Dreamworlds of Literary Space Are Haven from Economic Bad News

Maybe it's the economy, but I am plumb wore out on posting any opinions about the news of day. More and more, I am making time to sneak into the dream worlds of literary space. Last night's outing kept me up until three in morning, which meant I guiltily skipped my tao yoga group.

My adventure was in the cyberpunk dreamworld of Michael Marshall Smith's Only Forward. I was impressed with his second novel, Spares, a tauter and more cohesive cyberpunk novel that I read at least five years ago. I can see how the themes of Spares are improved variations of those in Only Forward.

I am hoarding the remaining Charlaine Harris/Sookie Stackhouse series books. Like an addict with a limited remaining supply, I am afraid that I will tear through them too quickly.

Another current diversion is Diana Vreeland's autobiography, D.V., published in 1984. I'll comment on that at Fashion After 50. I hope you'll visit there to read my most recent post about this fabulous button coat, a scanned copy that appear here without publisher's permission. This fiber art creation is by Mario Rivoli.

Literary Space: Experiences& Quotations

There have not been many times in recent years when I have found a literary space compelling and longed to escape there. Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series and the HBO rendition Trueblood are having that effect on me. I feel a little silly, because I have decided that a woman of a certain age should not be seduced by fiction.

The times when I have fallen so completely under the spell of another world created by a writer are memorable. One summer when I was working part-time, I read the entire, more than 1,000-page version of The Count of Monte Cristo, by Dumas Pere. Accompanied with Chardonnay and perhaps a bit of hashish, it was amazing.

In graduate school, I entered the cyberpunk world of William Gibson in the Neuromancer trilogy. It was a bright new way to look at the computers we in newspapers had been using for typesetting and layout for decades. Gibson coined the word cyberspace. He later said in an interview that his cyberspace world was richer because he didn’t really know much about computers at the time.

Here are some quotations related to creating and entering literary space.

• I read a great deal. It’s the only way we have to live more than lives than one.

-- Bonita Hersch, in John D. MacDonald’s Nightmare in Pink

• Why cannot one make one’s books live except in the night, after hours of straining? and you know they have to be your own books too, and you have to read them more than once. I think they take in something of your personality, and your environment also . . .It is that specially which makes one need good books: books that will be worthy of what you are going to put into them. . . . if you can get the right book at the right time you taste joys – not only bodily, physical, but spiritual also, which pass one out above and beyond one’s miserable self, as it were through a huge air, following the light of another man’s thoughts. And you can never be quite the old self again. You have forgotten a little bit: or rather pushed it out with a little of the inspiration of what is immortal in someone who has gone before you.

-- T. E. Lawrence, John E. Mack's biography, A Prince of Our Disorder

• That’s a great gift, my boy, to tell a story the way you did, a story that is not quite true but that sounds true. That the point in story-telling. Making people believe the story is true.

-- B. Traven – a man whose whole life is a story of false identities, stories told so that they sound true, a man whose life was as much an adventure as his stories – in The Death Ship

• Never trust a writer. They think they can do atrocious things and then just tear them out of the typewriter, throw them away and start afresh.

-- William Kotzwinkle in The Queen of Swords

• The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book published. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate.

-- William Faulkner, in the Paris Review Interviews, Writers at Work, 1958, edited by Malcolm Crowley

John Burdett, Bangkok Haunts; Robert B. Parker , Now and Then; James Lee Burke, Tin Roof Blow Down; J. Lantingua, Lady from Buenos Aires

John Burdett’s Bangkok Haunts captures the seamy underbelly of Thailand – an underbelly apparently as big as Sidney Greenstreet playing the corrupt Signor Ferrari in Casablanca or the vaguely homosexual seducer and rapacious Kaspar Gutman, The Fat Man, in The Maltese Falcon.

I mention these classic tales of human depravity, because they weave complex stories of human vice and virtues, although the later are practiced equivocally. Burdett ploughs new ground with this well-crafted page-turner. It had appeared that the James Bond novels and subsequent thrillers have covered every possible means of cruel torture and unnatural death. John Burdett proves it’s not so.

This tightly crafted novel offers finely drawn character portraits, a taut and surprising plot, and insight into Thai culture and consciousness. Burdett, who now lives in Thailand, has two previous novels with Bangkok in the title.

In Robert B. Parker’s novel, Now and Then, the gang is gathered together – Spenser, Susan, Hawk and Chollo – and up to their usual pranks of setting the world right with bullets. That these shoot-outs never seem to bear any consequences such as murder charges and the like is one of the enduring peculiarities of the series. The type is large, the story is brief. Now and Then, it appears, the author phones one in.

James Lee Burke is a word stylist worth reading even when plots curl over themselves in labyrinthine twists that – upon reflection – make little sense. The Tin Roof Blow Down is better than some (In The Electric Mist with Confederate Dead comes to mind) for plot. It is a Burke’s eye view of Hurricane Katrina, the 2005 hurricane from which the beloved city, New Orleans, has not yet recovered. Having spent a short time living there and most of my life wishing that I could, I was glued to my TV during those awful days following the storm. Burke presents a version of the events as deeply and darkly human as those of Spike Lee’s documentary, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.

Clete Purcel continues to self-destruct with dialectical carefree intensity, and Dave Robicheaux continues to tilt at windmills. Dave is on his fourth wife, by my count. Like Travis McGee in the John D. MacDonald color-coded mysteries, Robicheaux is one dangerous dude to fall in love with, if you’d like to live a long, happy life.

It’s probably not fair for me to comment on my brief tango with John Lantingua’s Lady from Buenos Aires. Willie Cuesta is a Miami detective. I picked up this one because the locale interested me. By chapter two, the pedestrian prose had me flipping to the end. My hat’s off to any author who gets a book published, but this one was not for me.

What Would Jackie Do? Presents Hints for Living with Courage, Discipline, Balance -- and Great Style

Long before J-Lo became a pop culture icon of the snappy abbreviated moniker, Jackie O was pursued by the paparazzi, celebrated by mass media, and obsessed over by fans. What Would Jackie Do? distills the fabulous femme’s life into a guidebook for living life with courage, discipline, and balance.

Shelly Branch and Sue Callaway have given me renewed respect for this former First Lady whose brilliant husband, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was famously assassinated with her by his side in an auto parade in Dallas, Texas. The authors state that Jackie Kennedy made sure that her young children – then six and three – slept in their familiar White House bedrooms that night, not at the homes of relatives. Kennedy was convinced the children needed the stability of familiar bedrooms in their lives. Later, she recreated these bedrooms for the children in her Fifth Avenue apartment. Unbelievably in these days when a million dollars buys a 500-square-foot studio apartment in Manhattan, that purchase cost her $200,000.

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis was a strict but loving mother, according to Branch and Callaway. It was refreshing to read about a wealthy society woman of JBKO’s stature who was so engaged with her children. Memorable anecdotes are Jackie sending John Jr. for counseling when he started sowing too many wild oats, JBKO seen on Manhattan streets with Caroline laughing and sharing secretively like gal pals, and Jackie indulging her grandchildren with a sledding trip to Central Park not long before her untimely death at age 63 from cancer.

JBKO practiced balance in her inner and outer lives. A lifelong practitioner of yoga, she investigated the Eastern and alternative healing therapies that were in vogue for much of her life. But, Branch and Callaway note, she never went overboard about anything that could endanger her life.

Her homes also illustrated her emphasis on balance. She loved beautiful things, but she created environments (with the help of many famous designers) in which her children and friends could feel at home. Priceless treasures were displayed so casually that a visitor might not notice at first glance that the art was by world-famous masters.

Yet, above all, Jackie is remembered for her fabulous sense of style. Her over-sized dark black sunglasses are iconic. They remain a wardrobe staple for which I will pay almost any price. Her little shifts were copied throughout the sixties and seventies; her pillbox hats were immortalized in a Bob Dylan song. She was always impeccably dressed.

She made culture a part of White House life when she hosted internationally famous musicians, dancers, and writers with the President during their all-too-brief White House years. Her restoration of that historic landmark has been nearly undone by subsequent administrations, report the authors. Jackie and an elite committee put time and research into to getting the details right.

What Would Jackie Do? is written in short information bytes that make this the perfect book for waiting room reading. The breezy style is seasoned with memorable short anecdotes. The authors, editors for national magazines, have done their research. They know what they are doing when it comes to capturing and sustaining reader attention. Tuck this one in your bag for those times when you unexpectedly get stuck with time on your hands. The seconds will speed past as quickly as those fatal moments in Dallas that changed the world.

The Christmas Lexus: A Fable for Our Times

The Christmas Lexus ads are as widely loathed as they are effective.

“Not just any Lexus,” as one of my graduate students said with just the right inflection for emphasis, “The Christmas Lexus.” We were performing a semiotic deconstruction of these illlustrations of American excess. But it doesn’t require the theory of Roland Barthes or Umberto Eco to spy and decry the haute bourgeoisie mythification of shopping for the glory of God.

As AdFreak headlines, Lexus is back with the usual Christmas downer. Adjab identifies the campaign as Ads We Hate and it tops the Yuletide peeves at The Daily Ping.

Jeremy W. Peters at the New York Times reports that the Christmas Lexus happens. The surest sign of flattery, other auto makers are airing imitations.

Those spoilsports over at Live and Learn Invest point out that the more likely response is “You did what?” than the happy smiles in the Lexus ads.

I knew a woman whose husband gave her a Mercedes Benz for their wedding anniversary. She’d left him after raising a family together but, like Janis Joplin, discovered freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. He was really glad to have her back. She was furious when he replaced her subcompact for the luxury Mercedes diesel. Ecologically responsible, she liked her peppy little car that handled like a top in traffic. How dare he trade away her car without consulting her, she fumed.

Then there’s this video of the 14-year-old girl who throws a tantrum because she received the gift of a $67,000 Lexus before, instead of during, her party. “My life is ruined,” she sobs. Or this spoiled teen who complains because her gift car is red, not blue.

Halfbakery has the perfect response – the evil gift of a fake Lexus key that sends the recipient into the snow only to discover there’s no luxury auto with a bow on top out there.

My students did a fine job of deconstructing the sign –the Christmas Lexus– into its signifier (the photo of the car) and the signified (a gift that shows you care, a lot). The sign empties of its denotative meaning, as Roland Barthes has it, and fills up with connotation – wealth and prosperity, a surfeit of money so great that a $40,000 to $70,000 car is but a bauble for celebrating the holiday. A perfect home, a perfect family, even a perfect snowy night in at least one of the ads. What could possibly result but perfect happiness?

Those of us who regard a car as a large, utilitarian purchase for which we must budget – that is to say, most of us, the petit bourgeosie hoping for admission into the upper levels of the middle class – are hooked by the emotions depicted in the ad's images. Consumer capitalism is concealed and mythified. If you want really good analyses of these, may I direct your attention to:

• Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957
• Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, 1990, about his trip across the USA
• Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness. 1977 and reissued.
• Or All Consuming Images, 1990.

Me, I’m off to buy a phony Lexus key.

For something cheerier, check out this fabulously creative and entertaining award-winning animation by Aaron Erimez. It's the story of a mischievous Christmas tree ornament and its adventures when the household is asleep.