Invisible Monsters

You can count down the facts and it's so depressing. I can only eat baby food. My best friend screwed my fiance. My fiance almost stabbed me to death. I've set fire to a house and been pointing a rifle at innocent people all night. My brother I hate has come back from the dead to upstage me. I'm an invisible monster, and I'm incapable of loving anybody. You don't know which is worse.

I think the only book I have ever read that was this messed up was Zelda's Cut by Phillipa Gregory. Even then, that story was only strange because the woman and her gay agent used to dress up like the same woman and then have sex, so it was basically like they were doing themselves. Only with two of them.

Anyway, Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk is so crazy I couldn't stop reading. It's like a tabloid -- you know it's crazy and trashy and whatever else, but it's just so bad you can't stop. It's like you've got to stick around to watch the train wreck.

And what a train wreck it was. Wow. In case you ever read this book, I won't spoil it, but suffice to say that Palahniuk has a real talent for painting a scene. I physically recoiled at some of his descriptions (a girl had her jaw shot off, and she shares the after-effects in graphic detail), but some things, like the opening scene with Evie, the inferno, and the rifle, are just incredibly beautiful in a really sick and terrifying way. Incidentally, the opening scene is also the closing scene, and it's even more fantastic the second time around.

I still feel like I missed something, meaning-wise, but that's okay. I'm okay with this book just being, like Palahniuk says, like a fashion magazine -- probably there's an artistic statement, probably there's a deeper meaning, but for now I'll just flip through, look at the crazy pictures, and wonder if I'm the type of person who can pull off the veil/silk negligee/rifle look.

If she were my sister, I'd kick her out too

Is there anything in the world more boring than Sister Carrie? Well, probably, but the fact is that when a journalist goes to write a flowery novel about the tragedy and hardship of life, clearly all is not going to go as planned.

Theodore Dreiser flunked out of college and wrote for two newspapers in the Midwest before becoming a novelist. I have to give him credit for being an objective writer. He was probably a pretty good journalist, and he's not prone to using any sort of trickery to make the reader feel sorry for his characters. In fact, he hardly seems to care about his characters, especially Carrie, to such an extreme that when he attempts to point out how hard Carrie and Hurstwood have it, it's incredibly out of place and more annoying than heart-wrenching.

Dreiser at his best is fairly forthright. He really should have stuck with journalism, but the fact is that in Sister Carrie he cannot make up his mind whether to be strictly objective and naturalistic or to succumb to the kind of overwrought prose typical of the Victorian novel. He makes a distinct mistake in not remaining straightforward, and instead tries to be eloquent and whatever else, resulting in passages that are hilarious in their awfulness. Hurstwood's money-feathers were growing in? Come on.

That being said, I'm sure there are many wonderful things about this book. I just don't know what they are. Good luck trying to find them...

Randomly Trippy

I know this is a literature blog, but since I technically was reading an online newspaper when I found this, couldn't it count?

Apparently the creator of this piece is what is called an "outsider artist," usually a person with severe psychological disturbances that lead to amazingly original art. Some of it is trippy, some of it is disturbing, and some of it is just plain weird -- but all of these artists are supposed to be creating in these "bubbles" of expression and with an intense dedication to their respective visions. You know, like deer with huge eyes behind...tombstones?

This particular artist, Eugene Andolsek, was obsessed with the idea that he was going to be fired from his office job, but never was. Apparently making these "mandalas" with colored ink and graph paper (think those circles you used to make in seventh-grade math class when you were bored) helped to calm him down and relieve that fear. Since mandalas are used as a meditative device for Zen Buddhism and other Eastern religions, this seems to make some kind of sense, even though I have no idea if Andolsek made the connection himself. If you click on the picture, you should be able to see it in more detail. It's really incredible.

Anyway, doesn't literature do this? I mean, people like Kurt Vonnegut and Siegfried Sassoon were certainly disturbed, and Hemmingway drank for a reason. Some of the most original writers of their time were either experimenting with drugs or had some other kind of psychological issue.

J.D. Salinger certainly wasn't the picture of mental health, especially after he became famous -- and, as you'd expect, he got much more original after he basically retreated from the world. Early Salinger reads a lot like John Cheever, his closest predecessor, but who knows what he's writing now? I'm willing to bet it's either really great or incredibly awful, but that it's definitely different from anything else out there right now. Maybe true originality can only exist in isolation -- to an extent, I guess, unless you really can create art in a vacuum.

For more information on "outsider art," click here or here.

New Year, New List

Forget about the holiday reading list. That was way optimistic. Here's the list of books I'm currently reading and that maybe I'll get a chance to write about sometime:

Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser. Not that Carrie is all that interesting on her own, but I think the purely naturalistic approach we're taking to it in my American Novels class should be okay...different than my last professor's view, anyway.

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf is brilliant, and this is an awesome read regarding women and fiction in all of their connections. Not that I agree that Jane Austen wasn't the literary genius Charlotte Bronte was (something Woolf argues for several times), but the general idea is fantastic.

Witness by Whittaker Chambers. The blurbs on the back of this book claim they are going to change my life. We'll see -- but the forward, written as a letter to Chambers' three children, is incredibly powerful and very moving. It's dense and kind of a tough read, but I think it'll be good.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. Apparently he died recently? Anyway, had this on my shelf for about a year and haven't read it yet, so I decided that's my new bedtime read. Don't expect me to finish this one anytime soon -- it's good, but I have about 700 pages to read for Tuesday, so this one might be put on the back burner.

There's the new list! I had better make it allllll the way through this one...

Cleaning House

Ugh. It really sucks, getting rid of books. I save books for the same reason my grandma saves tinfoil and those little tables that come on takeout pizza -- because someone might need it someday.

I have books on Irish storytelling that I hate, because it's total "shamrockery," but I keep them in case someday I overcome the hatred of everything Americans think is Irish and actually read them. Also, someone who knows I lived in Ireland for a while might, one day, ask me for a book on Ireland, and I'd be really embarrassed if I didn't have one.

I have one rather scandalous book which I will not read in public, but still love because the overblown dialogue always makes me laugh. This, however, is separate from the trashy romance I keep because I bought it on a road trip with a friend and we spent three hours reading it out loud and laughing.

I have too many books on Shakespeare. I have one giant book that contains all the "necessary" plays, but I don't actually know what those plays are, so it's flanked by backups of my favorites. I also have two plays that I don't even like but were rejected by a friend and I had to take them in.

Since I'm moving and don't know where or when these books can finally come out of their boxes, some of them have just got to go. The multiples, I can deal with -- no one needs three copies of The Grapes of Wrath. It's also time to let go of some of the textbooks I was keeping just because they cost me a LOT and the bookstore wouldn't buy them back. Still, I'm going to miss seeing that trashy romance stashed next to The Irish Story and one of four copies of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.

Michael Pollan is, quite simply, a brilliant journalist. I mean, he's clearly not above a little pretension and that shows in his book. But I think if I was that smart, I'd be a little cocky, too. He follows the trails of four different meals, one fast food, two "organic" and one gained entirely by hunting and foraging. The first concentrates mainly on commercial beef, the latter two on industrial organic and sustainable organic and the last on boar and mushroom hunting.

Though eventually Pollan decides that the best way to understand where our food comes from is by practicing the type of foraging our prehistoric ancestors did, he admits that this practice is not exactly realistic in this day and age. In the same vein, any attempt to increase the prevalence of sustainable organic farming (my personal choice for best and most realistic solution) could lead to the industrialization these farmers are trying so hard to avoid.

Pollan does not end up giving up meat at the end of the novel, and though he tries vegetarianism for a brief period, he does not seem quite satisfied with it. First, many vegetarians are ovo-lacto, assuming that cows and chickens are not injured or killed in the processing of milk and eggs and therefore it's acceptable. Pollan's dissection of that rationalization was enough to make me pause before making an omlette, but like him, I'm not sure giving both these foods up is the answer. Historically speaking, of course, humans evolved to eat both animal and plant matter, and I take Pollan's point that humans shouldn't toy with natural selection.

Pollan also addresses the culture dilemma which faces vegetarians -- those who shun meat are automatically alienated from traditions like Turkey on Thanksgiving, hot dogs on the Fourth of July, and other food-centered holidays. Since one of his early points is that Americans have suffered from a lack of tradition surrounding food which leaves us to fend for ourselves, the decision to be a vegetarian, for him, would mean abandoning the albeit limited food culture we do have.

Though this book did not convince me to eat cow (certainly not -- my goodness, I will never eat an American cow again after the feedlot section), it made me seriously consider my eating practices, the ethics behind it, and what I can do to minimize the damage I cause to the ecosystem every time I make a meal. I mean, it's not such a crazy idea, right, being able to tell where food came from, what damage its production did to the environment, and what, exactly, is in it?

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Arriving at the store, [Francie] walked up and down the aisles handling any object her fancy favored. What a wonderful feeling, to pick something up, hold it for a moment, feel its contour, run her hand over its surface and then replace it carefully. Her nickel gave her this privilege. If a floorwalker asked whether she intended buying anything, she could say, yes, buy it and show him a thing or two. Money was a wonderful thing, she decided.

The cover of the book with the introduction by Anna Quindlen claims it was chosen as one of the Books of the Century by the New York Public Library, and I have no trouble believing it. It's not deep or metaphorical or philosophical or anything, at least not in the way most literature we study is. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is probably the most accessible literary masterpiece I have ever read in my entire life, and for that reason, it's one of my new favorites.

It's the perfect picture of life during what seems to be the depression. I spent an entire day just reading this book, and I really felt like I was there. It's amazing, and the fact that it's largely autobiographical probably contributed to the realism. Also, I love how Francie's father is Irish, her mother is awesome, and the entire community Smith creates in this book is incredible and detailed and completely without pretension.

The realism is probably what makes this novel so incredibly heartbreaking. As one of my friends put it, Smith gets you at the beginning, the end, and all the way through. By the time Francie finds the roses on her desk after graduation, I was ready to excuse myself and have a good hard cry in the ladies' room as Francie herself does.

I would have rather Ben had not entered the novel, but as Betty Smith really did marry a law student and follow him to Ann Arbor, I understand why she did it. Throughout the novel, Smith refuses to compromise her realism. Johnny Nolan didn't have to die, but he did, and Francie didn't have to make the decision to hand her life over to some pompous Brooklynite, but she did. That's the way the world works sometimes, and if Smith does anything well, it's portraying life.

NEXT: The Omnivore's Dilemma