Checking Into Myself

I had/have largely abandoned this blog since January for several reasons, but I thought I would check in with myself now and then. I say check in with myself because I’m sure that no one actually reads this thing.

I’ve read several books since the last post, including Nick Hornby’s “Juliet, Naked”, Joshua Ferris’ “Then We Came To The End”, Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country For Old Men”. I’m taking to reading a lot of short stories by Dorothy Parker, John Updike, Harry Stephen Keeler, Ernest Hemingway, and others. I started writing one short story but it petered out, and I’ve mostly been working on a new novel. The novel I finished writing last year will be resting for some time, so when I go back I can be extremely depressed and critical and tear it apart and hopefully make it work (even?) better.

The novel I’m currently writing is just starting out, but I’ve got high hopes, not necessarily pie in the sky hopes, but so far I’m happy with what’s come of it. As a way to keep my brain operating despite the lack of sleep (3 month old twins don’t cotton to the newfangled idea of sleeping through the night) I’m doing a lot of research totally unrelated to this current novel, but pertaining to the next project I imagine I’ll be tackling later this year or even next year. It has to do with the nineteen-twenties, and it’ll be my first project not to be contemporary or almost-contemporary (the last novel I wrote took place in the early nineteen-nineties). At three o’clock yesterday morning I was calming a baby and watching Douglas Fairbanks Sr in “The Thief Of Bagdad” (not a misspelling, that’s how the film and the novel it was based upon spelled it).

I plan on getting back into the swing of this little blog a bit, so consider this a stretching out of the muscles. Today at noon I plan on getting a slice of pizza at a local place and working a bit on that short story that petered out, perhaps I can get it to unpeter, maybe even make it paul its way to completion.

Starting The New Year Reading

I’ve started out the year by reading about boys and men in trouble. First I read Mark Twain’s “The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer”, a classic I haven’t touched in over a decade. I was surprised at just how much I had forgotten or had thought was Tom Sawyer when it was in fact Huckleberry Finn (on my long list of planned Twain for 2010). It’s such a universal story of being young that even though I grew up in the north over a century after Twain’s characters I recognize many of the strange mannerisms and speech of youth that I hope Facebook and cell phones don’t destroy.

After Tom Sawyer I picked up “David Copperfield”, and am well into it. I debated the merits of either reading it straight through or breaking it up (it is rather long book) with another novel every few days. “Copperfield” was published over the course of nineteen months, from May 1849 to November 1850, so I justified taking my time reading. After sixteen chapters I put it aside for two days and picked up John Cheever’s “Falconer”.

Throughout my life I’ve found myself in trouble for various reasons, nothing too serious, and I’ve only seen the inside of a police station once, as a Cub Scout. We were shown around the booking area and had our mug shots and fingerprints taken. “Falconer” is a short novel about a man that has killed his brother and is sent to prison, where he falls in a deeper love than the one he seems to have ever shared with his wife, explores his memories in the long stretches of time he has, and finds freedom not only from the physical prison, it would seem, but from his own emotional captivity. It was fascinating seeing your typical upper-middle-class Cheever character transported into a place where everyone is equally (mostly) powerless.

I’m going to be reading a chapter or two of “Copperfield” a day, and for my other book (I like to juggle, keeps the reading fresh) I’ve picked up “Then We Came To The End” by Joshua Ferris. I’ve read a few of his short stories and liked them and I look forward to seeing how he works in long form.

Too Fast For Fiction

When I was in high school my father, in an effort to improve my grades and possibly improve upon his own intellect, purchased a speed reading course. This was before the internet took over everything, so it must have come out of the back of a magazine. The tapes came in a large, black case, with a strange looking pair of men on the back cover. It was Howard Stephen Berg’s “Mega Speed Reading”, and the photos were of Berg and Kevin Trudeau, the Penn to Berg’s Teller, if I may sully the names of my favorite magicians by making such a comparison.

If you’ve ever suffered from insomnia, you’ve seen Trudeau playing the part of a budget Larry King on an infomercial set made out to look like an actual news program. I have insomnia, hence I’ve seen far too much of Kevin Trudeau. One commercial that comes to mind is a colon cleansing program, pushed by a man with the dubious name of Klee Irwin and a moustache that reminds me of when my daughter eats pudding.

Much of the course consisted of Berg boasting about his abilities, such as reading Howard Stern’s “Private Parts” in about three minutes and passing a test on Stern’s radio show. The basic method was sweeping your hands over the text and skimming, identifying important words, so on and so forth. The ink from some books would build-up on your hands, which brings to mind the song “Informer” by Snow and (yes, I looked it up) MC Shan:

Take me to the station, black up my hands
Trail me down 'cause I'm hanging with the Snowman

I handled the method alright, and read a few books using it, but it felt like sticking a beautiful dinner into a blender, hitting chop, and then sucking the juice with a straw. For example: the following quote from Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit:

A person who can't pay gets another person who can't pay to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two wooden legs to guarantee that he has got two natural legs. It don't make either of them able to do a walking-match.

Those three sentences consist of 51 words. Berg claims to be able to read 25,000 words a minute, or about 416 words a second. That means that someone with Berg’s amazing ability would suck down that simile, given in a dialect, in a tenth of a second.

I love reading, and I wish I could do more of it. I used to spend entire days at the library or on a sunny lawn just plowing through hundreds of pages a day, getting pale when I was inside and red-skinned when I was out. Right now I’m blazing through John Steinbeck’s “The Moon Is Down”, a rich and moving fable from World War Two that was actually used as propaganda for the Allies, passed among the resistance, and banned by the Axis (the punishment for possessing a copy in Italy was death). Blazing for me is the expectation that I’ll be finishing it tonight, or about two days after buying it at the wonderful Book Barn in Niantic, Connecticut.

If I was Berg, however, I’d be done with it in roughly a minute, minute and a half (it’s short, about 110 pages). I have a wife and kid and more kids on the way, a garden and writing and a day job, so my reading time is little now, but you know what? The minute or two or even three (or ten, if it’s Pynchon or certain Faulkner texts) it takes me to get through the back of one sheet and the front of another is a wonderful time, and I feel no desire to flap through it like I’m yanking sheets of toilet paper from a stubborn roll. Some things in life shouldn’t be galloped through to the end, and I’d like to think that fiction is one of them.

(Although I’d like to have all politicians trained to speed read. Then, maybe, if they actually read the laws they pass, they might not do so.)

Non sequitur: How my car's front passenger seat looks right now: