The Reader Travels

Traveling south along the eastern edge of the United States from Connecticut, you’ll eventually get to Baltimore, Maryland, just below the Mason Dixon line that separated the North from the South.

I’ve only ever been to Baltimore through the eyes of Anne Tyler and John Waters. If you know who these people are, you know that they have completely different visions to share, but they’re coming from the same place — geographically, anyway.

Waters’s vision shows a grimy yet brightly colored caricature of his home town with images of depravity and f*dupness, honest in its way to Baltimore. Tyler, too, offers an honest vision of Baltimore, but hers is more literal with true to life characters and realistic descriptions of this old American city.

As different as their visions are, we can see an essence of Baltimore that ties it to the rest of the South, to people like William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor and Tennessee Williams. What’s oh so wrong is oh so right. You gotta love Baltimore.

Sometimes when you travel through books, you follow roads that start at one point in time and lead back a hundred years and across an ocean. I arrived at Vanity Fair in England circa 1850, but I started in Connecticut in 1979, where a spoiled suburban girl was forced to read the book in her summer school class.

I enjoyed Ann Beattie’s (beet’-eez) novel Falling in Place so much I actually travelled there twice, which I don’t do very often with books. But it took me two years after my second trip to actually make it to Vanity Fair.

There really was a connection between the two books. They both had characters who were obsessed with appearances and the dramas of their small lives. But what really got me most about Falling in Place was how it magically transported me to the summer of ‘79 with Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” playing on the radio, posters of Peter Frampton on a teenage girl’s bedroom wall and news reports about Skylab falling to Earth.

Here’s a challenge, read the book and count the number of times someone or something is falling. Or just let yourself fall instead.

I love to watch Mira Nair’s movies, especially the ones filled with the color and beauty of India, like Monsoon Wedding and Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love. One movie she directed that didn’t take place in India was Vanity Fair, but it too had her color and beauty infused into it.

I had a problem with her take on the story, though. The vivid colors and the Indian imagery were great, the production splendid, but she made the main character into a heroine, when Thackeray specifically stated in the subtitle that his story had no hero. Nair white-washed the utter bitch that was Becky Sharp, back stabbing, trash talking, shallow, lying, cheating… And on top of that she was a truly crappy mother, but even that was someone else’s fault in the movie.

Okay, so after watching the DVD interviews, it seems that Nair was bewitched by Becky as a young girl and always saw her as a great, yet flawed heroine. So, maybe she just wanted the rest of the world to see Becky with her same delusion. That’s okay, right? Image is everything.

The scene is St. Petersburg in the mid 1800s. A clerk works in a meaningless job sporting delusions of grandeur. Everyone in his office is talking about him, and everyone is out to get him.

One thing you can say about Fyodor Dostoevsky, he can really get into the mind of the mentally ill. I recently read The Double, and I felt like I had to wash the crazy off of me every time I picked up the book. But I couldn’t stop picking it up.

The story is written in first person, so you can hear every insane thought the clerk is thinking. He is the quintessential paranoid schizophrenic, and you’re just along for the ride.

But maybe he’s not just paranoid. Maybe everyone is out to get him. Maybe I’m the one who’s losing it.

So I stared out the window of my fourth floor cubicle yesterday for a half hour. There was a guy who looked like he was waiting for a ride, and at first I gave him the benefit of the doubt, assuming he was on one of those phones that attaches to the side of your head.

But the more I watched him, the more I figured he really was having an argument with the voices in his head. I had to sit on a jury for a competency hearing once, and they told me to watch the guy’s eyes. If he blinks a lot, it’s a sure sign he’s got something going wrong with his head. Well, I couldn’t see this guy’s eyes, but his whole body was blinking like mad.

A friend told me tonight he couldn’t finish Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves. He just wanted to read a book without having to wade through a bunch of footnotes written by a crazy person, and without having to turn the book sideways and upside down and backwards and forwards to figure out what the hell was going on. Personally, I loved it. It was a helluva ride and an incredible work of art, even if it was a total mind f***.

Remember if you want to get the most out of the spookiness that is House of Leaves, you have to put on his sister’s album entitled Haunted.

It seems the founders of my little Dallas suburb were fans of literature, just like me. After all, they named the town after “America’s first man of letters,” Washington Irving. Credited with creating the short story, Irving was from New York City and served as a US ambassador in England and Spain.

Nowadays, there’s a very talented author also by the name of Irving who likes to take us to places like Toronto and Vienna and, yes, Bombay. John Irving’s A Son of the Circus took me to all three, and what a whirlwind adventure it was — serial murders and long-lost twins and Bollywood actors and proselytizing priests and dwarves and contortionists and other great circus acts.

John Irving gets a lot of flack for being too popular, but even the worst John Irving books are thought provoking and fun to read (and A Son of the Circus is one of his best). Yes, Irving is guilty of repeating themes and symbols in his novels, but for me, it’s an adventure to explore the symbolism of his life and find connecting roads that make me appreciate the journey that much more.

Lots of people in the US are fascinated with India. It was the birthplace of Buddhism and other such Eastern philosophies. Yoga is huge among the Burkinstock crowd, and even Madonna is doing it. Then there’s the whole tantric philosophy espoused by such great individuals as Sting and Scarlett Johansson (rumor has it).

I live in a Dallas suburb called Irving, current home of the Dallas Cowboys, though the football team will soon be moving out of our lovely little town. Irving takes pride in its cultural diversity, and includes a large population of Indian immigrants. We have an old theatre dedicated to playing Bollywood movies, and a whole host of Indian restaurants and import stores that bridge the miles between Texas and India.

The first book that took me to India was an epic tale called Red Earth and Pouring Rain by Vikram Chandra. If you sit a monkey at a typewriter, he might not come up with the complete works of Shakespeare, but he could tell some incredible stories about the magic of India. The truth is that Shakespeare is simply not colorful enough for a monkey’s sensibilities. But India… ah. The monkey likey.

It was an adventurous but exhausting nine months at sea. I sailed with Muslim and Christian soldiers and slave traders in an incredible, epic novel called Ironfire by David Ball. I sailed with some nasty pirates in Barry Burg’s non-fiction work called Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition (Believe me, Johnny Depp was way too nelly for these guys).

I even got myself shipwrecked with Robinson Crusoe, who happened to have been on a voyage from South America, bound for the West coast of Africa where he intended to pick himself up some slaves, and probably deserved to be shipwrecked.

But of all my seafaring voyages, my favorites are the travels with Sindbad, the merchant sailor, in Arabian Nights, as translated by Sir Richard Burton. Now, Burton was a little too fond of breaking into song, and he didn’t include a single paragraph break in any of the tales. But it’s really cool that he thought to share these stories with the western world.

So how many times does it take for a man to get shipwrecked and carried away by giant birds or almost eaten by monkey men or buried alive or abducted by devil worshipers before he figures out he ought to stay at home? I think the lucky number is 7.

Several years ago, my sister recommended Ahab’s Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund, but I never got around to reading it until I found myself on an ocean voyage. I was actually glad I’d read Moby Dick because it helped me to appreciate some of the references.

Ahab’s Wife has all the fun and action and suspense that appeals to our lust for instant gratification. There’s sex and cross dressing and cannibalism and suicide and madness. What more could you want? You get to find out everything that happens in Melville’s book, without actually reading it, and you get to have fun along the way.

When you read an old book like Moby Dick, you should try not judge it on modern day standards. For instance, there’s a lot of detailed description, and you have to realize these people had no television. And Ishmael was a total racist in Melville’s book, but he was a product of his times. And Melville was seemingly into guys, so he didn’t have a whole lot of women in his book, even if he couldn’t talk about being into guys.

Naslund gave Melville no mercy. She answered all his flaws by doing the exact opposite. No women? We’ll focus on the women. Racism? We’ll help runaway slaves. No action? We’ll be all action. Can’t talk about the man sex? Well, we’re gonna talk about it.

I don’t know — it was fun. It just seemed a little judgmental to me. But who am I to judge?

I love to read adventure novels that include maps. The paths are twisting and turning and you have to reference them from time to time so you can see where you are in relation to the rest of the world. Maps really make me feel like I’m on a journey.

So, when I read Moby Dick, I followed the course of my whaling trip with the map included in the back of the book. The problem with Melville’s map, though, was that it totally gave away the ending. Not that I didn’t know what was going to happen anyway, especially with the not-so-subtle foreshadowing with bad omens every 50 or so pages, but they didn’t have to draw the whole thing on the map.

You can follow the course of the ship by tracing a dotted line from New England, down through the Carribbean, somehow ending up in the South Pacific, where the dotted line ends with a little line drawing of the ship sinking into the water.

So, what I’m saying is that Melville had no concept of suspense. He drags on and on, spending whole chapters describing a whale’s head.

Here’s a helpful tip, if you ever feel compelled to read about Ahab and Ishmael and that crazy white whale, scan each chapter for names of people before you start it. Unless you’re really wrapped up in the whole thing, you can just skip the chapter and go to the next one that mentions people. You won’t be missing any of the “action,” and it’ll be much more bearable.

More later on why I felt thus compelled.