Monthly Archives: September 2006

I’ve begun reading The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker, and guess what? It’s a novel with footnotes! Not the usual kind of scholarly footnotes written by an editor, but footnotes written by the first-person narrator. I had no idea! I’ve only read about 15 pages of the novel — which is short at 135 pages — so I can’t say much about whether they work or not, but so far, I’m liking it. In typical Nicholson Baker-fashion, the book gives you everything in minute detail: the setting, the character’s thoughts, the action — which, as I understand it, consists of the main character taking an elevator ride. The footnotes elaborate in great detail on the already detailed main text, explaining such things as the history of staplers, the history of straws, and how the narrator pulls up his socks. This could be intensely annoying, but so far it’s not, although I am predisposed to like this book, as I like other things Baker’s written (especially U & I).

Thanks to Barry for pointing out Mark Dunn’s novel Ibid, a novel made up entirely of footnotes. This, clearly, I will have to check out.

One of the blurbs for The Mezzanine says this:

I love novels with gimmicks. The list of great ones — Tristram Shandy … Pale Fire … Ulysses, the ultimate gimmick novel. The Mezzanine is a definite contribution, a very funny book about the human mind. Mesmerizing.

I don’t like this reviewer calling these novels gimmicky. Isn’t the term “gimmicky” kind of dismissive? These novels are more than just gimmicks; they are experiments, explorations, novels where the author is pushing the limits of what a novel can do. If something is gimmicky, it’s interesting only in its newness and tricksiness, but these books do new things and also old things — old things like telling us what it’s like to be a person or to live in one’s mind or to experience the world or to be obsessed with another person.

Anyway, here’s an excerpt from one of Baker’s footnotes, one that’s about reading and eating:

I stared in disbelief the first time a straw rose up from my can of soda and hung out over the table, barely arrested by burrs in the underside of the metal opening. I was holding a slice of pizza in one hand, folded in a three-finger grip so that it wouldn’t flop and pour cheese-grease on the paper plate, and a paperback in a similar grip in the other hand — what was I supposed to do? The whole point of straws, I had thought, was that you did not have to set down the slice of pizza to suck a dose of Coke while reading a paperback. I soon found, as many have, that there was a way to drink no-handed with these new floating straws: you had to bend low to the table and grasp the almost horizontal straw with your lips, steering it back down into the can every time you wanted a sip, while straining your eyes to keep them trained on the line of the page you were reading. How could the staw engineers have made so elementary a mistake, designing a straw that weighed less than the sugar-water in which it was intended to stand? Madness!

I was intrigued by Patrick Kurp’s post on the value of reading old books as opposed to new ones — old meaning published many years ago, not old as in used. He says, “the past is a much bigger place than the present, so it follows that most worthwhile books were published not last week but some time in the previous three millennia. Every minute devoted to reading the new and middling is a minute spent languishing away from the old and dependably superior.” This makes sense to me in a way. Almost everything we read that’s recently published won’t last; it will be forgotten, and there’s no knowing which very few books are the exceptions. I was interested to read in Virginia Woolf’s diary about the books she reviewed, and I noticed that many of them I hadn’t heard of before. The books we are debating about today, people won’t have heard of 100 years from now. The things we read from the past are by definition the stuff that has lasted, and perhaps that means they’re superior to today’s books.

Patrick also argues, following William Hazlitt, that it’s the older books that are really new: they can show us a world different from the one we inhabit. Older books can shake us up a bit, show us new things, get us out of the familiar and make us encounter the alien. I like that idea too. I look for the new and unfamiliar in my reading, often.

And yet, I wonder. Why do we read? Is it for edification and instruction, or for comfort and pleasure? Okay, it can be both, sometimes both at once, sometimes in separate reading experiences, depending on one’s mood.

But here’s what I really wonder: does it matter why we read? I kind of buy the argument that reading older books can be an encounter with the new and can help us break out of our private comfortable worlds as Patrick argues. But does it have to be older books that do this? Can’t we have that experience with new books, if that experience is what we are looking for, ones that show us worlds different from the ones we know?

And when it comes to the argument that older books are the ones that have lasted and new books probably won’t, and that therefore reading older books is more worthwhile, I begin to wonder what we mean by “worthwhile.” What do we seek to get out of reading? I guess this kind of argument presumes that we should be reading for self-edification, for self-improvement, that reading should be a learning experience.

I’ve often thought that myself. I’ve read a whole lot of older books because I wanted to be a better person. I wanted to be well-read and well-educated, and knowledgeable and open-minded. But sometimes I wonder what the point of all that is. Does every minute we spend have to be spent in a worthwhile manner?

Maybe after all pleasure and not edification is a better goal. A part of me shudders to say that — forget being a better person, just enjoy yourself! I’ve spent most of my life thinking I needed to be a better person and that every minute should be devoted to it. Ultimately, I wouldn’t be able to shake that way of thinking, even if I decided I really wanted to. But I do sometimes think I might be better off if I decided that not a whole lot matters but enjoyment of the present moment, and in that case I’ll read what I damn well please, old or new.

I guess ultimately I think that if everyone decided that not a whole lot matters but enjoyment of the present moment, the world would be a messed-up place (oh, wait … the world IS a messed up place …), but I also think that people like me who are driven fairly mercilessly to spend every moment of time wisely might be better off seeking pleasure more often.

And so I’m having a bit of a bad reaction to the idea that my reading should be worthwhile. Would it hurt me much if my reading were more escapist?

Hmmm … I’m off to read Proust. Make of that what you will.

I’ve written a number of times about the footnotes to my edition of Dracula (you can find those posts here and here), and I’ve continued to think about how fun they were — perhaps not so much as a first-time reader of the novel, but still, they were fun. And I’m reminded of a comment Mandarine left on one of those posts:

I was thinking someone should set up a literary comments/editing/footnote wiki, where one would suggest classics, and everybody could add/edit all sorts of comments around the text. Each comment would have categories, so a reader can then check or uncheck the ‘fun’, ‘gothic’, ‘schoolboy’, ‘academic’, ‘cultural reference’ footnotes as they please.

Now wouldn’t that be awesome? I think that’s a great idea. I have no idea how to set this up, but someone else surely does (maybe someone’s done this already?). The footnotes in Dracula make me realize how much fun this would be, because those footnotes provide a range of information, from historical background to personal responses to almost off-topic musings to textual inconsistencies. They are much more personal than footnotes generally are; in places they are more like a reader’s musings than formal footnotes. And reader’s musings are very interesting to read, provided, of course, that the reader is interesting. Maybe one of the options on this hypothetical literature wiki would be to follow the footnotes or comments of one particular author, so you could find a writer you liked and follow his or her way through the text.

For those of you who know Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, you have a glimpse of how much fun this can be; that novel starts with a 999-line poem and the rest of it is one person’s notes on that poem, notes that are … fascinating. Given the right primary text and the right reader, or group of readers, this could be a great exercise in thinking about how people read. Or it could be just plain old fun.

And, of course, you could have the scholarly comments, the historical footnotes, the theoretical ponderings, the critical citations. And these wouldn’t be limited by space constraints. They could be limitless in number and endless in length.

The commentary would get much longer than the primary text, I would think. You’d need to make sure a person could search through the material and get a handle on it somehow. I guess you’d run into the problems they have over at Wikipedia with fights over who gets to post what material. But anyway — it would be cool to experiment with, wouldn’t it?

As I’m typing this, in the oddest of coincidences, the Hobgoblin is laughing uproariously at this website: Joe Mathlete Explains Today’s Marmaduke in 500 Words or Less — it’s a site that has a commentary on the cartoon that’s just as funny as or funnier than the cartoon itself. I call it a coincidence, because it’s kind of like the commentary I’m talking about with Dracula — parasitic, perhaps, second-hand, but very clever and funny. The internet makes this sort of thing easy. Isn’t the internet the best?

Here are my nice, neat, pretty shelves full of books I own but haven’t yet read, from two weeks ago:

And here are my shelves today:

I blame this on Book Mooch; I swear I haven’t been near a bookstore recently, except to buy a copy of Indiana, which I need for a book group and Book Mooch doesn’t have. And now I’ve got two more books on the way: The Periodic Table by Primo Levi and Veronica by Mary Gaitskill. I’ll need a new shelf soon!

So Kate asks, “When and why do you read reviews?” And who am I to turn down a great idea for a blog post? As I consider my answer, I feel like I need to call it a confession: I don’t like reading book reviews of authors I’ve never heard of.

Well, that’s true when it comes to fiction and even more so for poetry. As for nonfiction, I love reading those reviews because I can often get the gist of the book without going to the trouble of … actually reading the book. The vast majority of nonfiction books that get published I’ll never read, and book reviews are a great way of keeping up with the ideas out there, a great way of learning a tiny bit of the latest in history, science, psychology, economics, politics, etc. etc. Sometimes I do end up reading the book; often, though, I get what I can from the review and move on.

As for fiction, though, that’s another story. The truth is that I feel overwhelmed by the number of novels out there and I’m sometimes resistant to new authors. I’m not especially pleased with myself for this; I’d like to be more adventurous in my reading. But I wait to see how widely a new name gets talked about, to see if the people I know, in person or online, talk about an author, to see what other authors recommend that person. I’m sure I’m missing out on a lot of good writing this way, but I don’t know what else to do, really, when my to-be-read list is already so long and I’m feeling too pressured by books I’m already aware of to take a look at new ones.

So I avoid those reviews of books that are completely new to me, unless I happen to glance at a sentence that catches my attention and then I might read further. But that doesn’t happen all that often.

The other problem with reading fiction reviews, for me, is that I’m bored by plot summary. I’m happy to read a plot summary after I’ve read the book because then it all makes sense to me, but beforehand? It’s hard work to make sense of a novel’s premise from a few paragraphs. I’ll read the reviewer’s opening hook with interest, but when the plot summary begins, my mind wanders and I’m off to the next review.

What I like to read about in a review are things like the reviewer’s sense of the author’s writing career and how the new book fits into it, or about writing style, or comparisons between the author under consideration and other authors, or the reviewer’s judgments about what works and what doesn’t. I find myself reading the opening and closing paragraphs of reviews because that’s where I most often find those elements; the middle gets lost in the plot summary.

As for poetry, I’m even less likely to take a risk on a poet I’ve never heard of before, so those reviews I generally ignore also.

Maybe I should make a point of taking a risk on a new author every once in a while. If I decide to make up some reading goals for the new year, maybe that’ll be one of them: to read a book by an author I’ve never heard of before and that nobody has recommended to me. So, readers, don’t give me any ideas.

I was fascinated by Bloglily’s post on difficult books, books she doesn’t finish because they just weren’t working for her. I’m going to steal her idea and talk about my own examples. She’s talking about books that she puts aside not because they are bad — an entirely separate category, I imagine, with its own list — but because she’s not ready for them for one reason or another. As an obsessive book-finisher, I don’t give up on many books, preferring to struggle on and suffer until the bitter end. But occasionally it happens, and then it rankles a bit. I feel challenged. I may have lost that round, but I’m coming back, one day when I’m stronger.

Bloglily mentions Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors, which is top on my list of unfinished books. I tried this book a few years ago, and just couldn’t for the life of me figure out what was going on. I looked around for some help on the internet and found a little bit, but I got annoyed that I needed a plot summary to keep going, and couldn’t get it on my own, and I said forget it. I did make it through The Wings of the Dove, another late James novel, with much sweat and perserverance, so I think I can get The Ambassadors; I just need the right conditions — a fairly calm, quiet, unstressful couple of weeks during which I can spend the time to get a handle on the story. Maybe, also, I need to learn something about reading slowly and about living with a little uncertainty. Maybe Proust will help me with that stuff.

More common for me, however, are those books that I’ve read twice, and come to like the second time around, when the first time I didn’t. Something about those books brought me back again, even after an initial bad response. Pale Fire is a good example; I had to read the book for a college class, and it left me kind of cold. I re-read it a few years later, and changed my mind entirely. There was something about the language of that novel, the excitement and intensity of the commentary that came after the opening poem, the playfulness of it all that I just couldn’t appreciate the first time, and came to love the second. I needed to learn something about the pleasures of experimentation with form and language, I think.

I had a similar experience with Don Delillo’s White Noise, which also left me cold at first. I’m not sure why I read it again, except perhaps because so many people loved it that I wondered what I had missed. When I re-read it, I finally got it — the humor and the social satire. Maybe I needed to learn how to read the type of book that doesn’t necessarily work to create emotionally-vibrant, psychologically-realistic characters of the sort I’m usually drawn to. I needed to learn how to read and appreciate satire. I think that’s true about me — I don’t always respond well to satire, preferring warmer, intimate reads that take me into the heart of a character rather than books that focus on the failings of people and of society from a more exterior point of view.

Thinking along these lines, maybe I should read The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann once again. I read it a year or two ago, and found it okay in places, downright boring in others. I’m guessing this is because of a flaw in me and not in the book. Maybe if I take another look at it again a few years from now, I’ll find its highly philosophical meanderings and its very slow pace intriguing and absorbing.

At any rate, many thanks to Bloglily for writing a thought-provoking post. I like the idea of giving certain novels a second chance — and giving myself one too.

So you know how I thought the introduction to my edition of Dracula was funny? Well, the footnotes are funnier. I’m discovering that my edition isn’t a typically academic one; in fact, I think it’s geared more toward gothic/horror fans, although the book proclaims the editor as “the world’s premier Dracula scholar” (which reminds me of Little Miss Sunshine …).

The edition has commentary by “leading contemporary horror writers, including Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch, and many more” and this commentary is interspersed throughout the book, so that in between chapters I’m invited to step outside of the story and think about what some other writer has to say about it. Actually, though, I just ignore those parts. The book also has “Over 35 illustrations, including stunning new Dracula illustrations by Christopher Bing.” These are fun, but I was a bit perplexed to come across a drawing of Bram Stoker himself – again, it’s disconcerting to get caught up in a story and then get pulled out of it to consider what the author looks like. Why couldn’t they just let the story be, and keep all that other stuff to the introduction or an appendix?

But the footnotes are the most intrusive of all; they are frequent, with probably 3 or 4 a page on average and often lengthy. Many of them contain useful information – a LOT of information – on the history and culture of Transylvania, on vampire stories, on Stoker’s life and times. But many of them contain no useful information at all, and instead offer interpretations of the book, point out inconsistencies in Stoker’s storytelling, make judgments on the characters’ actions, and generally just get in the way – and make me laugh. The book mentions the dish “paprika hendl,” and in the footnotes we get a recipe. The novel says that the driver “cracked his big whip over four small horses, which ran abreast,” and the footnote tells us “In no Dracula film yet made has anyone depicted the horses harnessed in this way.”

Dracula says, “I love the shade and the shadow, and would be alone with my thoughts when I may,” and the editor muses, “A surprisingly melancholy passage. Is Dracula lonely? Why does he want Harker there? Is he really testing his English, or his social skills, as he claims?” And what are these footnotes – attempts at creating a reader’s guide, complete with discussion questions? Harker considers escaping from Dracula’s castle, saying, “I shall try to scale the castle wall farther than I have yet attempted. I shall take some of the gold with me lest I want it later,” and the editor gets moralistic: “A pretty lame excuse for stealing Dracula’s gold.”

But the best footnote of all is yet to come (and I’ve only read about 60 pages! Hundreds left to go!). First, the text: this is the scene where Harker is first attacked by the three mysterious vampire women hanging out in Dracula’s castle (and the text itself is pretty funny, if you read it in the right way):

The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and could feel the hot breath on my neck….

Here’s the accompanying footnote:

I have tried, calmly as well as passionately, to reproduce this churning sound with my tongue but without success. It may be a noise that only a passionate vampire can make.

I’m glad to know this editor is doing his research!

It would be better to read a less intrusive edition for my first time through the book, but I have to admit that the editorial apparatus is adding an entirely unexpected level of pleasure to my reading.