Two book reviews in two paragraphs

Tom Wolfe, I Am Charlotte Simmons.

Tom Wolfe jumps the shark with this one. Don't read it, especially if you have been to college: Wolfe's ear has gone all to tin when it comes to capturing the way people actually speak. The book is a complete mismatch between Wolfe's eye for social hierarchies and powerplays (which remains pretty good at times) and the subject matter, which is an overlong heard-it-all-before tale of lost innocence for one Charlotte Simmons, who goes to Dupont University and finds that it's not all laurels and academic robes. That students drink and have sex. Gasp, gasp, triple gasp. The book could be shortened by a good thirty pages if Wolfe were to excise the needless ellipses. The book depends upon stock characters, and even says as much: "Denny, whose actual first name was Demetrio, was like a caricature of a pizza parlor proprietor..." and Wolfe's right.

*



Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy.

This is good. Ruth Stone's eighty-three and conscious of the fact. I've spoken with poet friends about how one might engage the domestic while avoiding inanity. How do you address the ins and outs of living a by-all-rights standard life at home and render that life not with stock romantic regard - i.e. "Ahhh, home." In the first stanza of "At Eighty-three She Lives Alone," Stone clearly finds one answer:

Enclosure, steam-heated; a trial casket.
You are here; your name on a postal box;
entrance into another place like vapor.
No one knows you. No one speaks to you.
All of their cocks stare down their pant legs
at teh ground. Their cunts are blind. They
barely let you through the check-out line.
Have a nice day. Plastic or paper.

We're all going to die, in short, and the presence of the domestic forces Stone to break out with all the strength she has. The whole book is marked with this kind of desperate energy (although it's not always so... crass, some might say). I recommend it.

Roadside America

Las Vegas is so prevalent in the American mythos that it's hardly a strange thing to see a billboard advocating its saucy charms. Nevertheless, the appearance of this billboard seemed, back near the outset, auspicious.




Eastern Kansas. Above me, and too big for any normal camera to capture, there is a humongous ground-to-ground double rainbow. The picture I had the toll attendant take for me took in only half of the phenomenon.




Liberal, KS. Dorothy's house is to the right, and indeed looked light enough to fly.




New Mexico, I think. Northern New Mexico's very mountainous - almost Pacific Northwestish in its numbers of pine and S curves.




Clearly, it was pretty awe-inspiring. I couldn't remember upon reviewing these pictures if I was incredibly impressed or incredibly bored. Let's go with impressed. Impressed with the American Sublime.




Rain in Arizona? What are the odds? Low?




Taken on 93 North on the approach to Vegas. Apparently you can't capture Vegas with any known photographic equipment; the city moves too fast and will evade your attempts to comprehend it. One big light show blur you're on the inside of.