Old Shit, by the Educational Testing Service

Okay, the reason why I haven’t been writing for awhile is because I am packing my brain with nonsense for the upcoming GRE literature subject test. Upcoming as in this time next week. I have only been studying for about a week, and clearly I am not actually studying right now (or ever), as rather than perusing the Norton I am writing this, looking up places in London I can buy a tutu, and wondering whether to paint my nails firehouse red or classy purple.

I expect to do not-so-well on this test, considering most of the questions consist of them giving you three lines from a poem and asking who wrote it, or giving you a line of Old English and asking you to translate it and identify the past participle. But it’s now or never because these scores last for five years and by next November I’ll only be speaking Kyrgyz. So I need to buckle in, take the goddamn train to Leeds this Friday, and pretend I’m having fun. Which I am. With everything written after 1900. But as far as the old shit goes, these are my essential takeaways:

Greek mythology: loves it. To have gods and goddesses who acted not like Blue-Eyed Misogynist Jesus but like Genghis Khan, Clinton and Angelina Jolie–no wonder the Greeks had it together. Seriously, I could read this stuff for ages. Fire, murder, chariots, babies coming out of heads. Amazing. Danae!

Keats, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley: KILL ME. If you’re not in some sort of emo trance, it is honestly very difficult to read this stuff in 2009 and not glaze over. It’s “gorgeous” and “important” and I understand that British Romantic poetry really is gorgeous and important, but reading this stuff is like drinking a rotten milkshake made of velvet, peat moss, and 200-year-old roses.

Restoration comedy: William Wycherley: The Country Wife (1675). Featuring Mr. Horner, Mr. Pinchwife, Sir Jasper Fidget, Mrs. Squeamish, and Mrs. Dainty Fidget. Don’t even tell me that I need to know that. Don’t even tell me.

Pilgrim’s Progress: Most hilarious thing ever. It’s just so impossible to misinterpret. Also I’ve always wanted to write a college version of this. Instead of Christian trying to get to the Celestial City and getting bogged down in the Slough of Despond, it would be Freshman, meeting his friends Slutty and Soc Major and getting sidetracked to Fraternity Row, where he encounters a demon named DUI, gets thrown in the Drunk Tank, and is afterwards given guidance by the Dean of Students. With woodcut illustrations I think I’d really have something… something about as good as Pilgrim’s Progress.

James Joyce: I understand very little of this man’s oeuvre. Outside of Portrait of the Artist–which I think is an incredibly unteachable book for high-schoolers, largely because I don’t think a huge number of high school English teachers are willing to be up to the task of teaching this–I struggled through Dubliners, I couldn’t finish Ulysses and I couldn’t even start Finnegan’s Wake. What moments of illumination I have had with Joyce constitute the bulk of my impression of what it would be like to be an idiot savant.

In many ways I appreciate having to read all of this, but mostly I think that culture has thinned out to the point where it would be more relevant to test this, from McSweeney’s: YouTube Comment or e.e. cummings?

The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand

I absolutely hate Ayn Rand. I abhor her. And if you like her–and I understand that many intelligent people go through or have gone through a die-hard Ayn phase, in much the same way that in fourth grade I couldn’t stop listening to “C’est La Vie” by B*Witched–either stop reading or please forgive me for this forthcoming stream of bile.

From the horse’s mouth: “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” That sounds fine, right? Definitely fine if you live in an imaginary capitalist snowglobe, where everyone is Patrick Bateman, injustice and hegemony have never existed, and sanitation and social work are done by robots, thus leaving the real people free to build skyscrapers and have lofty (heterosexual) sex. And to be honest, that kind of sounds like an awesome world, I’ll admit it. Perhaps the reason why I hate Ayn Rand so much is that she, like the best kind of devil, tells enticing half-truths. I too can be delusional and selfish, just like Ayn and her followers, and of course I would love to live in this hallucinated Gotham of flawless individuals. But I am not as delusional as Ayn. I know when my jeans won’t button, unlike Ayn, who would have loved to forget that she was really a short Russian Jew named Alisa Rosenbaum, bearing little resemblance to patrician, ideal Dominique Francon in The Fountainhead. And certainly, she was selfish.

But of course, to her, “selfish” is a positive word, meaning staying true to yourself despite the views of others. This is a crucial tenet of her philosophy, although it also sounds like a priggish excuse best usable by a spouse caught in an affair–”It has nothing to do with you! I was just staying true to myself!” etc. The fact that this comparison (between central philosophy and doghouse blather) is so easily made is just one of the reasons why objectivism is a morally bankrupt, dilettantish, and fucking stupid way of thinking. People like it because it is the philosophical equivalent of college: a potentially meaningful but incredibly misused scaffolding that enables people to think, “Bitch, I do what I want.” 

But the gender stuff is the worst. “The essence of femininity is hero worship—the desire to look up to man,” she says. “An ideal woman is a man-worshiper, and an ideal man is the highest symbol of mankind.” And I understand that she’s saying that the man has to be worthy or ideal before any of this is true, and, being straight, I can even get down with the idea that a woman “experiences the essence of her femininity” while surrendering (sexually) to a man “worthy” of dominating her. But no ma’am. She taps into a well of dangerous, complicated cultural undercurrents with this thought, which is anything but objective.

Ayn Rand undermines awareness and good sense just as much as all those evangelical Christian books that tell boys to hunt and girls to think they’re princesses. I am upset now. I need a cookie.

The Westing Game, by Ellen Raskin

Oh fuck yeah The Westing Game. Another one of the unsurpassable Newbery Medal winners, this book is perfect adventure. It’s a spoofy, fractalized, good-hearted, Clue-esque mystery–but unlike Clue, it has a real plot, studded with exciting things such as a dead millionaire, a haunted mansion, the stock market, blackouts, bombs, and a set of word puzzles that seem to come from the lyrics of “America the Beautiful.” Considering that the book features no less than sixteen main characters, the plot is surprisingly inwardly expansive, and all the characters are clearly drawn and memorable without being caricatures. And what’s awesome is that Raskin’s set of characters (who are like chess-pieces more than anything else) are diverse for the sake of being interesting, not for the sake of being diverse–and together they cover more bases than any other book of this length I can think of. There’s Sydelle Pulaski, the fat secretary who gets bored and decides to become “a cripple,” and paints her crutches to match her colorful cat-lady glasses; James Hoo, the failed inventor-turned-angry-restauranteur; Christos Theodorakis, the disabled, birdwatching young savant; Grace Wexler, the cold, social-climbing blonde matron; J.J. Ford, the unsmiling, black maid’s-daughter-turned-judge; the nearly mute, intensely religious cleaning woman named Crow.

And then, of course, there’s Turtle. Turtle, my idol. She is a defiant, awesome thirteen-year-old, who begins the book by taking a dare that she won’t sneak into the Westing mansion–she then finds the dead body of Sam Westing and sets the whole plot in motion. She kicks people for no reason, hates her sister for passively agreeing to marry the handsome (possibly gay?) Dr. Deere, and becomes extremely angry when anyone pulls her braid. She is in the great tradition of plucky female young-adult protagonists (anyone remember The Girl Who Owned A City?) and I love her.

The book is a true mystery, beginning with all sixteen characters being mysteriously persuaded to move into Sunset Towers, continuing through the death of Sam Westing, through the reading of his riddle-like will, through all the characters’ intersecting alliances and attempts to win Westing’s fortune, and through the logical but entirely surprising ending. Reviewing it after The Lost Symbol, it is sadly obvious that the puzzle in the Westing Game is a thousand times more complex but every bit as neat. This book, so much about independence and ingenuity and money and family and games and making things happen for yourself, is a better definition of America than most anything else.

The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown

As proven by the things we give our attentions to (hot-air balloons) versus the things we don’t (the actual structure of the public option), the majority of Americans have lately been displaying the attention patterns of terrible assholes.  Myself included one hundred percent: I mean, I read this book primarily so I could write about it. So I’m a tool, we’re all tools, etc, and it’s all our fault that Jon Gosselin is about to advertise for Ed Hardy, because we ask for it with every time we lack for conversation and stutter out, “So, how about that balloon boy?”

And we have come to this: Dan Brown is saving the print industry, and this book is the fastest-selling adult novel ever. How the formerly literate have fallen. This is not to say that I’m not in awe of him, and super jealous, obviously. But like–let’s go to the text, shall we? Chapter 2, page 10. “The one who called himself Mal’akh pressed the tip of the needle against his shaved head, sighing with pleasure as the sharp tool plunged in and out of his dermis…. I am in control of my own flesh. The intoxicating feeling of control derived from physical transformation had addicted millions to flesh-altering practices… cosmetic surgery, body piercing, bodybuilding, and steroids… even bulimia and transgendering. The human spirit craves mastery over its carnal shell…. He turned to face his reflection. Slowly, as if unwrapping a priceless gift, Mal’akh opened his robe to unveil his naked form. The vision awed him. I am a masterpiece.”

And there, in brutal clarity, is the reason why I am joining the Peace Corps. We are silly, silly people to like this stuff. I read a review that said that part of Dan Brown’s appeal is the way he attempts to weave mysticism and ancient history into our relatively young and aesthetically sterile national history. Which is fine, but does he have to do it with this kind of writing? No more of this naked-form, I am a masterpiece business.

I was, however, pleased to find that the formula is still functioning as well as ever. In The Lost Symbol, you can rest assured that you will find at least a year’s supply of deadly conspiracies, tourist destinations, mutant assassins, nonexistent academic disciplines (symbology), smart/attractive/sexless professors and scientists, secret tunnels, blood rituals, and epiphanic happy endings. And of course Mal’akh, the eunuch assassin who names his legs “Boaz” and “Jachin.”

Breakfast at Tiffany’s, by Truman Capote

So clearly I am frequently that little shit who can be overheard saying, “I mean, the movie doesn’t even compare to the book, but I guess for people who haven’t read it yet, the movie is okay…”

But with this one it’s the opposite. Give me Audrey and her stupid cigarette holder over Truman Capote and his extreme realism. And I mean, extreme: In Cold Blood is a “nonfiction novel,” and in his other stuff I find myself getting really upset just thinking of one man inventing so much ordinariness, and although Norman Mailer called him the most perfect writer of the generation after Breakfast at Tiffany’s came out, I just can’t deal. This is the kind of bland, journalistic mid-century realism that–to me–seems to elide absolutely everything that the genius nineteenth-century realists were able to bring out of the simple, terrifying original idea of writing things as they are. Balzac created a universe; in contrast, Capote is the guy on the train who’s on the phone telling his mom what he ate for breakfast. Yes, I know it’s not really the same thing. I don’t care, though. I guess I just find Capote super boring, and I rarely find things boring.

I think all this crankiness is brought on by the fact that I’m realizing I vastly prefer the movie to the book, and I don’t even like the movie very much. In fact, I hate Holly Golightly as a character, and the sort of delusional, glam, urban, faux-wanton archetype she has unleashed upon American females. She is gorgeous and fascinating, and I get it–but like, I refuse to be drawn to someone who can’t get their shit together. “I discovered,” says Capote’s narrator on page 16, “that her regular reading consisted of tabloids and traveel folders and astrological charts; that she smoked an esoteric cigarette called Picayunes; survived on cottage cheese and melba toast… she received letters by the bale. They were always torn into strips like bookmarks. Remember and miss you and rain and please write and goddamn were the words that reoccurred…”

Oh, come on. I’d rather listen to that Deep Blue Something song than read about a girl who only eats melba toast.

Best American Short Stories of 2005, edited by Michael Chabon

More people should read these, because the anthology format aligns perfectly with our giant cultural case of ADD. Short stories are the shit, and if the good ones were taught more, then people would read them for pleasure way more often. And it’s definitely true that it gets a little tedious to read an entire collection by one author: unless you’re reading one of the geniuses, you start seeing the author’s tricks, and the rhythmical, slightly askew magic that hits you at the end of a good short story is diminished after seeing it done again and again. But with collections like this, the editor has already taken care of these issues for you. It’s basically like watching awesome movie trailers for an hour. And although the stories in the Best American series are rarely unconventional and usually prominent re-runs (a third of the stories in this edition were first published in the New Yorker), they are just really good.

And this one in particular has some incredible heavy hitters. First of all, there is one of my favorite short stories of all time: “Until Gwen,” by Dennis Lehane (the author of Mystic River), which begins “Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen dodge Neon, with an 8-ball of coke in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat” and continues through this depraved Greek-tragedy tale involving motels and corpses and this disgustingly romantic undercurrent of decayed, pulsing Americana. Lehane structures his stories like poetry: as this couple is gunned down by the police, he writes the line “She was tuned to you like a radio tower out on the edge of the unbroken fields of wheat, blinking red under a dark-blue sky” and then a few lines later, “And her voice broke in the middle of her laughter and her fear and her guilt, and she took your face in her hands and you saw all those siren lights washing across the back window like Fourth of July ice cream,” and with the colors and the rhythm it’s so good.

Other standouts: this awesome one by Kelly Link called “Stone Animals,” which to me epitomizes the genre of slipstream fiction (a surrealist-sci-fi-realist hybrid defined by its emphasis on cognitive dissonance); a beautiful and unnerving story called “Eight Pieces for the Left Hand” by J. Robert Lennon; a baseball story from Tom Perrotta; a dingy, sexual story called “Natasha” by David Bezmozgis; and reliably great stories from Joy Williams, Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates, and Edward P. Jones. All of this in one book!

The Berenstain Bears, by Stan and Jan Berenstain

Can I just say that right now my dog is hiding in my closet hiccuping and it sounds really weird.

But okay, who doesn’t love the Berenstain Bears? They do what the Boxcar Children were too kiss-ass annoying to do–somehow imparting wholesome family values in a setting so entertaining that kids forget they are being taught a lesson. A few months ago I got a colorful booklet from the Pi Beta Phi Alumni association, which illustrated basic life issues in sratty terms (you don’t understand an investment? Well, it’s like a super awesome vintage dress), and I was reminded very strongly of reading Berenstain Bears. In fact, perhaps there’s something about bears (Smokey the Bear being the greatest example) that turns an ordinary PSA (look at the cover on the right: what else could make children want to read about gun control?) into entertainment. I could read into this a lot–cartoon bears representing some sort of priest-like symbol of sterilized, safe masculinity, blah blah blah–but according to Stan and Jan Berenstain, it’s much simpler. “The reason we did books about bears,” says Stan in an interview, “was because bears can stand up on their hind legs like people and they look good in clothes.”

Oh, right. Bears look great in clothes, how could I forget that imaginary fact. Regardless, Stan was on to something: I still remember one particularly edifying installment in the series called The Berenstain Bears Learn About Strangers, which teaches the singularly hilarious lesson of “stranger-danger.” Of course, all the strangers in the book were darker-furred bears. But, you know, pick your battles. I think they should make college freshmen read this book! I’d like to challenge any UVA first-year to go to DU and then tell me stranger-danger is not timeless and universal.

Let me close by reminding you of the hilarious names of the all-bear population of Bear County. There were Mama, Papa, Sister and Brother Bear; their baby sister Honey Bear; the bully Too-Tall Grizzly and his father Two-Ton Grizzly; Mayor Honeypot (Michael Bloomberg); Professor Actual Factual; and the fat kid Milton Chubb.

If Hilary Duff continues to appear on Gossip Girl I am going to call her Milton Chubb.

The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I am a fairly unemotional person, but I place an enormous amount of importance in certain emotions, and I trace that back to two specific incidents: a dream about a bicycle I had when I was six, and New Year’s Eve of 1999, when I read this book for the first time. Basically, without The Little Prince, I would be even more of a biatch, and whenever I find myself getting too snarky about other books-that-change-people’s-lives, like The Alchemist, I remind myself that I have no room to talk because I can still be quickly brought to tears by a twee-ass storybook about love starring a pre-gender prince and a bunch of line drawings. When the opera version of this came to Houston, I sat in the front row and cried the whole way through. (But maybe that’s separate, because I really just want everything awesome to be turned into an opera. Imagine Legends of the Hidden Temple as an opera. Epic!)

The one bit of this book that everyone knows is the “On ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux” line, which means–”It is only with the heart that you can see. The essential is invisible to the eyes.” This, despite the frequency with which it appears on Facebook, is an undeniable truth–applicable not just to sappy shit but really to everything that’s good in life. It’s what turns sheet music into Radiohead, a good-looking piece of pizza into the best bite of your life, a glance between two people into a rollicking good time.

But the fox part is what really kills me. I should have said this earlier: the plot of this book is about a little prince who lands in the desert on Earth. A bit outlandish, yes, but okay–he meets a cute little fox in a sand dune and tries to get the fox to come to him. The fox will not, because he’s not tamed. He explains this, saying, “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we will need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world.”

What I love about that is that it acknowledges the fact that we don’t inherently need one thing or another. We create the needs that we fill. When you find yourself needing something or someone, it would be stupid to forget that it once was a choice, a bargain of needs that you entered into voluntarily. But that doesn’t make the process less magical, it makes it more.

Chicken Soup for the Soul, by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen

These books are so strange and so emblematic of whatever 90′s spirit it was that unleashed Beanie Babies on the world. I mean, these books are a phenomenon. There are over 105 versions of Chicken Soup for Your Aging Stepmother, and they’ve been translated into dozens of languages and you can probably still find them at your local drugstore next to copies of The Blue Day Book and My Life by Bill Clinton. In fact these books are so ridiculous that I am actually somewhat offended by their existence in such disgusting numbers. Are we such an embarrassingly soft and stupid nation that we continue to produce books like the one at the right, in which “Tough Stuff” for the “Teenage Soul” is illustrated through clever clip-art such as a pencil breaking, a wine bottle, and a single surrealist eye? I’m sure if you opened this book you would find lots of stuff like this one excerpt, which I cribbed from someone’s LiveJournal (target audience for sure). It’s from a piece called “Hear What I’m Not Saying.”

“Each time you’re kind and gentle and encouraging,
each time you try to understand because you really care,
my heart begins to grow wings, very small wings,
very feeble wings,
but wings!
With your power to touch me into feeling
you can breathe life into me.
I want you to know that.”

And that’s from Teenage Soul. Imagine the contents of–these are all real, by the way–Chicken Soup for the Nascar Soul, the Single’s Soul (kill me), Girlfriend’s Soul (disgusting: naturally there is no Boyfriend’s Soul, because the very existence of Chicken Soup for the Girlfriend’s Soul ensures that most relationships encouraged by this franchise are not real), Father and Daughter’s Soul (Mackenzie Phillips FTW), and my favorite–Chicken Soup for the Chiropractor’s Soul.

But in all seriousness, what kills me about these books is that they extract so much sappy, weepy, heartsick energy from the American people and direct it absolutely nowhere. They produce dopey compassion that turns inward rather than outward, and just makes people–specifically lonely teenagers and stay-at-home moms–feel, with narcissistic inspiration, like they are little treasures to be nurtured, instead of real people who could very well tackle real problems in the world if they weren’t so busy reading stories about puppies with dementia and high school girls who weigh all their food.

The Man of My Dreams, by Curtis Sittenfeld

This one doesn’t get much press, does it? No one’s comparing it to Catcher in the Rye, like so many reviewers did with Prep–for real, that makes no sense to me–and there’s no intrigue like there is with American Wife and all its descriptions of what Laura Bush feels like while having sex with George Bush. Maybe it’s that this frog over here is less catchy than the ribbon belt. But, I both like and am also very interested in this middle child of a novel. In context of Sittenfeld’s somewhat singular place as a respected, best-selling chick-lit author, in context of the fact that she is able to give complete integrity and dignity to all of the people in said chick-lit books (which is rare indeed: think about all the status-hungry, eww-B&T stuff propagated by Lauren Weisberger and Candace Bushnell)–this book is interesting.

Because The Man of My Dreams, like Prep, is another coming-of-age story of a plain, nice, observant girl. But this time she tells Hannah’s life story through men rather than school years. The entire novel consists of anecdotes, spaced years apart, detailing every time Hannah has a significant encounter with a guy and showing her methodical attempts to understand herself in terms of these encounters and relationships. It’s a little bit unremarkable, for sure, but I was unnerved by the fact that it works. You do understand Hannah by the end, and very well.

And so what is Curtis Sittenfeld doing here? Is she calling girls of today out on the sad but common habit of defining yourself by whoever you’re with? Is she, with her limitless compassion, not calling anyone out at all but rather pointing out that understanding yourself in this way makes sense–just as understanding yourself by any changing constant, such as your restaurants or jobs or exercise rituals du jour, can also make sense? Curtis Sittenfeld’s most notable trait as a writer is the way that she accepts and states, without question and with a flat empathy, the fact that everyone is embarrassing and needy on the inside. But by writing this book this way, she puts into question whether we are needy because we do things like define ourselves solely through other people, or if it works the other way around. I’m interested.