I ended up finishing Kindred last week and concluded that I thought it was pretty good. My initial critique still stands, and maybe I just got crabby, but I think I got even more critical. In addition to the “As You Know, Bob” dialogues, I would also say there are a number of “messages from Fred,” most specifically when Dana makes an internal comment about having over-planned her escape.

I also became highly suspicious of the nature of some of the conversations going on. It’s hard not to take for granted how much philosophy permeates our daily lives, and if you’re writing about an earlier period, you have to back out whatever philosophy wasn’t around at the time. Two huge examples would be Darwin and Freud—it’s very difficult to imagine how much the concepts evolution and psychology impact the way we interpret the world. I’m by no means an expert on this, but it seems like the 19th Century characters in Kindred seems to have a too-modern perspective on issues of what it means to be a person and ownership of the body. Of course, I don’t doubt for a second that slaves thought of themselves as equally human as anyone, and I’m sure they fully believed that it was a crime to violate their bodies, but that doesn’t mean that they necessarily had the vocabulary to express themselves or think of themselves in that way at that time. It’s an extremely complicated issue and one that’s really tough, if perhaps impossible, for an author to get 100% right. I would need to reread closely and come up with specific passages, but my knee-jerk reaction is that a lot of these ideas in these terms came to prominence in the 1960′s and 70′s. But I could be wrong…

I had also remarked on Kindred not paying a ton of attention to language. This is in marked contrast to the audio book I started next, which is The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. For some odd reason, I’ve found myself wanting to dislike Chabon’s work and I have no idea why. That’s going out the window though, since I’ve been enthralled with the opening 100 or so pages of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is blowing me away. There are authors I admire for their ideas, and there are authors I admire for the way they tell a story, but Chabon’s one of those authors where I think, “I want to write more like that.” His sentences are meticulously well-crafted and his descriptions are rich, his characterizations nuanced, and only rarely does he strike a false, or perhaps overly-literary-for-my-tastes, note.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union brilliantly straddles a number of genres—the artful literary novel, the science fictional alternate history, and the pulpy detective novel. I’m not very far into the story yet, but I’m well and truly hooked. The more Chabon I read (most recently before this was “The God of Dark Laughter” in Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology) the more I think I should be a leading fan-boy (not that he needs them) for his insistence on blending ghettoized genres into the more “respectable” world of literary fiction, to the betterment of both.

Oh, the reason I’m reading this? One of my professors practically insisted that I include it on my prelim reading list on postmodernist, hard-to-categorize, genre-bending novels. So yes, it fits the bill nicely.

The outdoor team I’m on played for the first time on Saturday. We lost 3-1 to a team that hadn’t beaten us in five years, according to some of their players. It was a poor performance and we deserved to lose.

I’ve decided too that the guys I hate the most in these leagues are the defenders who think they’re so tough. In this league, the fields aren’t great, no one’s in great shape, it’s tough to move the ball around. The goals scored tend to be of the ugly variety. I played at right back for the opening ten minutes and it was amazingly easy—if you have any question whatsoever, boot the ball up the field or out of bounds. Believe me, it’s about twenty times harder to actually bring it down and pass it with some conviction given these conditions—I know because I played in midfield for the rest of the time and trying to do anything worth mentioning was much harder.

A disappointing start to the season but I think we’ll recover, both by playing poorer teams and by having more guys on hand. We had three subs, they had about eight. Quality aside, it would be interesting how many times the team with more subs wins the game. It was my strong suspicion in the fall that many of our lopsided results only happened because we would score two or three goals in the second half, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence we usually had five or six subs to the opposition’s two or three.

On the bright side, my Dr. Scholl’s gel inserts seemed to have worked extremely well. I was sore from my hips to my toes from the shock of running on hard ground after playing outdoors last Tuesday, but the good doctor’s claims of inserts that provide shock absorbency would, at this point, appear to be valid.

Current Mood: Not Looking Forward to a New Week |