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Of Thee I Zing: America’s Cultural Decline from Muffin Tops to Body Shots by Laura Ingraham

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Ok, friends, don’t hate me for the fact that I somehow ended up taking this book home from the library, (this book which, I discovered only after having gotten it home, is authored by a “frequent guest of the O’Reilly Factor.”) What the hell was I thinking? Shouldn’t I have been able to tell from the cover that the person doing the zing-ing is a conservative? (I’m drunk on the awesome library system where I now live, and on the fact that I can take. books. home. for. free. You can’t blame me, really.)

But then, I thought to myself, “maybe it will be good for you to read something from the opposite point of view.” Isn’t that good for our brains and our human development, to try to at least *listen* to opposing viewpoints from our own, from time to time? (Chris and I often do this in the car when the radio inevitably lands on some ranter, but we usually end up cracking up and doing imitations of the offending hosts.)

So, trying to be open-minded, I gave it a chance. And at first, I chuckled at bit. The author’s observations about excessive parents who compete over who can host the most elaborate birthday parties seemed pretty spot on.

But then I kept going, and I realized that, rather than these being essays poking fun at contemporary culture, the entries were actually just section after section of stuff to bitch about, or “wonder aloud” about, in a very old-guy-in-the-coffee-group kind of way. (“Now, about tattoos..what’s wrong with these kids today?”)

After all the mini-sections on things like, yes, tattoos, text-ing teenagers, obese people at the mall, people who write their own wedding vows, people who carry their babies in cloth carries, and on and on and on, I couldn’t help but return to one of my favorite TV bits of all time: Cliff Claven trying his hand at stand-up comedy on Cheers. (Enter subject matter here, then follow with, “What’s up with that?”)

So, regardless of her political affiliation, I thought she came off like a fuddy-duddy, a judge-y tsk-tsk-er, and a crank.

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You Don’t Sweat Much for a Fat Girl: Observations on Life from the Shallow End of the Pool by Celia Rivenbark

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

First of all, at least judging by the author’s photo next to her bio, she is decidedly not fat. So, that kind of annoys me.

And there’s a very “kiss my grits” style of sassy-ness in each entry, and at least for the first couple of entries, I found it kind of cloying.

Having said that, I like writers who analyzes or satirize the seemingly trifling elements of popular culture, (despite the fact that it means their material may not exactly hold up after 10 years because of the contemporary references). I admire writers who aren’t afraid of that possibility of dated-ness (and therefor use as comedic material such cultural fare as the Gosselins and other TLC-show subjects, Twitter over-sharers, and the way Betty Draper treats her fictional children).

I also tried, for two full years, to emulate a newspaper column in a style similar to what Rivenbark is doing, so, I respect and admire her ability to entertain with anything she chooses as her subject matter. I would definitely read more of her stuff, even if I occasionally think the Southern-fried grits-kissing attitude feels a little over the top). I would give this a 3.5 or 3.75 stars.

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Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

**SEE UPDATE OF ORIGINAL POST BELOW**

I’m re-reading this for the first time since college, when it was one of the books we studied in Craig Watson’s “Contemporary American Novel” course at Monmouth College. I know I liked it back then but I barely remember it.

In the process of moving from Illinois to Iowa over the past several days, I’ve been going through many a dilemma about keeping/donating/throwing things away. Finally, I have decided that if I’m going to keep *anything*, it has to be for a specific reason that I can state aloud.

A major change for me, Keeper of Everything I Read: from now on, books must fall into the category of “Because I Know I’m Going to Read it Again” or ecause “Because I Know for Certain It’s One of My Favorites and Inspires Me” in order to qualify as a keeper. Hence the re-read on this one: I had trouble putting it in the donate pile. So now I need to be able to see if I can justify keeping it, or face continuing to have too much crap when it’s time for the next Major Schlep to a new place.

This is really hard for me. But I’m trying to tell myself that, when it feels painful to give books away, there are always libraries (for the foreseeable future, anyway…).

However, I still refuse to get a Kindle. It will probably be quite awhile before I bend on this belief: BOOKS MUST BE SMELL-ABLE.

**11/28/11 UPDATE**

Wow. I just can’t do it. And by “it” I mean “actually re-read it,” not “give it away.”

I had thought it would be kind of a fun (and maybe fascinating) experiment to re-read this book (about young people in their early 20s) as someone who has now actually lived through her 20s (when, originally, I read it as a young college student).

But instead it’s just depressing me.

I know this book has literary merit. (And for the very way Beattie depicts the bleak scenarios with verisimilitude, etc.) But…it’s kinda bringing me down. So, out with you, Chilly Scenes. I’ve lived enough life now that I can paint /have experienced enough of them on my own!

(Have you read this book [or any others of Beattie's you'd recommend]? Leave your thoughts in the Comments below.)

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Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie

I’m re-reading this for the first time since college, when it was one of the books we studied in Craig Watson’s “Contemporary American Novel” course at Monmouth College. I know I liked it back then but I barely remember it.

In the process of moving from Illinois to Iowa over the past several days, I’ve been going through many a dilemma about keeping/donating/throwing things away. Finally, I have decided that if I’m going to keep *anything*, it has to be for a specific reason that I can state aloud.

A major change for me, Keeper of Everything I Read: from now on, books must fall into the category of “Because I Know I’m Going to Read it Again” or “Because I Know for Certain It’s One of My Favorites and Inspires Me” in order to qualify as a keeper. (This is, in part, the philosophy behind a site I’ve been following.) Hence the re-read on this one: I had trouble putting it in the donate pile. So now I need to be able to see if I can justify keeping it, or face continuing to have too much crap when it’s time for the next Major Schlep to a new place.

This is really hard for me. But I’m trying to tell myself that, when it feels painful to give books away, there are always libraries (for the foreseeable future, anyway…).

However, I still refuse to get a Kindle. It will probably be quite awhile before I bend on this belief: BOOKS MUST BE SMELL-ABLE.

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• Cooked! Several meals! which also meant that I: washed. dishes. all. weekend.
• Received an awesome surprise in the mail. I was making dinner (a sun-dried tomato, caramelized onion, spinach and gorgonzola pizza from a Weight Watchers recipe that I can’t find online, otherwise would link here) Friday night, waiting for Chris to arrive, when I sorted through the mail. Excitedly, I realized that I had received a small package, and was relieved to see that my wedding hair flower (or so I thought) had finally arrived. (After spending several weeks eying it, I finally ordered it, and then…realized I had placed an order for something made in Turkey. SO, it’s taking forever to arrive in the mail). And Friday I get this tiny package, with a strange, scrawled handwriting that I think is in another language….and instead, a tiny bubble-wrapped item falls out…my wedding band! I had no idea that the goldsmith who works at the Iowa Artisans Market in Iowa City was going to mail it to me when he was done (I thought he’d said we should come pick it up), AND I thought it would be mid-August before he was done. Not only did it arrive early, but…I love it. He did exactly what I/we asked him to do–create a simple but sturdy silver band, with a “hammered” design that almost resembles flowing water (hard to describe) and include an inscription inside. Thankfully, his “handwriting” was perfect inside the ring!
• Saturday: Went to a matinee. Enjoyed soaking up the AC, so it wasn’t all that disappointing that Horrible Bosses turned out to be pretty…horribly stupid. (And I’m definitely not above stupid movies. I laughed a lot at The Hangover, for example.) The Jennifer-Aniston-as-boss-who-sexually-harasses-her-employee bit was definitely over-the-top, but not actually funny.
• Watched another movie, The Adjustment Bureau, in which Matt Damon and Emily Blunt gave good performances, (and in which there were some good visuals), but in which I thought the basic premise was kinda sexist. (Hmm, a theme here.)
• Sunday: Invited my dad, who is bach’ing it for about 10 days, over for grilled burgers and corn on the cob. Made poor Chris do the grilling in the oppressive heat, (and, true to form, he didn’t complain or even say a word about it—while, meanwhile, I complained that the AC in the house wasn’t “wafting” enough from the window unit in the bedroom into the living/dining room, waah!) Enjoyed dinner together and cracking up at my dad’s stories, like the one about the time he accidentally maimed (very slightly) an exchange student with a ball-point pen when he was a student at WIU.
• Marveled at how laid-back and stationary this weekend felt, after lots and lots of driving around and wedding planning stuff over the past several weeks. Sunday marked the exactly-two-months-away mark for the big day. And we received our first wedding gift on Sunday, too! (A friend from my hometown gave us our first purchase on Traveler’s Joy, where we registered for our honeymoon. I’d long wondered if there was a way to make your honeymoon a gift suggestion, but worried that it might seem tacky or whatever, so it was cool to see someone not only give us approval, but a gift toward it too!)
• Dug further into The Little Friend by Donna Tartt, which is proving to be the most deliciously juicy fiction choice I could have chosen right now. What I mean by that is: I’ve been on a long string of non-fiction/memoir reading, and this is the first novel I’ve opened in a long time. A friend pressed it into my hands two or three years ago (and, in my defense, I did warn her that anyone who loans me a book runs the risk of not getting it back for a long, long time, because I’m slow reader and because I go in whatever order I choose, and if I happen to find something on sale at the bookstore that catches my eye, I’ll read that one, or something else, and maybe never get to the loaned book…). I had no idea what this book was about, and, as I often tend to do, I made a point to NOT read any of the back-cover copy, in an effort to go in totally uninformed and just let the fictional experience itself (rather than any quotes from well-known authors; reviews; etc.) influence me. And so far this book is so incredibly good, so rich in detail, with two young protagonists who bring notes of Scout and Dill to mind…. I just want to keep [sitting in front of the AC and] reading.

David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King, will hit stores April 15. Chances are, if you follow the book/lit/publishing world at all, you’re already well aware of this fact.

I first read about it on NPR.org (“The Magic Of David Foster Wallace’s Unfinished ‘King’”). The next day I did a tiny metaphorical eye-roll when I opened TIME to find another feature on Wallace’s “Unfinished Business.” I mean, perhaps Wallace never even meant to have it published. And what about all the struggling, living writers with finished works that aren’t getting any attention? Wallace killed himself while working on The Pale King. And, forgive me,  but there is the media-saturated part of me that feels like our culture lionizes too many writers and bandleaders after they’ve committed suicide.

That said, Wallace was indeed one of the most important contemporary American writers, not at least in part because, as Lev Grossman puts it in that TIME article, his novel Infinite Jest “reshaped the skyline of American literature.”

And it is kind of fascinating, (if not a little bit morbid), to read about how others put the book together after Wallace died, and to obsess a bit over what was going through Wallace’s mind before he decided to end his life.

But perhaps most importantly, how could I not be interested when I learned this little tidbit about the work that Wallace left behind?

His agent, Bonnie Nadell, knew he’d been working on it…. [but] she had no idea how much of it he’d managed to finish. She did know it had an unlikely subject: the lives of a group of IRS employees in Peoria, Ill.

I can’t help but be curious about how and why Wallace had Peoria, of all places, on his (brilliant, troubled) mind. Did he feel tied to central Illinois (or, conversely, critical of it) because he was born in Champaign and had lived and taught in Bloomington-Normal? It’s equally fascinating to wonder if he found Peoria valuable as a poetic or metaphorical setting. (A few years ago, one his short stories published in the New Yorker was set in Peoria, too).

And as for the title? The TIME article mentions that the editor who helped piece together the unfinished book never figured out what that phrase “The Pale King” refers to; it’s used to describe a certain character only once and then never explained.

I coulda told ‘em. (Obviously, the TIME writer and the editor are not from the pasty Midwest).

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Can I please just share the irony? I got three-fourths of the way through the book, and then it fell apart–literally.

I was reading a vintage copy (not the one pictured here; I can’t find an image of the cover of the version I have). It’s been on the shelf for a long time and I thought I had picked it up somewhere at a Salvation Army or yard sale. (Interestingly, it’s stamped “CARTHAGE PUBLIC LIBRARY” inside. Which means my dad may have bought it at a library sale and…I stole it from him.)

Anyway, this copy was loosely held together as it was, and then, right when I get close to the end, it splits into pieces, and now I can’t seem to find the last chunk! I’ve searched under the bed and the nightstand, to no avail, and now I’m wondering if my copy ever even had all the pages anyway.

Such is the state of my literary endeavors.

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The Best American Short Stories 2007 by Stephen King

All I’ve read so far is the one by Anne Beattie, and I loved it. I’ve been boycotting short stories for the last couple of years. But this one was a great reward for coming back to them.

P.S. So what if it’s a “vintage”? (I’ll probably get this year’s version in, like, 2015.)

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What’s there to see in Blandinsville, Ill.?

Well, not a heck of a lot, to be honest. But like so many other small towns in Illinois,  it’s a little self-contained unit–not quite a ghost town, because there are homes and churches and bars–that has survived for years and years despite not having much to go on.

When you drive down through the heart of town, you can’t help but feel a sense that time has passed in a way that this is a place that once was; that there won’t really be any growth to speak of.  Indeed, as the local history book (below) notes, there are more grave stones in town, by far, than living people.  But,

(More to read, below these photos)

Blandinsville Masonic Temple

here are some interesting factoids about this tiny town in McDonough County (follow the links to see the old black-and-white historic shots:

• It was started as gathering of log cabins, named Job’s settlement, in 1826, but officially platted in 1842 by Joseph Blandin  (a man who apparently did not have eye-rolling teenagers when he decided on the name Blandinsville.)
• The town was developed by, or because of,  the  Toledo, Peoria, and Warsaw Railroad, which came through town.
• A farming center, little B’ville once had a RR depot, a seminary, and a hotel featuring a fairly grand veranda.

The Masonic Temple is still there (pictured above), as are some of the other original Main Street structures. One building in the slide show above, the empty shop that’s for sale, appears in the lower left-hand corner in this street view of Blandinsville in the early 1900s.

(Historical facts taken from the book Images of America: McDonough County Historic Sites by John E. Hallwas,  WIU English professor emeritus  and author of The Bootlegger, [and guy so nice that when I told him I was a fan of his work, he hugged me]).

Just another little slice of the Midwest that seems worth taking a second to notice.

Pinckney Benedict, a fiction writer who has published in lots of prestigious publications, will be in town to give a reading and book-signing Oct. 21 as part of his short-term writer-in-residency at WIU.

(The linked release is published by University Relations, the office which, full disclosure, I work for—although I see nothing shady about promoting this event on my own page, mind you [picture me looking down my eyeglasses at you, shaking my finger].

(More, below the photo).

Pinckney Benedict book cover

The news of Benedict’s upcoming visit is pretty cool for a regional University like WIU. Since we’re not, say, the University of Iowa with its world renowned writing program, I think it’s impressive that in the time since I’ve worked here (four+ years), Western has hosted several other literary fiction writers and journalists whose work I like and/or respect, such as:

• Chimamanda Adichie, (who was here for the International African Literature Conference in 2008, and whose short story, “The Thing around Your Neck,” I highly recommend)
• Rick Bass
• Michael Walker, (whose visit I did a small piece about here), author of Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood
• Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation

(and this is not to mention that Western now has Charles Mcleod, an up-and-comer, on the faculty, teaching creative writing).

And a few years before I started here, Western hosted

• Stuart Dybek, (whose short story “We Didn’t” is one of my all-time faves),
• Ethan Canin
• Marge Piercy
• and several others whose names and work I’m not familiar with.

I’ll plan to attend Benedict’s reading or Q&A, if I can make it. (Ironically, I might have to miss an English-y thing to stay home and do another English-y thing: finish writing my master’s thesis.)

I know I have read at least one short story by this writer, because his name jumped right out at me, (though it does do that on its own, doesn’t it), but I can’t quite recall which story or where I read it. He seems like he might be something of a character. For proof, you should check out his photo here.

Are you a fan of Benedict’s fiction? Do you plan to attend? And/or, which of his do you recommend. Leave a comment below and let us know.