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Conflation, says Egan, below. Agreed. I can’t tell you how many times this same thing has happened to me. You re-read something (or go looking into something you’ve read) and discover that you’ve injected some scene or detail from another source into the work. NIcholson Baker got at this and similar phenomena in U and I. I have even conflated things that I read in U and I with other works.

Given how disparately we read these days, will this conflation get worse? And if it gets worse, does it make our experience of reading better? I think so. I’m the type who likes to pull in references from wherever I can get them (A Visit from the Goon Squad makes me think that so does Egan), but some people probably prefer to have their memories discreet and catalogued, easier to summon and identify.

When the chips get implanted in our heads, I hope they have a bookmark feature.

lareviewofbooks:

JENNIFER EGAN, PADGETT POWELL, ANTOINE WILSON, MATT WEILAND, and DINAH LENNEY

Image © Lisa Jane Persky for Los Angeles Review of Books

JENNIFER EGAN
Ghost of Books Past:

For many years, I believed that my favorite novel was Catch-22. I remembered reading it as a teenager and being transported by the interweaving narratives and impressionistic style. It seemed a perfect amalgam of radical originality and great human storytelling, and occupied the supreme position in my mental pantheon. Then, in my late twenties, I sat down and re-read the novel, and the magic was gone.

Though I was disillusioned with Joseph Heller to the point of anger, it clearly wasn’t his fault; one thing that had driven me back to Catch-22 was my discovery and admiration for a later novel of his, Something Happened. Heller was an excellent writer, no question. But I never lost myself in Catch-22 that second time, and — most bizarrely — my favorite narrative strand, a shivery account of a character recovering from a lung illness, was not in the novel at all. Somehow I’d conflated Catch-22 with another book, not to mention injected it with a whopping dose of teenage emotional paroxysm and revelatory self discovery. What novel could live up to all that?

¤
ANTOINE WILSON
Ghosts of Book Present:

In between projects and in search of what I like to call “assisted reverie,” I was about to pull Gaston Bachelard’s classic The Poetics of Space off the shelf when a friend recommended a Bachelard title I hadn’t heard of: Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. I’ve only just begun reading, but GB’s already working his old magic on me: “To be active, a phantom cannot wear motley.”

¤
PADGETT POWELL
On reading a letter:

I was put in glasses age 14 when the driver-license lady said “Read line six,” and I said “What lines?” I could read the giant E but below that was a chromosomal fuzzy mass. When I got to school with my John Lennon dork round frames I looked out the window and saw LEAVES on trees. I had theretofore seen a green crayon-like monotonism that I knew represented leaves but had no idea one was supposed to see them. I looked out the windows amazed for weeks. This was roughly the same time I saw Allen Collins also 14 play guitar en route to becoming a millionaire before I was a sophomore in college. I now approach 60 — how has this happened?

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(Source: lareviewofbooks)

Last night, around 11:15, upon my return from the gym, I looked up at my daughter’s bedroom window and saw that her light was still on. I hoped that she’d simply fallen asleep, but I had an inkling that she was up reading The Hunger Games, a book she had started reading that day and finished this morning, less than 24 hours later. When I got to the top of the stairs and found her bedroom light now off and her lying there, looking like a kid pretending to be asleep, I whispered that I knew that she was still awake, that I understood how hard it is to put a book down when it really grabs you, but that she needed to think about being rested enough for school the next day.

To get through that last part, I imagined Pa Ingalls in one of his stern but sensible moments.

I decided that today’s English lesson (she’s homeschooled) would be about the dystopian novel and its different types—allegory, satire, etc. A little web searching turned up a piece by Laura Miller from the New Yorker about how Young Adult (YA) dystopian novels differ from adult works in the genre. The important difference, Miller says, is the amount of hope present in YA stories, where things can get desperate, but characters don’t get their faces bootstamped for eternity.

Which made me think about last night’s State of the Union speech, which I missed, but the post mortems for which were all over the map, left and right. But the theme seems to have been that things are shitty now, but that we can make it. Because we are America, and that’s what America does. We can come through this period with our country intact, with our animal pelts on our backs, enough dried meat in our rucksacks to make it to the solstice, and enough strength to carry on to that shining city on a hill, the one lit by a mountainous tire fire and robot-controlled klieg lights swishing the landscape like knives.

“Hunger Games” Illustration, from the New Yorker piece, by R Kikuo Johnson.

Photo of Michael Landon, courtesy of the Internet.