The Financial Lives of the Poets

The Financial Lives of the Poets
Jess Walter

I first read about this book in the New York Times. This has nothing to do with the rest of this review, but I just like to add that because it makes me sound so responsible and upstanding. Not like the sort of person who would take their son to Petco and tell him it's the zoo. Which, in my defense, it sort of is, if they allowed you to purchase elephants and monkeys at the "big" zoo.

Anyways, the idea of the book intrigued me – the combination of poetry and finance, which Matthew Prior attempts to combine in an ill-fated website launch (poetfolio.com) which ultimately is one of the pushes that threaten to topple his family over the edge of solvency into that great chasm of bankruptcy.

And even though the idea was interesting, I found the voice of the narrator getting in the way of what (I think) the author was trying to say. Prior can be funny. Especially the first chapter where he goes out to buy milk for his family and winds up smoking weed with a group of young kids and ends the evening stoned, with no milk or shoes and the new moniker, "Slippers." Or when he is contemplating going to a concert that he thinks his wife may be going to with an old flame:

"I do hate concerts. I have hated them ever since we went to an outdoor festival once and were nearly trampled to death. I hate paying three times the cost of a CD just to stand in an unruly crowd and think one of two things: (A) This song sounds just like it does on the CD or (B) this song sounds nothing like it does on the CD."

But then he keeps trying to be funny and he's like the kid in class who wants to be funny so bad that everything that comes out of his mouth is an attempt at a joke and the emotional punch is watered down. The book feels it's strongest in the rare moments when he's not doing this.

The description of how they found themselves in Dante's seventh circle of credit is a bit thin also. A better portrait of the pain of a family crumbling under the economic anvil is New York Times (see – this makes me doubly responsible) reporter Edmund Andrews' Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown. Admittedly, I have not read in whole, only a good portion of it in a bookstore and excerpts online, which while lacking the witty dialogue of Walters, is a much more real depiction of how a solidly middle class family can trip into a financial morass.

There are some interesting ideas though, buried in the funny stuff. Matt's wife is described as being put together. Later on he notes that what is put together can just as easily fall apart. Which is sort of the like the faltering economy that is the force that rings in all of the characters in this book.

Another interesting concept is the idea that the failure of poetry helped spur the financial crisis:

"The poets were supposed to remind us of this, to regulate the existential and temporal markets (Let be be finale of seem./ The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream) and to balance real estate with ethereal states (One need not be a chamber to be haunted,/One need not be a house). Hell, we don't need bailouts, rescue packages and public works. We need more poets."

I wish he had developed this connection more fully because there seems to be some small truth in there. There are thousands of literary magazines publishing poetry, most of which have not been heard of outside of those writing poetry and perhaps trying to get their poetry in those same magazines. And maybe that is the problem – too many people writing and not enough people content to be just a reader, too many people wanting to be at the top of the financial heap and not enough people content to live a good, modest life.

Architecture Is Elementary - Visual Thinking Through Architectural Concepts

You know how puppies and babies are good for helping pick up members of the opposite sex? Well, this book is kind of like that. I read the book largely on Bart and almost every time I looked up from reading it, I would catch someone’s eye. The charming graphics I suspect, are a large reason for this. The illustrated buildings are done in ink and the pages feature a bold black and white design. Besides being an attractive book to look at, the book is a nice introduction to some of the general concepts of architecture, i.e. mass, proportion, etc. The book is aimed at everyone from kids to adults which might explain why the exercises in the book are a bit weak (make a triangle with your body) and some are just outdated (there is an updated version of the book so perhaps that has been corrected.). The most incongruous parts though are a couple of parables that have little, if none, relation to architecture. Besides these minor flaws though, the book is a nice way to stick your feet in the shallow end of the architectural pool. Or get a date.

My Other Body, a memoir of love, fat, life and death

Ann Pai’s, My Other Body was a self-published book. I ran across it while (hangs head in shame) joyfully browsing some of the truly awful self-published titles. I had stumbled across the now defunct website POD-Dy mouth and although I was tempted to click through since it seemed to be devoted to respectable self-published books (hangs head lower in shame) one of the entries caught my eye. It was My Other Body and the excerpts were so good that I bought the (e)book. And even though it provided absolutely no fodder for my demented demand for poor writing (think of me as the Statute of Liberty of Literature - give me your tired, your poor writing...), it was well worth it.

The non-fiction book follows the author as she watches her morbidly obese sister, Joyce, battle multiple infections and systemic problems that cannot even be adequately diagnosed because the amount of fat on her body makes diagnosis impossible. Pai’s description of her sister’s body and their relationship is beautiful, hypnotic even. For example, when the author comes back to the hospital room to find her sister being bathed, something she was not completely capable of doing herself:

"I came back too early. Checking, I peeked around the doorway's blue swag and saw her slumped and quiet in the shower chair, her back to the door. Water cascaded over her naked shoulders, over the chords of her hair, over the chair. My chest tightened as though cold air were being pumped into it. I couldn't speak. I couldn't recognize her body as a body. Her back and shoulders looked hunched under an heavy, silken pack of white pelts. Her immense buttocks collided, flattened pale planets, biologically incomprehensible. The fat, wet sandbag of her naked left thigh squashed against the shower chair. I backed out, sobered and awed."

And if Pai needs a second career, she might want to consider rewriting medical textbooks as the medical descriptions are elegant as well. Describing her the function of the kidneys, "The kidneys cup the spine like mitten potholders."

Pai allows Joyce to be a complicated person. She is sometimes critical, is not always honest, and fails to make much effort to make her health better. But she is Ann’s sister and the bond between them, even when the ends of that bond are barbed, is undeniable. Pai manages to create a brutally beautiful description of the sisters' relationship.

The only thing that did not work, for me at least is that the book is interspersed with the inner thoughts of a character struggling with weight. I think the idea is to cause the reader to challenge their assumptions when they find out the thoughts are those of Ann not Joyce (yes, it worked). These sections are written in a different voice and don’t have the same lyrical quality to them and instead read more like the pages of a weight loss blog. I think the book would have been better served to incorporate these sections into the rest of the book in one voice. I am probably being a bit harsh about those sections, but I felt the rest of the book was so well done that I think it made these sections stand out more.

While I didn’t find my nugget of awfulness in my POD search, My Other Body was a more than welcome surprise. Now back to our regularly scheduled search…

Alive in Necropolis

After being fooled by the promising cover of Like Snow Falling on Cedars (or as I like to think of it, Like Awfulness Falling on Unsuspecting Readers), I chose a book with no cover. That's right, I got me an ebook. Not a kindle though. I refuse, refuse, refuse, to buy an over-priced contraption that I will only get food on and ultimately lose on Bart. But. I use the option on Amazon that allows you to download Kindle books to your laptop. I figure one advantage of the ebook is that if you don't like it, at least you don't have to keep seeing it on your bookshelf, reminding you that you wasted money on a book you didn't like.

So, off I went to "get" Alive in Necropolis, a book about a rookie cop whose beat is a town with more dead residents than live residents. I picked the book because it was located in Colma, a small real life town, located about 10 minutes south of San Francisco and 5 miles north of where I live (Pacifica). It's a town whose main feature (other than cemeteries) is a Bart station that is all gray angles and pigeon poop, so I was curious to see how the book treated it. And you know, I wanted to feel all self-righteous and indignant if the author got anything wrong (which he didn't).

It turns out though, that some of the dead in Colma, well, aren't really so dead. And some of the living are doing a pretty good job at imitating the dead, at least emotional-wise. Rookie cop Mike Mercer, one of the living-ish. Early on Mercer manages to become a local hero by saving the life of a kid who had been left taped up and left for dead in one of the local cemeteries. Not long after that though Mercer's life begins to fall apart, spurred largely by his ability to see the dead and his own ghostlike movement through his life.

Where the book really comes to life though, is when the undead dead enter. The who's who of the Colma buried includes Phineaus Gage, who has spent all of his afterlife searching for the tamping iron that shot through his eye (true story...well up to ghost part), Lilly Coit and Doc Barker who is seriously pissed off that he got stuck in the afterlife with his bullet riddled body (apparently most people get a slightly younger or older version of themselves, but generally at least a version with all parts in tact).

According to one interview, Dorst's original draft included more of the ghost world, but was pared down to a fairly minimal level by the final draft – which is a shame because this is where the book really sparkles. The police reports that summarize a portion of the action are funny. (Mercer practices writing police reports by recording his everyday life in police report format - "Friend Owen prepared beverages by mixing rum and mango juice and serving over ice. Juvenile male (approx. 6 y.o.) rode electric rocking horse outside supermarket; cried when ride ended. Subject Fiona (W-F, 43) asked if I would like to establish a permanent residence in her home; Subject expressed dissatisfaction with response.)

Even without the other-worldly guests, the book is competent and a quick read and the snappy dialogue makes it easy to see how this book would make a good movie. However. Without the ghost element, I don't think the book would have been as enjoyable and would have been a bit on the ordinary side.