Aventurina King

I am reading a French book about Marilyn Monroe.  I haven’t finished it yet, so I cannot make any all-encompassing statement about the curve of its plot or the measure of its depth.  I like the book.  But up until today, 200 pages in, I couldn’t quite pinpoint why I liked the book.  I couldn’t even begin to describe it.  Reading it had been a completely passive experience, one in which I relinquished all intellectual control and was breathlessly dragged along the marble road of polished sentences without looking back.

 But a few days ago, in a conversation with my roommate, my reading experience congealed into sentences.  It is a historical novel.  You don’t know what’s true, what’s not.  Although the feeling of Marilyn’s presence that coats the open pages is so visceral that I can’t help but believe every sentence.  I already feel like I know Marilyn.  I couldn’t describe her face, nor what she likes to eat, nor even which jokes make her laugh.  I feel like I know her in a different way.  That knowledge is much like the memory of a delightful film you have seen five years ago.  You know it’s good, but you couldn’t begin to describe the plot.  The stenciled outline is erased, what remains is the raw, dense sensation of the core.

 How does the book achieve this? The chapters are short.  As in a puntilistic painting, form or rather meaning is achieved in the assembly of disparate events, thoughts, quotes and encounters.  In one chapter, Marilyn spends two weeks in a sanitarium.  In another, she is discussing anal sex with her last analyst, doctor Greenson.  Ignorant of time, yet loyal to its title, each chapter explores an issue discussed in Marilyn’s last few years of analysis.  The novel’s organization reflects the erratic digging of these sessions.

  Some of my favorite passages (i love the way the author, Michel Schneider, ends her chapters.  Not the incisiveness of the punch line, something more subtle, yet more poignant, like an unexpected caress):

 ”Upon her return home, in the evening, Marilyn thought about the calm and gentle man who had examined her with a certain coldness.  His eyes masked, under their challenge, a fatal gentleness.  When, laying down on the sofa, she had asked him whether she was going to do a real analysis with him, like with the Dr Kris, he had answered that they shouldn’t.  “One must be modest.  We are not aiming for deep changes, since you are soon going to go back to New York, to find your husband and pick up your analysis over there.”  The word modest had hurt her.  She had cried.  The analyst answered that it wasn’t a reproach that he making to her, but a goal that he was fixing for himself.  It’s still strange, thought Marilyn, strange that he didn’t propose that I lie down.  It always amazes me when a man doesn’t want to see me horizontal.  To see my ass when I’m turning my back on him.  A glass in hand, looking at the white of the wall and the black of the fabric that covered her bungalow, she continued to remember the session.  The Dr. Greenson doesn’t have any after thoughts I think.  It’s good that he didn’t propose I should lie down.  Maybe he was afraid. Of me? Of him? It’s better like this.  Me, I was scared.  Not of him.  It wasn’t a sexual fear.  “Let’s Make Love” it’s not only the title of the film.  With Yves, I took this title literally.  With the doctor, it won’t be about love.  In fact, she didn’t like people asking her to lie down, she was afraid of the night, afraid of beginning it, afraid that it wouldn’t end.  She often made love, standing up, during the day. ”

The last time that happened was in China.  I had over-immersed myself in Chinese literature and my blogs’ English was compromised by a small army of grammatical mistakes.  At the time, I was painstakingly pushing through To Live, courtesy of the author Yu Hua, and Huang Jin Shidai, by Wang Xiaobo.  Both of these men hold quarters in the pantheon of recognized, studied and revered Chinese authors.  Their works are ornamentations and distortions (to a limited degree) of communist propaganda stories: they generally involve hopelessly naive country bumpkins who satisfy their sexual cravings in explicit and humorous ways (by squatting in the local women’s bathroom for example.) 

At first, I had enjoyed these novels.  They were like toys shelved up high which you can barely touch with the tip of your index finger.  They were beyond the grasp of my Mandarin reading skills, but even I could make out that the writing was humorously simplistic and that it was trying to reach out to existential questions through childishness.  A few months down the road I began to view this simplicity as pretentious and was repelled by it.

Therefore, when I came back to the States, I naturally turned my attention towards the opposite: novels in which baroque sentences, weighted down by idioms and acrobatic literary allusions, bloomed as fervently as ornamentations on a Moroccan rug.  Well, this wasn’t the reason why I started reading books by Guo Jingming, the 20-some year old prophet of China’s youth.  It was because they were sentimental, like goo-ed down chic-lit, but then again, they were in Mandarin, and language practice was enough to justify this new guilty pleasure.  

An exemplary passage which surprised me, not by its eloquence, but by the fact that it made me cry:

“Xiaosi [the aloof talented high-school Romeo, but he doesn't know it himself] once told me [me being the socially awkward apple polisher Juliette] a story about angels.  I forgot the story’s details, but I can vaguely remember its outline: everyone has a guardian angel who looks over him or her.  If this guardian angel feels that your life is too miserable, that your heart is weighed down by an excess of sorrow, it will come down to earth and take on the form of a person near to you.  It could be your friend, it could be your lover, your parents, or the stranger you crossed paths with briefly.  These people appear silently by your side, and accompany you in your happiest moments.  And then, they disappear, as silently as they came.  But they leave happy memories.  Maybe in the future, you will come across endless hardships, but at least, you have those memories to warm your heart and give you courage.  So, all these people that leave us silently, they are all guardian angels, returning to the kingdom of heaven.”

I was surprised to find myself laughing along with everybody else yesterday night at the Happy Ending Music and Story Series.  It wasn’t because I expected the gigs to be bad, but because this was the first time I attended those more artsy and articulate shows in downtown New York called “readings”.

It was rather low key, except for a husky doorman at the entrance.  The ceiling lights were red bleaching into purple, there were red velvet benches spreading into the wall and small stub-like purple leather seats.  An atmospheric gradient of darkness made it difficult to make out the figures at the back.  There was no smoking aloud, and despite the lights and the number of people, the air currents sent chilly spells down my back.

I was inappropriately seated on the floor listening to the first three songs like a child in Kindergarten.  The singer and guitarist was Katell Keineg.  She played and sang at the same time.  Her voice was throaty, but controlled, a bit on the airy side when it soared into the clouds.  She strummed her guitar as if there was nothing else.  I would say conventionally, she wasn’t extremely talented, but I liked it.  It felt human, and listening to her music, and the perfectly articulated Irish?-accented curvature of her words, I felt it must have been cool to be her.  To squeeze five syllables in the last blossom of your breath, and make a refrain out of one name.

Amanda Stern (the eternal curator and host of these evenings) ushered her out and ushered in the readers with circus announcements that they were all in love with Amanda Stern, and that she had caught rabies from making out with the microphone.

Three readers: Scott Snyder, Deb Olin Unferth, Adam Haslett.

After coming out of the show, I still felt it was possible for me to become a professional writer. But I know I was fooled.  The first two readings were funny and deceitfully simplistic, meaning they were minutely and expertly wired.  And the third, performed by a nervous Pulitzer prize finalist would have blown me away if I had only read it myself. 
I noted with a professional nod how the first reading uncovered the psychological layers of the narrator in just a few fleeting comments. 

Example (paraphrased): “I spent my summers looking at a farm of fat kids near by, and with my high technology binoculars and high-perched position, I could see the flab on their bodies….(a long description of the fat kids sweating off their fat.”  There’s something wrong with someone buying binoculars and building a tree house to look at children trying to shake off their obesity; weirder though is the matter of fact-ness, the facility with which the narrator switches his focus off of himself and onto these children.  Clever marketing, now I actually want to buy his short story collection and read it.

(What’s with the design?  I downloaded a new set of paintbrushes for Adobe Photoshop and attempted to recreate Happy Ending Picasso style.  Discuss!)
 

As much as I miss Columbia University with its tanning lawns, drunken fraternity party lineup and early-bird competitions at the library; I can say with relief that I have regained the one precious thing undergraduate education had stolen from me: my love of reading.

When reading is cauterized by pedantic academic articles, even leisurely reading, by association, becomes boring. The cure (that worked miracles in my case): a 10 to 6 white collar job and a couch of my own. The white collar job creates a starvation for entertainment, and the 8 hours of computer screen eye strain cross out TV from the list of possible options. The couch offers a comfortable bouncing point from which the mind can drift off into other spheres.

I have been seeking refuge from my first steady job opportunity in works of French writers Houellebecq, Philippe Delerm and English language magicians Tony Morrison and Ian McEwan (a parentheses devoted to Wilkie Collins: a pioneer well confined within the boundaries of time-snobbing; yet, I must confess, boring classics of literature).

I read the last three books of Michel Houellebecq in disorder: Platforme, La possibilite d’une ile and Les Particules Elementaires. Prior to this endeavor, the general opinion floating among my french connaissances etait “Houellebecq, mais c’est toujours la meme chose”, a quoi je réponds, oui et non.

Oui, Houellebecq, c’est toujours des paragraphes un peu trop analytiques au sein desquelles se dispersent des debris d’action et des descriptions minutieuses de scenes pornographiques, en faite, c’est un peu comme ces magazines allemands qui offrent l’actualite du football flanque par des photos de femmes nues. (English translation of my impulsive gallop into French: French connaissances is “Houillebecq’s novels are all the same thing”, to which I answer yes and no. Yes, Houellebecq’s work is always composed of over analytical paragraphs within which plot debris and minute descriptions of pornographic scenes are dispersed. In fact, Houellebecq’s novels are comparable to those German magazines which offer football news flanked by pictures of naked women.)

The theme of those over-intelligent paragraphs is invariably old-age from every point of view as long as it’s negative: _how the concept of old-age has evolved from kotow-imposing wisdom to walled-in deformity. _how old-age’s rot spreads into every crevass of your life and makes it gradually more and more unbearable.

Old-age lurks under the surface of his pornographic paragraphs as well: _how old-age makes a woman’s breasts and genetalia sag. _how-old age makes erection less and less instantaneous for men, especially when they are faced with aging wives.

I can enjoy reading Houellebecq, as long as I keep the reality of my biological clock at bay of my thoughts. He covers his expert mastery and juggling of science, sociology, history and biology with a sadistic, humoristic gauze. This perversly enjoyable and informative writing style is another constant within his novels.

Non. What has changed within the span of my reading is the novels’ surface… (to be continued)

Only two hours after I began turning the pages of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking did I finally manage to tear my nose from its print and wonder why it had absorbed me so completely.  Unlike a detective story, it has no trail of clues that shimmer with the promise of an answer.  Nor does it possess the cold hot shower of serenity and terror that tugs forward crime stories.  Instead, Didion bullets the main event, her husband and companion writer John Dunne’s December 30^th 2004 fatal heart attack, in a small section of her first chapter.  There is no mystery or suspense involved.  Just as her daughter Quintanna’s hospitalization from December 25^th 2004 on, appears and disappears throughout in factual whiffs. The major part of the work interweaves Didion’s thoughts and actions over 2005, with her analysis of them. 

What turns those pages then?  Is it the catharsis that addicts Greek tragedy-goers?  Or is it the fascination of abomination that turns the heads of drivers when they pass a road-accident and sends them crashing into the car in front of them?  No, Didion does not dwell on the events that changed her life.  Never does she dive into an adjective and detail-heavy account of nervous break downs or unstoppable tear ducts.

Her grief cannot be measured in our everyday emotions: “grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it […] we might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return”.  Her writing does not fold in about herself.  Instead she places herself in a crowd of widows; in the statistics of science and literature.  Her citations of media and of such scientists as Freud and Emily Klein comfortingly re-evaluate her actions and thoughts of 2005 as various symptoms of grief.

After her husband’s death, she refuses to throw out his shoes in case he might come back.  It is the magical thinking of the title.  It is also the denial of death which she likens to that of a deceased nineteen-year-old’s mother on an HBO documentary.   She slices the flow of her year’s meager accomplishments and bitter-sweet flashbacks with italicized reminders that they are mere manifestations of grief.  “I tell you that I shall not live two days ” harkens back to a literary passage which exemplifies how the dying sense their death beforehand.  The italicized sentence intrudes when she remembers her husband insisted on going to
Paris just before that fatal New Year’s Eve.

Didion leaves the Goethe-like pouring of emotions to frequent citations of such poets as Auden, Matthew Arnold, and Gerard Manley Hopkins—“I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.”  It is as though she deems herself less-worthy of a writer to struggle with the indescribable experience of death.

But Didion’s writing is superb and quasi single-handedly abracadabras her work into a page-turner.   She captivates by foiling sharp, poignant sentences describing events—“John was talking, then he wasn’t”—with the mellifluous poetry of her flashbacks—”It was an effect of light: quick sunlight dappling, yellow leaves falling […], a shower of gold, spangled, very fast, a falling of the bright.”  

These poetic descriptions of an irretrievable past often move to tears.  But that is not the purpose of The Year of Magical Thinking, nor does it raise Joan Didion as a heroic model for stoicism and good-dealing with grief.  Instead, the work heightens the present’s worth and the urgency of embracing it fully.   Tragedy destroys, but even grief does not erase the beauty of memories.  Didion has proved this in her masterpiece.

Two things induced me to read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.  The first is a fact:  The Da Vinci Code has remained on the bestseller lists since its publication in March 2003.  As further confirmation, over the past two years, the familiar crimson cover has appeared persistently around me–hiding the face of a Columbia security guard, on a tea table in a nursing home in Miami, above a punk’s spiky wrist in the London tube.

The second is my circle’s reaction to The Da Vinci Code: “That was the worst book I ever read!” “Dan Brown must have a vocabulary of like, 200 words maximum.”  This intrigued me. How bad of a book can acquire so large a readership that it practically becomes a canon in the thriller category?  My spring break gave me the chance to find out.

The prologue of The Da Vinci Code plunges us into the midst of murder.  (What better way is there to yank the reader’s attention than with technical descriptions of blood and pain?)  The man being murdered is Jacques Sauniere, “renowned curator” of the Louvre Museum.  His thoughts (italicized streaks in the fabric of macabre prose) reveal he is the sole possessor of the truth.  His death means the truth will be lost forever.

The murderer shoots the curator in the stomach, enabling him to survive for 15 minutes while “his stomach acids seep into his chest cavity slowly poisoning him from within”.  Sauniere uses these last moments to write a coded message to his grand daughter Sophie, a cryptologist, clueing her in on the truth and telling her to find Robert Langdon.

Back in the Paris Ritz hotel, at 12:32 am, Robert Langdon, “renowned” professor in symbology at Harvard university is awakened and escorted to the murder scene by the French police.  The bull-like police chief, Bezuch Fache, believes that Sauniere’s coded message incriminates Langdon.  Sauniere’s granddaughter arrives on the scene to orchestrate her own and Langdon’s escape from the museum and the police.  For the rest of the 500 pages (the equivalent of three days and nights in the fiction), the outlawed cryptologist and symbologist scurry across Paris and England from clue to clue towards the truth.

The French police, Britain’s Scotland yard and Interpol are not alone pursuing the couple.  The murderer, almost immediately identified as an albino servant of the devout catholic sect Opus Dei, also wants the truth.

What is the truth?  Eventually, this question is answered, but not before The Da Vinci Code dangles the answer like a donkey’s carrot, just out of the reader’s reach, for the first half of the novel.

And the trick works.  The reader follows the carrot; irresistibly flips through the pages.  Moreover, as the pages turn, more carrots appear, more teasing unanswered questions—what did Sophie see her grandfather do that fatal night that was so scandalous? How does Opus Dei plan to acquire infinite power?  What does Leonardo Da Vinci have to do with all this?  Fortunately, all these carrots lead in the same direction.  They are distributed individually at about 100 page intervals and each of the answers drives the reader closer to the end of treasure hunt.

It is a pity these carrots, these answers constitute the only driving force of The Da Vinci Code.  The characters are lifeless, dully simple.  Langdon mostly acts as he would at Harvard, he lectures.  His monologues on feminine symbols, the life of Leonardo DaVinci, the Holy Grail run on uninterrupted.  Sophie (unlike the Harvard undergraduates who make off-color jokes during Langdon’s classes) listens in admiring silence.  Aside from that she muses on her grandfather’s life and cries over his death. 

The prose is trite and flowery.  The spooky settings are almost always badly lit and include walls “evaporating into darkness”.  Their description is complemented by irrelevant paragraphs taken out of touristic guides.  In the middle of Langdon and Sophie’s breathless escape from the Louvre, we learn that the Mona Lisa is “a mere thirty-one inches by twenty-one inches—smaller even than the posters of her sold in the Louvre”.

The suspense and curiosity aroused by unanswered questions is all that keeps the reader going.  Even then, it is a precarious process.  Like jam spread too thin, the answers are scattered so parsimoniously throughout the work that the reader almost tires of being led on and starts to gives up on finding the answer.  But just when the paperback is about to be shut and tossed, it drops one of its secrets and sparks the hope of finding other answers.

The suspense creating mechanism of the novel is painfully bare to see.  The three plots—Langdon and Sophie’s quest, the police’s pursuit, Opus Dei’s advance—are interwoven so as to cut each other off strategically.  Just when an answer is about to be revealed, that is.  This is becomes a leightmotif and almost all of the chapters end in an anticlimax, a teasing sentence: “Well lieutenant, the agent said, walking to the computer and launching a piece of software.  It’s the strangest thing …” “he whispered. “this cryptex, I think I know what it is…”.

It works, keeps the reader reading.  The Da Vinci Code is a functional thriller, it fulfills the single requirement of a page-turner.  But it is like a functional clock.  The beauty of its miraculous functioning is tainted when its back pops open and reveals its internal machinery. 

    The preparation behind a president’s canned debates and over-rehearsed speeches is no secret. What may be less apparent, though, is the extent of this preparation. Evan Cornog’s Power and the Story, a slightly tedious yet enlightening essay, reveals how finely a president molds each of his actions to fit a personal story, true or not, that will earn him public support. Thus “rather than clinging to categorical and implausible denials of past misdeeds involving alcohol, and possibly cocaine, Bush and his aides crafted a narrative of suffering and redemption” writes Cornog.

    And Bush is not alone. All past presidents, even before their campaigns, have chosen roles to play, most often from a pool of military heroes, businessmen, and politicians. These characters must relate to the nation’s problems.  In a 1992 presidential debate, Clinton connected emotionally with the African American audience by demonstrating that “he, too knew the face of suffering.” All of the president’s actions must match the crafted story. Bush regularly returns to his Texan ranch to “maintain the image of the new president as a Washington outsider.”

    Cornog follows each step of a candidate’s experience, from the beginning of the campaign to the last day of the mandate (and even beyond).  At every moment of the process, he describes what is expected of the candidate, then compares and analyzes candidate’s actions and their effecgts. He details the standard behavior of the politicians after receiving the election results “both sides try to appear above partisanship, with the defeated man urging the nation to support its elected leader and the president-elect promising an inclusive administration. ” To exemplify successful and failed inaugurations, he contrasts Washington’s jubilant welcome to the capital with President Clinton’s bus travel to DC line with opponents brandishing defamatory signs. 

    Cornog supports every one of his claims concerning the relationship between power and stories with historical evidence. Most of the time, the number of examples greatly exceeds the need of the point.

    This, paired with the repetitive claim-example construction, can be tedious. Yet this excess testifies to the researcher’s rigor.

    Moreover, Cornog spices things up by digging into a diverse pool of primary sources—comic strips, advertisements, movies—to add to the biographical examples.

    Cornog’s analysis of various mandates is enlightening, partly because it’s unclouded by partisanship. Cornog only judges a president on how well he tells his stories. The last chapter features a refreshing view of the Bush mandate.  Cornog skips redundant comments on the president’s speech impediment to criticize the narratives of victory and terror with which he reacted to 9/11.

    Cornog does not deny the value of stories. By simplifying situations, they enable decision-making. Instead, he warns against oversimplified, irrelevant, and untrue stories which can cloud an individual’s judgement. The Power and the Story provides a refreshing and critical lens through which to understand today’s politics.