Literary Chicago: Ruth Ozeki - "My Year of Meats"

"I had a lover in the Year of Meats. His name was Sloan and he was a musician from Chicago."

"Sloan lives in the penthouse of one of the high-rise apartment buildings that cluster along Lake Shore Drive as it winds around the southern perimeter of Lake Michigan. From his vantage, the horizon line is negligible, obscured by smog and slatted blinds. Floor-to-ceiling windows from the gray lake and the steel waves that lap the concrete shore. The carpet is gray and mimics the water."

This description of Chicago reminds me of Martin Amis's character riding the Blue Line from O'Hare in his book The Information (coincidentally, in that post, I reference Ruth Ozeki as well). Writers love to make this city sound bleaker than it actually is. It is setting the mood for a single scene, but it's interesting when it becomes a trend. Algren of course wrote about the roar of the L and the seedier parts of Wicker Park but he is probably most remembered for his over-quoted "never a lovely so real" to define the city.

This isn't to say that I think grittiness is an insult. But maybe perhaps the romanticiziation of the idea is a bit outdated. Then again, this story was taking place in 1991 (and The Information was written in 1995). This was a time when the murder rates and overall crime rates were even worse than in this year, which itself has seen a spike in murder and crime. So maybe the romanticiziation is appropriate, that things may have appeared to be too good in this city over the past decade, and now the ugliness is starting to rear it's thorny head again.

Or maybe I'm just trying to make the city sound worse than it actually is. 

...For The Time Being

This phrase. "For the time being."

It's all over literature. I first noticed it from the book A Tale For the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki a couple years ago. Ever since, I think I've come across this phrase in nearly every book I've read. I thought this was just a coincidence at first. But it's almost like the real version of Stranger Than Fiction's "little did he know." As Hoffman's character wrote papers and taught a class on "little did he know," so too will I conquest to create a tundra-like database of "for the time being." There's so much I've lost. But I might as well start now, if not never.

Martin Amis - The Information

"Her mother was still around for the time being, fat and falling apart and still mountainously pretty somehow, in a bed somewhere."

So. Much like my Literary Chicago project, I'm going to try to keep track of this phrase being used and how authors use it. Do they actually reference what their 'for the time being' foreshadows? Or is it a throw away? A red herring?

Speaking of that other project, this novel is ripe with Chicago references. For a taste:

"He reread:

To recap: The itinerary is New York, Washington, Miami, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Boston, New York.

Denver. Why Denver?"

52 Books 52 Weeks

I recently wrote about both these books for Frontier Psychiatrist. One I loved, one was meh. Let's start with the meh.

9. There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband and He Hanged Himself by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (finished March 6th)

Obviously the title is what attracted me to this book. Ominous, morbid, bizarre, I figured it'd be right up my alley. Unfortunately, the collection of short stories by the celebrated Russian author failed to really grip. What few moments of perceptive insight (is that a redundancy?) were overshadowed by the failure to create well-rounded characters, offering only a sketch of disappointingly unfulfilling stories. I try to seek the good in every censored writer, as it is something I doubt I will ever have to encounter and it takes courage to write in such an oppressive society, but there just wasn't anything memorable to me in the collection.

(click here for the full, original review)






10. A Tale For the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (finished March 12th)

READ THIS BOOK. RIGHT NOW. I've gushed about this enough on Facebook and Twitter and to anyone who has had the (mis)fortune talking to me while I've been drunk since I read this book because I've just been going on and on about. Please someone else read this so we can talk about it. Long story short: woman in Vancouver finds a diary written by a girl in Tokyo, woman tries to find out more about this girl and her family's history. Learn about environmental devastation, crows, Marcel Proust, "the half-life of information," meta-fiction, and the differences (or lack thereof) between Zen Buddhism and quantum mechanics.

(click here for the full, original review)

2011 Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan

(photo source)

I can't remember where I was when I first heard about the tsunami and earthquake in Japan in 2011. I know I was in France somewhere, probably too concerned with my immediate surroundings (ie, going to art museums and drinking wine) to worry about breaking world news. I do remember seeing images of whole buildings swept away by fantastic waves, resulting in towns that used to exist but no longer do.

Today is the anniversary of when the gigantic storm first hit. The nearest major city to the earthquake's epicenter was Sendai. I don't remember this name from news coverage back then, but I know it now. Coincidentally, I finished reading Ruth Ozeki's newest book today, A Tale for the Time Being. At the risk of violating critical ethics and saying too much before my official review, this was the most inspiring, brilliant page-turner I have read since Teju Cole's Open City. In short, it involves a woman in a small town near Vancouver who discovers a diary that washes up on shore from a girl in Japan, presumably killed in the 2011 tsunami. The book investigates time, fiction, quantum mechanics, and ecology all in one ambitious, but immensely gripping and satisfying story.

I have no real connection to Japan, but the more I read, the more interested in it I become. While Ozeki was born in America, half the book is from the point of view of a Japanese teenage girl, who uses many Japanese phrases which Ruth translates for us. Between this, recently reading Out, and Haruki Murakami in the past, it is definitely a culture of literature I need to explore more. And to find out if cats find their way into being a major character in every single Japanese novel or if this has just been a coincidence between the three.

In wake of such tragedies, it is always moving to find the ways humanity endures. One of my favorite art blogs, Colossal, posted today about an 88-foot tall sculpture that represents one remaining pine tree that survived for a year and a half after the storm hit.