Snow.

If I go outdoors this afternoon, ought I to use a cane? One of those awful adjustable hospital things? I’ve got at least one in the closet. Do I really need to go out? Or am I just feeling a little restless, anticipating the pleasure of coming home from having been out in the cold. I’d really like to have a small steak for dinner.

Kathleen is off to Florida tomorrow afternoon for an industry confab; today, she’s taking the day off. Unlike me, she is not tempted to go outside. She is tempted to stay right where she is, under the covers. And she’s doing a fine job of giving it to it, too.

Last night, we sat with Will while his parents went out for dinner. It is clear that he calls me “Dadoo.” He’ll say “Daddy” first and then correct himself. Not only does he say “Darney” perfectly clearly, but he recognized Kathleen as such in one of the postcards that I showed him. This was before Kathleen arrived from the office. The postcard was one of the pictures that I took two weeks ago. Which reminds me: I ought to be sending them out right this minute. The postcard rate goes up tomorrow, and I have a few books of soon-to-be-insufficient self-sticks in the drawer. Anyway, Will looked at the postcard and said, “Darney.” D’you think “Dadoo” will stick? Kathleen claims to find it at least as cool as “Doodad.” I don’t. It reminds me of “Tutu,” the Alzheimer’s-stricken grandmother in The Descendants.

***

The other day, I was casting about for a good read when one fell into my lap, right off my own shelf. I’d come across a receipt from Chatsworth, which I’ve never been to but from whose Web site I ordered a few books a while back. Instead of throwing the piece of paper away, I decided to tuck it into one of the books that I’d bought, all of which were either by or about Nancy Mitford. And right next to whichever one I tucked the receipt into was Wigs on the Green, which I didn’t even think I owned. The title is such a tease — whatever can it mean? Well, you find out, in the penultimate chapter or thereabouts.

Even though I recognized Eugenia Malmains as a caricature of Unity Mitford — the sister who shot herself when Britain declared war on Germany and who died of meningitis nine years later — I let the Mitford references that I got roll right off my back and didn’t go looking for others. Wigs on the Green is a sparkling but melancholy entertainment. In Waugh, who is so much darker, you’re invited to agree with the author that human beings are a depraved race. Mitford’s view is sounder, or at any rate grounded in history. Her disaffected, understating bright young things would clearly rather die than yield to a Victorian sentiment, and it’s clear that economic hardship is fermenting strange political brews. Mitford sits on the fence, laughing; she writes gleefully of geriatric Lords and MPs who “creep about the halls of Westminster like withered tortoises, seeking to warm themselves in the synthetic sunlight of each other’s approbation,” but she also shines a gimlet eye on the hysteria of ideology, particularly as embodied by Eugenia/Unity. Charlotte Mosley, in her introduction, puts it very well: “The dark side of Unity’s character is plain enough to see: ruthlessness, naïveté and a love of showing off, combined with an attraction to violence and a desire to shock, produced moral blindess of an extreme kind.”

But Mitford is naïve, too, or at least prone to wishful thinking: how much she would have liked to have a martini-chilled romance such as Jasper and Poppy’s, in which all the satisfactions of love are assumed to flow unspoken beneath a burble of vaguely affectionate insults. Mitford could do the insults with half an eye open, but she never got the passion. The men to whom her heart was drawn were either gay or cads. Nobody ever loved Nancy the way her sisters were loved — all of them, even Unity (by Hitler, I’m convinced — although chastely). It’s arguable that Nancy loved to show off as much as Unity did. She was always begging people not to take her acidic protraits too seriously. Surely they must see her caricatures as harmless, amusing distortions that no one would ever mistake for objective representation? Something occluded Mitford’s sense of being able to hurt other people’s feelings. She liked doing it too much. Moral blindness &c.

But there’s a difference between pursuing Hitler for uplifting post-prandial fireside chats and writing funny novels. We always forgive those who make us laugh.

***

I saw The Artist yesterday and was as blown away as anybody, possibly even moreso. Nothing had prepared me for the ecstatic finale, elegant tribute to a movie that I’ve probably seen a few more times than most cinema fans, and it was only because I couldn’t decide whether to jump out of my skin or sob to death that I am here today. Sadly, I cannot discuss the movie until everybody has seen it. So see it!

*****

Kathleen flew down to Florida this afternoon, for a convention that will keep her indoors for the most part but delightful warm when she isn’t. The minute she left, I felt the air go out of my tires. I am a slow learner: when Kathleen’s about to take a trip, I think that I’ll do thus and so, as if there were things that I do that require her absence. In the event, I’m beset by a general lack of desire to do anything. Thank heaven for reading.

I plowed through to the end of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s remarkable Pulphead, and decided that it is a memoir. Nothing could be further from the “collection of essays” or miscellany of magazine articles than this book; nor could it be less conventionally journalistic, no, not even if David Foster Wallace wrote it. Sullivan doesn’t write about unusual things, he writes from amidst them. And he is not a complete outsider when he crosses the line (which he always does briskly) between “reporting” and “living.” The book’s title is more apt than I thought: it is Sullivan himself who is the pulphead. He reminds me of that stage that serious bloggers go through early on, when they do things so that they can blog about them. That’s exactly what Sullivan does. How intentionally or straightforwardly he does it is not always clear. In the final essay, “Peyton’s Place,” it is never stated that Sullivan and his pregnant wife bought a house in Wilmington, North Carolina, because  they knew that the producers of One Tree Hill had been using it as a location and would be wqilling to pay, basically, the Sullivans’ mortgage to continue to use it, but this is not denied, either. It doesn’t matter. Sullivan’s very home life is more interesting than yours or mine, because he shares it with a fictional teen-aged orphan in a bad but popular cable drama.

And, as the dislaimers at the end of “The Violence of the Lambs” remind us, Sullivan’s pieces are not always strictly non-fictional. No matter. As the book went on, I found myself less and less concerned with whatever his nominal topic was and far more interested in what he would do with it, or let it do to him. Now I have to go back and re-read the beginning of “Upon This Rock,” the book’s first and most written-about piece, because Sullivan rather nakedly lays out a completely abortive strategy for “covering” a Christian-rock festival at Lake of the Ozarks; it is so funny and at the same time creepy that you fall for an image of the writer as a naïve tyro looking for a cool angle and bombing badly. What you don’t see until much later (“American Grotesque” for me) that you see what a troublemaker Sullivan is. I wouldn’t accuse him of starting a fire so that he could write about the excitement, but only because he’s not destructive by nature. No; he’s creative.

William Gibson’s Distrust That Particular Flavor is like Pulphead in one way only: it’s a collection of pieces published (or read) elsewhere. It is so far from Sullivan’s brand of non-fiction that some sort of triangle seems called for. If Sullivan is practicing journalism at the most advanced level, Gibson is simply sharing his thoughts about things, something that nobody would be asking him to do if he weren’t a celebrated writer of science fiction. Everything that he says is interesting, including the few things that he says about himself, but the air is thick with after-dinner smoke. The degree to which Gibson asks you to think about the world around you is approached by Sullivan in only one of his essays, “The Violence of the Lambs” — and then only remotely.

More on Gibson later. I’m just hoping that he’ll say, somewhere, that “the future is here, but unequally distributed,” so that we can source the quote.

 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Saturday, January 21st, 2012 at 3:49 pm.