Monthly Archives: April 2006

Isn’t this thing with Dale Peck just a bit silly? I mean, come on, guy — you’re supposed to judge a contest, so judge it! He says, “The truth is, contemporary fiction’s nothing more than an enabler of certain bourgeois illusions.” Yeah, SOME contemporary fiction, maybe, is doing whatever you’re saying it’s doing, but to make a sweeping generalization about all contemporary fiction is beyond meaningless. And certainly no reason to refuse to do what you agreed to do, which is to judge which is better, Ian McEwan’s Saturday or Ali Smith’s The Accidental. So don’t just toss a coin to make the decision, use your brains!

Okay, enough of that.

Here’s a bit from Howards End I liked:

“I’ve often thought about it, Helen. It’s one of the most interesting things in the world. The truth is that there is a great outer life that you and I have never touched — a life in which telegrams and anger count. Personal relations, that we think supreme, are not supreme there. There love means marriage settlements; death, death duties. So far I’m clear. But here’s my difficulty. This outer life, though obviously horrid, often seems the real one — there’s grit in it. It does breed character. Do personal relations lead to sloppiness in the end?”

“Oh, Meg, that’s what I felt, only not so clearly, when the Wilcoxes were so competent, and seemed to have their hands on all the ropes.”

“Don’t you feel it now?”

“I remember Paul at breakfast,” said Helen quietly. “I shall never forget him. He had nothing to fall back upon. I know that personal relations are the real life, for ever and ever.”

“Amen!”

Hmmm. Now that I think about it, this sounds a bit like an enabler of certain bourgeois illusions, like the illusion of a stable, coherent interior identity and self.

Still, I stand by my point about sweeping generalizations.

I’m tucked away in my upstairs study, spending the morning reading and listening to the rain/sleet outside. It should be cozy, but I’m not feeling particularly content. I keep hoping the weather will clear up so we can take our dog out on a good walk, of at least an hour or two.

I am reading Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed again, and her chapter on working at a Wal-Mart in Minneapolis is absorbing. I’ve read her book before, and I’ve read a lot of articles about Wal-Mart, but her description of working there is still horrifying. What is most hard to take is her struggle to find affordable housing, which simply isn’t available giving a housing crunch and her $7 an hour wage. And also her description of the false perkiness that’s expected of her at Wal-Mart, coupled with the invasive management culture, the expensive and pointless drug testing, the threats about unionizing, the insulting warnings against “time-theft” and getting blamed for things you didn’t do, the non-paid overtime. She says you have to pay $1 for the privilege of wearing jeans on Fridays.

And here is what she says about our world of “big-box” stores:

I get a chill when I’m watching TV in the break room one afternoon and see … a commercial for Wal-Mart. When a Wal-Mart shows up within a television within a Wal-Mart, you have to question the existence of an outer world. Sure, you can drive for five minutes and get somewhere else — to Kmart, that is, or Home Depot, or Target, or Burger King, or Wendy’s, or KFC. Wherever you look, there is no alternative to the megascale corporate order, from which every form of local creativity and initiative has been abolished by distant home offices. Even the woods and the meadows have been stripped of disorderly life forms and forced into a uniform made of concrete. What you see — highways, parking lots, stores — is all there is, or all that’s left to us here in the reign of globalized, totalized, paved-over, corporatized everything.

But I don’t mean to infect you all with my gloomy mood. On a lighter note, I got a new book yesterday: Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading. I’ve read good things about this book on other blogs, and it looks interesting, and I always like reading books about reading and books.

I finished Ehrenreich earlier today, and so now I’m down to five books I’m reading at the moment. I’d like to spend the evening reading Mishra’s An End to Suffering, as I will need to return it to the library soon.

But first, Ehrenreich, who ends her book with an amazing passage:

When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The “working poor,” as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else. As Gail, one of my restaurant coworkers, put it, “you give and you give.”

On impulse, I walked down to one of the used book stores in town (the one that has mainly paperbacks) and got myself a copy of E.M. Forster’s Howards End. I didn’t have anything in mind when I went to the store; I wanted something to jump out at me as something I’d like to begin RIGHT NOW. So, yes, I’m now in the middle of six books. With all the talk of Zadie’s Smith’s On Beauty, a rewriting of Howards End, I thought it would a good time to pick it up. Perhaps I’ll take a look at the Smith book sometimes soon.