"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
The copy of Tracy Letts' August: Osage County I got from the library had a previous patron's request slip still in it. Date of request: 2/21/20. I cannot imagine being stuck with that very depressing play for months while I wonder if the world is coming to an end.
Of course, the last thing I read before the pandemic hit was Ducks, Newburyport, so I guess I'm not in much of a position to talk.
Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author: Renee Gladman's Houses of Ravicka is divided into two parts, the first of which concerns a comptroller who is looking for a house that does not seem to exist; the character paints himself as far as possible into a corner, and then the part ends and the characters are never referenced again. In her essay on the book, she writes that she was stuck on how to end that part for a long time, and then realized that if the character had no way of resolving his problem, why should she, the author, be able to resolve it for him? I found that to be a satisfying explanation--it is metafictional, but the story works just fine if you don't know that explanation at all.
I think I would've loved the Pirandello when I was younger--it's groundbreaking, anarchic, and a little stupid. But there's just too much cleverness in the text, and I'm not sure I can submit as a reader to the idea of the author having these characters and part of a story but no real sense on how to put it together. I do suspect it would work much better as an actual performed play than as a text.
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman: speaking of "better as a performed play than as a text". The emotional heft, such as it is, seems like it depends entirely on the right kind of staging (that the staging is innovative is taken as a given). Otherwise, better to just go read August Wilson's Fences.
[Side note: "I revered my father so much that learning he was a liar destroyed my life" seems like a very American type of disillusionment only possible with a very American amount of naivete, which is perhaps the point]
August Wilson, The Piano Lesson: I'll admit I was not expecting the ghost to actually do anything. My bad.
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire: well, for one, it turns out the Simpsons episode was actually a pretty good summary of the plot. Stanley's a brute, but not exactly wrong that his life was perfectly fine before Blanche showed up. Mitch's ideas of how women should behave explain why he's not married. Blanche is right that watching people die is harder than turning up for funerals, and one gets the sense that she watched a lot of people die, with no help, and so it's not surprising she can't manage herself anymore. Stella was right, but cowardly, to get out of the way once it became clear what was going to happen at home. And so there you have it: a perfectly balanced machine.
This is maybe a rare example where the obvious attention-grasping character is so very obviously wrong that there's no risk of identifying with him? Streetcar is Stanley because of Brando, but there's no cult of 'Stanley was right' as there is with other, similar properties, and not just because young people don't go to the theater or watch black-and-white movies. There's plenty of ambiguity but none about whether Blanche has been failed. Why can't they all be like this?
[Because most writers are not this skilled, nor their ideas this good. Even Tennessee Williams was not always this skilled, nor his ideas this good.
I am grateful for my aughts tv habits of Lost and How I Met Your Mother; both were shows that taught me that writers could have good ideas but not have the ability to execute them in writing, and also that writers who have good ideas can also have bad ideas and not be able to tell which are which.]
The most sanity-preserving thing I realized in 2020 is that, in my life, I will do things for awhile and then sometimes not do them anymore. It's not a mistake or a failure for things to end, you just move on to the next thing.
(Inspired by watching It's Always Sunny again this evening, as we've been doing for most of this year. Need a show that will require zero emotions out of me, and that's the one.)
Every year, in the spring, we get ants. It's been ten years since we moved to this house, and it happens without fail: as early as January, as late as March. Sometimes they're gone in 48 hours; there's been a year or two where it takes months. One particularly tricky year we learned that they always come in through the electrical system when we caught them coming up through insulated wires, though how we cannot imagine. The electrical system piece makes it hard to eradicate them, because a lot of the pet- and child-safe options are liquids or gels. So I accept it: this is just an annoying struggle every year.
This year: no ants. We are now the latest it's ever been, and there haven't even been the typical warning signs (they start appearing in ones or twos a week or so before the big visit). Perhaps it'll stay this way.
Well, that's it.
Some autobiography:
I first read War and Peace in college, where it was one of several novels assigned for a Classics of Russian Literature course. The professor gave us a month, a pretty generous amount of time, to read it. I was on track through the end of Book I, then stopped and skipped class for a few weeks. With three days left to write the paper, I shut myself in Michigan's grad library for an evening and read the bulk of the novel, 800 pages or so. It was the highlight amongst many of a certain kind of reading I used to be able to do: read a lot, quickly, in a short amount of time, with high comprehension and retention. It's not surprising I went on to grad school.
In the intervening 20 years, I have learned a few other ways of reading. I could not repeat that effort now for a variety of reasons. Instead, it was smooth background reading that didn't require much effort, just time. That's how pretty much everything is now for me as a reader, that's what we train a lifetime for.
More substantively:
When I read War and Peace before, it was the only Tolstoy I had read, and I didn't like it very much, largely because it was not Dostoevsky. (Or, as I learned in that class, Gogol or Turgenev.) Beginning in 2015, I made my way through most of the major Tolstoy works--Anna Karenina*, Hadji Murat, The Cossacks, The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Kreutzer Sonata, etc. Re-reading War and Peace was meant to be an attempt to set his biggest work in the context of everything else.
It's not an original thought that Tolstoy is a novelist best in small moments: the rose at the beginning of Hadji Murat, Kitty and Levin writing to each other in the dust of the table in Anna Karenina, any of Prince Andrei's moments of realization in War and Peace. And this is the place it's easiest to like him best: life hinges on small moments and decisions and it's hard to render their impact in just the right way, but Tolstoy never fails at this. Following Isaiah Berlin, Tolstoy wants to be a novelist of big ideas, and the attempt to do this is where his novels fail.**
But living now in some let's say adventurous times, there's something about the sweep of War and Peace that feels true to life in a way it didn't to a 20-year old in 2001. It's in how regular, everyday life gets overtaken by events til it feels like there is nothing but what is burning in the world around you and then, just as suddenly, it's gone and you move on.*** Living through 2020 as an adult and a parent was enough to see the world alter and then forget; it's not the only time life has been like that. So the novel ends with everyone who survived more or less happily paired off and the next crisis already on the horizon. It's not a novel that finishes, it's one that stops, and there's nothing truer to life on the grandest stage than that.
* I read only two novels the year my first child was born, but those two novels were Anna Karenina and The Portrait of a Lady
** Zola, the novelist of French life and character: excellent. Zola, the novelist of big ideas about human psychology: terrible.
*** This is part of what goes on with A Dance to the Music of Time: while I prefer novels 4-6, it's hard not to argue that the emotional high point is not the WWII novels. There's nothing that can match the emotional intensity of Nick Jenkins accidentally finding himself at the victory service at St. Paul's, and nothing does. But he keeps on writing anyway. What else is there to do?
When I switched from Twitter to Bluesky, I attempted to recreate the list of muted words I'd had. The purpose of the list was to filter out a lot of the over-the-top political content, the better to not scroll endlessly a feed of negativity. It worked reasonably well. And as before, I'd add in new names or terms to try and keep things controlled, and avoid whatever the new source of negativity was. Then January 20 rolled around, and it became impossible to keep the negativity out. So now, often as not, Bluesky is a quick scroll to determine whether there is something specifically new and worse or just the general background misery. I spend a lot less time on there (five minutes a day? ten?), and functionally never post.
My break occurred in 2016, but not with the election: it was the Michigan-Iowa football game. Michigan was ahead, but not by enough, and conditioned by years of fandom I knew it was going to end badly. Sure enough, the notifications kept hitting my screen and I laid in bed and watched my hopes collapse for the second time in less than a month.
The next day, I turned off all notifications on my phone, removed news apps and others that would send me updates on the world whether I wanted them or not. I have not added any back since.
Look, on some level my brain is cooked like everyone else's. But I read actively, watch movies as frequently (or more) than tv, which itself is a tiny slice of the day, probably the least I've ever done in my life, walk the dogs, take care of the house and the yard, and try to live a life outside screens. And while life and observation have taught me that in this respect I have more self-control than the average person,* I don't think any of these things are impossible; some of them aren't even difficult. You just have to want to do them.
But I do think there's also a matter of wanting the other things that are available to you. I'll read a book, but not any book and not at any time. Sometimes I want a light movie, sometimes a more substantive one. I ate my vegetables on culture a long time ago so there are a wide variety of things that are pleasurable now, and it's usually just a matter of picking one. And some of that comes down to situations: I know I will have such-and-such time available and I know what occupies my mind in the right way for the right period of time. Your time without screens is a loss if the replacement is nothing, but kids, it's a big, bright world out there, and there are lots of things you could do.
(Side note: it's true that I don't devote the time or attention that I did before to pretty much anything. But my day is very different: kids must be woken up and taken to school, meals planned and groceries purchased, dogs walked again, kids picked up, homework done, dinner cooked, bedtimes managed. There are no unbroken 8-hour streaks in my day anymore, so it's not surprising if my brain isn't doing what it did when I had those regularly.)
* I recognize this is a big part of the causal picture, and I don't mean to downplay it. But also: if I want to stop doing something, I stop doing it; if I want to start, I start. There's some window dressing around various situations--I form intentions that take a while to realize themselves, I dislike certain things I do, occasionally there's a second-order intention question about whether I really desire to do x or not-x--but the core of it is never more complicated than that.
Five years ago I made a decision with lasting impact on my life: I started reading poetry again.
In the early days of the pandemic, I needed time by myself. The kids woke up early, and needed attention, and keeping them away from my wife was a constant, only intermittently successful, battle. Being in HR with no departmental leader meant there was a lot of stress as other people were constantly pushed to the breaking point, and I needed something that would keep me going throughout the day. So I'd wake up at 5:30 or so, make a pot of coffee, and read 40 pages of poetry. (Derek Walcott at first)
This was a pivot that had been coming, anyway: I'd been in London the previous fall and done a "bookstore crawl" through independent shops, where poetry was a thing; the London Review Bookshop did one of their celeb parody threads where Pierce Brosnan came in asking about upcoming poetry titles; from that list I'd found Laura Scott's So Many Rooms and the ending piece in Helen Tookey's City of Departures made it clear that the time was right.
For the next two years, poetry was always a part of whatever I was reading: blind spots by major poets, historical poetry, and trying to keep up with the current publishing world. Though as it turns out, poetry is not hierarchically organized, there is no real top of the heap anymore, so you can follow someone influential who has published quite widely and find there's no real consensus about their value or worth because even most poetry readers haven't heard of them.
And we continue on with it because it is old-fashioned, out of step, superfluous, hostile to the idea of efficiency as a written production, hostile to efficiency as a reader (a 70 page collection that really hits three times is a marvel), and something we do simply out of the love for something beautiful and considered.
Nevertheless, a list:
Sujata Bhatt
Mimi Khalvati (Afterwardness especially)
Louise Glück (I cannot even describe what it's like to have read someone's work in whole and then have them win the Nobel, top shelf feeling as a reader; The Wild Iris is indeed her best)
Tomas Tranströmer (there's a line in one of his poems about how the grey winter sky makes all of the other colors seem more vivid which evoked a specific feeling about having grown up in Michigan that I didn't even recognize it as part of my reality until I read him saying it, top tier poetry experience)