Bolano 2666 quote of the week (3)

So many to choose from. I have to admit I’ll be glad to be rid of the critics, but this week had several intriguing quotes. So. Vote if you feel like it.

1) “…he, in his own way, like Schwob in Samoa, had already begun a voyage, a voyage that would end not in the grave of a brave man but in a kind of resignation in any ordinary sense of the word, or even patience or conformity, but rather a state of meekness, a refined and incomprehensible humility that made him cry for no reason and in which his own image, what Morini saw as Morini, gradually and helplessly dissolved, like a river that stops being a river or a tree that burns on the horizon, no knowing that it’s burning” (107).

2) “It was as if the light were buried in the Pacific Ocean, producing an enormous curvature of space. It made a person hungry to travel in that light, although also, and maybe more insistently thought Norton, it made you want to bear your hunger until the end” (110-11).
[one of the best descriptions of the Sonoran desert I've ever read.]

3) “And yet your shadow isn’t following you anymore. At some point your shadow has quietly slipped away. You pretend you don’t notice, but you have, you’re missing your fucking shadow, though there are plenty of ways to explain it, the angle of the sun, the degree of oblivion induced by the sun beating down on hatless heads, the quantity of alcohol ingested, the movement of something like subterranean tanks of pain, the fear of more contingent things, a disease that begins to become more apparent, wounded vanity, the desire just for once in your life too be on time. But the point is, your shadow is lost and you, momentarily forget it. And so you arrive on a kind of stage, without your shadow, and you start to translate reality or reinterpret it or sing it” (121).

[This third quote is hands-down my favorite, made even more poignant by Norton's painfully ignorant and heartless proclamation that she didn't understand a word of it. Nothing thus far has made me like her less.]

Ben and Jerry’s newest flavor

I would buy two gallons of B&J’s newest flavor if they sold it out here.

It’s called “Spouse and Child Go to Santa Cruz So I Can Work on Major Revisions to My Novel (Near a Well Stocked Fridge)”.

It’s pure heaven. I got the only pint they ever made, and I’m savoring every teaspoonful.

Seriously, if Ben and Jerry made an ice cream called “Silence” I would buy it without checking the ingredients. And that’s saying a lot for the Michael Pollan in me.

(I do know, as a copyeditor and English professor that the period should go inside the quotation marks, but that doesn’t make sense to me. The punctuation applies to the sentence, not the flavor name, so I want it outside the quotes. Call me British, but I’m over fabricated American grammar and punctuation rules I don’t agree with. Yup. Prepositional end to that idea, baby. Cuz I’m wacky and wild while the men in my life are gone.)

Paul Simon agrees with us

Appropos of yesterday’s post, Peanut today put in a Paul Simon CD to which I sang along. With gusto.

“Well that was your mother
And that was your father
Before you wuz born, dude
When life was great.
Now you are the burden
Of my generation
I sure do love you
Let’s get that straight.”

Oh, my dear Mr. Simon. Why did I not *hear* you before?

Et toi!

Still ambivalent after all these years

Simon and Garfunkel sang that, didn’t they? Before the crazy version, there was being stuck between a rock and a sheer-faced cliff? Thought so.

Since the inception of this blog, I have wrestled publicly with the dilemma that I love my child and rather dislike parenting. Love, love, love the kid. Don’t get me wrong or send angry emails. Love the child. Dislike the job. It’s not a popular riff, and it’s not often said, so I feel like I’m talking to a (rather horrified) brick wall when I explain to people who ask, that I’m experiencing a range of emotions about being a breeder (ooops, there’s my problem right there, because Americans know the correct answers are “Fine” to “How are you?” and “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done” to “How do you like being a Mom?” regardless of how you feel. But I always forget that social rule and actually hear, process, and answer questions as they’re posed. Silly, poorly socialized me.)

So when someone the other day asked if I was excited about the new baby, my initial response was typical for me, caught between the headlights of social expectations and my still unabashed tendency toward truth:

Blink. Blink. Blink.

Don’t make me say the obvious: of course…yes and no…sort of…I think so…absolutely…blink blink blink. Here’s the thing, at least for me. The dive into parenthood, at least the first time, is like asking a solitary, heliophilic (lover of sunshine, not bleeder, though that might work, too), claustrophic acrophobe (nasty fear of heights…bear with me) to live the remainder of their life as a bat.

YES, there are beautiful sights to take in while you’re flying. Glorious smells and sounds and vistas unknown to humans. At…uhem…night. In the sky. Kind of high. Admittedly, there is awesome fruit to be had. A thousand times, yes, I love mangoes. Back at home, though, my small, cramped cave is filled with lots of smelly others who insist I hang upside down from the ceiling and avoid the sun. So admitting having mixed feelings seems less revolutionary than honest and, well, mandatory.

The whole foreign country/alien planet thing I’ve heard from other moms about the upending shock of plunging from independence and coherence into the unblinking and rapid-fire world of parenting implies that the surroundings have changed. Nay. Same place. I’m just living upside down. At night. By new rules with new people whom I simply don’t get. Their way is totally right for them, and it makes sense, and it’s quite lovely. But it’s godawful uncomfortable for me.

And the thought of doing it again really, really soon means less shock and more…upside down, claustrophobic, ceiling-clinging, guano-filled days. I know where to find the fun, but I don’t know how to escape when the not-so-fun threatens to overwhelm. Because you know what? (And I risk being a bit overdramatic here, but I defy you to prove me wrong….) there is no escape.

[Maybe that's why our culture makes such a big deal about bats. It's not the three out of, like 400 species of otherwise frugivorous bats who drink blood. It's the fact that we know, deep down, that I'm totally awesome at similies and metaphors, and that a lot of us are living, at once by choice and against our will, in caves filled with other upside down mammals.]

So I’m learning and I’m flying and I’m having copious amounts of fun. But home isn’t home…it’s claustrophobic and smelly. And going outside is different and new and overwhelming. That sense of displacement, of not just where did I go? but where did the world go? is a little disconcerting.

Once or twice. AND twice.

Consider that next time I just stare at you and blink blink. Blink.

Blink.

chickens coming home to roost

Well, here’s proof that if you post how lovely it is to have a sick kid, you’re guaranteed at least two scourges of your own in rapid succession. I’ve been sick now twice in two weeks, and my only post idea is going as a guest post on another site. In short, dear reader, I have nothing for you. No snark, no sass, no waxing philosophical, no book ideas or reviews.

Nothing. Nada.

I will, however, point you to something that always boosts my spirits. Engrish.

Bolano’s 2666 quote of the week (2)

This week’s reading is at once slower and more explosive than last week’s. I’m still intrigued, but far from being in love.

“Naturally, Norton was happy to hear from him and to learn he was in the city and at the agreed-upon time she appeared in the hotel lobby, where Morini, sitting in his wheelchair with a package on his lap, was patiently and impassively deflecting the flow of guests and visitors that convulsed the lobby in an ever-changing display of luggage, tired faces, perfumes trailing after meteroidian bodies, bellhops with their stern jitters, the philosophical circles under the eyes of the manager or associate manager, each with his brace of assistants radiating freshness, the same freshness of eager sacrifice emitted by young women (in the form of ghostly laughter), which Morini tactfully chose to ignore. When Norton got there they left for a restaurant in Notting Hill, a Brazilian vegetarian restaurant she had recently discovered.” (95)

I’m usually not a setting person and prefer to get straight to dialogue and character development, but this image of Morini in a stream of humanity compels with its uneven pacing and jump-cut imagery.

Head over to bolanobolano.com for erudite discussions.

Sick babes

Oh, poor little Peanut. Poor, poor little guy. Couple of days of fever, couple of drippy nose days, now a cough and copious vomit. Poor, poor guy.

{Pssst. Over here. I know this is a terrible thing to say, but what a relief it is when this child is sick. Thankfully, illness is rare for him. We’re lucky. I don’t want to underestimate how lucky we are to have a healthy child. But with a child who has enough energy to power the Eastern Seaboard, who has strong opinions, is persistent and intense and verbal and really more than I can handle, nothing says “relaxing day” like a fever or puking. I basically get a day off to adore him with a rare minimum of effort. Sick days (as long as I’m not sick, too) are days off, parenting-wise. I’m loving and wonderful and he’s grateful and cuddly. And quiet. He’s quiet, people! LOVE it. But I can’t say that out loud. It would be wrong to say that out loud.}

I hope he feels better soon. Poor guy.

Bad, bad, bad

I knew this would happen, and I knew it would happen once Peanut got to school. He now knows the word “bad.”

We avoided that word for the first four years of his life, because he doesn’t need it. There are few really “bad” things in this world, and those are so off-the-charts horrible that he doesn’t need to know about them. We’ll spare the discussions about terrorism, homicide, and even theft and greed until later. Most people are basically good, but some can make better choices. When we say it that way, everyone has a chance, you know? Someone at school who has a grumpy day and takes toys or hits needs to know there are better ways to be angry. But she’s not bad. Most cats expressing themselves with feces are frustrated and need understanding and training. They are not bad. Their actions are frustrating and disgusting and won’t be tolerated, but the cat, himself, is not bad. In our house, fruit rots; it’s not bad. We feel ill or crummy; not bad. I’m not saying that this approach is right; I’m just explaining why it was weird to hear my child use the word “bad.”

Just as I tried hard to teach P that I love him and I don’t like hitting, so he knew that the person and the action are not the same thing, we tried to teach him that some things were good choices and some were not good choices. We never needed the word “bad” and we liked it that way.

So when he came home last week and asked what “bad” meant, I said it can mean a lot of things; where did he hear it and I could tell him what the person meant. “Big bad wolf tried to get in some pig houses.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I know that story, and I guess, in that case, they mean bad because the wolf ruins the pig houses and scares them and doesn’t listen to their words. So in that case, bad is kind of like ‘not being nice’.”

So, predictably, for the next few days, he tried out his new condemnation on a variety of subjects. The cat is bad, Mom is bad, Dad is bad, this macaroni is bad…I’m going out of my mind. Because I want to let him try it, and not call attention to it for all the reasons parents *know* not to call attention to behaviors they don’t like, but that word KILLS me. It’s like a 1950s black and white world where we judge people and count them out because of one poor choice.

Spouse and I don’t say “good boy” because it makes him seek praise for any action, laudable or otherwise. Labeling a child good makes them second guess their every move to see if someone else will tell them they are good, instead of finding their own sense of self worth and justice. And being a “good boy” or a “bad boy” implies a permanence. There are no all good or all bad children. There are people who need better parenting and time to learn and help finding better choices. Even those people don’t have “bad” parents. They have parents who don’t know better or who don’t try hard enough.

Anyway. I’m miffed about the “bad.” Other parents freak when their kid comes home spewing four-letter words and I’m thrown at just three.

Arsenic and old babies

Peanut: I’m eating the apple and the seeds.
Me: I wouldn’t eat the seeds if I were you, P.
P: Why?
M: Because they concentrate arsenic, a yucky chemical that can hurt your body. Eating one seed won’t matter, but don’t try to eat them, please.
P: Why?
M: Not good for your body.
P: [pause] Maybe we could name the baby Arsenic.
M: It’s a nice word, isn’t it?
P: Yeah. Can we name the baby that?
M: Probably not, P, because I want to name the baby something nice, not something that will hurt people.
P: Why?
M: Well, when the baby is little, we don’t want people to worry that it might hurt them, and when its big we don’t want people to worry that it might hurt them. Arsenic can hurt you, so nice word but not a great name.
P: Can we name the baby Hitting?
M: That’s a little more direct than arsenic, but no.
P: Why?
M: Nice names, not hurting names.
P: Maybe we could name the baby Pretend Hitting.
M: Maybe.

Bolano quote of the day ~2666~

Okay, we’re at the first Bolano benchmark (someone email me with tilde instructions because the en rather than enyay is killing me) and I’m not sure yet. Engaging, amusing, smart. But the whole mocking of academia and its internal machinations has grown a bit tedious, in part because it reminds me of what I dislike about conferences, departmental in-fighting, and journal publishing.

Oh well. I’m still in this for the long haul. I think.

Quote of the day: tie. Because I’ll probably only post once a week, I’m willing to give the daily award to two bits from the first 50 pages of the novel…

“A rather ordinary picture of a student in the capital, but it worked on him like a drug, a drug that brought him to tears, a drug that (as one sentimental Dutch poet of the nineteenth century had it) opened the floodgates oof emotion, as well as the floodgates that at first blush resembled self-pity but wasn’t (what was it, then? rage? very likely), and made him turn over and over in his mind, not in words but in painful images, the period of his youthful apprenticeship, and after a perhaps pointless long night he was forced to two conclusions: first, that his life as he had lived it so far was over; second, that a brilliant career was opening up before him, and that to maintain its glow he had to persist in his determination, in sole testament to that garret. This seemed easy enough.” (5)

“The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word fate used ten times and the word friendship twenty-four times. Liz Norton’s name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word Paris was said seven times, Madrid, eight. The word love was spoken twice, once by each man. The word horror was spoken six times and the word happiness once (by Espinoza). The word solution was said twelve times. The word solipsism seven times. The word euphemism ten times. The word category, in the singular and the plural, nine times. The word structuralism once (Pelletier). The term American literature three times. The words dinner or eating or breakfast or sandwich nineteen times. The words eyes or hands or hair fourteen times. Then the conversation proceeded more smoothly.” (40-1).

See, just when I feel bored with the professional and personal nonsense, he waxes all Cervantes funny on me. And I dig that.