Category Archives: Marginalia
“Go then, there are other worlds than these.”
There remains a Sasha-shaped clearing on my bed; it’s the debris from the stillness of hours devoted to one book alone—there are (the leavings of lunch:) empty soda cans and bags of potato chips, an ashtray and a hollowed pack of cigarettes, a cellphone guiltlessly ignored. That is: I’ve finished reading Stephen King’s The Dark Tower—meaning, the seventh and last book; meaning, all of it. I can’t remember the last time I was so consumed by someone else’s world for months. The last time I had something constant to turn to, a much-needed something to get lost in. [Continue reading.]
Meaning is relative
I spent a couple of calm-before-the-storm days with Lowell Lake, the martyr of his own hapless (even bewildered) making and the contra-hero of A Meaningful Life by L.J. Davis. In neat encapsulation: “There was a sense of dwindling, like a slow leak in a balloon, as if all the vigor was slowly going out of their existence, all the light from the sky, all the color from the world, all the good thoughts from Lowell’s head.” And lest you think there’s something spectacular in this disintegration, Davis is quick to repeatedly disabuse you of that notion; for example: “His life wasn’t breaking up. On the contrary, it failed to show the smallest fissure in its bland and seamless surface.” [Continue reading.]
Pastiche
Done. I have no idea what just happened to me—what happened, period. All throughout, I kept telling myself it was difficult to surrender to this book, not only because I couldn’t understand why it was saying what it was trying to say, but also because I couldn’t trust it fully. Surprise, surprise: In Shields’ begrudgingly provided afterword to “his” manifesto: “This book contains hundreds of quotations that go unacknowledged in the body of the text… Your uncertainty about whose words you’ve just read is not a bug but a feature.” [Bet that really hurt, having to say it so baldly, and because of legal constraints, too.] So, at least, there’s that. [Continue reading.]
Light reading
I started this draft right after I read the book—which was amazing and fun and full of useless information, exactly the sort of thing I like spending my time with, and also full of deeply human things, like the life one can lead when one is surrounded by ridiculously intelligent and go-getter people and also when one very badly wants babies to impart all that useless information to, and wee! And I’ve kept trying to go back to the draft above, but then Real Life has always had this pesky tendency to kick all your well-meaning plans to up your self-worth right in the balls. Okay. That’s the explanation I’m going with. Toodles. [Continue reading.]
“She had read no further.”
I wanted to feel like there was something at stake. That way, I could commit to the text. I could commit to the story Salter has been at pains to tell me; I could actually know these people I’m reading about. I could actually read as though every page wasn’t a test of my intelligence, of my due appreciation of the art and craft of writing. Basically: I wanted a book. And Light Years hardly ever felt that way for me. [Continue reading.]
Of doe-eyed women
This is a great volume to have in a romance-reader’s shelf, in an art-lover’s stack of coffee table books. But I wanted it to be an invaluable book—and a little more effort, a lot more digging through the stacks, a lot more reading of the actual books featured, would have made it thus. [Continue reading.]
King and his ka-tet
This book just dares sprawl in a way that the first two couldn’t—this one is so far removed from a dusty trail in the middle of nowhere, this book has left that long stretch of beach. There is purpose and tangible goals. The links between the world of the Gunslinger and the world-as-we-know-it get more defined, we begin to make sense of what exactly this Dark Tower is, we know more and more about how Roland’s world works or (more precisely) doesn’t. Chillingly enough, we get more insight into that oft-repeated phrase: “Once there was a world we knew, but that world has moved on.” [Continue reading.]
In Steve We Trust
Last November, in an attempt to make her proud, I told my mother—the woman who read us Stephen King for bedtime, the woman who made sure that no shelf would be found wanting of a tattered, secondhand King paperback—that I’d begun reading The Gunslinger. And she promptly set down her tea and gasped: “Why haven’t you read—? Oh my god, you haven’t read The Dark Tower series.” [The subtext, of course, went along the lines of: “You are no daughter of mine.] And then we proceeded to gush over Roland of Gilead, because that’s the only way to react to Roland of Gilead. [Continue reading.]
Alpha heroine, anyone?
Last year, I started reading Mary Balogh reissues, which promptly hooked me. It was a welcome change of pace, romance novels where prose, for one, mattered more than the hijinks the hero and the heroine commit themselves to on the trail to True Love. [I keep saying it, and I’ll do so again: Balogh’s prose is graceful.] It’s almost quaint, these renderings of the love story; and though they were rarely intense reading for me, they could aspire for the quietly romantic at their best moments. The archetypes—nearly institutions, really—are as vivid as they’ll ever be, and the Baloghs of the 80s and 90s are perfect examples of how the formulae of the genres work: Here’s the virtuous daughter, the brooding peer, the naïve but refreshing country lass, the flamboyant lord. And on and on we go, with tropes galore. [Continue reading.]
What to do with du Maurier?
I’ve mentioned the wtfuckery that abounds in Daphne du Maurier’s collection of “lost” short stories, The Doll. I’m only halfway-ish through the book—that’s six stories down—and each one of those stories has a half-baked feel I can’t shake off, and majority simply has me scratching my poor head. That is: None of these is the du Maurier short fiction I’ve come to know. Though her always-to-die-for prose is present, all of the stories—with the [begrudging] exception of the title story—simply feels like du Maurier had an idea, picked up some loose leaf, and ran with it. If I were a snide little gremlin, I’d say something like: Oh, is it a wonder these stories were lost? [Currently reading.]
