THE DANGERS OF PROXIMAL ALPHABETS by Kathleen Alcott

This book. First, let's talk a bit about the title: The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets. It's ... intriguing. What are 'proximal alphabets'? Why are they dangerous? Why are you so sure they're dangerous? This book will be bleak. When I look at the title, at first, I think it's interesting. Those previous questions flit through my mind, but in passing, I think they are worthy questions, with worthy answers. At least, that's what reviews have told me. The title also attempts to grab your attention by introducing a phrase, mode of being, status, that is unheard of: proximal alphabets. 'Alphabets' meaning letters, or 'alphabets' meaning different writing systems? And the word 'proximal,' meaning next to each other, or similar to, as in 'approximate'?

Now all of this analysis is very unnecessary because this book was pretty terrible. The title is flashy, but is an empty metaphor, disguised as something deep. I've teased out some meanings, but they do nothing. This book is about Ida and brothers Jackson and James - they've known each other their whole lives. They're more than friends, they're beyond that, beyond lovers, beyond partners, beyond everything. Their relationship is special, but ... DANGEROUS. So anyway, the book goes through moments of their lives growing up and doing everything together, becoming a couple, breaking up, getting back together, and charts the various ways they hurt each other and everyone else in their lives. 

I am going to categorize this book as 'hip emotional torture porn.' Let's unpack this. It's hip because it's in San Francisco, and Ida (our narrator) talks about the shitty (but still so endearingly lovely) apartment she and Jackson shared in an immigrant neighborhood. All the items in their apartment are discarded objects from 'affluent neighborhoods' (114), hand-me-downs, or handmade, like the curtains which Jackson sowed together using several types of fabric. The best is their windowsill, which had 'a terrarium of moss and succulents where plastic dinosaurs loomed over tiny cowboys' (114). Wow. So hip. Things clash. They love old stuff. Please. Stop.

And when I say 'emotional torture porn,' I mean that these characters are so unreal as people. It is my militant belief that characters in a novel (or film, television show, play, etc.) should feel real. They should seem as if they could extend beyond the novel, that their consciousness is more than what can be contained in the novel. This stems from a lot of theory about subjectivity that I cannot really go into right now. Each character should have subjectivity, should be a subject. Ida, Jackson, and every other member of this motley crew of characters in this novel are not subjects, they are objects. This happens because of a narrative structure that is, to my knowledge, very popular.

The novel moves from IMPORTANT scene to IMPORTANT scene. The chapters are short and punchy. We either get some wild, hedonistic scene of youth, some deeply sad scene of adulthood and relationships, or some deeply sad and wistful scene of youth. These kinds of scenes allow for the narrator to jump back and forth through time, make connections between seeming disparate events, and give a comprehensive, but quick view of events. But when a whole book is like this, there is no room for characters to breath, no sense of their selves opening up beyond whatever IMPORTANT.EMOTIONAL.POINT/LITERARY.WISTFUL.SIGH the narrator is trying to make. In choosing to represent only the moments with very intense emotions, the actual weight of those emotions are lost. So the characters are merely objects or representations of these emotions, rather than a subject feeling and experiencing these emotions. 

All of this which leads me to the closing scene of the novel. So, spoilers, I guess. At the end of the novel, Ida's father dies, and she is reunited with Jackson and James. They're really a trio of dysfunction, which could occupy another post which I will not be giving it. Ida has been pining for Jackson these past couple of years, and when he comes back for her father's funeral, he tells her needs her, and misses her, and blah blah all the usual stuff, but of course, Ida feels kind of empty about it all, and doesn't really want to be with him anymore. After all of the emotional exhaustion of her father dying, and being back in her old home, Ida finds Jackson and James asleep next to each other on a futon in the house, and she gets between them, and in their sleep 'both draped their limbs around [hers] so intricately [she] couldn't move if [she] tried and [she] fought off sleep vehemently, determined to appreciate what they gave [her] without [her] even asking' (208). 

This moment is so unbelievable. They are all ready to fall into patterns of dysfunction. The moment maybe could have paid off if they all weren't an amalgamation of quirks and pseudo-emotion. 

Anyway, that's enough ranting about this novel. Please let me know your thoughts if you've read this novel, or if you know about a novel that is similar, and please feel free to rant about it in the comments. 

|| & ┴ : STATION ELEVEN & HIGH-RISE

I read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel a couple weeks ago, shortly after finishing High-Rise by J.G. Ballard (which I wrote a bit about here). Station Eleven was a perfectly fine book - not incredible, not terrible, engaging enough plot, some interesting themes, etc. It sticks out in my mind more so because I read it fairly closely to when I read High-Rise. 

If you didn't already know, Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic novel, in which most of the world's population was wiped out by a disease. The novel jumps back and forth in time, documenting some of the beginning of the outbreak and subsequent weeks after. For the most part, though, the novel takes place twenty years after the initial outbreak, and follows a troupe of actors and musicians, who perform Shakespeare plays. Most of the surviving people have created small self-sustaining communities, since there is no more electricity, plumbing, etc. This passage was of particular interest to me:

On silent afternoons in his brother's apartment, Jeevan found himself thinking about human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at al. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. No one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no one removes fallen trees from electrical lines (178).

This passage presents an interesting contrast to High-Rise, which I read maybe a week or two before this book, so it was still fairly fresh in my mind. In High-Rise, we see ways in which humanity is warped by 'modern' things, the ease and accessibility of resources and services, and when I say 'warped,' I mean it in the most neutral way possible. In the novel, it's not necessarily that people are made worse by modernity, but that modernity reveals humanity in its most grotesque forms, and the ultimate consequences of that are ambiguous.

In the above passage from Station Eleven, the city of Toronto is not really a city anymore now that the people are gone. These modern things of buildings, gas stations, airports, business, power plants - they are nothing without people. They are not modern, only relics. This passage highlights how intertwined humanity and technology are. They are not mutually exclusive. The same thing happens in High-Rise. It is not that the conditions of the high-rise are alien, and making humanity into something it is not, but revealing and recombining what it means to be human. We are androids. Mandel's Station Eleven, in part, highlights the opposite of this equation: the humanity suffused into the technology, into the delicate and precarious modern structures and urban ecologies.
_____________________________

Note: To clarify, I am playing a bit fast and loose with all of my definitions of 'modernity,' 'city,' 'humanity,' 'people,' modern,' etc. I'm trying to keep this blog casual, while still interrogating texts in a productive, thoughtful way. The differences in meanings are important, but I think for this post in particular, it's okay to fudge it a bit

Note: Those funny little symbols in the title of the post are the symbols for parallel and perpendicular...OHHHH. I will include these symbols in the title for posts where I'm discussing multiple texts in conjunction with each other. So I have this thing where when I envision how the meaning of things work, I envision them as being parallel or perpendicular, or both, creating acute angles or obtuse angles of meaning. It's just how I've always thought of meaning, and so that's the where I got the title for this blog. 

Franz Wright's 'Last Day on the Ward'

Poet Franz Wright died last year now, on May 14, 2015. I wanted to write about his death, and his poetry, and him, but I didn't have the words. I didn't know him, but I feel connected to him in the way anyone who admires someone else feels connected to that person. And it feels almost too personal to talk about how hard it is to know he's no longer alive, no longer walking around in his home, or writing. Because I didn't know him, he wasn't necessarily real to me as a person, and that somehow enhances the loss I feel. Which is a bit ridiculous, but it's how I feel so *shrugs* Thankfully, I still have so much of his work to read, and what I have read is hardly exhausted in its meanings and pleasure. 

I'm here today writing this because I recently read a small chapbook of his, published by Argos Books in 2014, titled The Writing. I want to talk a bit about the first poem in the collection,

Last Day on the Ward

There is a Heaven,

death. 

But getting there.

You can't

just say the word...

A blizzard. I can't see

a single person on the street,

a single light on.

I know they're out there, though: the fittest

reading the laptop and drinking their coffee,

winter light

filling the rooms where they sit

unaghast.

It's Monday in the world,

and time to go.

I've unpacked and already

have nothing to do 

but lie down

                                                                    and stare at the snow.

                                                                    Which is something

                                                                    I am good at, something I enjoy.

                                                                    Probably, I'll die like this

                                                                    a long time ago.

I love how in those two lines, it seems as if Wright is telling death that there is a Heaven, and it doesn't need to worry. But how does death get to Heaven? Or is Wright emphasizing that there is Heaven and death, but note that death isn't first listed. This slippage foreshadows the last two lines, in which Wright says he will die 'a long time ago' (line 23), once again mixing up the generally accepted process of living, dying, Heaven. Reading about this mix-up, though, reads to me now as an act of mourning. Wright is dead, a long time ago, and the time will only get longer. But I revisit his voice, his first person, his present tense, when I read this poem, this book, anything he's ever written. Though I don't believe in the common theme of literature that in books and writing people are eternal in a way because their words live on. No, they're not. They're dead. Whether they're somewhere else is not for me to tell you, but they're not immortal in literature. That has always seemed like a ridiculous fallacy to me, and completely unsatisfying as an end of a story.

What I do think is true, and what I think this poem is an example of, in life, there are visitations to death: we know we will die, we know people have died. This reality is so profound that the fact that people are even living is astonishing, which is emphasized in the middle of the poem,

I know they're out there, though: the fittest
reading the laptop and drinking their coffee,
winter light
filling the rooms where they sit
unaghast (lines 9-13).

This references, in part, the contrast of the fit and unfit, young and old, stable and unstable - the poem is titled 'Last Day on the Ward,' and mental health is an important theme in Wright's work. But I think all of this contributes to the strangeness of how people are actually alive. That simple things exist such as sitting at a desk, drinking coffee, unaghast. Life is not necessarily strange to these people, in the same way it is to Wright, but death has always been on his mind (if you read his other works) - they are not aghast, as he is. Death maybe is not so visibly intertwined with life for them.  

This is all really to try and figure out what it means to read Wright's work after he's died, months later, what it means to read this collection where Wright is even more so preoccupied with death. And I guess to mourn, to read his poems as a form of mourning, as a visitation, and to let death be intertwined with life a little more by reading this collection. I think it's okay if it is. 

2015: Some Numbers and Thoughts

So aside from my Best Books I Read in 2015 post, where I discussed (you guessed it!) the best books I read in 2015, I wanted to also spend some time giving a closer look at any trends in my reading, and some stats about what kind of books I'm reading and consuming. As a general introduction, here's a handy screenshot from my Goodreads about the books I read in 2015:

A few quick thoughts based off of the above photo:

• I'm happy that I read 93 books. It's the most I've read in years, and it is always my dream to get back to the way I was in elementary through high school where I would a couple hundred books a year. I did have a lot less commitments, responsibilities, and work, but still! I'd love to at least get close to that. So this year, I've decided to try and get to 100 books, but since I'm competitive, I want to definitely go over that.
• I only made it to 93 because I read 20 graphic novels, and 4 manga. I did make a conscious effort to read more graphic novels, but it definitely bolstered my reading...
• Reading graphic novels also contributed to my average page length of 254 pages. I did feel myself gravitating towards shorter books this year - I think it is partly the pressure of wanting to reach my Goodreads goal, and partly because I've been stressed. I want to try and read longer novels this year. I love, love getting lost in a long novel, but sometimes the emotional investment/toll scares me. Like when I began reading Cloud Atlas, I knew the pain would be prolonged. 

Other Business: General Numbers

1. I read 53 books by women, and 40 books by men. Not bad, but I was hoping to read about 70-80% women. 
2. To the best of my knowledge, I read 40 books by POC. Also, not bad, but I was hoping to do better.
3. The books I read were overwhelmingly American and British, but considering I'm American, and can only read in English, this was kind of bound to happen. 

Other Business: Genre Specifics

1. I read 13 books of poetry. Typically, I read more poetry, but I was feeling the novel much more this past year.
2. I read 6 books of non-fiction. Truly amazing, considering it is really hard for me to read non-fiction. I'm still trying to read more.
3. I read 20 graphic novels and 4 manga. Graphic novels and manga are different!
4. And finally, I read 51 books of fiction. 
5. I read 4 books by Roberto Bolaño. Roberto Bolaño's works are one of the great loves of my life. His books are a genre unto themselves, for me. I'm excited to read more Bolaño in 2016.

Other Business: Problems

When I began planning for this post, I thought I would get much more specific about an author's nationality, really trying to chart where everyone was from. Whether they were American, non-American, white, non-white, woman or man, and it was honestly overwhelming. These categories are too dichotomous, and it felt unnecessary to try and fit everyone into it. Here are a couple problems I ran into, that made me second-guess this:

• The graphic novel Saga, is written by a man, and drawn and colored by a woman. Do I count these to my ticks for women or men or both?
• I read two books of poetry by Li-Young Lee, and he is an American citizen, but was born in Indonesia. Do I give a tick to America or Indonesia? Do I make a category for 'hyphenated Americans'? Do I even like the term 'hyphenated Americans'? 

That's when I gave up on these categories, and decided that further trying to categorize authors was just confining them and their work. 

So yeah, that's a little bit about the books I read in 2015. I'm very excited for another year of reading, and of this blog. This blog helps me to remember how vital books are to me. Thank you for reading!