The Daily Sabbatical

If I Had A Heart from Fever Ray on Vimeo.

This scares me.

A friend of mine once said that England and America are separated by a common language.  While not entirely sure what this means, I’m often surprised at how much the predominant sensibilities of the two countries differ.  We both have our forms of The Office, sure, and who doesn’t love Hogwarts, but it is startling how many things fail to translate even though no actual translation needs to be done.  The works of Penelope Fitzgerald might be an example.  This woman had two books shortlisted for the Booker and won it with a third book.  Even her books that don’t get Bookered are unanimously praised in the British press.  So why don’t we know her better over here?

It was in an attempt to find out that I read Blue Flowers, which was Fitzgerald’s last book which won the American National Book Critics award in 1998, two years before her death at age 88.  I probably chose the wrong book.  The Blue Flower is about the German Romantic poet Friedrich von Hardenberg  and his love for a woman whom everyone but Fritz recognizes to be a silly dunce of a girl.  She dies in the end and that’s very sad.

Before ripping into this book, which isn’t really all that bad, I should voice my prejudice.  It turns out that Fritz (who became famous as the poet Novalis) was a dabbler in idealistic philosophy and was a student of Fichte.  While I think there is some stuff to be learned from Fichte (I actually made a pilgramage to Jena once, myself) like most of those German idealists things lapse into nonsense pretty quickly.  I also hate romantic poetry, and I have little understanding of someone who falls in love with an idiot.  So, because of my own baggage, I hated Fritz and wished he had died alongside his hollow beloved.

Hating a novel’s protagonist is no better reason for hating a novel than hating a lead singer’s voice is for hating a band.  (Both are often sufficient motivators, but I’m not sure they are really good reasons.)  It must be said that Fitzgerald was talented.  She had a very light touch, with a sort of understated humor that almost made me grin once or twice, but in general I found the book somewhat boring.  It has been called a masterpiece by more than one critic, but I couldn’t help being thankful that the chapters were short and the book as a whole was only a couple of hundred pages.  So, I have my doubts about “masterpiece,” but it was good enough to where I will check out another book by Fitzgerald.  After all, surely so many British critics can’t be wrong, can they?

Today is Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday.  The theory of evolution by natural selection might be the single most fertile and elegant scientific hypothesis of all time.  To celebrate the bicentennial, I’ve been reading the two volume biography by Janet Browne, Voyaging and The Power of Place.  Though I’m not through both of them, I can already recommend the books as among the best intellectual biographies I’ve ever read.  One of the encouraging things about Darwin is that he doesn’t appear to have been one of those almost magical minds ala Newton, inventing calculus on the way to greater things.  Darwin, it seems, was driven by a relentless intellectual curiousity and a keen eye for good explanations: characteristics that are a little easier to emulate than pure mathmatical aptitude.  He was also, it must be said, in the right place at the right time–which is a little harder to emulate.

It’s not just a metaphor anymore.  The company responsible for setting Beatles tunes to pan flutes in order to hypnotize Gap shoppers is going under.  I, for one, find this encouraging.  Now, if only Michael Bolton and Kenny G would go bankrupt, this economy would have hit the crap trifecta!

I normally don’t put a bunch of private lifey posts up here, but I thought it needed to be said: being an uncle is underrated.  I just spent a weekend with my brother’s family in Bend, Oregon and the time I enjoyed with my niece Marly and my nephew Finnegan was, well, rejuvinating.  One day I might very well have critters of my own, but the affection/responsibility ratio of the avuncular life is pretty damned good.

Though I now feel myself to be a southerner by little more than birth, I have to admit a tendency to seek out and relish southern writers with something approximating a search for kinship.  After his last book of short stories landed him on the shortlist for the Pen/Faulkner award and his novel Serena was one of the most lauded books of the year, I thought it time to check out the Appalachian poet and author, Ron Rash.  In the end I wasn’t disappointed so much as underwhelmed.

Serena is the story of the Pembertons and the swath they cut through the forests and communities of Depression-era North Carolina.  Pemberton and Serena, his wife, are logger-barons, ruthlessly indifferent to the toll they are taking on the environment and on human life in their ambitious grasp for power and wealth.  The body count of then novel is high, starting on the second or third page when Pemberton guts the father of a girl pregnant with his child.  In retrospect, this death will seem one of the most reasonable of the novel’s killings, and if the husband seems cold he is a kitten in comparison to his wife, whose singular drive is the engine at the novel’s center.

Rash’s novel is an entertaining read that definitely seems timely given the self-and-other-destructive selfishness that seems to be the rising picture of Wall Street.  Nevertheless, in the end its morality tale is a bit obvious.  Serena is such an extreme character that one is at a loss as to what really beats within her breast, and her husband’s shows of mercy at certain points in the novel do no more than open up cracks that reveal little beyond them.   Rash tempers the seriousness by introducing a sort of chorus of loggers who crack wise and philosophical in the background, but it’s hard to feel that one’s understanding is deepend by those comic moments–funny as they sometimes are.

Serena is not a bad book, by any means.  But it shows its seams a little too clearly for my taste, both in the form and the point of its construction.  At times I felt this was intentional–that Rash was trying to create a faithful homage to Greek tragedy, for example.  At other times, I wasn’t so sure and I ultimately don’t think it matters.  Serena does what it does, and it does it pretty well–but that’s not enough to earn it a home on my top shelf.

Somehow this story from the NYT tickled me.  For about a century, because of stop motion photography, it has been known that animals walk starting with the forward motion of their left hind leg, followed by left fore, then right hind, then right foreleg.  (I did not know this, and I have questions about starting on the left–do they always do that?  But nevermind.)  Turns out that in a large selection (around 50%) of cartoons, toys, artistic depictions, and even museum exhibits, the positioning of the legs is wrong.  While I don’t blame the creator of Marmaduke, the Finnish museum has egg on their face.

I recently read a story by Rick Bass in the 2008 Pushcart Prize anthology, my favorite book almost every year. I’d definitely heard of Bass–he’s in the pantheon of America’s short story writers–but till then I had never read him. It was a story about boys in Texas trying to turn a buck buying cattle, and I almost wept with laughter. I resolved to check this guy out, and though this story was from his new collection, The Lives of Rocks, anal retent that I am I had to start with his first book, The Watch, published in 1989. I was not disappointed.
Though Bass’s stories are often humorous, he is not a humor writer ala David Sedaris. The humour in his stories is a natural outgrowth of the voices of his characters, or their sideways perception of the events around them. (This as opposed to Sedaris, who I always feel is lying to me.) Bass is from Texas, so many of his stories are set here, but he feels more Southern than many Texas writers–more like Barry Hannah, perhaps. His characters are often just hanging on, trying to survive from day to day and to make sense out of the messes around them, but they are rarely desperate.  Rather, they accept the world that is theirs in a factual manner, and the distance between that factual manner and the often absurd situation is what generates a good deal of the humor.

Witness the first paragraph of the first story in the collection, “Mexico”:

“Kirby’s faithful.  He’s loyal: Kirby has fidelity.  He has one wife, Tricia.  The bass’s name is Shack.  The fish is not in an acquarium.  It’s in the swimming pool that Kirby built, out in his and Tricia’s front yard.”

This almost reads as notes for a story, but instead it sets the tempo and tone in a way that completely hooked me, and told me that the world I was entering was skewed, but that this was just to be accepted as part of the situation.

Bass’ grasp of voice is just masterful.  Check the start my favorite story in the collection, “Cats and Students, Bubbles and Abysses:”

“I got a roommate, he’s tally and skiny, when we get into arguments he says “I went to Millsaps,” uses the word like what he thinks a battering ram sounds like.  He’s a real jerk.  I could break both his arms just like that! if I wanted to, I’ve got a degree in English Literature from Jackson State.  I was the only white on campus, I can’t use “I went to Jackson State” like a battering ram, but I can break both his arms.”

Great stuff.  Reminds me a bit of Barthelme the Great and the late, sad David Foster Wallace.

Check this guy out.  It looks like he’s been pretty consistent over the years.  I’ll read everything the dude has written.