HA! i'm reading again!

Read (or at least started):
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
At the Same Time, Susan Sontag
Magical Changes, Graham Oakley (does this count? it's all pictures. my kind of book, man)
The Rape of Europa,
Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri
random book titled something like "Character Analysis in the work of Enid Blyton" that I picked up in Powells because I could NOT believe that someone would write a serious book about this, but hey, they did.

Stuff I want to read:
fictionalized biography of Artmesia Gentileschi, by Anna Banti
Biography of Arthur Ransome, by Roland someone
Swallowdale, by Arthur Ransome, and THEN all the other Swallows and Amazons books
Twilight series, by Stephanie whosit

I haven't actually, you know, FINISHED, anything to speak of, but at least I have rolled eyeballs over print enough to qualify as reading the last week or so, which is better than I was doing before.
I did end up starting Infinite Jest; obviously I'm nowhere near finished with it because it's like five million very dense pages, but so far thumbs up. I'm skipping the footnotes, I've decided; the flow thing is more important, and while I do sympathize to a certain extent with the common criticism of his work that it is too self-consciously show-offy, it's FUN how much he knows about everything, and has this extensive and very precisely applied vocabulary (i.e., not just gratuitous big words, but perfectly placed accurate vocabulary that gives you a little tickle of pleasure of OHHHHH how nice that he put that word _there_ exactly where it belongs, and it's a word you only hear once every ten years so it makes you happy that it is still not just getting used but getting used in the right place to mean its right thing.) On a slightly unrelated note, it has occurred to me before that in English-foreign language translation dictionaries, especially ones that include slang or very idiomatic terms, they should also include an appropriate frequency for each phrase. "cool" can be used once every five minutes, easily, without being egregious, for example; "all that and a bag of chips" should be limited to once a year, at most; I have restricted my mother to "getting up at the butt-crack [of dawn]" to once every ten years, not that she respects that boundary. I think it would be really useful when learning a foreign language to give you a sense of how often you can use a given word or phrase without sounding weird. Anyway. So so far I heart Infinite Jest, and I do feel happy to be getting in on the tail end of the whole grassroots thing of 'Infinite Summer' (the project of reading Infinite Jest this summer, which may be just a Bay Area? thing or a U.S. thing? I don't know - as a tribute to DFW's life and horrific early death. So tremendously sad when smart funny people can't find enough to be worth living for.)
The other book which I am going to claim I finished (even though I skipped one of the longer middle essays) was a book of Susan Sontag essays, "At the Same Time," which was compiled posthumously. I will admit to having Trouble with a capital T with some of them: she nearly lost me with the first one, which is sort of a weird abstract pseudophilosophical meandering about the meaning of Beauty, and what beauty means and how it's defined and how it relates to ethical/moral issues and cultural standards and I found myself losing patience just a wee wee bit with it because a) her attempt to define beauty isn't really going to change what anyone else finds beautiful (I don't think) and b) I am the world's least abstract thinker. I do think that beauty is not as visceral a decision as we might like to think: I have grown out of liking a lot of pieces of art that I really liked 10-20 years ago, and come to really like several other things that I hated as a teenager, in large part because of extra stuff I have learned about the cultural context/artist's intention/etc, but I don't think Susan Sontag (or Oscar Wilde, or Plato, or anyone else) philosophizing about the meaning of beauty is going to do much to change what is ultimately a fairly visceral reaction to a piece of art/music; you love it, or you don't love it. Ennyway. She also does this thing of referring to herself obliquely as this ultra-highbrow persecuted intellectual character, and it just seems a little bit snotty to refer to yourself as one of the last remaining smart people in the world, the last guardian of the True Culture and the Intelligentsia. meh, get over yourself.

The essay that most most grabbed me in the Susan Sontag book was a review of a fictionalized biography by Anna Banti about the Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi. First off, wow, what a great name, to be called Artemisia is pretty fantastic, and secondly wow, fantastic to be a successful (and apparently good) painter in Florence in the 1600's, in a world completely totally utterly dominated by men made me feel so vicariously proud and woohoo, you go sister! The part of the essay that was a little bit disheartening was where she talked about the decision that women (still) have to make about basically being hyperproductive in their life's work or having a family, and how that is not a choice that men really have to make. "For a woman to be free, free as a man, means choices - sacrifices - sufferings that a man may choose but is not obliged to incur... Feminism has meant many things... about justice and dignity and liberty - to which almost all independent women would adhere if they did not fear the retaliation that accompanies a word with such a sulfurous reputation... that feminism suggests an avowal of strength - and a denial of the difficulty and the cost for women in being strong (above all, the cost in masculine support and affection)." I don't know how Susan Sontag felt about masculine support and affection, but I for one am grateful for what I got in that arena, and would be loath to give it up, although I think I am as guilty as the next woman in terms of not infrequently deferring to men without really thinking about it too hard, which I am sure has cost me in productivity points. Anyway, I am undecided about Susan Sontag, but I'm definitely going to read Anna Banti's book about Artemisia at some point.

I finally started the Jhumpa Lahiri, although haven't gotten far enough into it to be able to decide yet whether I like it; I don't think I'm ever going to be able to get over how much I liked her first book, Interpreter of Maladies. I also yesterday went on a pilgrimage to Powell's bookstore in Portland - my first time ever; next time I go I am bringing a sleeping bag and a campstove and just staying there for a week or two, or until they kick me out, whichever is longer - and I bought a nonfiction account of the Nazi pillage of so-called "degenerate" art from Jewish collectors which I am twenty pages into and which I can tell is going to be just whoppingly depressing, with lots of destroyed paintings and murdered artists and the whole bit) as well as a Graham Oakley children's picture book called Magical Changes, which is AWESOME. that dude is a genius. I am not surprised his books are going for $200 a pop on ebay. (I looked for the Church Mice books, in vain, but I did find a hilarious 'Guide To Enid Blyton's Characters' which offered a semi-serious brief psychoanalysis of all the major players (George/Julian/Dick/Anne/Timmy the dog/Silky/Moonface etc etc) as well as books 3-8 of the Swallows and Amazons series, which I recently re-read book one of, and decided it was excellent. I didn't BUY books 3-8 because I need to read book TWO (Swallowdale) first, and of course they didn't HAVE book two... I also looked for the new biography of Arthur Ransome (author of the Swallows and Amazons series) which my sister sent me a link about which sounds FASCINATING - he apparently (in order to escape a tedious marriage) got himself sent as a journalist/spy to Bolshevik Russia and was there for the revolution, had a long term affair with Trotsky's personal secretary (whom he later married), worked in China for a bit as a journalist/British Foreign Office having all sorts of hairy adventures, and it wasn't until he was in his forties that he came back to the UK and settled down in the Lake District to write these gorgeously appealing kids' books about sailing and pirates.

I also might have to read the vampire Twilight series, as I have now heard it's fun from several people. hmm. we'll see. I might have to read it in secret when nobody's watching. We have to at least pretend to maintain some pretense at High Cultcha.