(By the way, if you’re a fan of 24 but also acknowledge that it’s a little bit silly, I urge you to check out this site. The nicknames alone are worth your time.)
So I had a great weekend and I’m going to tell you all about my Sunday, because I feel like I accomplished more than I usually do. First of all, I woke up at 8:30 (which is really early for me, as far as the weekend goes) and decided I needed a trip to Borders, since I hadn’t been book shopping in a while. A word of advice: never go into a bookstore with me unless you’re willing to spend the next two to three hours of your life there. I don’t know why but once I start browsing I can’t stop, and next thing I knew it was noon. So I bought the few books I’d decided a couldn’t live without (David Schickler’s Kissing in Manhattan, which sounds like a girly book but isn’t--assuming I have formed an adequately educated opinion based on the one short story contained within that I’ve already read [i.e., “The Smoker,” which originally appeared in the New Yorker a few years ago and quickly became one of my favorite short stories ever]; Nabokov’s Mary; and the Vintage collection of Nabokov’s short stories--both of which I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t already have in my possession) and then dropped by Panera Bread for an overpriced sandwich.
As soon as I got home I started reading Donald Barthelme’s Snow White. Now you may be wondering, based on the previous sentence, if your body just jumped into an alternate/parallel universe in which I had bought a different group of books while at Borders. But you can rest assured that your life hasn’t turned into a bad episode of The Outer Limits. I’m the kind of dumbass who buys books and then doesn’t read them. I often ask myself why I feel like I can’t live without a certain book in my library, when all I seem to do is buy it and then stick it on a shelf so it can gather dust for the next three years. (I still haven’t read Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor, which I acquired back in 1996, and yet I just bought two more of his books on Sunday. That’s idiotic.)
Anyway, Barthelme’s Snow White was just as I expected it would be. Completely postmodern and antinarrative and antifun, for the most part. I liked bits of it, but all-in-all I felt like I was missing something (which is how I usually feel when I read a novel by him, or Pynchon, or Joyce, et al.). And to that I say bleeegh. A friend of mine was getting rid of a bunch of books from her own library a few weeks back, and this is one of the books I’d taken. It’s an old paperback copy of the book that came out in the early ‘70s, and someone (probably my friend) had underlined a bunch of phrases in the book. The funny thing is that they aren’t the phrases I would’ve underlined if I were still inclined to do that sort of thing. (Thankfully, this is a habit I abandoned as soon as I got out of college, though I do still keep a journal in which I jot down interesting sentences from the books I read.) But of course my friend used to be a college professor and is ridiculously smart, so I trust that her understanding of the book was much better than my own. Still, the worst bit was the recurring (and, as far as I could tell, nonsequitur) phrase, “Where have the buffalo gone?” which is the kind of postmodern thing I’d normally ignore, but in this case it reminded me of something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.... Any ideas? Anyone? Anyone?
Anyway, here’s the one--and only--fragment from the book that I wrote down in my journal: “We like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant), but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of ‘sense’ of what is going on. This ‘sense’ is not to be obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there, in those white spaces) but by reading the lines themselves--looking at them and so arriving at a feeling not of satisfaction exactly, that is too much to expect, but of having read them, of having ‘completed’ them.” Ha ha. Yup. You can say that again.
Regardless, I finished the book in one sitting (never mind that it was only 180 pages and most of those pages were only half full with words--this being a postmodern novel and all), and that made me feel like I had truly accomplished something with my day. Even if I didn’t “get it” and will have forgotten the point by next weekend.
Maybe I should’ve just watched TV instead....
Time for an overshare: I think I pinched a nerve in my ass yesterday morning. As soon as I arrived at the office I got roped into an hour-long meeting, and I think I kind of sat wrong on my chair. Do you ever have one of those mornings where you feel like everything in the world is running about one second ahead of you, and you’re perpetually struggling to catch up? It’s like watching a movie in which the sound is just perceptibly out of synch with the picture. That's how I felt Monday morning, and I think it was affecting my posture or something. Anyway, when I stood up I got a pinchy kind of pain in my left butt cheek. It felt like I’d pulled something, and it only hurt when I walked. But can you “pull” something while all you’re doing is sitting motionless?
This reminds me of the time that I threw my back out while opening the door to my car. I should probably mention that I have a keyless entry remote, so I wasn’t even using my key. All I had to do was bend slightly and pull the door handle. But something gave way and my back was all wonky ‘n’ shit for the next three months. Because I opened my car door.
I am one decrepit bastard.
But I’m pleased to announce that when I woke up this morning the strained ass muscle (or whatever it was) didn’t hurt anymore, so I’m fine now. Thank goodness for that.
Also, you might like to know that I’m still finding rogue packing peanuts around my office, but they seem to have grown more docile as their numbers have diminished. Now I can force them into my trashcan pretty easily. I don’t even have to yell.
Last but not least, I’m getting the heck out of here because it looks like the apocalypse has hit the East Coast in the form of icy white pellets of slippy-slidey death. [El niño-style sidenote: it was 60 degrees and sunny yesterday. WTF?] And my car doesn’t like it when its wheels go in the direction opposite to the direction in which I just turned the steering wheel. Oh wait, that’s me who doesn’t like that.
So peace out, and to all my fellow East Coasters: drive safe!
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