Vacation Note: Breakfast
I’ve made it a point, this vacation, to get up early in the morning and head to breakfast. It’s very simple: I want to be tired when it’s time to go to bed, without having had a lot of wine to drink. So I’ve been getting up before seven, or shortly thereafter, and climbing the hill in hopes of snagging a table with a view like the one above, which I enjoyed for several hours this morning. On my way out of the room, Kathleen promised to join me, “in a while.” It’s true that, when I finally called the room to see how she was doing, she answered immediately and was obviously awake. She crested the hill about fifteen minutes later.
Between finishing my own breakfast and Kathleen’s arrival, I finished reading Diane Johnson’s Lulu in Marrakech, a novel as important as any that she has written and particularly important reading right now, when Americans are thinking about getting their groove back in the world. It’s largely about the waste of American intelligence — particularly the intelligence of women. I didn’t have much left to read; I’d had to put the novel down in the middle of the 42nd chapter — out of 45 — shortly after eleven last night. (See? My plan is working.) Then I got out my notebook.
I do not plan to write up Lulu while on vacation, but I do intend to take notes that are good enough to allow me to write it up later without feeling that I have to reread it. This is something that I ought to have gotten into the habit of doing a long time ago. In the summer of 2007, I read about ten books without either taking notes or writing them up promptly, and now they’re as good as unread. (I’m particularly distressed about Vikram Chandra’s amazing Sacred Games — which I wouldn’t mind re-reading if re-reading weren’t so very, very expensive in terms of time.) This summer, four books slipped by, two of them novels of the first rank: Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Rachel Kushner’s Telex From Cuba. In fairness, it wasn’t just poor note-taking skills that held me back. The power of both novels seemed to derive from something concealed beneath their smoothly engaging surfaces. Both were exciting, but the excitement struck me as a kind of sleight-of-hand. I brought both with me to St Croix, and I hope to start re-reading them tomorrow or Monday. In addition to taking notes as I read, I’ll try hard to summarize my immediate impressions right afterward.
Yes, it’s obviously the thing to do, and I point out my not having done it as a sort of incidental indictment: there are things that I don’t do very well, usually for the reason that, until I began keeping Portico, I didn’t need to do them at all. Oh, I ought to have mastered these skills when I was in school, but — school! As I’ve aged, I’ve grown less thick-headed. When I was young, I could not learn a thing that I wasn’t ready to learn: a vicious circle if there ever was one. Like the people who say, “What do I need a computer for? I get along perfectly well without one!”
As I say, the waste of American intelligence. It’s got to be something in the water.