Inappropriate Content

Books, Books, Books

I don't know who Julia Ruben is, but I don't like her. Her name, scratched out, is on the title page of my copy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's' One Hundred Years of Solitude——a cheap paperback I got from the professor-turned-librarian at the one room library in Fleischmanns, NY, in exchange for that weeks issue of The Nation, which in turn was purchased in Philly for the long bus ride up, during which there was a layover in New York City's Port Authority bus terminal, where I ate my first New York street vendor hot dog, a rite of passage for those of us whose only knowledge of the city on the Hudson comes from Woody Allen movies and Law & Order. (The former better than the latter, but new installments of both arriving with the same clockwork regularity.) I have since discovered that the real way to lay claim to New York is to go to Central Park early in the morning and drink coffee, eat an orange, cup of yogurt, and read that days New York Times at a leisurely pace.

I have also developed the aforementioned grudge against Ms. Julia Ruben. In addition to her name on the title page, she has gone over Marquez's text (or, to be perfectly accurate, Gregory Rabassa's translation thereof) and circled, underlined or highlighted various sentences, seeming at random. One some pages, the margins are interrupted by incomprehensible scribbles. ("blue shirt"--whose? Certainly no one in the novel wears one.) Meanwhile, Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is highlight-free and mediocre at best. Well, not that bad, really; but it is about perhaps the most dramatized period in American literature and film and New York is certainly the most dramatized city; and it's a thinly-disguised auto-biography to boot. Solitude, by contrast, is endlessly inventive and rather far from the familiar Latin world of Graham Greene and movies staring Gael Garcia Bernal (I wonder if he was named for Marquez).

So I have obviously been doing a lot of reading. Having actually read Burroughs and Kerouac, I find they're not my favorite authors. Must read Ginsburg, but am afraid I will become disillusioned with the Beats entirely. Or is Vonennegut one? (Here I have deleted the rest of a substantial reading list. For a country with no Great Novel, the number of Great American Novelists I haven't read is staggeringly long. Instead of College Educated, I shall become Well Read. Both are useless distinctions anyway.)

I will never read a Bad Novel again. I made this vow on page ten of Richard Preston's The Cobra Event. It is now clear to me that if you have read one novel about a genetically engineered virus being unleashed by terrorists, you have read them all, and it's a subject better addressed by Star Trek at that.

Flipping through Cobra Event, some unintended humor:

It looked no different to Hopkins than any other string of genetic code. The human mind can't read the text of life as easily as it can read Shakespeare.

Shakespeare is meant to be performed, and those who claim to read him "easily" are usually missing the point. But flipping to the back of his book, I discover that Richard Preston is a contributor to The New Yorker. I should, as they say, have known.

So the novels of this century——Capote to Vidal——have squeezed out my Blogging time, which George Pacher has pointed out is worthless anyway. And it's just been too depressing recently. Apparently Bush has some schysters come up with a legal case excusing torture. At least Nixon only broke people's stuff, not their kneecaps! No more of this poison, not now: back to books.

My roomie is taking a high school level American Literature course. Test question #163:

The subject of Whitman's poems was:
a)modern technology
b)every aspect of life
c)transcendentalism
d)love

I grab my copy of Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers, which has several excerpts from Leaves of Grass, and read from "I Sing the Body Electric." Then I inform anyone in the general vicinity that "'every aspect of life' is High School English code for "queers and prostitutes.'"

It is very important to remember that Whitman was also a poet of:
a)rural New England life
b)the self
c)order and reason
d)great intellect"

My first reaction is panic——all those high school freshman, America's Youth, under the impression that oneself, reason and intellect are mutually exclusive. A sudden, urgent longing to live in a shack in Montanta, write a manifesto, mail-bomb Mailer. But then I relax. As no one has explained to America's Youth why it is "very important" to remember anything at all about Whitman, they won't, and thus their education will leave few lasting disabilities. The right conclusion for the wrong reasons: a peculiarly American talent, and something, I suspect, that Ms. Julia Rubin would be quite good at.