Words and Woolf and Woe and Wishes
Once upon a time, I was a voracious reader. And when I say voracious, I absolutely mean it. I would read 5 or 6 novels a week, novels of varing quality and length, but novels nonetheless. And a plethora of magazines and newspapers and bottle labels and flyers and electronic equipment instructions besides... anything printed with words.
Somehow, somewhere along the line that compulsion sputtered, fizzled, wheezed and died. Oh, I still read the newspaper daily. I'm addicted to home decor magazines and Entertainment Weekly and sometimes when I'm feeling particularly flush, I buy myself a Communication Arts Annual or Print magazine or the like. And I often pick up books on different artists who interest me while at the library. But novels? Not so much.
I have decided to rectify that and spent two wonderful bathtub sessions immersed in bubbles and a book this weekend. On a recommendation from sooner, I borrowed Nick Hornby's "How to Be Good" from one of Jack's office mates. If you've been hankering for a good read, i heartily recommend you turn to Sooner's list, provided below. And if you can, i heartily recommend you borrow the book from Cindy whom I have only met once, but with whom I have decided i am completely besotted as she is a reckless reader like me, prone to page smudging, spine twisting and corner bending and I dare say she is also a fan of the classic soak 'n' read.
One of the reviews on the back of the book reads "How to be good? How to be bloody marvelous more like." � The Mail on Sunday (UK) and I really couldn't say it any better than that. And so I won't try to here. I'm not going to subject you to a blow by blow description of all the fine details. But there is one little line in the final chapter of the book that caught and hooked my imagination.
The protagonist, Katie Carr, is talking about... well, a dozen things, but she mentions Virginia Woolf's suicide. Now I know next to nothing about Virginia Woolf (which is something else I should rapidly rectify), but apparently she killed herself by filling her pockets with stones and jumping into a river.
The image, that of Virginia Woolf (or rather Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, long nose prosthesis authentically attached) slowly, purposefully filling her pockets with stones struck me as being at once elegiac and elegant. I imagined her on a bridge, looking down at her reflection, willows weeping on the bank and a grey mist slowly settling, rolling each stone in her palm before dropping it with grim determination into her pocket. Surely each stone represented some great and weighty disappointment, something unspeakably sad. And maybe the river, the one which she ultimately drown her sorrows, was the same river where on happier days long ago, she had skipped those same stones.
And while I find it rather disgusting to romanticize suicide in any way, it seems to me that, in a sense, it is the perfect metaphor for life. Because really, isn't that what we do?... pocket all our sad experiences and thoughts, sadnesses big and small, personal and not, one after the other, until our pockets are bulging and we're sinking in the mud. One stone for a lost dog, another for the dismembered body of a ten-year-old girl found floating in a cheap black suitcase, yet another for the loss of a family member to cancer or liver disease... on and on.
The key, the only solution, is in the redistribution of weight. You have to find those little pebbles of happiness, the smooth flat ones that will slip across the surface and lift your heart a bit, in the other pocket... the apple tree just purchased and planted, a nodding bank of tulips, a good book, a brilliant song, a delicate kiss on the back of your neck, on the nape, that tingles down your spine and floods you with warmth and blood and longing...
Lighten the load, keep the balance.
I had been thinking recently that this journal was a sort of frivolous and useless diversion. I mean, do you really care about the attention I devout to rice pudding or my unquenchable thirst for A&W rootbeer? Really? I was thinking about packing it in and starting anew, reversing direction and beginning another journal to fill with my dark, "meaningful" thoughts. Because i have them you know... fears and anxieties and doubts that gnaw on my extremities and surface in my nightmares.
But thinking about Virginia and her pocketful of sad stones, i've decided it's the little happinesses, the dog drool and the tales of marauding geese and raccoons that keep me from sinking. And it's far more important for me to give voice to those thoughts than the dark, mournful ones.
Okay. I'm done with the heavy moralizing here. The next entry will be filled to brimming with whiskers on kittens and fairy cakes and frolicking pups. And now, with no further ado, I give you Suggestions from Sooner. Should you have suggestions of your own, don't hesitate to drop them in my guestbook. I am determined to rediscover the reader in me.
Suggestion the first: Little Green Men by Christopher Buckley. A stuffy Sunday morning political talk show host and renowned skeptic is abducted by aliens off a golf course and uses his journalistic perch to beat his chest about the existence of little green men and other unexplained phenomena. Chaos ensues.
Suggestion the second: Bitch Goddess by Robert Rodi A washed up B-Movie and Night time soap opera (think Dynasty) star is dictating her autobiography to her ghost writer. The entire novel is told via various first person correspondence, news clippings, transcripts and journal entries. I don't want to say too much because this one is really, really funny. I devoured the entire novel in one sitting and disturbed a number of patrons at Starbucks with my raucous laughter.
Suggestion the third: How to be Good by Nick Hornby Told from the point of view of a female physician in London, the novel begins in the final stages of her marriage which is unraveling. But a short way into the novel, the protagonist is thrown for a loop when her husband has an epiphany about what it means to actually do good things as opposed to espousing "good" liberal politics and begins dropping huge sums of money in the cups of panhandlers on the tube, giving the children's things away to battered women's shelters, and inviting the indigent into their home to live. He becomes so sickeningly good it's impossible for her to live with him, but she can't find a way to leave someone for doing too many good deeds. Brilliant.
Suggestion the fourth: Bear v. Shark by Chris Bachelder. A wonderfully bizarre book about a nation wide craze that completely envelopes every aspect of life in the United States. A family of four set out to get ring side seats in Las Vegas for a virtual battle to the death between a bear and a shark to be held in a tank of water deep enough for the shark to maneuver but shallow enough to permit the bear his characteristic dexterity. Defies description.
Suggestion the fifth: Sellevision by Augusten Burroughs. Greatgadfly recently reminded me of this one. A hilarious look at the behind the scenes politics of a shop at home network, like QVC, called Sellevision. I wish I'd written this book. In the opening chapter one of the top on air personalities is fired because he wasn't wearing underwear during a segment staged to look like a sleep over selling toys to kids. Everyone was wearing pajamas and during the broadcast his penis fell out of the pajamas, scandalizing the moms and kids who were watching. It goes down hill from there.
Suggestion the sixth: Our Lady of the Lost and Found by Diane Schoemperien. (As an aside, Schoemperien is Canadian. True story.) A fairly non-traditional novel in which the narrator tells of a Marian apparition who comes to her and asks to stay in her living room for a week. Of course she agrees and the two of them spend the week chatting like old girlfriends about Jesus as a child and being present during actual miracles and the narrators seemingly mundane modern problems. It incorporates a good deal of the history of the Marian phenomenon.
Suggestion the seventh: Being Alexander by Nancy Sparling Another first person narrative which takes its cues from the Count of Monte Cristo and is told from the point of view of Alex Fairfax, a perfectly nice, though trod upon, young man. His girlfriend cheats on him with and leaves him for his much despised boss, he's passed over for promotion and eventually fired, his very nice car gets demolished by thugs, and he gets mugged for his last few pennies on the way home from the hospital. So he reinvents himself as Alexander Fairfax, a cold, ruthless winner with revenge as his primary motivation. Very dark humor.
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