Posts tagged with books
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![The Last Book I Loved: Joan Didion’s ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series from The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). This is the final installment of Tumblr Storyboard’s version, but you can still submit to The Rumpus for publication! Thanks for reading.
I came across a Facebook post recently in which someone offered W.B. Yeats’ poem “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” as encouragement for a peer going through a quarter-life crisis. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” Yeats writes. It’s a feeling everyone has at some point, but for a twentysomething in the midst of an identity crisis, it sounded especially appropriate.
Joan Didion must have felt the same way when she chose the poem as an epigraph for her essay collection of the same name.
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It was Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, not Yeats’ poem, that has been my totem throughout my 20s, because she has that gift that all great writers do of hitting on universal truths by admitting very personal ones. “One of the mixed blessings of being 20 and 21 and even 23 is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before,” she writes in “Goodbye to All That,” an essay about her time in New York in her 20s.
Reading that sentence for the first time at 21 and knowing, at some level, that she was right, was not nearly as comforting as realizing that there was an antidote to feeling young and confused — and that antidote was narrative. As Didion writes in another equally brilliant collection, The White Album, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” The trick to getting through your twenties intact, it seemed to me, was looking ahead to the narrative I could impose on that decade later in life.
I don’t recall why I first picked it up, but I can still conjure up the musty smell of the paperback I borrowed from the University College London library and the jarring contrast of being engrossed in Didion’s 1950s New York during a train ride between London and Manchester.
Mostly, I remember how homesick I felt reading Didion’s take on the American dream at a time in my life when, living far away from home for the first time, I was finally figuring out my own national identity. The irony of this feeling is that Slouching Towards Bethlehem isn’t what you would call a “feel-good” read. Most of the essays are set in California in the 60s, some of them are reportage on Haight-Ashbury hippies and Howard Hughes, and others are personal reflections on Didion’s life in exile from a California that “resembles Eden,” where “it is assumed that those who absent themselves from its blessings have been banished.”
Throughout the book, Didion is constantly shuttling between the coasts, back and forth from this promised land. In “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” in which Didion reports on a woman who murders her husband, she writes, “The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.” California stands in for the American dream: Its streets are always paved with gold, but its promise is never attainable. Didion’s writing — and her whole concept of California — nonetheless operates on the premise that all things are possible, because they have to be:
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.
But Didion’s California (and New York, for that matter) is a promise that never delivers, which she nonetheless can’t seem to give it up. She admits, “Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.” I understood that differently upon first reading it in England — during a semester abroad in which all time was suspended for me and all post-graduate futures infinitely possible — than I do during my fourth year of racking up frequent flier miles on the US Airways shuttle between DC and Boston.
It’s a romantic point of view to hold when you come from a place that makes you feel exiled for living outside it, and in that sense my hometown of Boston and Didion’s Sacramento have much in common.
Mostly, I keep reading and rereading these essays because Joan Didion is a writer’s writer. In the spirit of her declaration in “Goodbye to All That,” I have to imagine that there are many other twentysomething writers out there with dog-eared copies of this book, but since I haven’t met them yet, I continued to think I was the only one for years after I discovered her. More recently, I have taken to recommending her to anyone whose literary taste I’m trying to judge. I lent a friend my copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem once with the earnest warning, “If you don’t read this, we can’t be friends,” and during the months while I waited for him to return it, I sometimes worried that I would have to cut him off.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem isn’t just a collection for hopeful writers or even for people who are young and unmoored. It’s for all people who have lost their sense of place or sense of time or sense of self. It’s for “the quiet ones” that people always tell you to beware. Didion is all of these things, but especially the last:
My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
It’s easy to forget that line in the preface once the essays about Charles Manson and John Wayne give way to more personal ones about Didion’s relationship with her hometown and her grapples with self-esteem. It’s easy to think instead that the stories she tells of her struggles with depression are unvarnished, but at some point you have to ask: Why is this self-proclaimed shy, aloof reporter spilling so many of her secrets?
Her power to mythologize is so great that it must extend even to the stories she tells of her own life. Early in “Goodbye to All That,” Didion writes, “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.” But by writing years later, she already knows the ending; she alone controls the narrative. In life, sure, it’s easy to concede that “things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” but writing is different from life, and the contrast between the two in Slouching Towards Bethlehem makes the former a much more appealing occupation.
— Kara Hadge](http://25.media.tumblr.com/d116063cbe56c089cf4fc7d577efe4fd/tumblr_mklejntVhV1rrpm57o1_1280.jpg)
The Last Book I Loved: Joan Didion’s ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series from The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). This is the final installment of Tumblr Storyboard’s version, but you can still submit to The Rumpus for publication! Thanks for reading.
I came across a Facebook post recently in which someone offered W.B. Yeats’ poem “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” as encouragement for a peer going through a quarter-life crisis. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” Yeats writes. It’s a feeling everyone has at some point, but for a twentysomething in the midst of an identity crisis, it sounded especially appropriate.
Joan Didion must have felt the same way when she chose the poem as an epigraph for her essay collection of the same name.
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![Speaking Up for STFU Parents
When Blair Koenig started STFU Parents, a Tumblr that lightheartedly pokes fun at the myriad parental oversharers of the world, she had no clue that four years later her inbox would be overflowing with enough tantrums, dining table diaper changes, and placenta casserole recipes to fill an entire book. And yet, STFU Parents (the book) hits stands this week, complete with vomit, snot, and of course, those perennial potty-training updates. Breaking down the submissions into categories like “Mama Drama,” “Mommyjacking,” or the ominously titled “Gross-Out Factor,” it’s a cautionary tale for anyone who’s ever considered giving birth — or even been friends with a parent.
Do you just hate babies? Why start the blog?
I noticed a big influx of information — kidformation — in my Facebook status feed. I kind of loosely complained about it to a parent friend, so then she started sending me screen shots of her annoying friends, who were mostly bragging about their kids. Up until then I’d only witnessed more boring, minutiae-type updates — how many naps their kid had, how much their kids had eaten. But the updates she was getting were a whole new level.
I’m probably going to regret asking, but what’s the most revolting thing you’ve ever seen?
It’s all a matter of taste. Some people are not grossed out by snot, but personally, I think pictures of kids with snot hanging off their faces are the worst. Anyone who takes an aerial picture of an open diaper or a toilet with shit in it … I don’t even understand how a person thinks that way.
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What about all the placenta eating? I mean, I grew up with animals, I know dogs and cats do it, but until I became a regular reader I thought it was limited to the animal kingdom. And then one of my own friends posted a placenta smoothie.
The placenta shake is a powerful image. People are taken aback by that shot, because there are no red vegetables that create that color, and it looks, at first glance, like a cocktail. The fact that it’s an HD picture that looks like it belongs on a menu … that’s what’s so funny about it.
What’s been your most popular post?
Definitely the Brenda post. Brenda clicked “like” on a lingerie company’s Facebook page and so pictures of underwear kept popping up in her feed. She kept posting furious responses, demanding this company stop posting “pornography” on her page. Her relatives kept trying to explain, “Auntie, you can ‘unlike’ the page,” but Brenda’s fury kept growing.
I’ve read a lot of bitching about how you have no right to do this blog because you don’t have children.
Movie critics aren’t generally also filmmakers and food bloggers tend not to be chefs. I don’t understand a lot of the criticisms. I mean, are you really defending the right to change a diaper on a restaurant table?
Which is your favorite category?
“Sanctimommies” are hard to beat, though a good mommyjacking is up there too. My favorite is when someone posts something really sad like, “My brother RIP,” and then some idiot replies “happy birthday to little Samuel … in four days.” It’s not even their kid’s birthday THAT day — they just have to take the attention off the guy with the dead brother to talk about their child.
STFU Parents will celebrate its book debut with a baby-shower comedy session tonight at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe. RSVP here.
— Judy McGuire
Photo via Shutterstock](http://25.media.tumblr.com/9f20363a30537879ea81db59bce20950/tumblr_mkfndqJj2T1rrpm57o1_r1_1280.jpg)
Speaking Up for STFU Parents
When Blair Koenig started STFU Parents, a Tumblr that lightheartedly pokes fun at the myriad parental oversharers of the world, she had no clue that four years later her inbox would be overflowing with enough tantrums, dining table diaper changes, and placenta casserole recipes to fill an entire book. And yet, STFU Parents (the book) hits stands this week, complete with vomit, snot, and of course, those perennial potty-training updates. Breaking down the submissions into categories like “Mama Drama,” “Mommyjacking,” or the ominously titled “Gross-Out Factor,” it’s a cautionary tale for anyone who’s ever considered giving birth — or even been friends with a parent.
Do you just hate babies? Why start the blog?
I noticed a big influx of information — kidformation — in my Facebook status feed. I kind of loosely complained about it to a parent friend, so then she started sending me screen shots of her annoying friends, who were mostly bragging about their kids. Up until then I’d only witnessed more boring, minutiae-type updates — how many naps their kid had, how much their kids had eaten. But the updates she was getting were a whole new level.
I’m probably going to regret asking, but what’s the most revolting thing you’ve ever seen?
It’s all a matter of taste. Some people are not grossed out by snot, but personally, I think pictures of kids with snot hanging off their faces are the worst. Anyone who takes an aerial picture of an open diaper or a toilet with shit in it … I don’t even understand how a person thinks that way.
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![The Last Book I Loved: ‘The Unnamed’
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
When you go to the website for Joshua Ferris’s 2010 novel, The Unnamed, your screen fills with static for a second. Then it resolves into a grainy gray video of the main hall of Grand Central Terminal, like security camera footage, commuters walking to and from their trains. And then fuzzy blue circles appear over a handful of heads. When you click on one, the video pauses, and a small text bubble comes up. One says, “I look around, I wonder if I’m just sick.” Another quotes a poem by Percy Shelley. “Art thou pale for weariness / Of climbing heaven and gazing on earth/Wandering companionless / Among the stars that have a different birth.” They feel like a little of what each person has inside them, a bit of story or sorrow they keep inside themselves.
This is what Joshua Ferris’s work is — a song of this secret world. He writes about the isolation of modern life, our disconnect from the world at large and from the people around us. And he writes of the small, beautiful hopes of connection — through love, through hope, through body-breaking exertions.
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The Unnamed is about a man named Tim who cannot stop walking. Tim comes home to Connecticut one night from his job at a high-powered New York law firm and tells his wife, simply, “It’s back.” She bundles him in winter gear, packs a bag with provisions and a GPS. She finally falls asleep in the middle of the night and wakes up to find Tim gone, walked out of the house to who knows where. In the grips of this condition he is driven to walk, for hours on end, stopping only when he collapses, exhausted. No one knows why. No one has a cure.
Is it a metaphor? Maybe. Is it a conceit? Sure. But it’s a starting place. Every story has to start somewhere, and Tim’s starts with “It’s back.” For the first dozen or so pages, you don’t even know what “it” is, and the suspense builds like really good sci-fi: something is wrong, and you don’t know what. Ferris takes this conceit and builds a full, rich story about it. All of the rules — as in the best sci-fi — hold tight. All of the repercussions feel deep and true to the human heart.
Tim has a wife, Jane, and they have a daughter named Becka. Tim’s condition ravages his life, but their lives are intertwined, and so it ravages them all. Becka reads her father stories while he’s handcuffed to the bed. Jane picks him up from parking lots and police stations and curbsides, and waits for the next call when he’s gone. She worries the call will never come.
Tim is at war with his body; his legs that won’t listen. Walking forces him to shed his attachment to his career, to comfort, to any sense of plan or control. Walking takes him out into the world, first within a radius of a seven or eight hour walk from his office or his home, but then farther afield. He is completely alone. All around him, the world is falling apart.
Tim’s world is a world frighteningly like ours, with superstorms and deep snow. The winters are too cold, the summers are filled with droughts, fires, and floods. A carpet of dead bees covers Madison Square Park. Birds fall out of the sky. The great cracks in the rightness of the world hover in the background of Tim’s life — just as they do in ours. Maybe Tim’s story is set just a couple of years into our future. Maybe that’s what our world is really going to be.
The real reason I loved this book is that this world — Tim’s condition, the ailing planet — is just the backdrop of the heart of Ferris’s story to nestle into.
Little bits of The Unnamed are stuck in my head. A man clinging to a telephone pole in a flood. A daughter and her father on a bench in Tompkins Square Park. A sense of loss. A sense of isolation. A sense of love. For all its desolation, for all its characters’ helplessness, it’s a hopeful book. Because even when they can’t connect, can’t reach each other’s inner world, they try. They valiantly, desperately try.
— Jaime Green](http://24.media.tumblr.com/679563333403fa24080947b49b966176/tumblr_mkeoupnM6M1rrpm57o1_r2_1280.jpg)
The Last Book I Loved: ‘The Unnamed’
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
When you go to the website for Joshua Ferris’s 2010 novel, The Unnamed, your screen fills with static for a second. Then it resolves into a grainy gray video of the main hall of Grand Central Terminal, like security camera footage, commuters walking to and from their trains. And then fuzzy blue circles appear over a handful of heads. When you click on one, the video pauses, and a small text bubble comes up. One says, “I look around, I wonder if I’m just sick.” Another quotes a poem by Percy Shelley. “Art thou pale for weariness / Of climbing heaven and gazing on earth/Wandering companionless / Among the stars that have a different birth.” They feel like a little of what each person has inside them, a bit of story or sorrow they keep inside themselves.
This is what Joshua Ferris’s work is — a song of this secret world. He writes about the isolation of modern life, our disconnect from the world at large and from the people around us. And he writes of the small, beautiful hopes of connection — through love, through hope, through body-breaking exertions.
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![The Last Book I Loved: House of Leaves
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
The first thing that you notice about the full-color second edition of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is the cover. It’s not an ornate design, although the compass needle and outwardly spreading nautilus, and glossy lines of rooms in a house against matte-black paper are all lovely touches. What you notice is its size — which foreshadows the primary moving force in the novel. It is roughly a half an inch shorter than the book itself.
[[MORE]]I should start, before going into detail, by giving you the novel’s gist: House of Leaves is a book about another book, about a film about a house. To be more specific, its narrator, Johnny Truant, recounts in the introduction that he was asked to come over to his best friend’s place and look at the dead body in his neighbor’s apartment. This neighbor, Zampanò, died very peculiarly—there are large claw marks on the floor where he died (from what you’re only left to guess) – and the only thing of any real discernible value is a large stack of handwritten papers, Zampanò’s study of a film known as The Navidson Record. But, not only is Zampanò blind, there’s also no evidence that the actual film or most of the academic writings cited in Zampanò’s papers exist.
The film itself is even more disconcerting. It begins by following Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Will Navidson as he buys a house in Virginia with his wife Karen and his two kids. Navidson begins to install cameras in almost every room—not as an act of creepy voyeurism, he says, but in order to faithfully document what he see as a moment of rebirth for his strained family. It is in the process that he discovers something physically impossible: that the house is actually bigger on the inside, by half an inch, than it is on the outside. This revelation reveals the house’s inherent darkness, which has disastrous effects on its inhabitants and those close to them.
A story like this could be told in a straightforward fashion, but it wouldn’t be told as well. Every sliver of text has meaning. The novel is copiously footnoted, for example, but in Chapter IX, as they dive deeper into the labyrinthine nature of the house, these footnotes are less often numbered and more often headed with symbols from ground-to-air emergency code. The first such one used is the symbol for ‘Unable to Proceed,’ which is referenced not only several times in the chapter, but also by other footnotes. In other words, if you obey them, you’ll never move forward: the chapter itself is now a labyrinth.
This style can be polarizing. Either House of Leaves is the kind of book that is right up your alley or it isn’t. Several readers had called it gimmicky. What I admire about the book is that it can pull it off. Writers always say that if you want to write, reading is the best apprenticeship you can have; in that sense, House of Leaves is a very eccentric teacher of prose.
People often describe books according to how cinematic they are—they describe seeing a movie version of the story in their heads. What makes House of Leaves stand out is that it doesn’t allow readers to do that. This is a book that’s about more than what words are used in a sentence and how; it’s about how they are presented. Danielewski allows no wasted moments on the page. Everything means something, even things the author chooses to obscure from you. There is nothing about the act of reading House of Leaves that is passive. This book requires effort.
I grew up on “Give Yourself Goosebumps” (the “Choose Your Own Adventure”–style spinoff of “Goosebumps”) in primary school. Though it wasn’t very often that I had money to buy a book, I still amassed a considerable stack of them (until some calamity exposed them water damage). I would read them over and over in the dark by flashlight, finishing one path toward fright only to start back at the beginning until I had explored every available option. Those books are the first step to what Espen J. Aarseth calls “ergodic literature.” I hadn’t noticed until I discovered House of Leaves how much I loved reading stories where, as Aarseth says, “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text.” Even more, I want to write those kinds of stories—stories where you can’t simply turn pages and slide your eyes across the black line of text, but where the act of reading is just as dynamic as the act of processing what you’ve read.
I would have never before contemplated the notion of the reader as explorer, player, code-breaker, and more until I myself had seen a novel that is its own labyrinth, that asks the reader to play, that trusts the reader to decode.I imagine not a lot of people confess to loving a book because it inspires them to write better rather than because it entertains or touches them, and I’m not saying that House of Leaves doesn’t entertain or touch. Above all, though, it challenges me. This book prompts me to write something like it, and to find other people who have done so or are trying. It forces me to ask myself whether breaking the mold with my own writing should include, at times, writing beyond the margins.
—Brandon O’Brien](http://24.media.tumblr.com/e8b4f59d2c98193f8b602807f3dea80c/tumblr_mk19mz1lEw1rrpm57o1_1280.jpg)
The Last Book I Loved: House of Leaves
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
The first thing that you notice about the full-color second edition of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is the cover. It’s not an ornate design, although the compass needle and outwardly spreading nautilus, and glossy lines of rooms in a house against matte-black paper are all lovely touches. What you notice is its size — which foreshadows the primary moving force in the novel. It is roughly a half an inch shorter than the book itself.
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![The Last Book I Loved: A Time to Be Born
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
Ernest Hemingway purportedly said of Dawn Powell that she was his “favorite living writer.” Powell’s reputation has dwindled since then, and so I picked up A Time to Be Born in an effort to read more women writers — especially once-famous, forgotten ones. It took me a long time to get around to reading it, though, mainly because the back cover blurbs and reviews I read didn’t do justice to the one thing that made me love this book: Dawn Powell’s writing is so damn mean.
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A Time to Be Born takes place in New York City, in the world of journalism, in the months preceding the United States’ entry into World War II. Imagine being there: the outfits, the music, the atmosphere, the sense of foreboding, the knowledge that something big is going to happen, that we’re going to war.
Vicky Haven, a clever but self-conscious girl from Lakeville, Ohio, has had no luck in love so far. After her fiancée ran off to marry her business associate, Vicky is utterly dejected. Her best friend seeks out on her behalf the help of Amanda Keeler, a former school friend who made it big in New York — now known as Amanda Keeler Evans, after she married the biggest press mogul of the day. Amanda, said to be modeled after writer and politician Clare Booth Luce, is the archetype of the cold, beautiful, manipulative woman. This is why I love her.
In many ways, Amanda is the ideal villainess. She doesn’t own up to her modest Ohio upbringing, inventing instead a sheltered education in Europe. She shuns physical contact — she doesn’t like sex, which allows her to use it. Her awareness of her beauty helps her barter for whatever she needs. She is so un-feminist (is that a word?) that she actively hates and despises other women, their weaknesses, their mannerisms; she thinks she is the exceptional woman, the special snowflake.
And yet, despite all of Amanda’s faults, Dawn Powell still manages to make her completely, frighteningly human. Amanda is a villain, sure, but the author makes her so true to life and brushes such a brilliant portrait that I understood every one of her actions. More than once I caught myself thinking “Okay, I could do that.”
And it is not just Amanda. Every single one of the characters, primary and secondary, has this in common with the others: none are likable, but all are relatable. From the personal secretary who is sick of not getting her fair share of recognition, to the cynical, superficial bourgeois family obsessed with famous acquaintances, I understood them all. Some of them are horrible without even meaning any harm to anyone.
To me, Dawn Powell’s characters are as good as most from Balzac or Flaubert, without the annoying misogynistic, deterministic bullcrap. There, I said it. Powell does not have an agenda, such as proving that women are stupid by inventing a stupid character and pretending it was drawn only from observation. I found Powell’s writing style flawless: precise, never gushing. She shifts from one character’s point of view to the next seamlessly, allowing her well-constructed plot to slowly unfold. Some people have found A Time to Be Born funny, and I guess it is, in a laughing-to-keep-from-crying way. Others seem to be under the impression that Powell’s books are only a thinly veiled criticism of the famous New York writers of her time, but to me it is much more than that. Yes, they are timeless, but that’s not what I mean. They are also a study of the self-centeredness, the boundless selfishness of human beings, especially wealthy, famous ones — a study of the lengths people will go to, and the desperation they will fall into, when they are not able to think of anyone but themselves.
As I reread this last paragraph, I realize it sounds dismal, but this book really isn’t. For one thing, I can always find reassurance for my own little ego: “But I am not like those characters. Not me.” This mantra is what allows me to read about awful people, feel awful for a while, and then go on with my life. For another, what shines through most in all this book’s bleakness is Dawn Powell’s genius. As an aspiring writer, I know I’ve found yet another great novelist to look up to.
— Jade Marin](http://25.media.tumblr.com/ed3c3226aabb26c812d6ee1cc7d10a35/tumblr_mjpgugDIuD1rrpm57o1_1280.jpg)
The Last Book I Loved: A Time to Be Born
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
Ernest Hemingway purportedly said of Dawn Powell that she was his “favorite living writer.” Powell’s reputation has dwindled since then, and so I picked up A Time to Be Born in an effort to read more women writers — especially once-famous, forgotten ones. It took me a long time to get around to reading it, though, mainly because the back cover blurbs and reviews I read didn’t do justice to the one thing that made me love this book: Dawn Powell’s writing is so damn mean.
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![The Last Book I Loved: History of the Peloponnesian War
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
This is not an easy book to love. As an object, it is one of those books all of an age: squat, with yellowing, pulpy pages, the kind whose corners you can’t turn down because the paper creases so hard it that it might as well be perforated. Dog-ear it in the opposite direction and the corner comes off entirely. The print is small and dense; and it is a 2,400 year old account of a war that gets no press. It’s not sexy like the Fall of Troy, not Homerically epic. The gods don’t factor in. The content is almost as hard to love as the way I remember myself when the book first came to me.
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I was in eighth grade and my favorite aunt and uncle were moving to a new home. They were young — my aunt Patty is 18 years younger than my father, only eleven years older than I am, and she was everything that I thought was good and exciting in this world. She introduced me to Bon Jovi, and her boyfriend, who would later become my favorite uncle Shawn, had hair as long as hers. He played the drums and loved KISS, and though I never really liked KISS, I started playing the drums because of him. What made them so magnetic, though, was that they took me seriously, always. They took me seriously enough that when they were moving, Shawn opened up his boxes of college textbooks and pulled out a few he thought I would like. One was Thucydides. I don’t remember the others, but I remember that I was the kind of young person an adult (a really groovy adult) thought would like this book. Which is to say I was a grandiose, pretentious little shit. My one defense, perhaps, was that I did actually read the Impressive Books I carried around. If I was pretentious, at least I tried to be an authentic kind of pretentious. I don’t know that I read them well, but read them I did — except Thucydides.
Even at the height of my Homer fanaticism, I don’t remember even opening this book, or even looking at the table of contents. That was 17 years ago.Three degrees. Four moves to four different states. In all of that time, I’ve done nothing more with Thucydides than shelve and unshelve it, box and unbox. Better, more well-loved books have been given away in all of those moves. It’s not even that it has sentimental value — Shawn likely doesn’t even remember that I have it. I don’t think we ever had a conversation about anything approaching the topic, either. I’ve thrown away their wedding card (and everyone else’s). Why keep this book?
The only answer I can think of is that this book was a gauntlet. It’s not that anyone threw it at my feet in challenge, but there it was, the unread reminder, until this past summer.
I was having a conversation on Twitter with a person who I have never actually met, but whose writing I admire and who I like all out of proportion to how much we actually know each other (basically not at all). He brought up The Peloponnesian Waras a personal favorite. All day every day I see people online praising and recommending books, and sometimes I read them but more often I don’t. I’m not sure what about this conversation actually made me pick up Thucydides, but I did. What I found was a strange and most welcome kind of company. It isn’t that Thucydides’ writing (albeit in translation) had anything in common with my own, but (odd as it seems) he sounds like people I know. The sentences are dry and acerbic and often palpably exasperated. In commenting on the Trojan War, Thucydides writes,
[T]here is no reason why we should not believe that the Trojan expedition was the greatest that had ever taken place. It is equally true that it was not on the scale of what is done in modern warfare. It is questionable whether we can have complete confidence in Homer’s figures, which, since he was a poet, were probably exaggerated.
Fucking poets (and so say many of us, particularly as we understand that, for Thucydides, the “poet” was anyone involved in the creation of story — whether it was song or play or fireside tale). I am reminded of the person who recommended the book to me, whose incredibly low threshold for bullshit is something I frankly envy. I am reminded of my graduate school friend Patrick, who was cynical, impatient, and incredibly brusque, and also one of the most intelligent, most secretly kind people I’ve ever met.
I love this book for what feel like the wrong reasons. I am used to loving books for their story or their language or the very construction of their sentences — something that says content in one way or another. But I have to admit to only the most passing interest in the matter of the Peloponnesian War. The pretentious eighth grader in me is gratified to know a bit more about it, to say “look at this knowledge I now have,” but the rest of me is often bored by the minutiae of negotiations as Thucydides relates them, and relate them he does. The book contains set speeches, the terms of treaties — as one expects a solid history to do. But there’s also a lot of commentary on the process, on the state of humanity, and Thucydides asks the same questions we are still asking. Thucydides shakes the same crotchety finger I shake at my composition students:
In investigating past history, and in forming the conclusions which I have formed, it must be admitted that one cannot rely on every detail which has come down to us by way of tradition. People are inclined to accept all stories of ancient times in an uncritical way — even when these stories concern their own native countries … Most people, in fact, will not take trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.
And yet, Thucydides is no particularly objective recorder. In discussing his methods for relaying those speeches, he writes,
I have found it difficult to remember the precise words used in the speeches which I listened to myself and my various informants have experienced the same difficulty; so my method has been, while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation.
Thucydides faces the creative nonfiction writer’s dilemma but demonstrates not the slightest bit of doubt in approaching it. He has found his solution to his own satisfaction, and he pushes on, recreating long verbal missives from one camp to another, from one tyrant to the next. It is impossible to read forward with complete academic confidence, then — he confesses to taking liberties not three paragraphs beyond the imprecation to never take anything at face value. But he admits to the taking of liberties, and the prose is so emphatic, so certain. I seldom feel so convinced by myself. I wedge my fingertips between the pages and believe in osmosis.
The translator’s note in my edition, written by Rex Warner, begins, “It is difficult, pleasurable, and bold to attempt to translate Thucydides into English.” Warner’s note explores the doubt that underwrites translation as a whole, the knowledge that something will inevitably be lost in the process, but also that there is so much to be gained from the task. Warner nearly apologizes for his work, but he seems unable to keep himself from attempting the challenge of Thucydides. I like to believe that that’s what my uncle Shawn was thinking when he gave such a book to an adolescent: in reading it well before I was of an age or an experience to understand more than simply the words and events, something would inevitably be lost, if I ever even read it. Reading Thucydides would be difficult, but maybe I would feel bold in doing so, and either in the content or the undertaking, I might find something pleasurable.
I didn’t read it then, and having read it now, I don’t feel bold. The reading was difficult — I couldn’t let my attention lapse for a sentence or two, couldn’t skim if I wanted to know the fullness of the events. I did lapse, though. I did skim. Ultimately, I didn’t care as much as I wanted to about the debate at Camarina. But in Thucydides’s tone, in his interrogation of uncertain facts and his assertion of his own reconstructions, in the way the act of reading re-tied me to people — no matter how little-known or now-distant — there was familiarity and connection, and I can think of no greater pleasure.
— Holly M. Wendt](http://25.media.tumblr.com/8f58b77a94cf012daa9fd5791df4a596/tumblr_mjb78zK0d21rrpm57o1_1280.jpg)
The Last Book I Loved: History of the Peloponnesian War
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
This is not an easy book to love. As an object, it is one of those books all of an age: squat, with yellowing, pulpy pages, the kind whose corners you can’t turn down because the paper creases so hard it that it might as well be perforated. Dog-ear it in the opposite direction and the corner comes off entirely. The print is small and dense; and it is a 2,400 year old account of a war that gets no press. It’s not sexy like the Fall of Troy, not Homerically epic. The gods don’t factor in. The content is almost as hard to love as the way I remember myself when the book first came to me.
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