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He Doesn't Look A Thing Like Wednesday
Jan. 29th, 2020 01:09 pmWhat 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:
( Fear of the future, as expressed in objects )
(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!
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:
( Fear of the future, as expressed in objects )
(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!
