Posts tagged with longreads
-
![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.
[[MORE]]
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.
View post 297 notes -
![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.
[[MORE]]
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.
View post 488 notes -
![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.
View post 917 notes -
![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.
[[MORE]]
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.
View post 3,161 notes -
![The Last Book I Loved: Brown Girl, Brownstones
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.
My dreams, for so long unrestrained by land, air, or even death — and frequently including scenes of me tumbling through the air on glossy black feathered wings or jumping into an abyss with a smile on my face — now generally take place in a building with four walls and a roof. I dream of houses. I dream of owning a home, post-Great Recession, and despite the weight of federal student loans on my back. I am frequently visited by visions of curtains that open up to reveal a cold sunlight in the morning, of a cubbyhole library, perhaps in the attic, and of backyards that lend themselves to Slip ‘n Slides and crisp autumnal leaf piles. I would dream of brownstones, except I’m in the wrong tax bracket. Crippling pragmatism happens sometimes.
[[MORE]]
Occasionally, after these fantasies, I return to Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, originally published in 1959 by Random House. As with many books, my allegiances to certain characters evolve over time and with age. As a teenager, Beneatha Younger from Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun was my afro-haired spirit animal, always being smacked down (literally) by the elders in her life for her spunk and willingness to redefine her place as a black woman in America and in her family, always questioning and never satisfied. Just before I turned 30, and after a couple of failed relationships with men who had ill-defined or nonexistent ambitions, my allegiances turned to Beneatha’s sister-in-law, Ruth Younger. Ruth, who did so much and asked for so little, who faced economic realities that caused her to consider an abortion while her husband was waxing poetic about liquor stores.
In Brown Girl, Brownstones, which I read two years ago, I started out heavily involved with and invested in the protagonist, Selina Boyce — a second generation Bajan-American living in Brooklyn — and have lately embraced Selina’s mother, Silla, who is similar to my own mother and her American dream-centered ambitions. A South Side Chicago girl (Chatham to be precise) with college-educated parents, my mother gave directives to her female offspring that were very clear: get good grades, do a stint in Jack and Jill, go to college, avoid out-of-wedlock births, procure a good job and, perhaps later, a husband and children. In that exact order.
Selina is given similar instructions from her mother, who dreams of owning a Brooklyn brownstone: join the Barbadian church group, get good grades, become a doctor, meet an “acceptable” guy — a member of the community — and buy a brownstone. In that exact order. Though the story focuses on Selina’s coming of age in terms of her ethnicity, class, and sexuality (it is no accident that subsequent editions of the book were published by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York), it is Silla’s dreams of owning a brownstone that haunt me.
This is not to say that Selina’s struggle is any less compelling. Her teenage rebellion, culminating in a dramatic outburst intent on embarrassing her mother, struck a note in me, as I pulled a similarly childish stunt during a Jack and Jill conference while in high school. How clever I thought I was, railing against bougie pretensions in that petulant teenage pitch (you know the one). Yet in my thirties, I find myself comparing my life to my mother’s at this same age, understanding what she wanted of me and desiring it on my own. Career. Husband. Children. House. In that order. A yard built for raising a family and upon one can look out on from behind the aforementioned curtains, watching the world go by.
Silla is portrayed as cruel and oppressive, unyielding. Her children fear her; her husband Deighton spites her. “For always the mother’s voice was a net flung wide, ensnaring all within its reach,” Marshall writes. Through Selina’s eyes, Silla is like a chapter from the Book of Ruth, Hansberry edition, without the empathy. Yet, as a 30-something woman, I can understand how she might have turned so bitter, so angry, raising three children in poverty while her husband pursued whims like being a trumpet player, an accountant, a radio repairman, or a car mechanic with the unrealistic fervor reserved for buying lotto tickets, and leaving Silla to be the main financial contributor. She earns her family’s money as a domestic, dealing with subtle and aggressive racism all day long while working on her knees. Her desire to own four walls and a roof are simple in comparison. The brutal way Silla and Deighton wreck each other midway through the book, I see years later, as a commentary on how easily the American dream and capitalism can corrupt even the most earnest desires.
Reading the contrasts between Selina and Silla reminds me of a stretch of time in my twenties. It’s a period in which you feel smugly certain that your life is vastly different from your mother’s. You don’t imagine that your mother fell in love with inappropriate men and had sex just because she liked a guy’s dimples. You don’t imagine that your mom wanted to take off and live in another city to live a grand adventure, or explored bohemian scenes, or lived selfishly, or did only things to please herself — sleeping until noon, smoking, or leaving work early. So you do those things with gusto and abandon, but before you know it, you are speaking to a child in the same way your mother spoke to you, or giving your boss the same look your mom gave you when she knew you were lying.
At a critical point in Brown Girl, Brownstones, Selina makes peace with the ways she is like her mother, in a quietly devastating way.
“Everybody used to call me Deighton’s Selina but they were wrong. Because you see I’m truly your child. Remember how you used to talk about how you left home and came here alone as a girl of eighteen and was your own woman? I used to love hearing that. And that’s what I want. I want it!”
Silla’s pained eyes searched her adamant face, and after a long time a wistfulness softened her mouth. It was as if she somehow glimpsed in Selina the girl she had always been.
The summer I read this book, I made a similar peace with my mother. I began calling and Skyping home more, trying to bridge a physical distance of more than 900 miles. On holidays, we’re hugging more, and listening. I’ve inherited her voice and wry mannerisms. I’ve fulfilled some of both of our desires, but I understand more about her extremely rich experiences. I imagine that a Brown Girl, Brownstones sequel would show Selina, back in Brooklyn after her excursion to Barbados, shaking her head knowingly at a young, Angela Davis-crowned version of herself. She would probably tell her to mind the bohemians and beware of men with idle hearts and hands. The daughter will pursue her own dreams, evolving over time, just as her mother once also did.
— Stacie Williams](http://25.media.tumblr.com/8eab767f8ceee6570f7e165582a3b8e8/tumblr_mila5fzvzp1rrpm57o1_r2_1280.jpg)
The Last Book I Loved: Brown Girl, Brownstones
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.
My dreams, for so long unrestrained by land, air, or even death — and frequently including scenes of me tumbling through the air on glossy black feathered wings or jumping into an abyss with a smile on my face — now generally take place in a building with four walls and a roof. I dream of houses. I dream of owning a home, post-Great Recession, and despite the weight of federal student loans on my back. I am frequently visited by visions of curtains that open up to reveal a cold sunlight in the morning, of a cubbyhole library, perhaps in the attic, and of backyards that lend themselves to Slip ‘n Slides and crisp autumnal leaf piles. I would dream of brownstones, except I’m in the wrong tax bracket. Crippling pragmatism happens sometimes.
View post 1,459 notes -
![The Last Book I Loved: Skagboys
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.
Being a lover of charity shops, bargain basements, scruffy, slightly dusty secondhand bookshops, and long-forgotten boxes in attics, it’s a rare occurrence for me to buy a brand new, hot-off-the-press, full-price book. Frankly the idea gives me mild heart palpitations, perpetual tightwad that I am. But I’ve been one of the many who fall somewhere between an admirer and full-on obsessive about Irvine Welsh for a very long time, and when Skagboys was released in the summer of 2012, it was all I could do not to camp outside Waterstones the night before it went on sale — not hardly because of its strangely enticing advertising campaign.
Even those who wouldn’t count themselves among Welsh’s enthusiasts have come to know his signature mix of gritty realism with charming and yet wholly terrible characters through film adaptations of his work that have been made over the years. Ewan McGregor’s portrayal of Mark “Rent Boy” Renton won over those who couldn’t be bothered to decipher Welsh’s lavish use of Scottish slang, and a worldwide brand based on Renton’s “Choose Life” speech was born. Porno,the sequel, was very good (in my opinion arguably better than its predecessor) but failed to enter the public consciousness quite so effortlessly. And although I had high hopes, I could never have predicted how much I would enjoy the prequel to the Heroin Chic trilogy: Skagboys.
[[MORE]]
It is a testament to Welsh’s ability that the first and last books he has ever written should somehow still link together so fluidly. It helps, of course, that he has a personal connection to the subject matter, being born and bred in Leith and Edinburgh. Still, prequels can end up being romanticized versions of the first novel, with the author using the newer book more as a platform to correct the mistakes they made in the former rather than to formulate any real backstory. More than one critic suggested that since Skagboys is primarily put together from material that didn’t make it into Trainspotting, it’d be nothing more than an “a lashed-together series of outtakes and bloopers.” But Skagboys is nothing of the sort; Rents, Sick Boy, and sweet addled Spud are the same as ever—only here they are pre-skag and still naïve about a world that will leave them jaded and vicious in a few books’ time.
Described as “basically about how Renton and Sick Boy went from being daft young guys just out for the buzz on drugs to total junkies” by its author, Skagboys is a warning to those who find parallels with the characters within it against the all-consuming power of drugs. Renton is once again the primary narrator, and he is so convincing in his constant self-assurance that what he’s doing is normal that you almost don’t register how completely unreasonable it is for a boy who liked a drink to become a junkie trying to break into a factory. Learning more about his history helps us understand why Rents is how he is: angry, bitter, and yet not completely without tenderness, albeit a clumsy kind that seems to do nothing but land him in more trouble. We hear about his disabled younger brother, whose death more-or-less tears his family apart, putting strain on any hopes of finding salvation there in his later, heroin-addled years. Most intriguingly, we find out about his time at university, and how he did once seem to be a promising student with a girlfriend, aspirations, and a future away from Leith all mapped out. Somehow Skagboys manages to surprise me when this all goes to pot, even though having read Trainspotting I knew there was no other way for it to go — which I like to think is a show of Welsh’s skill rather than my own forgetfulness.
Sick Boy, in all his sleazy, charming glory, is as horrible and endearing as he ever is, but in this novel we begin to understand how he displays so much charisma while also mentally undressing and tossing you aside. The Scots-Italian background vaguely mentioned in Trainspotting is explained further, and it becomes a spot-on metaphor for his half-aggressive bully and half-purring Lothario persona. He is the antithesis of the boy that your mum thinks you should be with, but he’s the boy that you really want to be with, and he’s probably the boy that your mum really wants to be with as well. Sick Boy makes your skin crawl, and towards the end of the book he shows himself to be so ruthlessly cruel it almost beggars belief that he could possibly be seen as attractive, and yet he somehow is. In a nutshell, that’s what he’s all about. You hate him and hate him and hate him but deep down, you know you love him — everybody does.
As for Spud: He is the personification of why I love Skagboys so dearly. He is such a useless sweetheart, a cat-loving criminal with a conscience and no common sense. Although the tale for the others is one of a downward spiral, Spud’s is more of a plateau. He turns to drugs because there is nothing else for him. He isn’t particularly well-educated or knowledgeable about the world. He’s got a really big heart, but that will hardly help you in Thatcher’s Britain. His particular idiosyncrasy for calling everybody “catboy” is one I have always found unexpectedly touching, and in general his odd sense of morality and duty towards vulnerable creatures, whether they are old ladies, animals, or suicidal girls, has always stood him apart as the most lovable character of Welsh’s books.
In essence, I love Skagboys because however deplorable its protagonists, I really do want them to succeed. I want them to turn their lives around, get clean, end up fulfilled and well out of Scotland. I’m rooting for it from page one, which, due to the nature of it being a prequel, is as useless as watching Titanic and hoping it will all turn out okay. And yet Welsh forces me into doing it anyway. The fact that Trainspotting exists means that all hope that Skagboys inspires is necessarily false hope, and that’s what makes it such a good read. Any book that can fool you into thinking that there is a chance of redemption when you know there is none — that can make you hope for a “happily ever after” even though you’ve read the “after” and it certainly isn’t happy — is one that is worth reading.
— Lucy Uprichard](http://25.media.tumblr.com/6c1d2da9d73115e69692b711122fb28b/tumblr_mht5k3jQ4u1rrpm57o1_r2_500.jpg)
The Last Book I Loved: Skagboys
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.
Being a lover of charity shops, bargain basements, scruffy, slightly dusty secondhand bookshops, and long-forgotten boxes in attics, it’s a rare occurrence for me to buy a brand new, hot-off-the-press, full-price book. Frankly the idea gives me mild heart palpitations, perpetual tightwad that I am. But I’ve been one of the many who fall somewhere between an admirer and full-on obsessive about Irvine Welsh for a very long time, and when Skagboys was released in the summer of 2012, it was all I could do not to camp outside Waterstones the night before it went on sale — not hardly because of its strangely enticing advertising campaign.
Even those who wouldn’t count themselves among Welsh’s enthusiasts have come to know his signature mix of gritty realism with charming and yet wholly terrible characters through film adaptations of his work that have been made over the years. Ewan McGregor’s portrayal of Mark “Rent Boy” Renton won over those who couldn’t be bothered to decipher Welsh’s lavish use of Scottish slang, and a worldwide brand based on Renton’s “Choose Life” speech was born. Porno,the sequel, was very good (in my opinion arguably better than its predecessor) but failed to enter the public consciousness quite so effortlessly. And although I had high hopes, I could never have predicted how much I would enjoy the prequel to the Heroin Chic trilogy: Skagboys.
View post 1,296 notes
Most Popular
We
