Oooh! Wait! Two more! Because I can’t get enough LM quotes!

Again. Anagrams. It’s a wonderful, bewildering, poignant novel.

By this point we’re all aware that I’m obsessed and sing praises of this woman and her work quite frequently to the moon. As if you needed more fodder, more reason to get out and buy a book, here are three more Moore snippets. I don’t think I have to explain why I love them so much–though I am no longer nearly as bereft as Benna.

“I was not large enough for Gerard. I was small, lumpy, anchored with worry, imploded. He didn’t want me, he wanted Macy’s; like Aeneas or Ulysses, he wanted the anonymity and freedom to wander purchaseless from island to island. I could not be enough of the world for him. A woman could never be enough of the world, I thought, though that was what a man desired of her, though she flap her arms frantically trying.” (35)

And:

“It was like some principle of physics: Things flowed naturally back and forth between the two apartments until the maximum level of chaos was reached. I had his can opener, but he had my ice-cube trays. It was as if our possessions were embarked upon some osmotic, conjugal exchange, a giant french kiss of personal effects, which had somehow left us behind.” (35)

And one more. I swear it’s the last for a goodly while!

“He also had a habit of charging after small animals and frightening them. Actually, the first time he did this it was with a bird in the park, and I laughed, thinking it hilarious. Later, I realized, it was weird: Gerard was thirty-one and charging after small mammals, sending them leaping into bushes, up trees, over furniture. He would then turn and grin, like a charmed maniac, a Puck with a Master’s degree. He liked also to water down the face and neck fur of cats and dogs, smoothing it back with his palms, like a hairdresser, saying it made them look like Judy Garland. I realized that life was too short for anyone honestly and thoroughly to outgrow anything, but it was clear that some people were making more of an effort than others.” (19)

Lorrie Moore–if ever you read this whilst Google searching your name–I thoroughly, completely, totally admire you. If you need boots licked, children wet-nursed, dogs walked or help moving heavy kitchen applicances, I’m here and I’m willing. Lugging your fridge? It would be an honor.

Lorrie Mooreisms

This is the quote I ought to have posted for Thanksgiving. It (and the beautiful snippets that follow) are, in general, more gems from Lorrie Moore, in particular, from a novel called Anagrams. Here, the protagonist, Benna, watches her daughter repeat Thanksgiving grace and ponders children, the past and gratitude.

“You cannot be grateful without possessing a past. That is why children are incapable of gratitude and why night prayers and dinner graces are lost on them. “Gobbles Mommy, Gobbles Grandpa…” George races through it. She has no reference points. As I get older the past widens and accumulates, all sloppy landlessness like a river, and as a result I have more clearly demarcated areas of gratitude. Things like ice cream or scenery or one good kiss become objects of huge soulful thanks. Nothing is gobbled. This is a sign of getting old.” (116)

This is a particular favorite of mine. It hurt the first time I read it; I identified. I didn’t necessarily want to. I loved it all the same. This one is thought/spoken by Benna, too.

“Words, I think, words are all you need for love–you say them and then just for the hell of it your heart rises and spills over into them. My idea in a love affair is that if everyone makes enough declarations, one of them is bound to come true. Words are interesting that way.” (148)

And the last–which I appreciate, but certainly would have appreciated more ’round March of 2007 whilst penning ye olde undergrad thesis.

“How can she say that she has begun to think that all writing about art is simply language playing so ardently with itself that it goes blind?” (56)

Brace yourself: I’m about to go all Shakespeare on your ass

This marks night eight of my studies for the (largely impossible, excruciatingly daunting) GRE Literature in English exam. I find my labours have borne me well past ancient Greek isles and a snarling Scandinavian Beowulf and onward past duels ‘tween the Redcrosse Knight and Mephistopheles. With The Faerie Queene at my back and Piers Plowman pushing me onward, I now draw upon the Jolly Old English shore. It is there that I now scrape my stern and am greeted by a playwright, a poet, a scoundrel, and a wit: the highly-lauded (but certainly not overrated) Mr. William Shakespeare.

Hang on: let me explain. I am not one of those creepy Shakespeare fans who believes that Billy Boy was the only man ever for her. I do not attend Shakespeare festivals. I don’t even belong to any Shakespeare-centric online covenants (and that’s totally my bag, in case you couldn’t tell). In fact, for years I loathed–loathed–Shakespeare and what I appraised to be his entirely overrated, overplayed art. I don’t think, however, that my lack of deference to the Master had a damn thing to do with Shakespeare, but with me. I think it was the badass bitch persona I erected around myself rejecting the fettered romantic creampuff to whom in large part I attribute my true weepy softness. You see, I’ve spent the better part of my life being terrorized by my own snuggleability–so, because of all the silly twits I knew who loved Shakespeare so and my desperation NOT to be like one of them, I claimed I hated Shakespeare. But of course, like all groundless claims, this sham was destroyed by a lovely, gentle woman named Chloe Wheatley.

In my junior year at Trinity my former advisor and then-professor Chloe forced me, despite my haterness, to read Shakespeare’s sonnets–all of them. I grumblingly set about my task, convinced this would be the most painful homework assignment of my college career (next to Math One-oh-Dumb, of course). However, little by little, something rather surprising occurred: I fell into respect, then appreciation, then awe. The man had a voluble, virtuistic way with words, and, I’d like to think, a very rare heart from which to decant them. In partial penance for my late conversion to respectful admirer I’m posting here one of my favorite sonnets. Take number 116 and hold it close to your bosom–I’m pretty sure that that’s exactly where it would want to be.

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

About my aversion to amusement parks, + deep appreciation for Fielding and Dostoyevsky

I have never, ever been particularly amused by amusement parks. When I do go to amusement parks, even when I pay for them myself as opposed to being dragged along for free as part of a group bonding activity in which I have no desire to participate, my default activity is people watching. I survey hulking families and their poorly behaved spawn gallumphing about the park’s bounds, stuffing faces with fried dough and Dippin’ Dots, deploying ferociously awful grammar as though it were entirely acceptable, and yelling over other roaming herds of monolothic Americans. It’s fun at first, but gets pretty grim pretty fast. Also, I find it usually results in sunburn.

But it isn’t for the crowds that I dislike amusement parks. See, I’m not a gigantic fan of thrill rides–least of all roller coasters. Why do people love the terrifying ascent of each hill and attendant anticipation of a great fall, then that horrible, sick, rising feeling in the gut as you plummet towards earth? And they love it enough to sustain it multiple times in one ride, no less! See, call me crazy, but none of that appeals to me. I don’t choose to take myself  on physical adventures that can make me feel so horrible. Happily enough, today I concluded that I have no need to do so, because I can induce these very same sensations all by myself, free of charge, without standing in line and sweating, running the risk of contracting some sort of awful staph infection from the seat belt or being puked upon by someone three seats above me on the ferris wheel. This week has been one big fucking roller coaster ride. I’m up! I’ve down! Then, oh god! I’m flatlining! Oh shit, down again! Then without warning I’m retching out psychic and emotional illness over heart-wrenching, gut-hollowing images of what it must have been like every time he took her home. I’m sickest, however, over the knowledge that maybe I loved someone I didn’t know at all. Maybe I loved someone who, as he once intimated, didn’t really know how to love or be compassionate. Maybe for two years I’ve simply been an experiment, used as a template for how one acts when one deeply cares. Maybe I don’t know anything at all.

Maybe I’m going to go be sick again. Fuck.

(Service announcemet: Okay. That concludes the angsty portion of this entry. Now. Read on to get a dose of lit’rature)

To combat the sickness and my own unattractive descent into misery, I’d like to share a few literary snippets. The first comes from Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, an 18th Century novel initially received with some fierce contumely for its amorality, but which is now canonized for its exquisite attention to human manners. In this scene Squire Allworthy, the novel’s figure of goodness and virtue, has a stern talking to Jenny Jones, the strumpet who’s left her bastard infant in his home in hopes that he’ll care for it out of beneficence. Allworthy initially lays into Jones for the opprobrious situation into which she’s delivered them all, but in short order turns his invective upon her unknown violator. Specifically, Allworthy fulminates men who achieve empty use of women as fucktoys by professing to love them. I adored this selection because I think it’s exceptionally well written and exceptionally incisive. Here’s some of Allworthy’s speech:

“Love, however barbarously we may corrupt and pervert its meaning, as it is a laudable, is a rational passion, and can never be violent but when reciprocal; for though the Scripture bid us love our enemies, it means not with that fervent love which we naturally bear towards our friends; much less that we should sacrifice to them our lives, and what ought be dearer to us our innocence. Now in what light, but that of an enemy, can a reasonable woman regard the man who solicits her to entail on herself all the misery I have described to you, and who would purchase to himself a short, trivial, contemptible pleasure, so greatly at her expense! For, by the laws of custom, the whole shame, with all its dreadful consequences, falls entirely upon her. Can love, which always seeks the good of its object, attempt to betray a woman into a bargain where she is so greatly to be the loser? If such corrupter, therefore, should have the impudence to pretend a real affection for her, ought not the woman to regeard him not only as an enemy, but as the worst of all enemies, a false, designing, treacherous, pretended friend, who intends not only to debauch her body, but her understanding at the same time?” (Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, p. 53, super class Barnes & Noble Classic edition)

Researching for the Literature in English GRE, I’ve been doing some overview-ish reading about the works and lives of the many non-British authors with whom I’m embarrassingly unfamiliar. During today’s exploration of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I learned about Anna Karenina (which is DEFINITELY next on my reading list) Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and just a few moments ago, Notes From Underground by the big D. man himself. Notes From Underground is widely regarded as the first ever existentialist text, so naturally it has its depressing undercurrents of determinism and ennui. Yay! Anyhow–here’s something that struck a chord with me (yes, this is harvested from Wikipedia. Yes, I DO feel dirty, thank you).

“He (the Man Underground) states that despite humanity’s attempt to create the “Crystal Palace,” a reference to a famous symbol of utopianism in Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, one cannot avoid the simple fact that anyone at any time can decide to act against what is considered good, and some will do so simply to validate their existence and to protest that they exist as individuals.”

This made me feel remarkably free and, for a moment, quieted my brain chatter. Really? I wondered. You mean that sometimes, things are just horrible and there is no deep reason to undergird or explain it? Maybe that’s just the case, and maybe that conclusion saves me a lot of wondering for tonight. From my heart to yours, Fyodor, thanks.