The Polysyllabic Spree, or, how about reading a fucking book once in a while?

Soooo. Yesterday at work I picked up The Polysyllabic Spree, by Nick Hornby, and ignoring my personal ethics of reading (i.e., try not to read more than one book at a time), ended up reading a good half of it last night after my DVD player refused to read my current disc of Mad Men.

A few things, first. I've been busy working (busy for me means working about 35 hours a week, sometimes even 40), and when I'm not doing that or hanging out with the two friends I have left in Canada, I've mostly been watching TV. In my defense, it's mostly been Mad Men, which is stunningly good, but still. Given that I work in publishing and also at a bookstore, I feel a little guilty about how little I've been reading. I keep picking up books at work-- 30% staff discount, it's trouble-- and not reading them.

That said, I've been slogging through Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie for honestly the last month and a half. Embarrassing. Not to mention that I failed to finish the last book I was reading-- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami-- because, even though I was enjoying it, it was just taking too damn long. I brought it to Chicago with me, figuring that spending 40+ hours in a van would be the perfect opportunity to finish a 600 page novel that I was halfway through. However, a combination of friends, WireTap and my apparently inexhaustible delight in staring out the window of a moving vehicle all conspired to ensure I did not, in fact, get any reading at all done on that trip. That was at the beginning of August.

Which brings us to my current book, which I found on top of a pile of books that had just come in at work. I love books about reading, and I assume I love Nick Hornby although I've never actually read any of his books, but I have seen High Fidelity like fourteen times. And, as I said, my shitty ancient DVD player wouldn't read Mad Men, and the book is so small, so I crawled into bed with that instead.

And it was so comforting and delightful! Reading another reader writing about how, sometimes, even if you really like the book you're reading, you are just not that into it, really helped with the guilt. Sometimes life gets in the way, and sometimes the thought of sitting down and turning pages, for whatever reason, seems repulsive. You think about all the times you whipped through a novel in three days and loved every minute of it-- like when I read Middlesex this summer-- and wonder "What happened?" All in all, the almost 100 pages I've read have been reassuring to me as a reader.

So, with the hope of getting back on the Book Horse in mind, I think I am going to put aside Wednesdays as my day to myself, to read. My roommates aren't home, so I can sit in my armchair, which would not fit into my room, make a cup of tea, and just go for it for a few hours.

It is also hilarious, which brings me to another point. Most of the novels I have read or intend to read (and so, I suspect, most novels at all) are just not very funny. Which seems odd, because I would say that I'm someone who values fun in the things I enjoy. Like music-- some of my very favourite bands-- Spoon, The Decemberists, Of Montreal-- when it comes down to it, one of the main reasons I like these bands because they're fun. It often seems like, if literature is going to be serious, it has to be heavy. Like, for example, some of my other favourite things. The National. Arcade Fire. Mad Men. Not funny.

Obviously there are exceptions, but I wish more so-called "serious" literature was more fun, if beauty and humour could exist side by side more often in literature. And maybe it's not even true that they don't. Maybe it's a cultural construct-- there's Art, and then there's things that make you laugh. And maybe I'm just not looking hard enough, or maybe I can't find the humour in beautiful, serious books (or the beauty in funny ones). But I think I'm pretty safe in my assessment of Ondaatje as Not Funny.

Not intentionally, anyway. Some of those sex scenes are out of control.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle/The Suburbs

Okay, here we go, fourth post; I am making a really concerted effort to keep this up.

I was going to try to keep this for books only and avoid my passion for indie rock, but fuck it, I've got nothing really to say about Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I found it sitting around my house at the beginning of the summer and started reading it now-- and when I say now I mean probably a solid month ago-- because it is a long book and I thought I was going to have to give it back. Turns out a former resident of the house somehow acquired a "free-for-all box" of books, so it's come with me to Chicago, moved to a new house, and I'm still only about two-thirds through it. It's approaching the point where I'll have put it down for too long to pick it up again, which is nowhere close to a verdict on the quality of the book-- same thing happened with The Idiot last summer, and not only is that Dostoevsky and so practically Scripture, but I genuinely loved it, with the sort of emotional attachment that gets increasingly rare the more time and money one spends Studying Literature.

Anyway. I really am enjoying the book, but have not put the effort into reading it what with road trips, friends leaving and moving; plus, I still don't have much of an idea what is going on, philosophically, yet, at page 367 out of about 600 (so two-thirds was maybe a generous guess)-- I don't really have an idea to hold on to and so I'm just wandering sort of aimlessly through the book. Which is maybe fair enough; I feel a lot like protagonist Toru Okada, who is wandering through a sort of bizarre dreamworld without any idea what's going on. Who knows.

More thought-provoking, in terms of pop culture, for me, has been the release of Arcade Fire's third full-length album The Suburbs, which came out on August 3rd, just before our big road trip to Minneapolis to see The National and Chicago to participate in a day of Lollapalooza crazy. It is getting generally great reviews; the most interesting thing I have read, probably in the Pitchfork review or a column somewhere on the site, is that, whereas Neon Bible was a little too bleak, a little too accusatory, The Suburbs maintains an awareness of our inevitable complicity in the structures we criticise-- consumer culture, religion, whatever. My favourite lyric on the album is in City With No Children: "Never trust a millionaire who will quote the Sermon on the Mount/I used to think I was not like them, but I'm beginning to have my doubts/have my doubts about it." And this idea comes up again and again. I was a little nervous when I heard the title for the album and early comments because I am pretty disinterested in taking cheap shots at hipsters and yuppies; it's too easy, it's boring, and there are definitely moments on the album where this happens-- Rococo is a great song, musically, and it is really fun to sing "rococo" over and over along with Win Butler, but the lyrics are a little too accusatory and condescending to be interesting on its own, so thank goodness it gets balanced by the more sensitive and nuanced moments on the album. I was arguing about this with a couple friends last night, but to be honest, there was free wine and I can't quite remember if we came to any sort of conclusion about that particular song.

As a side note, I was listening to The A.V. Club's August Music Wrap-Up, which of course was mostly a discussion of The Suburbs, in which Steven Hyden (I think) pointed out potentially my biggest problem with Arcade Fire, in general, which is that they are pretty humourless-- those guys take themselves pretty friggin seriously, which is generally something I can't stand. But, I think their over-the-top, super-emotional musical arrangements really save their lyrics from being completely unbearable-- I find their larger-than-life musical pretentiousness entertaining enough to balance the more thought-provoking pretentiousness of their lyrics.

This entry is pretty scattered, but I guess I will just say that I've succumbed to writing about indie rock, not because I am an aspiring music journalist (boy, am I ever not), but just because I am interested in literature as a sub-category of popular culture; I want to study and think critically about what people are watching, reading, listening to-- the cultural canon, maybe. Obviously I am not as dedicated as I could be to this, because it is pretty easy for me to forget that the vast majority of people are pretty happy to consume shit, but I think there are a lot-- a lot-- of people interested in producing and consuming really quality "popular" media, and I think one of the places where this is happening is in the world of indie rock, pop, whatever. There is also a lot of garbage there, but bands like Arcade Fire and The National are making some really important cultural statements. So I will be there.

Reading Lolita in Tehran

I haven't finished the article that I'm reading, and I'll probably keep reading it as I write. Just, you know, heads up.

So, when I wrote my last entry, I was completely unaware of the discussion surrounding Reading Lolita; I mentioned the book to Jesse last week and he said he had heard a lecture on it last year at a conference. I did a little more research about the allegations against Nafisi, namely, that she is a big neo-con imperialist and is undoing the work of postcolonialist theorists everywhere (I'm reading Hamid Dabashi's article Native informers and the making of the American empire). It is all very fascinating. Dabashi identifies Nafisi as a "native informer," a designation which carries with it the implication of treachery; Nafisi has, according to Dabashi, turned on her country by denouncing the Iranian revoluation and enthusiastically endoring the classic works of the Western canon, supporting the imperialist project of "White men saving brown women from brown men," quoting Spivak. Dabashi accuses Nafisi of "(1) systematically and unfailingly denigrating an entire culture of revolutionary resistance to a history of savage colonialism; (2) doing so by blatantly advancing the presumed cultural foregrounding of a predatory empire; and (3) while at the very same time catering to the most retrograde and reactionary forces within the United States, waging an all out war against a pride of place by various immigrant communities and racialised minorities seeking curricular recognition on university campuses and in the American society at large." Quite the statement.

I find this fascinating not because of the argument it entails (passionate and largely predictable, with ample quotations from Orientalism), but because Nafisi, throughout Reading Lolita and in the brief statements cited in the Wikipedia article, wants to separate literature and politics, the public and the private. This, however, undercuts everything that makes Reading Lolita meaningful; Nafisi's literature class, which I was so excited about in the last post, is obviously only subversive if literature is intensely political-- being apolitical is not an effective counterpart to political injustice. The whole project of Reading Lolita seems to recognise this, even if Nafisi herself doesn't, and so occasional statements such as (following her account of a conversation with a friend about James' The Ambassadors) "[i]t seemed as if, apart from literature, the political had devoured us, eliminating the person or the private" (237) undercut what it is that makes Reading Lolita worth reading.

Anyway, I'm not interested in providing a passionate defense of either Nafisi or her book; maybe she is a big neo-con and maybe that does matter. At the moment I don't care enough to do all the research required to ascertain any of the "facts" of the matter; I feel as if both sides have valid points to make. Hamid Dabashi, the only critic I've read, overstates these arguments to the point where I find him a little bit difficult to take seriously, but one can easily read between the melodrama.

Conversation topics for another day: what makes a native informer? and how does the author/narrator function in the genre of memoir given the "death of the author", or can we not accept Barthes' proclamation in the case of a work like Nafisi's?

Reading Lolita In Tehran

Azar Nafisi's "memoir in books" has been on my reading list since the summer of 2008, when I read Lisa Adams and John Heath's Why We Read What We Read, which picks apart the Publishers Weekly and USA Today bestseller lists from the past 10 years (I think that ends up being 1996-2006; the book was published in 2007). It's a really fascinating book that more or less confirms what we all suspect-- most people are pretty happy to read shit. Reading Lolita in Tehran was far and away Adams and Heath's favourite book; from what I recall, it seemed to redeem the entire doubtless-depressing project for them. I found a copy at Aqua Books for $7 or so this spring and brought it with me with the 15 or 20 other titles to take up temporary residence at my summer sublet. Also, Vladimir Nabokov's scandalous novel is one of my favourite books of all time.

Reading Lolita in Tehran uses four sections to chronicle Nafisi's experiences a professor of American literature in revolutionary Iran. I'm a little less than halfway through, having finished the section on Lolita (which introduces Nafisi's intimate class of seven of her most studious female students who meet in her living room to study novels forbidden by the Iranian government) and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, in which Nafisi describes her first year of teaching at the University of Tehran during the early years of the revolution. 

 I'm really excited about the basic premise of the book-- namely, that literature, and the study of literature, can be a radically subversive enterprise. It's so easy even for me, as a literature major, to assume that studying literature is entertaining but ultimately self-serving and irrelevant. This notion probably won't cease to bother me-- there are, after all, people starving in the streets of my own city while I pay a lot of money to read books all day. However, studying liberal arts has taught me that the major movements of history, especially the revolutions, have their roots in philosophical, religious and literary texts. Reading Lolita in Tehran gives us two of these movements, or communities-- the Islamic Republic of Iran, shaped, formed and created by the doctrines of the Qu'ran, and Nafisi's class, informed by Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austen. The consequences of reading these texts in the Islamic Republic of Iran are dire, and although we in North America rail against censorship as a violation of our innate right to free speech, the Iranian censors, in a way, take literature much more seriously than we possibly can in our easy-going environment-- great literature is explosive, life-changing, person-forming and very, very serious. The scene I read recently, in which Nafisi's first-year students at the University of Tehran hold a highly-charged mock trial of The Great Gatsby, while real trials sentencing intellectuals to public stoning are going on around them, is an amazingly dramatic illustration of this. 

Intro

So, the purpose of this journal is going to be, more or less, to keep track of what I think about books I read. I read a lot, and think a lot about what I read, but a month or so after I've finished reading a book I was really passionate about, I couldn't tell you what I thought or why I liked it so much (although I will remember that I had thoughts, and that I did like it.) Seeing as I now have a degree in literature, I feel like people expect articulate thoughts from me than "Oh yeah, it was amazing, it was really-- you should read it." I want to keep track of my thoughts for my own sake; if other people want to read them, that is great, but not something I'm looking for.

This summer, I've designed a little curriculum for myself. I did the same thing a couple summers ago, when I felt that my reading experience up to that point had included way too little 20th-century literature. It was a great summer, I read a lot of really important books, and I felt like I had rounded out at least one deflated area of knowledge. This summer, it's "world literature", which I realise is an impossibly broad category, but it's a broad area in which I have done almost no reading. So far, it's been mostly writers with exotic-sounding names who nevertheless write in English and probably live somewhere in the States, but one has to start somewhere.

This is what I've read so far this summer, not counting some nostalgia reading I did in June:

• Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
• A Complicated Kindness, Miriam Toews
• Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides

That said, I'll begin the next post with thoughts on Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran.