A Book Thing

This is going to be one of those posts where I talk about books, which posts I know are never very popular, but tough skivvies, people, because books are what I feel like discussing. So don't be fooled by the sunflower, which is just there to add, you know, a bit of visual interest and also because I am so deeply enamoured of that particular peachish shade of virtually orange where the pink and yellow start to melt together. All the sunflowers in my garden are blooming right now, which is a) awesome because it always is, yet b) sucks because I was hoping they would all bloom the first weekend in August when I have a bunch of people coming to my house and c) is downright peculiar, because in an effort to prolong the blooming season, I planted them all at different times over the course of about 4 weeks.

But. Wait. Books. A couple of weeks ago I was in the downtown library, rushing as always because I have this bad habit of parking in the illegal 15 minute loading zone out front and I grabbed a book at random off the shelf called The Chymical Wedding. I am prone to fits of alchemy and I even know what the hell a chymical wedding is, so I thought, okay, that looks cool. The downtown library, unlike the West Asheville library, is not organized by genre, which I applaud in general as being less ghettoizing, but it does mean that you really don't know what you're getting, whereas in the West Asheville library you can (and I do) just go straight to the fantasy/sf section and stand there glumly for a bit because you hate Anne McCaffrey. Anyhow I took The Chymical Wedding home and discovered. . . that I'd already read it. Of all the books in the library, and so on.

I barely remember it, and I don't know when I read it, but I know that I did. So because I have this Zen Therapist I decided that this odd finding of the book was Meaningful (it's kind of a Meaningful Book, if you know what I mean) and meant that I had to reread it. Which I am doing, and so far all it's doing is bugging the hell out of me, because what it seems to be, really, is a poor man's The Magus. Now The Magus blew my small mind and changed my life and generally freaked me out and radicalized me and sent me on a strange and lifelong path - I read it for the first time when I was about 17 and I've read it a bunch of times since. That may be because it's just way, way better than The Chymical Wedding which so far is about a poet whose wife had an affair which wigged him right out and sent him headlong into the country where he naturally has a friend who loaned him this faboo cottage (why don't I have friends with faboo cottages in the country, I ask you? And why is it that English poets always do?) where promptly he starts getting Green Man intimations and meets a strange gypsyish American babe and then there are flashbacks to 100 years ago and Tarot cards, because there are always Tarot cards and a sheila na gig on the church and so on and so forth and if I remember correctly there will be all kinds o' weird Corn God type bloody wickerish goings on in the next 300 pages or so. But then I am jaded. Still, I shall persevere.

In the middle of this book, because it's hard to stay deeply interested in it, I picked up a book I had gotten A for Christmas (also on a whim, just at Malaprops this time) and which she told me I had to read. The book is My Year of Meats, and you should go right out right now and read it. It isn't science fiction, relax, or rather don't, because it's not relaxing but instead intense and funny and incredible and will make you never want to eat meat again while you are cogitating on women's rights and the differences and similarities between the Japanese and the Americans and so on. I mean it is fucking brilliant. I mean it is great and not only is it all that but the author's note in the back is funny and cogent and made me think for a long time about the writing of novels, the intersections of fiction and meaning and politics and I am invigorated.

Because good fiction, boys and girls, like sunflowers, sometimes has this tendency to burst in your mind all at once despite the date it was planted. Good fiction, like The Magus, like My Year of Meats, has so much going on that it's going to take a while to simmer in the back of your brain. Which has all made me think about why I am so determined to write fiction even though I am old and have so far demonstrated no discernible staying power for the task. But maybe that will change, because I'm thinking now about those intersections of meaning and story, which are the cornerstones of good fiction, and really, you know, of good lives.