Stuff and books and such

Well, dear livejournal, I have certainly been all over the map. I am back home, though, grateful to rest after all of my peregrinations. Although "rest" doesn't really describe the "million of unpaired silkworms" which is a quaint expression my parents use to describe periods in life when you have too much to do. I am finishing up the syllabi for the MA courses I am designing today, and yesterday I wrote the "fieldwork guide" for the same program. My manuscript revisions are due at the end of September.

But I am taking a break and want to write about a few books I read this summer--I am not doing an lj-cut because if there are any spoilers, they are very minor--more like references to plot points, without really giving much away. No more, I think, than regular book reviews one would read.

I read two books that are strangely, hauntingly intertextual--Jennifer Egan's newest "A Visit from the Goon Squad" and Gary Shteyngart's third novel "Super Sad True Love Story" (the latter made me cry a lot on the train between Paris and Maastricht). First of all, I want to say that I was apprehensive about Jennifer Egan's new work, since I am/was a huge fan of her, and then "The Keep" totally sucked, but The Goon Squad is really really good, it is still her typical themes, but it is really innovative. I still think my favorite one of hers is "Look at Me"--it was just so formative for me, and so helpful in coming to understand my own anxious mind (although it feels a little dated now--but it is not her fault--it's just anxiety can be very zeitgeist-specific...it feels dated the way "White Noise" is kind of dated now, you know?), and I still love "The Invisible Circus" although it her least sophisticated book. But yes, The Good Squad is disjointed in a way that is challenging to read, but ultimately works, largely because of the ending.

Super Sad True Love Story is in fact super sad, although I wonder if I find it especially sad as a child of immigrant parents/first generation immigrant myself. Shteyngard gets SO MUCH of the irreversible psychological configurations around that right--immigration is this zodiac sign that marked Lenny and Eunice, the protagonists, so profoundly, even though the book is about time and mortality. Just like The Good Squad. I mean, has anyone else read both of those yet? Aren't they, like, part of the emerging body of literature about what it is like to be alive and mortal RIGHT NOW?

Even though the narratives and genres of the two of them diverge, it is like they exist in the same symbolic universe, although they come by their distilled dreamlike images in different ways. The Goon Squad has this backwards-turned nostalgic kaleidoscope lens, that made me think of that "carousel" speech Don Draper gave in the season 1 finale of Mad Men. Things happen in the past tense, and sometime in the future tense, but it is all like a landscape of some dream of a collective unconscious, in locations that seem unstable once processed through the narrative or the characters' memory. The Lower East Side kitchen with a bathtub that Sasha, the owner of the apartment, imagines the one-night-stand she brings home trying to remember many years in the future, as a part of an undifferentiated "early years in New York" bricolage--and, in fact, he does. The drug-fueled swim in the East River, its consequences, and the liminal last house before the New Mexico desert starts that it results in, years down the road. The man who brings the giant fish caught in the East River to the powerful music executive's office. The safari, where the young anthropology student is re-inventing structuralism in an emotional landscape.

And then in "Love Story" maybe the dream images isn't what comes to mind first because it is more clearly a sci-fi/dystopia genre piece, what with the three-umlauted äppäräts--but all the exteriors seem strangely thin when mediated through Lenny's introspective anxiety, like his Rome, strewn together of peripheral interactions and half-glimpsed images in rooms and room corners, and later, when everything goes to shit in New York, much of it seems like a postapocalyptic dream.

Oh, I also read "Mockingjay"--the last book in "The Hunger Games" trilogy. I tore through it in a day and it was quite satisfying. I especially liked the pensive, reflexive, emotionally subdued tone of the coda. I mean, it makes sense that basically everyone in those series would end up with PTSD, even though that's not the vocabulary of that universe.

Random Fionn Moment

When we were on the train to Berlin a few weeks ago, a child seated in the seat ahead of us started eating a giant lollipop. Fionn immediately said: "I smell something! I smell something sweet!" I was like, oh no, because then he would want a lollipop, and I don't have one, and we don't give him lollipops in general, but as right at that moment we were passing a river, he asked "mama, is that sweet smell the river?" I saw a way out, and was, like, "yes!" BUT I was short-sighted, because fifteen and twenty minutes later, as the river was left far behind, Fionn kept saying "I still smell the river! I can still smell the river, mama!" And then I had to confess to him that it wasn't actually the river, it was another child's candy.