Little Women

The other day I finished a book while on the subway and I had enough of a commute left and no internet that I decided I had to read something that was already on my Kindle. Because of copyright law and the Gutenberg Project, there are many free books available online, and I've downloaded quite a few classics for times of need or ambition. This was a time of need and not ambition, so I decided to reread one of my absolute favorites: Little Women.


Little Women
Louisa May Alcott

Growing up, my parents limited the amount of television my sister and I were allowed to watch, so I spent most of my years before middle school playing pretend with my little sister, running around the backyard, and reading. I was also really shy when I was younger, and reading was a wonderful escape for me in awkward situations and most social environments. But more than any of those things, I learned early on what a fantastic, magical thing reading can be for its ability to take you anywhere and let you be anyone.

When I read (and reread) little women, I always felt so inspired by the girls, and have felt varying degrees of empathy for their situations. Each time I read it, I notice different details and commiserate with the characters in different ways. But overall, I feel the most for Jo, and I don't believe it is just because she is the main character to a certain extent. I understood her love of reading and escapism, her desire to write and perform, her awkward and stubbornly blunt way of dealing with others, and her impatience for that which doesn't make sense. I love this book for its comforts, lessons, stories, and lovely portrait of a family.

Below are some of the underlines I made this time around. There is so much that I love in this book, but these were the ones that stood out to me this time. Partly I was in the framework to think about love and loss due to what people in my life are going through, and partly these just seemed to be really lovely moments and thoughts.

"But I lost her when I was a little older than you are, and for years had to struggle on alone, for I was too proud to confess my weakness to anyone else. I had a hard time, Jo, and shed a good many bitter tears over my failures, for in spite of my efforts I never seemed to get on. Then your father came, and I was so happy that I found it easy to be good. But by-and-by, when I had four little daughters round me and we were poor, then the old trouble began again, for I am not patient by nature, and it tried me very much to see my children wanting anything." "Poor Mother! What helped you then?" "Your father, Jo. He never loses patience, never doubts or complains, but always hopes, and works and waits so cheerfully that one is ashamed to do otherwise before him. He helped and comforted me, and showed me that I must try to practice all the virtues I would have my little girls possess, for I was their example. It was easier to try for your sakes than for my own.' 

Jo's breath gave out here, and wrapping her head in the paper, she bedewed her little story with a few natural tears, for to be independent and earn the praise of those she loved were the dearest wishes of her heart, and this seemed to be the first step toward that happy end. 

Laurie thought that the task of forgetting his love for Jo would absorb all his powers for years, but to his great surprise he discovered it grew easier every day. He refused to believe it at first, got angry with himself, and couldn't understand it, but these hearts of ours are curious and contrary things, and time and nature work their will in spite of us. Laurie's heart wouldn't ache. The wound persisted in healing with a rapidity that astonished him, and instead of trying to forget, he found himself trying to remember. He had not foreseen this turn of affairs, and was not prepared for it. He was disgusted with himself, surprised at his own fickleness, and full of a queer mixture of disappointment and relief that he could recover from such a tremendous blow so soon. He carefully stirred up the embers of his lost love, but they refused to burst into a blaze. There was only a comfortable glow that warmed and did him good without putting him into a fever, and he was reluctantly obliged to confess that the boyish passion was slowly subsiding into a more tranquil sentiment, very tender, a little sad and resentful still, but that was sure to pass away in time, leaving a brotherly affection which would last unbroken to the end.

In spite of the new sorrow, it was a very happy time, so happy that Laurie could not bear to disturb it by a word. It took him a little while to recover from his surprise at the cure of his first, and as he had firmly believed, his last and only love. 

His second wooing, he resolved, should be as calm and simple as possible. There was no need of having a scene, hardly any need of telling Amy that he loved her, she knew it without words and had given him his answer long ago. It all came about so naturally that no one could complain, and he knew that everybody would be pleased, even Jo. But when our first little passion has been crushed, we are apt to be wary and slow in making a second trial, so Laurie let the days pass, enjoying every hour, and leaving to chance the utterance of the word that would put an end to the first and sweetest part of his new romance. 

It seldom is, at first, and thirty seems the end of all things to five-and-twenty. But it's not as bad as it looks, and one can get on quite happily if one has something in one's self to fall back upon. At twenty-five, girls begin to talk about being old maids, but secretly resolve that they never will be. At thirty they say nothing about it, but quietly accept the fact, and if sensible, console themselves by remembering that they have twenty more useful, happy years, in which they may be learning to grow old gracefully. Don't laugh at the spinsters, dear girls, for often very tender, tragic romances are hidden away in the hearts that beat so quietly under the sober gowns, and many silent sacrifices of youth, health, ambition, love itself, make the faded faces beautiful in God's sight. Even the sad, sour sisters should be kindly dealt with, because they have missed the sweetest part of life, if for no other reason. And looking at them with compassion, not contempt, girls in their bloom should remember that they too may miss the blossom time. That rosy cheeks don't last forever, that silver threads will come in the bonnie brown hair, and that, by-and-by, kindness and respect will be as sweet as love and admiration now.

Devil in the White City, part 1

So my boyfriend, sister, sister's best friend, and I started a long distance book club together. Initially, my boyfriend and I were doing one together because we are so far apart, and then my sister got excited and pulled her friend in. This is the first book the four of us are reading together, and this was my first email about Part 1. 

Note: since I read on a kindle, I have locations instead of page numbers (and my kindle is old, so it only has locations). 

Devil in the White City

By Erik Larson

Part I: Frozen Music

Chicago 1890-91

"The Black City"

Women able to leave home alone for the first time in modern history, work, and live away from home.

"Anonymous deaths came early and often" 

"Men shot women, women shot men, and children shot one another by accident."

How is this similar or different to today? On one hand, I think there would be less random and reckless deaths based on how deaths are described as so common with trains etc, but then again we still have plenty of accidental deaths and dangerous crimes. I'd be curious to know how those compare as a percent of population between now and then. Which society was "safer" from that standpoint?

Location 238

This book makes me curious about psychopaths/killers in that I wonder if their sensory experience is different so that smells we find offensive are pleasing to them, for example, and not because they enjoy killing per say but the actual smelling experience. 

Location 259

Windy city because of political talk - same as today (everywhere)

Location 282

France's set up of its exhibition and organization vs America's:

Pleasure in a unified and intentional design; and the benefits of that still in showing one's strengths

Location 296

Chicago spirit, civic pride as tangible

Unifying culture after tragedy and crisis -to what degree can a large society feel that they are a group with an "other" to compete/contrast with or a crisis/tragedy to endure together (modern: 9/11, sandy, sandy hook shooting, Osama bin laden, etc)

Also it says more powerful in Chicago - is it tied to it being an underdog city? Are there other qualities that create this type of an environment and attitude? (collective pride: Boston, NYC, Chicago, Texas, etc)

Location 355

Chicago fire took 18,000 homes and left 100,000 homeless: was it the largest scale tragedy at that point in history besides a war?

Location 415

Meals men ate in 19th century prevented them from walking up stairs - how does this compare to modern meals?

Location 491

Miasma of smoke... Description of city is bleak, cold, gross, dark, foul

Location 555

Whitehall Club

Really? So creepy and gross and morbid. What did they really do?

Location 607

His nature broke common decency rules yet was appealing because of it. Is this always true for people? Are we attracted to whatever breaks contemporary rules? Why? What evolutionary benefit did we find in pursuing the ones who diverge from society's paths, whether it's within a small range or extreme enough to be dangerous. Is it always a sexual attraction? Why is sex and rule breaking so intoxicating and attractive to humans? There must be benefits otherwise it wouldn't be such a common trait. Do those traits parallel other traits that are beneficial so it's just a coincidental/linked benefit that helps reproduce both traits and attractions?

Location 636

Related to my previous comment/question as to whether psychopaths find the sensory experience different or if it's just symbolic of their misguided/twisted desires. 

Location 648

The descriptions of doctors 100 years ago made me really curious as to when doctors became more credible and well educated. The corollary to that is to wonder to what degree they have made significant improvements. I'm not really trying to say that I don't believe that doctors aren't well educated at all or aren't doing their best (or that the vast majority aren't). I'm more interested in whether we have a similar blindness as to the real limitations of our current knowledge and methods that parallels what they did at the time. While we have certainly made great strides and discoveries and improvements, how can we really assess where we fall on a greater spectrum of the full knowledge and best practices for health. I'm not at all an expert either way, so I can't really give my own opinion with any confidence in its accuracy, but my guess is that we overestimate and have overconfidence in what we know and the medicines we prescribe and treatments we use. 

Location 1242

The attention to details like that is probably better understood and more familiar now, but even so perhaps we don't pay attention to the right details or allow ourselves to determine correctly which details will really matter and to what degree. And as a solution, we pay too much attention to too many details and waste time and resources on things that don't truly warrant it. 

Location 1413

"besides his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath."

This sort of shocked me because, as a loose definition, it made me wonder how many psychopaths I knew. (more on this later perhaps, just sort of wanted to finish up at this point)

I Feel Bad About My Neck

This was another random download from the Austin public library account, and I mostly picked it because I think it was on the main page and sounded funny. I always like a book that is simple and makes me laugh or smile, especially for reading while in transit. It makes 45 min on the subway go by more pleasantly in spite of crowds or smells or even just time. And this definitely did the trick - not necessarily for everyone, but I enjoyed it.

I Feel Bad About My Neck
Nora Ephron

The random quotes that I underlined while reading are below. Some really cracked me up because they were familiar, some just because her wording was great, and others just rang true even though I'm not yet her age or with all her experiences. I think she also provides good perspective on a lot of things I stress and worry about, which most women older than me can do (usually significantly older because 30somethings sometimes seem more stress or stress-inducing). Plus there are things I totally, fully agree with - like the things about reading or cooking.

A recipe for them appears on page 36 of the book, but it doesn’t begin to convey how stressful and time-consuming an endeavor it is to make egg rolls, nor does it begin to suggest how much tension a person can create in a household by serving egg rolls that take hours to make and are not nearly as good as Chinese takeout.

Just before I’d moved to New York, two historic events had occurred: The birth control pill had been invented, and the first Julia Child cookbook was published. As a result, everyone was having sex, and when the sex was over, you cooked something.

By the mid-sixties, Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Cookbook, and Michael Field’s Cooking School had become the holy trinity of cookbooks.

Okay, I didn’t have a date, but at least I wasn’t one of those lonely women who sat home with a pathetic container of yogurt. Eating an entire meal for four that I had cooked for myself was probably equally pathetic, but that never crossed my mind.

The point wasn’t about the recipes. The point (I was starting to realize) was about putting it together. The point was about making people feel at home, about finding your own style, whatever it was, and committing to it. The point was about giving up neurosis where food was concerned. The point was about finding a way that food fit into your life.

We begin, I’m sorry to say, with hair. I’m sorry to say it because the amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.

Black was for widows, specifically for Italian war widows, and even Gloria Steinem might concede that the average Italian war widow made you believe that sixty was the new seventy-five. If you have gray hair, black makes you look not just older but sadder. But black looks great on older women with dark hair—so great, in fact, that even younger women with dark hair now wear black. Even blondes wear black. Even women in L.A. wear black. Most everyone wears black—except for anchorwomen, United States senators, and residents of Texas, and I feel really bad for them. I mean, black makes your life so much simpler. Everything matches black, especially black.

I want to ask a question: When and how did it happen that you absolutely had to have a manicure? I don’t begin to know the answer, but I want to leave the question out there, floating around in the atmosphere, as a reminder that just when you think you know exactly how many things you have to do to yourself where maintenance is concerned, another can just pop up out of nowhere and take a huge bite out of your life.

The best thing about a pedicure is that most of the year, from September to May to be exact, no one except your loved one knows if you have had one. The second best thing about a pedicure is that while you’re having your feet done, you have the use of your hands and can easily read or even talk on a cell phone. The third best thing about a pedicure is that when it’s over, your feet really do look adorable.

Speaking of the pain of labor, which I seem to be, I would like to interject a short, irrelevant note: Why do people always say you forget the pain of labor? I haven’t forgotten the pain of labor. Labor hurt. It hurt a lot. The fact that I am not currently in pain and cannot simulate the pain of labor doesn’t mean I don’t remember it. I am currently not eating a wonderful piece of grilled chicken I once had in Asolo, Italy, in 1982, but I remember it well. It was delicious. I can tell you exactly what it tasted like, and except for the time when I returned to the restaurant six years later and ordered it again (and it turned out, amazingly, to be exactly as wonderful as I remembered), I have never tasted chicken that was crisper, tastier, or juicier. The song has ended, but the melody lingers on, and that goes for the pain of labor—but not in a good way.

Exercise, as you no doubt know, is a late arrival in the history of civilization. Until around 1910, people exercised all the time, but they didn’t think of it as exercise—they thought of it as life itself. They had to get from one place to the other, usually on foot, and harvest the crop, and wage war, and so on. But then the automobile was invented (not to mention the Sherman tank), and that pretty much led to what we have today—a country full of underexercised (and often overweight) people—and a parallel universe of overexercised (but not necessarily underweight) people.

Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.

Here’s what a parent is: A parent is a person who has children. Here’s what’s involved in being a parent: You love your children, you hang out with them from time to time, you throw balls, you read stories, you make sure they know which utensil is the salad fork, you teach them to say please and thank you, you see that they have an occasional haircut, and you ask if they did their homework. Every so often, sentences you never expected to say (because your parents said them to you) fall from your lips.

But eventually the baby in question began to manifest its personality, and sure enough, remarkably enough, that personality never changed. For example, when the police arrived to inform you that your eight-year-old had just dropped a dozen eggs from your fifth-floor window onto West End Avenue, you couldn’t help but be reminded of the fourteen-month-old baby he used to be, who knocked all the string beans from the high chair to the floor and thought it was a total riot.

Parenting meant that whether or not your children understood you, your obligation was to understand them; understanding was the key to everything. If your children believed you understood them, or at least tried to understand them, they wouldn’t hate you when they became adolescents; what’s more, they would grow up to be happy, well-adjusted adults who would never have to squander their money (or, far more likely, yours) on psychoanalysis or whatever fashion in self-improvement had come along to take its place. Parenting used entirely different language from just plain parenthood, language you would never write in big capital letters in order to make clear that it had been uttered impulsively or in anger.

It was so much a part of our lives, a song sung again and again, and no matter what happened, no matter how awful things became between the two of them, we always knew that our parents had once been madly in love. But in a divorce, you never tell your children that you were once madly in love with their father because it would be too confusing. And then, after a while, you can’t even remember whether you were.

I’ve just surfaced from spending several days in a state of rapture—with a book. I loved this book. I loved every second of it. I was transported into its world. I was reminded of all sorts of things in my own life. I was in anguish over the fate of its characters. I felt alive, and engaged, and positively brilliant, bursting with ideas, brimming with memories of other books I’ve loved. I composed a dozen imaginary letters to the author, letters I’ll never write, much less send. I wrote letters of praise. I wrote letters relating entirely inappropriate personal information about my own experiences with the author’s subject matter. I even wrote a letter of recrimination when one of the characters died and I was grief-stricken. But mostly I wrote letters of gratitude: the state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book is one of the main reasons I read, but it doesn’t happen every time or even every other time, and when it does happen, I’m truly beside myself.

Here’s a strange thing: Whenever I read a book I love, I start to remember all the other books that have sent me into rapture, and I can remember where I was living and the couch I was sitting on when I read them.

After college, living in Greenwich Village, I sat on my brand-new wide-wale corduroy couch and read The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, the extraordinary novel that changed my life and the lives of so many other young women in the 1960s.

And finally, one day, I read the novel that is probably the most rapture-inducing book of my adult life. On a chaise longue at the beach on a beautiful summer day, I open Wilkie Collins’s masterpiece, The Woman in White, probably the first great work of mystery fiction ever written (although that description hardly does it justice), and I am instantly lost to the world. Days pass as I savor every word. Each minute I spend away from the book pretending to be interested in everyday life is a misery. How could I have waited so long to read this book? When can I get back to it?

There’s something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can’t tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he’s liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can’t adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All this happens to me when I surface from a great book.

The book I’ve currently surfaced from—the one I mentioned at the beginning of this piece—is called The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. It’s about two men who create comic-book characters, but it’s also about how artists create fantastic and magical things from the events of everyday life.

Plus, you can’t wear a bikini. Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don’t take it off until you’re thirty-four.

Well, not quite exactly. Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over: Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it’s your last, or do you save your money on the chance you’ll live twenty more years? Is life too short, or is it going to be too long? Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses? And where do carbohydrates fit into all this? Are we really going to have to spend our last years avoiding bread, especially now that bread in America is so unbelievably delicious? And what about chocolate? There’s a question for you, Gertrude Stein—what about chocolate?

The Night Circus

I really enjoyed reading this book. I picked it relatively at random because it was on the homepage of the library's website for downloadable library books and the snipped didn't look terrible. A couple friends of mine read it and didn't like it as much, which surprised me because I liked it a lot. Maybe I was just in the mindset or mood to be entranced by something and let my imagination run wild with this magical imagery and quasi-romantic storyline. Regardless of the exact reasons, I read this very quickly because I could barely put it down and felt that envy for the supernatural that you feel when reading something like Harry Potter. 

The Night Circus 

By Erin Morgenstern

I think another thing I liked about this book was that the first snippet or so that I read reminded me of Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, which I don't even remember particularly well other than the beginning about a mysterious circus or something coming to town (did I even ever read it all? I'm not sure). Come to think of it, I'm not sure I ever did read it. But the first chapter is quite mysterious with the introduction of this strange lightning rod seller and a shift of the air, and the night circus that pops up out of nowhere and only opens at night has that same tangible otherness that is not so different as to be unbelievable but is just unusual enough to be completely entrancing.

 

I didn't really underline much in this book - I focused less on individual details or passages or sentences and instead was mostly just racing along to find out what happened next. Like I said, this book really captured me for some reason. These are the two things I clipped from it, which isn't terribly surprising to me based on the sentiment. One, that a great dinner party of kindred spirits does wonders for loneliness and that sometimes being special isn't what's required, but just putting yourself out there to be in the right place at the right time. My dad often told me that most of life was about luck and about putting yourself in the position that luck could happen to you. 

They sit over their drinks smiling like children and they relish being surrounded by kindred spirits, if only for an evening. When they depart, they shake hands and embrace like old friends, even if they have only just met, and as they go their separate ways they feel less alone than they had before. 

“But I’m not  …  special,” Bailey says. “Not the way they are. I’m not anyone important.” “I know,” Celia says. “You’re not destined or chosen, I wish I could tell you that you were if that would make it easier, but it’s not true. You’re in the right place at the right time, and you care enough to do what needs to be done. Sometimes that’s enough.”

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

The author is a character from the American The Office, and I thought it was a pretty hilarious book. She totally owns that it's going to be compared to Tina Fey's Bossypants, which I totally love. I really loved having two funny women's books to read, and their voices were so strong and unique to themselves. It really inspired me and comforted me and made me laugh, so essentially, I think it did what it intended to.

I don't know what else to do with this except copy the excerpts that I underlined while reading that totally cracked me up. Also, she throws in some good dating advice in there.


Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) 
By Mindy Kaling

Duante was also, unfortunately, a tyrannical asshole. Maybe I should have gleaned this from the joy with which he told the story about murdering a cow with a massive gun.

Again, I was forced to say thank you. How I continually found myself in situations where I felt I had to say thank you to mean guys, I’m not sure.

It took me a week to find my balance, because once I took both feet off the ground, I employed the ace move of closing my eyes out of fear.

What I’ve noticed is that almost no one who was a big star in high school is also big star later in life. For us overlooked kids, it’s so wonderfully fair.

It is easy to freak out as a sensitive teenager. I always felt I was missing out because of the way the high school experience was dramatized in television and song. For every realistic My So-Called Life, there were ten 90210s or Party of Fives, where a twenty-something Luke Perry was supposed to be just a typical guy at your high school. If Luke Perry had gone to my high school, everybody would have thought, “What’s the deal with this brooding greaser? Is he a narc?” But that’s who Hollywood put forth as “just a dude at your high school.”

Mavis said, quietly, “If you want to go with them, I totally get it.” There was something about the unexpectedly kind way she said that that made me happy to be with her, and not them. For some reason, I immediately thought about how my parents had always been especially fond of Mavis, and here was this moment when I understood exactly why: she was a good person. It felt so good to realize how smart my parents had been all along.

So things were coming together nicely for me to embark on a full-fledged depression. One good thing about New York is that most people function daily while in a low-grade depression. It’s not like if you’re in Los Angeles, where everyone’s so actively working on cheerfulness and mental and physical health that if they sense you’re down, they shun you. Also, all that sunshine is a cruel joke when you’re depressed. In New York, even in your misery, you feel like you belong. But it was still hard to fail, so consistently, at everything I had once been Camilla Parker Bowles–level good at.

greatest source of stress was that it had been three months since I’d moved to New York and I still didn’t have a job. You know those books called From Homeless to Harvard or From Jail to Yale or From Skid Row to Skidmore? They’re these inspirational memoirs about young people overcoming the bleakest of circumstances and going on to succeed in college. I was worried I would be the subject of a reverse kind of book: a pathetic tale of a girl with a great education who frittered it away watching syndicated Law & Order episodes on a sofa in Brooklyn. From Dartmouth to Dickhead it would be called. I needed a job.

I’m the kind of person who would rather get my hopes up really high and watch them get dashed to pieces than wisely keep my expectations at bay and hope they are exceeded. This quality has made me a needy and theatrical friend, but has given me a spectacularly dramatic emotional life.

Have one great cologne that’s not from the drugstore. Just one. Wear very little of it, all the time. I cannot tell you how sexy it is to be enveloped in a hug by a man whose smell you remember. Then, anytime I smell that cologne, I think of you. Way to invade my psyche, guy! Shivers down spine central!

Get a little jealous now and again, even if you’re not strictly a jealous guy. Too much, and it’s frightening, but a possessive hand on her back at a party when your girlfriend looks super hot is awesome.

It makes me cry because it means that fewer and fewer people are believing it’s cool to want what I want, which is to be married and have kids and love each other in a monogamous, long-lasting relationship.

Until I was thirty, I only dated boys, as far as I can tell. I’ll tell you why. Men scared the shit out of me. Men know what they want. Men make concrete plans. Men own alarm clocks. Men sleep on a mattress that isn’t on the floor. Men tip generously. Men buy new shampoo instead of adding water to a nearly empty bottle of shampoo. Men go to the dentist. Men make reservations. Men go in for a kiss without giving you some long preamble about how they’re thinking of kissing you. Men wear clothes that have never been worn by anyone else before. (Okay, maybe men aren’t exactly like this. This is what I’ve cobbled together from the handful of men I know or know of, ranging from Heathcliff Huxtable to Theodore Roosevelt to my dad.) Men know what they want and they don’t let you in on their inner monologue, and that is scary. Because what I was used to was boys. Boys are adorable. Boys trail off their sentences in an appealing way. Boys bring a knapsack to work. Boys get haircuts from their roommate, who “totally knows how to cut hair.” Boys can pack up their whole life in a duffel bag and move to Brooklyn for a gig if they need to. Boys have “gigs.” Boys are broke. And when they do have money, they spend it on a trip to Colorado to see a music festival. Boys don’t know how to adjust their conversation when they’re talking to their friends or to your parents. They put parents on the same level as their peers and roll their eyes when your dad makes a terrible pun. Boys let your parents pay for dinner when you all go out. It’s assumed. Boys are wonderful in a lot of ways. They make amazing, memorable, homemade gifts. They’re impulsive. Boys can talk for hours with you in a diner at three in the morning because they don’t have regular work hours. But they suck to date when you turn thirty.

My parents get along because they are pals. They’re not big on analyzing their relationship. What do I mean by pals? It mostly means they want to talk about the same stuff all the time. In my parents’ case, it’s essentially rose bushes, mulch, and placement of shrubs. They love gardening. They can talk about aphids the way I talk about New York Fashion Week. They can spend an entire day together talking nonstop about rhododendrons and Men of a Certain Age, watch Piers Morgan, and then share a vanilla milkshake and go to bed. They’re pals. (Note: they are pals, not best friends. My mom’s best friend is her sister. A best friend is someone you can talk to ad nauseam about feelings, clothing, and gossip. My dad is completely uninterested in that.)

Billowing pants: Once, a stylist for a famous women’s fashion magazine dressed me in massive charcoal gray pants with a drawstring. They looked like something a sad clown might wear running errands. Maternity tops billed as “Grecian style” are a relative of billowing pants.

Deadeye Dick

One of the philosophies KV introduces in this book is that of life being a peephole. It didn't stick with me as much as some of the others I've read in his books, but it's an interesting idea.

Deadeye Dick: A Novel 
By Kurt Vonnegut

KV throwing out the main symbols of the book - a bizarre self-spark noting at the beginning of a novel:

I will explain the main symbols in this book. There is an unappreciated, empty arts center in the shape of a sphere. This is my head as my sixtieth birthday beckons to me. There is a neutron bomb explosion in a populated area. This is the disappearance of so many people I cared about in Indianapolis when I was starting out to be a writer. Indianapolis is there, but the people are gone. Haiti is New York City, where I live now. The neutered pharmacist who tells the tale is my declining sexuality. The crime he committed in childhood is all the bad things I have done.

It's funny, I was just talking to a friend about how good it feels to do work that produces something - cleaning, cooking, making anything. Our society rarely appreciates or values labor unless you are the pinnacle example of it, and yet it is so fulfilling and truly vital. And though the goal seems to be success as defined by money and independence, are we often happier than when surrounded by people we love or are at least familiar with, talking, laughing, and eating?

It was surely then that I formed the opinion that the servants were my closest relatives. I aspired to do what they did so well—to cook and bake and wash dishes, and to make the beds and wash and iron and spade the garden, and so on. It still makes me as happy as I can be to prepare a good meal in a house which, because of me, is sparkling clean.

 And on cold days, and even on days that weren’t all that cold, the rest of the servants, the yardman and the upstairs maid and so on, all black, would crowd into the kitchen with the cook and me. They liked being crowded together. When they were little, they told me, they slept in beds with a whole lot of brothers and sisters. That sounded like a lot of fun to me. It still sounds like a lot of fun to me. There in the crowded kitchen, everybody would talk and talk and talk so easily, just blather and blather and laugh and laugh. I was included in the conversation. I was a nice little boy. Everybody liked me.

I thought this was a really interesting take on being a beautiful young woman. Certainly there are women who feel this way, particular the more unavoidably desirable. What is so upsetting and disturbing is the line about what men want to do to her and how ashamed it makes her feel. This is certainly not an outdated sentiment or problem - we have all sorts of issues with rape, and even in small communities of higher education. In college, they teach seminars to incoming freshmen on how to avoid being raped. Yet, as a friend pointed out, we don't teach men not to rape. We don't strictly punish that most despicable of actions, and we often excuse the situation because the girl was drunk or in a dress or flirted. It's somehow easier for us to blame her for being and wanting to be beautiful and friendly and even sexy, and to say that she can't be that way and not expect men to force themselves upon her and violate her. And society compounds that rape by making her feel ashamed and to blame and that she should be quiet about it and let it haunt her nightmares. It's all so disturbing and disgusting and disappointing.

This was a goddess who could not dance, would not dance, and hated everybody at the high school. She would like to claw away her face, she told us, so that people would stop seeing things in it that had nothing to do with what she was like inside. She was ready to die at any time, she said, because what men and boys thought about her and tried to do to her made her so ashamed. One of the first things she was going to do when she got to heaven, she said, was to ask somebody what was written on her face and why had it been put there.

And because the main character learned how to cook from the servants and loved it so much, there are several recipes throughout the book. A couple:

Polka-dot brownies: Melt half a cup of butter and a pound of light-brown sugar in a two-quart saucepan. Stir over a low fire until just bubbly. Cool to room temperature. Beat in two eggs and a teaspoon of vanilla. Stir in a cup of sifted flour, a half teaspoon of salt, a cup of chopped filberts, and a cup of semisweet chocolate in small chunks. Spread into a well-greased nine-by-eleven baking pan. Bake at two hundred and thirty-five degrees for about thirty-five minutes. Cool to room temperature, and cut into squares with a well-greased knife.

Linzer torte (from the Bugle-Observer): Mix half a cup of sugar with a cup of butter until fluffy. Beat in two egg yolks and half a teaspoon of grated lemon rind. Sift a cup of flour together with a quarter teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of cinnamon, and a quarter teaspoon of cloves. Add this to the sugar-and-butter mixture. Add one cup of unblanched almonds and one cup of toasted filberts, both chopped fine. Roll out two-thirds of the dough until a quarter of an inch thick. Line the bottom and sides of an eight-inch pan with dough. Slather in a cup and a half of raspberry jam. Roll out the rest of the dough, make it into eight thin pencil shapes about ten inches long. Twist them a little, and lay them across the top in a decorative manner. Crimp the edges. Bake in a preheated 350-degree oven for about an hour, and then cool at room temperature. A great favorite in Vienna, Austria, before the First World War!

How to make Mary Hoobler’s barbecue sauce: Sauté a cup of chopped onions and three chopped garlic cloves in a quarter of a pound of butter until tender. Add a half cup of catsup, a quarter cup of brown sugar, a teaspoon of salt, two teaspoons of freshly ground pepper, a dash of Tabasco, a tablespoon of lemon juice, a teaspoon of basil, and a tablespoon of chili powder. Bring to a boil and simmer for five minutes.

Breakfast of Champions

One thing that's great about this book (and some of his others) are his drawings. I could spend a lot more time thinking about the implications of what he feels the need to draw, which things he wants to shape the image exactly in our mind, which he allows us to imagine, and the interplay between text and image. I also really just like the aesthetic of the way his drawings look - simply, somewhat crude (vs. highly skilled), and yet communicative and clear.

Breakfast of Champions: A Novel 
By Kurt Vonnegut

In his own words:

This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast. One of them was a science-fiction writer named Kilgore Trout. He was a nobody at the time, and he supposed his life was over. He was mistaken. As a consequence of the meeting, he became one of the most beloved and respected human beings in history. The man he met was an automobile dealer, a Pontiac dealer named Dwayne Hoover. Dwayne Hoover was on the brink of going insane.

Some thoughts on the founding of America:

The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them. 

Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which was a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched this seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas. This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily; so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the bellows or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away. The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.

On ideas:

And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: “Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity. “The ideas Earthlings held didn’t matter for hundreds of thousands of years, since they couldn’t do much about them anyway. Ideas might as well be badges as anything."

 On failing to communicate - in a hilarious and ridiculous manner, but still somehow totally spot on:

Like so many Trout stories, it was about a tragic failure to communicate. Here was the plot: A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing. Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golfclub.

 On Conservationism (and God):

“I realized,” said Trout, “that God wasn’t any conservationist, so for anybody else to be one was sacrilegious and a waste of time. You ever see one of His volcanoes or tornadoes or tidal waves? Anybody ever tell you about the Ice Ages he arranges for every half-million years? How about Dutch Elm disease? There’s a nice conservation measure for you. That’s God, not man. Just about the time we got our rivers cleaned up, he’d probably have the whole galaxy go up like a celluloid collar. That’s what the Star of Bethlehem was, you know.” “What was the Star of Bethlehem?” said the driver. “A whole galaxy going up like a celluloid collar,” said Trout. The driver was impressed. “Come to think about it,” he said, “I don’t think there’s anything about conservation anywhere in the Bible.” “Unless you want to count the story about the Flood,” said Trout.

On bad chemicals:

Dwayne certainly wasn’t alone, as far as having bad chemicals inside of him was concerned. He had plenty of company throughout all history. In his own lifetime, for instance, the people in a country called Germany were so full of bad chemicals for a while that they actually built factories whose only purpose was to kill people by the millions. The people were delivered by railroad trains. When the Germans were full of bad chemicals, their flag looked like this: 

Here is what their flag looked like after they got well again: 

After they got well again, they manufactured a cheap and durable automobile which became popular all over the world, especially among young people. It looked like this: 

People called it “the beetle.” 

A real beetle looked like this: 

The mechanical beetle was made by Germans. The real beetle was made by the Creator of the Universe.

 On the most expensive thing you can do:

Dwayne’s waitress at the Burger Chef was a seventeen-year-old white girl named Patty Keene. Her hair was yellow. Her eyes were blue. She was very old for a mammal. Most mammals were senile or dead by the time they were seventeen. But Patty was a sort of mammal which developed very slowly, so the body she rode around in was only now mature. She was a brand-new adult, who was working in order to pay off the tremendous doctors’ and hospital bills her father had run up in the process of dying of cancer of the colon and then cancer of the everything. This was in a country where everybody was expected to pay his own bills for everything, and one of the most expensive things a person could do was get sick. Patty Keene’s father’s sickness cost ten times as much as all the trips to Hawaii which Dwayne was going to give away at the end of Hawaiian Week.

 On being a woman:

Patty Keene was stupid on purpose, which was the case with most women in Midland City. The women all had big minds because they were big animals, but they did not use them much for this reason: unusual ideas could make enemies, and the women, if they were going to achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they could get. So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.

On being a lonely vegetarian:

He not only did without dead meat—he did without living meat, too, without friends or lovers or pets.

 On writing:

Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.

On ending a story:

The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be that same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one: • • • And it is in order to acknowledge the continuity of this polymer that I begin so many sentences with “And” and “So,” and end so many paragraphs with “… and so on.” And so on.