Michelle Williams’ New Haircut. Okay, most importantly: Should I get my hair cut like this?
Travels. Here are the places I’ve been in 2007: Chicago; Puerto Vallarta (Mexico); Osage Beach, MO; St. Louis, MO; Atchison, KS; Louisville, KY; New York City; Tucson, AZ; Columbus, OH; Lawrence, KS; Green Bay, WI; Minocqua, WI
Anti-Materialism. I try to be anti-materialistic. I believe in being happy with the bare minimum because I believe that it is the goal of big companies to convince you that what you’ve got isn’t any good. For example, Apple tries to convince you that your Ipod is old and out-of-date, thus conning you into buying a new one. So I try to be happy with what I’ve got. My cell phone, for example, is pretty ancient. I kept my last laptop for three years. But I seem to keep getting stymied in my anti-materialism by things breaking. I would have happily gone on with my old laptop except that the battery and power cord gave out (which is something, considering both survived the Fire of ’06, plugged in on the power strip right next to the pyromaniacal air conditioner). I can be satisfied with a computer that doesn’t burn DVDs; I cannot be happy with a computer that only stays on for an hour at a time. How is one supposed to be satisfied with what one’s got when it keeps breaking?
The State of Contemporary Fiction and Taco Bell. I recently read Ian McEwan’s Saturday and I didn’t like it, despite the fact that it’s received rave critical reviews. This book suffered from a problem I see everywhere in contemporary fiction – it elevates the mundane to the majestic with really no purpose except metaphor. The result is descriptions like this one of a squash match (though the close-third person narrator): “Every point is now a drama, a playlet of sudden reversals” (115) and the main character is full of “seriousness and fury” as well as “the incredible urge to win, biological as thirst” (115). And though I’ve never played squash, I read that and think, “Really? You’re in a squash match thinking of phrases like ‘seriousness and fury’?” Because I’ve sat and stared at a blinking cursor for hours and never come up with anything half as poetic as “seriousness and fury.” I’m not even convinced that Ian McEwan himself would think something like that such a situation. Or take his description of a smell” “like warm hay drying in the fields in August.” I get that a character might smell something and think it smells like hay, even drying hay. But the specificity of warm hay? In fields? In August? Now, there’s several problems here, foremost that McEwan isn’t considering his character’s point of view, but what I’m concerned with is the fact of window dressing. McEwan feels the postmodern impulse to represent the mundane (and rejects the modern impulse to be grandiose or epic), but he still wants to write in an epic style. He uses his prose to elevate the mundane. Why? Because people’s lives are boring, but fiction can’t be.
I’m connecting this to Taco Bell, and then I’ll finish my point. Really everything at Taco Bell is some combination of the same ingredients: cheese, meat, shell, lettuce. And yet Taco Bell has like 50 incarnations of these ingredients on their menu to convince you that there’s always something new:, Gordita, Chalupa, that thing that is shaped like a stop sign and you can apparently eat anywhere! They’ve even convinced you of Fourthmeal – a whole extra meal of the day for eating the same damn thing! Anyway, I feel like McEwan’s problem is that he’s really just taking taco parts and marketing them as a Crunchwrap Supreme. I read the above section of his book, and I’m thinking “squash game” and he’s thinking “metaphor for the struggle for male dominance in society as manifested in competitive sports” or something, and no amount of fancy writing is able to convince me otherwise.
“But Faith, isn’t that pretty anti-postmodern of you to say that a squash game is just a squash game? Doesn’t that imply that there’s some kind of Objective Reality out there?”
I guess I’m arguing that McEwans’ primary problem is that he describes everything with such intensity and Significance that it rings false. The premise of Saturday is that it’s one day in the life (one Saturday) of the main character and in order to justify why he’s chosen this Saturday as opposed to any other day, McEwan creates passages like the one above. I’m arguing that if you’re going to write about A Day in the Life, you need to have a really good reason as to why you’ve picked that day.
Early Rising. When I move to Arizona, I want to start getting up earlier. Like 5am early. I’m just noting this here so there’s some means of accountability.
2 comments:
Are you seriously thinking of getting your hair cut in that style? I think it would be ADORABLE. Potentially. Your hair is pretty cute right now, however.
I just got my hair cut today-- I have bangs for the first time in about forever. Don't worry, they're the long, to-the-side kind of bangs.
Ok, so I have to comment about McEwan's descriptive writing (even though I've actually never read him). I just wanted to say that, for me, the whole "like warm hay dyring in the sun in August" is pretty much something I would think. (I know, I know.) There is a really distinctive smell to it. But, my question as I read that line would have been, "August, really? Wait, where are you setting this book?" You see, August is really late to be cutting and drying hay. Here is Missouri, most of the hay is cut and dried in late May, maybe June. I don't know--maybe they cut it later further north, or maybe it was a second cutting. But that would be important for me to know, because I rather despise when people who have never been anywhere near a farm who try to claim some type of familiarity with it, just because they are from America.
I also wanted to ask if it is really post-modern to elevate the mundane to the Significant. (Which--that is a theme of one of my comps questions. Do you think they would mind if I cite your blog in my answer? :) Isn't it more of a modern concept to talk about the mundane in such a grand way? How is Saturday connected to James Joyce's Ulysses, which also all takes place in one day, and has a really epic (or just really long and confusing) feel to it?
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