This is an ongoing debate on the internet. Do you consume or produce?

Back in the day it was harder to produce content. But there are so many tools to do so now

Facebook

Pinterest

instagram

Twitter

WordPress

and tons more

that creating content is not hard at all. Then the question is whether the content is quality content.

But. The people who just read or look at or listen to what other people have created, and don’t really contribute much of their own.

fast rewind to my first alone apartment. I was living in Mountain View and dating Chris. He had a big nice apartment with an always absent roommate. We spent most of our time at his place. Until I pulled a girlfriend move and said “Why don’t you ever come to my place?”

“You dont’ have anything to do there!”

“What are you talking about? I have a ton of things to do when I am at home. I play the piano, and I read…” Hmm…He had a point. These were things that a person does alone.

I didnt have things that included other people. Playing the piano is only fun for the listener for a brief time. And reading is a purely solitary activity.

Thing is I never feel alone when I am reading.

But with the scaling of literary Mt. Everest in the form of Ulysses, I feel as though I have no more mountains to climb. Naturally this makes me question everything.

What am I doing with all this reading, anyway? What is the point?

I would like to find a fellow enthusiast. I will do my best to find someone with whom I can discuss this love of mine.

But here’s another thing. Maybe if I have done the homework of reading all these books, I should share what I know. Maybe I need to write some essays. Maybe I need to create some lecture on these things I know.

Because…Now I know. What am I going to do about it? I can’t read all those gorgeous books again for the first time.

these are the ones I have not read
Aeschylus. The Oresteia
Allende, Isabelle. The House of the Spirits
Anaya, Rudolfo. Bless Me, Ultima
Aristotle. Poetics
Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing

Barrio, Raymond. The Plum Plum Pickers
Barth, John. The Sot Weed Factor
Baudelaire, Charles. Flowers of Evil
Bellow, Saul. The Adventures of Augie March

Boswell, James. Life of Johnson
Bradbury, Ray. Dandelion Wine

Brooks, Gwendolyn. Blacks

Bulgakov, Mikhail. The Master and Margarita

Duras, Marguerite. The Lover

Erdrich, Louise. The Beet Queen
Euripides. The Bacchae, Hippolytus

Fielding, Henry. Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones

Fuentes, Carlos. The Death of Artemio Cruz, Where the Air is Clear
Garland, Hamlin. Main Travelled Roads

Goethe. Faust

Hardy, Thomas. Return of the Native,
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance

Homer. The Iliad,
Howells, William Dean. A Hazard of New Fortunes

James, Henry. Turn of the Screw, Ambassadors,
Johnson, Charles. The Oxherding Tale
Joyce, James. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners
Kafka, Franz. The Trial
Kennedy, William. Ironweed

Kinnell, Galway. The Past

Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love, Experiment in Criticism
London, Jack. The Sea Wolf
Lorde, Audre. The Black Unicorn
Lowell, Robert. Life Studies
Machiavelli, The Prince
Mahfouz, Naguib. Midaq Alley
Mailer, Norman. The Naked and the Dead
Mann, Thomas. , The Magic Mountain

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Chronicle of a Death Foretold
McCullers, Carson. Short Stories
Melville, Herman.  Typee
Jean de Meun. The Romance of the Rose
Middleton, Thomas. The Changeling

Milton, John. Paradise Lost
Momeday, N. Scott. The Way to Rainy Mountain

Ovid. Metamorphosis

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49
Plato, The Republic

Rich, Adrienne. Selected Poems
Richardson, Samuel. Pamela or Clarissa
Roethke, Theodore. Words for the Wind
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses

Saroyan, William. The Human Comedy
Scott, Walter. Waverley

Silone, Ignazio. Bread and Wine

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queen

Stegner, Wallace. Angle of Repose
Stendhal (Henri Beyle). The Red and the Black
Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy
Stevens, Wallace. The Palm at the End of the Mind
Styron, William. Lie Down in Darkness

Thackeray, William Makepace. Vanity Fair

Trollope, Anthony. The Way We Live Now

Virgil. The Aeneid
Wallant, Edward Lewis. The Pawnbroker
West, Nathaniel. The Day of the Locust

Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward Angel
Wolfe, Tom. Bonfire of the Vanities

Wright, A. T. Islandia
Wright, Richard. Black Boy, Native Son

Yourcenar, Marguerite. Memoirs of Hadrian
Also, Genesis, Psalms, Job, Ecclesiastes, The Bhagavad Gita, Qu’ran, Song of Roland, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

So, I am wondering what to do next. I’ve read Ulysses, and that was the last mountain of a book I felt I had to climb. There is nothing I can’t read and therefore nothing left to challenge me.

Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to take on Gaiman after Joyce. THe difference is too stark.

Here’s the thing. If I read now, just for escapist pleasure, and I admit it is pure escapism, then I should try to get a new hobby. It seems that reading is not leading to anything.

I should learn to do something else. Maybe knit.

You can’t take the cake out of the oven until it’s done cooking. Otherwise it’s a mess.

Maybe we are all ready for the new phase of family trips. Chris was sick, and CRABBY as we made our way to my last-minute-itinerary-addition trip to a friend’s house last night.

But it worked. I am pretty sure that I am the one who slept worst today, but even so I am cheerful and ready to enjoy the holiday.

This is good. Dare I say it’s a new era?

we shall see.

It was the village venture a few weekends ago, part of the wonderfulness of living in my town. But things weren’t going the way I hoped. I stayed up too late the night before, and then we weren’t quite as prepared as I would have liked when we left the house.

We were walking, because parking is a nightmare. I was achey and still tired and still sick and it was wrapped around me like a heavy coat. It’s a bell jar of exhaustion that is so familiar to my life as a mom.

But the day was pretty and I thought, hey I can just look at the gorgeous sky and trees and this festival and not pay attention to all the things that are bothering me.

It was! it was a beautiful day. And their were balloons, which Veronica coveted. And the Claremont Youth Orchestra was playing, and my daughter danced  so joyfully to classical music holding her balloon. Even the conductor smiled at her.

Then we went to go browse the arts and crafts, and we got separated. Somehow, we got completely separated and I looked for him up and down the very crowded streets. I couldn’t find the others and I was all alone.

I had to walk home. That was the only place I knew we could meet. And there was me again, the heaviness. I am so TIRED and why did we get SEPARATED and I have to walk ALL THIS WAY.

And there was still the dancing that had happened. And there was still a balloon. It wasn’t perfect. But it was a tradition we’d had for years – more than ten years! – to go to this craft fair. It was still pretty good.

Things came back together. It involved more walking than I wanted, but with this and that we all got together again.

After Veronica got into her bed for nap and I was sitting and resting, Chris said “It would have been good if it were just a few degrees cooler.”

I smiled “Nothing’s perfect. It was great the way it was.”

Reaching for perfect can be more uncomfortable than enjoying the good. And with family, really, I recommend it.

Veronica was sick on Friday night. Chris is sick..VERY sick..today..shuddery cold and hot.

When he is sick, he somehow feels like helping me. it’s not that he doesn’t halp me when he is well, but there is somehting different about it when he is sick.

Maybe he is sick and watching me run around doing the perpetual motion dance that is life as a working mom, he thinks he should help. He is normally partially occupied with reading the paper to me or something else.

When he is sick he doesn’t have the focus to watch the lakers or read the National Review.

So he limps over to me in a sad pathetic voice and says “I’m sorry, baby”

THe first time I feel sorry back. but the 5th time I want to kill him.

FINE! BE SICK! but don’t interrupt me with apologies that you can’t help me. I know you can’t help me I am not mad about it. But to make me stop to listen to your apology is…well…not conducive. TO anybody.

Maybe this is more like when Veronica drags her rocking horse over to me and says “Horsey wanted to see you.”

It’s nothing to do with horsey. It’s more to do with wanting attention.

Maybe i should let go of Martha and go sit next to the sicky.

Could be worse.

Leopold Bloom seems to think very kindly of women, but none of the females he encounters in the book would have read Ulysses. So the novel’s readers, which I assume are mostly female, are left to identify with Stephen Dedalus or Bloom himself.

The two female characters that stand out for me are Molly Bloom, Leopold’s wife and Gerty McDowell. Neither of these women are very admirable. Gerty is very vain and hypocritical. Molly seems a thick animalian passion-centric person. Bloom loves her, loves her dearly as she is. But his mind and personal pleasures are more expansive than hers. And although he is far from perfect, he seems very kind.

Stephen is a cloud of artistic ambition. We begin the novel with his perspective, but transfer and stay with Bloom for the majority.

What on earth does the author intend, introducing us to these two people? I had to turn a lot of pages to seek out the answer. The story, such as it is, hangs on the desperate desire for connection between people. A connection between a soul mate. Bloom’s wife would be one manifestation of this desire, and he also spends a lot of time mourning his ten-years deceased infant son.

Good lord! Look at these horrible sentences I am writing! Whatever book I am reading can definitely infect the writing i try to do.

Bloom wants to connect with Molly, but is super conflicted because he has guilt over his baby son that died so long ago when he was so little. Molly wants to reconnect with Bloom, but doesn’t know how exactly.
Stephen wants to reconnect with an Irish soul, and with a literary tradition. He’s so young though, he is totally inept. He reminds me of a worm, who doesn’t have eyes, just light-sensitive spots on his head. he’s nosing towards an indefinable feeling of something.

It’s just a story of a day. When Joyce wrote it, it was a day in the recent past–about ten years past. A lot had happened in those ten years. The great war, World War 1, had happened, and that was a game changer.

Maybe a modern equivalent might be like writing about New York city prior to 9/11. So much changed after, that maybe it seemed weird to try to go remember a lived day in that town before the local apocalypse struck.

That’s from the perspective of the contemporary reader though. I have no impression of life before World War one.

I have, however, an impression of literature before it went modern. I like to read old books. I like to read really old books. This one, this one James Joyce wrote, is no old book.

He was doing this modernist literary experiment thing. He wanted to write in a totally new way because the world was totally new and different now. He did write a book in a way that had never been written before. That’s partly why it’s such a monster to read. It’s not fun, it’s not the immersive experience i love so much in reading. It’s disorienting, and i frequently had to remind myself why I was doing it.

Why *was* I doing it? Basically because lots of people said it was really good and that I would be glad I’d read it.

So here is my first impressions on why I am glad I read it:

Joyce was trying to write something new because the world was so very new. He wrote about the town of Dublin, it’s everday modern life.

And it felt really modern. Really really modern. He talks about telegraphs and public transportation, not new to us now. But he write about how the characters are influenced by whatever they encounter as they walk around, and Bloom and Dedalus mentally careen around different ideas of every possible type.

it made me think of smart phones, and websurfing. We do that all the time right now, skipping from searching for a coffee shop, to asking wikipedia if a coffee bean is actually a bean, to legumes, to goober peas to peanut allergies. Then a search on to allergies and autism, and all on a shuttle ride to the car rental from the airport.

We are so many extraordinary places in our ordinary modern life, and the best of them are in our minds.

I think that Joyce captures the modern life, even a hundred years later, and that is extraordinary. I think it is still still still about struggling for connection and aspiration, being lost and all too stuck.

Which is a lot of what it felt like, lost and stuck, reading this book.

I could spend hours playing on different parts of the internet

I could spend hours reading or listening to OTHER people who are doing it so well

Or just distract myself with trashy distractions of stuff that I believe I could do better than.

And I could work myself into a tizzy of hopelessness thinking, oh no one will ever notice what I read, no one will care or even if they do care they will not be impressed

But the thing is…it doesn’t matter what other people think of what I’m doing. It matters a little. But what matters most of all is that i do it because I like it

Chris decided he needed a new car.

I don’t really believe in new cars. I was not raised with new cars, and his new (okay, eleven years old new) car was not new enough for him.

“What’s wrong with your car? Why do you need a new one?”

“Good point!” he said. “If I am going to get a new car, it should be a significant improvement on my current one.”

whoa. Not at all where I was headed with my question.

But he wants a new car, and we could probably afford it so okay. He test drives and researches and discusses. We want this car to be a keeper, one that will please us for another 10 years like the one we have now.

He finally decides on the first rung of the BMW ladder.  Does he not realize this will cause me to rue my previous words from the “Alaska Road Rules” story?

He does not. This is the car he wants.  He is decided and decisive ( i LOVE that about him), and he sends an email to the dealer.

Say, salesman of the car I want –he says–do you have this car?

Salesman replies no, but he can order it from Germany.

An email is sent to Germany. The factory is going to make a car for us, just like a pizza. We get to watch, through the internet, the car progressing through the factory.

“The car is done! They are loading it onto the ship.”

Oh, yes, oh yes, they are loading Chris’s car ONTO A SHIP and sending it to America.

During this time, Chris locates a documentary on TV that shows us what it looks like to load a car transport ship full of cars. We talk about it and see what kind of ride our little car will be having on it’s first sea voyage.

He gets to watch it in the form of a little green arrow on the map of the Atlantic ocean sail our way. It will have to go through the Panama Canal to get to California.

But wait! WAIT! there is a concern.

Hurricane Sandy is also crossing the Atlantic. It happens to be gaining strength during a moment of radio silence (Gps silence?). Is our ship coming in? Is our little white car okay?

Now we get to watch with more intensity, feeling privileged and safe because it is just a car and not our home or our family under threat of hurricane.

We see that a number of green arrow ships have huddled out in the ocean away from the shore to wait out the storm. Probably our ship in amongst them.

But! There is an automated email that is sent, telling Chris that the ship has arrived at the Panama Canal early. The wise and skillful crew of our car’s transport ship hurried to get ahead of the storm. Chris got to watch our very ship, with our very car, progress through the locks that were created a hundred years ago to let ships get to California. He took snapshots and showed them to me after the fact.

Our ship has passed that landmark. The green arrow is coming this way. It has in fact landed and the car will be in our hands, probably by the time you read this.

The future is now. In case you didn’t recognize it. Jet packs are just retro.

I’m talking about self-help books. Or books on a topic.

I love books, and I dont’ read a lot of non-fiction. Lots of people love non-fiction though. It’s huge!

Books for the pleasure o flearning, history books that are not textbooks. Or self help books
“How to win friends and influence people”

Is this an american phenomenon? I don’t know. I suppose I could

LOOK IT UP

the internet is a very american phenomenon.

But. In literature classes about books…Sometimes they are novel, sometimes they are poetry,s ometiems they are plays.

But sometimes they are not.

Wasn’t greek philosophy that way? Plato and aristotle…haven’t read much of them but I know the gist is about thinking.

I think about the now, and what is the book of now that is going to be read a hundred years from now. I’m reading Ulysess..That might get read. But that’s almost a hundred years old!

What’s now? What is everyone reading now that will be rmembered so fondly? Franzen? …maybe…I kinda hope we can do better.

There are beautiful genre books. Mysteries…Romance…fantasy and sci fi…I’m not, but a lot of people love horror. Twilight?

I see a lot of people reading self help books. Aren’t diet books perennially best sellers?

can you imagine? oh my lord. Dr Atkins beign read as literature 100 years from now. No. NO I cannot.

But what is the shining pearl? What have we got?

What are we doing already? We can’t seem to stop writing writing buying books.