mccarthyism

9:15 on Monday morning. Woke up at half-past six to take Jenni in to work determined not to just fall back in bed when I got home. Took a shower and passed the time since with music and coffee, the early morning stillness. Heard the Great Lake Swimmers and put off making up my mind about them. Then I put this on, a mix of Dead Meadow and the new Lee Bozeman stuff, which I’ve definitely made up my mind about. Spot fucking on. Read Updike, “Rabbit Is Rich.” Getting on towards the end. I have a long day ahead today, with a fair amount of work to do, mostly Hebrew. I don’t actually mind it all that much, once I get started. It’s getting started that’s the hard part.

Updike is a little darker than my own personal experience but all the more real for that. I was never quite satisfied with my reading of him, I never quite feel like I’m getting it. I mean it’s realistic fiction, realism, which I lean heavily toward in my own tastes. The meaning implicit in the mundane, lit up by subtlety, turns of phrase, beautiful prose. It’s all right up my alley taste-wise. But what is actually meant? He seems just too essentially cynical at bottom. I don’t care if he did have Barth’s commentary on Romans on his bedside table. What’s the point in weighing down so heavily, in such a bleak outlook? A great faith in honesty, I guess you could say, honest prose is it’s own excuse for being. But behind that you wonder how honest he’s actually being. Of course the critics rave. It’s just the kind of stuff they would rave about. Christianity buried so deep in cynicism and “reality” you can barely tell it’s there if it is at all. Ok fine I know there’s a lot there, a lot going on, all the modern motifs of stasis and self-love, perversion, stupefaction. The alienation of the lower-class male, cowardice and blind instinct. But how great can an essentially static novel be? That’s the question, I guess. You do feel it pretty deeply at times. I often wonder about that third person in the room in the first novel, when the baby drowns. That was beautiful, really lovely, the hardest-hitting passage of all. It ached. I guess at bottom there’s a lot of me still old-fashioned, which still likes things more cut and dried, like Solzhenitsyn or Tolkien. My life is already fractured and static enough, I don’t need Updike to tell me. I need someone to help me sort it out, to transcend.

Oh the long winter. I’m actually a little disappointed though, there’s not as much snow and it’s not really as cold as I expected. I wish we lived in Canada. I mean if I’m going to live in the “north” I want real snow, short days, bleak landscapes, the works. And then the payoff, the heightened relief and beauty of April. Here it’s suburban sprawl, temperatures in the thirties and only a few inches on the ground. Mediocre all around.

I miss my family, so badly sometimes I can’t focus on anything else. It saps my motivation to work. No one understands you like your brothers and sisters. No one else “gets it.” Here I’m in the long slow process of forging a new family, a new identity. It’s a strange feeling. I feel like I’m working just for the future, putting daily little deposits in an account I won’t access for years to come: my own family, distinct from my parents’ and yet not. I don’t feel it much, yet; my loyalties are still in Toccoa, Georgia. My little brother is still in jail, my mom cries on the phone. A long long eight hundred miles.