Tag: USA

WOW, NO THANK YOU by Samantha Irby

For some reason I had the idea I wouldn’t like this lady’s work, and had put off reading anything by her for months. Big mistake. Turns out I LOVE HER.

WOW, NO THANK YOU is a series of comic essays about her daily life, covering such topics as ageing, irritable bowel, social awkwardness, and her love for her phone. One essay begins:

I once starred in a horror movie called I Was Caught Waiting, Alone, in a Public Place, without my Fucking Cellular Phone

She is enthused by it’s “cracked screen and lightly buttered handfeel.” Lightly buttered exactly describes my phone too.

She is hyper conscious of others’ feelings about her. Here’s an example, where she is being wheeled down the hospital corrider by a nurse on the way to a serious surgery:

And because my brain is a nightmare, I kept thinking, “Is this bed too heavy for her to push? Is this the heaviest bed she’s ever pushed? Is she going to need help to take that sharp right corner? Maybe I should just get up and push her in the bed instead,” and thank goodness I signed that DNR because what is the point of living like this? Anyway, we made it to surgery

What I found most interesting about this book though is the author’s casual attitude to achievement. She had a rough start in life, and struggles with depression, and generally she aspires just to get through the day. I found this kind of an inspirational approach. I wonder if when one has an easier start in life, one sets a higher bar on achievement to be ‘happy,’ and maybe that’s a trap.

LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I listened to this book, which is about a long journey by wagon from Wisconsin to South Dakota, while making a make shorter journey by car from Wisconsin and South Dakota. ALL HAIL THE COMBUSTION ENGINE! I thought ten hours was a lot, but that was as nothing to the multiple weeks it took, Pa, Ma, Mary, Laura and Baby Carrie Ingalls.

Not much has improved in terms of entertainment. I googled ‘things to do off the I-90’ and the most helpful suggestion was from a trucker who said people do like to laugh at the ‘Kum and Go’ gas station (this I had already done), and maybe eat some pancake-wrapped sausages there, but there is not much else to do unless ‘you like the smell of pig sh*t.’

This semi-autobiographical story is a pretty interesting account of the settler experience. It is quite amazing to see how they managed to create a homestead out of an axe, a gun, and the prairie. It was also interesting to see that they clearly understood that they were taking land from the Native Americans. I would have expected some kind of soft-soaping, but it is exceedingly clear that they are in conflict with people already using the land, and understood themselves to be in conflict with them. They are essentially waiting for the government to hand the land over to them. I learn from Wikipedia that Ingalls daughter, who owned the rights to this story, was a raging libertarian, so I find this hilarious.

What I will probably most remember about this book is it’s success in capturing a small child’s view of the world. Many books try this, and very few succeed. It was really elegantly done here. I expected a much less sophisticated book, for some reason. I now understand why it’s a classic.

WINTER IN THE BLOOD by James Welch

For some reason I had the impression that colonialism in North America was less bloody than in Africa, involving more diseased blankets and deceptive treaties and less outright murder. I learnt how wrong I was at the Akta Lakota Museum in South Dakota. The massacre at Wounded Knee is as stomach-churning a use of guns on unarmed people as anything Kitchner did in Sudan. I bought this book there, as the back cover told me Welch is a relatively important Native American writer.

It’s about a young man who goes on a bender while looking for the girlfriend who has left him. I wish I could say I enjoyed it but it’s profoundly not my kind of book. First of all, it’s clearly a boys’ book. I can’t defend this definition, other than to say I know them when I see them. Second, it has one of those motive-less protagonists so beloved of midcentury fiction. If even the protagonist doesn’t care what they are doing, I find it hard to do so myself.

Let me give you a taste:

First Raise got us each a cup of coffee and watched us drink. It was beginning to get light. He loved us. He watched us drink the bitter coffee down. In the living room beside the oil stove, my grandmother snored. Beneath the closed door leading off the kitchen, Theresa slept or didn’t sleep.

Perhaps there are some people who don’t find this annoying. If so, I am not one of them.

LEAVING CHEYENNE by Larry McMurtry

A story of a love triangle in small town Texas. And when I say small, I mean small. When there are only about two women in the whole place, and one of them is ugly, you can see where the triangle gets more likely.

It’s told in three sections, one for each person in the triangle. Wikipedia tells me McMurtry was married twice, both times to women, which surprises me because on the evidence of this book I would say he had never met a woman. The girl’s section of the book was just bizarre. It is clear throughout which man she ought to have married, and she chooses the other, and so I thought her section would be a ‘reveal.’ What it revealed is that McMurtry thinks women are basically irrational, don’t know what’s good for them, and can’t explain their own thought process.

That said, I still liked the book. The charm is in the setting, as with other books of his that I’ve read ( LONESOME DOVE, THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (minus the cow-rape of course)). Try this, on a hailstorm:

I guess the worst was Old Man Hurshel Monroe getting his skull cracked outside the door of the bank. They say Beulah Monroe found the hailstone that conked him and kept it home in the icebox for nearly ten years, till one of her grandkids ate it for an all-day sucker.

Or this, the very opening of the book:

When I woke up Dad was standing by the bed shaking my foot. I opened my eyes, but he never stopped shaking it. He shook it like it was a fence post and he was testing it to see if it was in the ground solid enough. All my life that’s the way he’d wake me up—I hated it like poison. Once I offered to set a glass of water by the bed, so he could pour that over me in the mornings and wake me up, but Dad wouldn’t do it. I set the water out for him six or seven times, and he just let it sit and shook my foot anyway. Sometimes though, if he was thirsty, he’d drink the water first.

I googled the author and found him to be a rather charming man. I love his transactional approach to writing. Try this:

If I could not write another word of fiction and make a living, I would. But I can’t. I live off of fiction, mostly. I have a novel coming out this year, Loop Group, and I have one more novel that I owe Simon and Schuster, about an aging gunfighter. I’m getting close to thirty novels in all, I think. That’s a lot of novels. It’s kind of embarrassing. I don’t even offer them to my friends anymore. They all stopped reading at fifteen or twenty. When a new one comes out, I think, “Do I really want to mail this one around?”

CROSSING SAFELY by Wallace Stegner

An unusual novel about compromise and friendship. It’s about a pair of married couples who become friends in their twenties, and follows their relationships across their lives

It’s about the fact that some people live their best lives, and some people don’t. It’s also about the subtler point that it is hard to know which category you fall in.

The husband in one couple becomes an author. The husband in the other couple would like to, but ends up a university lecturer. This is in part because his wife, who has far more energy and ambition than he does, is convinced he should do this ‘first’ before he tries the uncertain life of a poet. Seems reasonable. However he failures to get tenure, which sends his wife into a breakdown. I mean on the one hand one has to agree with the character who tells her to ‘renounce this dramatization of failure,’ but my other suggestion would be HOW ABOUT SOCIETY JUST LETS HER GET HER OWN JOB. Honestly, can you imagine how messed up things were in the early twentieth century when half the population had to try and live out the suppressed dreams of the other half?

This whole question of ‘failure’ is an interesting one. Here is the author husband:

Is it compulsory to be one of the immortals? We’re all decent godless people, Hallie. Let’s not be too hard on each other if we don’t set the world afire. There’s already been enough of that.

This is my third novel of Stegner’s, and I am inspired to keep going. He is a lovely writer. Enjoy this description of a hillside:

The air smells of cured grass, cured leaves, distance, the other side of hills.

I wonder how long it took him to come up with that.

THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P by Adelle Waldman

My third time through this excellent book, and I like it even more on the re-read than I did before.

It’s the story of a four month relationship between two New York hipsters, both aspiring writers. It tries to answer the age-old question, is it you or is it me, and the answer is, as it always is, that it’s both. Or it’s neither.

Part of the power of the book is that it is written from the man’s perspective, but the author is a woman. I have tried and tried to figure out what is so powerful about this book, and I think somehow this is part of it: there is a giant effort of imagination to see it from the other side. I note I am struck once again, as I was when I first read it in 2013, by this:

As they were getting into bed, she told him that he was treated like a big shot because he was a guy and had the arrogant sense of entitlement to ask for and expect to get everything he wanted, to think no honor too big for him. The funny thing was that Nate thought there was a great deal of truth in this. But he thought she could stand to ask for more. His main criticism of her, in terms of writing, was that too often she wasn’t ambitious enough. She should treat each piece as it if mattered, instead of laughing off flaws proactively, defensively, citing a ‘rushed job’ or an ‘editor who’d mess it up anyway’ . . .”

I’m also struck this time through by the complexity. He meets the girl randomly at a party, some time after breaking up with her, and drunkenly goes home trying to figure out why he dumped her. He wakes up feeling happy. The last few lines are:

In a few days, it would be as if this night never happened, the only evidence of it an unsent email automatically saved to his drafts folder (“Dear Hannah … “). He’d no more remember the pain – or the pleasure – of this moment than he would remember, once he moved into the new apartment, the exact scent of the air from his bedroom window at dawn, after he’d been up all night working.

I love this. It’s so true how hard it is to figure out how you really feel.

THE SUBTLE ART OF NOT GIVING A F*CK by Mark Manson

Here is an example of how a great title does half the work.  Though the author’s point is not so much that we should not give a f*ck, but rather that we should only give a f*ck about what we give a f*ck about.  Easier said than done, in my experience. I often find myself getting riled up about things that I know I do not care about.  In any case, the book is refreshing in its emphasis that there is no life without problems; the point is to choose the right problems. 

I also thought this was useful:

If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.

Here his point is, don’t measure success too much based on things you cannot control, e.g., the approval of others, promotions, etc. Rather focus on things you can control, e.g., doing your best.  Associated with this is what you should measure yourself on:

Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways. Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or an undiscovered genius. . . .  Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator. . . . (You should) define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible. This often means giving up some grandiose ideas about yourself: that you’re uniquely intelligent, or spectacularly talented . .  . This means giving up your sense of entitlement and your belief that you’re somehow owed something by this world.”

I can’t say it’s the best written or most insightful book I’ve ever come across, and admittedly I lost it in an Uber before I finished it completely, but that said I enjoyed it. 

NOTHING TO SEE HERE by Kevin Wilson

This was a re-read of this marvellous book about income inequality and spontaneous human combustion.

I didn’t love this the second time round as much as the first. But this still has me loving it more than most books. This time round what I concluded is that what makes it remarkable is the quality of the voice of the narrator. It’s weirdly, painfully, contemporary and disillusioned.

Try this, about her efforts to get a scholarship to a school for rich kids:

I didn’t know the school was just some ribbon rich girls obtained on their way to a destined future. . . . . I wasn’t destined for greatness, I knew this.  But I was figuring out how to steal it from someone stupid enough to relax their grip on it.

I won’t write up the whole book again; the first read is here. If you are looking for something to read, I recommend it.

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW by Larry McMurtry

In this book some teenage boys have sex with a blind cow. And this is not even the climactic center of the book. Apparently this is just part of normal small town life in Texas. The author is famous for his novels that draw on his own upbringing in small town Texas, so I guess this is based on true events. This just goes to show you what I have always thought, which is that small towns are not charming as people try to claim, but in fact dangerous and creepy. (See also scarring movie WICKERMAN, but only if you want to be scarred.)

“We could go on down to the stockpens,” Leroy suggested. “There’s a blind heifer down there we could fuck.” . . . . The prospect of copulation with a blind heifer excited the younger boys almost to frenzy, but Duane and Sonny, being seniors, gave only tacit approval. They regarded such goings on without distaste, but were no longer as rabid about animals as they had been. . . In the course of their adolescence both boys had frequently had recourse to bovine outlets. At that they were considered overfastidious by the farm youth of the area, who thought only dandies restricted themselves to cows and heifers. The farm kids did it with cows, mares, sheep, dogs, and whatever else they could catch . . . It was common knowledge that the reason boys from the diary farming communities were so reluctant to come out for football was because it put them home too late for the milking and caused them to miss regular connection with the milk cows.

IS HE JOKING. At least in the play EQUUS this kind of thing is given the dignity of being a major plot point. Here it’s not. This story is about this young man, Sonny, who is graduating high school. He is having an affair with a middle-aged woman who is in a marriage people casually assume is abusive. (Sample: “I don’t understand how Mrs Popper’s lasted,” Duane said). Sonny drops her the second the local popular girl shows an interest. It’s a sad as it sounds. As a middle-aged woman myself, it fills me with renewed gratitude to be alive now, with my own income and my own Tinder if I want it.

Even all the side plots are sad: he falls out with his best friend, who then blinds him in one eye (?) before heading off to fight in Korea. The only apparently positive figure is the local poolhall owner, Sam the Lion, who looks after a young disabled boy called Billy (you don’t want to know how he is involved in the cow thing). Then he dies. Because this is the kind of book this is. It’s so sad it gets into the ridiculous. Everyone was lonely , everyone was not getting enough sex, or getting the wrong sex, or etc. Life is not all sad, just like it is not all happy.

Larry McMurtry is a great writer, so still I enjoyed it. But if you’ve never tried him, I recommend you start with his Pulitzer winner LONESOME DOVE (which this blog tells me I read a solid ten years ago)