What Tony is reading

I've been too busy lately. At the end of February over the course of 8 days I signed the separation agreement with my wife, sold my old apartment, and acted in a fun sketch show at The PIT. I am now editing two fat books at work, one on construction taxation and one on construction accounting. If you are involved in any financial aspect of the construction industry, you should buy these companion volumes when they are published later this year.

I have also been reading. While I was reading Love & Death, edited by Carolyn G. Hart, a collection of 14 mystery stories, I pronounced it not to be literature. When I finished Love & Death, I then read After the Plague, a collection of 16 stories by T. C. Boyle, which is literature. Many of the themes and events in the Boyle book were the same as those in the Hart anthology. So, It's deficient of my to announce that one is literature and the other isn't. These works belong on a continuum and I have my subjective criteria for where I draw the line. Both books deal with themes of revenge, hatred, love, etc., and in both people die, people kill other people, and in some stories nobody dies. Both books are mostly in contemporary American English that is not patently "literary" (one story in the Hart anthology is self-consciously British to the degree that I could imagine P.G. Wodehouse putting it down and saying something like "No one would believe English people are this English"). I'm not just now going to try to lay out my fantabulous--and utterly idiosyncratic--criteria for what literature, but I will say this: Some of the stories in Love & Death got close to being literature. Stories in Love & Death tended to fail to live up to my standards of literature because of one or more deal breakers. For example, in one story about a teenage boy who disappeared shortly after an opiate was stolen from the town pharmacy, the 14-year-old girl who the narrator closely identifies pauses about two-thirds of the way through to tell someone all of the plot twists up to that point. That's a deal breaker for me. It was as if the author did not trust the reader to have followed the plot and needed a refresher before the finale assault on the dénouement. I paid close attention to the girl's recitation because I assumed she would make a mistake or leave something out and this would be a revelation or embedded clue. But, no, it was a straight recounting. T. C. Boyle could have told a similar story about a teenage boy and teft etc., but he would have trusted the reader enough to leave out the gratuitous recap. Here is one of the criteria for me: I don't understand everything that happens in real life; so, to the degree that fiction represents a glimpse of life as we live it, I don't need to understand everything in it either. As a writer of literature, T. C. Boyle leaves the reader with the sense that there is a definitive conclusion but does not need to always tell us explicitly what it is. Boyle is comfortable leaving the reader with the uncomfortable sense of having to ponder what happened--or possible happened.

Then I read The Essential 55, by Ron Clark. Clark, a Disney Teacher of the Year Award winner, explains his techniques for success in underresourced elementary schools. His book is about common courtesy and establishing and maintaining standards for behavior--which he did in some of the most difficult schools imaginable, including a school in Harlem whose students wouldn't seem to a lot of people to have much in the way of prospects. I took this book off the shelf at my library merely because it looked interesting. It was personally interesting for me because it is about setting and maintaining boundaries--something I am terrible at in my personal life. I don't know how to do it. For the most part I have been trampled on with no idea how I got myself into situations and no idea how to get myself out or avoid getting into such predicaments in the future: It's not just a book about 5th graders going to school in tough neighborhoods where nobody expects them to succeed. Ron Clark looks like Matthew Perry, by the way, who played him in the TV movie.

At this point I had exposed myself to too much of the tune of contemporary American English and I really felt I was starving for Regency era English, and even Victorian English--some kind of antidote. But before I got into Jane Austen and the Brontës, I decided to re-read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which I last read 25 years ago. As I began reading it I was struck that it was not as melodic as I had remembered; that is, until the monster speaks, who is the most eloquent person in the book. I was more struck in the early going by the "new Prometheus" aspect; a critic once described the book as an allegory driven by Shelley's sense of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution. Later in the book the theme that emerged more than I remembered was the potential for self-fulfilling prophecy in society, which I seen as Shelley's comment on human nature and the effect of prejudices. Because the monster was treated like a monster, he ended up becoming a monster (who was indescribably ugly and monstrous in appearance)--and Shelley makes no speculation that it is within human nature to set aside prejudices in order to prevent a catastrophic self-fulfilling prophecy.

Having finished Frankenstein, I have decided to re-read After the Plague, T. C. Boyle. After craving an antidote to contemporary English, and imbibing some, I find myself wanting to get to know T. C. Boyle's voice better. In fact, I'm not entirely sure what his voice is--but in saying that I am alluding to another of my criteria: Art is like magic--when it is done well, you are amazed and you don't know how it was done.

For my subway reading, last week I read Susan Shapiro's Secrets of a Fix-up Fanatic, which is hands down the best pep talk in print about how to be realistic and meet someone nice and raise the odds of meeting your soul mate. There is good advice in Sue's book even if you have already found your soul mate. She made me laugh out loud many times over the past few days--yes, on the subway.

I do want to mention blogs I read. Linda Fessing Up did a fun piece called "Why February is AWESOME!"--I am always a sucker for contagious enthusiasm. Get the Sh*t Out posted a demented little cartoon I enjoyed. Marx the spot has put up a series of posts lately that caused me to add him to little list at the right of this blog. There was a heckler at one of his improv shows (I wanted to see that show, by the way, but I am dead tired on Friday nights after working all week); there is a movie that he admitted having a soft spot for; and he had an experience with speed dating.

Lastly, I continue to be an ardent fan of How to be a person. Despite all the books I mentioned above, she is still my main literary influence these days (sorry, T. C. Boyle, other contemporary writers are having a stronger impact on me). I can't say that there is such as thing as a typical "How to be a person" post, but this one got my attention, a beautiful photograph accompanies this one, and she has a project beginning in March whose progress I think we'll all want to follow.

My Valentine

I did not sit in my apartment last night eating inhuman quantities of chocolate in my dim room listening to the howling wind, but I could have because my sister sent me a huge satin-covered heart-shaped box of chocolate. I brought the chocolate in to share with my coworkers. Yesterday was just another day. I stayed late at work. I swung by the grocery store on the way home to stock up in case winter got worse. And it was laundry day. But there is every reason to think that next year I will have someone to give flowers to.