Wax Banks

Tissues at the ready.

The best thing about MetaFilter is the occasional 'here is an amazing, achingly personal story prompted by some bit of pop-culture or breaking news' comment. The cancellation of Reading Rainbow prompted one such story. The first few paragraphs are moving, but if your mom or dad was a teacher, the end of the post might destroy you.

I watched Reading Rainbow, 3-2-1 Contact, Square One, Sesame Street, and Mr Rogers's Neighborhood as a kid. (I was forbidden from watching MTV until middle/high school, and never watched it at home.) I wish I'd known how lucky I was. Thanks, mom and dad.

Q: What sort of man was Ted Kennedy? A: It doesn't matter.

Senator Edward Kennedy lost his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980. Afterward he gave one of the most important orations by a liberal speaker since WWII. He cosponsored the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 and felt betrayed when it was underfunded by the Republican administration and Congress. Kennedy killed a woman named Mary Jo Kopechne on Martha's Vineyard forty years ago and 'got away with it.' He had lots of money and power and was spoiled. He took out a second mortgage on one of his homes to help pay for his 1994 senatorial campaign. He was expelled from Harvard for cheating on a Spanish test and was readmitted because Harvard is full of people like him. He drank a lot. He endured the assassinations of two brothers. Kennedy was a vociferous antiwar advocate in the early 70's. He pushed for universal health care for nearly 40 years. He supported busing in Boston despite vicious attacks from his constituents. He believed that ending poverty was a Christian responsibility, and worked toward that end.

In the mid-80's Ted Kennedy publicly defied the racist white South African government in support of Bishop Tutu. Ronald Reagan appointed him special go-between in negotiations with Gorbachev. His father Joseph was a criminal and a successful politician. Ted Kennedy was a firm supporter of women's rights. The women in his family have not been accorded the same status and privilege as the men. He felt a strong sense of noblesse oblige. He stayed conscious through the operation that removed his brain tumor. His speech about Robert Bork was effective demagoguery. The Kennedys and their many handlers and hangers-on are under the mistaken impression that they deserve power because of their status. Ted Kennedy worked very hard. He was an important and effective senator. He died this week.

Facts are facts; categories are bullshit. What sort of man was Ted Kennedy? Don't ask stupid questions. He was a man, he made mistakes, he profited, he paid, he suffered, he worked, he died. Narratives of 'redemption' and 'class privilege' and 'the prerogatives of power' and 'the lion of the senate' don't apply - or rather, they apply each in part, and help us get a grasp on the life of a dead man, which shared these qualities with every other human life: it was difficult and it ended. We demand that he be something more than the sum of his actions and experiences because we wish the same for ourselves. We remain ignorant, terrified, angry, hopeful, attached, and so death is difficult for us to understand. We wish our stories ended in something other than everlasting darkness.

Ted Kennedy was many things, and the television and newspapers and magazines are full of rich idiots bloviating on his 'meaning' and 'legacy' and 'nature' and so forth. On 'the Kennedys' and other gossip. These declarations might inspire but they do not educate. They bring us no closer to the man. He has gone beyond our reach now. Ted Kennedy worked hard and died having lived fully, for 'good' or 'ill'; the work remains. We should attend to it, and to the facts of the man's life, instead of groping about for his 'true nature.' His category, his identity. As if such things, in this world of acts and objects, meant anything at all. As if they could keep night from falling on us too.

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale.

Stayed up late last night to read the second half of The Handmaid's Tale. What exquisite writing! I worried at first that the politics of the book would be narrowed and hardened by polemic, but the characterizations are unfailingly generous and rich; unexpected kindness and connection and 'predictable' vileness all flow seamlessly together, and none of the narrative-present-time human elements are jarring. Some of the language is dated, of course, as are the assumptions about the role of consumer technology, and Atwood's version of a nativist-religious-reactionary revolution is the thinnest element of the book. But the implausible aspects of the Tale's future history nonetheless serve their purpose; what comes after the rickety bridging-fiction of the coup is emotionally airtight (however provisional or limited as political prediction).

And such writing, my god...the last sentence of section IX is a little stylistic fillip that occurs nowhere else in the novel; it's so beautiful I had to stop reading, if you know what I mean. The second half of the book is sprinkled with gorgeous, unexpected turns like that: flashbacks emerging almost undetected from present-time narration; imagined snatches of dialogue (e.g. Offred's vision of the Wives denigrating Janine); the instantly convincing reconstruction of Moira's narration. The book gets funnier, livelier, more sensual as it goes; the dusty opening chapters give way to fond memories, sexual longing, frank acceptance, and - finally - moments of rapture. I'm jealous of Atwood's skill. It's not just that every character is a complex human being; the writing itself evolves slowly from Offred's grim reportage (oh how very honest her justified cynicism seems) to the dangerous, intoxicating vulnerability of the final movements. The passages about love (after Jezebel's) are too true and honest to bear; Atwood's decision to follow them with the Salvaging is perhaps cruel but surely correct.

Offred is a real person. What higher praise is there for her creator?

I'm a little out of sorts today, and not just because of the book itself. Between Last Call and Atwood's novel, I've now read more novels (two) in the last three weeks than in any three month period since college. The purpose of confession is explicitness, so: I'm embarrassed, angry, worried about being exposed as a liar and hypocrite and poseur. I'm also hopeful (which is even more embarrassing). Maybe I'm learning how to read again. Wouldn't that be nice.

One other thing. Agi kept saying that The Handmaid's Tale was a 'hopeful' book, and through the first 150 pages I thought she was speaking ironically, playing a nasty trick. She was right though, as usual. Gents: listen to your wives.

[Surprise, surprise: Mary McCarthy's NYTimes review from 1986. I'm confused by her dismissal of the characterization; perhaps she couldn't tell Nick and Luke apart, but I knew them on sight, and I found the Commander (Fred) vivid and terrifying. This seems somewhat more accurate: 'At the same time, the Republic of Gilead itself, whatever in it that is not a projection, is insufficiently imagined.' But then the specifics of Gilead aren't the point. Offred's emotions, her desires, the constant (un)welcome return of her memories, the contortions required by her circumstances and the hardening ideas around her: all these things are instantly recognizable. The satiric target of The Handmaid's Tale isn't one particular religious/political movement or moment, but rather the dark desires given rein by fundamentalism, political or religious. Things would never happen quite this way; if they did, though, this is how they would feel. These are the choices we (would) face. Correct and true are not the same thing of course.]

Despair.

I started reading The Handmaid's Tale last night. I only made it through 75 pages and already I wish I were dead. My lady tells me it's a 'story of hope,' but she keeps saying it with this smile that makes me think I'm being set up for a fall. Alas. Click the image to see what I've been up to lately.

Milestoned.

Handed in what should be the first draft of a completed manuscript today. I have some administrative matters to attend to today and need to get started rewriting quite quickly, but since this project has been my summer's main focus, I feel at the moment as if I deserve a strong drink. I'll settle for a brief shower, as I neglected my morning ablutions and consequently stink like a fucking wet dog. Reader(s), you have my best wishes.

(p.s. I feel a little foolish pissing on Last Call like I did last night. The man's a beloved modern fantasist, after all, and plenty of people call it his best book. I just can't shake the feeling that, for all its imagistic potency and narrative drive, there's something the book completely failed to do, and it's got something to do with just-plain-people...)

Tim Powers, Last Call.

Tim Powers's Last Call comes highly recommended, but after finishing it tonight I can't shake a feeling of tremendous disappointment and frustration. It's not a bad book; indeed it starts beautifully, improves and accelerates throughout its first few hundred pages, and ends 'satisfyingly,' as it's supposed to. The trouble is that for all its no doubt richly-imagined goings-on and Powers's obvious intelligence and gnarly imagination, nothing much happens in Last Call. Familiar symbols (the Tarot, the Fisher King, the mythology of Vegas gambling and the poker table, bits of The Waste Land) are deployed enthusiastically, knotty plotlines proceed according to the familiar contours of those symbols, and at the 'exciting' climax the symbols (excuse me, characters) meet in symbolic conflicts devoid of emotional power. The book moves so briskly that you don't notice that it's not actually a thriller - each of its scenes seems to refer to a scene from a parallel novel, in which actual human stakes are played for in an actual world by actual humans, rather than elements in a Tarot-themed Gantt chart.

It is, in short, a neat idea (a few of them, really) stretched out over half a thousand pages. It's a heck of a story, and when 'THE END' comes it turns out not to have been much at all.

(I kept thinking of American Gods. Do not take that as a compliment.)

The good parts - Crane's early suffering over the fate of his wife, Dondi's apology, the Mandelbrot man, the slam-bang opening section, the regular appearance of steaming cups of coffee and cold beers - are just right, and pieces of the book will stick with me, I suspect. But with one exception the characters in the book never quite rise to the level of people. The relationship between Diana and Scott is wish-fulfillment and (when you think about it) a bit gross, and both characters get less interesting as the story progresses; the depiction of Scott's alcoholism is utterly facile; Dondi is a sentimental caricature but only that, and the thinness of his cruel backstory feels contemptuous on Powers's part; Arky spends most of the novel dicking around offstage in a plotline that has no interest beyond its dorm-room-bullshit-session premise, and his arc is engaging but far too handy to get invested in; Nardie is like a stock character beamed in from some other story; and Leon fulfills none of his initial promise, vanishing behind a twirling villain-moustache for most of the book.

Of all the characters, only the old man Ozzie is as neat-o as the book's symbolic register, and the book is weirdly muted in its treatment of him and his fate. I don't think that's a matter of noir aesthetics; rather, I imagine that Powers (like so many of his readers and critics!) was so enamored of the meaning of his story, its mythological referents, that he forgot to make the story itself matter. And we didn't mind - after all, who can complain about Weird Fantasy that flatters the allusion seekers and conspiracy fans in the audience? Some of the allusions and mythic parallels are so blunt they're offensive - when one character eats a thin white poker chip at a moment of transformational crisis, is it really necessary to have another character moan, 'Christ'? And should we pretend not to notice when the exact same thing happens a dozen pages later, with a bloody wound in the side immediately followed by a blasphemous 'Jesus!' outburst? I half want to assume that Powers's tastelessness in those passages is an ironic wink rather than a failure of nerve and style.

But I couldn't put the book down. It's exhilarating, and a few moments are breathtaking. But it feels, in the end, a little bit pointless. One Amazon reviewer unwittingly hit the nail on the head: 'One character is destined to play the Fool card in the drama and manifests as a homeless man who lives in special "boxes" all throughout Vegas.' Yes, I thought, that describes Dondi's storyline perfectly. I realized only after a moment that the reviewer meant only to describe Dondi's premise. And...and most of the jokes are puns. And without their symbolic parallels most of the events are meaningless or just not there at all. And the last 100 pages are a weirdly-paced mess, the beautiful coda marred by needless exposition and a saggy anticlimax that made the previous few hundred pages seem like much ado about nothing much. And, yeah, I couldn't put the book down. I feel like a fool for caring about 500 pages of notes for the Greatest Dark Magical Fantasy Novel Ever Written About Vegas, which Tim Powers slyly published in the guise of a novel. What a smart man he is.

Inspired by Mr SEK.

OEDIFICATION: to put out one's eyes in a fit of misplaced rage.

(I'd wanted to call it KENTISTRY but it turns out I'd misremembered Lear.)

Working still.

Busy few weeks, etc.

Still working.

Paying work is sapping all my writing energy, so nothing for here yet. Sorry.

On the plus side, PAYING GODDAMN WORK.

Why no posts?

Trying to limit Internet nonsense while traveling. Writing otherwise anyhow. Back on the 4th. See y'all soon.