Jumping around.

Still holding off on the Catch-22 discussion. Probably just going to make a mega-post when I finish it. The book is mad depressing in these last 100 pages. Not that I'm not still enjoying it between the crying jags.

I've done nothing to moderate my habit of jumping back and forth from book to book. I can't decide if it's a better or worse way to go about reading things. On the one hand, if I get bored with the way one book is going, I can take a break and go to another book, then go back to the aforementioned book when I've got more time. I feel this is the best way to read certain authors--for example, I read one chapter of Catch-22 and ten pages of Cormac McCarthy a night. Any more than that and I tend to get a little bogged down. With Catch-22, I feel like I'm drowning in all the words after a while because Heller's writing style is so frantic and shifts focus so quickly, so I need those breaks to fully comprehend what I've read. With McCarthy there's that similar flood of words, but McCarthy's writing style is the opposite of frantic--I'd say he comes as close as a human being can to emulating with words the desert he focuses on in so much of his work. And if you were sitting in the desert, just staring at it, for ages, you'd get overwhelmed, because there's just so much of it. But if you just take small trips out there, looking for a bit and then leaving, knowing it'll be there when you come back, it's much easier to focus on each beautiful detail, and you appreciate the beauty all the more comparing that unparalleled landscape to whatever sheltered little dwelling you're going back to.

But then on the other hand, I buy Stephen Fry's new book on a whim and of course can't just wait until I'm done with my other books, and then I can't put it down for love of Stephen Fry.

I mean, just look at him.

 
This new book is called The Fry Chronicles, and it's an account of his life mostly college and afterwards (there's a bit in there about his childhood and adolescence, but apparently he's got an entire separate book on that, which I will be acquiring in short order). The book is just a joy to read. Fry writes exactly like you'd expect him to, so he's got a really pleasant, down-to-earth (and often self-deprecating) way with words. Some might argue that I only love the book so much because I have a truly inappropriate amount of affection for Stephen Fry, but I don't think that's the case. The book is really just delightful to read. I mean, I'm only a hundred or so pages in, so I suppose it could take a horrible turn, but I've more faith in Fry than that.

My only issue with the book is that I keep calling it "The Why of Fry" in my head, because that's a much catchier title and also an episode of Futurama.

Don't worry, Other Fry, I love you just as much.

DONE!

I had all these grand plans for going in-depth about one particular section of Catch-22 that caused me to break down into inconsolable weeping, but more on that later, because I actually manage to finish one of the ten or so books I've been trying to read simultaneously since this summer.

My future home.

I always have such an undeserved sense of accomplishment after I've finished a book. I mean, honestly, all it really says is that I've managed to sit still and run my eyes back and forth across a page for several hours. But lately college isn't giving me much to feel accomplished about, so I'll take every small victory I can get.

The book in question was the third in Clive Barker's Abarat series, which I may have mentioned in here before. It manages to combine an intriguing story and a frankly totally bitchin' fantasy world with absolutely gorgeous art. I can't even imagine the amount of effort that goes into each book since I'm pretty sure all the pictures are actually paintings (as in the images in the books were originally paintings, not Barker hand-paints each and every book). This particular installment, entitled Absolute Midnight, was a bit of a behemoth at 569 pages, but Barker knows how to move a story along pretty well, and most of my delay in finishing it was due to being distracted by other books. I don't want to say too much because the series really is worth reading for yourself if you're into the fantasy genre. Barker does a great job of creating genuinely likeable characters, and the world he's created for these books really is fantastic. The art does a great job of really pulling the reader into the story. And I love to look at pretty pictures anyway, so the story is almost just a bonus for me. I will say that I think the first book is probably still my favorite, but it's a good enough story that it deserves more than one book. I just hope it doesn't get dragged out too long, because I would really love to see some sort of conclusion.

I'll leave you with this instead of further plot summary.

Anyway, now I can get back to dividing most of my reading time between Catch-22 and The Border Trilogy. Or I would, if I hadn't accidentally bought a copy of Stephen Fry's new book. Plus I've still got MetaMaus and Best American Comics of 2011 sitting on my shelf. Oh dear.

More on McCarthy.

I noticed something while reading All the Pretty Horses the other night, so I'm going to talk a bit about that instead of... not McCarthy, or something.

So I was reading about the horrifying escapades of John Grady Cole, and I came across this passage (it's when he's talking to Alejandra's great-aunt):

For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on. In my own life I saw these strings whose origins were endless enact the deaths of great men in violence and madness. Enact the ruin of a nation.
(All the Pretty Horses, pg 231)

Reading that section, I was reminded of a bit from Suttree when he discovers the ragpicker dead (the ragpicker is probably my favorite character in Suttree):

The old man lay dim and bleared in his brass bed. Suttree leaned back in the chair and pushed at his eyes with the back of his hand. The day had grown dusk, the rain eased. Pigeons flapped up overhead and preened and crooned. The keeper of this brief vigil said that he'd guessed something of the workings in the wings, the ropes and sandbags and the houselight toggles. Heard dimly a shuffling and coughing beyond the painted drop of the world.
(Suttree, pg 421-422)

These passages are not perfectly similar by any means, but there's a very definite similarity--both referring to the world at large as a sort of show put on by a hidden higher power, both referring to someone who was able to peer "behind the curtain" and catch a glimpse of what was going on behind the scenes. Again, this sort of attitude is so characteristic of McCarthy. If I were better at philosophy I'd try to throw some of that in for effect, but I really don't know anything about philosophy, and I'd just make a fool of myself.

I mean, I do know that this is a sort of deterministic view. But both of these characters seem less in line with the idea of an actual higher power or fate controlling everyone's lives and more of the opinion that there is some sort of malevolent force just, for lack of a better term, screwing everyone over all the time. In All the Pretty Horses, she's probably talking about actual people--government higher-ups and whatever sort of shadowy people enact revolutions. In Suttree, it seems more likely that he is actually talking about some sort of higher power, given some of his earlier conversations with the ragpicker. But Suttree doesn't seem to approve of whatever higher power he may or may not credit for everything that's happened, and the ragpicker definitely wasn't a fan of the being in the sky.

Both excerpts, and both books in general (although Suttree more so), remind me of the "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquy, which I'm sure we all know but I'll put it here anyway.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
(Macbeth)

I think if you'd asked Suttree, he probably would have agreed that life seemed like a tale told by an idiot.

Mostly links, less books.

I was going to talk about Kurt Vonnegut or something, but instead I'm going to have a bit of a ramble. I found some cool links (read: I lifted them off other people's Facebooks), and I wanted to compile them somewhere so I could stop having them as tabs in my browser, because they're making Facebook load really slowly.

This one I found because a friend had linked it on another friend's Facebook, and for some reason Facebook thinks I should be creeping on certain people's Facebook pages? I don't know. Anyway, little known fact (is it? I guess I really don't talk about myself that much; do people just make assumptions about me because of that?), I actually really like beat poetry and that sort of thing. That one up there is a lovely poem, and I love the sound of that man's voice. I like the emotion. I even like the anger, even though I don't like angry people, but some things we do have a right to be angry about.

DREAM/DAY, which I absolutely stole from my friend Matt, who actually found it and posted it on Facebook (Matt, if you're reading this, some day I will develop my own opinions instead of just reading everything you tell me is good; and maybe I'll stop getting everything interesting from Facebook and branch out a little). It's a blog, of sorts, just a guy going about his day, but the way he describes everything is great--wicked sense of humor he's got--and the writing style really appeals to me. It's very fragmented and stream of consciousness and just kind of odd.

This is nothing to do with books at all but I want to make these so much because they sound so delicious.

And a mash-up, which I've seen circulating around the internet for a while, but it is really fantastic, and I have a huge weakness for anything that makes use of the soundtrack to Inception. It's not writing, or anything like writing, it's music, but I guess they can go together? Although for me they usually don't; I don't like to listen to music when I read because it interferes with the rhythm of the words. So perhaps writing is a different sort of music? I don't know if I like that, that's a bit fanciful for my taste.

Perhaps I should pursue, among the many other self-improvements I've undertaken, going about being less nailed to the ground all the time. Perhaps being fanciful is a good thing every once and a while?

Speaking of fanciful, I'm still working through the third book of Clive Barker's Abarat series, which is a very good series that I think pretty much everyone can enjoy. I was going to find a picture from it to put up here but when I Google Image searched for it I got mostly terrible anime fan-art, so now I'm upset and I'm not going to give you anything. Go read it for yourself if you want to see all the pictures. (They're beautiful, by the way, please read it.)

I will give you one picture, because I took a picture of a cat today that I really liked. I'm sorry more of this wasn't about books, I'm a bit not all there right now. Too much something.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote a book about a cat once, I think.

Enjoy the cat picture and good night.

Where we all try to remember what the actual definition of Catch-22 is.

I'm only just now over halfway through Catch-22 after having owned a copy for over a year. I realize this makes me kind of a bad person, and I really am sorry. In fairness, I did spend a lot of that time in Ireland, and I read small books because I spent most of that semester living out of a backpack.

But I still feel like I need to apologize to someone for it (Heller? Yossarian? My father?), just because Catch-22 really is that amazing. It might possibly be the funniest book I've ever read while at the same time being one of the saddest.

There are so many incredible parts in Catch-22 that it would take ages to address all of them. The whole Washington Irving debacle hits me as being just so brilliantly hilarious; in fact, I'm pretty sure the exact moment I realized I would enjoy the book was in the first chapter, when Yossarian is in the hospital censoring letters:

To break the monotony he invented games. Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an, and the. That erected more dynamic intralinear tensions, he felt, and in just about every case left a message far more universal.
 (Catch-22, pg 8)

What I actually intended to write about in this particular post, amusing and highly relevant censorship jokes aside, was a particular chapter I read just the other night. This chapter deals with the group chaplain having somewhat of a personal crisis. He believes he has seen some sort of divine premonition while presiding over the funeral of a young man named Snowden who was killed in combat. What the chaplain has actually seen, however, is merely Yossarian sitting naked in a tree watching the funeral from a distance. Yossarian is naked because he decided to never wear a uniform again after Snowden was wounded in his plane and bled all over Yossarian while dying. The ending of this chapter is beautiful:

So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were Bleak House, Treasure Island, Ethan Frome and The Last of the Mohicans. Did it then seem possible, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to the riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall? Had Almighty God, in all His infinite wisdom, really been afraid that men six thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to heaven? Where the devil was heaven? Was it up? Down? There was no up or down in a finite but expanding universe in which even the vast, burning, dazzling, majestic sun was in a state of progressive decay that would eventually destroy the earth too. There were no miracles; prayers went unanswered, and misfortune tramped with equal brutality on the virtuous and the corrupt; and the chaplain, who had conscience and character, would have yielded to reason and relinquished his belief in the God of his fathers [...] had it not been for such successive mystic phenomena as the naked man in the tree at that poor sergeant's funeral weeks before and the cryptic, haunting, encouraging promise of the prophet Flume in the forest only that afternoon: 'Tell them I'll be back when winter comes.'
(Catch-22, pg 354)

Once again we see one of my favorite literary themes, people who have absolutely lost their way in life. And I find it wonderful that the chaplain finds solace not in his faith, not in the Bible, but in the sight of Yossarian sitting naked in a tree watching a funeral and Captain Flume emerging briefly from his self-imposed exile into the woods to ask if Chief White Halfoat has died of pneumonia yet. Perhaps the idea here is that we often take comfort from things that make absolutely no sense to us simply because we can allow ourselves to interpret them in any way that we like. We humans like to find patterns in things that have no matter and create significance where there is none. We give these things meaning because, if we truly believed that everything that happened to us was largely random and meaningless, how could we possibly keep going?

At any rate, Catch-22 is brilliant. And I'll add a brief nod to Cracked.com's Dan O'Brien for mentioning it in his list of "The Funniest Books I've Ever Read" at the end of this column here (5 Reasons It's Impossible to Find Funny Books), just because it made me happy to read that this morning while eating my oatmeal and drinking my tea before I went to my Ethics class and spent fifty minutes debating the ethics of cannibalism.

And I can't talk about Catch-22 without mentioning my absolute favorite part of the book (although what does it say that while flipping around for the exact quote, I ran across the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade and a bunch of the earlier parts with ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen and thought, "Oh, but these parts are brilliant, I should talk about them too!" I could write a book about this book):

Milo was even more upset by the possibility that someone had poisoned his squadron again, and he came bustling fretfully to Yossarian for assistance.
'Please find out from Corporal Snark if he put laundry soap in the sweet potatoes again,' he requested furtively. 'Corporal Snark trusts you and will tell you the truth if you give him your word you won't tell anyone else. As soon as he tells you, come and tell me.'
'Of course I put laundry soap in the sweet potatoes,' Corporal Snark admitted to Yossarian. 'That's what you asked me to do, isn't it? Laundry soap is the best way.'
'He swears to God he didn't have a thing to do with it,' Yossarian reported back to Milo.
Milo pouted dubiously. 'Dunbar says there is no God.'
(Catch-22, pg 155)

Guys, I really like Cormac McCarthy.

I thought it might help me through this little episode my brain is having (we fight a lot, he and I--and no, I don't know why I've given my brain a masculine identity) if I had something else to focus on besides college, college, and more college. So even though I'm sure there aren't a ton of people who are super excited to hear my opinions about literature--except my mother; hi Mom!--I'm going to go ahead and put them here anyway. I think it will be good for me, which is reason enough for me to do it.

Look at me, I have opinions on things. Look at all these opinions I have.

Anyway, I'm reading about six books at the moment because I can't concentrate on one thing for very long, so I'm sure these writings will jump around a lot. I'm going to start off with a book I've already finished, and to I'm sure no one's great surprise, it's a Cormac McCarthy book--but surprise! It's not Blood Meridian! It's Suttree.

I started reading Suttree mostly as a part of my ongoing quest to read everything McCarthy has ever written.

Side note: it always bothers me to call him McCarthy, because I immediately think of Joe McCarthy, who is not worth mentioning in any context. Thanks for ruining that last name for me, Joe.

But Suttree. Which doesn't really have anything to do with Communists as far as I know. Although I guess you could argue that some of them had some pretty Commie ideas. Anyway. Suttree was rough going for me, because it's incredibly dense, even for McCarthy. The plot kind of meanders, as opposed to say No Country for Old Men or All the Pretty Horses, where there's a very defined narrative. But even though it took me ages to finish it, Suttree is still one of my favorite McCarthy books (which is kind of like saying chocolate is my favorite kind of cake--why pick just one?).

I think my favorite passage from Suttree is this one:

I've seen all I want to see and I know all I want to know. I just look forward to death.
He might hear you, Suttree said.
I wisht he would, said the ragpicker. He glared out across the river with his redrimmed eyes at the town where dusk was settling in. As if death might be hiding in that quarter.
No one wants to die.
Shit, said the ragpicker. Here's one that's sick of livin.
Would you give all you own?
The ragman eyed him suspiciously but he did not smile. It wont be long, he said. An old man's days are hours.
And what happens then?
When?
After you're dead.
Dont nothin happen. You're dead.
You told me once you believed in God.
The old man waved his hand. Maybe, he said. I got no reason to think he believes in me. Oh I'd like to see him for a minute if I could.
What would you say to him?
Well, I think I'd just tell him. I'd say: Wait a minute. Wait just one minute before you start in on me. Before you say anything, there's just one thing I'd like to know. And he'll say: What's that? And then I'm goin to ast him: What did you have me in that crapgame down there for anyway? I couldn't put any part of it together.
Suttree smiled. What do you think he'll say?
The ragpicker spat and wiped his mouth. I dont believe he can answer it, he said. I dont believe there is a answer. (Suttree, pg 258)

I like it so much for a few different reasons. First, I think it shows the theme of the book very well in just a short dialogue (although with McCarthy, pinning down theme is always difficult). Most of the main characters are very poor people who seem to be a little lost as far as what they're supposed to be doing with their life, or their luck has run out, or they've just given up entirely. They can't "put any part of it together" as far as life goes.

Also, I love that the ragpicker is calling God out on how the world works. Essentially, he's saying that if he were to ask God what his life was supposed to mean, he would expect no answer. That, to me, is another key theme of Suttree: a bunch of people constantly wondering if their life, or anything they do, has any real meaning or value.

Suttree also has several hilarious parts (a kid fucks a watermelon--no, really), and I'd highly recommend it if you're okay with the stream of consciousness sort of narrative. There are several other excellent parts I could highlight, but I'll stop for now. Next time maybe I'll even talk about an author who's not Cormac McCarthy. Maybe I won't even mention McCarthy. Wouldn't that be exciting?