Amsterdam

Here's the thing. Next to my bed sit three tall stacks of heavy paperbacks. One morning of intensely aspirational Amazon.com browsing, and two weeks later the post-structural American canon is staring me in the face every day when I wake up. Pressure. Gravity's Rainbow has become synonymous with terror in my literary lexicon. I can't even bring myself to look at the title page. Cormac McCarthy's entire body of work is propping up my dad's childhood bible. Not to mention the Nabokov memoir hidden in my office desk drawer, its pages conspicuously not dog-eared after chapter three.

So many books. So many unread books. So many books I should have read, but haven't. What is shame? Spilling beer on Derrida's Writing and Difference after three consecutive episodes of The City. And it's Tuesday. At 10 AM. And shame, my dear, is relative. A year ago I was ashamed to bring Derrida onto the Metro. Thought it made me look aloof. What heady days those were! Now a "good read" consists of a three page NY Mag investigation on the social missteps of Olivia fucking Palermo. Why, and how, could I give a shit? Yet, I do. In spite of myself and in defiance of eight years of some of the most rigorous and difficult education offered in this country.

Day in and day out, the stacks of books in my bedroom have been reminding me that I'm a phony. All talk and no game. All blog and no essay. All hope and no change. It's not like I'm some cultural snob, either. I'm just closed-minded about which pop culture is worthy of my time and which isn't. For instance: I reject House, but I watch The Hills? Am I a 13 year old girl? Do I wear body glitter? Do I own hoodies with thumb holes in the cuffs? Are bras embarrassing to me? Did your friend just ask me to slow dance with you under the basketball hoop during the next Boyz II Men ballad?

To pull me out of this intellectual slump, Friend Dotts suggested that I lower my self-imposed and enforced literary expectations. Take it down to a more psychologically manageable level. Somewhere around the Twilight series notch. Start to love reading again--not the struggle of a difficult Faulkner, but the freedom and joy of a Roald Dahl novel. Ease your way back into the Big Boys. At least then I'd have something to talk about. Says Dotts.

Well, I tried to take her advice. I'd gotten a free copy of Ian McEwan's Amsterdam from a curb last year and dismissed it with my typical unfounded disdain of anything popular. So I picked it up. I read the first few pages and it was okay. It didn't launch me into fits of ecstasy, but it was entertaining enough. When I fell asleep, I was feeling pretty good about my liberation from the hang-ups of undeserved intellectual snobbery. But when I woke up this morning and saw Amsterdam lying on my nightstand, something deep within me twisted into a knot and resolutely refused to allow Amsterdam to go to the Metro with me. The voice in my mind said, "Cameron, Cameron. Come on. Amsterdam? Who's even HEARD of Amsterdam? Really, what's the point, darling? Don't you have some, cough, cough, work to do?" My eyes turned to the stacks of Real, Difficult books in the corner. "Come on, honey. Don't waste my time. Get real."

So I marched over there and picked up Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, one novel I had been avoiding nervously. I read the first three pages on the ride downtown this morning, and what I found there was exquisitely, painfully, jaw-droppingly good. Those three pages put Ian McEwan to shame. If language like the first three pages of Suttree can be written, it DOES seem a waste to spend one second of my reading life reading anything BUT the finest, most difficult literature. Of course, that kind of thinking led me to the reading drought of the last few months in the first place. Balance, in this case, and most cases, would be preferable. I'll have to work on that. Until I do though, I'll be reveling in the lushly apocalyptic and vile landscapes of Cormac, my #1 crush in the world. Feast.

"Factory walls of old dark brick, tracks of a spur line grown with weeds, a course of foul blue drainage where dark filaments of nameless dross sway in the current. Tin panes among the glass in rusted window frames. There is a moonshaped rictus in the streetlamp's globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady rain of the same forms burnt and lifeless."