From Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes:

We choose the dead because of our tie to them, our identification with them. Their helplessness, passivity, vulnerability is our own. We all yearn toward the state of inanition, the condition of harmlessness, where we are perforce lovable and fragile. It is only by a great effort that we rouse ourselves to act, to fight, to struggle, to be heard above the wind, to crush flowers as we walk. To behave like live people.

I’ve been having a lot of trouble with my zombies. When the dead are rising out of their graves and coming after me to eat my brain, the only way I can get them to lie down again is by making up a new story (I notice that this is the plot of ParaNorman, which I watched with the girls; this pleases me.)

Writing as a way to defy death is a major theme of Lawrence Wright’s wonderful Going Clear, a book I urge upon all my fellow Scient-trocity enthusiasts. I once met Jerry Pournelle and asked him about Hubbard. Pournelle said that there were days when L. Ron knew that the people around him were deluded, and days when he shared their delusions, and both kinds of days were the worst. I guess L. Ron’s real innovation was to use stories to turn living people into zombies which, mixed blessing at best. And he died in the end anyway (sorry, spoilers.)

Look. I need to write, to keep my graveyards neatly landscaped and my grey matter intracranial and off the menu. And I want to write, because books are awesome and I would like to make one. But even the effort of making up new stories to reframe bad things that happened to me, even in therapy with a good therapist, wipes me out. And when I read the acknowledgements sections of books like these two beauties, or Katherine Boo or Peter Hessler or or or, the authors thank the entire editorial and fact-checking departments of the New Yorker. It’s exhausting.

My would-be-creative girlfriends and I used to joke that we needed wives. What we actually need? Is staff. Maybe we should take a note from L. Ron and train up our zombies.

In Sydney I always want to read books about Australia and books by women. On this trip, I wanted to read books with dragons in them, too. Luckily Naomi Novik’s Tongues of Serpents exists to fill this very specific niche.

…no one could be immune to the almost shocking loveliness of the immense harbor: one bay after another curving off the main channel, and the thickly forested slopes running down to the water, interspersed with stretches of golden sand.

The dragons were there for their mixture of violence and lovingkindness; like cats, like life. For roughly the same reasons I read Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief by Pauline Boss.

“Don’t stay away from your homeland more than three months or you’ll never again know where home is.” …The immigration experience provides special insights into how people learn to let go of what used to be in order to embrace the new.

That was a little more unsettling than I’d hoped.

I didn’t have a fantastic year in reading, to be honest – I think the Kindle threw me off and that my patterns of acquisition and consumption have yet to rebalance. Here are some books I read that I liked very much:

Nonfiction

Fiction

I guess it wasn’t such a terrible year in reading at that. There are two books, though, that I want to push into your hands in an overbearing yet adorkable bookseller-or-librarian-ish way: Constellation Games and Fair Play. Please read these books. They are very great.

It feels like cheating to recommend Leonard’s book when I have known and loved Leonard for ten years, but I must have read Constellation Games four times this year and gotten something more out of it each time. It’s a first contact novel and an existential love story and it did more than any other single argument to make me believe games are an important art form, but it’s also incredibly funny and moving and Curic the two-souled purple otter is my new favourite fictional character. For its part, Fair Play is about two seventysomething women living at opposite ends of an attic having conversations about pictures and books. Yes, Tove Jansson is the Moomin person. This book is based in part on her life with her wife.

Why these two? Because I am 41 years old. Because I love animals and nature and am living through a mass extinction I helped cause. Because I am a pacifist living in America, and a progressive anarchist who spent my teens as an evangelical Christian assuming I would die in a nuclear holocaust. Because for my first quarter-century I was much troubled by despair. It’s only in the last decade or two that I have had the luxury of time to tinker with my diet and my neurochemistry and my cognitive behavior to try to make a habit of hope and not horror. Because it’s the Northern winter solstice and that means all the festivals of lights, all the songs and candles in the long darkness, and what all the festivals mean is that physics is real: this will be the longest night of the year, and that tomorrow at dawn one shaft of sun will light up the corbel-vaulted room inside Newgrange [or insert your neolithic solar calendar of choice]. And then everything will start to feel a little bit better. It doesn’t stay dark. As Bill Bryson says, life wants to be. Life doesn’t want to be much. From time to time, life goes extinct. Life goes on.

Constellation Games and Fair Play are quite literally stories of friendship and hope, not in the movie trailer way that makes you wince but in a clear-eyed, fearless way that is able to talk about betrayal and jealousy and irreconcilable differences and the cold empty vastness of space. They are both, in fact, books about how to be a friend, and how to be hopeful. We are chimpanzees with doomsday weapons, adrift on a rock in an immense dark void. We have to take care of each other and we have to believe that things can change for the better. So, you know. RTFM.

I just love this guy. Subtle and perceptive.

It requires almost a lifetime of riding to acquire really educated hands, because by “educated hands” we mean hands which are fixed on the reins with a resistance exactly equal to the resistance of the horse’s mouth against them, and hands so sensitive that they can yield the very instant the horse yields to their pressure. To continue that severe a pressure in the horse’s mouth even an instant longer than is necessary is to continue a punishment after the horse has yielded.

Also kind of totally Zen in a “you will never perfect this; deal with it” way.

In riding, you have got to feel. You cannot, and you must not, look. When you look down at your horse all you will see are your own mistakes! To keep from making those mistakes, keep your eyes up and focused on some definite point or some definite object.

The book is 62 years old but could’ve been written yesterday.

Remember, it is the horse’s job to throw you forward and upward, when posting with the motion. All you do is sink down in the saddle. The forward movement of the horse will then carry you back into position. Much of getting too far out of the saddle, twisting the upper body in mid-air before coming down, collapsing on the horse’s neck, or, in the other extreme, being thrown too far back so that the legs shoot out in front of the rider, is caused by the rider’s trying to do the horse’s work for him. The horse throws you forward and upward. You sink down. The horse’s forward motion carries you back. And until then—Wait for him!

Don’t just do something! Sit there!

Hugely enjoying this tale of growing up among Mitfords-manque in America.

Life is a scavenger hunt run backward as well as forward, a race to comprehend. But with Wasps, the caretakers lock the explanatory sorrows away, then swallow the key.

It is unkind of me to consider the embarrassment of the aristocracy my own private soap opera, but Goddess forgive me, I do.

When Donny lived in Manhattan he’d often walk by the Ralph Lauren store on Madison and glower at the windows’ horsy homages to the world the Robinsons once bestrode. “If Ralph really wants to get to the heart of Waspdom,” Donny says, “he should do a whole window full of beakers of lithium and patients in white gowns.”

I picked this up because one of the Rumpus bloggers read it in the Australian coffee shop in Brooklyn that Matt took me to – what? That’s cromulent! – but no one told me it was an AIDS memoir.

The Last Time

The last time we had dinner together in a restaurant
with white tablecloths, he leaned forward

and took my two hands in his hands and said,
I’m going to die soon. I want you to know that.

And I said, I think I do know.
And he said, What surprises me is that you don’t.

And I said, I do. And he said, What?
And I said, Know that you’re going to die.

And he said, No, I mean know that you are.

Oh, and also a love letter to her brother, two things which separately and together are bound to make me verklempt. I miss them, the AIDS dead. I imagine another mentor or two, acid-tongued, politically astute, fond of my children. The other books Paul Monette would have written, Kenny Everett’s late night talk show, Freddie Mercury’s kickass performance at the Olympic opening ceremony in London, the rest of Derek Jarman’s films. Fuck.

Nothing for it but my best Zen life hack: pretend you are travelling back from the future to see that person you loved one last time.

This made me swoon:

But it is not just the sex, or remembered sex, that makes me think I love Michael Weiss from Brooklyn, now, seventeen years too late. It is the way he refused to own me, no matter how much I tried to be owned. It was the way he would not take me, he would only meet me, and that only ever halfway.

Stopping now, I promise! I only just figured out where Amazon keeps my Kindle highlights, so I worked through a little backlog there :)

Marr is Australia’s best journalist right now, as far as I can gather. He is acute on both what makes us different…

David Malouf has a wonderful theory that it’s the English we carried in our baggage that makes America and Australia such different places. In the early seventeenth century, settlers took to America a language of abstractions: “Passionately evangelical and utopian, deeply imbued with the religious fanaticism and radical violence of the time, this was the language of … dissenters … who left England to found a new society that would be free, as they saw it, of authoritarian government by Church and Crown.” Malouf argues that by the time Australia was colonised, the language had changed. What the First Fleet brought here “was the language of the English and Scottish Enlightenment: sober, unemphatic, good-humoured; a very sociable and moderate language; modern in a way that even we would recognise, and supremely rational and down to earth”.

…and what makes us boringly the same as everyone else.

Wherever the Tampa tactics lead Australia in the years to come, those of us in the City Recital Hall yesterday will remember the sight and the sound of a white, prosperous audience baying for border protection. They know it’s the winning ticket and John Howard has found it for them. He is a genius of sorts: he looks this country in the face and sees us not as we wish we were, not as one day we might be, but exactly as we are. The political assessment is ruthlessly realistic. Only the language is coy. But who has ever admitted to playing the race card?

So great, I had to go back and read the whole series in one go.

…the psychological impact of inherited wealth, the raging desire to get rid of it and the raging desire to hang on to it; the demoralizing effect of already having what almost everyone else was sacrificing their precious lives to acquire; the more or less secret superiority and the more or less secret shame of being rich, generating their characteristic disguises: the philanthropy solution, the alcoholic solution, the mask of eccentricity, the search for salvation in perfect taste; the defeated, the idle, and the frivolous, and their opponents, the standard-bearers, all living in a world that the dense glitter of alternatives made it hard for love and work to penetrate. If these values were in themselves sterile, they looked all the more ridiculous after two generations of disinheritance.

Right now I am reading Tad Friend’s Cheerful Money, which is At Last’s transatlantic twin.

You can see tragedy coming from a considerable distance when you are older, but when you are young tragedy does not pertain to you and certainly never catches up to you.

The best book I have ever read about death.

When the blowup rose out of Mann Gulch and its smoke merged with the jet stream, it looked much like an atomic explosion in Nevada on its cancerous way to Utah.

What is up the NY Times’ butt? Another breathtakingly sexist review, this one by Francine Prose:

“But Gina doesn’t seem to have a heart — or, for that matter, a conscience. Nor is she particularly intelligent…”

Compare with Hermione Lee in the Grauniad, who at least seems to have read the same book I did:

A 34-year-old married woman – sexy, energetic and independent-minded…

Or more damningly, compare with Lydia Millet’s NYT review of Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask:

Milo Burke, a deeply cynical academic development officer, earnest binger on doughnuts, avid consumer of Internet porn, and devoted father and husband…

Or even Michiko on Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story:

insecurities manifested in Lenny’s self-deprecating humor, his compulsive need to try to make others like him…

Awful male characters are complex. Awful female characters have no redeeming features. Got it?

SIGH. Anyway, I enjoyed Waltz as I did not particularly enjoy Lipsyte or Shteyngart, and I had fun being drunk and envious in suburban Dublin again. Like most Anne Enright, this reads as the lovechild of Emma Donoghue and Lionel Shriver. Mmm.

Yes, they are both meditative middle-aged memoirs by great lesbian writers. Both dramatize the writer’s complicated relationship with her mother and both name-drop Woolf and Winnicott all over the damn place. And YES YOU HAVE TO READ THEM BOTH. I don’t care. Cancel your calls.

Henry James did no good when he said that Jane Austen wrote on four inches of ivory – i.e. tiny observant minutiae. Much the same was said of Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. These things made me angry.

I love them at least in part because the NY Times gave Bechdel a shitty review that boils down to “These women! How dare they think their inner lives are interesting?” Therefore reading these books is exactly the same as jabbing a burnt stick into the eyes of the Four Boresmen of the Aborecalypse (Mailer, Bellow, Roth and Updike. Could those guys HAVE more cockish names?) And if that doesn’t make you want to read them I don’t know what will.

I was very often full of rage and despair. I was always lonely. In spite of all that I was and am in love with life.

I remember curling up in Books Upstairs in Dublin, right outside the gates of Trinity College, and reading Dykes to Watch Out For like it was going to save my life. I can’t have been in Ireland for more than a week. And I never connected with Winterson in the same way; I’ve never even seen Oranges. But this book! This book. It took me apart.

I know these are ways of surviving, but maybe a refusal, any refusal, to be broken lets in enough light and air to keep believing in the world – a dream of escape.

I don’t remember when I first read Maus. I think it was probably the year I lived in Ireland, when I went on my first big graphic novel binge, but it feels like I read it earlier than that because it has become so much a part of me. Did Marie Suchting put it in my hands? Seems like the sort of thing she would do. Bless you, Marie, wherever you are.[1]

Maus is kept in the same area of my memory where I keep Olga Horak, a docent at the Sydney Jewish Museum who told me the story of the blanket in which she was carried out of Auschwitz. Olga’s blanket is made of a mix of animal and human hair.

Olga said to me: “I survived Auschwitz. One day all the survivors will be dead, and then there will be only you: the people who have met a survivor. Now it is your responsibility to remember and to tell the truth about what happened.”

Because I stand in this once-removed relationship with WW2, I am as interested in Art’s story as I am in that of his father. You can’t be a sheltered white Westerner and read history without knowing the terrible price of your peaceful, privileged life.

And of course Adorno was right: no poetry after Auschwitz. You can’t engage with the death camps in any meaningful way and then walk away feeling hopeful about human nature, or God, or life, or anything else at all, really. Ask Primo Levi.

But you can’t despair, either. What you do is you become Schroedinger’s human, both hopeful and hopeless. Everyone is a potential genocidaire; I, too, am a potential genocidaire; therefore I must do my work and be kind to other people and raise my children well. Or as Beckett put it: I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

It’s the human condition. This is what MetaMaus is about. It is the story of the story of Art, and of art. It is the impossible poetry after Auschwitz.

[1] Oh, Marie. I’d been meaning to call. I am so sorry. I hope you knew what you meant to me. You did your work and you were kind to me and raised me well.

Imagine if you mashed up Hurry Down Sunshine with Mountains beyond Mountains and, oh, a liberal (haha) dash of Atul Gawande or Siddhartha Mukherjee. You’d get this book: a gorgeous wrenching memoir of someone who had three psychotic breaks, went to Harvard Medical School and became a pediatrician, and then had another psychotic break. It’s incandescent.

If you take good care of any disease by eating well, sleeping well, being aware of your health, consciously wanting to be well, not smoking, et cetera, you are doing all the same things you should be doing anyway, but somehow having a disease makes them easier to do. A human without a disease is like a ship without a rudder.

It’s a good enough book that you should read it for its own sake. I feel bad even bringing this up. But yes, his father is who you think he is.

When Kurt tried to sell Saabs, he usually did the test drive with the prospective customer in the passenger seat. I tried to tell him to not go around corners so fast, especially if the customers were middle-aged or older, but he thought it was the best way to explain front-wheel drive. Some of them were shaken and green. He didn’t sell a lot of cars.

“Maybe you should just let them drive,” I suggested.

I kind of hate myself for loving my Kindle so much, except that it was a Christmas present from Jeremy so that makes it okay. I spent the best bits of my childhood in second hand bookstores and am gutted to see them close. I love public libraries and the smell of binding-glue, but the fact remains that I have read two library books in the eight weeks since I got the Kindle. And thirty e-books.

Those numbers are probably skewed by the fact that I slept in Sydney, Scone, Barraba, Nana Glen, Phoenix, New York, Orlando and Los Angeles as well as my own bed over the same period. The Kindle wins hands-down when I am traveling – whether it’s having a library to dig into on a transcontinental flight, or streaming audiobooks onto the car stereo on road trips. I used to get a bad back on business trips from the combination of MacBook and library books. Now I have the Air and the Kindle and I feel light as a feather.

All other things being equal, I’d still pick the book over the e-book. Good as it is, the e-ink hurts my eyes, especially at night, and it’s just not as pleasurable to curl up with the Kindle. That said, all other things aren’t equal. When I can order a book from SFPL and get it some weeks or months in the future, albeit free, or buy it off Amazon and read it straight away, it’s quite difficult to resist the lure of instant gratification. The two library books I did wait for – Hilary McKay’s Wishing for Tomorrow and Penelope Mortimer’s About Time – I waited for because they’re not available on Kindle yet.

The selection for Kindle is actually a bit shit. I don’t think my tastes are especially nichey but there isn’t enough Australian fiction or really good history. There are surprising gaps: David Marr’s Panic is on Kindle but his Dark Victory isn’t, for example. I got the whole Casson family series _except_ the fourth of five. Huh?

The selection for Kindle isn’t as shit as the selection for audiobooks, but at least it’s possible to see the point of that: the audiobook for Sabriel, for example, features Tim Curry reading aloud for twelve hours, which has an ungainsayable scarcity value to it. (The audiobook of Sabriel is perfect, by the way, except that Curry’s voice for Sabriel herself is a little too girly. Eventually I decided that Sabriel is a transwoman, which vastly improved the whole book for me. I’ve raved elsewhere about the greatness of history on audiobook, but fiction’s pretty awesome too.) But Kindle books are digital textfiles, and I am Web-native enough to shake a fist at the sky! when told that such things cannot be provided.

Upshot anyway is that I read virtually everything on the Kindle now, love its portability and capacity, am satisfied with its readability in brightly lit playgrounds and have taught myself to borrow Kindle books from the library. Still borrow books from the library but at a much slower pace. Have filled my request queue with graphic novels, which I love anyway, so, win. Love the highlighting feature and wanna figure out how to output it to a Tumblr. Would, honestly, recommend the Kindle to any other voracious reader still hesitating. But please go spend too much money in your local independent bookstore also!

Delia Falconer’s Sydney is, I think, the best book I have ever read about my hometown, and an excellent short introduction to Why I Am So Fucked Up. Recommended!

A reread: Seven Little Australians, which has aged amazingly well. The shock for me was realizing that Yarrahappini, Esther’s home “on the edge of the Never-never,” is… just outside Gunnedah, and closer to Sydney than my parents’ place.

We swim at the pool at Haddon’s homestead. Cobalt tiles and sandstone. The children are real swimmers now; Julia can swim across the pool; Claire can swim its length. Sunlight through the water. No sound but birdsong.

Driving home, the shadows of clouds across the green hills.

At night, leaving my sister’s house: ten times as many stars.

I read 150 books in 2011. Assume that I’ll live another 30 years, and say I get through another 100 books in each of those years. That’s only 3000 more books.

Shit. I have to read the rest of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany.

I quite liked the Jennifer Egan and Allegra Goodman books, but fictionwise the discoveries of the year were Teju Cole, Sybille Bedford, Laurie Colwin and (is it really possibly I hadn’t read her before?) Lionel Shriver.

It’s a terrifying book. Austen only wrote horror stories. One is dumbfounded by the narrowness of their escape. Lizzy’s predicament is up in your face but I am acutely aware, this time, of Darcy’s. Magnificent estate schmagnificent schmestate. His chances of happiness are slimmer even than hers. Lizzy’s constant companion since earliest childhood? Jane. Darcy’s? That bastard Wickham.

Darcy was raised by wolves.

He’s so constrained. He is so alone. He is twenty-six years old and running the equivalent of a Fortune 100 company. He has hundreds of dependents. His mother and father are dead. Georgiana may turn out to be bright, and poor old Colonel Fitzwilliam is sadly underused, but Bingley and his sisters are not clever people (Caroline has rat-cunning but no real wit) and Lady Catherine de Burgh is a vicious fool.

Why does Darcy fall in love with Lizzy? Same reason anyone does. A person looks at you out of their eyes. Suddenly you are no longer the only person in the room.

Trigger warning for: Wickham

Things you notice for the first time on the umptieth read through: the chronology is so exact you could set your watch by it.

Darcy wrote his letter to Elizabeth on Friday, April 10, 1812. In it, he says:

About a year ago, she was taken from school, and an establishment formed for her in London; and last summer she went with the lady who presided over it, to Ramsgate; and thither also went Mr. Wickham, undoubtedly by design…

So Wickham’s attempted rape of Georgiana took place after April 1811 but before, say, September of that year.

Bingley took possession of Netherfield “before Michaelmas”; ie, the quarter-day on which houses were traditionally let: September 29.

This explains something that had always puzzled me: why did Bingley and Darcy come to Hertfordshire anyway? Bingley was clutching at straws, hoping a change of scene might help. Help whom? Darcy, who was blaming himself for his sister’s near-catastrophe.

Proud? Prejudiced? Sure, but Darcy’s early scenes resonate even more if you read him as clinically depressed (my diagnosis) or suffering from PTSD (per Liz.)

Pobrecito. No sooner is he finding Elizabeth’s face rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression in her dark eyes, than (on Tuesday, November 20) he runs into her in the street in Meryton – being introduced to that rapey douchebag Wickham. Fun times, fun times.