Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

Stream of consciousness

That's what Victor did with his blog today. Stream of conciousness does seem to lend itself to summer Friday nights, too...rather drifting and lazy.

I had to read James Agee's A Death in the Family in tenth grade, that was my introduction to the style. I hated that book. A few years ago I ran across a copy at a church bazzar and added it to my "fill a box for a dollar" paperbacks...I guess I had a quick flash of maturity and realized that I'd been an obnoxious, ignorant little snot at 15 and perhaps there was a good reason Agee was an American classic.

After re-reading it...I can't say I enjoyed it, because it is such a dark book...but it was good. It took me three readings to really appreciate The Great Gatsby, too. Now I'm not sure if it is the greatest American novel, but I can understand why some make that case. (Or do more people say the greatest is Huck Finn? That I enjoyed even as a kid, but haven't re-read as an adult. Perhaps I should.)

Another book I read in early high school, and this one I picked up on my own, not on assignment, was John O'Hara's Appointment in Samara. That one doesn't seem to make the great American Novel lists...although O'Hara is probably a runner-up. It blew me away, and I spent the summer I was 14 in Gibbsville. (Not because of the sex and the booze, but it probably didn't hurt. Great literature is racy...that was a good revelation for a kid.)

The same summer I caught part of The Sound and the Fury on tv (the movie, that is, with Yul Brenner--when he had hair!) I tried to read it after that, but every time I have tried to read Faulkner...and I try every couple years to see if I can...I feel like I have a bad fever...spacy and sweaty. Maybe I am just a hopeless Yankee. I had no trouble with Harper Lee (and my vote for absolute best book/movie adaptation from book has to be To Kill a Mockingbird. And my favorite line in both is "I was to be a ham.") but I got a touch of the Faulkner fever feeling when I read Carson McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Maybe it's just that southern humidity.

I mentioned last week that I don't write any more. I haven't been reading, either. I realized that recently and went on an Amazon spree, because I was ashamed of myself. Occasionally I talk to some of my oldest friends, guys I have known since junior high, and they are always mentioning what they are reading, or just finished, or are about to start, and I'll mumble something about the stuff I need to read for work and journals in my briefcase.

I did just finish a book, a real book, from my spree: The House on Beartown Road, by Elizabeth Cohen. It's a memoir, I guess you'd call it, by a columnist in New York state who cared for her father, suffering from Alzheimer's, and her toddler daughter during a winter after her husband left the family. It was really well done, and not completely depressing if you could appreciate the cycle-of-life balance of her daughter's expanding world versus her father's contracting one. It was a bit of a tough read, though, in terms of "there but for the grace of God" with my own family, and I actually read it to see if I should give it to my sister, whose father-in-law has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

I've started some of the others, too (I have trouble reading just one thing at a time...my mind is too jumpy):

The Day of St. Anthony's Fire : I actually read this many years ago, but now that I work in the pharmaceutical/toxicolgy field, the story of ergot poisoning fascinates me more. It is an account of a village in France that was staggered by ergot from moldy rye flour at the local bakery in 1951. One of the things that is striking me on the re-reading is how much I take for granted the ease with which we gather and exchange information...contrasting the medical community's difficulty in nailing down the ergotism in this case with, say, SARS.

The Main Enemy : The most interesting thing in this book about the CIA/KGB activities at the end of the Cold War is Milton Bearden's belief that there's still another American double agent that isn't identified yet. I'm just at the point in the book where Bearden is assigned to Afghanistan, so I'm expecting some current events insight there, too.

Hope's Edge : Sort of a sequel to Diet for a Small Planet, which I never read but knew of: the major thesis is that we could have plenty of food for everyone in the world, but the meat-based, agribusiness Western model uses up all the resources. I read Fast Food Nation before I picked this one up (so I lied, I do read some). There's some real, er, food for thought, if you'll pardon the pun. Although I'm not one, I have definite vegetarian sympathies, so I'm probably predisposed toward agreeing with a lot of the arguments in both books. (Some, but not all. In almost every situation or controversy I recognize more shades of grey than Ansel Adams. Another subject for another day.)

I also have Walter Issacson's new Ben Franklin biography...I read the exerpt in Time (I read magazines, too, but that doesn't count) and enjoyed it. I haven't read about Franklin since grade school, when I read my way through all those "for young people" biographies of American heroes they had in the library to turn us into good little citizens.

There are no novels on my currect to-read list, though. After I got out of college I started leaning unintentionally toward non-fiction...perhaps true stories are that much more compelling. Maybe it was giving up journalism for tech writing...I know I turned my back on real drama, but if I don't write it, I can at least still read it.

Speaking of real drama, tomorrow in France is the man-versues-man, man-versues-nature, man-versues-himself showdown that is the Tour de France time trial. I need to go to the office this weekend, but I'd rather give up my Sunday than miss this.

Til then, my consciousness has slowed to a trickle. Good night.

Posted by Nic at July 25, 2003 09:47 PM