Wednesday is the Thing With Feathers
Aug. 14th, 2019 01:38 pmWhat I've Finished Reading
How To Save Your Own Life by Erica Jong is the first 99 Novels selection that made me suspect Burgess of being condescendingly inclusive. I changed my mind later - I don't think that's Burgess' style, for one thing - but I did think it for a minute, however bad that makes me look.
Jong had a megahit in the mid-Seventies with a dishy feminist novel about women's sexual fantasies called Fear of Flying, which I haven't read. In this book, a writer named Isadora Wing has just had a megahit with a dishy feminist novel about female sexual fantasies starring her alter ego, Candida Wong. In addition to thinking about being a writer a lot, Isadora has loads of boring affairs with different aspects of the late-70s yuppie social scene to help her decide if she should break up with her icy psychaitrist husband Bennett, makes fun of said scene, takes part in an unsatisfying but not absolutely soul-crushing orgy, and gets taken to Hollywood and the cleaners by an energetic parasite. Eventually she meets the love of (the next three years of) her life and writes a bunch of goopy love poems about all the great sex they have and how good they are together. Burgess appreciates that the novel ends with 22 pages of poems; I failed to reach that peak of magnanimity. Jong writes directly and with striking clarity about sex, and with an endlessly chattering jargony flatness about everything else, which makes for some interestingly awkward transitions.
While I suspect I would have liked at least the first two hundred pages of Giles Goat-Boy a little better if I'd read it in 1966, this book gives the opposite impression: that I'm reading it a little more fondly now than I could have when it was contemporary. I kept drifting up out of my own annoyance to look down and think, "Well, it was a place and a time,"- which I guess makes me the true Condescending Includer after all. I didn't laugh nearly as much as I was supposed to, but there was one line I liked a lot: Isadora decides to go to Hollywood and sell out because "I had already tried most of the other cliches and found them wanting."
Also:
Introduction to Problems in American Culture is an absolutely delightful high school sociology textbook from 1931, written by Harold Rugg. Things Harold Rugg likes include: Carl Sandberg, leading questions, the city manager system, The Advancement of Women, the word "progressive," thinking before you vote, immigrant assimilation, educational radio, trying as hard as you can to stay calm about robots stealing our jobs, and Stalin's First Five-Year Plan. There's a whole section about economic downturns in US history to illustrate how things always pick right back up again! so don't worry! and it made me sad because the economic downturn was going to last longer than he thought. Nothing turned out exactly the way Rugg hoped it would, but how could it? This is an incredibly detailed snapshot of a dynamic present, and also (in spite of Rugg's always-abundant love for leading questions) a pretty good textbook. In the first chapter, three teenagers talk about their political affiliations and try to tease out how their different beliefs have been formed. It sets the tone for an optimistic book that is often even-handed and thought-provoking, and nearly always a little more of those things than you expect. I almost said "always," but the unfootnoted Stalin cheerleading is a major exception. Luckily, that comes only at the very end, which you'd probably have to skip anyway due to unscheduled snow days or teacher layoffs, or half the class dropping out to work in a cracker factory as soon as it opens. It was the threshhold of the future, but that won't pay the bills.
Unfortunately, this was supposed to be a "read it and move it along" book, but I loved it so much that it's still on my shelf. Eventually my love will cool and I'll be able to pass it on to a new home.
What I'm Reading Now
The "you" of the Sonnets has been getting a little Alcibiadean:
( try not to burn yourself on all that hotness )
. . . and in Kristin Lavransdatter, Erlend has buggered off to his mountain fastness to sulk like the straight-backed and silver-haired man-sized baby he is, and other things I won't spoil for![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer if she hasn't gotten there yet. I'll just say that if you guess sad and frustrating, you won't guess wrong. I'm still loving this massive slow burn of interwoven irreversible choices and the wildernesses they seed. It's definitely Sigrid Undset's fault that I spent all of How To Save Your Own Life thinking, "But I love unhappy marriages; why am I still bored?"
What I Plan to Read Next
I skipped ahead a little in the 99 Novels sequence with How to Save Your Own Life (1977) and I might skip ahead again to Lanark (1981), since I already have it sitting around. I also have a non-99 non-novel called Modern News Reporting, also from the early 30s, with the most 30s bookplate I've ever seen. You can see it here if you want to: ( The revolution will not be novelized )
Nearly all the printing has rubbed off of Modern News Reporting's tan cover, making it look like someone's nostalgic watercolor of a book, but that doesn't mean it's not just as modern as ever inside.
How To Save Your Own Life by Erica Jong is the first 99 Novels selection that made me suspect Burgess of being condescendingly inclusive. I changed my mind later - I don't think that's Burgess' style, for one thing - but I did think it for a minute, however bad that makes me look.
Jong had a megahit in the mid-Seventies with a dishy feminist novel about women's sexual fantasies called Fear of Flying, which I haven't read. In this book, a writer named Isadora Wing has just had a megahit with a dishy feminist novel about female sexual fantasies starring her alter ego, Candida Wong. In addition to thinking about being a writer a lot, Isadora has loads of boring affairs with different aspects of the late-70s yuppie social scene to help her decide if she should break up with her icy psychaitrist husband Bennett, makes fun of said scene, takes part in an unsatisfying but not absolutely soul-crushing orgy, and gets taken to Hollywood and the cleaners by an energetic parasite. Eventually she meets the love of (the next three years of) her life and writes a bunch of goopy love poems about all the great sex they have and how good they are together. Burgess appreciates that the novel ends with 22 pages of poems; I failed to reach that peak of magnanimity. Jong writes directly and with striking clarity about sex, and with an endlessly chattering jargony flatness about everything else, which makes for some interestingly awkward transitions.
While I suspect I would have liked at least the first two hundred pages of Giles Goat-Boy a little better if I'd read it in 1966, this book gives the opposite impression: that I'm reading it a little more fondly now than I could have when it was contemporary. I kept drifting up out of my own annoyance to look down and think, "Well, it was a place and a time,"- which I guess makes me the true Condescending Includer after all. I didn't laugh nearly as much as I was supposed to, but there was one line I liked a lot: Isadora decides to go to Hollywood and sell out because "I had already tried most of the other cliches and found them wanting."
Also:
Our popular magazines reflect the same lack of sustained interest and attention. Short stories and articles abound. Magazines with the largest circulations rarely print stories more than two or three pages in length [. . .] One popular magazine with a circulation of more than 2,000,000 a week announces at the head of each story the time in which the average person can read it. For example: "Reading time: 15 minutes, 52 seconds."
Introduction to Problems in American Culture is an absolutely delightful high school sociology textbook from 1931, written by Harold Rugg. Things Harold Rugg likes include: Carl Sandberg, leading questions, the city manager system, The Advancement of Women, the word "progressive," thinking before you vote, immigrant assimilation, educational radio, trying as hard as you can to stay calm about robots stealing our jobs, and Stalin's First Five-Year Plan. There's a whole section about economic downturns in US history to illustrate how things always pick right back up again! so don't worry! and it made me sad because the economic downturn was going to last longer than he thought. Nothing turned out exactly the way Rugg hoped it would, but how could it? This is an incredibly detailed snapshot of a dynamic present, and also (in spite of Rugg's always-abundant love for leading questions) a pretty good textbook. In the first chapter, three teenagers talk about their political affiliations and try to tease out how their different beliefs have been formed. It sets the tone for an optimistic book that is often even-handed and thought-provoking, and nearly always a little more of those things than you expect. I almost said "always," but the unfootnoted Stalin cheerleading is a major exception. Luckily, that comes only at the very end, which you'd probably have to skip anyway due to unscheduled snow days or teacher layoffs, or half the class dropping out to work in a cracker factory as soon as it opens. It was the threshhold of the future, but that won't pay the bills.
Unfortunately, this was supposed to be a "read it and move it along" book, but I loved it so much that it's still on my shelf. Eventually my love will cool and I'll be able to pass it on to a new home.
What I'm Reading Now
The "you" of the Sonnets has been getting a little Alcibiadean:
( try not to burn yourself on all that hotness )
. . . and in Kristin Lavransdatter, Erlend has buggered off to his mountain fastness to sulk like the straight-backed and silver-haired man-sized baby he is, and other things I won't spoil for
osprey_archer if she hasn't gotten there yet. I'll just say that if you guess sad and frustrating, you won't guess wrong. I'm still loving this massive slow burn of interwoven irreversible choices and the wildernesses they seed. It's definitely Sigrid Undset's fault that I spent all of How To Save Your Own Life thinking, "But I love unhappy marriages; why am I still bored?" What I Plan to Read Next
I skipped ahead a little in the 99 Novels sequence with How to Save Your Own Life (1977) and I might skip ahead again to Lanark (1981), since I already have it sitting around. I also have a non-99 non-novel called Modern News Reporting, also from the early 30s, with the most 30s bookplate I've ever seen. You can see it here if you want to: ( The revolution will not be novelized )
Nearly all the printing has rubbed off of Modern News Reporting's tan cover, making it look like someone's nostalgic watercolor of a book, but that doesn't mean it's not just as modern as ever inside.
