I only have time to post on the fly, and so will settle, for now, for sharing some quotations from my current reading: Henry Green’s memoir Pack My Bag, written when he was 33. Why so early? Because it was 1940, his son tells us in the introduction, and he “became convinced that there would be another terrible war and moreover, having vivid schoolboy memories of the carnage of the First World War, that he was sure to die in it himself.” The resulting memoir has at once an urgent and an unfiltered feel about it, as though Green had mined for any scrap of memory–and then imbued each surfaced fragment, however trivial or fleeting, with the value he found in it by writing about it vividly.
Here are some nice lines from the book’s first quarter:

“It is at that age if ever that one is fancy-free because little boys hardly ever think about themselves as everyone else does all the time.”
“In his presence we were small mirrors changing in colour to the hues of his moods.” (On a schoolteacher of “a violent appearance.”)
“Can it be true that people genuinely feel they were happiest at school or is it because they are so miserable grown up?”
“That is the pity of sobering down to middle age, there must be a threat to one’s skin to wake what is left of things remembered into things to die with. The crime is to forget.”

Writing for his life, Green attains an eloquence that seems founded less in artfulness than emotion. It’s bracing.

Late in Kate Christensen’s deceptively wicked novel The Epicure’s Lament, the Jernigan Memorial Psychiatric Hospital makes a telling appearance. But by the time the reference turns up, Christensen’s debt to David Gates’s bleaker 1991 novel has proven more cosmetic than substantive. The antihero of her novel, Hugo Whittier, may be dying a painful death, but for bitter, black misanthropy he ultimately has nothing on Gates’s physically healthy but spiritually stunted David Jernigan. On the surface Christensen’s novel is all sharpened elbows and bared cuspids, but ultimately these outward edges are covering for a reasonably soft heart.
Christensen’s novel takes the acerbic form of four of Hugo’s notebooks, kept during the last year of his illness with Buerger’s disease, a circulatory condition usually caused by heavy tobacco use. Indeed, the forty-year-old Hugo is hopelessly addicted to smoking–as well as to good food, casual sex, and as much distance as he can place between himself and the fellow humans whose less refined ways so offend his sensibilities. Heir to a very good deal of very old money, Hugo has led his life free of financial constraint but ever oppressed by the poisonous aftertaste of his widowed mother’s unnatural attachment to and queasy demands on him as a boy.
As an adult, Hugo dissembles. He lies to the people in his life, and he lies to us, the readers of his notebooks, too–for instance, he doesn’t despise those people in his life nearly as much as he’d like us to think. His disavowed compassion shows itself now and again, like the lowered hem of a slip. The moments when it does make the novel’s ultimate softening not as much of a stretch as it might have been; and their unexpectedness along the way, along with Hugo’s own abashed surprise at them, makes them genuinely moving.
(The question of what Hugo would like “us” to think, incidentally, raised another interesting question I ask myself a lot: just who do we think we are writing for when we keep a notebook, diary, or journal? Like most of us who keep these kinds of private records, Hugo through most of the novel wants and doesn’t want an audience. By the last pages, however, you feel that he has wanted one earnestly and that his being read has saved him, in more than just the most obvious way. It made me wonder about my own ambivalence between the wish for privacy and the wish for a reader, and made me see, for an instant, even the most secretive journal-keeping as a furtive plea to be read, to be understood–just maybe to be saved.)
I’m a bit behind the curve, obviously, on my Christensen reading. Her new novel, out only about a week, is the talk of the web, even garnering a glowing notice from my co-blogger (see the Top Five, to the right). As The Epicure’s Lament was compulsively readable and nearly single-handedly roused me from a summer-long reading funk, I don’t think The Great Man will be far behind on my reading list.
Up first, though: This Side of Paradise and Lost Illusions.

I’ve always wondered about the correct usage of this word, and no wonder:

§ 90. deceptively

Would you dive into a pool that is deceptively shallow? The question gives one pause. When deceptively is used to modify an adjective, the meaning is often unclear. Is the pool shallower or deeper than it appears to be? We asked the Usage Panel to decide. Fifty percent thought the pool is shallower than it appears. Thirty-two percent thought the pool deeper than it appears. And 18 percent said it was impossible to decide. Thus a warning notice worded in such a way would be misinterpreted by many of the people who read it, and others would be uncertain as to which sense was intended. When using deceptively with an adjective, be sure the context leaves no room for doubt. An easy way to remedy the situation is to rewrite the sentence without deceptively: The pool is shallower than it looks or The pool is shallow, despite its appearance.

Per The American Heritage Book of English Usage. My Fowler’s (second edition) is silent on the matter.

Summer 2007 has been a season of nearly compulsive movie-going and video-watching. This year, books have taken a back seat. For one thing, I started commuting again for the first time in 14 years. It’s a train ride of ten to fifteen minutes merely, but it changes the texture of weekday life completely. The one plus is that I can read on the train, but the short spans of time don’t accommodate anything very demanding, only books I can slip into and out of with ease. So it’s been Reginald Hill mysteries for the most part, though I did manage to polish off “A Buyer’s Market,” the second novel in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, during the first two weeks of this brave new life. While I appreciate the newfound intervals for reading, truth be told, half the time I find myself more absorbed in the people around me and the scene outside the window. And once in a while I just want to close my eyes and extend last night’s sleep.
Instead of reading, I’ve been watching movies left and right, in the theater and in the living room. And the batting average has been high. Among revivals I was swept up in the glittering hauteur and proper passions of The Earrings of Madame de… and rolled with the punches, funny and bleak, that life in Watts deals to the hero of the gentle but unflinching Killer of Sheep. Some matches were made in heaven, or at least a planet or two away: a late spring viewing of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris lent Danny Boyle’s ravishing Sunshine, seen only a few weeks ago, added layers of resonance. In both movies, the seductive visuals serve first to mitigate, then to heighten, the scariness of the something out there that means us harm.
But what of the blockbusters, you ask? Ratatouille afforded simple, easy enjoyment. Spider-Man 3 was batty, blockheaded fun–considerably more enjoyable for me, who had few expectations, than for my date, who was hopeful. Laughing at a movie can, I think, be as gratifying as laughing with one, and I totally cop to having had a great giddy time watching this franchise leave skid marks.
Once: did you see this movie yet? I don’t know of anyone who saw it who wasn’t taken with it. Modest and surprising and complicated, it left me unsure how I felt, in the best possible sense. The Departed on DVD was the opposite, manipulative to its core–right down to the soundtrack loaded with bait for personal nostalgia–and distractingly strewn with star power. The very premise of the script is a kind of stunt, let alone the casting. The last word on the Boston accents, of course, goes to the Cinetrix.
Today finds me shifting gears, as I have four hours to spend on an airplane to Seattle this afternoon. Believe me, I’m not the most comfortable, cool, calm, and collected flyer in the world, but I’ve always loved one thing about a plane flight: that there is no excuse not to read a book, nothing more productive I could possibly be doing with myself. (I know, I know–spoken like someone who hasn’t had to travel for business very much.) The question of the night, of course: what to read? Truly, four-hour travel stints come rarely enough in my life that this is no small dilemma. If I choose wrongly, the missed opportunity will rankle and when I’m back soon enough to my few stolen minutes with something slight. Next week I’ll let you know how I did.

I was pleased to be asked by Carrie to file this week’s installment of 5×5. But when I thought back to what I’ve been reading this summer, I realized that it has consisted solely of comfort reading, which in my case typically means: series. So there’s no really new news here for regular readers of this blog, who already know of my guilty affection for MacDonald, the flirtation with Powell that’s recently been upgraded to an actual involvement, and my longstanding crush on Fisher.
But in a world rife with readers (like CAAF her very self!) who are facing the end of the Harry Potter series with a lead sinker in their gut growing weightier as they advance through the seventh volume–maybe the time is right to revisit some of the series and sets of books that I rely on to patch me through spells of readerly indecision. Of all these I can say that it soothes me to know they’re at hand and it buoys me to know there’s plenty of them. Maybe some of them will provide a next harbor for some of you soon-to-be Potter refugees out there.
1. A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (link is to the first volume). Twelve novels in four volumes following the life and times of an Englishman following World War I. Powell writes in an apparently meandering fashion behind which lurks–I’m certain it’s there though I don’t, after reading two of the novels, quite yet discern it–a masterful design. The novels are quietly infectious, with truly great (though seldom conspicuous or showy) insights and feats of writing strewn about liberally to be stumbled over like half-buried treasure. Rarely have I felt so ravished and so comforted at the same time.
2. The Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald (link is to the first book in the series). Residing at the opposite end of the world from #1, these crime novels have not a subtle bone in their sizable body. Their charms lie wholly elsewhere. Belonging to the series does a lot for the individual books, somehow; they gain appeal and impact when read in quantity, filling in at length–detail by detail, stratum by substratum, hustler by con man, felony by misdemeanor–a lurid panorama of southern Florida from the 1960s to 1980s. Pure buttered popcorn.
3. Dalziel and Pascoe mysteries by Reginald Hill (link is to the first book in the series). I just tonight finished what must have been about my tenth of these smart, wonderfully written English mysteries, On Beulah Height. While nearing the end and thus the whodunit, I remembered again how little of my affinity for Hill’s mysteries has to do with their, er, mysteries. His plots are always clever and sometimes deft but, it seems to me, tend to turn the screw a time or two too many, so that by the end I don’t much even care who did. No matter; the characters are glorious and so is the writing. Not that I’m one to sniff at genre fiction–couldn’t be further from the truth–but how often does one turn to genre fiction for the writing? Not sodding often, as Dalziel might say.
4. The Art of Eating by M.F.K. Fisher. But you really want these separate editions of the five books collected here: The Gastronomical Me, Serve It Forth, An Alphabet for Gourmets, How to Cook a Wolf, and Consider the Oyster. They’re lovely, and she is gorgeous in the pictures on their jackets. Long ago, I defended Fisher from charges of preciosity here.
5. The Waverley Novels by Sir Walter Scott (link is to their namesake). Rejoice: you’ll never get through them all! Just kidding, sort of. The best of them (The Bride of Lammermoor, The Heart of Midlothian) are terrific, but others have defied my best efforts to get up a head of steam for them. it’s true. Outside English departments, though, who reads Scott anymore? Consider this a gentle reminder that the man arguably had about as great an influence on the history of the novel, and not only in English, as anyone else you can think of. And–you’ll never get through them all!
By the way, I’ve never read a Harry Potter book myself. It was, in fact, only ten days ago that I saw my first Harry Potter movie–which I much enjoyed, thanks in no small part to the whispered running tutorial of my better-versed companion. He, incidentally, finds himself in a bit of a conundrum on the occasion of the last book’s appearance: he has followed the movies devotedly but not read the books, and wishes to know what happens sometime ahead of 2009, or however long it will take the sixth and seventh installments to reach the screen–and presumably wishes not to find out by overhearing a conversation on the elevated train. Should he start with the 6th book, picking up where the movies currently leave off? Skip straight to the 7th? Friendly advice may be sent in care of ogic@artsjournal.com.

A twin set for a misanthropic Wednesday:
“He liked people to think the worst of him, because then the best often came as an unpleasant surprise.”
Reginald Hill, On Beulah Height
“It was rather annoying to hear how kind she’d been; it entailed putting tiresome qualifications on his dislike for her.”
Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

For the most part, I find it impossible to recall how I discovered the blogs I regularly read or to remember the first time I encountered them. They seem to have permeated my consciousness undetected, like vapors. Tingle Alley, the home of our new co-blogger CAAF, is a rare exception. I remember reading it the very day it debuted, directed there by Maud among others, and instantly being charmed into bookmarking and blogrolling this handsome new site with its oddly arresting name (explained here). Tingle Alley has remained a frequent and favorite stop. Carrie’s smarts, wit, and unflagging good nature have made it a reliably sunny retreat on the internets.
It’s a happy occcasion, then, to welcome her to ALN to blog beside us. Make yourself at home, Carrie! This is going to be fun.