20 Essential Albums: In the Flat Field

In the Flat Field - Bauhaus

It doesn’t get darker than Bauhaus.  In the Flat Field, their first full-length, opens fast big and loud, with “Dark Entries” and lines like “Puckering up and down those avenues of sin.” The sound leaves little doubt that this is something different. Abrasive and disturbing. Expressing a life one can only hope to avoid. Yet, still, Bauhaus captures something dark inside, something that demands expression. And it comes with the benefit of shocking and offending others (especially parents).

And it gets darker with the second track “Double Dare”, with Peter Murphy entreating the listener, “I dare you / to be real.” I found this music frightening at first listen.  Wondering why someone would create something so dark, so sinister sounding.  But, in my sophomore year, I remember coming home from track practice to sit, exhausted, in my basement room, and listening to Bauhaus.  The music came over me like an hallucination, like a trance that lasted until the cassette player stopped.

Later, in my late teens and early twenties, this music began to reflect a darkness that I knew. And now, with the darkness replaced by light, the mood is occasionally just the right one for the music of Bauhaus.

Book Review: Home

Home - Marilynne Robinson

The first hundred pages of Marilynne Robinson's Home are boring. Disappointing. Having thoroughly enjoyed her novel Housekeeping, I wondered how this novel could be so dry and shallow. Glory, a grown woman, having some unmentioned embarrassment, has returned to the home of her youth to look after her aging father. These first hundred pages are filled with descriptions of life in the house now and reflections of life in the house when she was young. And then one of her brothers returns home and the story becomes deep, rich, and finally compelling.

Jack was the outcast, the one of six or seven children who set himself apart. The anxiety of his appearance is palpable. The father feels he did wrong by his son, obviously failed him in some way that led him to be so distant and to get himself into the trouble that followed him into adulthood. Glory, some years younger, had held a magical sort of notion of her older brother, believing she always had some connection to him.

Jack has also suffered some embarrassment, or many of them, including jail or prison, alcoholism, homelessness, and some sort of current entanglement with a woman with whom he hopes to reconcile. He is awkward, embarrassed by who he is, socially inept in a way that Robinson makes real. Not only do you sense his sorts of fits and starts in trying to be a good son, a good brother, someone deserving of respect and maybe forgiveness, but Glory's embarrassment for him is also strongly felt. She wishes he could get over it all and just relax, she feels bad for him, but she is also embarrassed. Maybe for the respect she has always had for him.

It turns out that Jack is concerned about his soul. With his father and his father's best friend both clergy, the novel is heavy on theology. But never to the point of turning away the heathen. Jack is looking for help, knows his scripture, but can't bring himself to believe it.

The conversations in the novel surround grace, predestination, salvation, and perdition, but at the bottom of it all is the idea of identity. Each of the novel's main characters suffer from a lack of understanding of whom they have become. They have difficulty knowing how they got from who they were to who they are. And how far off who they are is from who they they would prefer to be.

And all of this is carried with enough tension, enough action to keep the reader moving along. Enough of everything to make up for the failings of the first hundred pages.

20 Essential Albums: Rubber Soul

Rubber Soul - The Beatles

I can only assume that The Beatles’ Rubber Soul must have been played a lot when I was a child.  Hearing it sometimes I can imagine playing on what seemed then like a wide expanse of carpet.  And still, the album became important to me across many eras of my adult life.

Rubber Soul is socked full of singles, songs we know well from a variety of settings. Together, though, they form an album that is at times earnest and joking at other times. No one should believe that they could sing “Beep beep, beep beep, yeah” without a tongue in their cheeks.  Often it is the backing vocals that reveal the sarcasm in the pop songs.  The songs are so well crafted and yet they seemed to sing of a life that was still to come, at least hearing the songs as a youth.  Hearing lines like “Carve your number on my wall / and maybe you will get a call from me / if I needed someone” conjured an adulthood of entanglements and emotions that could only be imagined.  Even as an adult, it is as if The Beatles have packaged a variety of elements from your life into a perfect pop song, with the backup vocals going “Aaaahhh, ah, la la, la lala.”

20 Essential Albums: Goat

Goat - The Jesus Lizard

One the elements most essential to good alternative music is the role of the bass guitar in the music. Certainly in the music of The Jesus Lizard, the bass plays the role of the rhythm guitar.  It is what propels the songs, with the guitar sliding over the surface.  Oh, and then there’s David Yow’s singing.  Sometimes the music is about more than the “quality” of the vocals.

Goat is another album that deserves to be played loud. Put on “Nub” when you need a little motivation, or “Monkey Trick” when you need to combine a driving rhythm with the occasional scream.  Another 1991 release, Goat was an antidote to Pearl Jam.  The music coming from a place more honest and raw.  Like a open wound of some sort.

I’ve probably seen The Jesus Lizard live more times than any other band, not only because the sound translates well live but because of David Yow’s onstage antics. Sometimes abandon is exactly what is called for. Live or just loud, The Jesus Lizard makes you feel like throwing yourself against the world like a stage dive.

20 Essential Albums: Bakesale

Bakesale - Sebadoh

         
Sebadoh’s album Bubble and Scrape came to me through a borrowed cassette tape from a close friend and, though there a great songs there amidst the noise, it was Bakesale that became the important album.  It helped that Sebadoh gave up some of the pure noise that infected their previous efforts, but Bakesale showed it was okay to write sensitive indie rock.  It was 1994; maybe it was emo before emo became a thing.

         
The guitars on the album are loose, maybe a little out of tune, barely distorted. The drums often shuffle with a backbeat that would come off as funk in another setting.  And Lou Barlow’s voice is thin and plaintive. When he sings “There's nothing wrong with the need to please,” you believe him.  And there’s a song like “S. Soup”, led by the band’s Jason Lowenstein. Loud and harsh, the bass up front, the song makes you agree with the lines “Crazy people are right on / crazy people are right.”

Book Review: Falconer

Falconer - John Cheever

How much context should we bring to a novel? Should we consider the writer's other works? Should the author's biography inform the reading of a particular novel?

I would like to read a book independent of its context. While the text may have an historical context that comes from without, what we should care about is within the text. Yet, when I read John Cheever's Falconer I couldn't help but consider the author's other work. The novel is so different from what I think of as John Cheever.

The novel centers on an upper-middle-class heroin in Falconer prison for murdering his brother. Other than the upper-middle-class part, there is little in common with the characters that inhabit most of Cheever's writing. But it goes beyond the setting and the protagonist. The writing itself is loose, casual, colored with flourishes. At times it is brutal, infused with violence and obscenity, and at others it is dreamlike, fantastical.

Falconer is not a suburban novel. It is a prison novel, filled with the things that make up prison life. Shocking, naturally, but even more shocking in contrast to Cheever's other work. At the same time, it never feels like the other is trying to shock us. He doesn't show us the violence and sex in order to make us gasp about the awfulness of it or to prove that he can shock. Falconer is given to us from the point of view of a character who has, in a way, given up. He is not shocked by what comes his way. Not resigned, but not amused. He doesn't completely accept his fate, but his attempts at change are only derived from desperation. Even when he experiences strong emotion, he seems to be documenting it in order to make it true. At the novel's ending, he has gone through change and maybe we can believe that he is capable of the emotion he describes, but he is so over the top that we can help but doubt him.

In all, context or not, more like Denis Johnson than John Cheever, the novel was a good read.

20 Essential Albums: OK Computer

OK Computer - Radiohead

I’d known Radiohead from the singles off their first two albums, the second album The Bends even became a favorite, but it was 1997’s OK Computer that revealed the band’s art.  On first listen, it was “Climbing up the Walls” that got my attention.  Thom Yorke’s falsetto, the atmospherics, and then feeling like we’re waiting for storm clouds to break open. But is probably the album’s second track “Paranoid Android” that is Radiohead to me. The song has everything. Starting with acoustic guitar and a clicking rhythm and a lead guitar that finds its way in through the back of the head. And when the storm clouds open here, the listener is beaten, pushed and pulled, and finally let go again. Indeed, the song’s bridge leaves us to float in some sort of psychedelic dream.

            The album sounded like a culmination of everything that came before, all the music I’d ever liked. Indeed, it came into my life in the same sort of era. When everything felt like it was coming together, like things were making sense. A time when you can appreciate the troubles you’ve been through, even relish them somewhat, in order to appreciate the life that has come out of all of it.

Book Review: For Whom the Bell Tolls

For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway

Taking place over three days during the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls follows an American and a loose band of guerrillas as they prepare to play their part in a coming assault on the fascists. Three days is a short amount of time, especially for Hemingway. Compared to the rollicking, faster-paced novels like The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, the pacing here leads the author to divergences, wanderings that slow the pace. Three days is long enough, though, for the American to fall in love, to hear stories of brutality rivaling a Cormac McCarthy novel, and still maintain a tension that keeps us reading on.

Self-reflection takes place throughout the novel and it isn't the author's strong-suit. Hemingway attempts something that is the antithesis of what what we consider to be Hemingway. When we look at a story like "Hills Like White Elephants," we don't need the reflection to see the tension, to understand what is at stake. In the novel we have pages upon pages of the protagonist in conversation with himself. This is not to denounce self-reflection. My own writing sometimes relies more on this than the abstract unsaid. In this novel, though, it is unsuccessful.

The novel also commits a bete-noire. Some two-hundred pages in, the perspective shifts. We've spent nearly half the novel already following the American and then suddenly we slip into the perspective of a secondary character. We come back, but it happens again, this time into the perspective of a minor character in a lengthy section that takes place away from the main action. I don't know if this was a way to fill in the novel or the result of the author's boredom with the regular perspective and action. It is a pet peeve for me. I hate it in movies, too. Like in a mystery, when suddenly we see a bit of action away from the major character that tells us something that would otherwise be unknown.

There are many things for which the book has merit, but I cannot in good conscience recommend it. Not when there are better Hemingway novels to read.

20 Essential Albums: The Nymphs

The Nymphs - The Nymphs

The only album by LA’s The Nymphs appeared in 1991, at the ascendance of grunge to the mainstream, when I was spending time playing in rock band and spending my evenings living an appropriately rock-influenced lifestyle.  The Nymphs, though, weren't grunge, they were dirty glam.  The sound is of a life lived large.  A sound and a life that demands high volume.  It was music to be played out of open car windows and the way to a night out.

Singer Inger Lorre’s voice sails above guitars that slide along both rough and glossy.  The rhythms, even when playing straight ahead, lay back, everything coming down right behind the beat.  The song “Heaven” does exactly this.  The second guitar slugs along while the lead’s notes fall down, and again Lorre’s voice has to cut through.

Unfortunately, The Nymphs never went on to make another album. And this one is relatively unknown. I would take another dozen albums like this.

20 Essential Albums: Shabooh Shoobah

Shabooh Shoobah - INXS

Named after the sound of the drum beat prevelant on the album, INXS’s Shabooh Shoobah contains a couple of the staples of 80s retro. Both “The One Thing” and “Don’t Change” remain great songs, no matter how they get overplayed today (and appreciated today by people who never would have listened to INXS in the 80s). They showcase the Michael Hutchence swagger, but the album’s deeper cuts reveal the band’s creativity.

The second track of an album is often the most representative of the character of the record. Here it is the case with “To Look at You.” The strong rhythm guitars steps aside to leave space for us to get inside, the drums stagger and shuffle, and Hutchence holds back on his strong voice until the chorus. And it is like this throughout the album. It forms a unique sound that I’ve never heard anyone imitate successfully.

The drums are a lot what makes this album great, but it is the voice of Michael Hutchence (and his swagger) that made INXS one of my favorites. My long hair in the 80s had a lot to do with Mick’s hair during the 1985 Listen Like Thieves era.

20 Essential Albums: The Head on the Door

The Head on the Door - The Cure

Originating in the ‘70s and still going today, The Cure has had a long and varied career in alternative music. And no single album by the group is more representative of everything they have ever been than The Head on the Door. The pop hits are here, the darkness is here, and then there’s Robert Smith’s hair. Released in 1985, The Head on the Door came to me when I was 15 years old. It was easy to like to dance to songs like “Close to Me” and “In Between Days”, but it was the open, atmospheric melancholy of “Kyoto Song” and others that, while never really knowing what the song was about, reached inside. And then there’s “Sinking,” which perfectly captures the sort of depression that can strike someone at 15. When Robert Smith sings “I am slowing down / as the years go by / I am sinking,” over that perpetually descending bass line, you get the feeling that someone knows exactly how you feel.

This album prompted me to reach back through The Cure’s back catalog at the time, unearthing other pop treasures (Japanese Whispers) and true darkness (Pornography). Then 1986 brought the compilation Standing on the Beach and its companion b-side compilation, followed by 1987’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (a close runner-up for this list), and The Cure was solidified as one of my favorite bands.

20 Essential Albums: Introduction

There are great albums. There are influential albums. There are also albums that make us who we are. These are the albums we wouldn’t give up, that we continue to play, and that hold up over the years. These albums that, when heard in the right mood, one can recall a pivotal event or some small memory that is emblematic of the time in which it came into your life.

These are my essential albums. Or at least twenty of them. It is no easy task, to identify just the twenty albums that have made the difference. And how do I limit it to one album by artist over the whole list? Some titles on this list barely won out over rival albums by the same artist.

This is my list. From the albums listened to on weathered tape players carried around to a teenager or even albums played off vinyl by my mother when I was a child, to records discovered in my late twenties, when one stops expecting to be surprised by music anymore. Certainly there have been other albums from the last decade that are often in my rotation, but they have yet to stand the test of time.

These albums are the ones that have made all the difference to me. These are the albums that both reflect and made me who I am.

Over the next several weeks, I will post about each of them, starting with....

My Year in Reading: 2011

Since I didn't finish the book I’m reading last weekend, I have read 21 books in 2011. Not a bad count considering the pace at which I read.

Looking back over the year, I am amazed at the number of forgettable books I read. Maybe it’s because I didn’t immediately sit down and record my impression of every book, or just because the book left no impression, but there are a number books of which I cannot even remember the plot. Aimee Bender’s An Invisible Sign of My Own and Lorrie Moore’s Like Life both fall into this category. I would have expected to like and find inspiration in both, yet nothing remains. Then there are the pairs of books I read by William Faulkner (Sanctuary and Absalom Absalom!) and Cormac McCarthy (The Crossing and Cities of the Plain). I don’t doubt the quality of any of these novels, but over time the stories conflate and each pair becomes a muddle.

The books I read in 2011 are more notable for the disappointments, led in sequence and importance by Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. The book was so highly lauded, and I was already a fan of The Corrections, so how was I not to like this book? The lack of a coherent arc to the novel is really what did it in. It can be as smart, clever, incisive, clairvoyant as possible and still fall down as a book if you can’t convince me that I need to read the next page.

But Freedom wasn’t the only let down. Add to it Jennifer Egan’s The Keep (reminiscent of Stephen King, but too childish and novel for its own good), David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide (retelling the same story in different ways and with different facts isn’t exploration--it’s confusion), and Richard Yates’s Disturbing the Peace (like John Cheever at his most matter of fact and least insightful).

And then there were the surprises. Jane Eyre proved to be much better than expected. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth proved to me that a book can be a dramatically different setting and culture than my own (and even my own interests) and still be a fantastic book to read. Indignation proved that, despite the failings of Everyman and The Humbling, and other recent novels, Philip Roth still has it in him to write a great novel. And John Cheever’s Bullet Park, thought it was as dull at times as Cheever can be, showed the impact of a sudden, simple action and the well-laid phrase. It has the best final paragraph that I have ever seen.

The best books I may have read this year were two short story collections that didn’t surprise as a whole form. The Stories ofJohn Cheever and What We Talk AboutWhen We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver both revealed everything we think of as typical of each author. Some stories come out as caricature, like people trying to write the Cheever or Carver story. At the same time, there are stories in each that prove the author to be the master we expect.

Despite the masters on the list, it was an unremarkable year of reading. It does inspire a couple of new year’s resolutions. First, to find better books to read in the new year. And the second, to write down at least some thing about each book I read. It’s the least I can do.

The full list:

Freedom- Jonathan Franzen
Like Life - Lorrie Moore
Zombie - Joyce Carol Oates
White Teeth - Zadie Smith
Sanctuary - William Faulkner
Bullet Park - John Cheever
An Invisible Sign of My Own - Aimee Bender
The Keep - Jennifer Egan
The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy
Disturbing the Peace - Richard Yates
Legend of a Suicide - David Vann
Black Water - Joyce Carol Oates
Indignation - Philip Roth
Dusk - James Salter
Absalom Absalom! - William Faulkner
Disturbing the Peace - Richard Yates
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Stories - John Cheever
Cities of the Plain - Cormac McCarthy
Women With Men - Richard Ford
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver
Cold Spring Harbor - Richard Yates

The Usual Year-End Thing

I suppose the year’s end requires some sort of reflection. There can be value in looking back, but it seems like we look back for things to regret, mistakes made, things we’d like to do better in the coming year. This doesn't seem to me like a fruitful exercise.

I know that there is a long list of failures, objectives unfulfilled. But if I’ve learned anything in the last year, it is not to set my sights too high. Trying to achieve too much is bound to lead to failure. Overachiever or not, my expectations for myself need to be reasonable.

In thinking about the new year, and resolutions for it, I know that I need to de-task. I need to get some things off my to-do list. And not by getting them done. By never putting them there in the first place. Starting with the stacks of unread magazines. I will not be renewing any magazine subscriptions in 2012. Sorry New Yorker. Sorry BusinessWeek and Harvard Business Review. My backlog is enough to carry me a year or more without a new edition appearing in my mailbox.

Another objective must be to focus. At any given time I have many projects in the works. I make plans to do this little bit on this project, another little bit of another, filling my spare hours with this variety of tasks with completion expected by the end of the week. This might just be unreasonable. It just leaves me with a long list of partially finished or unfinished and neglected objectives. Pick the next important thing on the list of things to do (let’s keep calling them objectives) and see it through until it’s done. I am more productive when I’m allowed to obsess over one thing instead of multitasking.

This, though, applies to everything but writing. I have found that I work better in short bursts. If I sit down, writing a first draft, for much longer than an hour, I find I begin rushing to the next sign post, the next major event. When I work for short periods, I am allowed to keep my creativity focused on what is before me. In an extended period, I start trying to look further down the road, and rush to get there.

Without the looking back and beating myself up, I’ve managed to make some resolutions. Now to stick to them--and not beat myself up if I don’t.

I Picture

I picture a small apartment, in a hundred-year-old building, with architectural features they wouldn't bother with today. Arches and the like. One bedroom. The walls thick with paint. A smell that can’t be eliminated or replicated. And it got hollower, emptier toward the end. It wasn't just the stuff she sold. Everything, the stuff, was useless, pointless, insignificant. It was, then, just her and those walls. And the bottle.

She wasn’t working. Couldn’t. A friend, a former lover, was paying the rent now. The things she sold paid for the booze and boxes of organic rice. And then there was no point in the rice. All she needed was the bottle and a place to drink it alone.

She would have fits of energy that sent her out into the streets. At first it was invigorating, inspiring, all that life. It quickly became too much. She stumbled. The sights, the sounds, the people swam around her. Scared that she’d have to hide in an alcove, lying on the concrete until it passed, something passed, she’d make her way back to the apartment, those soft walls, her hollow home.

And then she didn’t go out anymore. She didn’t get up anymore. Her body gave up, just as she had.

I picture a sunny summer morning, the wind tossing the boat as it idles. The boat’s passengers, including the rented captain, stand with their legs apart for balance. Her mother cannot pour the ashes. She can barely see through her tears, but at least her sobbing has subsided.

The others are surprisingly sad. They think of how they thought they knew her, but they didn’t. They think about how the rest of the day would feel after starting it this way. They want to think that she is somewhere better, somewhere she can be as beautiful as she was. Somewhere she is rewarded for all of her goodness.

The former lover pours the ashes slowly and the others toss sunflowers that float, dip, and dive, in the water. They hoped that she was on to something better. They wondered why her mother was the only one here to have known her more than five years. Would it be like this for them? Where were the other lovers? Everyone else? Why was she this alone? Would they be this alone? Could they still be as beautiful, as loved as she was. As loving as she was. She was.

I picture the old lover, her proclaimed first love, a half a country away. He doesn't know. He still thinks of her fondly, thinks of her ‘out there’, living her life. He is sure that someday their paths will cross again. He thinks that there connection is strong, though they haven’t spoke in years. Her influence still remains over him. The memories of their volatile years together, vital, formative years, are still strong.

He loves another. His life is good, comfortable, complete. And when he thinks of her, he has no idea what has become of her. He has no idea that a part of him has died.

(for Lo)

The Meaning of My Library

I have never counted the books in my personal library. Indeed, the total figure grew within the last few weeks after the library's book sale. I'm nervous, though, that the number of unread outnumber the read.

Maybe this isn't all bad. If I had read them all, where would be the fun of browsing my library for the next book to read? An argument could be made for disposing of all books already read. Save those one might want to return to for reference.

A personal library, though, is so much more than a grouping of books either read or unread. The books are there to tell the observer something about the library's owner. Even if that observer is the owner. I don't get many observers down to my basement office where most of my library is confined, but I still enjoy looking over my books. The various titles, the colored spines, remind me not only of the stories within, but also of the person I was at the time. Various bits of my collection remind me of who I was an who I think I am.

Not my library. You can tell by the Ken Follett and the Janet Evanovich.

To see on my shelf Updike's The Afterlife, I remember the day of waiting for jury duty. To see Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, I'm reminded of two distinct points in my life when I read the novel. The first time makes me recall an early morning after a late night, drinking coffee downtown watching the business world start up its day.  The second time, I was well ensconced in that business world. Or McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, devoured while laying on the couch of my current home.

When visiting someone's house, I am drawn to the books on their shelves. Yes, I am judging them by what they've chosen to put on display. The books there are meant to be a representation of the owner. And if there is a disregard for which books are on the shelves for public display, that tells me something (disappointing) too.

In an article, "Shelf Life", in last week's New Yorker, James Wood explores the meaning and meaninglessness of our libraries. He sums up the sentiment thus:

Libraries are always paradoxical: they are as personal as the collector, and at the same time are an ideal statement of knowledge that is impersonal, because it is universal, abstract, and so much larger than an individual life.

The books on my shelf mean something to me not only because they represent me to myself, but because they represent me to the observer as well. And as personal as the identity that is created can be, it is in the universal that it finds meaning. But, as Wood asks,"Isn't a private library simply a universal legacy pretending to be an individual one?"

A library is a showcase and I've known more than one person who has used bookshelves to demonstrate superiority. Some would likely say I'm guilty of the same. The trashy novels are relegated to a bookshelf in the guest room.

Where, though, does this universality go when all of these titles are contained in a small piece of electronic hardware? Do I care about the representation they form? I would say they mean significantly less.

When books are commoditized, stripped of their physical presence, their abstract value is reduced. They have no presence. They are experiential only. We have the pleasure of reading and the meaning found in the words, but those e-ink letters don't represent me in the same way a book, those same words on paper and bound between covers, does. The electronic list of titles, browsed with a push of a button, does not please me, does not force recall of memories and desire, as much as does a simple glance at my shelves.

The materialism of it is something that probably gives many book owners/collectors worry. There are many books on my shelves that I will never open again. But still they are there to tell me something. They are there, though, to give me pleasure, to help me recall the stories within and the stories of my own life when I read the book. And it real is this pleasure that matters. It is this pleasure that gives my library meaning.

Book Review: Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë 

I had always lumped Jane Eyre in with the books of Jane Austen. These are important works in the canon of English-language literature, but I didn’t figure that I would find too much appealing about them. I would get to them at some point. With a free version of this book for my Kindle, I finally decided it was time.

I chose Jane Eyre primarily because of the previews I’d seen for the movie version released this year. It looked much more dramatic than I would’ve imagined. And I was impressed with the book right away. It felt very comfortable, as if I’d read these pages before. The tale of an orphan left to live with a family that treats her horribly then sends her away to a boarding school where she is also treated horribly before becoming a governess.  I could see Henry James and Anna Kavan in the set up. When, in the first section, Jane is locked up in the red room and believes she is visited by the home’s deceased master, the story takes on a bit of added depth and mystery. It also tells us that Jane is something different. She is susceptible to certain flourishes. And when she finally rails at her mistress before being sent away, we get a glimpse of the will--often irrational--that will guide her later in the novel.

The language of the novel is both difficult and beautiful. While I enjoy the opportunity to ingest syntax that is twisted, words in odd order, atypical word choice, it is difficult to know if this is the work of the age of the novel or the work of the author. I can also imagine that the language could also be a hindrance for someone attempting the novel who is without an appreciation of the particular texture of the text.

When the romance finally arrives in the novel, we are well prepared for the importance Jane places on everything. She is not one to feel an emotion only slightly. But at the novel’s most dramatic moments, she confounds. She does not act as expected. And while this provides purposeful twists, it can frustrate the reader. I found myself speaking out loud to Jane at these moments, shouting the direction she obviously needs.

The novel also suffers from--like many novels--an Act IV lag. She must go through some experiences that should prepare her for the novel’s conclusion. It is, though, a divergence from the central plot line. New characters appear, a new existence established. And all I wanted was to return to the course we were on previously.

I will not offer here any social critique. I don’t think I could properly determine what Bronte is saying about the convention of marriage, or the role of women, or even the distinction of the social classes. She is certainly examining these issues, revealing them, but I can’t say that she was looking to shatter convention or even make a real statement about these issues.

Jane Eyre is compelling in unexpected ways, and worth recommending to those whom think they wouldn’t have an interest.

An Economic Worse-Case Scenario

The other day, a man asked me where I thought the economy was heading. I'd made the mistake of mentioning that I work in finance (it's easier than launching into the long list of what I really do). This man, this stranger, began speaking to me as I sat on one of my writing mornings, despite the earbuds in my ears, the moving pen. He said he was surprised to see someone writing by hand in a journal. "A diary", he called it. So, this bit of small talk led suddenly to the economy. My answer for him? I told him I'm more frightened now than I was six months ago.

I can easily envision a future where things get worse for most Americans, where wealth is harder to attain for most people. Jobs don't come back. At least until workers are so desperate for income that they're willing to accept pay at nearly the same depressed levels as Mexico or Vietnam. Prices for staples continue to rise, squeezing out spending for discretionary items. Government slashes so-called entitlement programs, all sorts of public assistance. State and local governments are in trouble. Basic services disappear. I can envision towns that can't fix roads, that can't ensure public safety. Lawlessness and decay. The middle class disappears, with some ascending to the rich classes and the others falling behind. The housing situation only gets worse. The suburbs drain of life. I can see things getting difficult. (There's a story somewhere in this worse-case scenario.)

The reason for his scenario is politics. All of this nonsensical grandstanding. No one has the will to take a position unless it is opposition to the other side. Real work needs to be done. But any attempt to speed up a flagging recovery has devolved into a fight over the deficit and the debt ceiling. This argument has only made things worse. Everything things that they benefit from holding some righteous position, forgetting that the real work of politics is the crafting of compromise. If we wanted the most radical to govern we would let everything be decided by popular vote.

This man put the whole stalled recovery down to the Administration's energy policy. He was in energy. While he might benefit, it's not like opening up development--drilling--would lower fuel prices or make companies feel like spending money or hiring. And it isn't likely to make the consumer feel like suddenly spending money. He went on to use the words "environmentalists" and "socialism." It was time for me to leave.

The truth is that I'm frightened. I feel like squirrelling away every penny. I don't know that things are likely to turn negative again, but I think that it's more likely today. And in my mind I'm picturing dusty streets, dead grass and hollow, empty buildings.

Keeping the Pen on the Paper

Sometimes the writing comes easily. Most of the time, in fact. With the pen in my hand, the facts and details seem to come right out of the ink. Not always the right word, but that's a discussion for another time. And then there are times when you need a particular scene, to serve a particular purpose.

Right now, I need a fight scene between my protagonists. This is late in the novel and so far we've seen how they are disconnected from each other, off in their individual struggles. But we haven't seen them really clash, not in a significant way. I need to show that they may be close to the end of their marriage than they believed when the novel began.

What, then, do they argue about? What would be so severe that it might show that maybe they shouldn't really be together? I don't want to go so far as to justify their later actions with this blow out. But it can't just be an argument about the house or money. It needs to demonstrate that Darren doubts Nicole's integrity.

I would like it to center around their son, Hunter. They both spend a surprising amount of time not thinking about the boy through the course of this thing. I'd like to show that they do take his upbringing seriously. And somehow I need to get around to the notion of his doubt of her.

Here, though, I should have faith in the writing. Over-thinking, over-planning, can debilitate. A vague notion of where I'm going and a vague objective should be all I need. Put the pen to the paper and see where it goes.

Writing a Philosophical Novel

I hadn't realized until this week that I am writing a philosophical novel. I thought of it as contemplative, meditative, psychological. A wandering quest novel. But, more than any of these, I believe now it is philosophical. Without a doubt, morality is at the center of the novel. Darren and Nicole are both having existential crises, but the book's root is in the question of morals.

Darren believes he has always had a strong moral sense. Some of this may be his nature, but in his adult life it comes out of his father's actions. Of course, one doesn't have morality without responsibility and guilt. Indeed, this is a key question. How does one live with a subjective morality without the guilt? He doesn't understand how his friend can commit what he sees as an immoral act with its accompanying guilt. The lines blur for Darren. What is wrong becomes more subjective. His experiment in the end is to see if he can live with the guilt of his actions. If guilt is part of the immoral act. He is held frozen by the prospect of the freedoms provided when guilt is absent. If he can commit the immoral act, the faithless act, without being held captive by his own guilt, then his future opens up. His morality, his sense of responsibility has locked him into his course in life. One should question if he can return, not only to his wife, but to his work as well. His work in law, in the area of contracts in particular, is rooted in his sense of moral justice. With that center gone, his work will lack meaning.

There is also the question of religion in the novel. Its blows within the text are glancing (and more of a concern for Nicole than Darren), but one cannot discuss morality without at least the undiscussed notion of Christianity. That Darren and Nicole are not religious, are lacking faith, opens them up to the moral questioning we witness. Not that faith, by itself, would wipe away their doubts about the righteousness in morality. But maybe some of Nicole's despair is 'the sickness unto death'.

Nihilism, I think, is also at play in the novel. Darren encounters people along the way who reject the standards by which we live, judge. He sees this as narcissism. An excuse to live by one's independent standards in rejection of one's inherent moral responsibility to others. This moral order is also part of his foundation, and in the end this might be more of a determining factor for him than any sort of inherent right or wrong.

I don't know that I can see Nicole's struggles in the same terms. She lost her notion of morality in her youth. Her feelings toward Darren are not guided by morals. She does not wonder whether her actions are right or wrong. Things for Nicole are more personal, less abstract. More existential and metaphysical. She does have trouble in her perception of the world. She seems to know that she sees the world differently, experiences the world differently. She feels its imposition. This part of what separates her from those around her. This difference.

But her real problem is the sort of void she feels within. There is a hole that, in her twenties, she seeks to fill with drugs and sex, experience. Later she chooses marriage and child-rearing to fill the void. And we come across her she is again realizing her dissatisfaction. Her thinking of life alone is not the end. It is not what she's after. Its a sort of displacement. A way of trying to fill the void with fantasy, another life. The internet itself is part of this alternate existence. It has not taken over her real life. Her cleaning is a way to constantly order her life, seeking to control and contain it. As much as possible. But life is an imposition. The outside world, the suburban city blocks, even the houses and lawns of the neighborhood, are part of an externally imposed order. What philosophical school of thought all of this falls under, I'm not sure.

Of course, some of my favorite novels are philosophical novels. I didn't set out to write one, though. And I certainly don't think I'm trying to forward some sort of treatise. The realization, though, has given me another way to look at what is happening within the pages of text.