Did you like that book? Read it again!

"“Huck” is a great illustrator of “Vlad” (I didn’t actually know him) Nabokov’s admonition that there is no such thing as reading. Only rereading. Try it with a book you read and think you know. It’s as if the thing’s been rewritten and filled with gems that you missed the first time. Try it, even with a few pages you’ve just read. We’d all have been better off to have read half as many books. Twice."

(Dick Cavett, interviewed in the NYT Sunday Book Review) http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/books/review/dick-cavett-by-the-book.html?emc=edit_bk_20141219&nl=books&nlid=20885389

He's right. I've only done this once so far, with Smilla's Sense of Snow, and I couldn't believe how much of the story I'd forgotten. Also, the whole time I was reading it I was waiting to rediscover a sort of philosophical musing about the importance of Smilla's clothing to her sense of self-possession and confidence. This had really impressed me, but it turns out that IT DOESN'T EXIST. No such passage in the book. So I'm even more impressed with the thought now because it appears that I made it up myself.

Anyway, go get one of your favorite books and read it again.

Women in Clothes

All quotes in this post are from Women in Clothes, by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, Leanne Shapton and 639 Others

"I hate when people say they don't care about clothes, because it's a lie. It's like when writers say they don't care about plot. Lie. We are always asking for something when we get dressed. Asking to be loved, to be fucked, to be admired, to be left alone, to make people laugh, to scare people, to look wealthy, to say I'm poor, I love myself. It's the quiet poem in the waiting room, on the subway, in the movie of our lives. It's a big fucking deal." (Leopoldine Core, writer, Manhattan)

"I feel ashamed of myself when I feel right in New York, because there's something wrong with this place. I'm always stunned when I walk into a party and I find all these women are really wearing little high heels, and girls are dressed in tiny clothes that look really horrible in fact, and they're so miserable in the cold of winter, wearing tiny little high heels in the snow. These women have no pride." (Kiran Desai, novelist)

"You'll never look like you've fallen apart completely if you're wearing a good pair of shoes." (Sasha Gora, curator and writer)

"Wear whatever makes you less sad and feels right when it's on. Don't wear too many things that serve no function. Wear what you can wear on a bicycle. Wear what you can run in or survive in if necessary. If something feels right, wear it all the time. Don't look too cool. Keep some things in!" (Margaux Williamson, painter, Toronto)

"So many psychological problems fell away when I started tailoring my clothes to my body instead of the other way around." (Karima Cammell, author, painter and book publisher, Berkeley)

"Clothes have always been very important to me. Since I was a small child, I was aware of clothes and had very strong feelings about them. My mother and father both have excellent taste and care about clothes, too. Though we didn't indulge in any nonessentials, my parents would buy clothes -- especially for us children. People often think fashion is frivolous, but it isn't -- at least for some of us. Clothes give you confidence and power to do things you might not be able to do otherwise. It puts you into a role...People perceive you differently and treat you differently. How I dress has literally changed my life. At the same time, I dress for myself, not others." (Young Kim, many interests, New York and Paris)

"It's wonderful to be a woman if you are young, thin, and pleasing to men. Otherwise there's not so much that's wonderful about it. We were told to be sexy, that without children we wouldn't be fulfilled as women, but raising them in decent conditions is practically impossible. It seems essential to capitalism that women be made to feel that they are failing all the time. Every choice is the wrong choice. I wanted to break free of convention." (Christen Clifford, writer, performance artist, and a few other things, Queens, NY)

"Try not to eat cake every day." (Friederike Girst, designer, professor, Munich)

"The smartest thing I ever did was hang twenty-four hooks along my wall. That's where my most-worn clothes live. Sure, it looks like a hallway at a primary school, but it keeps my stuff off the floor, where it used to live." (Trish Kaliciak, marketing professional, Toronto)

"I like things to be casual but special. Like if I have a dinner party, I want the best food, but the most relaxing way of eating it." (Christine Muhlke, executive editor of Bon Appetit)

The electrified generation

"Sometimes we wondered what it would have been like to be part of the generation of Americans who discovered Paris in the twenties and remade the world from the Left Bank. Had they felt as we felt? They were younger, some of them were greatly gifted, some of them were infected with fashionable literary despair, most of them were theatrically pleasure-bent. We thought them luckier. They had had only a war to damage them, and war's damage is, when it isn't fatal, likely to be stimulating rather than the reverse. Living through a war, you have lived through drama and excitement. Living through what we had been given to live through, we had only bad luck or personal inadequacy to blame for our shortcomings."

(Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety)

Talent, luck, fate

"I believe that most people have some degree of talent for something -- forms, colors, words, sounds. Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low, or their obligations are too many. Something."

(Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety)

Okay, so this one's not actually from a book

"The technology is not responsible for our woes -- it is neither good nor bad. Mississippi state legislator Noah Sweat's famous 1952 'if when you say whiskey' speech comes to mind: 'If when you say whiskey you mean the devil's brew, the poison scourge...that defiles innocence, dethrones reason...if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it. But, if you when you say whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine...if you mean the drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and to forget, if only for a little while, life's great tragedies...if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm; to build highways and hospitals and schools, then certainly I am for it.'

If by automation you mean the soulless fiend that takes jobs away from earnest hard-working Americans, the myopic mechanical monster that robs us of the opportunity to use our hands and our minds in the service of exercising agency in the world; if you mean that collection of integrated circuits that amorally moves electrons from one chip to another without regard for the hopes and dreams and lives it may be crushing in the process, then certainly I am against it.

But if when you say automation you mean the time-saving device that allows a loving couple to spend more time together while the dishes and clothes are restored to their store-bought new condition; if you mean the intelligent, vigilant and benevolent robots that prevent the brakes on our cars from locking in the ice, causing an irreversible skid and resultant loss of life or limb; if you mean the marvelous multi-national manufacturing machines that make the drugs that a child with leukemia needs in order to live a healthy, full and productive life, then certainly I am for it."

(Daniel J. Levitin, "Learning to Roomba", in The Wall Street Journal, October 11-12, 2014, p. C7)

Smilla's Sense of Snow; final group of quotes

"A breakdown doesn't necessarily have to be a collapse; it can also take the form of a quiet slide into resignation."

"I've never liked the dark. I've never understood the Danish penchant for wandering around at night. Taking a stroll in pitch darkness. Nightingale walks in the woods. Insisting on gazing at the stars. Nighttime orienteering.

You have to respect the dark. Night is the time when space simmers with evil and peril. You can call it superstitious. You can call it fear of the dark. But it's ridiculous to pretend that the night is just like the day, simply without light. Night is the time to huddle together indoors."

"He is the quintessential Dane, with his fear, his iron resolve to repress what's happening around him. And his indomitable optimism."

(Peter Hoeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow)

Don't get mad at me, the author is Danish

"I've always been fascinated by the melancholy shamelessness with which Danes accept the enormous gap between their common sense and their actions."

(Peter Hoeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow)

First impressions

"It's difficult to judge his age. From Elsa Lubing I know that he must be over seventy. But he looks healthy and athletic, as if every morning he walks barefoot across his beachfront and down to the sea, where he saws a hole in the ice and takes a refreshing dip, then runs back and eats a little bowl of gladiator muesli with skim milk."

(Peter Hoeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow)

Ha! I'm not the only one

"I don't like talking on the phone. I want to see whom I'm talking to."

(Peter Hoeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow)

I'll have a serving of great olive oil, please, with a side dish of humor

"The first thing he did when he got home was attack the salmon. A hefty slice dressed with fresh lemon juice and a special olive oil given him by the person who made it. ('The virginity of this olive oil has been certified by a gynecologist,' said a little ticket that came with it.)"

(Andrea Camilleri, in The Paper Moon)

You're looking good

"He arrived a bit early for his appointment with Marshal Lagana. 'You're looking good,' said the marshal, eyeing him. Montalbano got worried. Often of late that statement didn't sound right to him. If someone tells you you're looking good, it means they were expecting you not to look so good. And why were they thinking that? Because you've reached an age where the worst could happen overnight. To take one example: Up to a certain point in life, if you slip and fall, you get right up, because nothing's happened to you. Then the moment comes when you slip and fall and you can't get up anymore, because you've broken your femur. What's happened? What's happened is you've crossed the invisible boundary between one age of life and the next."

(Andrea Camilleri, in The Paper Moon)

Discussing literature at our house

Actual conversation, verbatim, regarding The Echo Maker by Richard Powers:

Patrick: "You might like this book, actually."

Me: "I might like this book, the same one that's been boring you to tears?"

Patrick: "Yes, but he's got a bunch of stuff in there about brain damage and mental health that would probably be interesting to you. I'm not into that kind of thing; I'm looking for a story."

Me: "You're not into mental health?"

Patrick: "It's overrated."

Dubliners

"She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed; and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male."

(James Joyce, "A Mother," in Dubliners)

The Swing of Things

"What were people looking for? They all knew that this was the eye of the needle, that nothing lasted, the silence will win. The animal drive to survive and the human reason knowing it is futile - was that it? People knew it was pointless and dwelling on it changed nothing...The great stale void sucked everything into it whether you were aware of it or not. You could laugh or put a gun in your mouth. Or in somebody else's mouth. Or you could go to work, marry the woman, bring up the kids and keep it out of your mind."

(Sean O'Reilly, The Swing of Things)