Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

Yes, it's been a while since I updated this journal. Mostly, I didn't feel like writing about what was going on in my life, even though most of it has been good: my mother underwent successful colon cancer surgery back in October, and doesn't have to undergo any follow-up radiation or chemotherapy; and while work has its problems, as all workplaces do, I've now cleared to give tours inside most of the major buildings at Colonial Williamsburg, so I've got a lot more variety in my job. But work didn't strike me as interesting enough to discuss at length, and I'd already posted up-to-the-minute accounts on my mother's operation (from the hospital waiting room!) on Melon Bread, so anything more would be redundant.

Actually, I'm not entirely certain why I've decided to resume this journal now. I think it's because I feel a strange sense of uncertainty and confusion, and I need some sort of venue to work through those feelings. But I also don't feel entirely comfortable being specific about why I feel this way, at least not in such a public forum, so there may be some difficulties with the whole idea. xp

So, we'll avoid that subject for the moment and instead discuss something else: how I've managed to avoid writing anything substantive while doing a whole lot of reading about writing. The latter is thanks to Nick Hornby's Housekeeping Vs. The Dirt, which I've been reading in dribs and drabs over the past couple of weeks. I should have been able to plow through this volume in a few hours-- it's less than 150 pages, and that's including excerpts from five of the books Hornby evaluates, including two pages from a graphic novel about growing up female in Iran during the period when the fundamentalists came to power-- but instead of reading it straight through, I opted to read a chapter at a time, usually while waiting for my mother to get her hair washed (her eyesight makes it tough for her to do it herself, so she gets it done at Hair Cuttery once a week). I finally finished it today during my lunch at Nawab. I've read a lot of books while eating naan and tandoori chicken over the past few years...

Actually, the piecemeal approach may have been best, since Hornby's book is a collection of columns he wrote for The Believer over the course of a year or so, concerned with whatever books he read that month. (Apparently there's an earlier collection called The Polysyllabic Spree, after Hornby's fanciful portrayal of the magazine's editorial board, but I missed that one.) There's sort of a narrative linking these columns-- Hornby gets tired of his usual reading matter and decides his tastes are stuck in a rut, tries to branch out, is largely unsatisfied, and winds up disgusted at the debauchery portrayed in Motley Crue's autobiography (the funniest column in the book, and my favorite overall). But mostly, it's a gentle and wryly funny ramble through Hornby's literary interests, and an expression of his anti-elitist perspective on books and reading; he's at his best when he tears apart critics who insist that only "high" literature is worthwhile and snobs who condescendingly look down on the tastes of ordinary people. It's reminiscent of his earlier book of musical criticism, Songbook, in that respect; and since Hornby's intelligent enough not to let his open-mindedness deteriorate into an insanely relativistic world where everything's equally good (like some music critics I'll refrain from naming), it's a refreshing perspective.

The strange thing is, as much as I like Hornby's writing, his non-fiction books always remind me of how old I feel. I experienced this with the New Yorker magazine column that led to Songbook; when Hornby approached Blink-182 and Eminem and came away bewildered, I understood, because a part of me had the same reaction: this is the music of youth, and it's impossible for me as a 34-year-old curmudgeon to completely understand or even objectively evaluate. And there were moments in this book as well where I identified with Hornby's incomprehension of some modern taste or trend, and then felt somewhat uncomfortable with that degree of identification. But that didn't stop me from enjoying the book in the slightest.