not falling down

Right now it’s showering sideways, and the wind is blowing so hard the water is going up the hill.Yesterday it was a lot harder. The picnic table almost flipped off the deck, and the first tree weplanted when we moved here split. It’s not exactly down the middle, because the trunk is mostlyintact, but about half the branches are sheared off in one big clump.

The tree looks lopsided now, of course. The other half is still lying on the ground on the lawn,and I keep looking at it like it’s an open wound. Which it is, I guess. I want to cut the dyingpart off and drag it behind the house, to patch up the torn part with tar, but it’s raining now andMom says it’s going to die anyway.

I just finished The Bean Trees. I don’t go back to school until the 25th.

Almost forgot: bizarre spam subject line alert!

That last post was less than coherent, wasn’t it? Yikes. I was up too late, and under the influence of a really good book, and shouldn’t have been trusted with a keyboard.

I’m not going to take it down, but I want to make it clear that I don’t see myself as some kind of literary-analysis savant, nor do I mean to cast aspersions on the English majors of the world–my brother is one, after all. Also, I don’t like casting aspersions in the first place, as they get my hands all yucky.

All it is is that I just read one of my new favorite books ever, and found some great stuff underneath the surface. I’m sure there was more below that, but I think if you go too deep you lose the parts that made it so good in the first place. That’s all.

Next topic.

At GSP this summer, a guy from my hall–the infamous Ben Stith–had to leave a day early due to a really awful situation (yes, he’s still a Scholar; it was nothing disciplinary). As he was packing, he played this one song over and over again, and as the only other person on the hall at that point, I could hear it through the door.

It was a really good song. Unfortunately, I neglected to ask him for the band name or the song title, so when I started thinking about it a few days later all I had were a few snatches of lyrics to look for.

I spent nearly an hour googling for that song,and to paraphrase John Constantine, in an hour I can google into anything–the Bank of England’s vaults, or a nun’s knickers. I barely found the song, though. As it turns out, neither its title nor the band performing it are exactly solid things.

The band was called Sunday Drive when it put out its first indie release, which included “Piano Song.” They then got signed to a major label and started calling themselves The Starting Line.Because the song was written by someone outside the band, it never made it onto a major-label release, though subsequent reissues of the original EP had the song titled “Hold On.” All the links to the original indie label’s site, or sites about the original EP, are pretty severely dead.

Anyway, the upshot is that it’s impossible to buy the song unless you find a copy in your favorite local underground-record establishment. It’s certainly nothing you’re going to find at CDNow, even under any combination of bandname/title matches. So! As a part of my ongoing quest to bring otherwise-unavailable quality music to you, illegally, I hereby present

Another damn book post.

I just finished the last hundred pages of The Blind Assassin–the most I’ve read at one sitting, I think. At one point, probably halfway through, I thought “this should be a movie.” There are a lot of clothes and places in it, but I was still wrong. If it were a movie, I’d be in love with the characters, which would be fine. As it is I’m in awe of the book. Also in love with it.

The only AP scores I’m really proud of were the ones I got in English; upon hearing about the second one, Mr. Munson told me that I had “a gift” for analysis. It sounds generic, but I still rank it high on my list of Best Compliments Ever (even if there was an “apparently” in there somewhere too).

The only English course I’ve taken or will take at Centre was my three weeks of Creative Writing. That’s not just because neither of my majors intersect with English. As far as I can tell, the tools of analysis you learn beyond eleventh grade are so finely sharpened, so stretched and twisted, that they’re turning back in on themselves: overgrown fingernails.

I like having a “gift” for analysis, if I do, and not a skill. Trying to get meaning from Crime and Punishment and Wuthering Heights was like going at tubs of concrete with an emory board. The Blind Assassin is the world’s biggest tub of hard-frozen ice cream, and it’s mint chocolate chip, and I feel like I was born with spoon in hand.

It’s all there, if you want it–layers and layers that my less-trained analysis would probably never find. I’m fine with that. I think the author would be too.

I’m more interested in watching how she starts by putting two books inside the first book, and then putting another book inside one of those. I’m interested in how, by the end, they’re all the same book. After The Handmaid’s Tale, I was prepared for the title to frame a huge central irony; it crept up and caught me at the end anyway, and it’s stunning.

I don’t want to give any more away, but I want to keep writing about it.

I’m more interested in the characters. There are only two of them, really; there are also exactly six, and then there’s only one. I’m amazed by them all. They are to the phrase “three-dimensional” as the ocean is to “damp.”

I love these books. This book. I think it defines “masterwork,” for me, because it’s the most masterful and most accessible book I’ve ever read.