Grab your bag and grab your coat
Tell the ones that need to know
We are headed north
This is going to be my last post on Invincible Summer, because I am switching over to tumblr. It's not really a big deal, everything is going to be pretty similar (even the background!), but it is making me kind of sad. A few months ago when I decided to start writing on here again I went back and re-read a bunch of my old posts. A lot of them are pretty painful to read, but it is kind of cool to have documentation about what was going on that I felt was worthy of writing about over the course of the past three years. I started out, and remain, kind of ambivalent about the whole having-a-blog thing, but I like writing things for my friends to read so I guess I'll just keep doing it.
I can't believe this thing has existed for three years.
Anyway, I am switching over because most of the blogs I read now are on tumblr and it is just easier to keep track of things this way. I probably would have done it sooner but it has taken me a while to figure out how to set everything up in a way that I like. A lot of tumblrs are pretty multimedia based and not very good for long blocks of text, so finding a good layout took forever. It turns out I am pretty picky about that kind of thing, which I wasn't really aware of before. I still don't like the way the archives work, and I'm still figuring out how comments are going to work, but I think it's going to be good. Oh, and I changed the name.
Here is the new thing. Come visit.
4.02.2010
Cannonball - Book 18
Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp
I was going to start reading Their Eyes Were Watching God on the bus yesterday but the prose was difficult and I was having trouble focusing, so I started this instead. I picked it up because someone on the Slate podcast (it was either Meghan O'Roarke or Katie Roiphe) I listened to about The Night of the Gun recommended Drinking: A Love Story as an example of a memoir that was a little more insightful about the motivations and emotional implications of addiction, so I picked it up.
It's a good book. It didn't have the same level of drama or insanity that The Night of the Gun had (there are no guns at all in Knapp's story, for one), but I found it more compelling, somehow. Knapp is a different kind of addict than Carr. Carr did crazy things and his life visible began to desintegrate; he lost his job, he was arrested multiple times, he engaged in some pretty significant criminal activity. Despite being a serious alcoholic for 20 years Knapp always managed to at least keep up the appearance that she had her life together. She continued to succeed professionally the entire time she is drinking and very few people, except those she was very close to, even knew she had a problem. That is just more interesting to me for some reason. I guess it is because anyone can just go crazy and screw up their lives but only a very specific kind of person can get blackout drunk almost daily for two decades and still maintain the appearance that nothing is wrong.
Page count: 254
Up next: The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
I was going to start reading Their Eyes Were Watching God on the bus yesterday but the prose was difficult and I was having trouble focusing, so I started this instead. I picked it up because someone on the Slate podcast (it was either Meghan O'Roarke or Katie Roiphe) I listened to about The Night of the Gun recommended Drinking: A Love Story as an example of a memoir that was a little more insightful about the motivations and emotional implications of addiction, so I picked it up.
It's a good book. It didn't have the same level of drama or insanity that The Night of the Gun had (there are no guns at all in Knapp's story, for one), but I found it more compelling, somehow. Knapp is a different kind of addict than Carr. Carr did crazy things and his life visible began to desintegrate; he lost his job, he was arrested multiple times, he engaged in some pretty significant criminal activity. Despite being a serious alcoholic for 20 years Knapp always managed to at least keep up the appearance that she had her life together. She continued to succeed professionally the entire time she is drinking and very few people, except those she was very close to, even knew she had a problem. That is just more interesting to me for some reason. I guess it is because anyone can just go crazy and screw up their lives but only a very specific kind of person can get blackout drunk almost daily for two decades and still maintain the appearance that nothing is wrong.
Page count: 254
Up next: The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
4.01.2010
Cannonball - Book 17
With Love and Squalor: 14 Writers Respond to the Work of J.D. Salinger edited by Kip Kotzen and Thomas Beller
This book was pretty uneven, quality-wise. There are a few essays that I really loved--Amy Sohn's "Franny and Amy" and Thomas Beller's "The Salnger Weather" were standouts--but overall the bad outweighed the good. Maybe the problem is that, while I like Salinger, I have never been able to understand people who looooooove Salinger. I wanted to, I really did. When I read The Catcher in the Rye for the first time in grade nine I guess I was expecting it to change my life or something, because that is what everyone said would happen, and instead it just turned out to be a novel I more or less enjoyed. Maybe I didn't read closely enough, or maybe I was not feeling sufficiently alienated. I don't know.
So, the essays were a little hit or miss. Whatever. The part of the book I really want to talk about is the writing in the margins. Here are some things I know about the person who wrote in the margins of this book: 1) She has good penmanship (in a feminine, curly way, so I am going to assume the comment writer is a woman), and 2) She is an asshole.
I don't know who this woman is, but I hate her. First of all, she was writing in a library book, which is uncool. And second, she was writing stupid, snarky bullshit that wasn't even about the content of the essays. For example: she circled the word 'demise' on page 20, and wrote in the margin "terrible word choice--it's a legal euphemism for the death of a sovereign--as in "demise of the Crown". Worst person ever, right? For one thing, she is using a completely outdated definition of the word 'demise' (yeah, I looked it up), and even if she were right I have no idea why she would have felt the need to write a correction in the margins of a book that doesn't even belong to her. Is she just showing off for future borrowers? Her handwriting is all over the book and she never writes a single interesting thing. She is just arguing semantics with no one in particular. It is obnoxious as hell.
Page count: 194
Up next:Their Eyes Their Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp
This book was pretty uneven, quality-wise. There are a few essays that I really loved--Amy Sohn's "Franny and Amy" and Thomas Beller's "The Salnger Weather" were standouts--but overall the bad outweighed the good. Maybe the problem is that, while I like Salinger, I have never been able to understand people who looooooove Salinger. I wanted to, I really did. When I read The Catcher in the Rye for the first time in grade nine I guess I was expecting it to change my life or something, because that is what everyone said would happen, and instead it just turned out to be a novel I more or less enjoyed. Maybe I didn't read closely enough, or maybe I was not feeling sufficiently alienated. I don't know.
So, the essays were a little hit or miss. Whatever. The part of the book I really want to talk about is the writing in the margins. Here are some things I know about the person who wrote in the margins of this book: 1) She has good penmanship (in a feminine, curly way, so I am going to assume the comment writer is a woman), and 2) She is an asshole.
I don't know who this woman is, but I hate her. First of all, she was writing in a library book, which is uncool. And second, she was writing stupid, snarky bullshit that wasn't even about the content of the essays. For example: she circled the word 'demise' on page 20, and wrote in the margin "terrible word choice--it's a legal euphemism for the death of a sovereign--as in "demise of the Crown". Worst person ever, right? For one thing, she is using a completely outdated definition of the word 'demise' (yeah, I looked it up), and even if she were right I have no idea why she would have felt the need to write a correction in the margins of a book that doesn't even belong to her. Is she just showing off for future borrowers? Her handwriting is all over the book and she never writes a single interesting thing. She is just arguing semantics with no one in particular. It is obnoxious as hell.
Page count: 194
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