I am starting my research for my M.A. major research project, and surprise, surprise, it’s on women and country music.

Moving up in the world!

But I could have done without most of the first 150 pages of The Marriage Plot, which work through each of the character’s undergraduate backstory, and felt a bit like a rehash of Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction, without the cocaine, which was the only interesting part.

Oh snap.

Basically, this is a book about three assholes. They are 90% full of shit, and 10% right about things, which maybe is the recipe for all twenty-two-year olds. Such a huge disappointment after Middlesex, which is an absolute masterpiece – certainly kicks the shit out of anything Franzen ever wrote.  The female main character in The Marriage Plot is both slightly prettier and slightly richer than everyone else – and that’s it. Not she’s prettier and richer and a raging boozehound like in Gatsby. Or prettier and richer but totally psychotic and fucked up. Nope. Just really pretty, rich, and normal. And totally fucking boring.

Too bad we’ve all been waiting nine whole years for this book. I know it must be hard to top a book like Middlesex, but you must be able to do better than this.

Sorry for the extended absence. I’m in grad school. I know, I know, excuses, excuses.

Yes, ambitious, talented writers will continue to exist and their writing will be great because they have read. And yes, there will remain people who have nary an interest in writing but luxuriate in an afternoon of reading. The devaluing of imagination as it departs on flights of fancy brought on by just being with yourself, this is what is changing us in profound, yet to be fully realized ways.

Wanting to write without wanting to read is like wanting to use your imagination without wanting to know how.

Check out Laura Miller’s essay at Salon.com

Charged with looking beneath, behind and around such images, the novelist comes up against the question of what makes these particular violent deaths so very different from every other violent death. That isn’t easy to answer, and any answer you do come up with is likely to sound disrespectful, cynical, unfeeling and insufficiently solemn. A novelist may decide to push onward anyway, whether into sentimentality (“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”) or smarmy self-aggrandizement (“The Good Life”), but in such cases, the results feel thin, vaguely false and meretricious. “It’s kryptonite to novelists,” a critic friend of mine once said about 9/11.

1.0 SWEAT BEE: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.

1.2 FIRE ANT: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for the light switch.

1.8 BULLHORN ACACIA ANT: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.

2.0 BALD-FACED HORNET: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.

2.0 YELLOWJACKET: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W.C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.

2X HONEY BEE AND EUROPEAN HORNET: Like a match-head that flips off and burns on your skin.

3.0 RED HARVESTER ANT: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.

3.0 PAPER WASP: Caustic and burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.

4.0 TARANTULA HAWK: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath.

4.0+ BULLET ANT: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.

When entomologists are also amazing writers, everybody wins.

The Game

Oh, but he does ennui so well:

From the referendum on Quebec’s independence to the “son of Sam” murders, I find almost everything ‘interesting’ and if pressed for more,  I offer explanations. I show that I ‘understand’ how such things happen and I go no further. But as I hold back, giving less of myself,  I find that I am losing my enthusiasm for the game. In an athlete, it is not the legs that go first, it is the enthusiasm that drives the legs.

Easy, David Foster Wallace. And here he is, on playing at Maple Leaf Gardens in the late 70s vs. going there as a kid.

It was a period piece – elegant, colonial Toronto – perfectly shamelessly preserved from a time before glitter and spectacle came to the city; and came to sports… I don’t much like the Gardens now. Competing against a child’s memory, that is perhaps inevitable, but it is more than that. The building’s elegant touches are gone, but anachronistic perhaps, even in that other time, most deserved to go. It has been expanded and modernized for contemporary needs – more seats, more private boxes, a bigger press box – but I dislike the haphazard, graceless way it was done. There is a veneer of newness about it now that doesn’t quite fit. It has been stranded in an awkward transition; no longer what it was, it cannot be what it wants to be. Now after nearly fifty years, there is nothing special about it. It is just another rink; just another place to play.

Such a great book. Highly recommend it.