Bookish Thoughts

As I was fixing my exciting dinner of scrambled eggs and put-by asparagus from the summer Market, I flicked on the National Book Awards, momentarily forgetting that the Awards were actually presented last Wednesday and this was merely a recap. The confusion became pronounced when they announced the winner for fiction (Lily Tuck) because suddenly I thought, wait a minute, this sounds familiar. Didn’t she win last year? Try last Wednesday, ye of feeble mind and even feebler memory.

But my post is about something else. Several small points were made in the course of the Awards Ceremony and before I turned the whole thing off (how can you take seriously an Awards Ceremony where half-way through, the host, Garrison Keillor, says “and now let’s all get to our dinner here; we’ll get back to the prizes after we’re done eating”), I did take note of the following: only 96 million Americans read any fiction whatsoever. The announcers thought this was tremendous. I thought it was paltry. Another stat: the vast majority of sold books are never read. Fine, I admit I am a sinner here: I covet fresh books like others covet microbrewery beer or a good night’s sleep. And I do not finish a number of them. But is it really the case that most purchased books aren’t even cracked to the first page?

In a sense it is a relief. If I ever write the First Great Novel, I needn’t worry about delivering my message with aplomb. All I need to do is cozy up to someone at Borders and get them to display it at one of the front tables and issue one of those store-people cards that says “hey, like wow! You really need to read this! It was a favorite here among the Café employees and the noon-crowd too!” To fully appreciate the import of such a statement you need only go one day to Borders at around twelve and take a look at the noon crowd.

Overwhelmed

Oscar is complaining about an overcrowded email Inbox. I am sympathetic. Mine has long crossed the 1000-message mark and since I have a separate Eudora program on my home computer, you might as well double that, because whatever folly guides me to preserve email in my office is perniciously at work at home as well.

Yes, I have files. The trouble is most email does not fit into the dozens and dozens of files that are already in place and I am loathe to add more because they are now scrolling off my screen, hence I am likely to forget all about them, let alone their content.

But this is not my point, because it is one Oscar has amply covered.

I just wanted to add that I am similarly beleaguered with regular mail****. A picture tells it all. Below, witness my mail from this week alone, and this is (like with important email) after I pulled out all urgent matters and items that are 100% trash. Of course, as a result of the onslaught of the “ambiguous and difficult to classify” mail, I am loathe to even approach my mailbox each day. And so oftentimes I just ignore it, resulting in the mailbox depicted below as of this morning (it is Sunday and yes, I am okay with the idea that the US Postal Service should not make deliveries on Saturdays and any other days it wants to call "postal holidays"):

****BTW: Last night I went to have dinner with a lovely couple (blogger friend!)***** and all I kept thinking was – I wonder where they hid their mail, because their counter was meticulously barren of a single shred of paper. The last time I myself had friends for dinner I hid my stacks as well (I have my secret hiding spots!) and then promptly forgot about them. Two weeks later, when the lights began to flicker, it struck me that I hadn’t written a check to MG&E recently. I’m not sure it was MG&E giving me the three-flicker notice, but I was grateful that something had jogged my memory to retrieve all that was buried in some forgotten
crawlspace.

***** Do yourself a favor and cook up the salmon chowder I was served (recipe here). Yum! I also wanted to devour (with an embrace!) the children. They don't come any sweeter.

I'll pay someone good money to come and tell me what I should do with all this. 

After I photographed it, I closed it and left it alone. I'll worry about it tomorrow. 

Message to women: speak loudly, but make yourself small in other ways… how sad. How true.

Ann scooped the link that I’d been thinking about all morning – the NYT interview with the Austrian Nobel laureate, Elfriede Jelinek.

Ann’s post highlighted the same paragraphs that sent me spinning (emph. my own):

I describe the relationship between man and woman as a Hegelian relationship
between master and slave. As long as men are able to increase their sexual value through work, fame or wealth, while women are only powerful through their body, beauty and youth, nothing will change. ...

A woman who becomes famous through her work reduces her erotic value. A woman is permitted to chat or babble, but speaking in public with authority is still the greatest transgression.

(You're suggesting that your achievements, like winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, detract from your overall appeal.)

Certainly! A woman's artistic output makes her monstrous to men if she does not know to make herself small at the same time and present herself as a commodity. At best people are afraid of her.

The interview has other disturbingly vivid assertions that Ann bypassed:

I consider the current presidency to be dangerous to the world. I am really afraid of Bush, actually less of him than of the deputies standing in the shadows behind him. Compared to their activities, even Thomas Pynchon's paranoid conspiracy theories are just children's books.

And finally there is an interesting speculation about the relationship between art and political engagement:

(Why do you suppose European artists are so much more politically engaged than American ones?)

The smaller a group, the easier it is for more people to argue and enter into discussions. The U.S. is vast. It's too large. The intellectuals hide out in enclaves, in big cities or universities, like a bunch of chickens hiding from a fox.

Sunday entertainment: let’s see what the British royalty is up to

Wouldn’t you know it, the Prince of Wales has gotten himself into a pickle, with a statement he issued concerning educational attainment. It seems that he had complained “ about a learning culture based on a child-centered system which admits no failure, that led people to believe they could succeed without work or talent.”

Well naturally he has to apologize. After all, critics right away interpreted the comments as “meaning people could not rise above their station.” So British to worry about stations!

But if I were to bet my shilling, I would say that the Prince was not thinking about station-attainment. Instead, mightn’t he have been following American elections and was now merely commenting on the ascent of our man George (such a British-sounding name, isn’t it?) to positions of leadership (“…people to believe they could succeed without work or talent”)?

And I’m not sure what I think of his rebuttal either. When he says “In my view it is just as great an achievement to be a plumber or a bricklayer as it is to be a lawyer or a doctor,” is he publicly manifesting his disdain for bricklayers and plumbers?