A homecoming (of sorts)

So I'm in Montreal as I write this, here since Saturday late afternoon (after enduring a three-hour delay courtesy of Porter Airlines), and leaving tomorrow evening. I'm attending the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (still remembered by many as the Learneds) at Concordia, primarily under the guise of some extra-curricular work I do for a humanities-based association (I edit its newsletter, and thus attend both the council meetings and events it sponsors). While I was somewhat looking forward to getting out of town for a few days, not to mention coming to Montreal (the city of my wonderful youth), my heart and mind isn't truly involved here. It's not that I'm having a bad time - a friend of mine delivering a paper is also here, so I've been hanging out with her, and some of the sessions I'm attending look interesting - but I'm not all that keen on venturing too far outside of Concordia's campus (ie., heading out to the east end to hang out along St. Denis, etc.). Which is odd, since I usually tend to take advantage of these increasingly fewer business-related ventures to engage in some fun and frolic activities and to help decompress. I think it's a lingering hangover from the malaise I've been feeling of late, that I'm not much motivated to do anything that gets me out of my comfort zone. I still feel like I'm in minor recovery mode, if that makes any sense.

These conferences, and the council meeting of this humanities association in particular, also tend to be tough for me, largely because they make me feel terribly inadequate. I tend to feel like I'm on such a steep learning curve with my supposed area of expertise, and forever fearful I'm going to be caught out as an intellectual fraud! So I'm always more on edge as I truly feel outside my comfort zone. (That's been the phrase of the week, actually, "comfort zone," beginning with a long conservation this past weekend with the lovely A.) But onward I go. And I have some "real" work to do, so I feel I can justify my non-presence at some of the less-than-interesting sessions scheduled.

A partial return

For those few of you that read this blog: no, I haven't died. (You probably figured that out, since the few that do visit here actually know me.) I haven't been much in the mood to write on this thing, however. I went through a fairly difficult melancholic stretch a few weeks back, which I still feel like I'm recovering from. Just your garden variety existential angst, nothing to be overly concerned about. I was in a bit of a reading slump too - still am, sort of, although I'm on the cusp of finishing Richard Ford's Independence Day, his 1995 follow-up to The Sportswriter, both of which are narrated by the protagonist Frank Bascombe. These novels, The Sportswriter in particular, have been eerily prescient in terms of shadowing my current mood and state of mind. At times, I feel a little like Frank: self reflective, mostly happy, but also seemingly in search of something - a connection, a sense of fulfillment, all the while knowing that it's not necessarily attainable. But yet we continue to search.

Short(ish) life (and other assorted thoughts)

Even though Yann Martel's new book, Beatrice and Virgil, is but a slim volume, and I'm about two-thirds of the way through it, I've decided to stop reading it. I read Martel's Life of Pi a few years back, and loved it. And while I do consider myself a patient reader, and willingly to give complex works the benefit of the doubt, this book is leaving me cold. There's still a lot to like about Martel's writing - he's a wonderful prose stylist, and he makes the craft of writing seem easy and effortless - but there's much to hate about Beatrice and Virgil. It's almost as if Martel set out to write something that would be contemptuous toward his readers. Or maybe fables about the Holocaust just don't turn my crank. In the end, life is too short to waste on something that's really doing nothing for me, even if I was almost finished. (I flipped through the final 40 or so pages and got the gist of it. That seems good enough.)

This is the second book in a row that has left me disappointed. Priorly, I read Ian MacEwen's latest, Solar, which was also a disappointment. (Actually that's not entirely true: Roberto Bolano's Monsieur Pain was sandwiched in between. It's tier B Bolano, but it's still great fun, and takes some joyously surreal turns for good measure.) Again, MacEwen is one of those writers who I admire (but don't necessarily "love"), and I'm also one of the few who thought his last work, On Chesil Beach, was a small masterpiece. But Solar was, overall, a fairly weak effort. The writing is, as always with MacEwen, sharp, but I found the story flabby and, at times, downright silly. Moreover, the main character felt a little too much like Philip Roth's Mickey Sabbath. In the hands of Roth, despicable characters are three dimensional and (almost) likeable; MacEwen, however, doesn't seem to have the immoral balls to pull it off.

So as you can see, I'm in something of a reading slump. A bit of a mirror on my life, actually, since I feel like I'm in a personal slump as well. Nothing to be concerned about: just your regular garden variety melancholy that strikes me every few weeks or so. (I was also battling a nasty head cold for a week, which wasn't fun.) I'm struggling to write, which is frustrating. I get into these periodic, existential "what the hell are you doing with your life" moods, but then I find some degree of purpose and snap out of it. First world problems, of course. I'll get beyond this. And hopefully I'll soon be taken with a great novel.

Family day fun

Happy Family Day! (As somebody at work said to me the other day, "Brought to you by sex." I think she read it on a greeting card.) Unfortunately, it seems most of my family is travelling - namely, the lovely A., who is in Cuba for the week - so I'm spending the day without family. I couldn't have swung the trip because of my lack of vacation time, although the excursion was never really on offer to me: it was a long-planned trip with a friend of hers. Besides, as she said to me, "I don't see you as an all-inclusive resort-type guy." She's probably right, although I'm sure I could be tempted by the sunshine, warmth and mojitos. So my Family Day will be spent mostly on the couch, surrounded by a book, long-put-off magazine articles, and perhaps a film or two on DVD. Accompanied, of course, by the only family member of mine seemingly not out of the country: my cat. I'll toast the day when the sun sets with a glass of Irish whiskey.

So it seems I'm struggling to post as often I'd like on this blog. And writing more in general. Without getting into too much detail - I promised this blog would not be a confessional about my personal life - it's been an emotional couple of weeks. It's sapped much of the energy I'd use for personal pursuits, like writing. Even reading has been difficult: my one-book-a-week pace was broken. But things have calmed, the sails are no longer flapping in the wind. I've found some emotional ballast. 

Much of this emotional turbulence can actually be summed up in a line from Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, which I just finished this morning. "An independent fate, and love too - what confusion!" 

My reading history with the great Bellow is spotty. I read my first Bellow, More Die of Heartbreak, when I was around 18 or 19. I can't remember what compelled me to pick that book up: my guess is that John Updike, who I was reading quite a bit of at the time, probably made a reference to Bellow in an interview, and figured I should read his work. I don't remember much about Heartbreak, except that I read it during my breaks on my summer job at a golf course and genuinely enjoyed it (although I probably didn't "get" it all). I then read Seize the Day, which was short, powerful and wonderful. After which, I remember telling a friend, "Bellow is my favourite writer!" Hyperbole, to be sure, considering I'd only read two of his books, and had yet to tackle the real masterworks. I ended up buying three more of his books - and don't ask my why this particular detail is remembered - at Village Book Store, the fantastic (but now long-departed) secondhand book store on Queen St. run by Marty Ahvenus: Henderson the Rain King, To Jerusalem and Back, and The Adventures of Augie March. 

At this point, I imagine I knew Augie March was one of the classics, so that was going to be the Bellow book I would next tackle. To that end, I brought it with me on a train ride to Montreal. (Again, not sure why I remember these details, but they are emblazoned.) Unfortunately, even though it has one of the great opening sentences in 20th-century literature ("I am an American, Chicago born - Chicago, that somber city - and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent"), I don't think I got much farther than 20 pages. The writing was too dense and impenetrable for my still-developing 19 year-old brain. I figured I would eventually try again, and carried that particular paperback copy with me as I moved apartments over the years, but I never did pick it up. I eventually ditched it during one of my periodic book purges, along with the other Bellow books in my collection. 

Fast forward 20 years, and now suddenly I "get" Bellow, especially now that I've read the three acknowledged classics in the last six months: Herzog, Humboldt's Gift and, finally, The Adventures of Augie March. In some ways, these three books blend together for me, largely because their narrators share many similarities: namely, a propensity for wild, wonderful and dazzling semantic pyrotechnics. I think it's safe to say that nobody writes sentences like Bellow: they often have flash to spare, yet they're also rooted in a sometimes-coarse street vernacular. He can also be hilariously funny and rowdy. It takes some time and patience - at least it did for me - to dial in to Bellow's style and sensibility, but once locked in you're hooked. 

Ultimately, however, what hooks me more than the language is the general tone and melancholy that seems to surround the characters in his books. Yes, many of the characters are painted broad and wide, even larger than life, but the narrators themselves seem to be weighed down by endless self reflection and, often, disappointment. They tend to one catharsis to another, and rarely learn from their mistakes. In fact, at least in Augie March's case, they will repeat these same mistakes. They're flawed, probably much like Bellow himself (the man did marry five times, after all), but admirable nonetheless. There's also a genuine optimism that abounds in his works, that despite all the struggles and conflicts, there's still a hopeful jauntiness. 

Without making too big a deal, and for fear of overstating matters, I see a lot of myself in these books. That I live, for the most part, a happy and content life, full of good humour and surrounded by interesting people. Yet, I can't help escape from a seemingly chronic state of melancholy, that there's something more out there, something that's missing. It doesn't weigh me down nor do I suffer from depression (I tend to refer to it as a harmless case of the "blues"), but it's a constant presence. It's there, although perhaps it's also something I welcome from time to time. It helps to ground me.

Ok, enough about me. I'll be back on the Canada Reads Independently wagon this week, hopefully reading two of them back to back (I took them from the library): Ray Smith's Century and Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese. Reviews to follow.

the heat, the books

Ah, so this is what we've been missing all summer: hot, sticky, uncomfortable evenings because of the humidity. Let's just say, that crazy rain aside, I can live without this summer weather. Give me cool, fresh summer nights anytime. Humidity blows.

Since I couldn't sleep this morning, I thought I'd cobble together a quick post. I've been going through a variety of moods of late. Some of it is because of job-related stress and continued frustrations in my workplace. I've also been dwelling (too much, I think, and probably irrationally) on aging, feeling life is starting to proverbially "pass me by." It's always dangerous and foolish to compare one's life to others, but sometimes I can't help observe the activities of the friends and acquaintances around me and wonder if they're doing it "right." They're buying houses, getting married, having children. There's a sense of progress there, while it seems my life has been somewhat stagnant.

Anyway I don't mean this to be a lament. But I figure it was on my mind this morning (and of late), so I thought I would share it. (For those of you that might be worried, don't! As per usual, this will pass.)

In other news... I've decided, after reading 123 pages of TC Boyle's The Women, that I'm going to return it to the library without reading the last 200 pages. It's not that I wasn't enjoying the book per se - Boyle is a great craftsman, and the narrative is engaging - but I realized when I was about 100 pages in that I didn't really care all that much about these characters. Nor did the book seem to have any relevancy and insight to the particular moods and thoughts I'm currently experiencing. It made me realize how important that type of relevancy and immediacy is to me when I read. I don't read to escape; I read to understand, to involve, to make some sense out of my own life. That doesn't mean I require a narrative that's comparable to my life and circumstances, but I need something I can relate to. Perhaps offering some wisdom into solitude, or relationships, friendships, family. The Boyle just didn't have that going for me (as entertaining as the story was), so I'm giving up on it. Life is too short to spend with a book that just isn't working for me.

Instead I picked up another Saul Bellow: Humboldt's Gift. I was hooked from the first few paragraphs! It's not nearly as complex as Herzog, but it contains all the elements I love about Bellow, namely the richness and wonder of both his language and the characters. It's going to be an engaging read. And the thing that resonates (which is why it has relevancy for me) is the theme of literature (and its so-called purity) vs. crass commercialism. More on this in another post, after I finish the book.

Is it a fact of life that CBC's Metro Morning has to play the same crappy music almost daily?

tendencies

I have a tendency toward (false? misdirected?) nostalgia
which often leads to melancholy
Thankfully the low-grade kind.

Melancholy

"The Man who is alone and waits is seen in every cafe in Buenos Aires - a symbol of the city's essential melancholia." - Alberto Manguel

Essential melancholia - perfect.