Victorian lit 3

         Over 200 pages into Middlemarch and my now 21^st century brain simply does not have the patience.  Maybe patience isn’t even the right word.  Maybe I should just say it was boring.

         Reading Middlemarch I’d be enjoying it for a while.  As many as 10 continuous pages I’d really be entertained, and then along would come 10 pages of filler, village politics and philosophies on the life of a country doctor.  This broke my stream of reading and deflated my suspension of disbelief.  I found myself skimming past a paragraph or two, then three or four.  Then I skipped two pages; well, it looked really uninteresting.  When I found myself wanting to skip five or six pages, I took pause.  That’s just way beyond.

         Either you read a book or you don’t read it.  It doesn’t seem to me that there’s so many points in between.  What am I going to say? “Middlemarch?  I’ve skimmed it.” Should I force myself to keep reading just so I can say I read it and be true to my word?  What’s the point?  It’s better to just cut my losses and move on.  And my only feeling upon doing this is one of relief.

         The question presents itself to me: as time passes has the Victorian novel lost its relevance?  Psychologically speaking people have changed so much since the 1870s.  Middlemarch is more valid now as a historical marker, revealing how different things were then.  Human experience may be universal across time and space, but the delivery method has changed so completely that 19^th century literature is now archaic and, yes, less pertinent than it was.

         

Victorian lit 2

         It’s been years since I watched As the World Turns and now that endless narrative has ended (RIP ATWT 1956-2010).  It’s also been years since I read a Victorian novel quite as long as Middlemarch (Well, I did read Tess of the d’Urbervilles about three years ago- thought it was too long and not as good as the other Hardy I’d read). 

I’m struck by how very like a television soap opera Victorian literature is.  The slowness of the story, stretched to fill vast lengths of time.  Daytime soaps are made to fill a TV timeslot five days a week and, plotwise, exciting things can’t be happening all those days, so most of the content is really just filler. 

19^th century fiction comes from a time we can barely even understand now.  I don’t suggest that the majority of people were literary or even literate then, but those that were had attention spans.  These were the days before radio and comic books, let alone movies and all that followed.  If you were going to read a novel you wanted it to last a good long while, entertain you for a couple of months.  So, just like on the soaps, the Victorian novel is chock full of filler.  Not that it’s all pointless: George Eliot usually has intelligent points to make.  It’s just that the plot is diluted with philosophy and filler to the point of being obscured.  It’s like, let’s stretch this out so it’ll take you more time to read. 

The first hundred pages not much happened.  Then a whole bunch of new characters were introduced (just like on a soap), but it didn’t turn down the faucet of filler.  Middlemarch, moreover, is the small town where all these characters live.  Just like Oakdale.

Victorian lit

         Over a hundred and fifty pages into George Eliot’s Middlemarch. 

I used to be a regular reader of the 19^th century novel – Wilkie Collins, Hardy, even Trollope, though the only George Eliot I’d previously read was Silas Marner.  I guess practice brought an amplified patience level. 

         Reading Middlemarch isn’t like reading more modern novels.  The end is not in sight.  I’m in the middle of a behemoth, stretching out on either side of me; I’m standing on an endless curve watching time and page space unfold around me.  But unlike more current epic novels there is no attempt made for excitement or suspense to carry me along.  Five or six pages go by where characters discuss business or local politics and from a twenty-first century perspective it just feels like so much filler.

         Of course, if you’re in the mood . . . if you just moved and your life feels excessively chaotic and unsettled, something as static and harmless as a Victorian novel might just hit the spot.  You open the book and enter a world where nothing’s changed and little will change.  If anything does happen in the plot it will probably be encased in a hundred pages of gentle prose and slow cushioning, lest the change feel too sudden.  It’s like evolution, continental drift: you won’t see the changes in your lifetime. 

Book Hoarding 3

         On a deeper level I believe my book hoarding habits speak of control issues.  When I examine my motivation for accumulating several hundred books, the core emotion I identify is FEAR. 

How could fear lead one to surround themselves with books?  Well, I think fear and its associated control issues reside at the heart of hoarding, at least for me.  Some sort of concern that all will be lost, that life will become scary and I’ll have no control or, I guess (more rationally) that I’ll lose all my money and the ability to make any more.  We never know what is going to happen in the future.  Hoarding can be an attempt to control the unknown.  Fill the cabinets with canned food and you’ll be covered no matter what comes at you.  For a while it even makes you feel better.

“I have so many books that no matter what happens I can read forever.”

         This is a false sense of security.  Trust me, having several hundred books actually makes you substantially less flexible.  You find yourself paying rent for your books.

         In addition to my (semi-conscious) fears of natural or financial disaster, there is another, even deeper and more psychological terror.  It’s as if I’m scared of developing amnesia.  Not consciously (though “Desperately Seeking Susan” did have a big effect on me growing up).  It’s like I fear I’ll forget everything I’ve read and if I keep the books they’ll serve as a kind of talisman helping me retain the memories.  This realization goes a shade further and I can see that I’m afraid of losing my identity altogether, and keeping books and other material possessions proves to me that I am who I think I am.  This is so false, stupid and pointless.  I am who I am and I’m going to be who I’m going to be no matter what books are on the shelf.

         This leads me to the real hoarding realization: the attempt to hold on to objects (books in my case) and identity is really an attempt to hold on to time.  In the face of time’s passage we have no control and this is, for many of us humans, a very difficult thing to come to terms with.

         Even now, after moving once again and shedding more possessions, I still have over a hundred books (though this includes more than ten copies of my own novel Gossip Kills).  I’m a reader.  I’m a writer.  Books will always be a major part of my life.  But I feel like I’ve made priceless progress in learning that I don’t need to own everything, and these epiphanies have left me physically and psychologically freer.  

Trying to Define Magical Thinking

         The most common definition of Magical Thinking I could find (through my elaborate intensive research – I googled it) involved seeing a causality or correlation between arguably unrelated things and events.  Apparently this is also known as Associative Thinking.  It relates to the Jungian concept of Synchronicity, but that’s not so much about causality as the meaning or significance revealed by the connection of these seemingly unrelated events.

         Are there invisible connections between things, times, phenomena?  Is there an alternate unseen causality that we, with our modern focus on science and coincidence have pushed from sight?

         Magical Thinking is widespread and multifarious.  It has many faces.  It’s a catchall definition of something that manifests in near-infinite types of behavior.  That’s one of the things quite interesting about Magical Thinking, all the different forms it takes.  You’ve got the major religions, you’ve got cults and self-help books.  On the opposite end of things there are all the personal practices, idiosyncratic and creative or as simple as one little good luck charm.

         If there’s any underlying principle shared by these various forms of Magical Thinking it’s found in one’s relationship to the concept of coincidence.  Belief in coincidence, randomness and causality is the opposite of Magical Thinking; I suppose you could call it a classically scientific view of the world.  So it all boils down to how you feel about coincidence.  Any time you feel one is significant, that’s a touch of Magical Thinking.

Book Hoarding 2

         So I had the epiphany.  I accepted that I am a book hoarder.  I’ve now moved again, for the third time in two years, and this was likely the epiphany’s impetus.  Previously I had already shrunk my library considerably, but as mentioned, it had always grown back like a wart or a starfish’s leg.   

         How many books, I now ask, does one person need?  I have to be careful to not be a hypocrite here, because in all likelihood my library will grow again (though hopefully not to such monstrous proportions).  There are certain books it makes sense for me to have, and I’m sure I’ll always have a good sized collection.  But, let’s face it, I do not need shelves upon shelves of books I bought at thrift stores and charity sales because I might want to read them someday. 

         I read always and I do go through books aplenty.  I’m no speed reader, but constant practice makes you faster at anything.  I work and I work on my writing and there’s only so much time for reading.  Long past are the days I would call in sick to work and spend all day in bed reading a book.  Realistically, how many books do I read a year?  My guess is around 25, maybe 30, but I could be way off; I don’t waste my time counting things.  So if I kept 100 odd books (which I did), that’s a few years covered right there (and I do re-read things I’m fond of; you never really get something the first time).  So is there really a necessity for owning several hundred books?

         I cut down more drastically than ever in my recent divestment.  It was like I was seeing things with a new eye, fresh perspective, a fresh realism.  So many of those books I just did not need.  Or the likelihood of my ever needing the book again is balanced against the sheer bulk of material objects owned and how they weigh on my life.  And it’s not just books.  That happens to be the area where I have compulsive shopping habits (okay, full disclosure: I also hoard tea, but being a consumable, it doesn’t pile up the same way).  There were a lot of things I was keeping for “sentimental value,” stuff from my childhood.  Well I hope the Goodwill appreciated my paper dolls, beloved stuffed animals and 1980s Archie comics.  Sentimental value and nice memories may be valid, but if you care about these things your life becomes saturated with material objects; you live surrounded by unnecessaries, wrapped in pieces of the past.  If you own a house and are planted, then it’s fine to live immersed in your objects if that’s what you like.  But when, like me, you’re moving three times in two years, it might be time to make some changes in your accumulation habits. 

        

         

Book Hoarding

         I’ve broken through the veils of denial.  I can admit it now: I am a book hoarder.  Granted, I certainly read plenty of books.  There might be some logic in stockpiling a few.  But does anyone need several hundred?

         I’ve always had a library, and when I moved from Boston to Los Angeles in 2000 I brought it with me.  And then at some point when I was living there I took on the habit of shopping for books at thrift stores.  I found good stuff.  Books at thrift stores tend to be 1-3 dollars or less, so it’s easy to let yourself go crazy. “Oh, I’m sure I’ll probably want to read this someday” or “If I get locked in my apartment for two months I can read this to distract myself from starving.” 

         I was also buying books for their covers alone.  This habit set the hoarding into high gear.  I can date its extreme manifestation to the spring of 2005, when I was working at a Starbucks in Pasadena.  I didn’t have a lot of money, but apparently I still had a strongly developed hunter/gatherer instinct.  I mean I wanted to shop.  Thrift stores provide a good service here for poor people.  And I adore book cover illustration, particularly cover art from 60s and 70s paperbacks.  I was buying these at a quarter each, building a collection at less than a dollar a week (when I was lucky enough to find good ones).  I collected copies of Wuthering Heights (available, over the years, in a dizzyingly delightful plethora of paperback covers) and the works of Daphne du Maurier and Agatha Christie, plus any good 60s gothic romance or sci fi paperback.  Of course I would also buy books to read.  Suffice it to say my library grew.

         I’ve shed books many times over the years, but the library, like some unkillable monster, grew back every time.  Well, I’ve just moved again, for the third time in two years, and this time, something had to give.  Rest assured, I am not bookless.  I kept a few more than a hundred.  But I got rid of my paperback Wuthering Heights collection and the Patricia Highsmith novels I had read before (with the exception of my two favorites, This Sweet Sickness and A Suspension of Mercy).  Things I never would have let go of in the past.  So something changed.  I had an epiphany.  

Magical Thinking

          I said, when writing about my old journals, that I find myself envying my former propensity for magical thinking.  It sounds, I know, silly.  How could I envy something that is so easy to attain?  Well, luckily, I’ve changed since I was a teenager.  I was definitely more anxious, more uncertain, less sure of myself . . . all the typical ways a 17 year old’s life differs from someone twice her age.  And isn’t Magical Thinking the recourse of the sad and disenfranchised?  I’ve heard that it's at its height in times of depression, war and hardship.  It’s the times when one feels the least amount of control in one’s life that deals are made with God and beasts sacrificed. 

So sweet as my symbolism-centered teenaged life may seem now, the spurs behind it were unhappiness and lack of control.  I was in a difficult circumstance as a 17-18 year old, living with a very drunken grandmother and her dying husband, still recovering from the death of my father some six years before.  I clung to any meaning I could find or invent.  Is Magical Thinking wrong, a crutch, a weakness?  I don’t know.  Millions (billions?) of people have religion, is it wrong if I do?

Style Cycles 2

         One of the strongest manifestations of the Perversity of Fashion is seen in teenagers, and I don’t just mean their susceptibility to trends.  My generation of teen (coming of age in the 1990s) wore baggy or boot cut jeans; one look at the current crop of kids and you see skinny ankles everywhere.  It was barely conscious, but my group of teens was reacting to/rejecting the tapered ankles of the 1980s, and the new teens are positioning themselves against the pants of my day.  This is part of the fashion cycle in general, but seems more intense, direct and necessary in adolescents. 

         In the June 2010 issue of The Atlantic there’s an article by Caitlin Flanagan about the modern “hook up” culture teens are experiencing (“Love Actually”).  This article chiefly discusses the cycles and changes of youthful sexual experience, but it refers to the adolescent fashion reactions as an example of teen cultural transition, and I thought Flanagan expressed it with remarkable precision and insight.

         She writes: The answer lies – as does the answer to so much teenage behavior – in the mores and values of the generation (no, of the decade) immediately preceding their own.  This tiny unit of time is always at the heart of what adolescents do, because as much as each group imagines itself to be carving new territory out of nothing more than its own inspired creativity, the youngsters don’t have enough experience to make anything new – or even to recognize what might be clichéd.  All they know is the world they began to take notice of when they turned 12 or 13 ; all they can imagine doing to put their mark on that world is to either advance or retreat along the lines that were already drawn for them.

         Wow.  Caitlin Flanagan got it spot on and said it so well.  

Style Cycles

         it’s been interesting so far to observe the turning of the gears as the cycles of fashion and culture roll along in my lifetime. 

I believe in what I call The Perversity of Fashion.  Another term for it is The Cycles of Style.  These cycles are always moving away from what was in place before them, so it’s a constant emergence of what’s currently unfashionable transitioning into the vanguard of the cool: thus the perversity, as something bad is always being chosen as the new good.  It’s not as easy as it sounds, though.  Everything currently ugly and out will not be rising to the world of chic; this perversity of coolness requires an editing process, something some individuals seem to have intrinsically and others will never develop.  And fashion, if predictable in its perversity, spreads beyond it to something indefinable: the zeitgeist, the bubble, the collective unconscious.  This is even more difficult to chart. 

         I’m using fashion as an illustration (it’s visual and obviously trendy), but the wheel turns for everything, certainly for any sort of culture.  Words, thoughts, lifestyles, memes.  Pop culture may move the fastest, but the wheel turns for all culture.

Journals Past 2

         Revisiting my journal (reading as I type it) from when I was 17 and 18 has been like discovering a window or a wormhole to myself at those ages.  I was still an adolescent: I was rather dramatic and a lot more anxious and negative than (luckily) I am now, but I was also often surprisingly mature (verbally anyway – it’s apparent that I already had a strong relationship to the written word).  Reading these missives from the past I’m occasionally struck by how wise I could be.

         I was more melodramatic, and while this may be typical of a teenaged girl, it is also one of the parts of myself back then that I’m learning from now.  Because, at 18, I saw the world as a symbolic place imbued with significance and double meanings.  I suppose life has made me more cynical, and there was a time when I eschewed “magical thinking” (though, honestly, never completely obliterated it). 

         Reviewing my life at age 18 – an intense transitional time - now, at another transitional time, I am almost envious of my ability then to see life as significant and even magical.  Granted I’m happier and more together now and the magical thinking of that time was born of desperation; any envy it causes me now is probably just twisted nostalgia.  But if nothing else, it’s so cool to actually get to see clearly and revisit these paradigms my mind shifted away from so long ago.  

Journals Past

         I kept a journal when I was younger.  I still do, more or less, but somehow the journals I wrote half my life ago carry a different significance.  This vintage text (the first book stretches from 1993-5) isn’t exactly a scribbled, scrawled mess, but some of it is, and it’s all written in different pens, some of which are fading.  Years ago now I thought it might be a good idea to retype my old journals.  It’s a different experience reading something typed than hand-written.  They feel psychologically distinct; the method of delivery can affect the reception, the reading.  So I’d been thinking of typing them up for a long time, and I finally started doing it about six months ago.  I had not read the journal, beside a rare quick glance here and there, since I initially wrote it, and revisiting these old entries has been illuminating.

         One fascinating revelation regards the strengths and weaknesses of memory.  I’ve always known (don’t we all) how malleable and untrustworthy memory can be, but it’s so interesting to actually see how this has played out it my own life.  My memory is pretty good.  But naturally there are things I recall in the journal and then there are things I don’t.  Most often I’ll remember some but not all of a situation; I’ll remember events yet be unclear on the context and continuity.  The best is when I don’t currently recall something then reading/typing the entry will bring the memory back.

        

Retail Memory

          I’ve had a plethora of different retail and service jobs in my life.  In this kind of “profession” a lot of different people pass through your workspace.  Some customers stand out in your mind - you’ve made an actual connection with them, or just through some idiosyncrasy of memory.  But then there’s the humanity that passes through your life, sometimes frequently, but whom you only vaguely recognize if at all.  Obviously you don’t have time to pay close attention to every detail, especially when you’re working. 

What I’ve always found interesting – and it may just be my own brain for all I know – is the way my memory works in this situation.  Because there have been many times – and this spans back over years of different jobs – when I won’t recognize the customer’s face at all but then my memory will be jogged when I see their bag, wallet, jewelry, or some such insignificant  marker. 

         Why does my brain recognize and remember material objects over human faces?  The human brain, looking at something unrecognizable, will often see faces and other visions of humanity. Pattern recognition.  Maybe memory is different; maybe it’s too much to ask it to store all those people.  So I recall material objects before the people they belong to, who I’ve obviously spoken to before or I wouldn’t recognize their objects.

Writing about frustration about writing (it's a palindrome!)

          One of the hard things about being a novelist is the difficulty of sharing your art with others.  Even in the best of circumstances – a willing reader who wants to read your book – it’s going to take them a little while.  Then you have the people who say they want to read it and don’t, and they feel guilty and then you feel sort of guilty . . . I’m not complaining about these potential readers.  Reading novels is a niche activity; it always has been, and it is more than ever in this super modern world we live in with all its distractions and devices.  If anyone actually wants to read my book I am grateful. 

         My gripe is based on jealousy.  Jealousy of the practitioners of every other art form.  A visual artist or a musician, it takes someone 30 seconds to look at or listen to their artistic output – okay, I get that chances are the looker or listener still won’t give a shit, but at least in that 30 seconds they got an idea of what that artist does.  As a writer you don’t even have that.  You’re lucky if your work exists as an abstract concept for most people you know. 

         This is why, a few years ago, I quit writing for probably the third time.  The frustration had built to such an extreme, I felt that writing was pointless and no one cared.  Living in L.A. exacerbated this.  Los Angeles is shallow and technology-driven and everyone’s reading screenplays, not novels.  I stopped writing altogether, tried to throw myself into visual arts.  It lasted about a year.  It was forced and false and after a while of repression I could no longer deny that I wanted to write novels.  I was like a drug addict who put my all into quitting but was unable to resist the lure of old habits. 

         Now that my first mystery novel Gossip Kills is out for readers to find if they care, the frustrations have eased a little.  At least I have something for people to read if they actually want to.

Skulls Are Evil

         There was a customer in the store I work at, with her son who was probably 7 or 8.  The son was looking at some buttons (buttons as in pins, brooches) with slightly irreverent cartoon images on them.  The kid wanted one of these ($1 each!) and the button he chose had a rather heavy-metal-looking skull on it.  The mom clearly found it distasteful or tacky.  So when the boy asked for it she said no, but her stated reason was, “skulls are evil.” The kid of course pressed her, but she held firm and kept repeating that skulls were evil.

         From my eavesdropping position behind the register I was shocked.  Skulls are evil?  I kept waiting for her to qualify this with, “Of course you have a skull, it’s under your face and over your brain and it’s an important thing you need to live; while biologically natural, skulls are sometimes used to represent death and evil things, but this is only part of the story.”  But no.  The mantra continued: “skulls are evil.”

         I found this to be lazy and pathetic parenting, and decided the woman had something of a weak mind.  Especially when she allowed the boy to buy his second-choice button, which was a cartoon image of a mushroom cloud.  A mushroom cloud.  And she didn’t blink.  I was floored by the ignorance and the irony.  I can only assume she couldn’t identify a mushroom cloud or didn’t know what it represented.  I know it’s hard raising kids and you have to pick your battles.  But really.  Skulls are evil?