How to Write About Books You Haven't Read

Seven Cents Aug 24 2024: How to Write About Books You Haven't Read

1. "I have not read the original 1818 version," writes Elisa Gabbert, in her essay comparing the two editions of Frankenstein.

2. Come on, Gabbert, it's a 260-page monster book, and you're a professional literary critic. Surely you can handle perusing the actual novel about which you're writing an essay (to be published by FSG for $18 a copy)?

3. "I've never read the books," begins Gabbert's essay featuring… Gossip Girl. As usual, not having read a book doesn't stop Gabbert from writing about it. It's okay, she's special. She's Chuck Bass.

4. "I would never read it cover to cover," she writes of Sylvia Plath's journals. Okay, Gabbert, but let's say hypothetically you were writing an essay about them. Oh, still no? Okay.

5. "I was tired and didn't feel up for Proust." Hey, Gabbert, I can relate! Maybe that's why everything you quote occurs in the very first section of the first part of the first volume of In Search of Lost Time. Lots of people stop reading Proust after a few dozen pages, but most don't publish essays called "Proust and the Art of Suffering," in which they sort of skirt whether they actually finished the book or not. But you do.

6. "When I stopped rereading books, I didn't stop rewatching movies." Maybe this is why the only piece of art that receives a four page plot summary in this alleged collection of literary criticism (and even then it's not clever critique or astute analysis, just a high school plot summary) is… the movie Point Break.

7. The beautiful painting ("The Passing of Time") on the cover is by Jess Allen. June Park incorporated it into one of the year's best book designs. All this for the dumbest book I've read in months. Yes, I read it. Every stupid word. So who's the dummy now?

Elisa Gabbert: Any Person is the Only Self

FSG 2024 $18 230 pages

Totally Normal People

7 Cents July 26 2024: Totally Normal People

1. Is Sally Rooney having me on? Maybe she's mad that I ditched her last novel halfway through, on page 225 out of 350. 

2. For Intermezzo (out in September '24), Rooney adopts and adapts James Joyce's fractured sentences when inside her protagonists' heads. 

3. To make a point. Yes. But also because it works, clever. And bring in that language philosopher: Ludwig Witts-his-name. But does it connect? Or not, like those neon circles not really. Brain makes the circle. 

4. I also noticed some Hamlet bits, because I just watched Julia Stiles and Kyle MacLachlan in the great and bonkers 2000 Hamlet. Ethan Hawke wonders whether to be or not while pacing through a Blockbuster. Also, Rooney meantioned it in her notes. 

5. Ulysses, on the other hand, I hadn't read since lockdown. As Rooney mentioned in her nice 2022 Paris Review piece, Ulysses is about a couple of guys.

6. And so is Intermezzo. There's a third protagonist, Margaret, whose interior we sometimes feel. But mostly, when it comes to internal focalization, free indirect discourse, feelings: It's about these two brothers. 

7. And it's great. But maybe that's exactly what Rooney wants me to say! I won't fall for it! Does she think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? I hate it when she does that.

Cause for Alarm in Milan

Cause for Alarm

Eric Ambler

1938

1. It turns out that the American commie agent's "sister" really IS her sister, as far as I can tell. And that's not even the craziest left turn in "Cause for Alarm," Eric Ambler's fourth spy novel.

2. She and her brother are both multilingual American Soviet agents living in Milan. They share a very modest apartment with scavenged furniture in which each room has a foldaway bed. They're married to the cause, I guess. Which is not really the USSR, but International Socialism and Anti-Fascism.

4. Good thing it's Internationalism and not Russia, because Ambler wrote this in 1937, published it in 1938, then saw the USSR sign a nonaggression pact with the Axis in 1940. Harsh toke.

5. Neither of these Americans talk like other 1930s Americans. I have extensive and very personal experience with Ginger Rogers and the Marx Brothers, so I know whereof I speak.

5. Eric Ambler's next novel, "Coffin for Dimitrios," (in Greece this time) far exceeds this effort. Since you're going to read that one instead, I'll spoil the highlight to "Cause for Alarm": Our heroes escape by humming the Worker's Anthem "Bandiera Rossa" ("Red Flag") to signal their allyship to their would-be guard.

6. The narrator's fiancee back home in England won't "give up being a very promising surgeon to become a second-rate housekeeper." The shady Nazi-Yugoslav spy wears makeup and employs a mincing manservant who burns incense, despite the wife's wishes.

7. The gold dust of "Cause for Alarm" is hidden in its details.. The trouble with the novel is the part that isn't the details: pages 150-260.

As Rich as the King in Casablanca

Seven cents June 16 2024

1. Hate it. The double-stacked vertical piles. My fault. I did it to myself. So I couldn't find "This Strange Eventful History" by Claire Messud.

2. Fortunately, I had another book!

3. "Gossip Girl in Casablanca," said the Times of London. Sold. I sped through Abigail Assour's debut novel like a motorcycle in Morocco, I guess. It won the Francoise Sagan award, and like in Sagan, sex happens, but not in detail, not right on the page.

4. Is that how you say it? When it's a movie, you say, "off-screen." Do we say "off-page?"

5. A patron asked if it was a rom-com. "No, it's neither romantic nor comedic, really. What would I call it?" So I looked up the novel Vanity Fair: A domestic drama.That's Francoise Sagan, too: dom-dram.

6. It's an off-page dom-dram that ends just after Ramadan. A couple of characters fantasize about moving to America. But what they don't know is that at that very moment, as the last period concludes the domestic drama's last second, "I Saw the Sign" by Ace of Bass is about to be knocked off America's Top Forty by "Bump n' Grind" by R. Kelly.

7. So be careful what you wish for, characters! It's like "a tragedy with a happy ending," but the ending happens, you know, off-page.

As Rich as the King in Casablanca

(Aussi Riche que le Roi by Abigail Assor, trans. Natasha Lehrer)

Swimming with Miranda July

Swimming with Miranda July

1. Miranda July's new novel, All Fours, sat around a while before I picked it up. Pre-publication copies bear the title's release date, sometimes right on the spine. You could sort them chronologically. I sometimes do.

2. And then you can look at your books, and there's no kidding yourself. You've had that one since it came out three years ag0–in fact, a couple months before that, even! You're never going to read it, are you?

3. All Fours, however, was a stylish pleasure. The narrator / protagonist immerses herself in projects, sometimes long-term, sometimes short-term; ranging from quixotic to quotidian.

4. The narrator / protagonist is unnamed, so let's just call her Marcel.

5. After reading the novel's last page, I went swimming. Around lap four, I remembered the Miranda July story about someone teaching themselves to swim, or maybe inventing a stroke, or pretending to swim in front of the mirror.

5. That story was great! It's in No One Belongs Here More than You, which I can safely remove from my shelf because if I'm not going to open it to check the title of that story, I can certainly re-buy it whenever I want it. In the story, as I remember it, a protagonist engages in a very individual, partly physical, personal project. Like Marcel in All Fours!

6. The book–the protagonist?--obsesses on one's authentic self, but thankfully without that word, "authentic." There's been an interesting little run of thought lately, about how maybe the individual isn't even a real thing, or at least worthy of all that post-mid-century existentialist primacy and valorization and stuff.

7. A nice acquaintane (from my retail life) said hi as I walked to the public pool, towel over my shoulder. Somehow in the course of five seconds I managed to say something weird and awkward back to him. This wasn't part of a project, or an artwork. I was just being my authentic self, without even trying! While swimming, I thought: it's okay to be yourself, at least a little. I just read a whole pretty great novel about it!

Condemned to be Flea

1. My colleague sighed with relief. The chair fit him better. "Thank goodness," he said. The concert had already happened, so he wouldn't have to decide whether to buy tickets, whether to drive up to LA, maybe stay there or drive all the way back home afterward.

2. So many decision trees, and branches, pruned by the past. Thank goodness! I laughed, or maybe smiled. Does anybody really like free will?

3. Or is it like violin lessons, something you feel like you should get for your kid, but definitely not yourself, because let's be honest, who wants them? And you're an adult; you can make your own decisions now. Ha!

4. Or you could exercise your freedom of choice, and take bass lessons instead. Then you could say, paraphrasing Sartre, "We are condemned to be Flea!"

5. But only if you did that slappy-poppy kind of bass playing.

6. It's been a while since I busked, but I'd like to perform at that line of people waiting for the Powell's Books warehouse sale to open this weekend: only the easy-to-play Beatles songs in the misty morning rain while miserable Gen X book scouts grasp their empty Ikea tote bags and bankers boxes.

7. Hopefully by now it has already happened.

Segue-Mania: 2023 Best Books and Films

Segue-Mania: Read and Watched in 2023

“What’s knittin’, kittens?” (Barbara Stanwyck, BALL OF FIRE, 1941)

As we learned from BARBIE’S (2023) progenitor JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS (2001), “When the going gets tough, the tough make lemonade.” Plenty of tart and tasty treats pass the lips of Barbara (not Barbie) Stanwyck in her Preston Sturgis-penned screwball masterpiece THE LADY EVE (1941). For once, her opposite number (Henry Fonda) matches her spark, but she demurs, “I need him… like the axe needs the turkey.”

Such festive banter seems decades ahead of the similarly dialogue-driven 1935 novel A HOUSE AND ITS HEAD, by Ivy Compton-Burnett. Her all-talking, no-singing novel may be the driest, oddest piece of prose NYRB has yet rereleased. If you guessed that someone named Compton-Burnett might be inclined to follow her own stylistic star while portraying a strange retro-Regency mix of patriarchy and misanthropy… well, ten points to you and your house, with or without its head.

It's much easier to pin down the set and setting of Frank and Youman’s TINY IMPERFECTIONS (2020). Cloaked in a rom-com skirt and blazer, this breezy read hits every mark. The story’s backdrop: The Obama-era San Francisco boomlet. The story: a private school admissions officer’s foibles as a daughter, a mom, and a woman of color in a lily-white environment. Come for the Hayes Valley namechecks, stay for humor and heart.

Had TINY IMPERFECTIONS been set in Brooklyn, it surely would have namechecked DINER, whose DAY FOR NIGHT (2023) cookbook / photo album finally provides what the world has been ordering since opening night: 48 recipes and 160 full-color pages of mise-en-scène, atmosphere, and ambience, the real reason we dine out instead of using all those cookbooks we already have. (That said, the olive oil cake recipe deserves its own holiday.)

Was Diner one of the mandatory hipster big city stops for the protagonists of ROAMING (2023)? The Tamaki Cousins kindly collaborated on this graphic / comic masterpiece of three young women on break from their freshman year. Their hostel stay is depicted in swooping lines and minimal color wash, fine representations of the wet and wintery city. Maybe the comic’s protagonists will find their way to Diner when they graduate and move to The City in their twenties. Who knows, maybe they’ll get hired.

The bars and cafes of the 81-minute movie FALLEN LEAVES (2023) host people who are neither famous writers nor trained assassins. Their jobs are washing dishes, sorting merchandise, cleaning construction sites. With an economy that stands as the Finnish inverse of Wes Anderson’s WONDERFUL WORLD OF HENRY SUGAR (2023), Aki Kaurismäki’s characters lose jobs, find each other, and just might improve their lives together.

If not, there are certainly other ways of living. Attractive pickpockets and conceited conmen seem to be doing pretty well in Paris, at least according to Ernst Lubitsch’s pre-code sly wink of a rom-com, TROUBLE IN PARADISE (1935). How do you get a crook to fall for you? Just ask him, “When a lady takes her jewels off in a gentleman’s room, where does she put them?”

Crooks and cons abound in Fintan O’Toole’s incredible WE DON’T KNOW OURSELVES: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF MODERN IRELAND (2022). If it was easy as pie to combine memoir, hard reportage, cultural analysis, and tiptop writing, we’d all be bakers, living off olive oil cake and Cadbury Flake. Slightly less sui generis, but no less important, is Rosanna Xia’s CALIFORNIA AGAINST THE SEA: VISIONS FOR OUR VANISHING COASTLINE (2023). Xia doesn’t whine or scold. She just lays out the facts, the conflicts, and the options. Her emphasis on optionality positions us where we belong: in the place of democratic citizens with free will.

When considering free will, 21st century fiction tends to play with the multiverse. A century and a half ago, paths not taken found expression through twins in Mark Twain, and doubles in Charles Dickens. Zadie Smith’s excellent page-turning novel THE FRAUD (2023) features an ersatz heir among its Victorian cast of characters. Whether we agree with THE FRAUD’s characters or not, we always sympathize with them as they make their decisions, surrounding the book’s titular cypher.

IN THE CAFÉ OF LOST YOUTH (2006, translation 2016), one particular cypher captures the attention of the other patrons. They alternate narration in Patrick Modiano’s slim gem. One narrator composes odd catalogues of his fellow café visitors. Another narrator, an outsider, sees the café denizens better than they see themselves… and declines to intervene, favoring a strange code of honor. This touching multivocal novel’s conclusion should have been as obvious as a locomotive, but I never saw it coming.

We all know how American Apparel ends—not with a bang, but with a whimper. Kate Flannery’s STRIP TEES: A MEMOIR OF MILLENNIAL LOS ANGELES (2023) fills in the shortages between chambray shirtsleeves, the places behind white piping, the blanks betwixt the bodysuits. It stands out as the more guilty pleasure of two at fine cult-escape books out this year, the more mature pleasure being FORAGER: FIELD NOTES OF SURVIVING A FAMILY CULT by Michelle Dowd (2023). Oh, Los Angeles.

And oh, Beverly Hills. There, Phil Spector kept Ronnie of the Ronettes quite literally at gunpoint until her own barefoot escape from the mansion with an empty gold coffin in its basement. Phil and other predictably awful dudes thankfully cede center stage to the women and girls of the ‘60s girl groups in Flam and Leibowitz’s easy-reading oral history, BUT WILL YOU LOVE ME TOMORROW? (2023).

While the pre-Beatles girl groups were busting into US radio, Michel Legrand was composing tunes for the eternally watchable A WOMAN IS A WOMAN (1961). His commitment to artifice continued with THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1964), which was shown on a few big screens last year, the better to abolish the thought of all dour earth tones, grays and browns, and blahs.

Grays, blacks, and slightly lighter greys pervade PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS (1961), an ocean or two away from Cherbourg. Shōhei Imamura’s heartwarming and heartbreaking masterpiece deserves a screen like that big U2 McCube in Las Vegas. Can we pretend it debuted in 1963, and re-release it for its faux-60th anniversary? Just spit-balling here.

The 60th anniversary release of MY VERY OWN SPECIAL PARTICULAR PRIVATE AND PERSONAL CAT (1963) is its own miracle of a children’s book, an existentialist self-help book about boundaries as imagined by Gertrude Stein. The title hints at its characteristic cadence, which it carries throughout, like a signature scent.

Nineteen sixty-three’s style can’t be said to pervade PG Wodehouse’s release of that year, STIFF UPPER LIP, JEEVES (1963), which reads no different than the first dozen Wooster and Jeeves books, the first of which he published in 1919. Wodehouse reportedly had the same English teacher at Dulworth school as Raymond Chandler, whose classic noir THE LONG GOODBYE (1953) hardly aged a day between its composition and Robert Altman’s 1973 liquor-soaked adaptation.

Liquor-soaked poetry doesn’t get much higher than HIGH WINDOWS (1973). Altman’s Los Angeles looks more colorful, seedy, and sexy than Philip Larkin’s desultory hamlet of Hull, but Larkin certainly has more rhymes:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:

The sun-comprehending glass,

And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows

Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

(Larkin defaced his own his first draft as soon as he finished it, replacing “is endless” with “fucking piss,” which still rhymes, at least.

As sad as it is to consider liquor-logged Larkin battering his body with booze and treating other people no better, it’s a little late to call him up and ask him to change. The tension between creator and created has surely been around since the first blind warmongering misogynist storyteller, but Claire Dederer may have added something genuinely worthwhile to the discussion with MONSTERS: A FAN’S DILEMMA (2023). She declines to hide behind academic jargon or politics of the moment. One gets the sense that she’s holding art, ideas, and feelings up in the light, examining them, then changing the angle and inspecting again.

Dederer herself appears in MONSTERS as a whiskey-imbibing character, just as Lauren Oyler appears in her brilliant HARPERS cover story, “I Really Didn’t Want to Go: On the Goop Cruise” (2023). Narrative journos have self-descried since at least Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” so there’s nothing new here. That said, there’s something different when the auto-portrayed author makes comic books. Alison Bechdel serves as her own protagonist in ARE YOU MY MOTHER? (2013). She adroitly shifts POV and gaze in service of her self-examination. Nothing stops the pages from turning, and even though nothing happens, the story rumbles downhill, like dozen magic eight-balls on a steep slope.

Somewhat broader strokes and more conventional angles depict Kate Beaton in her graphic memoir, DUCKS: TWO YEARS IN THE OIL SANDS (2022). Apparently, there were some awards that went to other books last year. This is a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a miscarriage of justice. Whatever it was, Ducks was better. And that includes the Argentine men’s World Cup team.

Equally divisive opinions spread like soft milk across the pages of the newly resurrected quarterly BOOKFORUM, (FALL 2023, #30.2). It boasts Carl Wilson on Sly Stone’s memoir, Hanif Abdurraqib on the Lou Reed bio, and pieces on both Julia Fox and Janet Malcolm. Not bad for ten bucks—and yet there were only 6,098 printed. Miss out at your own intellectual impoverishment.

Among the contentious (not to say unpopular) opinions absent from those BOOKFORUM articles, here’s a big one: SHALL WE DANCE (1936) and FOLLOW THE FLEET (1937) may be just as smile-inducing as SWING TIME (1936), the sole Astaire / Rogers film in Criterion’s stable. Remember, you read it here first, where the takes are as hot as a Prius’ catalytic converter. Having dropped that bomb, it’s time to take the advice of Barbara Stanwyck in BALL OF FIRE (1941): “Scrow, scram, scraw: the complete conjugation!”

Considered:

Ball of Fire, feat. Barbara Stanwyck. RKO, 1941.

Barbie, dir. Greta Gerwig. Warner Bros, 2023.

Josie and the Pussycats, dir. Deborah Kaplan. Universal, 2001.

The Lady Eve, feat. Barbara Stanwyck. Paramount, 1941.

A House and Its Head, by Ivy Compton-Burnett. NYRB, 2021 (1935).

Tiny Imperfections, by Asha Youmans and Alli Frank. G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2020.

Diner: Day for Night, by Tarlow, Gillard, Fidanza, and Johnson. Ten Speed Press, 2023.

Roaming, by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki. Drawn and Quarterly, 2023.

Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet lehdet), dir. Aki Kaurismäki. Bufo, 2023.

The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar, dir. Wes Anderson. Indian Paintbrush, 2023.

Trouble in Paradise, dir. Ernst Lubitsch. Paramount, 1932.

We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, by Fintan O’Toole. Liveright, 2022.

California Against the Sea: Visions for our Vanishing Coastline, by Rosanna Xia. Heyday, 2023.

The Fraud, by Zadie Smith. Penguin, 2023.

In the Café of Lost Youth, by Patrick Modiano, trans. Chris Clarke. NYRB, 2016 (2006).

Strip Tees: A Memoir of Millennial Los Angeles, by Kate Flannery. Holt, 2023.

Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult, by Michelle Dowd. Algonquin, 2023.

But Will You Love Me Tomorrow? An Oral History of the ’60s Girl Groups, by Flam and Liebowitz. Hachette, 2023.

A Woman is A Woman (Une Femme est Une Femme), music Michel Legrand. Euro International, 1961.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg), music Michel Legrand. Parc, 1964.

Pigs and Battleships (豚と軍艦, Buta to Gunkan), dir. Shōhei Imamura. Nikkatsu, 1961.

My Very Own Special Particular Private and Personal Cat, by Sandol Stoddard Warburg, illus. Remy Charlip. Enchanted Lion, 2023 (1963).

Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, by PG Wodehouse. Scribner, 2000 (1963).

The Long Goodbye, dir. Robert Altman. United Artists, 1973.

High Windows, by Philip Larkin. Faber, 2015 (1973).

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, by Clare Dederer. Knopf, 2023.

“I Really Didn’t Want to Go: On the Goop Cruise,” by Lauren Oyler. Harper’s, May 2023.

“Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” by Gay Talese. Esquire, April 1966.

Are You My Mother?, by Alison Bechdel. Mariner, 2013.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, by Kate Beaton. Drawn and Quarterly, 2022.

Bookforum, published by 1865 Publications. 2023.

Shall We Dance, feat. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers. RKO, 1937.

Follow the Fleet, feat. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers. RKO, 1936.

Swing Time, feat. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers. RKO, 1936.

Keeping Records

1.

In Warrior Two position (are yoga postures capitalized?), I heard the teacher intone, “Some of us are always reaching toward the future; some of us… lean back into the past,” and I thought, “that second one–that’s me!”

2.

While we stretched, the voice continued, “Does anyone know… what’s special about… today?” And I knew the answer, because as soon as class ended, I was headed out to get in line for Record Store Day. (The teacher said something about the seasons and stars.)

3.

Record Store Day is every day for some of us. Especially those of us who lean backward. There are also denim collectors, voice-mail savers, antiquarians, scrapbookers, and yearbook keepers.

4.

Today marks two months since my dad’s death, and I still have this lovely white retail-style paper bag, with strong twine handles, featuring the blue insignia of the University of California San Diego Medical Center. For a while it held his paperwork. Then I stuck the box with my dad’s ashes in it, then I filled it with other papers–things I wanted to bring to his memorial. Now it’s holding recycling. More paper.

5.

Paper. Past. Papa. Passed. Paper. Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow, by the Rivingtons (1962, Liberty / EMI).

6.

I framed seventeen things, and stuck them up on walls. It didn’t make a dent in the piles of paper. At least the paper is vertical, so I actually have files, not piles, of paper. Like spine-out books and sideways-standing records. On Record Store Day, while driving home, I got paranoid about getting pulled over. My brain and body chemicals were so wired and wild, I forgot I wasn't driving on drugs.

7.

But that’s combining the consumer buzz with leaning back into the past. Forget records. What about the baby playing peek-a-boo, delighted to re-find the world as it was? Or the sleeper’s astral plane populated by the recent dead? I proudly threw my hospital parking receipt in my recycling bag. “There’s no reason to keep THAT,” I thought. But the hospital recycling bag outsmarted me. It’s still over there, between the records and the trash.

KEEPING RECORDS / SEVEN CENTS AUGUST 2023

Comics & Criterion

Seven Cents, March 2023

1. Oh, hello! I didn’t see you coming. But you know what they say: “If crime showed on a man’s face, there wouldn’t be any mirrors.”

2. At least, that’s what one character says in “We’re No Angels.” It’s a movie with Humphry Bogart and Peter Ustinov, and that lovely line is uttered by neither of them. Tough luck, boys.

3. David Mamet didn’t keep that dialogue for his 1989 film by the same name, in which Robert de Niro and Sean Penn “pass themselves off as priests and pass by the police”...

4. …into “the safety of Canada.” Well, it’s no “Canadian Bacon.” Or is it? Speaking of faux-philosophical films streaming on Criterion (I watch during my semi-stretching quasi-yoga pseudo-sessions before breakfast), consider this gem from Billy Wilder’s “Ball of Fire”:

5. Scene: Aged medical professor inspects Barbara Stanwick’s throat, notes “slight rosiness.” She replies, “‘slight rosiness?’ It’s as red as The Daily Worker and just as sore!”

6. Well, maybe you had to be there. And by “there,” I mean reading “Mary Worth” in the Sunday comics. “Mary Worth” (weekly since 1938) remains the longest-running soap opera comic, far outlasting my favorite, “Apartment 3G.” I miss those three sassy and stylish young roomies in their big city apartment. It was like “Friends” without the boys, as drawn by Patrick Nagel.

7. Only titular heroine Mary Worth would say, in full color, on the Sunday Comics page of the San Diego Union Tribune, in 2022: “The great theologian St. Thomas Aquinas defines love as ‘the choice to will the good of the other.’” So give the old gal some credit.

xo MHH

Seven Cents: January, 2023

Seven Cents

Hello Beautiful Human People,

1

Did you remember to vote? I see by this month’s American Rifleman magazine (the paper kind) that NRA Board elections are happening! The Nominating Committee nominated 30 members this year… but “Voting members may vote for no more than 25.” So for five of you all, tough tuchus.

2.

One NRA Director candidate statement: “Helped wife form G.R.I.T.S. (Girls Really Into Shooting) chapter.” To be fair, there are only 19 local chapters, so maybe this was a bigger achievement than… well, advancing from the nominated group onto the board.

3.

My $26-per-year soccer fan club–the umbrella organization for the Rose City Riveters and Portland Timbers Army–is holding elections, too. Maybe it would help if one of the candidates was the “Producer and host of REALIZE Your Concealed Carry Fashion.” But then you would have to explain why REALIZE is all caps. Is it an acronym? Initialism? What?

4.

Both of those candidate lists came metaphorically closely on the analogous heels of Lunar New Year, when we freelance journalists must submit all lists for “last year” (or “pasintjare” as we say in Esperanto). So: My top seven list includes the following lists:

5.

1) Top Seven magazines to which I subscribe. 2) Top Seven books I read last year that you can’t buy at the bookstore where I work. 3) Top Seven astrological signs for which I wrote horoscopes several years ago. 4) Top Seven Esperanto grammar rules. 5) Top Seven movies I re-watched on the Criterion Channel while doing half-assed pseudo-yoga. 6) Top Seven movies I watched for the first time while doing half-assed pseudo-yoga. 7) Top seven people who died last year to whom I feel a totally unreasonable connection.

6.

Esperanto pronouns–like the non-gendered third-person ĝi (say it however you want; it’s Esperanto!)--fall into grammar rule five. Esperanto has a lot fewer rules than most languages–only about sixteen–so if Number Twelve* doesn’t make the list, tough tuchus! (*Rule 12: There is no double negative.)

7.

The Esperanto discussion is… a lot of weirdos trying to be reasonable. Even the NRA nominating committee offers one moderate among thirty: “Promote election / retention of pro-gun candidates from BOTH major parties.” Ain’t no way I’m not gonna rock the vote for that guy!* (*Again: there is no double negative. Thank you, friends!)

love to you,

Matthew Hattie Hein

rhymes with consign

Seven Cents: December, 2022

Seven Cents

Hello, Beautiful Human People,

1.

Did you sneak away last year? We mean figuratively about the sneaking part. But if you visited a vacation rental or family house, please confirm or deny: those places have the best bookshelves.

-A fading old photo book of the general area.

-A charity compilation of recipes from local restaurants.

-A combination of photos and recipes, called “A Taste for the Eyes” or “A Lens on the Landing.” “Life… al fresco!” “La Vida Aloha.” “Wild Flavors.” “Good Meal Hunting”

(Reader suggestions are respectfully solicited.)

2.

Beyond the books stocked by the joint’s owners, what paperbacks have previous lodgers added to the shelf? A “Gone Girl” psychological thriller, or a “Cat Who Caught a Clue” Christmas cozy by a Dean writing as a Miranda? Will it be Tom Clancy, or Ken Follett?

If it hadn’t been for this paradox of limited choice (we call it a “spare-adox”), the chuckle-worthy eco-pulp of Carl Hiaasen might never have crossed our eye sockets one fine winter vacation years ago.

3.

Of course, there’s a fine line between spare-adox and Russian Roulette. To wit, James Patterson. The Ear Read This podcasters concocted a game suited to Patterson’s notoriously short chapters and blank prose. You’ll need a) at least two adults, b) a way to randomly pick numbers between one and one hundred, and… oh yeah, c) a Patterson.

a) Pick a number—you’re going to read the Patterson novel in random order. b) Read the that number chapter aloud (most are only a couple pages). c) Summarize the chapter in a few words, and write those words down next to the chapter number on your doc (or notebook). d) Compile a couple pages that clearly tell the tale of the Patterson, out of order. e) Cut-and-paste your one-sentence chapter summaries, so they’re in the correct order. f) Re-tell the novel by reading through your one-sentence summaries!

4.

More high-minded literary podcasts certainly exist. Consider the vintage audio of Jack Keroac clinking his glass while beguilingly recounting the tale of the Buddha’s awakening from The Paris Review.

The journal / tote bag / institution / podcast that is the mighty Paris Review also offers a fresh recording of Jessica Hecht dramatizing Joan Didion’s 1978 “Art of Fiction,” if that’s your idea of a good time. (It is.)

5.

“Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.”

When they’re not discussing the meaning of Marxian wisdom like that, the Marx Brothers Council podcast introduces heroes like educator Hannah Mira, who shows classic movies to her students in juvenile prison. Mira makes a great case for her curriculum’s success in a magical hour of audio inspiration.

6.

The Marx Brothers mirror scene from Duck Soup (1933) takes three minutes. Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin do it in half that time at the peak of Big Business (1988). Both films use only ambient sound for the old Vaudeville routine, resulting in strangely silent stretches during otherwise verbally frantic comedies.

Or, as one scholar has asked, regarding that mirror scene, “how can his self be materially located in a place different from the psycho-physical origins of the knowledge of that self?”

7.

How true! Probably! Every time we read that, we think we might understand it. But no.

Next time we’re on vacation, and there’s no good trash—no tattered Carl Hiassen or big World War history book—we can just keep thinking about “the psycho-physical origins of the knowledge of that self,” until you drop us a little line. Please. The sooner the better.

Love to you,

Matthew Hein

rhymes with swine