I’m not reading as much as I used to, or usually do. I’ve usually finished about 20 books by this time of year; instead, I’ve barely finished a dozen. I don’t know why. I don’t have any less time than I usually do, except for the commute. I just can’t concentrate. I’m very easily distracted.
I started writing about some of this year’s books. That’s taking forever, too. I publish my book list later and later every year and at this rate, I’ll be lucky to finish this year’s book notes in 2023. That’s fine; it’s not like I’m on deadline.
I'll eventually get around to reading more, and writing more (to be perfectly fair, though, I write all the livelong day: I just don't do it here). Right now I am just about to finish Jessica Mitford's Poison Penmanship, a collection of her famous muckraking journalism, with commentary by the author. Yes, she basically wrote a book about her own writing. Only a Mitford gets away with that. It's very meta, and quite brilliant.
Jessica was the subversive, rebellious, Communist Mitford and her writing (especially the writing about the writing) makes it clear that she never stopped sticking it to the man; not for one second. She went after an odd assortment of targets: the funeral business (most famously), the segregated South, fancy spas, the university where she briefly taught, a pretentious NY restaurant that overcharged her for a meal – it's quite a range.
Side note about the restaurant, a now defunct establishment called The Sign of the Dove: The incident that Mitford writes about happened in the mid 70s and the whole idea of a trendy restaurant with a twee name oppressing its patrons reminded me of the famous line in “When Harry Met Sally” about the undue influence of restaurants on NY culture: "Restaurants are to people in the 80s what theater was to people in the 60s." Of course, Nora Ephron wrote that line and it turns out that Nora was the New York magazine editor who commissioned Mitford's piece on The Sign of the Dove. This surprised me not one bit. Nora would have hated that kind of overhyped restaurant and of COURSE, she also knew Jessica Mitford. She knew everyone.
*****
I finished Poison Penmanship about ten days ago, and started on what I thought would be a very quick read, Merrill Markoe’s Cool, Calm, and Contentious (I think the title doesn’t have the serial comma, but I find myself unable to type a series of three or more items without that comma). I love Merrill Markoe. I still have a paperback copy of How to be Hap- Hap- Happy Like Me, her 1995 book of humorous essays about her crazy dogs, her jerk boyfriends (including the very thinly disguised David Letterman), and my favorite, her philosophy on health and beauty. In the essay “My Year of Health and Beauty for You,” Merrill explains how every woman can achieve the smooth otherworldly glow of a Vogue supermodel (supermodel culture was at its very peak in 1995) through the simplest of means: a better gene pool. “Next time you are born,” Merrill wrote, “try to get better parents.” Revolutionary advice, that. On the topic of hairstyling, Merrill writes that she once wasted hours of valuable time attempting to style her hair, lamenting her failure to achieve the optimum combination of length, shine, volume, texture, and color, all while appearing to have made no effort at all (another peak 1995 value–look perfect but also look as though you didn’t try). Reflecting on that wasted time and effort, she suggests that readers look at pictures of themselves at age 2, and just stick with the hairstyle they had as toddlers.
Yes it was funny but I promise you that I followed that advice. I never permed my hair again after that. I got rid of my curling iron AND my flat iron. I started cutting my fairly long hair to shorter or medium lengths ranging from mid-neck to just below the shoulders. I embraced the use of headbands and barrettes and clips (and ponytails when my hair got long again), and I started leaving my house with wet hair all the time, not just when I was on vacation. To paraphrase Merrill, I looked at my two-year-old self with my thick, very slightly wavy, very slightly wiry, plain brown hair with its weird bends and cowlicks, and I decided to CHOOSE thick, very slightly wavy, very slightly wiry, plain brown hair with weird bends and cowlicks as my hairstyle. And although every so often, I try to style my hair a bit and embrace a more polished look, the “me at age two” look is the one that I have stuck with more or less for the last almost 30 years.
But I was writing about a completely different book, was I not? That right there was some meta insight into why it takes me ten days to read a book that most people read in an afternoon. I myself used to read that kind of book in an afternoon. I can’t even write a simple paragraph about a book without a meandering turn through an entirely different book. And can I tell you that I stopped writing this paragraph mid-sentence to go and fold laundry? Well, I did. Adult ADD, as I keep telling everyone, is real.
Anyway, back to Merrill’s book. The one that I’m reading now, that is, not the one that I read 27 years ago. The essays are funny, of course, because Merrill Markoe is very funny, but they are very serious, too. Her advice on how to spot a malignant narcissist is spot-on, and obviously very timely what with the last six years or so. And her account of her rape by a stranger who broke into her apartment when she was in college was heartbreaking and upsetting and horribly familiar. It’s different for everyone, of course, except that it’s also exactly the same. Just like adult ADD, PTSD is also real. And just like with the ADD thing, I know this the hard way.
*****
It’s Wednesday night now, and I’m home waiting for someone other than me to make a call on our Wednesday night swim meet, which is about 80 percent likely to be cancelled (thunderstorms) and 100 percent likely to start late if it proceeds at all. I wouldn’t mind an evening off, but I do love Wednesday night meets.
Anyway, I’m almost finished with Merrill, and I’ll probably read more Mitfords next. Jessica’s Hons and Rebels is next up in my queue. This too should be a quick read, but I’m beginning to think that there might no longer be any such thing for me. I can’t stop checking Twitter and NPR and MSNBC and the Washington Post to see what new outrage the J6 committee will reveal. My attention span is similar to that of a gnat, and it’s all Trump’s fault.
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