Lynn Raye Harris

I’m reading Lolita right now. I find it disturbing, to say the least. The language is beautiful, the narrator both disgusting and worthy of pity. Nabokov was truly a master. I can’t believe this is the first work of his I’ve read.

What to say about Humbert Humbert and his little Lo? Hum sickens me and fascinates me at the same time. Lo may be spoiled, but I hurt for her. Her childhood is gone, taken by first one lover and then another. I can see why the book was so controversial, why it was banned. I don’t agree with banning books, of course, but I understand how people could get so worked up over this one. They could also choose not to read it, so no excuse there.

I have chosen to read it, mostly because I’ve always wanted to. The opening lines are incredible, both poetic and full of promise. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

I’ve also started to read Kim Harrison’s Dead Witch Walking, a gift from Cyn in Carson City. I thought it started a bit slow, and I think she bogs the narrative down with unnecessary details, but I like the premise: bounty hunter witch opens her own shop with a pixie, a vampire she doesn’t fully trust, and a contract on her head. Mayhem ensues. And I just read in Publisher’s Lunch that Harrison recently inked another three book contract for more Rachel Morgan novels.

Speaking of reading and writing, next Saturday evening I’m attending a taping at Hawaii Public Radio. My friend Michael Little (see sidebar for his webpage) will be reading from his story “Mango Lessons,” which appears in the current Bamboo Ridge Anthology. Yay, Michael! Michael informs me there will be wine and pupus, too, so I look forward to eating, drinking, and being entertained. If you have time, read Michael’s short story “Walter! Walter!”, which won the Honolulu Magazine’s fiction contest in 2002. It’s a great story.

Friday night, Mike and I went out. First, we went to Ryan’s for dinner. Then we went to the theater and saw Serenity again. After the movie, we stopped into Borders where I could not resist buying Joan Didion’s new book (nominated for a National Book Award, btw). I dare you to pick this book up, read the first couple of pages, and not be compelled to finish it.

By the time we got home Friday, it was late, so I didn’t pick the book up until Saturday evening. And then I did nothing else until I was finished. I could not put this book down. It’s the sort of book you want to read and don’t want to read at the same time.

From the book jacket: “Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year’s Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over.”

The first words of the book are this: “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.”

What follows is an attempt to understand the grieving process and to come to terms with the fact that her husband, the man through whose eyes she’d seen herself for forty years, was gone. Her daughter lies in a hospital in critical condition and her husband is dead in an instant. Though Quintana pulls through, she winds up in LA two months later having emergency brain surgery. She pulls through that as well. Unfortunately, what makes this book that much more poignant is the knowledge that ultimately Quintana did not survive. She died in August of this year, not quite two years after her father. Joan Didion had already finished the book by then and decided not to change it. In an interview with Terry Gross, Didion talks about the fact that she hasn’t even begun to deal with her daughter’s death yet.

Whether or not you’ve had to deal with the grief of a loved one’s passing, this book is worth reading. It is like, in some respects, watching a train wreck and being unable to turn away even though you want to. In other respects, it’s like sharing in the community of humanity. This is grief. This is loss. This is what it feels like for one person. This is what it might feel like for me.

Ms. Didion is very deservedly nominated for a National Book Award for this work. The prose is transparent, the writing seemingly effortless. Nothing calls attention to itself, nothing says, “Look at me, I’m style!” And yet, there is voice here. The voice makes you ache and yet isolates itself from you. You want to reach out and pat the author’s shoulder, but you also feel you wouldn’t dare to intrude on her grief. Amazing book. Read it.

Do those idiot posts in the comments section really work? “Great blog, I’ll be coming back more often. Check out my website at blahblahblah for great web hosting tips.” Pick your poison. Could just as easily be p*nis enlargement or, my favorite, airports. Do people really click on that shit?

Anyway, I’ve had to turn on word verification. I was sick of deleting spam from a post I wrote three months ago.

Live Aloha.

From the NYT comes this gem:

Rulebooks of English grammar are not generally known for their longevity, or for their ability to implant themselves in the broader cultural imagination. But as even William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White conceded, every rule has its exceptions.

[...]

At a rehearsal last week, the tenor Matt Hensrud stood on the elevated catwalk of he library’s reading room and sang mellifluously of punctuation and orthography. “Do not use a hyphen between words that can better be written as one word: ‘water-fowl, waterfowl,’ ” he intoned, his voice echoing in the churchlike acoustics. He was joined by the soprano Abby Fischer for some tenderly turned philology: “The steady evolution of the language seems to favor union: two words eventually become one.”

Yes, they have made The Elements of Style into a musical. What a hoot!

Over on Booksquare, a question is asked:

We have often wondered how certain books would fare if presented to contest judges in manuscript format (sans author names). If a book is stripped of all identifying markers and judged simply by the words inside and how they are presented, would genre fiction have a fighting chance? It is a fair question — how much of how we perceive literature is determined by the label given a particular work?

Leaving aside genre considerations (and I do agree, btw), what about authors whom we are told are the creme de la creme of the literary world and yet who don’t seem to follow any of the rules as chipped in stone by Strunk and White? Take this OPENING sentence to a novel:

At five in the morning someone banging on the door and shouting, her husband, John, leaping out of bed, grabbing his rifle, and Roscoe at the same time roused from the backhouse, his bare feet pounding: Mattie hurriedly pulled on her robe, her mind prepared for the alarm of war, but the heart stricken that it would finally have come, and down the stairs she flew to see through the open door in the lamplight, at the steps of the portico, the two horses, steam rising from their flanks, their heads lifting, their eyes wild, the driver a young darkie with rounded shoulders, showing stolid patience even in this, and the woman standing in her carriage no one but her aunt Letitia Pettibone of McDonough, her elderly face drawn in anguish, her hair a straggled mess, this woman of such fine grooming, this dowager who practically ruled the season in Atlanta standing up in the equipage like some hag of doom, which indeed she would prove to be.

That is one sentence, folks, and it’s from The March by E. L. Doctorow, a current National Book Award finalist. Leaving aside the extended structure, why didn’t that woman yank or tug on her robe? Why did Doctorow use an adverb to prop up a weak verb when a better verb could do the trick? Stephen King would object, I am sure.

This, among many other reasons I am sure, is why I will never win a National Book Award. I haven’t read any Doctorow before, but if you’ve read any of the various “best of” booklists I’ve put on this blog, you’ll know that he’s on them, usually for Billy Bathgate.

*sigh*

I’ll never figure this business out. It’s Dan Brown polluting the linguistic waters with his swill, or Doctorow sounding like Faulkner, or Hemingway writing in staccato bursts, or Ann Patchett carrying you along with the most fluid sentences ever. In short, it’s everything under the sun.

Write. Just write.

Okay, I’m a sucker for book lists. This one is by TIME and purports to be the best 100 books published in English since 1923. I’ve only read 22 of them. I feel like such an underachiever.

Just watched the movie last night. First, let me say I have a graduate minor in history. I know this movie is historically incorrect.

But I still enjoyed it. ((Guilty shrug)) I have no problem with making Saladdin a smart, honorable guy (uh, he was a bit more blood-thirsty than that, really, but that’s never stopped Hollywood before). I have no problem with making the Crusades a bad thing. They were a bad thing, and though you can’t blame all the poor guys who went to fight for the glory of God, you sure can blame the greedy misguided idiots who sent them in the first place. Religious fanatics of any stripe are reprehensible.

But this movie reminds me of old Hollywood epics, and I liked that. It has the pagentry of Cleopatra and Ben Hur, and a couple of Shakespearean moments that almost seem cribbed from Henry V. “I am what I am,” says one guy. “Someone’s gotta be.” For some reason, this reminded me of Ancient Pistol.

Over all, a decent Hero’s Journey type movie, in spite of some stretching of credulity in places and a couple of clunky transitions. Two slippahs up.

I’m in a quiet moment, sort of, between the day’s activities and tonight’s jogging. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is playing on the television. I find it dull and stupid, but since I picked it (yes, me), I’m watching it through to the end while Mike has a nap. I am also blogging because it doesn’t take much attention, frankly, to follow this fluffy movie. I can suspend disbelief, sure, but my difficulties began with the name Totenkopf. I started expecting the SS to show up. I could even buy the fact that the Death’s Head units would build great big robots, and when Polly and Joseph and everyone else kept wondering who was behind everything, I kept saying, “Sheesh, how dumb can you be? It’s Hitler of course!”

But the joke’s on me because Totenkopf is the name of a scientist (German, naturally) and not the traditional Totenkopfverbande I expected. But I think it would have been far more interesting if Hitler had instructed the SS to create robots to take over the world instead of this rogue scientist with a Noah’s Ark complex who wants to found a new world. Sheesh.

The other major annoyance of the day is Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code. Oh my God, this book is awful, and not because I’m offended by the subject matter. Where was this man’s critique group? Where was his editor? No one in my writers’ group writes prose this bad. If they do, they don’t do it for long. Here’s the best explanation possible as to why this writing sucks. Syntactic swill, I believe this fellow says. By far one of the funniest articles on the subject is here. I suggest, however, that easily offended Christians not read this one. This guy is definitely not a Christian, and he doesn’t care who he pisses off.

In the meantime, I’ll soothe my offended grammarian genes with some great writing. Ann Patchett, anyone?

Fellow Aloha Chapter member Sally Sorenson has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize!!! Her story “Kaneloa,” which appears in Ghosts at the Coast, has just been nominated. Awesome news! The Pushcart Prize features the best of the small presses and is quite a big deal.

Watch tonight as Jay shows the Maui Writers’ Conference “Pitch to America” segment! A friend, Malena Brooks, may be on there pitching her women’s fiction novel. With a name like Malena you’d think she’s Hawaiian, but no, she’s African-American. She’s a lovely lady with the most infectious attitude you ever came up against. No matter how down I might feel, an evening talking with Malena always brightens my outlook. The woman is smart and classy and she knows what she wants. So tune in tonight and see if Malena made the cut!