Weekend Update: Floods
A touch of fall in the air last week tempted me to trundle the portable room air-conditioner off into the closet, but I wasn’t so foolish. One shiver does not an autumn make. This mid-September weekend has come straight out of summer. At the market today, I noticed a lot of very cross women, complaining about the heat to their cell phones. Walking home, I took my time and stuck to the shady side of the street, but I was dripping when I got home. Sitting down in the chilled blue room, with a fan to boot, will probably undo my defenses to Kathleen’s cold, which has kept her very quiet since Thursday evening.
LXIV accompanied me to the movies on Friday morning. I almost canceled, because New Yorker Festival tickets went on sale at noon, but in the end I decided to give the Festival a pass, for the second year. I liked going for the first few years, but I overdid it in 2006, and felt rather like a groupie-in-training. I have never understood the reading part of author readings. Many writers are no good at all at reading their own work, while others — I’m thinking of Gary Shteyngart here — are so vivid and entertaining that you wonder if their books aren’t simply scripts for great performances. Discussions are find, but what I like most are Q & A sessions. I’ll ask a question if I can think of a good one, but I like watching writers speak ex tempore. And then there’s the signing at the end. That’s a feature that the New Yorker Festival events omit.
Ms NOLA called me last night with the news of David Foster Wallace’s suicide. I liked the man’s non-fiction very much, but I never even tried to read Infinite Jest. I will miss his voice, which was both very funny and very learned. Considering the state of the union today, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he was finding it difficult to be funny and learned these days. As we slip into something like a shogunate, with Republican Party pooh-bahs manipulating elected officials in the exploitation of the res publica, we have a greater need than ever for critics who are learned and funny. (I don’t know what Wallace’s politics were, but his teaching post at Claremont College in Pomona suggests that he was not a radical leftist.)
Yielding to more purely personal trends, I decided to stop writing up Friday movies in time for Saturday publication. I want the weekends for myself, and the weekend begins when the Friday morning movie lets out. “For myself” means “for reading.” Instead of writing up Burn After Reading on Friday afternoon, I read Home, Marilynne Robinson’s radiant concurrence to Gilead. When I finished the book last night, it was a good thing to have a box of Kleenex by my chair. Tears flooded my eyes the moment they weren’t required for reading.