Juvenile Nonfiction

1. I expected this book to be historical and deadly serious, in the vein of Underworld. I think, upon research, that I based my expectations on some algorithm comprising the subjects of Libra and Falling Man and the title of Mao II. I was sorely mistaken: this is primarily a novel about structure and words, and though serious it is deadly funny.

2. While reading this book, which concerns in part The Airborne Toxic Event and includes a chapter by the same title, I heard a song on the radio by a band calling themselves The Airborne Toxic Event, of which I’d never heard before that day.

3. David Foster Wallace’s archives went to UTexas this past month. Among his effects are heavily (heavily!) annotated copies of many of DeLillo’s novels. This novel bears the suggestion that he was a fan.

4. SPOILER. White noise is about death by a thousand cuts. The field of information junk we traverse every day literally and figuratively sucks the life and identity out of us. Jack Gladney, the first and preeminent scholar in Hitler studies, and with a hodge-podge family borne of various marriages, finds that his current wife Babette has had an affair with a rogue researcher in order to gain access to an experimental drug, Dylar, which treats Fear-of-Death. When Jack is exposed to a toxic cloud and faced with his own imminent death, he becomes increasingly desperate to procure the drug himself, ending in complete and vague dissolution.

5. What a rich book. The modern condition comprises a toxic cloud, which literally materializes in the novel and chases the main characters around their county. I wasn’t prepared for how inventive and funny it would be. Disarming. Probably launched a couple dozen careers. Canonical for a reason.

The Art Installation, that hard-to-define blend of mixed-media, space and event, can be an attention hog. The strangeness, the size, the ill-defined requirements of the viewer are all in play, bringing you to the table and then daring you to figure out what it is, exactly, that you’re eating. The viewer’s mind often slides over the thing and the concept at the same time, desperate for purchase on the smooth, indifferent surface, theorizing, guessing and reguessing at the point. Or, the Point, as it were.

DeLillo frames Point Omega (2010, NY: Scribner) with an Installation, 24 Hour Psycho by Douglas Gordon, installed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2006. The piece plays Hitchcock’s famous film, slowed down to a running time of 24 hours, so that each frame hangs for a (relative) eternity. Attending this installation in marathon bouts, day after day, is an unnamed narrator. He is both obsessed with the work and stuck in a feedback loop of his thoughts:

“The film made him feel like someone watching a film. The meaning escaped him. He kept feeling things whose meaning escaped him… He began to think of one thing’s relationship to another. This film had the same relationship to the original movie that the original movie had to real lived experience. This was the departure from the departure. The original movie was fiction, this was real… Meaningless, he thought, but maybe not.” (pp. 11, 13)

Two visitors to the installation go on to star in the middle third of the novel: Jim Finley, a would-be documentary filmmaker and Richard Elster, an aging academic and consultant to the Pentagon during the invasion of Iraq, and the would-be subject of Finley’s film. Finley follows Elster out to the desert, and spends ages with him attempting to win his consent to star in his film, a talking-head documentary, “just a man and a wall,” recording Elster’s thoughts about his role in the war. Later, Elster’s daughter Jessie joins them, and then disappears, and… that’s it.

Finley and Elster drink, stare. Elster speaks occasionally, theorizing:

“‘Consciousness accumulates. It begins to reflect upon itself. Something about this feels almost mathematical to me. There’s almost some law of mathematics or physics that we haven’t quite hit upon, where the mind transcends all direction inward. The omega point,’ he said. ‘Whatever the intended meaning of this term, if it has a meaning, if it’s not a case of language that’s struggling toward some idea outside our experience.’” (p. 72)

Slowly, slowly, certain disparate strands of the very slight narrative begin to cohere and certain meanings become explicit — the connections between the framing device and the central story come into focus at just the right pace, for instance. But even as this happens, another intention also surfaces: DeLillo is concerned with our relentless drive to make meaning out of nothing at all. The intellectual conceits of the novel, the big ideas of its characters, are fatuous, vacant. The characters work and work over the slightest, the most intellectually vague and intractably theoretical raw materials, to construct some kind of… something, and imbue it with value. Finley’s intended film, for example, rests on the flimsiest of conceits, but he pursues it with almost fanatical faith in its importance. I wonder if DeLillo isn’t having a joke at our expense. Reviewers have been lamenting his decline into insubstantiality for years now, expecting less and less from his newer work. Maybe he’s tired of being an idea man.

The novel ends revisiting Jessie and the visitor to the Installation, who stays to the bitter end of the film — at least, as much of the film as can be screened before the Museum closes for the night. No more meaning can be wrung from the viewing than that, if there was any meaning there to begin with.

Sometime in the last 18 months, my reading quota skyrocketed. I was unaware of how and when, exactly; what I know is that before 2009, I was having trouble finishing 52 books a year, and then during 2009 I finished upwards of 80 (and am well ahead of schedule this year).

I’ve given some cursory reflection to this, after the fact, and thought I’d share some of my tips for reading upwards of 52 books a year, if you share my ambitions.

1. Read more than one book at a time. This allows you to average the long books out with the short books, for one thing. A long or difficult book can monopolize your available reading time, and it can be discouraging to come to the end and realize you’ve got some catch-up to do to keep on pace. Following multiple narratives also keeps you from getting bored with your reading, and so stalling out on the project entirely. You might make them location or circumstance specific: read one only on your lunch hour and another only at bedtime (and a third only on the bus).

2. Rediscover poetry and young adult fiction. Poetry counts. A volume of poems is often as rewarding in its own way as a novel, and much much easier to get through. And work your way through the Newbery winners — they’re classics, they read quickly, and you’ll find yourself better in tune with the worlds your kids are living in or will live in soon.

3. Read down to your children. What I mean is, read books to your children that are above their age/reading level. My son could not read The Hobbit or The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe on his own, but he loves listening to them, and I love revisiting them. I can help my kids comprehend and contextualize passages as we discuss the book. And my children are being stretched by the material. When we finish, my children will have a broader cultural base than they otherwise could have, and I will be one step closer to book 52.

4. Use the in-between occasions. Trip to the post office? Walk and read. Gotta go? Take your book to the bathroom with you. You can push lights-out 10 minutes later to get through a few pages. Reading is essentially a journey taken a page at a time. Use the in-between moments to take a step or two.

5. Make it a priority. You don’t read because you don’t think it’s as important as working/doing-the-dishes/LOST/etc. Reading is rewarding in and of itself, inherently. If you don’t think so, you won’t make time to do it.

6. Write about what you read. Documenting interesting passages, taking a moment to jot down your thoughts about a theme or character, keeping a reading diary to remind you of plots — all of these help you contextualize and remember what you’ve read, and they become encouragements for further reading. Use a site like Readernaut, and your diary will double as a prompt for further reading. If you write about it, you’ll remember it better. You’ll also begin to develop over time a feeling for which authors, genres, stories are compelling to you, which will in turn motivate you to press on to new titles.

You can do this. I believe in you. Go. Get started.

Read a book.

A slim volume (free ebook), developed from a sermon. Driscoll is a polarizing figure, garnering both acclaim and scorn for his blend of extreme conservatism with the emergent church model. Most of the way, this reads like the barest gloss on Proverbs (“…14:26 says, ‘In the fear of the LORD one has strong confidence, and his children will have a refuge.’ … [So,] the safest place for children is with a man who fears the Lord.”), which isn’t bad. But Driscoll drifts into behaviorism and a shocking lack of grace, admonishing a failing father for his lack of wisdom by (obliquely) recommending he shoot his daughter’s boyfriend and summarily excommunicating Christians-who-sin from the Church. I don’t mind separating the wheat from the chaff. Really, I don’t. But I bet I could find a follower of Jesus to give me sound scriptural advice on fatherhood without demanding that I sift through this deadly legalism to find it.

(Update: I neglected to point out Driscoll’s conviction that it’s a Biblical mandate that a Godly father make a lot of money, which he emphatically asserts but takes little time to flesh out. It follows from the mandate to provide for his family, which, I’m not sure, but I think our role in provision is at the very most as a team member and probably more likely as a charity case.)

A colleague loaned this to me. It’s of a piece with writing of the time — squarely avant-garde, almost poetry, Sixties San Francisco. The phrase “Trout fishing in America” becomes a synecdoche, both for a number of representative people, places, thoughts, actions relating to America and for America itself. There’s something elegiac about it: Brautigan may feel that Trout fishing represents something both fundamental about and increasingly missing in his America, as especially represented by a late chapter in which he visits a scrapyard where they’re selling lengths of Trout fishing creeks and various waterfalls. His voice is relentlessly fun, and he’s willing to follow his pen to almost any absurdity it intends. A unique, quirky little book — one that’ll probably get stuck in my synapses long after it should reasonably have faded.

Juvenile Nonfiction is Joshua Neds-Fox’s blog v.3, internetted lovingly to you from Detroit, Michigan.

I’m worth $1MM in prizes. I am without excuse.

I’ve redesigned this thing a mere two times. This is its third iteration. It’s using WordPress, for the first time. This theme was adapted from the standard, Kubrick. Border elements prefacing the ‘comments’ were graciously provided by Barrett Stanley, from his 100 Erased Lincolns.

Try joshua, here at neds-fox.com, via electronic mail, should you want to get in touch with me.

I hope you’re happy.