were monkey-bars built on a structure of likeness:

The boy cannot hit the baseball to his satisfaction.  Though he makes contact almost every time he swings the bat, he does not strike the mighty blow he sees in his mind.  The ball does not leap scalded into the sky, but hops into the tall grass as if startled by a noise; it buzzes mildly, a dying beetle tied to a piece of thread, and rolls to a disappointing stop. (45)

Obviously I heartily recommend Jim the Boy to you: I have already given it to D, who (contrary to my stern instructions) didn't get a chance to read it while he was still in Raleigh, and so has brought it to Waikiki with us.  I am curious to see how this environment changes the texture of the reading.


But as a last note, I want to say a bit more about that formative journey that Jim takes with his Uncle Al. If I remember correctly, upon setting out, all his uncles will tell him is that they need to see a man about a dog.  There's never a dog, Jim thinks, a bit grumpily.  In fact, they head south in the hopes of buying some horses from a man near the South Carolina border.  For reasons I won't go into, there are no horses for them when they arrive, and Jim is left with the nearly universal North Carolinian feeling that he is glad he doesn't live amidst his neighbors to the south.  In the face of this disappointment, his Uncle Al has a sudden outbreak of impracticality: they will go to the ocean, which neither has ever seen.  How could I help but think of this stunning passage when I am surrounded by Pacific in every direction?

Eventually they drove out of the swamps and plantations and entered a desolate barren in which there was nothing at all to see except pine trees.  When they crossed finally out of the pines, they discovered the wide sea.  Jim's breath caught up in his throat like it was afraid to come out.  He tried to breathe several times, but drew no air.  He wished that just for a moment, until he grew used to the sight, the ocrean would simply hold still.  But the waves lined up and bore down on the wide, white beach like a gang of boys intent on jumping a gully.  Each wave rose and took a running go and rushed toward South Carolina and cast itself down on the sand.  And each wave when it crashed and broke sounded to Jim like the angry breath of God. (66)

This passage is something of a miracle: it recreates a state of innocence that we all must think is lost to us.  (How, I often wonder, do you retrieve the almost religious sense of awe that came with your first sight of snow, or your first experience of flight?)


I got my copy of Jim the Boy through BookMooch, and it makes me want to mount a spirited defense of the joys of reading a used copy, and the aesthetic richness (where many, I know, see bibliophile depravity) of writing in books.  Just after this passage, you see, I found this marginal note from a previous reader:

if only i could feel again 

what it felt like 

to touch the ocean 

for the first time....

And just like that, I knew not only Jim's sense of displaced wonder when confronted by the sublime instability of the ocean's vastness, but the nostalgic loss of my predecessor, and in fact my own.





Jim the Boy
Tony Earley
(2000)
****


(Normally I don't plug like this, but if you click through on the links above to Amazon, you will see that Jim the Boy is on serious sale there for $5.18, at the time of writing.)

Sunday Salon: Alert

... is what I certainly haven't been this week.  Certainly not like this highly caffeinated stag.  (He's got his eye on you.)  This was a week of rampaging insomnia in the midnight heat.  "Tonight we should see a low - that's a low - of 85 degrees," our weatherman kept warning us.  So I tossed, turned, read a shocking amount, and saw the dawn from the wrong side several times.  And then, naturally, I fell ill.

But here's hoping that all that dull, restless discomfort is behind me now, and I can start doing things with my days besides barely making it through my obligations and then collapsing into fitful unconsciousness for much of the remaining daylight.

Friday night I went out to Old Town Alexandria for an evening of tasty sushi and rollicking political debate with my friend L, whom I have known since kindergarten. (How can you tell two people were raised in DC?  Upon first seeing each other for the first time in months, they spend hours arguing about national and local politics, all without ever actually disagreeing with each other.)  Old Town is gorgeously green and antiquated, and I renewed my dismay that this was only my second visit in a lifetime of living a half hour away. "Of course," said L, "you were raised in Washington.  Washingtonians never go to the suburbs." What suburbs I did find myself in as a child tended to be north, rather than south, because of the part of town we lived in.  So it was with no minor sense of triumph that I navigated the tangle that is the roads and bridges leading over the Potomac and into the southern part of town. This is an approach D and I used to make all the time, coming up from Chapel Hill, but the only times he ever did it uneventfully and accurately were when he didn't have me - the Washingtonian - in the car, urging pieces of truly bad advice on him.  By now I have decided that the northbound approach to the city is intentionally designed to confirm southerners' conviction that it is an opaque and labyrinthine metropolis with no urge to welcome them or explain itself.  Sigh.

On Wednesday, I head off to Los Angeles and reunion with D, although it looks like our plan to be there for the rest of the summer may meet with an unexpected disruption.  More on that soon, I hope.



Watching


This has been a week of much non-literary posting, as I watched WALL-E for a second glorious time with an audience I'm not entirely sure the makers anticipated, and dove back into Deadwood for the third and final season of lawful lawlessness.  I also sought out the sibyl and asked her to look forward in television (a variation of looking back in anger) to prophecy which series would please me the most in the coming year.   To no one's surprise, not a single network show made the list.  Unmentioned in the annals of the blog is my viewing of Leo McCarey's subtle and moving Make Way for Tomorrow, about an elderly couple who lose their employment and then their house, only to find their children can make no place for them in their new, "modern" lives.  I have a lot to say about the film, but it was devastating, so I haven't quite come to terms with it yet.



Cooking


There hasn't been a lot of cooking this week, what with the wacky sleep schedule and falling ill, but I have continued to make batches of my summer guacamole, which is so simple and adaptable that I could do it in my sleep. (This is a major claim from someone who clings to recipes for even the most familiar dishes.  What can I say?  I am a textual girl, a bookish sort.)

Here's how it goes:

• Slice a clove of garlic in half and rub the sides of your bowl with the recently cut edges of the two halves.
• Dice a small onion (use Vidalia for a sweeter guacamole, yellow for a spicier, or red for a more colorful), and toss in the bowl.
• Cut four small ripe avocados (or two large ones) in half, removing the pits by whacking them sharply with a knife and then twisting the embedded knife until the pit pops out.  Use a spoon to remove the avocado halves from their peel, and plop them into the bowl.
• Pour a generous splash of lime or lemon juice into the bowl (aim for about 1/2 to a whole lemon/lime's worth, depended on how liquid and tart you like your guacamole).
• Add a pinch of salt (not too much, since the chips you will probably be eating this with will be VERY salty), and a generous pinch (about a half to 3/4 teaspoon, although you can adjust this to taste) of each of the following: paprika, cumin, and either cayenne or chili powder.
• Use a fork to mash the ingredients together until the guacamole has reached a consistency you like.  I like it chunky, but if you want it super-smooth, you can use a food processor.
• At the end, you can either serve the guacamole directly or add any of the following ingredients that you have on hand: rough chopped cilantro, finely diced pear, finely diced jalapeno with all the seeds carefully removed, a handful of pomegranate seeds. 

A few recipes have also caught my eye this week - all summery and fruit-filled - although I haven't tried preparing them yet:

• Melon with Lime-Chili Syrup
• Banana Bites
• Mango Slaw with Cashews and Mint

Listening


I am still listening (home-longing in the heat) to Haligonian artists, between Matt Andersen's Live at Liberty House, which I just bought this week, and Meaghan Smith's The Cricket's Orchestra, another album filled to the brim with retro energy.

There is something so delightfully odd about the tone of this video by Meaghan Smith, which starts off seeming like a serious, intense-stare and elaborate-hairstyle period piece in the vein of Poirot and Mad Men.  But then the next thing you know Smith is dancing with an overeager mop (in the tradition of the Swiffer commercials), who just might also be able to play in her band.

Reading

I am just finishing, after many months of neglecting it, John Burdett's Bangkok 8, in which Sonchai Jitpleecheep tries to maintain his status as the only non-bribe-taking cop in Bangkok, and his colleagues attempt to convince him that his Buddhist restraint is in fact throwing the carefully balanced moral ecosystem of the city's justice off kilter.  His beloved partner has died in a particularly unpleasant way while investigating the crime scene of a murder-by-car-full-of-venomous-snakes.  His mother (a highly skilled lady of the night) is trying to open a brothel that relies on the chemical reality of Viagra rather than the imprecisions of natural arousal, and his boss is the co-owner of the venture.  A beautiful but culturally insensitive FBI agent has been foisted upon Sonchai for the run of the investigation, which increasingly implicates a wealthy American jade merchant with (it seems) some other tastes he likes to pursue while in Thailand.

On deck:

Magic Study, the sequel to Maria V. Snyder's very enjoyable Poison Study, in which Yelena (former poison tester to the Commander of Ixia) goes to her homeland of Sitia for the first time to be trained in magic.  Sadly, this means leaving her new beloved, the second-in-command in Ixia.  Their complex friendship was a big part of what made the first book so enjoyable for me.  We'll see how it goes.

The House of the Scorpion - I've read the first, three-page chapter of Nancy Farmer's novel, and here's what I know already.  This is a society that raises cloned embryos by gestating them in mostly immobilized cows - but don't worry, because the cows' "brains were filled with quiet joy from the implants in their skulls" - "Did they dream of dandelions?... Did they feel a phantom wind blowing tall grass against their legs?"  A man fears for his job and his future if his batch of embryos doesn't produce at least one success.  When a single century-old fetus does make it all the way to birth, he sighs with relief and begins the routine task of "blunt[ing] its intelligence."  "Don't fix that one," says his colleague quickly, "It's a Matteo Alacrán.  They're always left intact."  Has any author even been as efficiently intriguing as this?  Three pages, and she presents all these oddities with perfect clarity.  I can't wait to read the rest.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson - That's right, everyone else is reading it, and now I will be too. This is lemming-reading, I guess.  But I hear great things about the first volume of this bestselling series, even from those who couldn't stand the later installments.  So off I go.



That's it for this week: happy World Cup finals, all, and a joyous Bastille Day later this week.  Le jour de gloire est arrivé!