Back with the bears

Boy, am I ever going to regret staying out this late, so I'm writing this entry to remind myself it was worth it. I was on the cusp of leaving the bar--I'd just taken my leave of Blue Eyes and his posse and was a few paces from the door--when I came face to face with someone I'd had half an eye on all night. Inspiration struck, and I strode up to him, put my mouth to his ear, and asked, "Is your nickname 'Fig'?"

I'd finally placed him as the cutie from (near) Charlotte I'd met in that exact location just shy of a year ago. He was, perhaps predictably, stunned that I remembered so much from that meeting. Pleasantly so, I discovered to my relief, since the semi-stalkerish overtones were not lost on me. He asked me about the friends who were with me at the time; I recalled Coleman immediately, but it took me some time to remember Dale was along as well. Finally, it took Coleman jogging my memory to recollect that the fourth man in our party was le Ragoton.

When we met him, he was just dealing with the death of his father, and things don't seem to have gotten much easier since then, which explains why we haven't seen him out. He was wearing a "Brennivín" t-shirt which sparked a lively discussion of the virtues of Iceland (he's been to Bears On Ice and loved it) and the problems of binge drinking among Nordic youth. But he confessed his resolution to be "more social" this year so I'm hoping to lure him to one of my cocktail gatherings.

Up until then, it had been a pretty quiet night. Illness decimated the guest list for the evening, but I relished the opportunity to focus my attentions on clintswan and Scruffy. Poor Clint wasn't drinking, but I managed to sell Scruffy on a Sazerac and made myself a Corpse Reviver 2 as a result of hearing utopian_camorra sing its praises at work on Friday. Nice, but I don't think I got the balance exactly right--and sadly I exhausted the Lillet with my first attempt and couldn't follow up with another.

Until ending up with Fig, I actually spent most of the night in the hallway with some combination of acquaintances trying to coach a recent reentrant into the dating pool on chat-up technique. Even more interesting than examining something I haven't thought about explicitly in ages was hearing other people's suggestions. And naturally it reminded me just how damn thankful I am not to be in that boat myself.

Under the Screaming Trees

mollpeartree's freshly posted reading processional 2012 is a reminder of how lax I've been in reporting on my own fiction reading. I decided to take a break from my Russians for the holidays and packed two books for St Louis: John O'Hara's Appointment at Samarra and Junot Díaz' The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao. I can no longer recall who suggested that I read the former, but it had been waiting patiently for me to read it ever since I picked it up nearly a year before. The Díaz was an impulse purchase the day before I left because I'd heard some good buzz and was intrigued by the premise.

I actually started the O'Hara shortly after I bought it, but when I hit the line "for it is Christmas morning" in the third sentence, I laid it aside. Reading a Christmas-themed story out of season is for me like having Christmas cookies at a barbecue. "Themed" is the wrong word, really, because the Yuletide setting is only really important for the clump of parties on the social calendar, through which we can trace the disintegration of the novel's chief protagonist.

The 1930 setting really underlies the truth of the adage of the past being a foreign country. I mean, I did recognise commonalities between the social order of small-town Depression-era Pennsylvania and that of places I've lived in the Midwest, but they weren't much more striking than, say, those between the mores of bourgeois Germany in the late 19th century as represented in Buddenbrooks and my own German-American family.

I was most struck by the frank depiction of sex and sexuality, mostly because I wouldn't have expected to find it in an American novel of that era, by this was apparently one of O'Hara's calling cards and source of great notoriety at the time. It was also amusing, in light of the current classic cocktails revival, to get a glimpse of real Jazz Age cocktail culture:

The drinks were rye and ginger ale, practically unanimously, except for a few highballs of applejack and White Rock or applejack and ginger ale or apple and ginger ale, or gin and ginger ale. Only a few of the inner sanctum members were drinking Scotch.

(White Rocks Beverages still exists, despite everything, but it's not clear from me which of the twenty varieties in their portfolio is intended.)

O'Hara himself called the plot "quite slight" and so it's mostly the finely-observed sociological details ("accuracy" being reportedly something of a fetish for the author) that mostly carried the novel for me. The writing is Hemingway-esque in its simplicity, which is particularly effective in scenes of psychological breakdown; it can sometimes seem at odds with the purpose of the more expository passages. It's a tremendous portrait of a marriage, which is probably why I thought going into it that this would be its overwhelming focus. Makes me curious to seek out some of his other work but far from burning with eagerness.

Díaz' book also combines a closely-observed portrait of a place with the biography of a self-destructive man but is different in almost every other way. That's not just because the place is the Dominican Republic but most of all because of the style, which is self-consciously slangy, "ethnic", and peppered with pop culture allusions. What drew me to it was its preoccupation with a double outsider, a gamer geek from a minority culture. The author frequently emphasises that however bad it is to be a virgin white boy who reads Tolkien and plays Gamma World, that's nothing compared to being from a macho Hispanic society and doing the same.

Again, I found it interesting more for the pseudo-sociology than the plot as such; it didn't really come alive for me until the extensive middle section retelling the experiences of the title character's mother growing up during the Trujillato. (And this despite the fact that at various points I mused on how desensitised I was to such fictional horrors after reading semi-autobiographical accounts of everything from Mao's China to Mengistu's Ethiopia.) There's a certain element of trying to hard in many of the more reference-heavy adolescent passages.

But it was enjoyable enough to finish in a few days, mainly in the course of the train trip down and then an hour before bedtime on nights when I wasn't ready to simply drop from exhaustion. As with O'Hara, I'm not filled with confidence that another story set in essentially the same milieu would interest me as much. I'd be kind of scandalised that it won the Pulitzer if I weren't beyond putting any stock in most American artistic awards at this point.