Dept. of Speculation - Jenny Offill (2014)

In titling this post, I instinctively wrote "2018" as the year of publication. Once again, The New York Times Book Review podcast alerted me to this author, in a discussion of Weather, her newest volume. They had occasion to reference Dept. of Speculation, her previous book, and praised it effusively. I put a hold on it at the library. It took a while to get it, because of the waiting list, and then a 60+ day closure. Then it took me too long to read it (it could be read in a day, or two; it took me a week, or two, or three, or four). 

But this book came out six years ago, in the comparatively innocent days of 2014. And I slept way, way too long on Jenny Offill. Unquestionably, this goes on the Best Books list. The first thing I did after finishing Dept. of Speculation was to place a hold on Weather.

Offill, it must be well-known, writes in a very unique, totally original style. It is prose, but it reads like poetry, and sometimes comedy. Also tragedy. The paragraphs are short, sometimes just a sentence or two. The pages are small. There is a limited third-person narrator. 

The plot concerns a young couple--a wife in her mid-30's, a husband a few years older--that has just had a baby in Brooklyn. The novel covers roughly the first six years of the baby's life. It is hardly at all about the baby, later the little girl, except how she annoys them and how they love her:

"Is she a good baby? People would ask me.

Well, no, I'd say." (30)

Certain details emerge. The Husband plays the piano and writes musical scores for film and television. The Wife is a college professor, not writing a follow-up novel; instead she attempts to ghostwrite a memoir by a man who was almost an astronaut, who wants to tell the story of Voyager 2. At a certain point, their apartment is infested with bedbugs. And then the Husband has an affair. And the Wife goes mad, and struggles to find meaning in her life.

There are no easy, simple, neat answers in this book. Only questions. There is no sense that everything is going to be okay in the end. While there is great darkness and cynicism in this work, there are also moments of inspiration that border on the divine (generally, quotes without context from Rilke, or Kafka, and others):

"What Rilke said: I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone." (148)

"What Kafka said: I write to close my eyes." (156)

"Studies show that 110% of men who leave their wives for other women report that their wives are crazy.

Darwin theorized that there was something left over after sexual attractiveness had served its purpose and compelled us to mate. This he called 'beauty' and thought it might be what drives the human animal to make art." (103) 

There is hardly a wasted word in this book. There must already be many Jenny Offill imitators filling up the slush piles. Please read it if you haven't.

Grade: A

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone - Lori Gottlieb (2019)

This morning (8/8/20, from approximately 10:30 AM to 11:45 AM) a truck was parked outside my living room window. The truck had been outfitted with an extremely sensitive alarm due to past break-ins. The driver told me as much when I confronted him. He was parked in a tow-zone. Every time a car rushed past closely enough to his, a little beep would ensue, followed by a succession of quick horn bursts. This aggravated me to no end, as I had a headache, and did not get quality sleep last night. The truck driver (owner of a plumbing company) explained he was not going to change his alarm. I asked him if he could move it, not very politely. I thought I heard him say no, and I cursed at him, not exactly under my breath.  Then I saw him pull away. I was just a jerk. I've been wracked with guilt for more than an hour after the incident.

For context, I was trying to read the last 10 pages of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, the latest selection from the Voracious Violets book club (I have fallen off, badly. Maybe I will resume after Just Mercy, the current selection). To review, previous selections include Educated, A Gentleman in Moscow, and The Line Becomes a River.  Certainly, this is my least favorite thus far.  

I open up with this anecdote for two reasons: (1) my aggravation at the car alarm was certainly related to my aggravation at this book never ending; (2) this type of behavior is problematic and indicative of need for change. No one deserves to be talked at like that. And maybe because of this book, and my own disgust at myself for being "that guy," a person that the plumber will look back on with disdain, maybe I am going to try to be better, and more compassionate. 

This book is too long. That is my primary gripe. It's over 400 pages. It's a bit self-indulgent. There is great vulnerability in it, and while that is always beautiful to regard in actual life, in memoir it can feel cloying and overly precious. To be clear, this book has its moments. Several passages did, in fact, make me cry. I just think it could have been about one hundred pages shorter. At a certain point, the author describes how she gets contracts to write two different books--one about Parenting, and the other about Happiness. Apparently she was given huge advances for these. She writes neither. (Note: this review will have mild spoilers.) Instead she wrote this book about Therapy. And it really feels like that--a book she was commissioned to write, that has to hit a certain quota. 

I don't doubt many people love this book, but I did not have the patience for it. I struggled to read it for more than thirty minutes at a time. It is very hard for me to reject books outright. Previously I was forced to do so, since the Chicago Public Library had a three-week limit, and fines. Now there are no fines. I do not want to be a jerk and keep books unnecessarily long. I have three other books to read, all of which are overdue.  I digress. Must avoid self-indulgence in review.

PLOT: Lori is a therapist that suffers an upheaval in her life. Boyfriend leaves her. She is a single mother, and Boyfriend tells her that he can't live with a kid under his roof for 10 more years (he has a kid of his own that is going off to college, and he wants the freedom of an empty nest). He does this completely out of the blue and leaves shortly thereafter. She is completely devastated. She needs to start going to therapy, and she gets connected with Wendell. 

Now my first complaint with the book are the scenes with Wendell. They just bored me to tears. This would probably be a great book for therapists because there is so much inside baseball (and yes, speaking as a patient, some of it was illuminating, and helped me to better understand what my psychiatrist was trying to do with me). But let's be clear: Lori is a clinical psychologist, not a psychiatrist. Perhaps a psychiatrist would write an even more boring book, discussing drug interactions. There is bravery and courage in this book. Gottlieb (not Robert's daughter) certainly opens up some veins and bleeds. Yet she writes so much about appreciating life and enjoying every minute and being thankful for all of its gifts that I can't help but be annoyed, because everything seems easier for her, somehow.

This is decidedly not the case in the chapter "The Whole Package," where she details her desire to be a mother, while not yet having found the right partner, as she hovers around age 36 and 37. As a single, childless 37-year-old, this book made me even more depressed than I already am, at times. She does opt for artificial insemination, and the discussions of the guys whose sperm she wants made me want to puke because they reminded me of how recessive I am. Must not be self-indulgent. There is one clever aside, that perhaps explains why I feel about this book the way I do:

"Other donors seemed to have good health, intelligence, and similar physical features, but something else would raise a red flag, like the donor who wrote that his favorite color was black, his favorite book Lolita, and his favorite movie A Clockwork Orange. I tried to imagine my child reading this profile one day and looking at me like, 'And you chose this one?' I had the same reaction if the donor couldn't spell or use punctuation correctly." (101)

Now I can certainly get behind the last sentence. But dissing fans of Kubrick and Nabokov, two of their mediums' indisputable masters? That is not going to sit well on Flying Houses. Were I that child, were I so lucky to have a mother so open-minded as to embrace transgressive genius, I would love her all the more. Who is to say that child will grow up to be a difficult freak, an enfant terrible? Such blanket characterizations are ultimately harmful to art and humanity. Perhaps this is just a small joke that I am taking far too seriously. But yes, she is enamored to get the sperm of "young George Clooney" (as is everyone else in that clinic).

Clooney, however, does have a memorable cameo in this book:

"Late that fall, I was out to dinner with a group of people after my baby shower when my mother noticed the real George Clooney sitting at a table nearby. Everyone at our table knew about Kathleen's 'young George Clooney' description, and one by one, my friends and family pointed at my enormous belly, then turned their heads toward the movie star. 
He looked much more grown up than he had as a young actor starring in ER. I, too, felt much more grown up than I'd been as a young executive working at NBC. So much had happened in both of our lives. He was about to win an Oscar. I was about to have my son." (107-108)

Yes though, perhaps I am jealous of her trajectory: working at NBC on ER in Los Angeles, deciding she wants to go to med school, then deciding she would rather get a PhD in clinical psychology. She made tons of mistakes and backtracks, and her story feels empowering and reassuring. Yet it still seems too easy for those less accomplished readers among us.

FURTHER PLOT: the narrative technique employed in the novel is to focus on several of her patients: John (a successful TV-show producer and writer); Julie (terminally-ill 35-year-old, recently married, on the verge of starting a family); Rita (a depressed 69-year-old planning to kill herself on her 70th birthday), and Charlotte (a mid-20's low-grade alcoholic in search of a meaningful relationship). Several other ancillary characters appear as supporting players in these patients' lives: Margo, Gabe, Gracie, Ruby, Rosie (John's family); Myron (Rita's romantic interest); Dude (Charlotte's romantic interest that she meets in the waiting room, a patient of her colleague's, a f***boy). 

Some of these narratives are insufferable, some of them have revelatory moments. One of the biggest questions I have about this book: what show was John working on? It seems like a big hit, yet I have zero idea what it could be--it's definitely not Friends, but it seems adjacent to that.

Ultimately, Rita's story is powerful and beautiful, a true highlight of the book. I can recall exactly the passage that struck a chord:

"Here's what Myron realized: He missed Rita. Deeply. He wanted to tell her things--all the time, every day--the way he had wanted to tell his wife Myrna things throughout their marriage. Rita made him laugh and think, and when photos of his grandchildren popped up on his phone, he wanted to show them to Rita. He didn't want to do any of this with Randie in the same way. He loved Rita's sharp intellect and sharper wit, her creativity, her kindness. How she picked up his favorite cheese if she was at the grocery store. 
He liked Rita's worldliness and wry observations and wise counsel whenever he asked her advice. He adored her throaty laugh and her eyes that were green in the sunlight and brown indoors and her bright red hair and her values. He loved that if they started a conversation on one topic, it would segue into two or three others before it would loop back around or that sometimes they'd get so immersed in their tangents that they'd forget what they were talking about in the first place. Her paintings and sculptures made his heart thrill. He was curious about her, wanted to know more about her kids, her family, her life, her. He wanted her to feel comfortable telling him and wondered why she had been like a cipher, revealing so little of her past. 
Oh, and he thought she was beautiful. Absolutely stunning. But would she please stop wearing T-shirts that looked like rags?" (229-230)

Julie's story is also quite moving, and John's story is shattering, and there is certainly much I can relate to in Charlotte's (except it also annoys me because she's 10+ years younger and lamenting, "I just don't want to wake up five years from now and never have had any kind of relationship...five years from now, a lot of people my age won't be single anymore, and I'll be the girl who hooks up with a guy in the waiting room or her neighbor and then tells the story at a party like it's just another adventure.  Like I don't even care." (333-334)). But Rita's story for me is the true heart and soul of this book. 

So this is a complicated book to process, and I think my feelings of annoyance or aggravation largely stemmed from impatience, the pandemic (how can it not color everything we digest, seeing the world we lived in before?), and the unresolved issues I continue to have after six years of therapy. I cannot wholeheartedly recommend it, but I certainly recommend it for anyone that is struggling with grief or trauma, particularly as it relates to parenting or the looming spectre of death. As long as it took me, I got through it faster than A Gentleman in Moscow (which to be fair is very long). There is so much in it that I can't properly address in this review. Actually I wrote this review in less than two hours. So I'm sorry if it's not my finest work. It's a messy review for a messy book. There is great humanity in the work, and many wonderful "academic" portions. I learned something about myself in the process of reading it, and certainly in finishing it this morning and writing this review. I do believe that it will help many people to have a better understanding of therapy and the changes it can inspire in the way we process the world. Patience and compassion are virtues, too. 

Grade: B

Let's Play Two: The Legend of Mr. Cub, The Life of Ernie Banks - Ron Rapoport (2019)

My mom grew up loving Ernie Banks. She was a Die Hard Cubs Fan (and had the membership card to prove it), and while she sometimes spoke of Ron Santo, Randy Hundley, Billy Williams, Fergie Jenkins and others, there could be no doubt as to her favorite player. Witness, for example, this framed poster I am keeping in my apartment for the time being.

So for her birthday/Mother's Day (they are generally 1-2 weeks apart) last year, I bought her this book. And in my efforts to support a local bookstore, I discovered there were two Let's Play Two books about Ernie Banks, released about a month apart from one another. That other one was reviewed in short-form and anticipated a first for FH. I am not aware of any other book review platforms publishing dueling reviews of these books. And I am not doing that, because my review of the Doug Wilson Let's Play Two is cursory, at best. And the Rapoport Let's Play Two is, somewhat predictably, more comprehensive and more beautifully-written. Rapoport spent the last few weeks of Ernie Banks's life attempting to begin work on a new autobiography (after Mr. Cub), and this biography is the finished product, five years after the fact. And lately, while I have found many biographies fascinating, these were some of the most engaging 413 pages I have read in any. One could not call them the most revealing 413 pages, but they are as revealing about Banks as any other source, and therein lies its r'aison d'etre: Who was the real Ernie Banks?

Because the only Ernie Banks everyone knew in the world was Mr. Cub. The catchphrases, the ever-present smile, the humble attitude, the unrelenting positivity, the absence of dissent or displeasure. Mr. Cub. Never gets to go to the playoffs. Hall of Fame career but no championships. Just one heart-breaker of a season. But what pain and sadness lived underneath, what struggles did he conceal, what resentments did he harbor? Both Let's Play Two books try to answer this. And because Rapoport no doubt had bountiful resources available to him, as well as close personal relationships with many people in the Chicago sports world, this is the better book. Though Doug Wilson's is shorter, and totally decent, this is more consistently entertaining and engaging. Perhaps one day soon there will be an Ernie Banks biopic, and while both volumes would no doubt prove useful in such a venture, there is little that Wilson uncovers that Rapoport does not (and yes, to be fair, I can't check a copy of the Wilson volume and get specific--but don't challenge me on that until you've read both, too). It would be named to the Best Books list alongside biographies of Raymond Carver and William O. Douglas if the genre was not beginning to subsume it (and this is before reading anything by Robert Caro).

This Let's Play Two opens up with the totally iconic scene of Ernie Banks playing golf with Warren Buffet and Steadman Graham (Oprah's fiancee), along with an Illinois State Senator, on 9/11. They are in Omaha and Air Force One arrives to bring then-President Bush to a secure underground bunker. All the planes are grounded after, so the Senator (William Marovitz) drives back to Chicago with Banks, and Banks opens up to him like he rarely opened up to anyone, an experience so engrossing that Marovitz didn't realize he was driving for seven hours in the wrong direction, passing through most of South Dakota before realizing as much.

Banks was born in Dallas in 1931, the oldest of twelve children in a very poor family. Of special note is that both Essie Banks (Ernie's mother) and O.J. Simpson's mother (Eunice Durden) were first cousins. As a youth, he worked with his father, picking cotton, for 5 or 6 dollars a day. His father, Eddie, had once been a catcher for the Dallas Green Monarchs, a semipro Negro League team, who once caught for Satchel Paige. He made Ernie bat boy one game when he was 8 or 9.

The book then dives away into the history of the surrounding area and the high school Banks attended. Booker T. Washington, which also produced many notable artists. In the summer of 1948--not long after he had started playing more seriously--playing for the Detroit Colts. After another summer, Bill Blair, who had discovered Banks on a local ball-field, referred him to Buck O'Neil, the manager of the Kansas City Monarchs and the first of many legendary figures to appear. Banks began playing for him in 1950.

Banks joined the Cubs in 1953, and the book devotes 42 pages to the years between 1950 and 1953, also touching upon Banks's tenure in the military. These are some of the most charming pages, where he played against teams such as the Indianapolis Clowns, the Birmingham Black Barons, the New York Cubans, and the Chicago American Giants, in the twilight era of the Negro League. After Jackie Robinson moved into the major leagues, attentions shifted.

In 1953, he first played for Phil Cavaretta, then for Stan Hack from 1954-1956. Starting in 1955, he began crushing the ball.  He played for Bob Scheffing from 1957-1959, continuing his streak of dominant seasons. In 1960, the Cubs became "experimental" in their managerial hiring process, starting with an older Charlie Grimm, who had managed the team from 1932 to 1949, and who did not last long. Lou Boudreau replaced him after a handful of games. In 1961, they began their "college of coaches" concept, cycling Elvin Tappe, Lou Klein, Vedie Himsl and Harry Craft. The team finished 26 games under .500. Yet they continued this way in 1962, with Tappe and Klein again, and Charlie Metro. And they were even worse, finished 44 games under .500 and in 9th place. Bob Kennedy took over in 1963 and stayed til 1965 when he was replaced mid-season by Lou Klein again.

This roll-call of managers is only undertaken to underscore their relative anonymity in contrast to Leo Durocher, who emerges as one of the liveliest characters in this story. And they were also atrocious in his first year, 1966, once again 44 games under .500. However, things started looking up in 1967 and 1968. Finally, they broke out in 1969 with a 92 win season.

In 1969, Banks was 38 years old, and had been playing for the Cubs for 16 years. His best days were certainly behind him, yet he still made the all-star team and drove in 106 runs. Between the years of 1955 and 1960, Ernie Banks was arguably the most threatening hitter in baseball, particularly in 1958 and 1959, when he was named MVP.

The book, predictably, takes off in discussing the 1969 season, though this is not to say anything about the years of 1953 to 1968 are less interesting. This is mostly because of Durocher. It is difficult to select excerpts from this book but inevitably one must be about Durocher. And even within that subset, it is difficult. For example, the dissection of why Durocher treated Banks as badly as he did begins by acknowledging that Durocher may have just been trying to light a fire under him, because he wasn't like Ron Santo, who became noticeably upset when things didn't go his way. Ultimately, it centers around jealousy, and because of past experience managing Willie Mays. Mays, if anyone, is the counterpart to Banks, in terms of career accomplishments and renown. Hank Aaron is the other, even as his stats tower over theirs. Durocher took credit for the rise of Mays, and building his confidence after a slow rookie start. He treated Banks oppositely, yet it must be noted, they were at entirely different points in their career when he managed them.

Really some account of his outrageous demeanor should be recorded:

"There were times when Durocher's complaints defied belief. In May 1968, reporters were stunned when Durocher pinned a 9-2 loss to the Cardinals at Wrigley Field on the fact that Banks hadn't scored from third base on a ball hit to the infield. 'Banks should have walked home,' Durocher said of a run that would have reduced the margin of defeat from seven runs to six. 'He's been in the league sixteen years, but he just won't get off the bag.' But once again, Banks turned the other cheek. 'Leo's right,' he said. 'Taking the extra lead or the extra base helps the club.'" (245-246)

Around page 260, things start changing for the Cubs in 1967, as they develop what would become a group of core future Hall-of-Famers in Fergie Jenkins, Ron Santo and Billy Williams, along with Banks. The Bleacher Bums are born, and the story of their rise has little to do with Banks, but is one of the welcome surprises of this book. Chapter 26, devoted to them, is definitely a highlight.

Chapter 29 deals with the 1969 season and the team's infamous downfall in the last month of the season, to the lowly New York Mets. It should be noted that, among Rapoport's many gifts, is a knack for the incisive detail from a game that is otherwise lost to history. In his recitations of the minutiae of each crucial game, they are further etched into history, and the drama these moments create in the lives of the players are felt more all the more deeply. Witness the turning point that marks the beginning of the end of that year:

"The Cubs were in a foul mood when they arrived in New York for games on September 7 and 8. They had just lost three games at home to the Pirates and were still replaying the last one in their minds. They had been one strike away from victory after a two-run homer by Hickman in the eighth inning when Willie Stargell hit a home run off Regan* that tied the score. And when Kessinger, who earlier in the season had set a record for shortstops with fifty-four errorless games, booted a ball in the eleventh, the Pirates were on their way to a 7-5 victory. 'To me,' Santo said, 'that was the turning point.'" (314)

AND HERE IS THE TURNING POINT OF THE REVIEW

[Yesterday, 7/14/20, I completed this review. Then, because I had taken a picture with my phone of the poster in my dining room, and updated the blog post from my phone. I felt I had published it, but perhaps I had just saved it. Regardless, this morning, I planned to publicize it on Facebook/Twitter. I tried to close the web page on my chromebook, and it warned me that I would lose all the changes I had saved. I thought, no way! I saved it from my phone earlier. And none of those changes were showing up on my chromebook version and I didn't want to have to re-do it. But apparently, yes, even though I saved it with all the finishing touches, the world prefers that I lose them, and waste 1-2 hours of my life, and appear even more amateurish. It makes me so angry that I will not re-do. This is not the first time this has happened. This is probably the forth of fifth time (somehow, with Buddenbrooks, way back in 2008, I wrote 2 different reviews) this has happened. And I just do not have the patience at the moment to make it as perfect as I did yesterday. I just can't. The internet has made writing an even more stressful endeavor.]

The first thing I included was an analysis of when my mom must have sent a letter to Leo Durocher, threatening to categorically reject the team if Ernie Banks was not taken off the bench. I had included several different paragraphs to provide additional context. I can be quick about this and cut a lot:

"Durocher responded by benching Banks for a week, leading one Chicago columnist to say the manager was vying for the title of most unpopular man in Chicago. Durocher was so determined to denigrate Banks that in a series in Atlanta he used reserves Jimmy Stewart and Marty Keough, who were hitting .153 and .069 respectively, as pinch hitters while Banks, who had a nine-game hitting streak, sat on the bench." (245)

I had a great second asterisk about Jim Bullinger. A quote about Ernie Banks trying to marry everyone off, including Mark Grace and Dennis Rodman, and presuming that Patrick Kane had a wife. And then about how he shouldn't be one to talk, as a four-time husband.

Finally there was a long quote about Joe Pepitone, a fan-favorite in 1970, who I could only think of as the Nick Castellanos of his time.

Also something about the Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony in 2013, and the absence of family attending. "It was as if he was proclaiming on a national stage that he was alone in the world." (396)

There is great historical value in this book, and it is not a bad blueprint to follow if one hopes to play in the MLB, though obviously things are quite different nowadays. Many would do well to follow the example set by Banks, even though the culture of today urges us to "make it okay to talk about mental illness." Sometimes it is better to simply keep one's mouth shut, and not try to update a blog, where little good may come of it. Better to smile, for it is July 15, and another beautiful day, and the MLB will returrn in 9 days for the strangest season in almost 150 years.

Grade: A

*Phil Regan appears as a minor character in this book several times, most prominently as a member of the 1969 Cubs. There is a reference to his work as a pitching coach later in his career, but the book does not divulge that Regan, in 2019, fifty years later, was still a pitching coach. And actually, was the head pitching coach of the Mets, as an 82-year-old. So he could actually compare Fergie Jenkins to Jacob DeGrom, and that is pretty remarkable.

** (note) References previously made to trying to set up Mark Grace, Jim Bullinger and Rick Wilkins, led me to make reference to Bullinger's (reliever/starting pitcher) first-career at bat home run, and Jose Guzman's 26-out no-hitter, both of which took place in 1992 and 1993. Which is when I became a Die Hard Cubs fan.

State of the Union (2020)

I felt compelled to note that many of the links on the right side of the web page no longer work. This is sad.
----------------

You need to ask Bradford Cox or somebody if you want access to Deerhunter's blog.

Mario Batali Voice is defunct, redirecting to a page that simply transmogrifies the blog header into a
domain name (SteveAlbinicooks.whatimadeforheather.com, or something).

Dickson has not updated his Working Marathon Runner blog since 2015.

Daniel has not updated Adventures of a Gastrophile since 2012.

Jill has not updated Bitchin' Vegan Kitchen since 2011.

Even Portastatic (which to be fair has mostly been supplanted by Superchunk/Mac solo) is apparently finished since 2012 (CMJ was still a thing).

THINK AND GROW POOR and DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME, thankfully, are still available.

Owing to the massive difficulty of attracting anyone's attention (absent schadenfreude), I should stop trying to produce content that many no doubt find spurious.

------------------

Moving onto the second list of links, Daily Routines was turned into a book. We should all be so lucky. The promised land for the majority of us content producers.

A Newbie's Guide to Publishing is - pretty active! Last post was made almost one year ago (7/19/19). It is arguably more active than Flying Houses. I will need to revisit this soon.

Nathan Bransford -- really? Updated his blog yesterday? He wins this contest.

Paper Cuts, the NY Times blog, should actually be removed, because it just links to The New York Times Art section, but I guess just going to that page that doesn't take up 1/10 articles for the month.

Pub Rants ALSO WINS!  Updated July 6, 2020.

Book Cannibal also stopped since 2012.

-----------------

Things have changed since 2008. Are blogs still the best way to reach a bigger audience with longer form writing, absent a job/contract/respected platform to do said writing? I don't know, but I have been attempting to crowd-source/focus-group/revise-collaborate my WIP via Google Docs with an ever-growing list of users authorized to comment.

And nobody comments. Nobody wants to read it. So this ultra-efficient feedback device is--for me at least--misbegotten.

I had an idea for a social media platform designed for writers and other artists, that would narrowly focus on each users' projects, for feedback, criticism and advice. I also once had an idea for a reality TV series framed around an MFA-creative-writing class. But the act of writing is not inherently interesting, they told me. I beg to differ--there could easily be a way to make it interesting--but it appears most people just don't want to read as much, they'd rather listen to audiobooks most of the time.  Or podcasts.

Instagram has emerged as a sort of successor to the so-called blogosphere. Just one of the many reasons this blog has been "retired." Instagram is very good for visual artists and dubious, at best, for writers. Text on Facebook does not do much for me. My engagement rate, if you will, is much higher on Instagram. My posts on Facebook are more or less completely ignored, except by a handful of friends that have apparently not muted or unfollowed me. This blog has been about as successful as my Facebook account in terms of branding and eyeballs.

And yet, while we have not read nearly as much as we would have liked during Quarantine, there was Let's Play Two and now, currently, Dept. of Speculation. I'd like to write about both of these. So stay tuned.

And please, if you would like to help me with the WIP as a guinea-pig reader, please reach out. Thank you and be safe.

Short Form: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine - Gail Honeyman (2017)

About a month ago, an old college friend rang me up, expressing concern for both of us. After the requisite conversational benchmarks were cleared, less pressing matters, such as book recommendations, emerged. She had to repeat that she was reading Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine several times before I got the title right. I told her I would read it if we could discuss it on my (largely theoretical) podcast, as episode 4, and she agreed.

So now then, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is the debut novel by Gail Honeyman. At first blush, she reminds me of Sally Rooney, and it leads me to consider whether these two authors will spar in a kind of friendly rivalry over the next several decades, but time will tell.

Does this book take place in Glasgow? I think so. Is Tesco an actual grocery store there? It appears to be the case. Am I an idiot for writing book reviews like this? Most likely.

Eleanor is 30, single, depressed, and has buried childhood trauma under a steady supply of vodka and condescension. She works at a graphic design firm in the accounts receivable department. 

***

Okay full disclosure: I haven't worked on this review since March 2, in part because it is supposed to be the subject of a podcast episode. Yet I did fully (long-form) reviews of all previous books featured in those 3 recorded episodes (Our Band Could Be Your Life, Grass Roots, and Garden State). So this will be the 4th, and hopefully the best yet, though I haven't tried to do one in about a year or two. Unfortunately I am not able to include quotes from the text, as it was returned long ago. Apparently this is "soon to be a major motion picture produced by Reese Witherspoon." Query: is Reese the new Oprah? I do think this will be a fun and interesting movie to see. Maybe it will be a bit like Bridget Jones's Diary? I never read or saw that so I'm probably completely off-base and they're probably just both British Isles set stories written by women and featuring a leading female protagonist. Is it chick-lit? Is it now problematic to refer to a genre as "chick-lit?" Certainly, both involve romantic misadventures. But I have to doubt that Bridget Jones shares the same traumatic "mommy issues" that Eleanor grapples with throughout the novel. Because that really is this novel's major-key theme. So I think this book will be very helpful for people that may have experienced volatile childhoods or negative parental influence. It is also quite funny.

Grade: B+ 

The Night of the Gun - David Carr (2008)

David Carr worked until he died. It's been more than five years, and for some reason that feels totally insane (see his Twitter https://twitter.com/carr2n?lang=en; he passed away February 12, 2015). He was too young to die, not yet 60, and yet after reading The Night of the Gun, one is not surprised by the eventual toll that excessive drinking and drugging can inflict on the human body.  It should go without saying that this automatically goes onto the Best Books list, written as it was by someone with such a sharp literary mind and deeply-embedded BS-detector. The self-examination in this book is merciless:

"I got out, locked the door, and walked away, pushed from behind, pulled by what was inside. I clearly remember solving the math out in the car, but not much of the rest of it. Just a bit of a pick-me-up while I am here, I probably said, glancing at the door as I did. Of course, I told no one in that forlorn circle in the studio that I had, um, friends waiting in the car. There were no windows in the place, and the outside likely disappeared in a flurry of consumption. My kids may or may not have been safe, but inside, a transformation--almost a kidnapping--was under way. The guilty father was replaced by a junkie, no different from the others sitting there. Time passed, one thing begot another, the machine bucked, whistles blew, smoke came out, and eventually I was thrown clear.
Leaving, I remember that. Out the metal door and then out the front door with its three bolts onto the porch and the hollow sound of my boots on the wood floor. A pause. How long had it been, really? It had not been ten minutes tops. Ten minutes times ten, probably, if not more. Hours not minutes. I walked toward the darkened car with drugs in my pocket and a clod dread in all corners of my being.
I cracked the front door, reached around, unlocked the back, and leaned in.
I could see their breath.
God had looked after the twins, and by proxy me, but I realized at that moment I had made a mistake He could not easily forgive. I made a decision at that instant never to be that man again." (164-165)

The plot of the book is roughly this: Carr grows up in Minnesota and eventually works as a journalist for the alt-weekly Twin Cities Reader, lives a life of adventurous debauchery, attends rehab, gets sober for twenty years, finally "makes it" and lands at the New York Times around 9/11, does excellent work and relapses, and finally ends at a point where he decides to write this memoir and investigate the self-mythologized "Night of the Gun."

The Night of the Gun was March 17, 1987 (33 years ago from the date of this writing). Carr had just lost his job, effectively choosing to quit rather than attend rehab, as his employer offered. He instead goes on a major bender, and goes after his friend Donald, who had ditched him at a bar, and confronts him back at his house, who then asks him to leave while brandishing a gun. But Donald later says, he never had a gun. The gun was yours, he tells him.

This memoir traces the intersection of memory and fact, as if they were two concentric circles in a venn diagram, and attempts to merge the circles completely. There is some truth in every memory, but Carr's professional background compels him to search mercilessly for absolute objectivity, as painful as it may be to see himself as his most monstrous. He brings a video camera and tape recorder to meetings with friends and acquaintances from his extensive "drug period" about twenty years after the fact, goes over all his memories with each person, and obtains confirmation or denial as to the depths of depravity that he reached.

There is a lot of indie rock in this book, which is not all that surprising given that most of the heavy drinking and drugging took place in mid-1980's Minneapolis. There may be a reference to Husker Du, but Carr was definitely a fan of the Replacements. There may even be one overlapping story with Trouble Boys, but it's not like it would be revelatory or anything. He probably just did some coke or smoked some crack with one or more of its members.

Crack is a major subject of the book. Crack has always struck me as a disgusting drug. And while it still does, Carr normalizes it to an extent. It does not seem more deadly than coke. Yet that is always how it has been painted. Coke is for rich white people and crack is for poor black people. And I'm not sure, but it seems like the only major difference is that a certain amount of coke will last longer after being to turned into crack:

"...Lots of the people I knew who loved coke took a long, hard look at crack and demurred.
But not me. Here's the thing: If you snort a great deal of cocaine, eventually your nose gets full and your synapses get bored. Crack cocaine offers all the benefits of injectable drugs--a complete and immediate rush, the possibility of easing up to overdosing without actually having it befall you--without all those messy needles, track marks, or exposure to bloodborne contagions.
When smokable cocaine first came on the scene, it involved very complicated processing to produce what was then called freebase cocaine. Powdered cocaine was dissolved in a strong alkaloid solution such as ammonia. Then ether, or some other highly flammable solvent, was added to further refine the mixture and conjure a smokable substance. It yielded a purity that could be eye popping, but it had its pitfalls. Just ask Richard Pryor.
Crack, on the other hand, required just four elements: fire, water, coke, and baking soda. The mix is heated, and the impurities from manufacture boil away. The remaining solid bonds with the baking soda, or base, and a rock is formed. To wit:
Coc-HCl + NaHCO3 --> Coc + H20 +CO2 +NaCl.
Different ratios of baking soda to coke yielded different outcomes. I preferred the very prosaic 1:1. Most crack ranged from 75 percent to 90 percent pure, based on seizures by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. When the coke is cooked with the sodium bicarbonate and water, it tends to make a popping, crackling sound, hence the name crack." (113)

It goes on longer but you get the idea. If one ever needed a how-to manual on drugs, this would not be a bad place to start. I have not read A Million Little Pieces, but it was quite in vogue at the time that Flying Houses launched. A random reference or two may be found to it in the early reviews (note also: a quote from the first book ever reviewed here serves as an epigraph to Chapter 38). Carr was aware:

"Suddenly, writing about the idea of self-fashioning, of coming up with a history that allows you to make your way in the present, began to seem like a worthy intellectual pursuit. At the same time, one of the most successful hood ornaments of the genre--James Frey's A Million Little Pieces--was coming apart in very plain view, a story I covered. I began to think that there might be room for another memoir from a lost-and-found soul, a work of recollection that was based on reporting and fact-finding." (178)

Apart from Frey, Carr also includes a few highly-entertaining pages charting his (mostly endearing) relationship with another famous spinner of tall tales:

"I knew Jayson as a friend in recovery who I smoked cigarettes with. He was plugged into the paper in a way I never was and never will be, so I always learned something juicy when we talked. Jayson was socially adept, the kind of high/low cat who could hit almost anyone's happy buttons, unless that person was trying to supervise him. I knew that he was viewed as a handful--he had been in and out of jams working in the metro section--but I was no longer in the business of supervising or judging young reporters." (344)

Apparently, Carr "discovered" Lena Dunham (seeing Tiny Furniture as SXSW), so perhaps Adam Driver owes a certain debt to him. But that happened after this book. There is a chapter about David Bowie potentially singing to him at a concert on what I believe would have been his last tour, back in 2003. This is another example of false memory. However, he is able to remember that Bowie played every song off Station to Station except "Word on a Wing" and "TVC15." He was quite a hipster. It would be inaccurate to call him a star****er. In any memoir, or opportunity to reach a broader audience in the appropriate context, stories about celebrities are generally "content-worthy." In this case it comes in the form of an entire chapter about Tom Arnold.

He is referred to as "Tommy" and he is part of the tough crowd he ran with that did lots of coke together. Basically. He was doing stand-up comedy in Minneapolis at the time. Near the end of their Bender, he is married to Roseanne and she has started her show. So there are some really titillating tidbits:

"We had a lot in common. Both large guys back then, we could take over a room or turn it against us with a flick of the wrist. In the summer of 1987, Tommy stiffed on a coke debt from the night before--he still denies, but some things I do remember. Like a lot of us, Tommy was better at doing drugs than paying for them. He was not one of those guys who would steal your dope and then help you look for it, but he did what he needed to stay high.
I will cop to hassling him a little bit too much about that. Then I remember him, out of nowhere, attempting to remove my left eye. In my mind, it had always been one more bit of tomfoolery gone bad, no big deal. We had joked about it many times, but when we really got down to cases and were talking about it at length, I realized Tommy felt bad about it." (122) 

One of the main reasons that Carr slips so deeply into addiction is Anna. Anna is the mother of his twin girls. Anna provided very easy access to an incredible amount of cocaine:

"Decades later, we are talking outside a hotel in Tucson, and she still has no trouble recalling the dimensions of a pressed kilo of coke.
'It was about as big as a book, about this big,' she said, framing the air with her hands. 'It still had a snake seal; I mean, it was right from the Medellin cartel.'
'I sold a kilo a month for seven years,' she said. 'It cost me twenty-five cents a gram. It was twenty-five thousand dollars a kilo and there's a thousand grams. And I turned around and sold that for one hundred grand.'" (127)

There are few valid criticisms that I feel I can make about this book. Perhaps Carr is sometimes too self-congratulatory, sometimes a little repetitive, but his story is an admirable one. It appears that he had made his appropriate amends and ultimately made out quite well with his time on earth. Page One: Inside the New York Times is a documentary worth watching, and approximately 50% of the reason is getting to see Carr in action.

I feel like there was something else I wanted to say about this book, or about how Carr might have prevented the NY Times from running some of its less respectable headlines in recent years, but he likely had no such authority. He does however randomly mention Harvey Weinstein in his first paragraph about moving to New York City:

"People often use personal fables as a way of answering the question of who they are. My current fable is that I fell off a turnip truck in Lower Manhattan--at night, of course--in 2000, and the city, as is its habit, clutched another emigre to its ample bosom. I may or may not have been a rube, but I didn't know anyone or anything. In the first three months before my family arrived, I sat in a bug-infested rental in Independence Plaza and read the daily papers, trying to diagram this new, strange place. A lot of my tutorial came from Page Six in the New York Post, where I kept reading about this large, powerful movie guy named Harvey, who could block out the sun. Sometimes when I was taking my 7ease at the window with the papers, I would look out and see a big black car pull up; a large man got out, and everyone around him on Greenwich Street would begin scurrying. He would be flipping pages in his hands, barking orders I couldn't hear, and then disappear into the TriBeCa Film Center. Some weeks passed, my worlds merged, and I realized that the man on Page Six was the man on Greenwich Street. And sometime after that, I ended up in that car interviewing Harvey for a story." (333)

I know this review was really heavy on quotations, but I do that so people get a flavor for the prose. I highly recommend that almost everyone read this book, especially those looking to go into the fields of journalism or memoir-writing. And of course, those in recovery. 

Grade: A

Trick Mirror - Jia Tolentino (2019)

Though Flying Houses has reverted to mostly short-form reviews, there are some books that merit the long-form treatment, and one of them is Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror. Now this book is very popular right now. Obama named it to his Best Books of 2019 list. I probably would put it on mine as well, because it's unlikely I read more than 10 books per year published in that year. It is easy to say that She Said would go higher on my list; it's hard to say if this would go higher than Year of the Monkey.

Overall, this is a fine book because it's extremely thought-provoking and inspirational. Reading this book makes me want to write. It's an interesting book to talk about with other people. Not that I would know, as I've only been able to tell people about it, but at least that's what I imagine would be the case.

Trick Mirror consists of 9 long essays over 300 pages. At least one critic has compared Tolentino to Joan Didion. These essays vary in quality. For fun, I am now going to rank these essays in order of Best to Worst:

[First Blush]
(1) The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams
(2) The I in the Internet
(3) I Thee Dread
(4) Ecstasy
(5) Pure Heroine
(6) We Come from Old Virginia
(7) Always Be Optimizing
(8) The Cult of the Difficult Woman
(9) Reality TV Me

The mark of what I consider a good book worthy of recommendation is whether I am really excited for lunch to get to read, or make the extra effort to read on the train while standing, or read before bed, or really during my leisure time at all (as opposed to downtime). This is one of those books. That said, it wasn't a page-turner like She Said. It was a page-turner like a book I might hate-read. In truth, it was a pseudo-hate-read for me. I mean, how does she get away with writing for the New Yorker as an active and unabashed stoner? Is it just because she went to the Peace Corps, or got an MFA, or sold her soul to the Devil?

Perhaps because she just doesn't make an ass of herself on the page the way I likely would. She thinks the right thing, and she writes it well. And to be fair, I feel that she is already something of an iconoclast, as this book could potentially reinvigorate the personal essay as an art form. Still, it feels a bit too safe for me. It would be interesting to compare it to Bret Easton Ellis's White. The knee-jerk reaction is to cast them as polar opposites. I'll submit that Trick Mirror is better than White, and that my personal politics sit somewhere between Tolentino and Ellis, though I would not consider myself a moderate.

The essay I've put on top is about the Scam Economy. This is the most important chapter in the book, and the most important idea to emerge from this book. None of the seven "scams" she writes about (Fyre Fest, 2008 Financial Crisis, Student Loans, Facebook, #GIRLBOSS, Theranos, Amazon, Trump)  should be news to many. (Note: how is it not "Eight Scams?") But the way she puts them together in the same essay is quite masterful. This is somewhat bolstered by the fact that Tolentino is in the Hulu documentary about Fyre Fest, which I watched this weekend (I had only seen the Netflix one, a while back). Perhaps it's because of her appearance that I put this essay at the top, for her ideas have crystallized an issue that I've long suspected as one of the key problems of capitalism: monetization primarily via ripping off a bunch of dumb, poor schmos. And we're all dumb, poor schmos, to an almost laughable degree. There is more bullshit in the world than ever, and it is easier than ever to believe in it. And there will be untold millions that will believe total nonsense because that's what they're fed. So much of this is righteously infuriating.  Tolentino, however, must humble-brag in the interest of full disclosure that she got to see Kendrick Lamar and Calvin Harris on a beach in the Bermuda Triangle, at a sprawling resort in Puerto Rico including three days of open bar, all on the dime of the Bacardi corporation. I'm assuming many Fyre attendees have experienced feelings of worthlessness after falling prey to a con, and would scoff at this: she's just too lucky--it's not fair!

Student Debt is a very important issue for me, and it was the most cursory part of the essay. When she writes for example, that the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program has rejected 99 percent of applicants, I'd like to know why. But we wouldn't want to lose the basic reader's attention now, would we? I kid. I do appreciate this takedown of the bullshit millennial mindset:

"In the years following the recession, I kept hearing the little factoid that people my age would change careers an average of four times in our first decade out of college. Stories about how millennials 'prefer' to freelance still abound. The desired takeaway seems to be: Millennials are free spirits! We're flexible! We'll work anywhere with a Ping-Pong table! We are up for anything and ready to connect! But a generation doesn't start living a definitively mercurial work trajectory for reasons of personality. It's just easier, as Malcolm Harris argues in his book Kids These Days, to think millennials float from gig to gig because we're shiftless or spoiled or in love with the 'hustle' than to consider the fact that the labor market--for people of every generation--is punitively unstable and growing more so every day. I've been working multiple jobs simultaneously since I was sixteen, and I have had an exceptionally lucky professional life, and, like a lot of Americans, I still think of employer-sponsored health insurance as a luxury: a near-divine perk that, at thirty, I have had for only two years in my career--the two years that I was working at Gawker, which was sued into the ground by the dropout-loving, suffrage-hating, Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel." (169)

It is for just these sorts of run-on dramatic flourishes that Tolentino deserves much derision and praise: derision for getting away with breaking the rule; praise for evoking poetry out of it. And moreover, the themes in this essay reverberate in many other parts of the work as a whole. The Scam is the definitive topic in this book by the definitive voice du jour of millennials.

Yet there are other themes, such as female subjugation. And part of me feels like I've underrated "We Come from Old Virginia," because it seems like this is the most important essay in the book. Mainly because Tolentino basically wrote an incredible Dollop episode on the University of Virginia and its sordid history. So I would put it at #2 actually. There is a strong She Said-vibe to this chapter too, on the topic of proper journalistic vetting practices, as it delves rather deeply into the 2014 Rolling Stone story, "A Rape on Campus." If I'm continuing to design a curriculum for a journalism class on reporting about sexual assault, which I have no business doing whatsoever, this essay would also be on the syllabus. And because of Tolentino's personal experience at UVA, the essay ultimately reads as the most authoritative in the collection, and that includes "Reality TV Me," which catalogs, in excruciating detail, how she starred in an early-aughts Noggin reality show called Girls v. Boys: Puerto Rico when she was sixteen. I just found that this essay dragged for whatever reason. It's definitely unique as far as personal experiences go, particularly as she later goes off about Kim Kardashian, et al., and the rise of Influencing as a career. The only critique I can pinpoint is that the expository scene-setting took me out of the narrative.

"The I in Internet" sets the collection off on a high note, with a lot of energy and substance. Even though I have [more than] several years on the author, her memories of the early internet are fairly accurate. She actually got much more involved in Geocities and Angelfire than I did. But did she ever use Prodigy? I digress. Considerations about how our usage has changed over these last few decades help to account for other cultural shifts. We've lost some of our humanity. We need to engage in virtue signalling to make sure our friends don't think we're secretly xenophobic. We don't take pictures that need to be developed and kept in nice albums at home to show our visitors, we post them on Instagram for random acquaintances and strangers to judge. (Note: shout-out to the Hot-or-Not reference in the "Scams" essay; saw the site once, had no idea Facebook wouldn't exist without it.) We keep getting shit shoved into our faces to buy, even if we were just casually checking our options to see what it would cost. Our elections are compromised and voting appears more meaningless than ever, even as more people than ever are turning out. And then there's the whole every-single-person-staring-down-at-their-screens-like-zombies thing, to say nothing of social isolation or the phantom scourge of sleep deprivation. (I'm not sure that streaming video is very deeply mined as a topic here, and I volunteer to write that essay.)

"I Thee Dread" is the last essay in the book, and floats along similar lines to "The Cult of the Difficult Woman" and "Pure Heroines." It is about the wedding industry. The wedding industry is another fucking joke and scam. Reading these essays gave me permission to feel that it was okay to point out the bullshit that is other people calling you cheap as a pejorative. Maybe I don't get invited to weddings because people think I'll look down on them for wasting so much money, or having so much that they need not worry about anything. Actually I think it's because I have very few friends. I certainly haven't been to 44. Far be it from me to judge anyone for being popular--Tolentino should be commended for saying yes so often. She doesn't necessarily mine a great deal of profundity from this material, yet it is refreshing to read an essay about something more frivolous than say, the decision to have children (a topic that seems glaringly absent in a book about so many things, though perhaps I'm forgetting examples of friends pressuring her into having them, the way they try to pressure her into wedding her partner of 10 years). I don't remember much of what "The Cult of the Difficult Woman" was about beyond Hillary Clinton and Sheryl Sandberg and how we put successful women down. (And note: by no means do I consider this a bad essay; certain parts are as brilliant as anything else in the book). "Pure Heroines" was my favorite because it examined prominent female characters in literature (The YA canon, The Virgin Suicides, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, The Bell Jar, Days of Abandonment), and contained generous factoids from perhaps the leading philosopher of feminist thought: 

"Why all the affairs? De Beauvoir, who famously stated that 'most women are married, or have been, or plan to be, or suffer from not being,' writes that 'there is a hoax in marriage, since, while being supposed to socialize eroticism, it succeeds only in killing it.' A husband gets to be 'first a citizen, a producer, secondly a husband,' where a wife is 'before all, and often exclusively, a wife.' Her conclusion is that women are destined for infidelity. 'It is the sole concrete form her liberty can assume,' she writes. 'Only through deceit and adultery can she prove that she is nobody's chattel and give the lie to the pretensions of the male.' (In 2003, in her polemic Against Love, Laura Kipnis argued that adultery was 'the sit-down strike of the love-takes-work ethic.') (117) 

"Always Be Optimizing" is a takedown of lulemon and the barre method, athleisure-wear and health food. It feels more trifling than the other essays. I'm also underrating this one because it is one of the most amusing in the book. It's sort of similar to "I Thee Dread" in its proposition that it is precisely because a service has such a high cost that it is seen as more valuable and desirable. 

Finally "Ecstasy" is mostly about Tolentino's childhood attending a parochial K-12 school with a laughably obscene "campus," while tying together disparate threads about underground Houston hip-hop, spirituality and drug use. It's sort of the "kitchen sink" essay of the book, and while it doesn't come off quite perfectly, it comes close enough to round out the top 5 in the book. 

Enough of this ranking best to worst. That list above is completely inaccurate. I only finished this book yesterday. My feelings are continually evolving. I see the news about Iowa caucuses and my mind explodes in miniature. It might be a conspiracy but it's likely peddling a false narrative. However, the robots tend to win these days, so why not the most robotic candidate? I can't think. I have too many other things to do. Must publish. Must work. Must influence. Must monetize. Must survive. Must figure out plan to make capitalism work for self.

[Second Blush]

(1) We Come from Old Virginia

(2) The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams

(3) The I in the Internet

(4) I Thee Dread

(5) Ecstasy

(6) Pure Heroines

(7) Always Be Optimizing

(8) The Cult of the Difficult Woman

(9) Reality TV Me

Grade: A-