Book Report: Out of Sheer Rage

27. Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence (1997) (5/16/21)

I first read Geoff Dyer a few years ago (my report of that book, White Sands, is here) and thoroughly enjoyed him. He's really smart, a bit neurotic, curious, and a good traveling companion. Recently I reread that book report and was reminded that I have other of Dyer's books—so I pulled this one out. There is a gap of twenty years between the two, and you can see the difference. In Out of Sheer Rage, written when he was in his late 30s, Dyer is full-blown neurotic—ostensibly working on a study of D. H. Lawrence, but . . . not really. Really what he's doing is interrogating the human condition: our obsessions, our insecurities, our waywardness, our yearnings, our torments. He does this by following in Lawrence's footsteps, going to places where DHL himself spent time: his family home in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire; Taormina, Sicily; Oaxaca; and Taos, New Mexico, where DHL's ashes rest. In between, Dyer finds himself, somewhat happily, in Paris, and, very much unhappily, in Rome and Oxford—or simply en route somewhere, in between. So like White Sands, this book becomes something of a travel book—only again, not really. He also reads (or avoids reading) Lawrence, as well as Rilke, Philip Larkin, Thomas Bernhard, Milan Kundera, and others, trying to get a handle on Lawrence's essence. Which ends up always coming back around to Dyer himself. At times he's very funny, at other times fretfully wise. Here are a couple of excerpts (out of many, many that I dogeared—to keep the selection from being entirely random, these are the first and the last that I flagged):

Here he is on a train, on the way to Siciliy:

I read [Lawrence's] Sea and Sardinia. More accurately, I read the first paragraph of Sea and Sardinia over and over until I felt sleepy. I loved the first sentence, its urgency of intention: 'Comes over one an absolute desire to move.' The sentence had ended, left, moved on, almost as soon as it had begun, while I, the diligent reader, was still checking that it had everything it needed to leave, to be a sentence. The whole of the first paragraph was like that, I thought to myself: a train that was moving out fractionally ahead of its appointed time, doors still ajar, leaving the reader running along after it, unsure where it was heading, but convinced of the need to climb aboard before it gathered too much momentum: 'Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.' It was only with that quaint 'whither' that we had the chance to gather our senses and settle down comfortably in our seats. I love that first paragraph, I thought to myself, sleepily. I resolved to look at it more closely, to discuss it 'at length' in my study of Lawrence, the study I was going to Sicily to research. In Rome I'd had that idea of putting together an album of pictures of Lawrence. I still wanted to do that but now, after reading a paragraph of Sea and Sardinia, I also wanted to do a series of travel sketches of places Lawrence had been, an album of travel pictures, I thought, sleepily. Came over me an absolute desire to sleep . . . I opened my eyes once before falling asleep and saw that [his girlfriend] Laura had fallen asleep, in fact everyone in the compartment was sleeping so that it seemed I was standing guard, falling asleep when I was meant to be keeping watch.
     I woke up, other people woke up or slept. I read, looked out of the window, slept, read, or dreamed I read and looked out of the window.

And here he is ruminating about depression and the possibility of "calling it a day, giving up, abandoning any attempt not just at earning a living but at having a life." Ah, but what then? If (short of death) you stop living one way, he observes, "you have to start living in some other way." But is that true?

Should anyone flatter us by asking what we are looking for, what we are searching for, then we think immediately, almost instinctively, in vast terms—God, fulfilment, love—but our lives are actually made up of lots of tiny searches for things like a CD we are not sick of, an out-of-print edition of [DHL's] Phoenix, a picture of Lawrence that I saw when I was seventeen, another identical pair of suede shoes to the ones I am wearing now, even, I suppose, a [breakfast favorite] cornetto integrale, ideally, a place where they serve perfect cornetti integrali each day without fail. Add them together and these little things make up an epic quest, more than enough for one lifetime. 

The details here are a few of the things he's obsessed over in the course of the book. Including, in the end, working on the study of D. H. Lawrence itself: accepting that the quirky passions that drive each of us are what make us who we are and complete us. 

Book Report: Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day

26. Ben Loory, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day (2011) (5/10/21)

This may be the sort of book that you need to savor slowly, a story at a time, but I did not: I hurried through it, simply to get it over with. It consists of 40 very short stories, populated by nameless people and the occasional tea-drinking octopus, walking tree, or play-writing television set, and all manner of weird stuff happens, often with a twist at the end. I suppose the stories might be allegorical, and some of them do give you something to think about in terms of our perceptions of others or our understanding of cause-and-effect or of the nature of dreams (and nightmares). Loory has a wild, extravagant imagination, that's for sure, though the writing style is very  plain, as befits a fable or fairy tale. Too plain for me, and many of the stories felt like they might have been written in response to a prompt—too slight to be considered a full-fledged "story." But again, perhaps the effect is different if you, say, take forty days to read the book, and let the mystery or darkness or whimsy or horror of each story settle in you. I will never know. 

Here is one story in its entirety:

The Shadow

Once there was a man who was afraid of his shadow.
     Then he met it.
     Now he glows in the dark.

I've been reading more experimental fiction lately, and I find I am ready to get back to some more traditional literature. Something that isn't trying to tweak me with its cleverness, but actually has a serious point to make. Though that said, there is an existential gravity to these stories that has haunted me while I've been reading. Upshot: I found this book impressive, but I'm not sure I liked it. I'm also not sure I didn't.

P.S. In his acknowledgments, Loory says that "this book was written exclusively to Alina by Arvo Pärt." Here is that piece of music. It may be a better indicator than this report as to whether this book is something you might enjoy.

Book Report: The Island of Sea Women

25. Lisa See, The Island of Sea Women (2019) (5/8/21)

This is an excellent book that combines a fascinating culture, a history I had not been aware of, and a tale of a long, yet fraught friendship. The culture in question is that of the haenyeo of Jeju Island, south of South Korea: women who harvest the bounty of the sea. Theirs is a matrilocal society, in which the women are in charge of making a living, while the men tend the children and keep house. The history begins in 1938, when Japan occupied Korea, and continues through World War II, the horrific massacres of 1948–49 on Jeju Island, the Korean War, and into the 1970s, which allows us to see how society changed over those years. And the friendship is between Young-sook and Mi-ja, two haenyeo of different backgrounds. There is a framing story as well, set in 2008, when Young-sook, now in her eighties, is approached by a Korean-American family and asked if she recognizes a woman in a photo. Of course, it is Mi-ja, and that launches the full story of their close friendship and how it went awry. 

The writing is excellent, but curiously, I did not flag any passages—maybe simply because I was caught up in the story. It starts off a bit slowly with a certain distance as See describes the women's culture, how they work, what it means to cultivate both dry- and wet-fields, why they engaged in "leaving-home water-work" in Vladivostok, how they fit into the larger society, what the expectations were for family life. See certainly did her research, and it shows in the somewhat encyclopedic treatment. As the two girls become women, get married, have children, the story becomes more emotionally invested, leading ultimately to a resolution that is quite believable and moving. If too late...

Book Report: A Venetian Reckoning

24. Donna Leon, A Venetian Reckoning (1995) (4/29/21)

This is the fourth book (of thirty!) in Donna Leon's Commissario Guido Brunetti series, set in beautiful, moody Venice. (I read a British version; in the States, it's called Death and Judgment.) The story begins with a truck crash, then moves into a murder, and then another murder—that quickly gets whitewashed into a suicide. Prostitution figures in, and success: the two deaths, followed by a third, feature an international lawyer and a couple of high-profile accountants. The action takes us back and forth between Venice and the university town of Padua, a mere half-hour train ride away. We learn about in-house tensions at the police headquarters, or questore. And as always with Commissario Brunetti, we get to salivate at some scrumptious-sounding food:

He brought his attention back to the table and their plate of fettuccine, glistening with the sheen of butter. The [restaurant] owner came back, carrying a small truffle on a white plate in one hand, a metal grater in the other. He bent over della Corte's plate and shaved at the truffle, rose, and bent over Brunetti's plate and did the same. The woody, musty odour wafted up from the still-steaming fettuccine, enveloping not only the three men, but the entire area around them. Brunetti twirled the first forkful and began to eat, giving in whole-heartedly to the sensual delight of the butter, the perfectly cooked noodles, and the savoury, heady taste of the truffles. . . . They said little until the meal was finished, the duck almost as good as the truffles—for Brunetti, nothing was as good as truffles—and they sat with small glasses of calvados in front of them.

I would have to agree about truffles.

As for the mystery, this one ends up being very dark (according to one GoodReads review, it is the darkest in the entire series), involving not just sex trafficking but a more sordid side of sexploitation. When justice is served, in the form of murders, one nods in agreement: such crimes deserve punishment, yet such criminals are rarely caught out. The finale of the book occurs in a whirl, with justice of a different sort interrupted, the hand of corruption in evidence. I know that's cryptic, but I don't want to spoil the book. Phone records play a key role.

Here's a humorous passage that takes place in the police station. The Signorina is the secretary of the Vice-Questore; she pays a lot of attention (well placed) to her appearance and seems to know people all over town and in all walks of life—people that aid the investigation in all manner of ways. 

Brunetti went up the steps towards his office. Before he got to the top of the steps, however, he met Signora Elettra, emerging from the end of the corridor and turning down the steps towards him. 'Oh, there you are, commissario. The Vice-Questore has been asking for you.' Brunetti stopped and gazed up at her as she descended the steps towards him. A long saffron scarf, as light as gossamer, trailed behind her, borne aloft at the level of her shoulders by the streams of hot air that flowed up the staircase. If the Nike of Samothrace had stepped from her pedestal, regained her head, and begun to descend the steps of the Louvre, she would have looked much like this.
     'Um?' Brunetti said as she reached him
     'The Vice-Questore, sir. He said he'd like very much to speak to you.'
     'Like very much to,' Brunetti found himself repeating, impressed by the phrasing of the message. Paola [his wife, a professor of English literature] often joked about a Dickens character who predicted the arrival of bad things by announcing that the wind was coming from a certain quarter, Brunetti could never remember which character, or which quarter, but he did know that, when Patta 'would like' to talk to him, the wind could be said to be coming from that same quarter.
     'Is he in his office?' Brunetti asked, turning and going back down the stairs beside the young woman.
     'Yes, he is, and he's spent much of the morning on the phone.' This, too, was often a sign of a looming storm.

As always, I enjoyed getting to wander through the streets of Venice with the earnest Commissario, spend time with his wife and daughter, and meet a few interesting characters, some good, some not so good. I will look forward to the fifth book in the series.

Book Report: The Book of Delights

23. Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019) (4/23/21)

I love Ross Gay. (I've shared a couple of his poems before, here and here, and you can hear him in conversation with Pam Houston here.) In this book of 102 "essayettes," he takes on delight—daily: it was a project, begun on his 42nd birthday, ending on his 43rd. I love daily projects, too. (Obviously, he provides here a selection from the year.) 

The subjects range far and wide, from pecans to black bumblebees, a Rothko basketball backboard to a pawpaw grove, coffee without a saucer to Donny Hathaway on Pandora. Friends and family populate the essays. Some of the musings are focused, while some veer here and there. I especially enjoyed the pieces that include close attention and description, or some quirky retelling of an interaction he had, or a meditation on words and meaning, or, especially, a revelation, an insight, a sort of "note to self."

Like here, in #88, "Touched," after he has lovingly described three individuals who might be called eccentric or innocent, might be considered "touched," he writes:

All of these examples make clear that touched often also means exuberant or enthusiastic, both of which qualities can provoke in us, when we are feeling small and hurtable, something like embarrassment, which again maybe points to the terror at our own lurking touchedness. When I watched the child doing his wonky, unselfconscious moonwalk [to the song "Billy  Jean" while standing in line], I had a feeling that I might have then identified as embarrassment, aware of this kid's obliviousness, his immersion—his delight.
     But I am coming to identify that feeling of embarrassment as something akin to tenderness, because in witnessing someone's being touched, we are also witnessing someone's being moved, the absence of which in ourselves is a sorrow, and a sacrifice. And witnessing the absence of movement in ourselves by witnessing its abundance in another, moonwalking the half and half, . . . can hurt. Until it becomes, if we are lucky, an opening.

Or here, from #10, "Writing by Hand":

I often write [prose] on the computer, piling sentences up quickly, cutting and pasting, deleting whole paragraphs without thinking anything of it. For these essays, though, I decided that I'd write by hand, mostly with Le Pens, in smallish notebooks. I can tell you a few things—first, the pen, the hand behind the pen, is a digressive beast. It craves, in my experience anyway, the wending thought, and crafts/imagines/conjures a syntax to contain it. On the other hand, the process of thinking that writing is, made disappearable by the delete button, makes a whole part of the experience of writing, which is the production of a good deal of florid detritus, flotsam and jetsam, all those words that mean what you have written and cannot disappear (the scratch-out its own archive), which is the weird path toward what you have come to know, which is called thinking, which is what writing is.
     For instance, the previous run-on sentence is a sentence fragment, and it happened in part because of the really nice time my body was having making this lavender Le Pen make the loop-de-looping we call language. I mean writing. The point: I'd no sooner allow that fragment to sit there like a ripe zit if I was typing on a computer. And consequently, some important aspect of my thinking, particularly the breathlessness, the accruing syntax, the not quite articulate pleasure that evades or could give a fuck about the computer's green corrective lines (how they injure us!) would be chiseled, likely with a semicolon and a proper predicate, into something correct, and, maybe, dull. To be sure, it would have less of the actual magic writing is, which comes from our bodies, which we actually think with, quiet as it's kept.

And finally, I'll quote this, from #87, "Loitering" (which is also a meditation on production and consumption, racism and repression, as well as safety and laughter), because it caused me to go in search of this photo:

Carrie Mae Weems, Mom at Work, 1978–1984

There is a Carrie Mae Weems photograph of a woman in what looks to be some kind of textile factory, with an angel embroidered to the left breast of her shirt, where her heart resides. The woman, like the angel, has her arms splayed wide almost in ecstasy, as though to embrace everything, so in the midst of her glee is she. Every time I see that photo, after I smile and have a genuine bodily opening on account of witnessing this delight, which is a moment of black delight, I look behind her for the boss. Uh-oh, I think. You're in a moment of nonproductive delight. Heads up!

Hate speech

I got dinged this evening on Facebook for "hate speech." I was commenting on a friend's post. He remarked, "Over 40% of Americans and another 40% of the military have rejected getting the vaccine... doesn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." I responded, "Americans are idiots. Well, 40% of them. They prove it time and time again. In so many ways."

I didn't actually say anything so very different from what the original poster said. Did I? I was merely expressing support for getting the damn vaccine.

I have to wonder what Facebook's algorithm is. "Americans are idiots" = hate speech? Is it that simplistic?

Fortunately, I have been weaning myself off of Facebook. They're just doing me a favor. 

A few weeks ago I got "canceled" for a comment I made on a "friend's" FB page. (She unfriended me, summarily.) Granted, the comment reflected my ignorance of the subject—women being banned from wearing hijabs. It was strange, and a little painful, to be erased so swiftly. I would have preferred to have been educated on the issue. But I got over it. There is a lot of self-righteous judgment out there. I happened to be on the receiving end of it, and that was an interesting lesson for me.

So now I'm in Facebook jail for 24 hours. If I try to post, or even simply "like," anything, I get this message:

Yeah, that's Derek Chauvin getting removed from court in handcuffs underneath Facebook's admonishment. Talk about deserving punishment.

I no longer recall what my previous infraction was. Something egregious, no doubt. I am such a bully.

Meanwhile, in this great country of ours, bills are being proposed right and left—by which I mean, in red states—aimed at restricting people's ability to vote and clamping down on the right (First Amendment, dammit) to protest. I have a general sense of uneasiness, despite the respite we've gained from booting that buffoon out of the White House. I am not looking forward to the midterm elections. Too many Americans are idiots. 

More geocaching!

On Saturday, the usual suspects—me (annevoi), David (FifiBonacci), and Alastair (Mimring)—headed up to Henry Coe State Park to find another of the 100-Mile Hike caches. This one was our sixth. We need three more. But the likelihood of our getting them all before the hot days of summer is slim, since it looks like Alastair will be off to Tanzania soon for work.

Nonetheless: six down! three to go! We are making progress! This one was perhaps the longest hike in the series, 14 miles, with serious elevation changes. It was a workout. Yet we got all 42 of the caches we sought, so yay for that. However, we somehow forgot to note the keyword in the 100-Mile cache that was that day's object. Yikes! It was the whole reason we were out there, to get that one scribbled word!

Fortunately, the cache owner, Ullii/Julie, was most accommodating and surrendered the word (it was, aptly, "up") without us needing to beg. So we were left with a sense of accomplishment and many happy memories. Here are a few photos from the day:

Winter Pond: the cache is at the base of the post David is leaning on

Just some beautiful scenery: the newly leafing oaks were splendid!

The wildflowers were out too: here, vetch.

An oak. There was a cache here. Perfect place for one.

Mimring trying (in vain) to capture the glory of the
wildflower-bedazzled setting.

Just lovely, no?

One thing I love about geocaching is that you tend to be
lured off trail, to magnificent spots you wouldn't
otherwise have visited.

New oak leaves. Late this year.

Sidalcea malviflora (“checker mallow”)

Up in a tree, cache in hand—
does it get any better?

On our way back down. There's a cache in 
that tree on the left. Just saying.

Unfortunately, when we got back to our car, we found a ticket for $71.50—because in our eagerness to get on the hunt, we'd forgotten that this might be a fee area? Yeah. It was. Which makes every one of our 42 caches worth (...calculating...) $1.70. Next time I'll try to exercise more situational awareness. Dammit.