PriorBlog

Since it’s been really icy lately and it took me forever to get rear lights for my bike I have been taking public transportation to work, which is nice because even though I am gaining weight like crazy, I get to read. So, score two for gravity.

First book I read was Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas. I’ve always wanted to read this because it is about Boston. It didn’t disappoint. It follows three families through the decade surrounding the bussing crisis in Boston. As somebody who lives here, it was interesting to see what in the past were to me nondescript street corners or buildings come to life as a parts of a larger history. We were down in the South End Saturday. It was the first time I had been there since reading the book and I felt like I was on a pilgrimage to the holy land.

Oh, this is where Colin chased the guy down the street with the baseball bat, etc, etc.

I love playing tour guide even though it puts my wife to sleep.

For me there was an added bonus of an entire chapter having to do with the large newspaper I am currently contracted to work for.  I was able to regale my lunch table with tales snipers being dispatched to the roof of the building  in 1974 and so forth.

Then I moved onto Plexus by Henry Miller. A couple of years ago I bought this after browsing around Pazzo Books with nothing better to do one afternoon. How I miss those days when I had nothing better to do. Nowadays there is always something better to do, so hop to it! I picked up this book for two reasons. One, I knew Henry Miller was “important” but didn’t really know anything about him. Two, it was an early edition, from like 1963 or something and I liked the cover art.

I never thought I would read it, but one night I pulled it off the shelf just to see what the writing was like and I liked it a lot better than I thought I would have. Eventually I got around to reading the rest of it, and I was really enjoying it until about the last fifty pages or so.

It’s about Henry living in New York with his second wife, who supports him as he tries to become a writer. The parts about wanting to be a writer kind of make you want to vomit, but the other details of his life in New York in the twenties and the odd ball characters he hangs out with are worth throwing up for. This is the second book in a trilogy, so I wasn’t a 100% on all of the details.  For example, the way his wife Mona supports him is basically through taking advantage of her admirers.  I kept wondering how accurate this description was.  Basically, she stays out all hours of the night with one of her admirers and comes back with a bunch of bills to support the two of them, but Henry seems to stick to the line that there’s no sex involved.  Everytime she comes back though, I was wondering what he was or wasn’t telling us.

The one thing I had heard about Henry Miller was that he had run into some trouble with people considering his work to be obscene.  From Amazon, I learned that other books in this trilogy are a lot more graphic.  This book is very tame until an impromptu orgy breaks out about two thirds of the way through.  It’s abrupt intrusion makes for a nice comic landing, as Henry’s friend uses a post-coital pause to gush on and on about how philosophical and deep Henry is.  And then it’s back to fucking, I suppose.

As much as I am not into reading books to find out about the authors’ sex lives, I would have much preferred a sixty page sex scene than the end of Plexus, which is this paean to Oswald Spengler.  The book is steeped in Henry’s egotism, which is possible to overlook when you are invested in reading about the parties and people that make up Henry and Mona’s world, but when it’s just Henry raving about Oswald Spengler’s influence on his way of thinking, things get dull fast.