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Wednesday's On the Moon
Apr. 27th, 2022 05:13 pmWhat I Finished Reading A While Ago And Then Forgot To Post About
I loved The Corrections with all my heart for maybe 500 pages straight and then very suddenly at the end I didn't love it anymore. It's not that it "pulled a Zadie" (as my brother calls it when a book climbs a dizzying ladder of plot threads and then vanishes in midair), but it went sour and brittle for me all at once. Not because of the fathomlessly miserable ending; the misery is great. I think it's because Franzen persistently has it in for Enid in a way that activated all my reactionary sympathies, and then tried to end the book with a stilleto thrust into the dark heart of Enid Being Godawful instead of complicating the picture like he knows he's capable of. I know that in real life, sometimes there really is nothing to say but "Wow, what a bitch." But I expect more from fiction.
Do I recommend The Corrections anyway? I absolutely do. Franzen's international satire is a lot weaker than his quotidian Midwestern angst, and his walk-on characters aren't always distinguishable from Candyland cutouts, but when he's good he's very, very good.
I was surprised to find an entire sequence based on the difficulty of finding a working pay phone in Manhattan in 2001. This must be a regional thing, or possibly an NYC thing - I can't recall ever having trouble finding a pay phone until at least 2005. Or maybe I was just lucky?
What I Finished More Recently
I've been trying to get up earlier lately, and almost always succeeding, though it has not led to new heights of productivity (whatever that would entail). Yesterday, for example, I was awake, dressed, and carrying a cup of delicious coffee by 6AM, three hours before it makes sense for me to clock in, and all I did with the extra time was read Weike Wang's novel Chemistry in its entirety. So Chemistry must have been good, right? I've been thinking about it ever since, so I'm going to say yes.
( MSS Fall 1984 )
Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her is fine. I was fascinated to learn that Nancy was created by the same Stratemeyer Syndicate that gave the world not only the Hardy Boys, but the Bobbsey Twins, the excreable Rover Boys, the Motor Girls, Dorothy Dale, and literally dozens more resolutely formulaic series books. The ins and outs of producing a series, dealing with rogue authors, rewriting old books to better suit contemporary mores and then having to do it all over again because time keeps passing, and so on are interesting but not necessarily fascinating. There's some enjoyable material on the world of early land-grant coeducation and the perils of trying to bring popular series books to the screen. The description of the 1938 movie adaptation, where Nancy is played by a sassy 15-year-old who spouts statistics about the average mental age of women and makes a lot of cutesy faces, was a high point for me. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I had liked Nancy Drew growing up? It tended to assume that anyone reading the book was a Nancy fan and that non-fans were all humorless librarians or male chauvinists, and didn't really take the opportunity to help me appreciate Nancy more.
Anyway, if you want to learn all about the Stratemeyer Syndicate, this guy has created a website about it.
What I'm Reading Now
I was so excited about Sindya Bhanoo's book Seeking Fortune Elsewhere that I accidentally ordered it twice. I placed an order at the bookstore the day it came out, and the next day got the copy I'd pre-ordered from the publisher back in 2021. It's a small collection of nearly perfect short stories.
Of A Fire On the Moon, Norman Mailer's book-length journalistic inquiry into the space program, is a good candidate for Most Norman Mailer Thing Ever Written By Norman Mailer. But isn't that everything by Norman Mailer, you ask? Yes, but only Of A Fire On the Moon begins with Mailer in the dumps because Hemingway shot himself and no one called Mailer for a comment. Then he clarifies, in case you were worried, that he did eventually get asked to comment, just not right away! Then he decides to name himself Aquarius for the duration of this essay, because he was born under the sign of Aquarius and there's this song about the Age of Aquarius, and Aquarius is in space, so it's relevant. And then we're off to the space races! Like all the best Mailer, this one veers drunkenly from insight to ass-pinching and from prescience to petrification, usually within the same paragraph. This is probably a bug for someone, but it's a feature for me. It's hard to write about the present, especially when you're trying to look knowing and world-weary at the same time.
Do You Have Enough Book-Related Challenges in Your Life?
22 in '22 is a "visit more bookstores" challenge - the idea is to visit 22 bookstores in the year 2022. If your region is low on bookstores you can even visit the same one 22 times, as long as you go on different days. Sounds fun!
I loved The Corrections with all my heart for maybe 500 pages straight and then very suddenly at the end I didn't love it anymore. It's not that it "pulled a Zadie" (as my brother calls it when a book climbs a dizzying ladder of plot threads and then vanishes in midair), but it went sour and brittle for me all at once. Not because of the fathomlessly miserable ending; the misery is great. I think it's because Franzen persistently has it in for Enid in a way that activated all my reactionary sympathies, and then tried to end the book with a stilleto thrust into the dark heart of Enid Being Godawful instead of complicating the picture like he knows he's capable of. I know that in real life, sometimes there really is nothing to say but "Wow, what a bitch." But I expect more from fiction.
Do I recommend The Corrections anyway? I absolutely do. Franzen's international satire is a lot weaker than his quotidian Midwestern angst, and his walk-on characters aren't always distinguishable from Candyland cutouts, but when he's good he's very, very good.
I was surprised to find an entire sequence based on the difficulty of finding a working pay phone in Manhattan in 2001. This must be a regional thing, or possibly an NYC thing - I can't recall ever having trouble finding a pay phone until at least 2005. Or maybe I was just lucky?
What I Finished More Recently
I've been trying to get up earlier lately, and almost always succeeding, though it has not led to new heights of productivity (whatever that would entail). Yesterday, for example, I was awake, dressed, and carrying a cup of delicious coffee by 6AM, three hours before it makes sense for me to clock in, and all I did with the extra time was read Weike Wang's novel Chemistry in its entirety. So Chemistry must have been good, right? I've been thinking about it ever since, so I'm going to say yes.
( MSS Fall 1984 )
Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her is fine. I was fascinated to learn that Nancy was created by the same Stratemeyer Syndicate that gave the world not only the Hardy Boys, but the Bobbsey Twins, the excreable Rover Boys, the Motor Girls, Dorothy Dale, and literally dozens more resolutely formulaic series books. The ins and outs of producing a series, dealing with rogue authors, rewriting old books to better suit contemporary mores and then having to do it all over again because time keeps passing, and so on are interesting but not necessarily fascinating. There's some enjoyable material on the world of early land-grant coeducation and the perils of trying to bring popular series books to the screen. The description of the 1938 movie adaptation, where Nancy is played by a sassy 15-year-old who spouts statistics about the average mental age of women and makes a lot of cutesy faces, was a high point for me. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I had liked Nancy Drew growing up? It tended to assume that anyone reading the book was a Nancy fan and that non-fans were all humorless librarians or male chauvinists, and didn't really take the opportunity to help me appreciate Nancy more.
Anyway, if you want to learn all about the Stratemeyer Syndicate, this guy has created a website about it.
What I'm Reading Now
I was so excited about Sindya Bhanoo's book Seeking Fortune Elsewhere that I accidentally ordered it twice. I placed an order at the bookstore the day it came out, and the next day got the copy I'd pre-ordered from the publisher back in 2021. It's a small collection of nearly perfect short stories.
Of A Fire On the Moon, Norman Mailer's book-length journalistic inquiry into the space program, is a good candidate for Most Norman Mailer Thing Ever Written By Norman Mailer. But isn't that everything by Norman Mailer, you ask? Yes, but only Of A Fire On the Moon begins with Mailer in the dumps because Hemingway shot himself and no one called Mailer for a comment. Then he clarifies, in case you were worried, that he did eventually get asked to comment, just not right away! Then he decides to name himself Aquarius for the duration of this essay, because he was born under the sign of Aquarius and there's this song about the Age of Aquarius, and Aquarius is in space, so it's relevant. And then we're off to the space races! Like all the best Mailer, this one veers drunkenly from insight to ass-pinching and from prescience to petrification, usually within the same paragraph. This is probably a bug for someone, but it's a feature for me. It's hard to write about the present, especially when you're trying to look knowing and world-weary at the same time.
Do You Have Enough Book-Related Challenges in Your Life?
22 in '22 is a "visit more bookstores" challenge - the idea is to visit 22 bookstores in the year 2022. If your region is low on bookstores you can even visit the same one 22 times, as long as you go on different days. Sounds fun!
