Roaming the dial

Book: Radio On: A Listener's Diary

Author: Sarah Vowell

Published: 1996 (St. Martin's Griffin)

Pages: 228

This is exactly like reading a smart person's real diary, in that it's repetitive, sporadically brilliant, half-assedly organized, deeply personal, well-written with highly crafted opinions, and, an ultimately aimless record of what was going on inside the writer's head for a fixed period of time.

Things I Know for Sure About Sarah Vowell's Relationship to Radio After Reading This Book:

1. She hates Rush Limbaugh because he says awful things and has way too many listeners who worship him for it.
2. She hates NPR because it's boring.
3. She loves Nirvana, Hole, and Hank Williams.
4. She has a good grasp on why she likes this music.

Things I Suspect But Never Confirmed Because They Lurked In the Details But I Tried to Pay Attention Because They Seemed Important for Context Of Which There Was Precious Little

1. She lives in Chicago.
2. She teaches art. In a museum? Or used to work in a museum?
3. She worked in college radio and gained swank connections through that because she's able to talk to radio people and go right into their studios without any explanations (to the reader at least).
4. She visited these radio people to get more perspective for her book and to sub for shows--still at the college station?--but not to actually, like, ask them anything about their jobs and how that relates to what she's writing.

Things I Wanted to Know But She Never Tells Me

1. How did she come up with the idea for this book?
2. What was her recording methodology?
3. Why did she sometimes write about music magazines or tapes she listened to without tying them back to their/her relationship with radio?
4. What would she think about the satellite and Internet streaming radio and podcasts that have exploded since she published this?
5. Wait--so, she's traveling again now? 
6. Why did she do this? Seriously, I'd love to know because I get the feeling the reason would be fascinating in an idealized early-twenties social adventure kind of way. I love reading about those; I need road trip ideas! And I also need context to figure out what she's trying to say. I bet it's really cool but I just don't know because she's not telling. 

O my brothers

Book: A Clockwork Orange

Author: Anthony Burgess

Published: 1986 (this edition--Norton Paperbacks)

Pages: 212

There's nothing to fear about this book; the slang is omnipresent but easily penetrated, while at the same time enough to keep the violence at an abstract distance. Which I guess is one facet of the point, another of course being the extra chapter that  was originally left out of the American edition (and, consequently, Stanley Kubrick's movie adaptation).

(Side note: After reading this, I want to watch the Kubrick movie to see how it stacks up to The Great Shining Debate, which is when Liberry Tom says Kubrick's The Shining is a great movie because it's shot so well and I say it sucks because it completely misses the point of the source material.)

I wasn't super shocked by anything in here. It's a fairly straightforward plot: brutal young man gets off on doing violent things to people, gets caught, gets put into mind-altering therapy that gives him visceral reactions to violence, tries to get right back into it, gets depressed and tired of it. 

That's not to say I didn't like reading about all that. It's still a fascinating journey, and it's all in the narrator. This book is one of the strongest arguments I've read for the importance of unique character voice. Alex goes from simple to sick to existential, all his confusion wrapped in his comforting blanket of slang whose familiarity isn't nearly enough to protect him from the changes forced on his emotions. He remains a sympathetic character in a way that makes me feel like a terrible person for saying that, which means he's very well-written. A well-written sociopath.

The last chapter--I don't see how it's such a controversy. It's the logical, if somewhat muted, continuation of Alex's life. Leaving it out could be seen as approving such violence that he's gotten back into, or at least saying that it's an inevitable part of decaying society, but it's made clear that even though he's pushed past his conditioning, Alex won't be able to sustain his sociopathic behavior for much longer without it taking an even more crushing toll.

Anyway, go read this and see if you can tease out the metaphor for clockwork oranges. I didn't get that bit.

Origin stories

Book: Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal

Author: Jeffrey J. Kripal

Published: 2011 (The University of Chicago Press)

Pages: 334 (not counting endnotes)

Holy shit, comic book writers are just as crazy as you think they are.

Kripal’s conclusion is a lot more nuanced, academic, and sympathetic than mine. But all his research into the great minds of speculative fiction basically comes down to this. Everyone from Alan Moore to Jack Kirby to Philip K. Dick to pulp writers of the 1950s had some sort of paranormal/religious experience that brought them out of their own consciousness in some elaborate mind-melting way that may or may not have involved drugs (it’s split about even along the users/nonusers line). And boy howdy did they ever want to dissect the hell out of these experiences in print.

I won’t cheat or pretend to remember by paging back through for some random quotes about any of this stuff. It was confusing and blurred into one giant blob of higher intelligent beings revealing themselves to grant their higher knowledge on the open-minded. Basically, these guys did not go, “You know what would be AWESOME? SPACESHIPS and sexy goddesses!” and proceed to make it up as they went along. They were transcribing, translating, and interpreting. Their work was not their own.

To me, that’s disappointing, mostly because I want to hear how artists take control of their own creativity. I wanted to read about how they took ordinary lives and molded them into fantastical allegories about their world and its direction, disguised in mystical experiences that their audiences would use for escape. I did like that Kripal had enough insight to divide the experiences into different socio-historical anxieties, like alienation, radiation, orientation, mutation. 

But then he dropped giant musing paragraphs into the middle of everything and lost me out in the cosmos. Maybe I’m just not ready for enlightenment yet.

One more chance (because I checked out so many)

Book: The Flamenco Academy

Author: Sarah Bird

Publication: 2006 (Knopf)

Pages: 381

The history and tradition of flamenco is fascinating. The flimsy tale of romantic obsession Bird uses as an excuse to write about flamenco is not.

Her characters are interesting: a shy young girl who discovers flamenco as a way to a tortured guitarist’s heart, her best friend who needs attention in the same way of oxygen, the guitarist himself as he wrestles with mysteries of his identity that could make or break him in the flamenco world. They’re human enough to recognize and empathize with, and they provide crucial insights into a rarified subculture as outsiders who gain access throughout the tale.

Or that’s what they do in my head, when I really want to like this opera-on-page. In reality, there are no actual examples of them doing this, as in you have to take the narrative voice’s word for practically every character development. It baffles me why Bird thought it was a good idea to pull back the camera and use so much exposition. SO MUCH EXPOSITION, y’all. I want her to go full-out Gypsy fairy tale for this thing or add some fucking DIALOUGE between the shy girl and the minimal amount of people she’d have to interact with to become as good at flamenco as she is.

But Bird’s writing fluctuates. At least three people tell dramatic tales of their origins and secrets that take up chapters at a time. I wish she would’ve just expanded those until they touched each other and made a narrative that mimics flamenco’s mysterious, overly emotional depth framed by traditional structure.

Everything was harped on so fucking much, too, like she thought the reader would forget every few pages. And so many metaphors to describe the dance and the music. SO MUCH.

Sigh. I checked out Bird’s The Boyfriend School and The Mommy Club in this same batch because I love The Yokota Officer’s Club so much, but I can’t do it. They’re due back this week and I’ll take the gamble that I won’t regret reading her take on getting boyfriends back or surrogate motherhood.    

Brothers and sisters

Book: The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us

Author: Jeffrey Kluger

Published: 2011 (Riverhead Books)

Pages: 295

At a business dinner the other week, the girl next to me kept saying, “You look really familiar…” until I found out where she works and blurted out, “OH if you work there, you probably know This Guy! I dated his brother for awhile.” (I still can’t hold my wine, okay?) She said she’d always wanted to meet This Guy’s brother because she’d heard they were completely different from each other.

And they WERE. I got a front seat to that shiznit, how even their hair grew in as opposite textures. Being a nosy only kid, I mentally recorded it all with a fascination that possibly prevented me from defending This Guy’s brother as much as I should’ve.

Turns out most of the sibling-ism people talk about have some sort of scientific, statistical basis, although whether or not the results come about because of actual biology or social conventions depends on which trait you’re looking at and when it becomes apparent in the kid’s development stages. First kids and only kids usually ARE worried about, doted on, and expected to make more of themselves because of simple resource allotment; they get first crack at Mom and Dad’s energy and sense of novelty and chance at putting away money for college. This usually DOES create type-A firsties, although this can jump to the girl in an otherwise all-boy family because she usually ends up shouldering the traditional gender role of caretaking unless she’s like ten years younger than everyone else. Behavior influences slide up AND down the line if the sibs are close enough in age.

Just all this cool stuff treated with the proper social science skepticism, sprinkled liberally with personal anecdotes of the author’s life growing up with three brothers and then a couple stepsisters on both sides. Holy shit, do the personal details get better exponentially. Kluger doesn’t bash you over the head with all of his problems at once; he slides them into perfect contexts that took me a beat to realize oh wait, those actually happened TO HIM. He’s so calm about it, but not unemotional.

It’s great! I got enough science to convince me I learned a bunch, with enough personal narration to satisfy the part of my brain that needs visible human figures at all times. A really excellent read. 

"A great girlfriend gift"

Book: Just Let Me Lie Down: Necessary Terms for the Half-Insane Working Mom

Author: Kristin van Ogtrop

Published: 2010 (Little, Brown and Company)

Pages: 259

Awe: the state in which I hold working parents. I have taken care of kids (daycare summer job) and am right now easing myself into a professional life; separately, each of those things have exhausted my punk ass to the point where I am really, sincerely, bewilderingly curious as to how the hell people do both at the same time without keeling over.

But: everything I’ve read about it has such a well-worn fondly crazy lightheartedness that I can’ tell what’s exaggerated for laughs and what’s damped down for sentiment. Van Ogtrop’s stories don’t go any deeper than the rest of them.

Can: it be something you just have to DO, like moving your legs when you want to learn how to run, or when you discover that nobody actually knows how to be an official adult and everyone just b.s.es their way into it until something clicks?

Does: the blurb that says “The ideal girlfriend gift!” mean a great present for a significant other or something to give a female friend? Either way sounds a little insulting and presumptuous.

Everything: this does not make me want children. Like, at all. I’ll settle for cooing at them while their mothers are preoccupied, thanks, so maybe both of us can visit the other side of life for the brief second that will be all we need. Also, I wanna play with the Legos.