He Doesn't Look A Thing Like Wednesday

[evelyn_b]

What I've Finished Reading

I was so hyped to find Generation X by Douglas Coupland on the free books shelf at the local furniture resale store, and I also felt strangely hyped to be reading it the entire time I was reading it, though I didn't think it was very good. About fifty pages in, I said, "I'm so glad Douglas Coupland had the balls to publish his notes for a novel and just call it a novel." Would that we all had such beautiful confidence.

Dag, Claire, and Andy are downwardly mobile friends in their late 20s, who live in a bungalow, feel smothered by and detached from American culture, and tell lots of stories to pass the time. The structure is a little reminiscent of The Decameron, only in this case the apocalypse is just capitalism. Chapter titles include "Our Parents Had More," "Shopping is Not Creating," and "Dead at 30 Buried At 70." It's about a hundred and fifty pages long, the better to reach the tragically jump-cut attention spans of the 90s, and it's got giant margins decorated with sticker-or-patch-like graphics with phrases like "STOP HISTORY" or "REINVENT THE MIDDLE CLASS," and tongue-in-cheek "definitions" like "O'Propriation: The inclusion of advertising, packaging, and entertainment jargon from earlier eras in everyday speech for ironic and/or comic effect," and "Squirming: Discomfort inflicted on young people by old people who see no irony in their gestures." The last few pages are devoted to statistics about unemployment, TV watching, social security, etc., with which the experiences of the characters (and presumably the overeducated/underemployed reader circa 1991) were supposed to resonate. Also, Douglas Coupland has just learned about liposuction and he is not happy to be occupying the same world and species as its practitioners. This filled me with nostalgia like few things can.

The book didn't really come together for me; the author had too many ideas and not enough genuine weirdness, the stories were mostly bad, and none of the characters ever emerged from their cocoons of terrible dialogue to want anything recognizable. (My husband, who read it first, thought they were all "unpleasant"; I found them too flat to achieve unlikeability).

The dialogue is bad. Immediately after expressing embarrassed shock that a young yuppie-in-training could "really talk like that," (in cornily wolfish innuendoes), Andy reports the following conversation between himself and his friend Dag:

"Fine comment coming from someone whose entire sense of life begins and ends the year his own parents got married, as if that was the last year in which things could ever be safe. From someone who dresses like a General Motors showroom salesman from 1955. And, Dag, have you ever noticed that your bungalow looks more like it belongs to a pair of Eisenhower era Allentown, Pennsylvania newlyweds than it does to a fin de siecle existentialist poseur?"

"Are you through yet?"

"No. You have Danish modern furniture; you use a black rotary-dial phone; you revere the Encyclopedia Brittanica. You're just as afraid of the future as my parents."

Silence.

"Maybe you're right, Andy, and maybe you're upset about going home for Chirstmas--"

"Stop being nurturing. It's embarrassing."

"Very well. But ne dump pas on moi, okay? I've got my own demons and I'd prefer not to have them trivialized by your Psych 101-isms. We're always analyzing life too much. It's going to be the downfall of us all."

(For context, Andy thinks his parents are afraid of the future because their house is "like a museum of fifteen years ago," which, to me as an old person, seems like an extremely odd thing to worry about. What's the alternative? Change furniture every five years? Like a consumerist?)

The book ends with a moment of ambiguously ironic transcendence facilitated by a group of friendly disabled kids on field trip, a literary move that, like Blockbuster Video, had a brief and outsized period of flourishing.

Anyway, Dune was better. Dune is all about ruthless space politics and how, if you're smart enough and lonely enough, you can kill people with your mind. I remembered really disliking Paul Muad'Dib Atredies by the end, the last time I read it, and I was not disappointed this time around - the way he and his mother gloat about how little respect or kindness he's going to show his new politically advantageous wife is just sad. It's not her fault you don't love her, you doucheparade! I may try to read the sequel again at some point - last time I tried, I gave up early and forgot all about it, but that was years ago.

What I'm Reading Now

Selected Poetry of Wallace Stevens. It's time to confess that I don't understand Wallace Stevens.

What Some of You May Be Interested to Know

There's a new book out about the Wilmington insurrection, the 1898 white supremacist coup featured in The Marrow of Tradition. It's Wilmington's Lie by David Zucchino. Will you read it? I might!

What I Plan to Read Next

I had a disappointing visit to the library recently. A couple of days ago, I searched the catalog and found, or thought I found, all five books in The Mennyms series, described with winning horror and confusion by skygiants. I naturally wanted to experience these exceptionally miserable life-sized sentient rag doll non-adventures for myself. But I didn't read the catalog closely enough, and when I got to the library, I found that they are not available in the print collection after all, only as e-texts to which I have no access. So now I have to decide how committed I really am to the life-sized sentient ragdoll experience.

I also couldn't find Mary Oppen's Meaning A Life, an autobiography I read about in the latest issue of Poetry. This time, the catalog assured me it was on the shelf, but I spent about ten minutes staring at the relevant location and couldn't find it.

However, I did get Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?, a book I have been meaning to read since August 2016, so it wasn't a total loss.

Also coming soon: Don Quixote!

Comments

[delphi]

About fifty pages in, I said, "I'm so glad Douglas Coupland had the balls to publish his notes for a novel and just call it a novel." Would that we all had such beautiful confidence.

I snorted so hard at this that I legit almost did myself an injury. I read a fair bit of Coupland back in the '90s, but when I go back to his work now, my general reaction is: "Well, that certainly captured a Moment."

[evelyn_b]

I was a little too young when Generation X came out to grok the malaise (and now I'm much too old, alas). But a Moment is definitely being captured. I didn't like any one thing about this book (except maybe Andy's annoying proto-influencer little brother and the aforementioned irredeemable yuppie chauvinist pig, both of whom are made to VERY UNCONVINCINGLY confess that they envy Andy's more "authentic" approach to life*), and it completely failed to make what should have been a straightforward case for Andy and co's unhappiness, but I also feel like I'll probaby read Coupland's Microserfs at some point because that, too, was A Moment.

*It's more authentic because it pays less and you don't have to exercise. I think?

[osprey_archer]

You're braver than I am: as much as I loved skygiants' review, I don't think I would dare to brave the actual Mennyms books. So much desire! Packed into life-size rag dolls!

I am tempted by Wilmington's Lie, but I might wait for you to report back on it before I dive in.

[evelyn_b]

When you're a life-sized rag doll doomed to live out a hollow parody of middle-class life for all eternity because you're made of rags and can never die, desire is all you have! Which is worse, to be an eternal rag doll teenager cursed with awareness, or to be a rag-doll PERMA-BABY for all time? If you're a rag-teen, you definitely feel like you're suffering more because you know how bad you have it, but on the other hand maybe you can rationalize your pain a little better and derive some fleeting comfort from writing emo poetry that turns out to be less metaphorical than it seems.

(I'm really disappointed that I don't have The Mennyms in my hands right now).

[thisbluespirit]

So now I have to decide how committed I really am to the life-sized sentient ragdoll experience.

Always a tough call! I remember we had a couple of those in my library system when I was a children's librarian, but they were post-child-me and pre-children's librarian-me as it were, so I never read them. Which, honestly, sounds like the best plan, following that link!

[evelyn_b]

Best plans are all well and good, but do you think the old woman who created seven enormous rag dolls and a ragdoll baby to keep herself company was making decisions based on what the best plan was for those dolls? Maybe not!

The books seem to have some fans - I feel I need to find out for myself whether they're brilliantly horrifying or horrifyingly horrifying. Or both?

[skygiants]

I only own the first two books, but I'd be absolutely willing to get them off my hands in the good cause [of making someone else read them] ....

[evelyn_b]

That would be amazing! The first two will tell me whether I need to follow the Mennyms all the way down (or if I can follow them down, but not that far). I'll send you a message!

[thedoubtfulguest]

I'm happy to hear that Mary Oppen's autobiography is being re-issued. It's really good, but my copy got lost in one of my moves and is gone forever, unless it's hiding under the Virginia Woolf diaries in the Bloomsbury box, but that's the same as gone forever. I should have just given it you when I left LV, but you had (and have?) so many books that I felt bad about trying to push more in your direction.

(Poetry Magazine is also telling me about the release of The Dolphin Letters and if the library has it, I'm about to break my 2017 reading resolution, no more collections of letters, especially for authors you don't read.)

Is there a scene in Generation X where the characters swing on a swingset? I feel like I've read some 90s book where that happens.

[evelyn_b]

One more book wouldn't have hurt anything! In any case, I'll find it eventually. It looks good!

Generation X has already gone to its new home in a Little Free Library outside the Unitarian church, so I can't check to see if it has a swingset scene. It would be perfectly in keeping with the rest of the book for its characters to swing on a swingset and have feelings or possibly sad songs about it, but I don't remember if they did or not.

[liadt]

When normal books* are scarier than horror books 0_o


*Well as normal as living rag dolls can be!

[evelyn_b]

Living rag dolls do their best to get by in a world that will never understand them. Poor dolls! Maybe what we need is MORE living rag dolls, so that they can form a supportive giant sentient rag doll community.