Dispatch 3 from Hell Is Other People's Opinions: Went to a book club last week. We discussed "The Kite Runner," which I thought was not very good. Completely and instantly clear when I walked in that everyone else loved it. LOVED it. One girl said it was her favorite book ever. We went around the room and said our favorite books, so I know these are not dumb or unread women. I just can't figure out what about that book has made such an impression on readers. I found it amateurish in writing and plot. Implausibilities involving topics I do know about (life in publishing) made me doubt the facts relating to topics I don't know about (the Taliban). I guess it's another Da Vinci Code. Oh lord, though. I said my favorite book was "Howard's End." Why not.

Here are some words I have banned in copy at my office:
decorative
special
various
-type as a suffix

I am crazy about the BBC show "Look Around You" but it's on at the worst time in the world: 10:40 on Thursday night. I really did try to stay up for it yesterday but fell dead asleep on the couch. I woke up at 1 am, which is right in the middle of the unfocused worry portion of my night. Usually I am up at about 3 having unfocused worries in a semiconscious state. But last night I had to get up from the couch, clear my dinner dishes, set up the coffemaker, go up three flights of stairs, and get ready for bed, all while in this state of unfocused worry. Everything I did seemed to have horrible consequences I could not begin to comprehend. Then I couldn't get to sleep so I played computer solitaire on N's old iPaq. Which was the exact worst thing to do, as it allowed my mind to race freely. I spent a little time working on the graduation address I will someday deliver to the students of my old high school, wherein I will share all the carefully worked-out theories that enabled me to get the hell out of Toledo. I was working through the definition of "adulthood" ("There's no principal of adults!") when my rational mind told me it was time to read a fucking book. I am reading "Low Life" by Luc Sante, which is more or less a rehashing of some other, older books such as Asbury's book about the gangs of New York, as well as "The Big Con," the greatest book ever written. In "Low Life" you get the feeling the writer is working a lot with secondary sources and simply presenting all the facts out of those sources. It's actually a lot like an article out of "Murder Can Be Fun." One of his other books is called "The Factory of Facts" and the phrase rings in my head as I read this book. It's fact after fact. I know the facts all came from places but I don't know whether I trust those places -- there are a few fun asides presented as fact that I believe are urban myth. But a book like this does fill the mind wonderfully.

From Will Christopher Baer's "Penny Dreadful":


...they were patiently waiting for me to stop freaking out and get my shit together and flow.


This line occurs to me a lot.

Guy Davenport died this week. I think I lent his book "The Geography of the Imagination" to some of my friends. I know I have lent or given "7 Greeks." I go back to his essays when I am feeling too tired to read anything new, or feeling stupid or complacent. Yesterday morning I saw his publisher's announcement of his death in the New York Times and felt a shock. His name has held a totemic significance for me ever since I was a teenager and read an essay of his on the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard. This was in an Aperture monograph of Meatyard's work that I must have read to pieces. Then I lent it to someone whose photography reminded me of Meatyard's but who had never heard of him. Next thing I knew the book was lost in the Oakland fire, along with whatever other great treasures. But there was an essay about Meatyard by his friend Davenport that moved me. It's the source of a thought I apply to many of the people I love -- Davenport, who was extremely educated, was remarking that Meatyard had never read the Odyssey or the Iliad or something. But, Davenport said, when Meatyard does get around to reading it, what a reading it will have. I may be getting the attributions messed up but that's the idea. Most of his nonfiction writing involved making connections among writers and books and ideas, about half of which I've read. And every time I go back to reading his essays, I've read a few more books he mentions. I'm excited to go back now having finally read Howard's End. He jumps around among topics and ideas in a way that gets me excited to pick something new up. It is as exciting to me as my freshman-year honors conference, when there was a similar interplay of ideas. It was just assumed you wouldn't make cheap pop-culture references that would end the discussion. I don't know if kids can even have this kind of discussion now. Some smartass would jump in with a sitcom refernce and shut down the higher brain function of the class. If I was a professor I would ban references to any kind of modern work produced for profit. "Madonna Studies" can blow me.



One thing I remember doing on search engines in, like, 1996 was searching for the terms "Guy Davenport" and "Ralph Eugene Meatyard." I'd come up with nothing. The two groups, early Web users and modernists, were absolutely separate. It was akin to Fran Lebowitz translating the letters of Alfred Lord Douglas into CB slang. (There was no CB term for "pearl gray.") Is it declassé to know the works of Fran Lebowitz almost by heart? Guy Davenport knew lots of Greek lyrics and stuff.

"I know what to think. I know what to do and I know what to think." Elliott Gould as Phillip Marlowe in "The Long Goodbye."

To read this weekend:



St. Clair McKelway's "Annals of Crime and Rascality"

Geoffrey Household, a new book I found at a mystery bookshop called Whodunit

A bunch of NYTimes Magazines that I saved up, now that I only have time to read the Style section.



In every other house on our block, it's Thanksgiving. I hear someone next door moving heavy stuff and it might be a turkey roaster pan. Of course, it's almost too late to start one, isn't it? Thanksgiving is a day I feel a bit sorry for myself because our little household has no gravitational pull on the holidays. No one really takes seriously the idea of hauling kids and minivans down to see us. We go to them. We also like to travel, so everything adds up to us going away and calling the lovely Angie to come feed the cat. This weekend we'll decide where to take a trip next year. That $200 Expedia coupon offer is burning a hole in my pocket. We could buy tickets to visit another relative but I really want to go back to Europe. N has floated the idea of Jamaica. I wonder who he thinks he's married to. Neither of us tan. I want to go back to Turin, for some reason (the witchy attraction), or to Barcelona. When I have to think of a place I haven't been yet, I draw a blank. I mean, I can name places. But should I take a chance on finding a new place (Prague) depressing when I know I love Paris?

This weekend is all about freelance work that I was too chicken to turn down. It's been tough to turn down project after project for this one company and I got the feeling that the next thing I turned down would cause questions to be asked such as whether I was really a real person or just an auto-reply. If I had still been freelancing full-time, I would be getting ready for NaNoWriMo, which I'd thought about doing with my mom. We'd actually been thinking of doing it in August, a better month for us. But I had a job in August. Instead as November rolls up I am reading a catalog of other people's novels and wishing that my clever friends would write novels for me to read.



Part of the freelancing this weekend has involved going back through the list of all the books I've read professionally this year, from January to when I stopped picking up freelance work. One story has stuck in my mind, and I just re-read it just now for fun. It's called "For Those Who Ride the Dog," by Nikki Barranger, from the anthology "Stories From the Blue Moon Cafe III." It's the first story in the anthology (after a poem) and it might be the best thing I read all year. The hard part is that even as I read it I can understand why other people whom I like and respect would not like it. The other things I read and liked a lot were three books by Will Christopher Baer, which unfortunately I read on page proof so have not got a copy on my hard drive to re-read. These books are very sick but have some lovely writing. They're the kind of books that you almost can't recommend to anyone you know if you live outside certain West Coast subcultures. Like, anyone who gets the V. Vale newsletter would be down with these and get them 100% without having to actually subscribe to the lifestyles portrayed therein. I get the newsletter and am down. But can't imagine anyone in my East Coast life being even slightly so.