April Book Club - Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris

For April, the Nonfiction Book Club will be reading the book Me Talk Pretty One Day, a collection of essays by David Sedaris.

This is a smashing series of irreverent pieces, poking fun at nearly every imaginable topic. David Sedaris describes his travels from New York to North Carolina to Illinois, eventually finding a place in France where he studied the French language under the tutelage of a sadistic instructor. Sedaris displays an expert knowledge of an astonishing range of topics, such as

Applied Sciences:

“To this day, I prefer to believe that inside every television there lives a community of versatile, thumb-size actors trained to portray everything from a thoughtful newscaster to the wife of a millionaire stranded on a desert island. Fickle gnomes control the weather, and an air conditioner is powered by a team of squirrels, their cheeks packed with ice cubes.”

Modern Art:

“When the notice arrived that my work had been accepted, I foolishly phoned my friends with the news. Their proposals to set fire to the grand staircase or sculpt the governor’s head out of human feces had all been rejected. This officially confirmed their outsider status and made me an enemy of the avant-garde.”

Drug Addiction:

“Thinking I must have dropped a grain or two, I vacuumed the entire apartment with a straw up my nose, sucking up dead skin cells, Comet residue, and pulverized cat litter. Anything that traveled on the bottom of a shoe went up my nose.”

Writing Workshops:

“Thinking that a clever assignment might help loosen them up, I instructed my students to write a letter to their mothers in prison. They were free to determine both the crime and the sentence, and references to cellmates were strongly encouraged. The group set to work with genuine purpose and enthusiasm, and I felt proud of myself, until the quietest member of the class handed in her paper, whispering that both her father and her uncle were currently serving time on federal racketeering charges.”

Public Sanitation:

“I seriously considered lifting this turd out of the toilet and tossing it out the window. It honestly crossed my mind, but John lived on the ground floor and a dozen people were seated at a picnic table ten feet away.”

Physiognomy:

“Mine is a look of intense concentration, the face of a man who’s forever trying to recall an old locker combination…you’ll notice that my nostrils are prominent and oddly expressive, like a second, smaller set of eyes assigned to keep watch over the lower half of my face.”

Career Changes:

“It’s somewhat surprising that I’m a serious contender for the title of world heavyweight champion, not because I’m slow or weak but because I’m a relative newcomer to the sport. I’d been just another Yale medical student and had never really thought of fighting until I got shut out of an endotracheal intubation seminar and signed up for a boxing class instead. The teacher recognized my extraordinary talent, lined up a few regional matches, and one thing led to another.”

Legal Liability:

“What can you say about the family who is suing the railroad after their drunk son was killed walking on the tracks? Trains don’t normally sneak up on people. Unless they’ve derailed, you pretty much know where to find them.”

The World Wide Web:

“I didn’t know about them, but I was hoping the people of the world might be united by something more interesting, like drugs or an armed struggle against the undead. Unfortunately, my father’s team won, so computers it is.”


Building Vocabulary:
"I found no listing for those who fear they know too many masochists. Neither did I find an entry for those who fear the terrible truth that their self-worth is based entirely on the completion of a daily crossword puzzle. Because I can't seem to find it anywhere, I'm guaranteed that such a word actually exists. It will undoubtedly pop up in some future puzzle."


Geopolitics:
"Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos were born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are, 'We're number two!'"

If you are intrigued by these words of wisdom, I thoroughly encourage you to read Me Talk Pretty One Day and come to the Marx Room on Wednesday, April 27th at 7 p.m. The book is located at 814 S447m in the stacks. Interlibrary loan requests can be made if necessary.

Book Review - Blackberry Wine

I recently finished reading the book Blackberry Wine, written by Joanne Harris. It is the first novel of hers I have read, though I have seen the movie Chocolat which is based on her novel of the same name.

The story is fun, comfortable, faintly fantastical. The main character is Jay Mackintosh, a washed-up English author who wrote a novel called Jackapple Joe many years ago and has not written a decent thing since. Living with his girlfriend Kerry, he one day sees an advertisement for a house in Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, a French village that Joanne Harris invented (so don't look for it on a map, you won't find it). Looking at this house brings back memories of Jay's childhood, which he partly spent at the farm of an old man named Joe Cox. Joe had once shown Jay a picture of this exact same French house and had told Jay that he planned to move to this house and begin a new garden there, since Joe's house was in danger of being bulldozed by heartless land developers.

Much of the story dwells on the summers Jay spent in Kirby Monckton, a Yorkshire town. These flashbacks are split between the lessons Joe gave Jay in gardening, and a series of skirmishes Jay has with the neighborhood kids who are mean nasty bullies and nothing else. The latter part did nothing for the novel except to demonstrate, painfully, how Jay came to learn that life is not fair. As for Joe's lessons in gardening, the scenes are touching but they did not influence Jay in any significant way except to make Jay fascinated with Joe as a person (his novel Jackapple Joe is loosely based on Joe Cox himself; as readers we never find out exactly how much Jay changed or hid). I was reminded of a remark Roger Ebert once made about the movie Dead Poets Society: that a great poetry teacher should inspire his students to love poetry, not to love the teacher.

But the novel's greatest flaw was that it took far too long to get anywhere. In the present, Jay moves to this house in Lansquenet and finds out that his neighbor is a reclusive, mysterious social outcast named Marise, and she has a daughter named Rosa. I knew right away that (a) Marise was an exception to the gossipy, shallow social atmosphere elsewhere in the village of Lansquenet, and (b) that Jay was going to fall in love with her. Yet it is only in the last quarter of the novel that we begin to find out who she really is, and that - gasp - she has a deep dark secret! This is suddenly revealed, and though her secret is as terrible and as clearly imagined as Rochester's in Jane Eyre, it has no serious consequence in the novel, because the novel ends precisely fourteen pages after she finishes telling Jay this secret. A plot twist is only as good as its effect upon the other elements of the novel. In Blackberry Wine, the revelation explains the oddities of Marise's behavior, but it does nothing to help Jay understand his own role in her life, and it brings up additional complications in the plot that are not resolved.

The five-act system in storytelling is in decline. Shakespeare perfected this system: introduction, complication, climax, resolution, outcome. First the main characters and their problems are introduced; they interact in a way that produces one or more larger problems; those problems reach a height and create a crisis that cannot be ignored or easily alleviated; then one or more characters resolves to face this crisis in a certain way; and we see the final consequences of that resolution, we see if the effort was successful or unsuccessful. Most stories today focus too much on introductions, take too long to demonstrate the complications, and then the climax occurs so late in the story that there is little or no time for a resolution. I know that every story does not have to follow this pattern, but I think this pattern is the best way for an author to realize his or her story fully.

So I guess my advice to Joanne Harris is that the climactic conversation between Jay and Marise should have happened halfway through the novel, not at the very end. Shakespeare usually made sure things really came to a boil in the third act. Romeo killing Tybalt, Hamlet giving his soliloquy and killing Polonius, Brutus and Cassius killing Caesar, Lear yelling at the storm, Macbeth killing his best friend and subsequently seeing his ghost walk through the dinner hall - all of these events happened in the third acts of their respective plays. In The Phantom of the Opera, it is halfway through the novel that Christine meets the phantom, Erik, and finds out how truly haunted and psychotic he is; this revelation influences the way she sees the phantom for the remainder of the novel, and it makes the phantom much more terrifying to us because we realize that, even when stripped of his cloak and his parlor tricks, he is truly a monster through and through (though, I thought, a sympathetic one).

Blackberry Wine is not a bad novel, but considering the simplicity of the story I thought it could have been structured according to Shakespeare's conventions and thereby made into something more than just the sum of its parts. In the end, it is a story about believing in yourself. Joe tells Jay, "You've got to create the right conditions for magic to work." Well, I wish the novel had made more of an effort to show that moral, rather than just tell it. Most of the novel is Jay bumbling around without a clue, listening to his strange hallucinations of a long-gone Joe, making advances toward Marise that are mostly ignored, working on a new book that we as readers never get to peruse, and reminiscing about a gypsy girl whom he met as a kid and who never gave him a chance to express his feelings for her. Jay is a very passive character, and I don't like passive characters. If you are going to give a character his own novel, he'd better be strong enough to do something that really strikes the reader.

December 2 - What should we celebrate?

The Tuesday after Thanksgiving is Giving Tuesday.
For books about charity, see 361.
For books about child welfare, see 362.7.
For books about virtues such as patience and gentleness, see 179.9.

December 2nd is Fritters Day.
For books about frying food, see 641.77.
For books about cooking with fruit, see 641.64.
For books about cooking with vegetables, see 641.65.

On this date in 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte is crowned emperor of France in Paris.
For books about Napoleon, see BN216 in the biography section.
For books about the French Revolution, see 944.04.
For books about the First Empire of France, see 944.05.