Ending Moravia

Moravia's The Conformist isn't doing it for me so I think I will put it down, about halfway in. There are just so many books on my shelves waiting to be read that I shouldn't allocate time and attention to something that fails to energize me.

There are certainly virtues to reading the "minor literature" of a period, the stuff that was heralded at the time but didn't stand the stern reductive force that the canon imposes over time: only a few books for any given time or place tend to command attention decades or centuries later, particularly in other lands. My Major Oral exam in my PhD program, which I designed myself (as is the custom) focused on the minor prose writers of the 1820s-1830s, people like Orest Somov, Vladimir Odoevsky, Ivan Lazhechnikov and some others whose names I've forgotten. For my dissertation I read people like Panaev, Mikhailov, Askochensky and others, also largely lost to the sands of time. 

You can learn a lot about a period from these books. What were people focused on and worried about at the time? What was their concept of human nature and what -- in the author's view -- made their contemporaries the way they are? 

Moravia focuses relentlessly on fascism. How could Italy -- and individual Italians -- let themselves become Fascists. Writing in late 40s-early 50s, the palette Moravia reaches for is a mix of Proust and Faust: traumas visited on the child by fucked up parents create aberrant behaviors, guilt and a desire to be like everyone else. That's about it.

Who knows, I may go back to it. I doubt it.

Books Are Magic

In Princeton Ted recommended that we listen to the Sound Exploder podcast on our drive back to NC. Since we were indeed a little tired of our current list of podcasts and had even -- you may be shocked to hear -- squabbled a little over listening to a little too much of mine (so we listened to more of Mary's for a while), we decided to take Ted's recommendation. We listened to Lindsay Buckingham on the early days of Fleetwood Mac and the crafting of their first hit, whose words I could mumble imprecisely but right now I can't recall for the life of me what song it was. Then we listened to Lindsay and Stevie Nicks at length about the backstory of their predecessor band to Fleetwood Mac and one of the songs on their first record, which Mary had never heard and doesn't really care to hear again, but we heard about their early days and time passed as the miles of Maryland's Eastern Shore disappeared in the rearview (Google had sent us down Route 13 to Annapolis to avoid construction).

Finally all of that ended and it came time for the episode I had picked out for me: Emma Straub talking about the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs. I had assumed that Straub was a member of the band, but she was in fact not but had first been Stephen Merritt's personal assistant and then traveled with band for a decade running their merch table while they toured in support of the triple album that cemented them into cultural history. Goes to show you how music connoisseurship declines once you have kids and a job.

Anyhoo, after Straub spent a decade touring with the band she published books and opened a bookstore (Books Are Magic) in Brooklyn that has become something of a thing and now has two branches, but will apparently open no more. I like that. I will need to visit it.

Not because I need books, mind you. I have a lot of them and one of the successes of my vacation was that I got rid of a couple of them, giving one to friends and leaving another in an AirBnb. I also did not stop and peruse the shelves of any of the excellent looking used book emporia in upper New England. 

I will get more books, however, in the fullness of time.

Mild overwhelm

Back in the saddle for a day with a very full list of tasks and meetings that will persist for a couple of weeks. Towards the end of yesterday we learned that our upcoming fundraiser with two well and rightly loved governors will be probably 40% larger than any we've had and has already well exceeded its seemingly ambitious fundraising target. Sadly, not too many of the attendees will be my close friends (thanks so much, guys), so this will be really a fundraiser rather than a party with friends. Hopefully there will be some food leftover and we can invite people the next night to clean up the remains, something that has evolved into a beloved tradition. I guess I just have to embrace the true fundraising aspect of it.

Meanwhile there are things I need to do out the wazoo at work. Clients to serve, notes to input, expenses to log. My new associate Amanda is off on vacation for a couple of weeks. 

To say nothing of the things that need doing around the house. And tennis that needs to be played. 

The doorbell just rang downstairs and I went to see who it was, since I saw no delivery van. It was a guy with long hair and a beard and a hardcover book in his right hand who said he was out advocating for peace on earth. I told him we supported his cause, but needed to get ready for work.

Home again

And so we have returned from our epic 3-week adventure in the north, which included:

• ~2500 miles of driving
• Sleeping in 9 different beds
• Meals with 13 different people or couples in 6 different states
• 2 instances of dodging World Cup games (including the final) using advanced knowledge of NJ infrastructure

All in all, a most successful trip, from which more stories may yet be gleaned. For today, I must focus on reentry to the land of the working, as my young associate Amanda heads off on her own two-week car trip extravaganza en famille tomorrow and I must make use of this single working day to synch up with her.

Also, it is Spirit Week and Alma Mater day at the office and I have to find something in school colors (CHHS, natch) to wear to the office.

More on the paragraph

As I often do, I brought some more serious books along with the espionage/mystery stuff with me on vacation. I started with the Ernaux I already mentioned, partially because I knew it was bite-sized and easily consumed in almost one sitting. Next on deck was Alberto Moravia's 1951 The Conformist, which I picked up used somewhere. Now that I poke about the internet a bit, I see that the book doesn't appear to have been received that well and isn't even considered to be Moravia's best, but probably survives in print because of attention brought to it by Bertolucci's 1970 film. But somebody translated it into English and it has survived so here I am, reading it. It's OK. I may come back to it later.

One noteworthy feature of the book is its rather lengthy paragraphs. I have railed a little on the prevalence of the one-sentence paragraph earlier on the blog. In Moravia paragraphs can easily run a page, a page and a half. My gut says that he displays a bias towards the long paragraph because it signals the high style and seriousness of modernism. Moravia's book is shot through with hints of Kafka and Proust if not Joyce, Faulkner and Broch, those other high priests of modernist interiority as signaled by paragraphs that at times strike the modern reader as veritably interminable.

I've also been dipping into the New Yorker archives here on vacation on my new tablet and have started reading the first 1961 Rachel Carson article that expanded into the 1962 book Silent Spring. Carson also prefers long paragraphs. Looking at them I can see obvious places where a modern editor would probably break them into new ones, on account of a shift in narratorial focus.

There are of course no hard and fast rules as to when paragraphs should begin and end. They are more or less supposed to contain units of focus or content. A bias towards longer paragraphs on the part of an author or (dare I say it) an era seems to indicate human subjects with greater integrative capabilities. To the extent that -- as many have said -- we live in an attention economy, the inability and/or wholesale disinclination to attend to things for longer hollows us out. When Our Robot Overlords finally arrive to conquer, they may discover there is nothing here to seize.

Laura Lippman

The thing about mysteries is, or rather are, that because many people enjoy reading them and many people secretly aspire to be writers, many try their hand at writing them. And there's a bit of a craft to it, a bunch of conventions to help one along. And so, it turns out, a pretty decent quantity of people get good at writing them, which makes the pleasant serendipity of finding one seemingly at random possible.

That's what happened to me with Laura Lippman. I picked up the first (for me -- Lady in the Lake, 2019) of her books at some kind of free location: maybe a little free library or in a coffee shop. I liked it well enough that I picked up a second one (What the Dead Know, 2007) in a used bookstore. I just finished that one and am delighted to have a new author I can look for in used bookstores or libraries, perhaps even a new bookstore, as there's no reason for me to wish to deny her revenue, though it seems like she is doing well enough so providing for her livelihood may be less important than supporting a used bookseller.

The Trifecta

Today I accomplished my summer vacation trifecta. On this trip I have

1. Eaten fried clams
2. Eaten a lobster roll
3. Swum in very cold mountain river water. In fact, not once but thrice in the same day

As of now I can pretty much go home now and/or devote the rest of vacation to delivering Mary to suitable photo locations and then walking back and forth getting in extra steps while Mary photographs things. Which is substantially what vacation is anyway.

But it is rare to accomplish all three in one trip.

Up in the holler, South Duxbury, VT

After a bunch of automotive adventures, some of which I may in the fullness of time recount, we find ourselves up a holler near the "town" of South Duxbury, Vermont in a little cabin. Maybe 450 square feet, all super-efficiently laid out. Really the stationary equivalent of a Winnebago/RV. As if to demonstrate this, we've already had one minor squabble about washing dishes. She was wrong, I was right.

Anyhoo, yesterday evening as we were sitting at the compact dinner table eating ravioli and an arugula salad with slivered almonds and strawberries when we heard a little bustling activity outside our window. Someone, it seemed, was trying to get into the shed in the back which holds the garbage cans and various other sundries. When I investigated it yesterday evening, the shed's doors were fasted by not one but three different latches, which clearly implied there were bears in the area.

And so, a bear. I thought I saw a black shape out there. We turned off all the lights so we could see better outside. The pathetic little flashlights on our phones were no help, but I did hear a growl.

A little chat with the AirBnb host confirmed that bears had been known the bustle about back there (hence the three locks) but that none had ever tried to get into the cabin.

Having spent a lot of time in Alaska, Mary has done an awful lot of internet research about bear attacks. She did some more. For my part, I got all traces of food out of the car out in the driveway, blasting first a little Hendrix and then (when I recalled the snacks in my tennis bag) Gang of Fours "Love like Anthrax" through our little portable speaker to keep the bears away. I returned safely.

Happening

In between mystery novels I just read through Annie Ernaux's Happening, a 2000 memoir of her 1963 abortion. 

One wouldn't think Ernaux would be as distinctive as she is. Maybe plenty of women have written unsparing narratives of their own abortions and I just haven't come across them because I'm a guy. Maybe there are others who are gimlet-eyed observers of the simple of time, changes in mores and how a storyteller can refract and embody it all.

But I don't know them. All too often the quest for distinctiveness forces authors and artists to reach for some kind of quirk instead of just being themselves on the page, canvas or whatever. Ernaux skips all that and just does what she has to do. She feels, thinks and remembers deeply and lays it out for the reader. I'll keep reading her.

If only her books were a little longer.  

Bye bye Neymar

Seeing Neymar shit-talking with the Norwegian goalkeeper before an absolutely meaningless penalty kick yesterday in the 100th minute as Brazil prepared to crash out of the World Cup was an appropriate coda to an ultimately undistinguished career. Yes he scored a lot of goals. Yes he was very talented and sometimes fun to watch. But ultimately Neymar will go down as a footnote to history, maybe the soccer version of Dominique Wilkins or Russell Westbrook: someone who was fun to watch but never really won anything.

What's worse, Neymar was the one who really popularized the weak-assed tippy toe stalling penalty kick. To my mind it's just wrong and emblematic of someone who lacks commitment. The penalty kick is for the most part an unfair contest between shooter and keeper. It should more or less always result in a goal or a sense of failure for the shooter. Neymar's PK is a net loss to the game.

His retirement from soccer is a net gain for the sport. Ponder last night. Why not let some young kid take the PK? Why not, for example, Endrick? Having a new face get the last goal would have been net prospective to Brazilian soccer. Neymar was retrospective, and going out like that tells us a lot about Brazilian soccer as a whole. They have a lot of talent -- plenty of the players out there were familiar -- but are a pale shadow of their glory days. It's a shame. But the great Brazilian teams of the 60s were kind of like the Celtics or UCLA Bruins of their day. The competition wasn't as great yet.

Blazing away, Belfast, Maine

We're at the tail end of this heat dome in Maine. We had come up here to beat the heat, which we'll be able to do starting tomorrow. It's 89 outside now and falling, but it was touching 100 as I hustled up here from Cambridge on Thursday to pick Mary up at Portland. Not so hot for NC, more than plenty hot for ME. Thankfully, our place has AC, a window unit just big enough to cool the 600 or so square feet here.

David and I played tennis in the park today. Hard courts. My feet and calves are killing me, my knee may follow suit.

Afterwards, we popped by the snack bar to survey its bill of fare, expecting hot dogs and the like. Instead, it turns out they feature such things as lobster empanadas. I had lunch for today, but we may well be back tomorrow or the next day.

77th and Amsterdam, 8:30 pm

On a blistering Tuesday evening in Manhattan Natalie and I enjoyed ice cream after a nice Omakase on Columbus. Sitting by a blacktop watching mixed gender 3X3 soccer, two other younger boys kicking ball through the older kids game. Everyone around, it seemed, had football on their mind, with France having just dispatched Sweden 3-0 in the Meadowlands earlier that evening. We were killing time while NJ Transit got done ferrying the hordes of spectators from the stadium back to Manhattan or wherever they were staying. 

Then there was an incident. An hispanic guy in his 20s(?) was laying on the ground leaning against the fence around the blacktop growling. We didn't know why. A silver-haired woman, whom I christed "the mayor" has been watching everything. She goes over and talks to him. He comes back and sits with her.

Slowly, some affluent white kids who were playing basketball or had some other incident with the hispanic guy trickle over and apologize to him. They praise his basketball skills. At last the tallest of them, a guy, also jeunesse doree, comes over and apologizes. They hug.

Amazing.

Natalie and I were primed for wonder at this moment of urban transcendence, having seen an amazing short documentary on the history of NYC, animated by Stanley Tucci, in the basement of the Museum of the City of New York. It made each of us proud to be present or past New Yorkers. Go and watch it.