Against Love

I'm reading Laura Kipnis's polemic Against Love. It's a welcome and enjoyable readerly investment after spending the last few weeks slogging through Steve Martin's A Thing of Beauty, a smugly namedropping view of the New York City art world of the 1990s and early aughts. Perhaps, upon further reflection, these two books should be snuggled up against one another, since after a few years within Chicago's art world it seems to me as though the conventions of marriage and the importance of fidelity have little import. Sure, remind me, it's art school. And I'll concede. Point taken.

But onto Kipnis's book.

Against Love is smart and funny and 60 exuberantly-read pages in, I'm ready to throw in the towel on love, too. Or at least any ideas I may have had of it. Kipnis is not only expertly deconstructing everything my happily married parents showed me, but playing with form. She likes to remind us of what a polemic is and true to what it defines she goes after love and marriage with a warrior-like vengeance, decimating certain cuddly conventions, and imbuing her arguments with the zing and zest and an intensely intensity of, well, love. For a girl like me, who took a class called "American Love & Marriage" in college and who is collecting wedding paraphernalia to cover the landlord white walls of her tiny carriage house, Kipnis is giving me plenty to consider.

A Good Man is Hard to Find

I am not going to say that this phrase hasn't come in handy from time to time, even before I got myself a copy of Flannery's O'Connor's collection. A Good Man is Hard to Find. Once you're read the title story, however, the phrase loses all of its sly intimations. O'Connor wouldn't waste her talents on something as basic as questionable character or an unsatisfying mate. It's a whole lot more harrowing than that.

Here's a bit on my foray into Flannery's fictive world.

There is something unmistakably Southern about Flannery O'Connor's writing. The cadences in the language of her often unnamed characters. God and faith religiously invoked along the dusty roads, within simple frame houses. These country climes belie- time and again- the dark and brutal; stories of seemingly small and innocent choices that slyly become sinister vignettes of the callousness of human nature. The men and women who populate these small towns and rural landscapes are hardened, but somehow hopeful, simultaneously cunning and exploited. They are at once wily and shrewd, righteous and fearful.

In the title story of the collection "A Good Man is Hard to Find," a grandmother's relentless anxiety over becoming a victim of a serial killer named The Misfit evolves, from a familiar depiction of a batty old woman's wild imaginings to a coldly realized, almost unbelievable, encounter with teh very object of her terror. In the Life You Save May Be Your Own," it's hard to know to whom we should direct greater disdain - the old woman who is so willingly marries off her mute and innocent daughter - or Mr. Shiftlet who is, as his name suggests, a cagey, unreliable character whose overtures of generosity barely mask his greater motives for profit and escape.

There is an inevitability in these stories, dark and disappointing endings lurking from the start. But knowing where O'Connor is taking us does not demean the pleasures in getting there.

I had a baby.

Yesterday a colleague of mine was having lunch with her old boss.

"She's a woman of a certain age," she said.

I wasn't sure exactly what that meant (It turns out this particular age is 76).

However, it got me thinking that I'm a woman of a certain, well, other age. The age where babies and husbands and suburbia - the have or the lack - take up a lot of room in the imaginations and conversations of me and my friends.

That's why I like Sara Levine's "Baby Love" so much. Levine is the chair of the Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and I had a chance to hear her this past week at the Green Lantern's The Parlor Reading Series in Wicker Park. She's a fantastic reader - sly and funny. In this one myopic narrator she defines an urban, intellectual motherhood. Someone you might recognize from Facebook; a zealous contributor and maternal pioneer set to record her singular experience of mothering. But beneath the incredibly witty, tongue-in-cheek tone, Levine gets at something much more universal - a confounding reality of parenthood - the simultaneous need to both nurture and let go.

http://necessaryfiction.com/stories/sara-levine-baby-love-

Okay, maybe I'll take a look at those pictures from the Anne Geddes-lookalike photoshoot that just showed up in my newsfeed. After all, they do grow up so fast.

The Greatest American Novel?

Mike Dorf, lawyer, cultural advocate, and adjunct faculty for the Arts Administration & Policy program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago has made the following statement. Twice.

Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men is the greatest American novel.

Of all time.

Who am I to disagree?

Hopefully by the end of this Biblioyear, I will contest his claim with a list of my own.

A Weekend with the Glass Family

I took a break from Raymond Carver's Collected Stories to reread JD Salinger's Franny and Zooey. They are perfectly paced, but feel a bit slight to me. What's interested me more is the report that Salinger spent his years in semi-seclusion creating an entire Glass world. How many writers devote their entire writerly oeuvre to one family? It's either brilliant or crazy making.

Laura Miller Knows Best

http://salon.com/books/laura_miller/index.html?story=/books/laura_miller/2010/01/05/resolutions

Laura Miller's New Year's resolution is a good one. Maybe this is the year for Gravity's Rainbow? Or, perhaps, I will find myself elbow deep in strategic/SWOT analysis until semester's end.

French cooking & dreams of Paris

I am half-way through Thomas McNamee's Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution. A testament to publishing's adoration of subtitle excessiveness, if I ever saw one. I first started reading this book on the grand, carpeted staircase of Denver's Tattered Cover bookstore in 2007. It took me 'til a few weeks ago, browsing in the cookbook section Powell's in Chicago, to finally pick up where I left off.

I think what I like best about this book so far is McNamee's diligent recreation of the many special dinners that were hosted by the restaurant during the 1970s. Although most of it is utterly inedible to a vegetarian, these Frenchie menus do have a certain, je ne sais quoi...so much cream, and butter, and the descriptions of the pastries concocted in a small cabin behind the restaurant have a certain magic.