So yeah. I still haven't finished This Is Your Brain on Music, and don't even talk to me about Virginia Woolf. She is still not a presence in my life, and we're all just going to have to make our peace with that.
But don't get me wrong, I've been reading. I've been reading up a storm... if you consider reading Take the Cannoli three times in a month to be 'a storm.' That's not all I've read, I hasten to add: I also got through Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans (the McSweeney's Press humour collection, which was awesome), as well as Nick Hornby's Shakespeare Wrote for Money (laugh-out-loud-to-myself-on-the-Red-Line funny). But Take the Cannoli and Assassination Vacation brought me back to reading in a big way.
All of you who know me (which, let's face it, is all of you) will be familiar with the particular brand of ish that I went through in the last several months. It hasn't been good, and there were a million and one ways that it reverberated through my life. But one of the most troubling, to me, was that I found it really hard to read. Reading has always been my #1 displacement activity: it's what I do when I'm sad, or fretful, or bored, to make me feel happy and relaxed and entertained. I get sucked into books to the exclusion of pretty much everything else around me; when I go to someone's house for the first time, I make a beeline for the bookshelf; I get twitchy fingers when I'm deeply into a book and have to put it down. I've been like this for as long as I can remember. It's what I am.
So you can understand, then, why it was so unsettling for me to find myself unable to focus on print for more than a couple of minutes at a time. I felt like (still yet another) piece of me had been suddenly and inexplicably ripped away, and I didn't know what to do about it. I kept trying to read, retreating to old favourites like Douglas Adams and [heart] Nick Earls [heart], but I'd struggle. The only things that seemed to hold my attention were Jacob's 'Gossip Girl' recaps from Television without Pity, but as awesome as they are (and they are - go, run, read them now. I''ll wait), they didn't fill the hole that losing my book love had created.
This all changed when I picked up Take the Cannoli. To be fair, the shift had started with Hornby's Shakespeare, but as that's a collection of columns, I still didn't get the feeling I was reading a single-entity book. Take the Cannoli, while also a collection of essays, felt much more book-like to me, and I suddenly felt on much more solid ground: I was excited and moved, I laughed and cried, and I tore through it while desperately not wanting it to end. All of this was heightened when I went on to Assassination Vacation, her story of touring sites related to the assassinations of U.S. Presidents Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley: I actually fell asleep hugging the book to my chest, and not because I had dozed off while reading it.
I like my room tidy. This may come as a shock to anyone who has lived with me, but it's true: my decorating inclinations lean more toward minimalism than any other aesthetic; unfortunately, I also have an abiding devotion to books, stuffed animals, and Japanese kitsch, and this plays hell with my attempts at clean lines. So I live with the conflict, mostly comfortably. At the moment, this means that my books are migrating from my bookcase downstairs to my bedroom upstairs at an alarming rate. Most of them end up on, in or beside my bed, even if I'm not reading them right that second. I like having them close to me, falling asleep with them and waking up with them and knowing that they're there whenever I need them. It's about way more than the text; it's their feel and smell and size and shape that I find comforting. It's about the pages I fold down so I can find favourite lines quickly. It's about the stains on the pages from sloppy laksa or suntan lotion, the sand between the pages and the weird water-marks from that time I dropped it in the bath. I'm glad to have it back. I feel like myself again.
3 comments:
I loved Assassination Vacation. I am currently reading The Wordy Shipmates. Sarah Vowell is fabulous. Also, just had to comment on your shout-out to Jacob. I adore him. I read recaps of shows I don't even watch when he writes them. He is pretty much the only thing keeping me going to TWOP now that it is mostly filled with trash. And in particular, his recaps of 'Gossip Girl' and 'Battlestar Galactica' truly enhance my appreciation of the shows I already love. I love him and love him and love him, and it is nice to see him getting some props.
Oh my god, I love him so much. I hate, *hate* what's happened to TWoP since the Bravo take-over, having been a loyal reader since the Mighty Big TV days, but there are a few of the old guard still there whose recaps I read, and Jacob is the star. They only just started airing 'Gossip Girl' down here, so I've never even seen an episode, but I love it so much based entirely on his work. I even printed out all of the recaps and took them with me to Samoa last year, and when I was done, I made Jac read them, and now we just text random lines at each other. My favourite at the moment is 'i set yr dad on fire w my awesome'.
His 'American Idol' recaps are great too - I avoid the show like the plague but I can't wait for to start again every year so he can start writing it up. His Sanjaya stuff from a couple of years ago remains some of the funniest writing of any kind that I have ever read. Go back and have a read if you didn't catch it the first time around. I desperately wish they'd put him on 'Project Runway' duty; I think he'd rock the hell out of that.
My friend Molly and I, both Jacob devotees and TWOP readers, knew from experience (attempting to look at Project Runway photos and 'rate the runway's) that Bravo's website SUCKS. That's with a capital SUCKS. So we feared the worst when we heard they were buying TWOP. And lo, it is worse than we thought it would be.
Anyway, 'Gossip Girl' is as good as he says. I started reading the 'Idol' recaps a few years ago even though I didn't watch the show because of Jacob. I also used to read the 'Apprentice' recaps even though I didn't watch it because he wrote them. He managed to turn what was no doubt at all a terrible show into a series of hilarious surrealist vignettes. He virtually never reported what was literally happening on the show. If you haven't read the last year of that that he recapped, do yourself a favor and do so. They are, I think, even more awesome than the show was awful.
There seem to be a lot of idiots out there who don't appreciate him though. I don't believe in message boards, but I have gathered from a lot of what he says and what I have heard from others that he is reviled by many. He made so many references to how much he was getting reamed for his 'Battlestar' recaps in the recaps a few years ago that I felt compelled to email him and tell him that I at least adore them and that they deepen my appreciation of a show I already love more than most shows ever on TV. We have emailed a few times now, and are Flickr buddies.
Anyway...um...enjoying the blog. Good stuff!
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