What, me worry?

If you don’t know Thomas Midgely, Jr. (1889-1944), then let me give you a brief CV: Solved the problem of engine knocking in 1921 by adding lead to gasoline. Solved the problem of refrigeration toxicity in 1930 by discovering Freon. Won a lot of accolades from the scientific community. Died by misadventure.

In the decades that followed, of course, it became clear that leaded gasoline and CFCs—Midgely’s miracle solutions—had destroyed the environment far more than anything that had ever existed before. How could he have known that?

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about plastic, which to our grandparents and great-grandparents was the miracle solution to so many things, and at which we now turn up our noses. It must be frustrating to see one of the greatest discoveries of the age vilified before your very eyes. (It’s this kind of thing that leads to resentment, conservatism, and generation gaps.)

And so this recent NYT editorial by Susan Freinkel was right in my wheelhouse. “Plastic has become synonymous with cheap and worthless,” she writes, “when in fact those chains of hydrocarbons ought to be regarded as among the most valuable substances on the planet. If we understood plastic’s true worth, we would stop wasting it on trivial throwaways and take better advantage of what this versatile material can do for us.” It’s smart and well-argued, and you should read it now before you have to pay for it.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHGCvJjat1E

Year-end best-of lists are always confined to that year, but that’s not how most of us read. If you’re like me (read: poor), you won’t catch up with 2010 until it’s in paperback—and there are so many other books to catch up on, besides. So my year-end lists are never about the year that’s ending; they’re mostly about me. Isn’t that always the way?

Here are 20 great books I read this year.

All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays by George Orwell (2008)
I’ll quote myself: “Orwell is so damn smart that reading him makes me feel smarter, and everything he writes about—dirty postcards, Tolstoy’s hatred of Shakespeare, the disappointment of T.S. Eliot’s later work, and of course, socialism—is made fascinating and important.”

The Complete Peanuts: 1950 to 1952 by Charles M. Schulz (2004)
Before Snoopy (or even Linus) could talk, before the characters were shilling for Hallmark and MetLife, long before the introduction of the life-sucking Peppermint Patty, Peanuts was maybe at its funniest: a frequently absurd examination of the adult neuroses of four- and five-year-olds.

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So the stakes are coming up, and within a couple of days the Lilac City will be a dust-colored speck in the rearview. But before I leave Spokane to return to the birthplace of Letterman and Vonnegut, it’s time to reflect the only way I know how: in list form.

Top 5 foods I’ll miss

1. Irish Nachos at The Globe
A pile of thick waffle fries covered in cheese, bacon, and sour cream will shut your heart right down, but you will not care.

2. Maytag Blue Fries at Zola
More fries? Sounds right to me. But these are crispier and smothered in a ridiculous blue cheese sauce. I never said it was the top 5 healthiest foods.

3. Biscuits and Gravy at Frank’s Diner
Case in point. I’ve had biscuits and gravy in a lot of breakfast places, but this is the only place in Spokane I will still order them.

4. Curry Fried Rice at Thai Bamboo
I could swear that what makes this so good is the curry, but Rachel insists the pineapple is its secret weapon, so I will defer.

5. Orange Watermelon from the South Perry Farmers’ Market
I only ate it a couple of times, and I still think about it way too much.

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Yes, we think words are the bee’s knees. We’re obsessed with opening lines. And last lines. Hell, second lines. It’s only a matter of time before someone (my money’s on me) posts a quiz of first full sentences from page 57 of novels written after 1979.*

But this week, I watched Stormy Weather (1943) and was forcibly reminded that sometimes words are insufficient and superfluous. The song is “Jumpin’ Jive,” performed by Cab Calloway’s band, and these are the Nicholas Brothers:

* (e.g., “Our mother opened her frayed wallet and wondered aloud how I’d make a living while I was writing poems.” —Mary Gaitskill, Veronica)

I’m just going to sigh and say, “God damn it.” Harvey Pekar has died. He was 70.

Above is the end of the great American Splendor story, “The Harvey Pekar Name Story,” illustrated by R. Crumb. Below is Paul Giamatti as Pekar in the Splendor film’s version of this story:

In one of the fiction sessions during last week’s Summer Writing Institute, a classroom discussion of Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” and Donald Barthelme’s “The School” led to a brief detour, toward which I steered us, about punchlines.

A great punchline, in a piece of writing, doesn’t have to be funny, but it does have to contain within it the cumulative power of everything that’s come before. It requires the entirety of the preceding pages to do what it’s doing. We like to think that’s what all ending lines do. But a lot of books, stories, etc., reach their peak and then peter out for a few more paragraphs (or pages), and the prose may be nice, but it’s not the same.

The lines we discussed, by Barthelme (“I opened the door, and the new gerbil walked in. The children cheered wildly”) and Johnson (“And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you”) do have that power. I call them what I do because of Portnoy’s Complaint, where Philip Roth has labeled the last line (“Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?”) as the punchline.

And now you’re going to be given some of my favorite examples, for identification. They are not all full-length books, though many of them are, and they are not all fiction, though ditto. They should all be one sentence, but I have cheated on a couple.

My favorite punchline of all time, by the way, occurs after 450 pages of set-up, and is obscure enough that I’ll just make it the first one:

***

1. Everything he hated was here.

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So The New Yorker has identified 20 promising fiction writers under the age of 40, and apparently, other writers have decided it’s something worth being a dick about.

In this strange Times piece, Sam Tanenhaus uses this list—and The NYer‘s subjective-but-defensible opinion that these writers “are, or will be, key to their generation”—as an opportunity to spit on them, basically arguing that they probably won’t write anything worthwhile from now on. Why? Because fiction writers “often compose their best and most lasting work when they are young.”

There follows a brief discussion of how “most of the great novels” are written by writers under 40, and then a list of examples to prove it. But even if you ignore the stupid assumption that all great, lasting fiction is in novel form, it’s hard to see how this litany supports the argument that most writers “performed their greatest magic when they were young.”

Tanenhaus says that Thomas Mann finished his “first masterpiece” at 24, that the lost generation “found their voices when they were very young,” that the “indefatigable warhorses who grew up in the 1950s were also good very young.” Is this the same as writing their best and most lasting work?

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I'll judge all I want.

…if it contains the phrase “compulsively readable.”
Working at the used-book counter of a major independent bookseller, I see more mass-market paperback mysteries and thrillers than your grandparents’ garage sale, and every other one has a blurb proclaiming the book “compulsively readable.” Don’t feel superior yet: A lot of so-called literary fiction has the same endorsement. Even putting aside the basic absurdity of this description (“readable”? why not “legible”? or “in English”?), it should also be obvious that when this many people use the same phrase in the same way, it doesn’t mean that the phrase is apt. It means it’s pre-fab and lazy.

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Christopher Hitchens talks to a remarkably combative interviewer in the New York Times. Did they decide on this tone together? Is she coming at him the way she thinks he would come at people? Does it seem like at any moment she might haul back and slap him? I’m not used to him being the calmer one.

Q: Your mother committed suicide, in a pact with a lover, in 1973. Did she suffer from lifelong depression?

A: No. I think she was having a bad menopause, and she was losing her looks, which were pretty impressive.

The conversational gambit was simple: What’s the worst song that you like?

“So,” he said, “like ‘Take on Me’?”

I told him, no, not exactly, because “Take on Me” isn’t bad.

“Then I guess I don’t understand your definition of bad.”

Fair enough.

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