The N-Spot: Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

I’ll confess up front that I don’t often have the opportunity to read contemporary fiction; or in any case, I’m always a few years behind. Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, for example, was the only book I read in 2009 that was actually published in 2009 (and I should say that I finished the novel about an hour after midnight on New Year’s Eve—or Day, rather, at that point—as I sipped the dregs of my celebratory champagne). The novel was the latest on my kick of trying to work through everything she’s written, a little mission that began nearly two years ago, when I decided to include her novels The Edible Woman and The Robber Bride in my senior honors thesis on fairytale revisions by recent women (some might say ‘feminist’) writers. I re-read The Handmaid’s Tale for about the eleventh time that summer, and quickly devoured the two aforementioned novels for academic appropriation, and then moved on to Cat’s Eye, Oryx and Crake, Bluebeard’s Egg (short stories), some poetry (Selected Poems and Morning in the Burned House), and, most recently, Alias Grace, which I had the wonderful opportunity to teach in an honors seminar I was TA-ing for. When The Year of the Flood was released in September, I was at the exact point in the semester where I began to be overwhelmed by everything; if nothing else, my first semester in graduate school stripped me of my pleasure reading time. The book sat on my shelf for nearly three months, a shiny, brand-spankin’-new hardcover copy (and you should know by now that I almost never buy books new—it’s just not in the grad student budget, despite the fact that I have to purchase about a million per semester now)—and more importantly, signed by Atwood, who had stopped in Harvard Square to give a reading on her book tour. She sang, she danced, she enticed me by reading bits and pieces from the novel…but still I had to wait.

And then winter break. My reading list is hemorrhaging books—everything that’s been shoved to the side over the past four months, but I made certain to crack into Atwood’s before the opportunity escaped me. I posted thoughts on the novel as I worked through it, which you can find on my goodreads.com review of it, but here are some more overarching musings about the novel.

Because I'm not fucking old enough to do a Best-of-the-Decade List (Part II)

Music, 10-1

10 Metric, Fantasies

I may find Live It Out to be a catchier album, but Fantasies is mature and resilient from beginning to end. Emily Haines will never let me down. Key tracks: Gold Gun Girls, Collect Call, Help I’m Alive

09 Patrick Wolf, The Bachelor

Pop, electronica, folk, and piano balladry—not to mention Tilda Swinton as the ‘narrator’ of the album’s journey—all compressed into a hot white ball buoyed by Patrick’s beautifully emotive vocals, The Bachelor may well be his strongest and most cohesive effort yet. Key tracks: Oblivion, Blackdown, Count of Casualty, The Sun is Often Out

08 Gossip, Music for Men

Gossip outdo themselves on this one; every track has the power to provide a soundtrack to your stomp-offs and mirror-karaoke. If the last album showed that Gossip had come into their own, this one proves their true artistry. Beth Ditto’s voice remains soulful, uplifting, and full of conviction. Key tracks: Music for Men, Love Long Distance, For Keeps

07 Tori Amos, Midwinter Graces

Tori was well on her way to complete irrelevance and oblivion, but strangely, a seasonal album dragged her kicking and screaming out of the slump. It’s a tender, deeply felt, and beautiful album, focused by her kooky eye trained on traditional carols, while remaining universal enough to play for the whole family. Key tracks: Star of Wonder, Winter’s Carol, Holly Ivy and Rose, Candle: Coventry Carol (yes, had to choose four)

06 Lady Gaga, The Fame Monster

If you don’t love Gaga already, I won’t be the one to convince you; nonetheless, this is a flawless eight-track EP that blows even her impressive debut out of the water. Impossibly catchy and fascinatingly constructed, TFM wears its influences on its sleeve while proving that Gaga has both come into her own and harbors the capacity for transformation. Key tracks: Bad Romance, Telephone, Monster

05 Florence + the Machine, Lungs

A truly exciting debut album filled with gems; Florence’s voice is at turns violent, booming, caressing. Each song shines, sometimes drowning out the album as a cohesive whole, but give it time to sink in—she’s certainly got a bright future. Key tracks: Cosmic Love, Girl With One Eye, Howl

04 Bat for Lashes, Two Suns

Her debut was fantastic, but Two Suns takes Natasha Khan far away from the sophomore slump and proves that she has staying power; she’s matured from what could have left her as a Stevie-Nicks-knockoff into a voice all her own. Key tracks: Daniel, Siren Song, Sleep Alone




03 PJ Harvey and John Parish, A Woman a Man Walked By

I’ve come to realize the PJ Harvey is possibly the only artist I love that has a spotless track record, at least in my book. Every album is ace; nearly every track is spot-on. I can put her on at any time, in any mood, and find something enjoyable and new. People bitched about her new collab with John Parish, complaining that it’s intentionally ugly, that her gimmick is wearing thin, that she’s doing things simply to seem avant-garde—but I couldn’t disagree more. Admittedly, I loved Dance Hall at Louse Point (their first collab), which is another divisive album, but just when I thought she couldn’t take her music in any other directions, she and JP pull this one out of their sleeves.

Every track is a surprise, and each one inhabits its own sonic and narrative world. Black Hearted Love is vaguely reminiscent of the alt-pop glitz of Stories; Sixteen Fifteen Fourteen is a biblical tale gone sour, or perhaps a Hansel-and-Gretel fable of lost innocence. If Grow Grow Grow (on her last album, White Chalk) was a child’s terrifying elegy for her dead grandmother, April from this one is the grandmother’s haunting poem to her lost granddaughter. The title track could be dissected within the parameters of feminist body horror theory, with its bizarre attention to a woman/man hybrid with “chicken liver balls,” not to mention the narrator’s violent declaration that she wants to “just get up your fucking ass.” The album runs the gamut of emotions, with fury and arrogance carrying Pig Will Not and violence the title track. Melancholy dominates much of the rest: “Send me home damaged, and wanting” she cries in The Soldier, while in April, the plea is for escape, when “these days just crush me.” Passionless, Pointless is perhaps one of the subtlest laments for a love-gone-bored-stiff that I’ve heard; the breakout into wailing midway through the song elevates the yearning to the passion she wishes for, but otherwise, the song merely encapsulates the failure of a love to sustain itself. Cracks in the Canvas, the closing track, is a reflective glance back over the many places the album’s been, and fittingly leads us into the silence that follows.

Polly’s voice remains chameleon-esque; on April she croaks like a century-old hag; on Sixteen Fifteen Fourteen she howls like a lost girl; she growls and shrieks her way through the title track; she’s an otherworldly siren for The Soldier and an androgynous demon on Pig Will Not (evidently, inspired by a Baudelaire poem, to boot). If DHALP at times suffocated under the weight of its experimentalism, AWAMWB creates its own private world that thrives on its strangeness and gains coherence through loosely connected narratives among the songs. PJ has never been more daring vocally, and even if the stakes weren’t high for a side project like this, she and JP are both (chicken)balls-out for the whole run. It’s ugly, it’s haunting, it’s violent and beautiful. Incredibly difficult to rank these top three, I should add.

Key Tracks: Sixteen Fifteen Fourteen, April, Black Hearted Love



02 Neko Case, Middle Cyclone

I know most prefer her last one, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, to Middle Cyclone, but I think I may be on the other, more evil, end of the spectrum. Though the standout tracks of FC shine brighter (re: Star Witness, Dirty Knife, Hold On Hold On), Middle Cyclone tears you open with its opening note and doesn’t stitch you back up until the bitter end. There are (to my mind) two weak tracks on the album; everything else is simply perfect. This Tornado Loves You would probably top my Songs of the Year list if I were making one, and nothing is quite as heartbreaking as the title track. Of course, Neko’s soaring voice is the highlight of every track, but she never suffocates the music. This isn’t a ‘narrative’ or a concept album, but it feels like it could be, because I always feel as though I’m doing it a disservice if I don’t listen to the thing in its entirety.

And now that I’ve sat down to write about this, I have no idea what to say. I was lucky enough to see Neko live in Richmond, VA in April—she was as stunning and powerful as you might expect. There are artists with distinctive voices that I love—PJ and Karen O among them, not to mention Bjork or Joanna Newsom, or Patrick Wolf—and then there are vocalists that are simply so polished and beautiful. Neko somehow manages to excel in both of these, and the best of it was that this power came through even live. Her lyrics seem only to get better with time, whether they’re darkly humorous, as in “You spoke the words, ‘I love girls in white leather jackets’—that was good enough for love, it was good enough for me” from The Pharoahs, or simple and emotionally wrenching, like with “Baby, why’m I worried now? Did someone make a fool of me? For I can show ‘em how it’s done. Can’t give up actin’ tough; it’s all that I’m made of. Can’t scrape together quite enough, to ride the bus to the outskirts of the fact that I need love” on the title track.

She’s a bit country, a bit indie, a bit pop—none of these and all at once. I suppose she’s a bit of a hipster darling from her work in The New Pornographers, but there’s not a more earnest or genuine artist in music right now—she truly strikes me as an artist’s artist, and that shines through on this album. It’s a moving forty-five minute trek into a timeless sort of landscape, and you’ll be kept warm with Neko’s incredibly voice to hold your hand along the way.

Key Tracks: This Tornado Loves You, Middle Cyclone, People Got a Lotta Nerve, Don’t Forget Me, Prison Girls, all the rest



01 Yeah Yeah Yeahs, It’s Blitz

Essentially flawless from beginning to end, It’s Blitz is the album that, according to the band, brought the Yeah Yeah Yeahs back from a career precipice. Karen O confessed that Show Your Bones and the ensuing tour nearly brought the band to their breaking point, personally and creatively. Some people have called this album derivative or said that the YYYs jumped a little too quickly onto the neo-eighties bandwagon, but nothing on the album feels stale or forced; it’s electrifying, fresh, and strangely compelling (though the emotional power of the YYYs isn’t, for me, usually the first strength to come to mind). They’ve revitalized their sound without leaving behind all the qualities that make them so distinctive in contemporary music. Karen O coos and howls her way through each track; the band matches her word-for-word, and the listener (okay, well, I) follows the siren-call. Some tracks compel you to stomp around (Zero, Heads Will Roll, Shame and Fortune); some to dance (Dull Life, Dragon Queen); some to cry (Runaway). Tracks like Soft Shock and Hysteric are of the sort that no one does better than the YYYs—they impeccably juggle reflective melancholy and naïve hope. Maybe it’s Karen O’s voice that captures this—I can’t think of anyone who really sounds like her right now, or, if they do, they don’t do it nearly as well. I’m sure this is why she was asked to do the Where the Wild Things Are soundtrack, because who better brings a childlike joy to a frighteningly jaded and adult world than Karen O?

I honestly don’t even know what to say about this album without sounding forced, mawkish, or kiss-ass-y. The best thing I might close with is that this album has followed me throughout the year, through high moods and low, through lonely nights and booze-fueled tranny parties; I played it in the car, in the shower, at work, for my friends and for my mother. As much as I love Neko and PJ, this album had already topped my year-end list by the time I finished my first listen.

Key Tracks: Dull Life, Heads Will Roll, Soft Shock, Runaway, all the rest

There you have it.

Because I'm not fucking old enough to do a Best-of-the-Decade List (Part I)

I was thirteen-years-old when the big, bad Y2K apocalypse threatened us all; my memory is so awful that anything before that moment is a bit hazy. As such, I’m not going to pretend that I can wield any goddamn best-of-the-decade lists. Here’s a few things from the year that I loved; if you trust my judgment at all, check them out. Trusting my judgment™ is recommended by 0 out of 5 ADA-approved dentists.

The movies list is sadly incomplete, as I really haven’t seen that many from 2009; the books, likewise, are comprised almost entirely of books *read* this year, though not published in 2009 (except for Atwood’s Year of the Flood). The books are alphabetical; the films are basically unranked, except for Bright Star and Inglourious Basterds, which were my two favorite films of the year. The albums list isn’t too bad, though, and so there’s a pretty strict ranking system there.

In conclusion, 2009 had its high points—I completed my thesis with highest honors, I somehow managed to sneak into graduate school, I read about a million books, and survived the two most harrowing academic semesters of my career thus far—and its low, which I have no desire to get into, but all in all, I’m ready to kiss that shit goodbye. Not sure what 2010 has to bring, but as Ella F sings, something’s gotta give, and hopefully, this year will at least run a bit more smoothly. Cheers to you all.

Films

Best film of the year:

Bright Star












Runner up:

Inglourious Basterds












Honorable Mentions:

Star Trek
Coraline
Drag Me to Hell
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Up

Disappointments:

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Halloween II
Paranormal Activity

Books

I read approximately 82 books this year (which means I didn't reach my goal of one hundred), and these were the ones that stuck out for me:

Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood
Jane Austen, Emma
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
A.S. Byatt, Elementals
A.S. Byatt, Possession
Angela Carter, Wise Children
William Faulkner, Light in August
Ian McEwan, Atonement
Toni Morrison, Beloved (re-read)
Alice Munro, Open Secrets
Sapphire, Push
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Music, 18-11

18 Martha Wainwright, Sans Fusils, Ni Fouliers, A Paris: A Tribute to Edith Piaf
17 Nellie McKay, Normal as Blueberry Pie: A Tribute to Doris Day
16 St. Vincent, Actor
15 The Decemberists, The Hazards of Love
14 Marissa Nadler, Little Hells
13 Little Boots, Hands
12 Karen O and the Kids, Where the Wild Things Are
11 Tori Amos, Abnormally Attracted to Sin

To be continued...

That Ol' Christmas Haul (Image Heavy)

So none of this for Xmas:









But I did get these:


Australia (DVD). Yes, I know it was panned, but I *loved* it. I'm a Kidman fanatic, admittedly, and a copious drooler over Jackman...but I genuinely enjoyed the film, too.









Kiki's Delivery Service (DVD). OMG I LOVE MIYAZAKI AND I'M A CHILD. Kiki is so great.










And also Milk, Changeling, and Elizbeth: The Golden Age on DVD. Which means I'll be running out tomorrow to pick up this one:

Brideshead Revisited. And possibly grabbing Atonement, The Fountain, or 2046.











Bat for Lashes, "Two Suns"












Oh hellz yeah, Lady Gaga, "The Fame Monster." Ra-ra-ah-ah-ah.

Need to grab Neko's new one, PJ Harvey's and John Parish's collab album, Gossip, Patrick Wolf, and Florence and the Machine when I get the chance. I download a lot of music, but I always buy the albums I really love, usually at the end of the year.



And then, the real gems:


After Atwood's "The Year of the Flood" (which I'm working through now--and it's wonderful), Byatt's "The Children's Book" was my most anticipated book of the year. I'll probably jump on this once I finish Atwood--I'm scared that otherwise, it'll get pushed off until after the spring semester. It's a pretty giant book, but it's gotten rave reviews--considered her best since Possession, apparently, so really excited for it.






Wallace, "Infinite Jest"--A hefty tome I won't get to this until the summer, but really excited to see what all the fuss (and by 'all the fuss,' I mean all of Conley's fussing over it) is about.









Brad Gooch's new Flannery O' Connor biography. Been looking forward to this all year.











All of Didion's nonfiction before "The Year of Magical Thinking," I think. Can't effing wait to read Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album--I've heard incredible things about those collections.

Tons of books were on my list to Santy Claus, so I'll probably treat myself to a few of those too (though probably copies that are beaten up and half the price on half.com)--so Hermione Lee's bio of Virginia Woolf, Alison Light's new book called "Mrs. Woolf and the Servants," Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian," Timothy Findley's "Not Wanted on the Voyage," and Anne Carson's "Autobiography of Red." Yummy.

Of course, most importantly, I was with my family for Christmas--and it's been wonderful, I truly truly missed them. And I haven't felt as relaxed and content as I have this past week here in some time...thank goodness I'll be staying here for at least another week, and probably two. I needed it. Happy Christmas, everyone. xo.

The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Reviews

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (5 stars)




I went to the liquor store a few weeks ago to buy smokes; the first pack I’d paid for in Boston, in fact, because my Virginia stash(es) had lasted the first four months of my living here. It was painful to hand over seven bucks; even more painful was the fact that the woman at the register looked at my ID for approximately seven minutes, as the line behind me accumulated, and even went so far as to pull out one of those little mini-microscope-things and peer at every centimeter of the license. She then looked me up and down, glaring into my face as though to see the inner corruption that would compel me to use a fake ID for my nicotine fix. Eventually, she handed the Camel Crushes over, I gave her the cash, and went on my merry way.

It was an oddly poignant moment to have, having just finished reading Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray that morning. Yes, call me a bad English student; call me a bad queen; it was my first reading of the novel. It was also a surprisingly thrilling reading of a novel—I hadn’t been so emotionally caught up with anything I’d read throughout the semester, except perhaps Beloved. Of course we all know the story; Dorian is young and beautiful and sells his soul in order to stay so for all of eternity. His portrait takes on his sins instead (and at this moment I can only think of Anne Sexton’s ‘The Double Image’—“they had my portrait done instead” being the refrain marking her own corrupt relationship with her mother and with her daughter and her self; she even references Dorian at one point in the long poem, which is well worth checking out if you don’t know it). But I suppose I wasn’t anticipating the novel being able to sustain its excitement or beauty beyond the most basic components of this plotline. Wilde’s prose is stunning, and as much as we hear of him being a strict aestheticist, it’s a peculiarly affective, a really deeply felt, novel. I think Wilde wants his reader to believe he’s Lord Harry, but I get the sense that he is, in reality, the Basil figure. Intrigued by beauty, prone to idolatry, remorseful for all things lost—in particular youth and beauty. Basil was perhaps the only truly compelling character of the novel, at least on an emotional level. Lord Harry is absolutely wonderful to read—someone you’d want around you at every party (so long as you weren’t the target of his witticisms), and Dorian is the dumb pretty little creature you want to pat on the head but not keep around for extended periods of time…but Basil is the real Prince Charming of the novel. Everyone else in the novel, as Lord Harry would certainly agree, is mere backdrop—setpieces intended to provide color or contrast to this triumvirate.

If Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway was the perfect novel for me to read last fall, Dorian Gray was ideal for this one. Mrs. Dalloway recalls with an astounding nostalgia the possibilities that one has foreclosed throughout life—the experiences that are shut out by choosing other experiences over them. Nonetheless, that novel brings loss in all of its breathtaking beauty back to the reader with a tangible quality; loss is a texture of the novel, nostalgia is the scent that permeates everything. As I embarked upon grad school applications, and a number of decisions that would effectively map the next decade of my life, Mrs. Dalloway helped me to—as Clarissa says at several moments—appreciate the present: “What she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?” Dorian Gray, on the other hand, fears this possibility; the loss of youth and of beauty, and finally death—which ends absolutely—are harbingers of absolute terror, and thus are violently disavowed. I say that this was the right moment for me to read this, not because I’m increasingly fearful of aging or of death but because now I’ve made the leap into the next phase of my life and now these foreclosures of possibility are not merely tangible or recognizable but will forever evade my grasp—I’ve crossed that threshold moment that Mrs. Dalloway so preserves, and entered into the next stage. Hopefully, of course, I’ll handle this more in a Clarissa than a Dorian sort of way; perhaps I’ll throw a party and make sure not to murder any of the guests.

In any case, Dorian is an absolutely stunning novel. Forget the awful ‘Classic Lit-ruh-chah’ assignation of the novel (though I’m currently a lover and voracious reader of classics, I remember being likewise terrified of that designation). The setting may be over a century old now, but the thrills, the motives, the anxieties are all as modern as anything being published now. The writing is fluid and exciting, and this has some of the best one-liners you’ll ever read, among them: “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about,” “To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable,” “The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young,” “The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true,” “When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self and one always ends by deceiving others.” Every line is essentially quotable, except for the strangely bland and undercooked dialogue with one of the old women towards the end of the novel. But this is a strikingly philosophical and contemplative book despite its glamour and its many ‘Wildeisms.’ I connect this to Mrs. Dalloway only because both have truly fascinating things to say on aging and conscience, the ability to be compassionate and to connect to others (in each, I think there’s more evidence against genuine connections or genuine sympathy than there is for them)—and it’s certainly a recommended read to anyone reading this blog who hasn’t enjoyed it already.

And here are a few capsule reviews of some other things I’ve been reading, x-posted from my goodreads:

Joan Didion, Vintage Didion (4 stars)



I'd only previously read "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Didion--and, considering my admittedly non-existent experience with having lost loved ones, didn't connect to it in the way so many seem to have (at least on an emotional level). Nonetheless, I found her prose style there to be breathtaking, and it's in full form in this short collection. Vintage Didion collects essays from several books--three from "After Henry," three from "Miami," two from "Salvador," one from "Political Fictions," and one based on a lecture concerning September 11th. Truly, every essay was spot-on, though Didion really confronts me with the fact that I'm pathetically unsavvy with politics. The essay on NY and the Central Park Jogger case was perhaps one of the best non-fiction essays I've ever read. Though it's clear she's done her research and doesn't mind showing as much, it comes across as astute rather than showy, fluid rather than stuffed full of other people's facts and writings. Her logic is fascinating to watch, in the sense that she moves from the most micro-level observations into smart arguments about much much larger questions. Thus, the Central Park Jogger case becomes an essay on ideologies of crime and class, specific to NYC over the past 150 years, but reaching outward, as well. And then she sweeps back into her initial arresting claims. The essay on good ol' Bill's sexual exposure in "Clinton Agonistes" was particularly provocative, as was the Sept. 11th essay, and the one on Patty Hearst. I think I was swimming too deep in the Salvador/Miami pieces, but they too are beautifully written and argued.

I'm really looking forward to moving through more of her work--and as a close friend tells me, I'm an awful idiot and a bad Lit PhD for not having read her novel "Play It As It Lays." Any case, this is probably a great introduction to Didion--at least to her more politically-minded work. I'm trying to think of lovely descriptors for her, but the one that sticks out most for me at the moment is 'shrewd'--she's got a hawk's eye to everything she mentions, and watching her follow through that sightline into an argument is inspiring. Read it, for sure.

Ian McEwan, First Love, Last Rites (3.5 stars)



After reading 'Atonement' over the summer, I really really wanted to love this collection. McEwan is clearly just gaining traction at this particular moment, though, and I felt that the stories--one after another, almost without fail--succeeded only on the strength of some gimmicky twist at the end. This isn't to say that they weren't unexpected turns, thrilling ones at times, but that without these turns, the stories would have been meandering and oftentimes mediocre. The first story is perverse, yes, but I feel like I've heard the same sort of sentiments about adolescent longing expressed before (though McEwan's wonderful dark humor remains intact here)--it's the twist that defines the story, and I feel as if that's perhaps one of the biggest weaknesses of any narrative--that if one thread is removed, the glamour unravels. Needless to say, that first story, "Last Day of Summer" and the final story, "Disguises," are the strongest of the group. The first one does indeed rest on its own twist, but I commend McEwan at least for daring to take the story to its most extreme conclusion--hard to read? Certainly, but I can't think of another author who would have handled incest in that way--shocking, sick, but also really bold. "Last Day of Summer" is the only one of the collection that, to my mind, has a genuine emotional investment in its characters--a convincing and compelling one. And the final story is just a damn good story, with both the perversion of the rest of the collection but the breathing room to develop and really flesh out its narrative world.

In short, it's a decent collection--a thrilling one to read, but clearly a bit of an exercise book.

Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road (4 stars)



[[Very very light spoilers, but nothing critical.]] You know those days where literally everything seems to go sour, as if you've been caught up in some sort of awful vortex where fortune cookies instantly stale and every endeavor is a failed one before it's even begun? That's sort of what Revolutionary Road feels like, except higher on the magnitude scale and a helluva lot more depressing. This is not to its detriment, of course; after all, it's a novel about suburban malaise, and the deflation of the American Dream (and the deflation of the dream of the counterattack on that American Dream). The characters are nearly universally insufferable, even the well-intentioned ones (like the Campbells), but these are characters that you've met time and again in your life. Their very terribleness is what convinced me of their genuine quality. So when Millie Campbell becomes this monstrous, nasty character at the end of the novel--and Shep appreciates her in spite of recognizing this--it all makes sense. There's not much of a redemptive urge in the novel; even Frank's 'change' at the end is not one envisioned as one for the better, but rather, one that's hollow-eyed and done out of desperation.

Yates' prose is tight and clean, the plot moves along at a fairly quick pace, and the dialogue is always always spot-on. It's not quite a 5-star novel for me, not because it's not well-constructed or compelling, but simply because it's slightly dated and somehow more cinematic (to my mind) than literary. Perhaps it's simply that I felt like more of a voyeur than a participant at times--which can be quite fun, but frequently discomforting as well. Looking forward to finally seeing the film.

Brief jottings...

Confession: I should be writing my papers right now, but I’m tired and I’m officially finished with classes and I came home and had a cocktail too many. I wish I were blogging more; or rather, that I had had the time to do so over the course of the semester. I won’t lie and say that grad school isn’t rough—it’s a chaotic mess, frequently, scrambling to get through readings, trying to put together a coherent thought, a workable presentation, and now, a half-decent paper (or three, in the case of we first years). Class in and of itself tends to be exhausting; just getting through a discussion wears a body down. My brain is fried. My writing is muddled. My body is actually not too bad off; I walk probably three to four miles a day, just by way of commuting to school and back. But then, there are days when just putting a sandwich together for dinner is too exhausting, so you burrow in bed and read or pass out or do whatever it is you do in bed. There will be deeper, further reflections on this whole crazed semester once I’m actually through with it.

For now, I’m tipsy and a little sad. We had a departmental party tonight, full of naughty desserts, serious™ conversations, and more than a few awkward moments. But nonetheless, it was weird to say “see you next semester” to people you feel you’re only just getting to know. Anti-climactic, I guess. Maybe I’m just being mawkish; I still feel like a bit of a child in all of this. Most of the people I’ve gotten to know are real people, adults, who have lives on their own, incredibly separate from school. For the past three months, school has been my life, and my entire life in many ways. Perhaps the strangest thing to me has been that the most challenging experience grad school—thus far—is, in fact, what goes on outside of the classroom. Growing up; playing adult; trying to figure out what my place in this city is. Boston is a cold city in every sense of the term. And being locked away in my room, in a coffeeshop here, a coffeeshop there—I still feel somewhat alien here. I suppose, in short, it hasn’t been at all what I expected. In some ways, good, in others not so much—but I suppose that’s any experience, no?

Hopefully, I’ll keep up with this blog from here until at least the start of next semester, but I can’t promise anything until the eighteenth. I’ll be entirely hermited away until next Friday, churning out these papers, and then it’s off to Virginia to visit my loves for a week. I shan’t take the laptop, but will likely be tweeting from the phone. Until next time…

Also, here's what my bed looks like in paper-writing-time:



Also, here's my wild lion's mane--I haven't had a trim since I've moved here. Increasingly, I feel as if I should have been a Rossetti painting instead of a person.

The N-Spot: Beloved and Sula Reviewed

It always feels slightly blasphemous to review Toni Morrison’s work—even worse if you’re discussing her in an uppity, academic setting. There seems to be some disservice done if you aren’t simply basking in her glory. This is not to say that her work is untouchable (read Love and you’ll know what I mean), and I certainly don’t believe she thinks as much (though she wields a far heavier hand in critical reception to her work), but that any review I might eke out will inevitably fall short. Perhaps this is why I’ve felt so uncomfortable over the past several weeks; I re-read Beloved and Sula one after another (Beloved for my longest seminar paper; Sula for a presentation), and in a scholarly capacity. Not only did I feel slightly, as I said, presumptuous—but also inadequate, for how does one write about a novel as emotionally complex and ethically indeterminate as Beloved? How does one argue against Sula as a positive model for the ‘new black woman’ in a classroom—especially when you yourself love Sula, even despite your inclination to think of her as an awful person? At the end of the two weeks or so it took to get through both novels, I felt like a picked scab. I was emotionally tired out.

It seems strange that it had been so long since I’d read either novel—above three years for both of them—because so many moments from each have become imprinted on my psyche, it seems. Of course, one forgets much: the strange spectacle of Shadrack’s final National Suicide Day; Helene Wright turning to ‘custard’ on the train; the fact that Paul D made an impact on 124 Bluestone Road (or Paul D more generally; it seems I only remember the women of Beloved). But there is also much that feels inescapable: the ‘O-gape’ of despair in Nel’s final howl for Sula; the chokecherry tree that blossoms on Sethe’s dead-skinned back; that strange rose-shaped birthmark over Sula’s eye; Amy Denver’s yearning for velvet and for Boston, where she’ll find that velvet. In some ways, I can only describe the power these novels have had over me in Sethe’s terms—they follow me, my rememory, and I run into these images and moments at unexpected times, with unexpected reactions to them. I say rememory because for Sethe, rememory signals the tangible quality of the past—you encounter your own history as tactile, rather than ephemeral, and at times, this past is something you simply cannot get away from. Not that I want to escape Morrison’s work, but that her novels have that beautifully tangible quality for me; I don’t simply scan the pages, but enter into some other world, an elsewhere, where I confront my self even as I confront all that is narrated.

Re-reading Beloved this go-round was particularly difficult. It took me nearly two weeks to get through the novel—for no other reason than that there were many occasions where I simply had to put it down and step back for a spell. I won’t pretend that I feel the emotional resonances of black experience—but even as a white, gay, male reader, I can feel the resonances of the human experience, which is precisely what I think Morrison intends. The politics of slavery and the tensions of the post-Reconstruction era are of course central to the novel, but Beloved is never a polemical minstrel show—the powerful political work is done, it seems, simply by granting her characters an implicit and enduring humanity. One of the things I’ve always admired about Morrison’s work is her capacity to imagine the nuances of every person, no matter how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ they might seem at surface. Thus, in the face of the awful atrocities Schoolteacher and his pupils commit against the Sweet Home slaves, there are whitepeople like Amy Denver, like the Garners and the Bodwins—and even in the case of Schoolteacher, who horrifyingly instructs his pupils to put Sethe’s ‘human’ qualities on one side of a list and her ‘animal’ on the other, there is an indication that he has some capacity for sympathetic feeling, if only in his treatment of his dying sister-in-law. Likewise, Sethe is the emotional core of the novel, but she has committed one of the only crimes that is literally unrepresentable—infanticide. Morrison neither condemns her, nor lets her entirely off the hook. Even in their most fraught and horrifying sins, these characters are for Morrison essentially human, and she treats each one on their own terms. A novel about slavery and infanticide—a ghost story, in some capacity, as well—never manages to become moralizing or alienating, because Morrison refuses to let either her narrative or her reader take any easy outs.

Sula once tried to battle Beloved for my top-Morrison spot, but I think this re-reading has cemented the hierarchy for me. Nonetheless, they both remain among my favorite novels of all time (Beloved, in fact, has to be in the top five for me). Sula offers a wonderful exploration of female-female relationships (not necessarily erotic, though one can certainly read the Sula/Nel pairing as erotic in some capacity—I would argue more autoerotic than anything), and imagines a space in which women necessarily rely upon one another in a woman-centered community. My professor asked as we discussed the novel: ‘Do you think Morrison suggests that men have to leave in order for these characters to establish healthy and productive intimacies?’ And in fact, I tend to agree. We talked about the novel as contextualized alongside the Moynihan Report (a 1965 sociological ‘study’ that essentially claimed that female-headed black households kept ‘the race’ down, and generated figures like the Welfare Queen)—and so wondered together whether Morrison’s novel offers an alternative to these sorts of (white) hegemonic discourses on matrilineal systems in black communities. For Sula, this is the only available model; and in the case of Sula and Nel, female intersubjectivity is the most powerful and generative model of subject formation. Notice that the real troubles of the novel occur only after Nel and Sula’s strangely indistinguishable identities are fractured. Oh, look. There I went and did an academic discussion of the novel. But these issues weren’t what first drew me to the novel; rather, I think I was pulled in by the vulnerability of Nel, who ‘pulls her nose’ to make it seem more ‘white’ in the eyes of her mother. I was drawn to the way Morrison describes the ‘expanse of khaki’ that covers the men’s predatory/dormant dicks—and how Nel and Sula are unable to comprehend—but simultaneously able to intuit—what it means to be called ‘pig meat’ by these men. I was seduced by Sula, much the way she seduces everyone around her, and repulsed by her selfish actions—I was lured into imagining what it would be to function as the ‘dumping ground’ for a community’s frustrations, but being self-sufficient enough (as Sula is) to not give a damn. I felt my chest tighten when Nel lets out that final roar of utter grief (sidenote: Morrison has a real way of illustrating inarticulable emotions through guttural sounds). I considered my own conflicting desires to assimilate, as Nel does, and to deviate, as Sula does—the novel asks, in many ways, how we might discover a middle ground, and if such a thing can sustain itself. Sula doesn’t have the weight of Beloved, but it is in many ways so different from Beloved (even though many of the same issues arise—woman-centered communities, the mother-right, infanticide, & co.) that it carries the same sense of power.

As I mentioned at the top, Morrison has had her hits and her misses. Love is scatterbrained, meandering, and a bit of a hackneyed reworking/amalgam of her earlier novels. Song of Solomon may be a powerful novel, quite well written (with an absolutely amazing opening scene)—but for me, Morrison simply can’t write men in the same way she writes women, and the novel suffers for it. Her most recent, A Mercy, is positively stunning; The Bluest Eye was an eye-opening experience for silly-freshman-me, who had read perhaps one black author previously (Ellison’s Invisible Man). Jazz, Paradise, and Tar Baby all sit on my shelf, beckoning to me—but will likely have to wait until summer, as Atwood and Byatt’s new novels will dominate my winter break.

But Beloved and Sula are truly two works beyond comparison. As schmaltzy as it sounds, they changed my life. And it’s almost heartbreaking to see so many vicious reviews on goodreads, where people tear Beloved apart, call it the ‘worst novel’ they’ve ever read, decry Morrison’s illuminative faculties as a prose writer. I can only tell myself that art is subjective that these people are fucking idiots, like most people, and that I’ll keep-on-keepin’-on with my worship at the altar of Toni.