Lonesome Quill

The other day, while waiting for my car to be washed, I came upon a novelty product in the car wash gift shop. (Yes, there is a gift shop. And it’s not half bad.) The product: My Poo Journal, in an appropriate shade of brown.

It had to be a joke. I picked it up, opened it, and found a detailed daily log, in which the user was invited to record intimate specifics about her crap. Shape, consistency, color — I had to put it down before reading much more, because I was both embarrassed and grossed out.

Who buys this book? Men? But the book is designed with girly fonts and swirly graphics (no poo images, as far as I could see). So, gay men? Women? Which women? Because isn’t the woman who records details about her daily defecation the same woman who uses Excel spread sheets and can’t be bothered with cutesy bullshit?

I wish I could see the proposal for My Poo Journal. Demographic: yogically inclined, chick-lit-reading city dwellers recently introduced to ayurveda.

Billy Collins is so famous and beloved that it’s tempting to dismiss him. Because don’t Americans, even Americans who like poetry, always choose the easy over the difficult? And Collins is so easy, so entertaining, so companionable. When reading his poetry, you don’t even really have to try. It’s all right there in front of you, including the jokes.

And yet. Collins is delightful and even, in his latest book, cutting. We’ve chosen a new poem of his, called “Hippos on Holiday,” for our wedding ceremony, even though it doesn’t say a single thing about relationships or marriage. (It says something about living large.) And here’s his poem called “Divorce”:

Once, two spoons in bed,
now tined forks

across a granite table
and the knives they have hired.

Slice.

Can you get away with that, in literary fiction? I don’t think so.

I just read A Family Daughter, by Maile Meloy. Brisk, fairly entertaining read, but 90% plot. Each character had precisely one quality, or occasionally a single counter-quality. That’s it. No substance to the book. No point, either, although a few floating points here and there, with nowhere to stick.

Where was the editor to point this out and make Meloy focus?

After hearing Studio 360’s excellent hour on The Great Gatsby, I reread it. And I thought, a) It really is a masterpiece of prose (duh), and b) Its meaning is pretty clear. Or is it?

I read Gatsby first in high school, when I pretty much missed the point. As in, I was more attracted to Daisy and Jordan than repulsed; I wanted to be them, and I wanted to live like them. I couldn’t quite see anything wrong with Gatbsy, either–I think I found him very romantic. The parties were glamorous; people said clever things; the dresses were drapey and elegant.

I could see that Tom was an asshole.

Of course, I was living in a rich and superficial place and time–the 80’s in Potomac, Maryland–and I had not yet fully grasped the pointlessness of massive amounts of money. Or of behaving in a particular way merely because it was stylish. I couldn’t see the class thing, either. At least, not deeply.

The second time I read the book, I tore through it to get the plot. I was helping a teenager write an essay for English class, and I needed to remember who was driving which car, and when. This time, I was left with the impression of despicable people doing despicable things. John corroborated. He said when he taught Gatsby, he felt covered in grime. “The prose is beautiful,” he said, “but the message is dirty.”

Is it? What is the message? This time, here’s what I got from the book: 1) Gatsby is a fantasist, and his fantasies are America-sized, and one fantasy (Daisy) is hopeless; the other (money) is pointless. So, that feels sad. But not dirty. Because the book knows that Gatsby is a kind of American fool. 2) People who are born into poverty will never be accepted by the East Coast establishment. That’s obviously absurd (though who would want to be accepted into the East Coast establishment, anyway?), but the book knows it. 3) There is a reckless, superficial kind of living that’s morally bankrupt. Which the book also knows. Right?

Maybe. Gatsby’s criminal behavior is likely responsible for the suffering of at least a few collaborators, and we don’t tend to remember that about him. Nick is privy to all manner of debauchery, and adultery, without doing anything about it; at the very least he could have the backbone to separate from these people sooner rather than later. But he’s young and lost (away from home, as they all are) . . . I don’t know. There’s a kind of attraction, a seduction about the Gatsby landscape, where while we understand that the behavior is almost wildly cruel, we still want a piece of it . . . I’m still puzzling. John’s supposed to read it soon, so we can discuss.