I read this book because of a boy - I am willing to admit that. His name is John and we have been on a couple of dates, and I am in*contains spoilers*
I read this book because of a boy - I am willing to admit that. His name is John and we have been on a couple of dates, and I am in that all-too-familiar no-man's-land of not-knowing. He mentioned that this was his favorite book of John Green's and so I bought it and told him I was reading it, and the response I got was "such a good book!" - an hour and 51 minutes after. It will seem a little irrelevant at first, but I promise I will get to my point if you have any patience for it. I can't say you'll be rewarded, but for lack of keeping a diary and for the amiable anonymity of the GoodReads population (save for a small number of my friends, family, and acquaintances on here), this is the closest I will ever get to revealing all about what is presently on my mind.
John and I met for our first date on August 7 (his 24th birthday, I am noting). For a while, until I checked on it, I thought this might have been the selfsame date of coincidental recurrence in The Good Soldier though I was sorry to discover it was three days too late. Having now lost my consolation of this being "the saddest story" - which of course it is not, and has not even decided if it is tragedy or comedy yet, I am stuck in the doldrums of incomplete knowledge. Our first date went well, we have good chemistry though he is a touch quieter and I am, he came back to my apartment and we had a passionate first kiss. A week later (the following Friday) I drove up to Revere where he lives with his family, and we went out for dinner in Winthrop. Dinner was good, and after that we drove around for a bit, not knowing where to go, singing along to the radio and holding hands over the center console. Deciding on drinks at a place in Somerville, we went and had a margarita together. At points the conversation faltered, he checked his phone, I felt unsure, but the prevailing mood was a good one and we returned to my apartment to stay the night. I brought him home the following day. For me, texting has always come very naturally - I am an extrovert and I banter all day long. John texts me each day, around late-morning-early-afternoon, to say "hey" and ask "what's up" although his investment in my answers seems to be low. Our conversation falters along those lines and his responses space out interminably. Why initiate conversation if you don't extend it? I wonder to myself and to anyone else who will listen. Yesterday I told him I was reading Looking for Alaska - a book which by his own admission is one of his favorites (distantly to the Harry Potter series), and his tepid affirmations of it have left me increasingly uncertain of our prospects.
Looking for Alaska is ostensibly about snotty private school high schoolers, their antics and love affairs. Each character is a stereotype long played out by the Young Adult genre, and even before that - Pip and Estella could probably find small reflections of themselves in Pudge and Alaska. But what this book is really about is not-knowing, or worse yet the unknowable. While this is so openly addressed in relation to death and its mysteries, it is also applied to relationships between the living. Pudge will of course never discover how Alaska felt about him, because she is dead, there is no evidence of her feelings either way. Life is not a novel from the 1880's - woebegone women do not leave behind their revelatory diaries or letters, their mysteries die with them. But even should Alaska have lived - how well could Pudge have known her feelings? When we date, when we interact, we are constantly grappling with the questions of the unknown - tipping the scales of knowing vs unknowing with our pounds of flesh. Is it better to force a definitive "no" or battle on under the escutcheon of mystery? I am historically forceful in my self-destruction. I am candid and open about my feelings, and when my insecurities eat away at my defenses I put down my armor and force the question too soon - do you like me?
For this I am the butt of many jokes (primarily my own). I do not know how to date, I do not let my relationships gestate enough to have that answer of "yes" - I force a "no" because I cannot bear to be uncertain. And how many "nos" might have been avoided had I wrestled with the unknown? What advantage is knowledge if it makes you unhappy? If it reinforces your insecurities and lets you hide behind them? To love someone, you must love yourself enough to be vulnerable. I cannot say I love John - I barely know him. But I do like him.I enjoy getting to know him, I enjoy our talks. He is adorable in all of the ways I like most, he is sweet, he is kind. And in my proleptic imagination I can see us holding hands in apple orchards, and playing board games with my family, staying up late when it is raining to re-watch for the umpteenth time the Harry Potter series in marathon form, kissing goodbye once-twice-three times because it has gotten so hard to say goodbye. But this is not my reality and I don't know if it will be. How much do I like John as he is, versus how much I like the potential of what John could be? This is also a question pondered by Pudge in Looking for Alaska - did he love Alaska as she was, or as he selectively imagined her to be?
We are told repeatedly that Alaska loved to make herself a mystery. I wonder how many people think that about other people vs. how many people think that about themselves. Do I love to make myself a mystery? I would say definitely not, I am very candid and forthcoming about what I am thinking and how I feel. Yet a few men I have met have told me they think I am "complicated" and John admitted that he "couldn't classify me" (I thought am I a butterfly? must I be classified?). To the reader, Alaska is literally a mystery, because we view her only from Pudge's perspective - one which is amorous and often disputed by other characters as being biased. What is mysterious to me is why she is even remotely interested in Pudge? There are many stories told by gawky young men about their great sweeping love affairs with wild young women like Alaska Young. I can see the appeal of these unpredictable succubi but what allures them? What does Alaska see in Pudge? He is sweet but only in an adoring way. He is not brave, he has nothing in common with her personality or in her interests. Does she simply enjoy being adored? Is that her attraction? I believe we are most often attracted naturally to that which is most likely to destroy us, not what is most likely our savior. In the end, Pudge's passive enabling does contribute to her destruction, and that is perhaps the greatest tragedy for Pudge - and he is also somewhat destroyed by it. He is not destroyed by Alaska's caprice but by his own passivity. Yet in his destruction, he is reborn under the banner of his own delusions. By letting Alaska drive off to her death, he immortalizes her in a moment when she was most unknowable - that moment when your affection seems to be reciprocated but the sources are uncertain, and so are the consequences. After John stayed the night, I was also placed in that territory of uncertainty, and for the moment I remain there. Unless he dies before I see him again, it is unlikely that he will be rewarded with any kind of immortality for me - I may not know for a week or more, but I will eventually know if his interest in me has endured or if it has begun to die out. I will know with certainty. But Pudge will not - and so for him Truth is not Beauty, Beauty not Truth, as Keats would have us believe. Rather, Beauty is the opposite of truth - not falsehood but Unknowing, something separate from verity completely. Alaska will remain a beautiful question mark forever. He may forget her in pieces, but enigmas die hard, and when the puzzle-pieces of her face, he hair, her vanilla and cigarette scent, and the dying Strawberry wine kiss all fade and recede in his memory, it is certain that the labyrinth which she has left for him will remain a beautiful artwork in his brain forever, until he heads off towards his final Great Perhaps....more
Oh the places I've gone! And places I'll go! Regrets I have none, where next I don't know. [image] New England is home and it always has been. But always yeaOh the places I've gone! And places I'll go! Regrets I have none, where next I don't know. [image] New England is home and it always has been. But always yearned to roam or move, but how? when?
I went, two weeks old, To become a Deutschlander in a country so olde, but I didn't remain there. [image] Then I went at eighteen to see the rising red sun The farthest I've ever been, 'cross Pacific Ocean. [image] To Prague and Berlin And the big Zurichsee, More places I've "been", Which I want to make "be." [image] Off to the Paris, Nice too, touring beautiful France (Tour Eiffel and Coast Blue), starts a Gallic romance. [image] Soon I left from the Seine, to see Portugal and Spain, Through that blissful pain of traveling by train. [image] To the River Bosphorous, and Cappadoccian valley Turkey was no loss for us, on our Mediterranean sally. [image] Would that I could I'd take out a lease and move for good to the islands of Greece. [image] In the island of Lief with mounts and hot springs, I found Nordic relief from modern worryings. [image] [image] To safaris and beaches of Tanzania and Kenya. These East African reaches are a 10/10, yea. [image] Where will I go next? There's no way to know! I need no pretext for the places I go!
If you give a mouse a cookie is the story of the perversity of desire, and more particularly the stunted pleasures of the bourgeoisie. Written by the If you give a mouse a cookie is the story of the perversity of desire, and more particularly the stunted pleasures of the bourgeoisie. Written by the exquisite Laura Numeroff, in what can only be assumed was a violent passion for sterile aloofness from the society which she condemned, and a lust for concision which would socialize her treatise against the deadening wants, making it accessible to the masses. I can imagine her, unbathed, ignorant of her own hunger and thirst, cutting every insignificant word in a Flaubertian frenzy for le mot juste.
The titular mouse is a scathing manifestation of our ruling, yet tirelessly servile, middle class – his small figure manifests the smallness of our self-worth, and the relative largesse of our smallest desires. Every visible aspect of the overall-clad hero hearkens us to the plight of the middle class in the late twentieth century. The mouse, like man, is easily won over to new “needs” – endlessly trying to fill the vacancy of his own heart, deadened by the loss of illusion, by the evaporation of virtue, and the brutal ennui of routine. But as the significantly unnamed mouse usurps his pleasures and whims from his remote human benefactors, we too usurp our desires. Whether from the conspicuous consumption of the upper classes, from the romantic visions of novels and television programming, or from the simple white noise of broadcast advertising, which we subconsciously mold into our own desires – desires for things which we do not want. René Girard identifies this parallel with chilling accuracy to our present condition: "The distance between Don Quixote and the petty bourgeois victim of advertising is not so great as romanticism would have us believe.” It is easy to replace “bourgeois victim” with our murine hero, raising to idolatry his search for false desires, which leads to a parodically circuitous odyssey of “want.” Numeroff’s story is one of deceptive simplicity, but with a jarring impact. In less than three-hundred words, she is captures the movement of emotion of her literary predecessors, primarily of French origin, though also hearkening back to the Homeric epics. Proust, James, Balzac, Dickens are among Numeroff’s literary forefathers, and her precision for language shows a heavy influence of Flaubert, contemporarily manifest in the logical exactitude of Truman Capote and Ernest Hemingway. Take or example the opening sequence:
If you give a mouse a cookie, He’s going to ask for a glass of milk. When you give him the milk, he’ll probably ask you for a straw. When he’s finished, he’ll ask for a napkin. Then he will want to look in a mirror to make sure he doesn’t have a milk mustache.
Immediately we are drawn into a contained cosmos of desire – which is postulated in a hypothetical, though illustrated in an ever-present reality. While we are kept somewhat distanced from our mouselike counterpart by the conditional, we are drawn in by the seeming reality of the action, the omniscience of the narrator, an almost godly knowing, reminds us of a master Chess player, foreseeing the hero’s moves, up to his ultimate epiphany, from the first line. We are acquainted with the mouse with such immediacy, we feel we know him, we feel as though he is a part of us, or perhaps more than we are – despite his size. Though we are removed from the hero’s consciousness, we feel he is both na?ve of his circuitous desires, but also disturbingly manipulative. This contradiction, this na?vete matched with perturbing self-possession, concerns the reader – how aware am I of my own desires? We are moved, our uncertainty of the hero’s self-awareness is never satisfied. We observe the seeming na?vete and it enlightens us to our own short commings of self-awareness. “To see someone who does not see is the best way to be intensely aware of what he does not see” argued Barthes, and it is precisely the salient power of If you give a mouse a cookie.
The godless landscape of If you give a mouse a cookie is one marked by a total secularization of morality and gratification. The parallels to our own secular society, in which we are diminished to figurative animals - beasts of pure will driven in the vain effort for satiety of our animalistic desires. Instead of a God, the world within the story is governed by a maternalistic hand - more reminiscent of Neo-Marxian doctrine of entitlement than it is to the classical Judeo-Chrisitan rule of centuries past. Instead of being ruled by virtue, or protagonist is ruled by the ever-demanding "want!" of his body. Cookies, milk, soft bedding, but no time for self reflection, no orison nor even secular gratitude is shared by our profane hero. We compare the mouse's struggle for "want" to the Defoe's struggle for need in Robinson Crusoe, and we are dismayed at the descent from virtue of our present day society, in which our vices and excesses have supplanted our virtues and reservations.
In his gustatory pursuits, we observe his coy glances, his polite demeanor, but ultimately his ingratitude. And what disturbs us as the reader is his humanlike disposition, his canny vanity, his concern with appearances and hygienic preoccupations, and his servility to routine. His look into the pierglass is so human that one expects to see our diminutive friend the next time we check for our own milk-mustaches – the parodic symbol of self-indulgence and minor fall from poise. The vanity implicit in our héros de rongeurs is startling parallel to our own fall from grace, manifest in Milton's Paradise Lost. Despite his many pleasures, his many "wants" they are startlingly mundane to us, they are self-serving but unambitious. He foregoes the search for self-discovery, for transcendent pleasure, for the pleasures of immediacy, which feed his vanity and his comfort. His look into the mirror reveals to us a world of pleasures forgone, given up, in the vain restraints of society, with which he is disturbingly complicit. His concern for his milk-mustache, his imagined need for a haircut - a purely imaginary need for our rodent friend, one which is purely vain and removed from true necessity, disturbs us, but warms us to him. He is made more human to us, but that is precisely the element which disturbs us and makes us question our own vain pursuits.
But our hero’s desires are manifold. What begins as a novel of unhealthy appetite of necessity and hunger, become a hunger for a higher appetite: the hunger for the aesthetic.
He’ll probably ask you to read him a story. So you’ll read him one from one of your books, and he’ll ask to see the pictures. When he looks at the pictures, he’ll get so excited he’ll want to draw one of his own. He’ll ask for paper and crayons.
What began as low hierarchical needs (according to Maszlow), rises with expediency to needs of self-realization in his pursuit for artistic expression. This passage is the greatest drop of the mask of our narrator revealing her greater purpose: to expose the mimetic nature of our deepest desires. Upon hearing the story, which we imagine is the very story we are reading – a classical representation of the meta-literary play often attributed to post-modern writers, and seeing the illustrations, he is moved by a previously unknown desire. Due to the constrained world in which the narrative takes place –a small house, presumably in the suburbs, a set-manifestation of the class so brutally satirized – we must consider this desire within the constraint of the story. What moves our hero to request a bedtime story? We can only assume it is a routine he has usurped from his benefactors, a further emulation of their posh lives which they take for granted. The story is so moving to the mouse that he is immediately affected. What author can claim artistic impulse in a void? Certainly no contemporary author is without his or her literary influences. Literature too is circuitous in its search for the truth: every author seeks the “answers” behind his characters, behind his plot, behind the meaning of his life’s work, but each author usurps his questions from his literary forefathers (or foremothers). Where is literature without Homer? Without Sophocles or Plato, Plutarch? The question we are never answered is what moved the unnamed author of the unknown bedtime story to write it? We know only that our bourgeois protagonist seeks emulation of that art.
If you give a mouse a cookie ends with an almost Borgesian nihilism: “ Looking at the refrigerator will remind him that he’s thirsty so…he’ll ask for a glass of milk. And chances are if he asks for a glass of milk, he’s going to want a cookie to go with it.” Thus desire begets desire, begets desire – the search for fulfillment is endless, and our hero is left always hungry for something new, but can never identify what that is. We are left haunted by this “children’s” story, but the foolishness of the petite protagonist, who wants big things – but those “big things” seem very small to us. It makes the reader turn in upon himself/herself and wonder: what do I want? And what is the ultimate path of my “wants”? Can I ever be fulfilled or am I resigned to the mazy route of routine-desire?
Imagine waking up to realize the fruition of your ultimate desire is only the begetting of more desires? Desires of things which you only believe that you want? Chilling....more
So when I added this, I vaguely recalled the title, and I swear, I have definitely read it, but what I thought it was about was a boy being stuck undeSo when I added this, I vaguely recalled the title, and I swear, I have definitely read it, but what I thought it was about was a boy being stuck under the snow following an avalanche (it turns out the book I was thinking of is apty named Avalanche by Arthur Roth) but anyway, that's not what it is about, and I really don't remember this book at all.
Hatchet I definitely read in middle school at the instruction of my librarian (we had a sort of once-weekly class in the library to introduce us to the already anachronistic card catalog, and maybe to encourage us to read). It strikes me now as one of those "boy books" and was sort of offered to me as an alternative to Babysitters' Club or Nancy Drew, maybe. It's strange now, because it undervalues literature very much to say that some is suited to boys, and others to girls (which is to say nothing of our society's pathetic need to classify and categorize). Based on my vague and unreliable memory (and the description gleaned from amazon), here are the reasons why you should have your son, nephew, homeless male orphan read Hatchet:
1) It is the story about a boy named Brian. Brian is a great boy name (maybe you've considered it for your tot?), and everything he does (probably) exudes the same brand of outdoorsy masculinity that you want your little Timmy, Tommy or Teddy to adopt as an adolescent and adult. 2) It takes place outside. What better way to encourage kids to go outside than to have them sit inside and read a book about a boy who is outside? 3) There is a hatchet, presumably. Whether little Johnny has that lumberjack vibe, or that investment banker gone Sarsgaard-murder-house vibe, certainly it will be important to introduce them to the concept of the hatchet. A very useful tool that almost no one uses, as far as I know. 4) The plot evidently features a plane crash, wherein Brian must be the lone survivor. Very likely to happen. Also, surely all the characters in this book are male, what better way to introduce your young one to a realistic view of the world than to immerse them in world dominated completely by a young boy and some owls, or something. (also see: Lord of the Flies) 5. This 20th anniversary edition features a great commentary by the author, Gary Paulson. Even though your little brat probably won't read this (why would he?), it will give his ego the small boost for the illusion of having read a book a little longer than he actually did). 6. This is the first installation of a SAGA. For one, "saga" is reminiscent to me of the Nordic mythos, which seems to be the most supporting of the idealized male image. It also means there are multiple volumes following our intrepid Brian. What more could you want? Why invest in Boy Scouts when you could drop a pile of Brian books in your kid's lap and turn him into a man, while saving all that time and money?
In 2015 I'm really going to give up sweets. Forever. I just want to be an 8% body-fat Adonis-built man, and I can't be that if I eat chocolate in the In 2015 I'm really going to give up sweets. Forever. I just want to be an 8% body-fat Adonis-built man, and I can't be that if I eat chocolate in the extreme and life-threatening degree that I currently do. I'm like Augustus Gloop, but obviously not nearly that level of obese. But I am that fat on the inside.
Can you imagine if this book was written in 2014? All the fat-shaming of poor Augustus Gloop! He's really the hero of this story, living out his life of abject ugliness on the express track direct to Type II Diabetes. You practically can't mention healthy eating without eliciting some diatribe about: a) the various virtues and villainies of fad diets, b) the cure-all powers of kale, c) the importance of exercise, but ultimately the super-importance of diet, d) the you-go-girl attitude of don't-fat-shame-ers warning you that you're buying into our superficial culture obsessed with image and that you are inherently self-centered and/or biologically predestined in a way other people weren't, etc. Little do these puritans know, that I don't care a hair about any of that shit, I just want to look good!
What's wrong with wanting to look good, anyway? People have been wanting to look certain ways for as long as humankind has existed! Maybe Augustus grew up and into his body and became a bodybuilder or something, HOW ARE WE TO KNOW!? Maybe he was a late bloomer and rebelled against his childhood gluttony. Unfortunately for us readers we don't get that story, the real heart-warming fat-to-fitness story. Instead we get this crapload about goody-two-shoes Charlie inheriting some pedophile's chocolate conglomerate which lives off of the free-exploited labor of midgets (presumably Pacific-islander?). What a disgusting tale of consumerist excesses....more
Down a rabbit-hole our heroine screamed, For nothing was what it first seemed! Our gentle jeune fille, Alice, Met both with games and malice, But at last,Down a rabbit-hole our heroine screamed, For nothing was what it first seemed! Our gentle jeune fille, Alice, Met both with games and malice, But at last, awoke and saw it all was dreamed....more
Reading "grown-up" literature is excavating the human soul, the adult soul: a mangled mess of contradictions and self-deceptions, screwy motives and tReading "grown-up" literature is excavating the human soul, the adult soul: a mangled mess of contradictions and self-deceptions, screwy motives and the odd self-adherent logic of artistic creation. But Literature (capital ell) is a pyrrhic battle between message and evasion: one must avoid moralizing outright, must avoid overt allegory, but must never be too subtle, too veiled, lest you be resigned to snobby undergrabs and many rubbish bins. The Phantom Tollbooth is a strange beast: decidedly accessible to children, but remains lovable to adults. It's championing of the struggle against moral short-cuts, boredom, and mental waste is timeless, ageless, and remains prescient, even to me: a grown person 52 years after it's publication!
My grandmother has always said: "only boring people get bored" - I am guilty of sometimes serving this packaged wit cold when a friend laments "I'm bored!" but I think forcefully throwing this book at them would be a better remedy. What is signifed in my grandmother's aphorism is that interested people are interesting, and more importantly are never idle. My family (paternal side) is a hard-working, conservative, New Englander family: we don't watch much television, we read lots of books, we listen to NPR and read the Wall Street Journal, we somewhat self-indulgently talk about the cultural decline in literacy and how we are not a part of it. But the story of Milo is one which is both entertaining, lovable, but also cautionary. By no means is Milo a bad child, a dull idler, but rather he has not found passion yet. He is bored because his urban living, his deadening routine has stayed access to the bliss of potentiality.
The only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that's hardly worth the effort.
We are plagued, as a modern, urban society by the two-headed monster of routine. Routine comforts us, it gives us an escape into the dull and Terrible Trivium: the small tasks which comfort us and distract us from important, difficult work and choices. Our society is filled with spineless and indecisive people (the Gelatinous Giant) and those who feed us half-truths, who coddle us into a mire, into a trap (Monster of Insincerity): they are not villains, and these flaws do not define all people, but are characteristic in turn. Our weaknesses, our daemons, are our horrible defenses, our cozy citadels in the mountains of Ignorance. It is not the absence of bad habits (hours of dull television, bad reading or no reading) that marks an individual's decline, but rather the presence, the support, of our defenses. The demons of the mountains of Ignorance are impotent without our compliance, they feed on our weakness for what is easy. If we allow the glittering sovereigns of Rhyme and Reason to go fugitive in their empyrean prison, we lose our grip on true happiness, we become boring, we become easily bored.
Thankfully, there is nothing boring in The Phantom Tollbooth: its play with language is unrivaled certainly in children/young-adult literature, and rivals even the masters of play (Joyce, Nabokov, etc) in the grander schema. With a dual reverence for words and numbers, rhyme and reason, and a prevailing apotheosis of time, beyond the value of currency: something never to be wasted, Juster champions all forms of mental activity and cerebral play. I can imagine no better way to introduce a bored student, particularly one ahead of his class, to the ever-infinite vistas of imagination and invention than to hand him or her this book.
“It has been a long trip," said Milo, climbing onto the couch where the princesses sat; "but we would have been here much sooner if I hadn't made so many mistakes. I'm afraid it's all my fault."
"You must never feel badly about making mistakes," explained Reason quietly, "as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.”
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