Save the words

Remember how in the 80s, Cabbage Patch dolls would come with little adoption certificates? And you'd have a good feeling, 'cause you were saving some adorable, chubby-cheeked urchin from a life of drudgery, picking cabbage leaves or whatever? Well, I don't have a Cabbage Patch Kid anymore (little Oliver Wendell is languishing somewhere in my parents' attic, I think), but I've found something that provides similar warm fuzzies and similar uselessness to society at large: save the words.

You "pledge" to save a word by using it in conversation, or scrawling it on the subway or whatever. This clearly isn't a decision to take lightly, so here are the words I'm considering saving:

frutescent - shrublike

oncethmus - the loud and harsh cry of a donkey

legatarian - pertaining to a deputy

panchymagogue - medicine purging bodily fluids from the body

phylactology - science of counter-espionage

plebicolar - appealing to the common people

venustation - the act of becoming beautiful or handsome

So tough to choose...they all need good homes...and how do you know which ones are going to grow up to resent you, once they're accepted back into the lexicon thanks to your love and nurturing?

Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

We live in a post-superhero world. Today's presidential events aside, as a society we seem to be past the need for a cool dude--wrapped in American determination and blessed with superb ass-kicking kills--to sweep in and dispose of our street crime. We've got bigger problems.

The interesting thing about Watchmen, a limited-series DC comic, is that its creator saw this coming--23 years ago. Now retroactively repurposed as more of a graphic novel (thus saving its dignity, I guess), Watchmen is more sophisticated than your average superhero comic.

The main action of the book takes place in an alternate October 1985, where Nixon is still president (!). About seven years earlier, a federal act illegalized (is that a word? I'm going with it) "costumed adventurer" vigilantism, because the self-appointed heroes were getting in the way of the police. By the time the act was passed, costumed adventuring had become a cottage industry: some heroes had cashed in with endorsement deals and action figures; others offered themselves as rent-a-heroes for corporations; and the porn implications were pretty much endless. In short, Americans ruined helpful vigilantism the way we ruin everything else. So all practicing adventurers were forced into retirement or underground.

These included an old clique of heroes, who spent more time bickering than actually saving anyone:

• the Comedian, a brutal government mercenary who's not actually funny;
• the Nite Owl, a nebbishy guy who came up with a lot of Batman-esque gadgets with a bird theme;
• the original Silk Spectre, the token chick, who pushed her daughter into the family business;
• the second Silk Spectre (Laurie the daughter), who bitches a lot about being forced into the costume, but enjoys the benefits of dating other heroes;
• Ozymandias, a genius with an Alexander the Great fetish, who turned his previous hero popularity into a multibillion-dollar brand;
  
• Rorshach, an ink-blot-masked sociopath who avenges anything and everything he can get his hands on; and
• Dr. Manhattan, the one genuine "superhero," who was accidentally baked in a nuclear test oven, was obliterated to atoms, and reconstructed himself somehow as a godlike being. He has the ability to change matter, teleport, and know everything that will ever happen at all times. Because he's indestructible and has unlimited powers, of course he's on retainer by the U.S. government as the not-so-secret weapon of national security.

The story kicks in when one of them is found dead, and it starts looking like someone is hunting "masks," or the adventurers of old. But the more intriguing underplot is the unfolding of these heroes' history together--all the nastiness, the ineffectiveness, and neuroses that undid the whole lifestyle. The comics themselves, divided up into about ten different "chapters," are interspersed with fake memoir excerpts, magazine articles, etc. which give context to the characters.

Perhaps most interesting of all is the idea of how America would really approach grown men in costumes, taking it upon themselves to fight crime. This is the kind of thing that was touched upon in The Dark Knight last summer--what happens when a social construct outlives its usefulness? What do you do when the hero causes more damage than the villains he's chasing? You legislate it out of existence, that's what you do. But by then it's already part of the larger cultural consciousness, so you get a weird, shadowy area in the middle.

The writing is sharp--beyond the superhero issues, there's an interesting channeling of Cold War anxiety. And the art is pretty gorgeous, in a dark and grim kind of way. I don't know that this will get me into comics any more than The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay did last summer, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. If the movie is anywhere near as good, I'll happily fork over my ten bucks.

Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008

Sometimes I like to pretend that I'm cool and literary. If I had more time and money, this double identity would involve reading magazines like n+1 and The Paris Review, and being familiar with the hip new short story writers. But I have neither time nor cash, so I depend on Dave Eggers's Best American Nonrequired Reading every year to fill the gap.

But the collection has been disappointing in recent years, and I thought about skipping it this year altogether. Then I saw who wrote the introduction for the 2008 edition: Judy Blume. Five minutes later, the Amazon transaction was complete. (My inner eleven-year-old makes far too many of my financial decisions.)

It's not actually a traditional intro, but rather an interview with Ms. Blume. It's full of non-sequiturs (and features a hand-drawn self-portrait), but it's entertaining enough. Plus, it reveals that her favorite Judy Blume book is also mine (Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, FYI).

The "Best American ___" lists at the front were uneven as usual. Bad hipster band names stop being funny after the first two. But I did like "Best American NY Times Headlines from 1907" and "Best American Facebook Groups," which included:

Legalize Dueling
Automatic Doors Make Me Feel Like a Jedi
I Have to Sing the ABCs to Know Which Letter Comes Before the Other
It Wasn’t Awkward Until You Said “Well, This Is Awkward.” Now It’s Awkward.
Carol Never Wore Her Safety Goggles. Now She Doesn't Need Them.

And I really liked
Best American Diary of the Living Dead: Are You There, God? It's Me. Also a Bunch of Zombies. It's no zombie-version-of-The Great Gatsby, but then what is?

The journalism is so-so. There's a New Yorker article that I never made it through when it was in the magazine. They reprint the Pulitzer-winning piece on Joshua Bell and busking that still makes me feel guilty when I tune out subway musicians. And the requisite Serious International Piece (an essay about African-Americans and Israel by Emily Raboteau) is interesting, but overlong. Probably the most interesting one is "Bill Clinton, Public Citizen," by George Saunders. Saunders was on the press corps for Clinton's big African tour, and giddy about it from start to finish. The Vanity Fair article, this is not. It does provide flashes of the old, much more fun Bill Clinton--pre-primary. In fact, I think Hillary is mentioned just once, in passing. The article is much more about Saunders's mancrush on Bill. Also, AIDS patients in Africa. But mostly the mancrush.

The short stories are better."Darkness," by Andrew Sean Greer, explores the relationship of an elderly lesbian couple, set against the backdrop of the sun's sudden and total disappearance. I'd disliked Greer's previous novel, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, but he's redeemed himself now. Another story I enjoyed was "Cake" by Patrick Tobin, which follows a thoroughly unlikeable chronic pain patient through a final meltdown. A new story by Stephen King was good too (slightly eerie, decently written, and only partly set in New England).

The graphic novel excerpts, well...I'm still not a graphic novel convert. I'm trying, but when one of the chosen excerpts is about a graphic novelist who has trouble writing his graphic novel, things are getting a little too meta. Give me good old-fashioned prose any day. But they do add visual interest to the book.

All in all, the book made for good subway reading--and now I can hold off on that Paris Review subscription for at least another year!

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Depending on which book you count as the first, Infinite Jest was number 11 in the Jacob-Katy book club. And it was a doozy. We've had our share of long, complicated ones (Ulysses, Bleak House), but this one was definitely the unwieldiest. Yet it may have been the most rewarding, in terms of sheer accomplishment. Between the two of us, we dragged the book across several continents (him), and on innumerable trains (me), took several months to read and reflect, and ultimately conquered the 1000+ pages (including 388 end notes).

And now, having read it and talked it over, I'm glad to have done it. It's an undeniable part of modern lit, and now that David Foster Wallace is gone, we'll never get anything quite like it again. Jacob has a much better plot overview than I was going to do, so here's the quick gist.

Basically, at an unidentified point in the near future, America is a mess. Large parts of the country are now wastelands. Technology and branding have pretty much taken over. We've absorbed Canada and Mexico--and French-Canadian separatists are especially pissed at the assimilation. Said French-Canadians are looking for a way to punish the Americans, and they've found out about a tape that's so addictive, anyone who views it is reduced to instant, irreversible mental mush. (Supposedly, what's on the tape is a veiled mother figure, bending down over the camera as though talking to a newborn infant, and saying, "I'm sorry.") But while the tape is the catalyst for the book, the plot is really about the tape's dead creator, and everyone/every place touched by him somehow. It's all loosely grouped into three main spheres, which rarely touch one another: the Canadian spies talking about the tape, the filmmaker's son and his friends at a ritzy Boston tennis academy, and the drug addicts at a rehab facility next door to the tennis academy.

But when I say things like "plot," I mean it in the loosest sense possible. 'Cause it's really just a thousand pages of David Foster Wallace including every detail that's ever crossed his mind, exploring issues he finds interesting (like tennis as war, addiction recovery as religion, or how easily Americans could be taken down by psychological porn). The language is good, though. There are literally hundreds of characters, and Wallace takes care to shift vocabulary and syntax accordingly. The sections which really shine are the ones where he pays equal attention to wonky detail and to description. Like in a scene where the kids in the tennis school play a game called Eschaton--essentially Risk on a tennis court--and end up going crazy, U.N.-style.

Also excellent are his descriptions of drug addiction and suicidal depression--they're terrifyingly vivid. And his passionate details about how and why someone would kill themselves are painful to read. Given that he'd clearly had mental health issues for a long time, part of me wonders if Infinite Jest was originally intended as a kind of suicide note--the serious writer's ultimate purge before he leaves the world. And it's all so scattered. I have no idea how he, let alone some poor schmuck of a development editor, could possibly keep track of the hundreds of characters, many plot threads, and erratic timeline enough to edit the manuscript. I have to assume that he cashed in his Famous Author Points, said, "Publish this as is," and that was pretty much it. But he's got enough bluster to pull it off, and even while you're struggling to read the book, you sense that there's something brilliant simmering underneath the extraneous crap.

And if you enjoy things like plot resolution and endings? Look elsewhere, friend.

I found it much easier to read once I started looking at the book as more of a collection of short stories, obliquely connected--kinda like Last Exit to Brooklyn.

Again, I'm glad to have read it. Now I can go back to reading Wallace's more straightforward (though still heavily footnoted) journalism without much guilt. And I'm also glad to have had a partner in crime, because I totally would have ditched the book after the first few chapters if I didn't know that Jacob was doing it too. All the same, I see the next book club selection being short and sweet. Something Seussian, perhaps?

life is unfair

Y'know, if I thought that the Times would publish personal essays about embarrassing public puking incidents, I would have submitted about ten pieces a long time ago.

Once again, Sloane Crosley beats me to the (spiked) punch. Letting the Chips Fall

shortcuts

As I get older, and my years of hardcore television-watching start to catch up to me, I admit that my attention span is shot. If entertainment isn't broken down into manageable chunks, I whine and drag my feet like a third-grader faced with long division homework. So I've determined that short stories/essays are pretty much the ideal literary format. When magazines like The New Yorker make an extra effort to drop short fiction in my lap, I'm always thankful.

Their holiday fiction issue is especially strong this year, with stories from Alice Munro and Colson Whitehead. But my favorite was Another Manhattan by Donald Antrim. It starts out as a modern update on the kind of bantery, upper-class neuroticism that Woody Allen has practically trademarked in film (a little bit of covert spouse-swapping, and everyone seems to be a doctor or therapist of some kind). But then it turns darker, more serious, into a reflection on intense unhappiness among people who appear to have everything under control. The pacing is good, the nuances are there, and...it's short.

Of course, this fondness for brevity might not mean that I'm losing my attention span. It might just mean I'm turning into a Japanese teenager. The New Yorker also has an intriguing article about the latest literary fad to hit Japan: the cell phone novel. My first reaction was to scoff at the idea of full books written in text-message-speak, but the further I read in the article, the less absurd it seemed. Maybe teenage girls shouldn't be dismissed so easily--after all, they turned a lousy vampire book into a major phenomenon in about ten seconds flat. And after watching my own company scramble to figure out what kids want, what iPhone/Kindle users want, I don't think it will be long before you see oddly formatted books popping up here in the U.S. as well. Maybe this means I should start working on my Twitter-formatted memoir.

poetry

So you're the President-elect. Your advisors say you need to pander to the people in the heartland who are half-convinced you're going to take your oath on the Koran, so you need a megachurch-foundin', Prop 8-supportin' pastor to show everyone how much you love Jesus. Check! Who's left to charm? Oh, yeah, those Hillary chicks. I know! Why don't you pick someone who writes about vaginas to deliver the poem? It worked for Clinton!

Monsieur Cuvier investigates
between my legs, poking, prodding,
sure of his hypothesis.
I half expect him to pull silk
scarves from inside me, paper poppies,
then a rabbit! He complains
at my scent and does not think
I comprehend, but I speak

There haven't been enough gynecological poems at presidential inaugurations. In all seriousness, though, while I'm ticked about the Rick Warren thing, I like what I've read of Elizabeth Alexander.

Giving birth is like jazz, something from silence,
then all of it. Long, elegant boats,
blood-boiling sunshine, human cargo,
a hand-made kite –

Post-partum.
No longer a celebrity, pregnant lady, expectant.
It has happened; you are here,
each dram you drain a step away
from flushed and floating, lush and curled.
Now you are the pink one, the movie star.
It has happened. You are here,

and you sing, mewl, holler, peep,
swallow the light and bubble it back,
shine, contain multitudes, gleam. You

are the new one, the movie star,
and birth is like jazz,
from silence and blood, silence

then everything,

jazz.

Plus, yay for a president who knows enough about modern poetry (hell, any poetry) to go with someone a little off the beaten path, but who also has a kickass resume. Also, I had no idea--or had forgotten the probable reference from The West Wing--that only Kennedy and Clinton had included poets in their ceremonies. Definitely a wasted opportunity for the others--who would Nixon have chosen?

the rest is noise

I think I have a crush on Alex Ross from the New Yorker. I always enjoyed his pieces in the magazine, but never really thought much about him beyond "pleasant subway reading." But then today, I was reading last week's piece on Leonard Bernstein, and just really loved his lush, descriptive language and style:

"To attend the Bernstein festival night after night was to watch this man’s sometimes desperate struggle to find the proper vessel for his talent. In a better world, these conflicts—between classical and popular traditions, between composing and conducting, between high-art institutions and radical politics, between gay and straight sexualities—would have mattered little. The spirit of the man, which had something primordial, almost animalistic, about it, overwhelmed all categories."

and

"The moment exemplifies Bernstein’s ability to render almost any abstract sequence of notes or chords as a physical act, a sweatily human gesture."

So bravo, Alex Ross. Way to pull ahead of Sasha Frere-Jones.

it's retrospective season!

Good news, everyone! The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2008 is out, and I've actually read one of them! That's about the same as I was doing at this time last year, so yay for maintenance. (The numbers look, umm, less good if you take into account that I've read only two of the top 100 notable books of the year, but hey, who's counting? Chances are I'll get to Toni Morrison and Fareed Zakaria soon. Ish.)

Notably missing from both lists is The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell's latest book, which was pretty much eviscerated last week by Virginia Heffernan. What a sad Thanksgiving in the Vowell house.... Plus, this illustrates reason #46 not to piss off a TV critic in general, and a Times critic especially.

"And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting"

This time of year, I always make it a special point to read "The Raven." Part of it is that Poe has always been shoved down our throats as a horror writer (though I've always found him more sad than creepy), but really because it's such a good autumnal poem. It's cold and bleak and lonely--yeah, November!

Also, possibly the best thing ever (at least today): Christopher Walken reads "The Raven."