Overstimulated

Tuesdays, my shifts go from 9:00 to 11:00 in the a.m. and then from 6:00 to 8:00 at night. In between: a long lunch, somewhere distant. (An effortful walk does me good.)

Today, though, I only got as far as the IUSB cafeteria, what with needing to quickly rid myself of jitters from breakfast (I’d drunk too much syrup and coffee). Therefore, after lunch I had an extra hour to kill in the library. I was restless. I was able to read just ten or twenty pages before I had to get up to browse the stacks. There’s that Tim O’Brien book I’ve been curious about. There’s another Anne Lamott book to wallow in.

But I figured, what I check out I’ll have to carry home, and hardbacks are heavy. So I put them back.

As it happened, though, Martin offered to drive me home because of the windchill. When we arrived at the house, Mary had the fire going, and Bianca was all snuggly. … Point is, I could have painlessly brought home those books.

Stephen and I have agreed to read Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall, one chapter per day, beginning tomorrow (the prologue counts as a chapter). We invite you to read it with us.

Snowed in

Still coughing …

and last night we had a blizzard; and at this moment, outside, it’s supposed to feel like −26°F.

Currently reading:

• Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

• Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber

• Frank & Marie Drown, Mission to the Headhunters

• Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies (while I was getting sick, I was finishing bird by bird; due to AL’s grudges and death scenes and neuroses, the book was actually making me feel worse)

• I Am Zlatan Ibrahimović (this is fantastic)

• … and articles for W130

Currently viewing:

• Misery

• The Shining

• WSBT StormTracker

• Downton Abbey

• The Pink Panther Strikes Again

Whom we like

Susan Wolf, in “Moral Saints”:

When one does finally turn one’s eyes toward lives that are dominated by explicitly moral commitments … one finds oneself relieved at the discovery of idiosyncrasies or eccentricities not quite in line with the picture of moral perfection. One prefers the blunt, tactless Betsy Trotwood to the unfailingly kind and patient Agnes Copperfield; one prefers the mischievousness and sense of irony in Chesterton’s Father Brown to the innocence and undiscriminating love of Saint Francis.

It seems that, as we look in our ideals for people who achieve nonmoral varieties of personal excellence in conjunction with or colored by some version of high moral tone, we look in our paragons of moral excellence for people whose moral achievements occur in conjunction with or colored by some interests or traits that have low moral tone. In other words, there seems to be a limit to how much morality we can stand.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Anne Lamott, in bird by bird:

I once asked Ethan Canin to tell me the most valuable thing he knew about writing, and without hesitation he said, “Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. …” I think he’s right. If your narrator is someone whose take on things fascinates you, it isn’t really going to matter if nothing much happens for a long time. I could watch John Cleese or Anthony Hopkins do dishes for about an hour without needing much else to happen. Having a likable narrator is like having a great friend whose company you love, whose mind you love to pick, whose running commentary totally holds your attention … When you have a friend like this, she can say, “Hey, I’ve got to drive up to the dump in Petaluma — wanna come along?” and you honestly can’t think of anything in the world you’d rather do. By the same token, a boring or annoying person can offer to buy you an expensive dinner, followed by tickets to a great show, and in all honesty you’d rather stay home and watch the aspic set.

Now, a person’s faults are largely what make him or her likable. I like for narrators to be like the people I choose for friends, which is to say that they have a lot of the same flaws as I. Preoccupation with self is good, as is a tendency toward procrastination, self-delusion, darkness, jealousy, groveling, greediness, addictiveness. They shouldn’t be too perfect; perfect means shallow and unreal and fatally uninteresting. I like for them to have a nice sick sense of humor and to be concerned with important things, by which I mean that they are interested in political and psychological and spiritual matters. I want them to want to know who we are and what life is all about. I like them to be mentally ill in the same sorts of ways that I am; for instance, I have a friend who said one day, “I could resent the ocean if I tried,” and I realized that I love that in a guy. I like for them to have hope — if a friend or a narrator reveals himself or herself to be hopeless too early on, I lose interest. It depresses me. It makes me overeat. I don’t mind if a person has no hope if he or she is sufficiently funny about the whole thing, but then, this being able to be funny definitely speaks of a kind of hope, of buoyancy. Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don’t need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them. Of course, they did hide more Jews than many other countries, and this is a form of winning. Although as my friend Jane points out, if you or I had been there speaking really bad French, they would have turned us in in a hot second — bank on it. In general, though, there’s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.

Sometimes people turn out to be not all that funny or articulate, but they can still be great friends or narrators if they possess a certain clarity of vision — especially if they have survived or are in the process of surviving a great deal. This is inherently interesting material, since this is the task before all of us.

Some Catholic (and some non-Catholic) writers

It used to be, whenever I’d learn of a book I didn’t own, I’d have to go to Amazon right away to buy it. But now I’m a faculty member at two different colleges. I have borrowing privileges all out of proportion to what I do for anybody.

So if J.H. posts a link to the effect that Malcolm Muggeridge’s autobiography was the best autobiography that Mark Noll claimed ever to have read, I can say, “Oh, it’s in the stacks at Bethel,” and a few minutes later I’ll have walked to the campus and secured the book for the next six months.

It turns out that Muggeridge is the insufferable sort of writer whose every sentence is a gemstone. But whatever. I have the book. It feels good in my hand, and the font is nice. The cover has a blurb from someone cranky and pompous:

And the title reminds me of:

He had published eight books … concluding, at the moment, with Waste of Time, a studiously modest description of some harrowing months among the Patagonian Indians.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Or if Madame mentions Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, and I’m at IUSB, I can go to that library and soon the book is in my hand distracting me from the papers I should grade. Anne Lamott repeats her cleverest bits over and over, as Muriel Spark used to do. Anne Lamott must have learned from Muriel Spark, because she pays a sort of tribute to her:

I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her.

That person must be Muriel Spark because, a few lines later, Lamott says:

Now, Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning – sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away, humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this.

And soon I’m looking for evidence that Lamott herself is of the Roman church, but no, either she isn’t or I’m a bad researcher. And anyway she’s different from those other writers because she’s more explicitly self-effacing.

Now, you might wonder why my tone is so grouchy, why I’m so critical of these undeniably fine writers. Well, (1) I’m a grouchy guy; and (2) they were grouchy first, and when I was at a tender age I figured out, by reading such people, that eloquence could atone for being a grouch. Up to a point.