On the night after the earthquake, I was reading Virginia Woolf’s A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN when I came across these lines:

“[I]t is in this famous library that the manuscript of Thackeray’s ESMOND is also preserved. The critics often say that ESMOND is Thackeray’s most perfect novel.”

I’ve never read Thackeray, nor heard of this novel.  I put down the Woolf and Wikipedia’d Thackeray.  The novel in question might more rightly be called THE HISTORY OF HENRY ESMOND, or so Wikipedia informed me.  I wondered why I hadn’t read Thackeray before.  Why had I never read VANITY FAIR, which, despite Woolf’s 1928 assessment, is novel which critics today seem to agree was his best?

I struggled mightily to fight off the impulse to dash off to my nearest library and search out the Thackeray stacks.  There are times when I berate myself for being so poorly read.  This was one of them.  Never mind that it was nearing midnight: Project Gutenberg (god bless them!) listed 30+ Thackeray titles, each of which could be downloaded within seconds.   I stared at my laptop, my fingers poised over the keyboard, debating where to begin.

And then it hit me: I’m never going to read Thackeray.  Even if I live to 100, I’m never going to imbibe one of his sentences or wrap my hands around one of his bloated novels.

This realization came with both sadness and a feeling of liberation: as sad as it was to confront the limitations to the breadth of my reading, it felt good to let go of my lofty readerly aspirations.  

Every so often, one encounters a much-talked-about list of the books everyone ought to read.  Or a list of the greatest 20th century American novels.  These lists make their way around the internet with frightening regularity, momentarily halting whatever conversations are going on about contemporary letters.  Like everyone, I glance at these lists and pat myself on the back (good boy! what good taste!) for having read many of the listed books—but then, inevitably, comes the moment when I tally those I haven’t read.  And I think to myself: Dear boy, just what have you been doing with your life?

I was fortunate to grow up in a town that lavishly funded its school libraries.  The libraries at my middle school and high school were vast brightly-lit treasure lands staffed with several librarians to guide your journey if you became lost.  I remember checking out maybe seven or eight books from my middle school library on the cusp of my seventh grade spring break.  They were biographies mostly: John Charles Fremont and Sun Yat-sen were the two that I remember now.  I had vowed to read all the books over the upcoming week, but I fell short: perhaps the Fremont and Yat-sen books were the only ones that I finished.  I remember feeling foolish the following week when  returning the stack of books that mostly went unread.  Perhaps the librarians asked me about them, and I shrugged them off.

Why did I feel like such a failure?

It was the first time that my intellectual appetite outpaced my capabilities.

After my Thackeray epiphany the other day, I thought of the other writers I would never likely read: Dickens, Proust, Tolstoy, Mailer, George Eliot, Steinbeck, Rushdie, and Rilke.

The big names kept crashing down all around me: Christopher Marlowe, Simone de Beauvoir, Garcia Lorca, Swinburne, Colette, dos Passos, Styron.  All of them unread.

Then there were the writers whom I had merely sampled—a few stories or maybe a novel: Conrad, Twain, Henry James, Solzhenitsyn, Goethe, Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, Ring Lardner, Thomas Mann, Updike, Duras.  Given an endless amount of time, I would gladly refresh myself in their pages, but in this world one must make choices every time we step into a library or bookstore.

While I was doing my MFA, I took an independent study course on The Absurd with Dr. Christine Kiebuzinska.  It was one of the most remarkable experiences of my reading life.  Over the course of eight months, we read a couple of dozen books together.  She had me read multiple translation of Camus and Sartre (something every writer-in-training should try, if only to gander and the remarkable variations in which one can construct sentences) and exposed me to a number of writers (including Gombrowicz, Hugo von Hofmannsthal) I might not otherwise encounter.

Yet at the end of this remarkable experience, I came to the understanding that it was more important for me to keep abreast of the currents in contemporary literature than to delve deeply or exclusively in the past.

Contemporary literature is filled with as many hits as it is with misses.  There are times I shake my head and wonder why I wasted a few hours reading the blunder du jour, but (like most would-be writers) I read not only for my enjoyment but to sense contemporary possibilities, for no matter how good my writing might one day be, I’ll never be read in c. 1946 France.

Meaning, I guess, that Camus and Sartre have nothing to fear.

Part of being an American is making peace with one’s ignorance.  In this way, I am no different from the Tea Partiers who choose to turn their backs on a century of progressive American accomplishments.  When I step into the bookstore, picking up an old Henry James classic means foregoing at least temporarily the new Kevin Wilson and Caitlin Horrocks books (both of which I hope to read soon).

Yet, still there is sadness.

And no: the list of writers whom I’ll never read is not fixed.  If you had asked me last week, I probably would have included Jane Austin in that list.  However, reading Woolf’s fine opinion of Austin makes me want to check out PRIDE AND PREJUDICE the next time I’m in the library.  Would that be a good place to start?

~~~

  DYKSTRA ERRATA: That one-time baseball player who hit me up for money?  He's sleaze. You know that.  I know that.

Yesterday, he was charged with multiple counts of indecent exposure.

The incidents date from 2009 to just a few months ago. Lenny would place Craigslist ads for personal assistants, housekeepers, and chauffeurs. The ads would request candidates email pictures of themselves to him. He'd claim the jobs would be dream jobs, that he'd pay incredible salaries and that, through him, his employees would meet high-flying sports and entertainment celebrities.

Interviewing the candidates, all of them female and all of them having sent him pictures of themselves that he must have fancied, he'd disrobe and say that the job would also require "massages."  Some of the girls, bedazzled by the prospect of good money, probably serviced him-- Lenny, after all, isn't as outright stupid as he's often portrayed; I doubt he would have placed so many Craigslist ads if he was constantly being rebuffed.

The thing is, I wonder why law enforcement waited so long to charge him with these crimes, especially since it had been well-known from various published accounts and accusations that this was Lenny's modus operandi for getting hand jobs.  While the police waited, they allowed Lenny to do this again and again.

A friend of mine is going through an emotional upheaval.  She’s in her forties, married, with two children.  She is no longer effervescent.  She tells me that she is incapacitated by sadness and fear.  Things are happening in her life that drain her of her will to live.

“What kind of things?” I ask.

“Family things,” she whispers.

Because she won’t tell me, I fear the worst.  Though I’ve asked, she refuses to tell me exactly what is happening.  She’s painfully shy, secretive about the things she cherishes most.  To better cope with her inner turmoil, she’s taken up smoking again.  Whatever happened has affected her for months, yet she cannot bring herself to tell another living soul about it.

            In an email, she writes about the weight she’s lost since whatever happened happened—“down to down to [x lbs], my weight at time of marriage--but I look fabulous!”  Because I know her to be sensitive about her appearance, I read this as a proud boast.  I write back that this is good news, but what I really think is how profound her depression must be to have caused this loss of appetite.

A couple of weeks ago, an article on MSNBC.com caught my eye.  A woman who survived a lupus-induced stroke tells of how impressed her friends of her resulting severe weight loss. 

“The crazy thing was people thought I looked great because I was so thin.  They'd ask if I was working out and I didn't have one muscle. You could see every bone protruding out of my shoulders, my elbows, my wrists.”

She tried to tell people how dire her weight loss was, how much it jeopardized her health, yet her friends prodded her for diet tips.

“It was like the skinnier I got, the more I heard about how great I looked.  Men, in particular, thought my body looked fabulous.  I'm like, ‘Wow, that's really sick.  I have to be anorexic to make you think I'm attractive.’”

Stories like this get to me.  I’ve been writing a novel lampooning how obsessed we can be with false ideas of feminine beauty.  Much has been written elsewhere about the psychologically damaging effects that our culture’s focus on body image can have on women, yet it still startles me to see how alarmingly short-sighted people can be.  What’s the value of weight loss when it is achieved as a consequence of emotional despair?  Or life-threatening medical conditions?

When beauty is concerned, misplaced priorities are rampant. 

Earlier this month, Jane Fonda appeared in Harper’s Bazaar.  The occasion?  A new movie by the two-time Oscar-winning actress?  A new political cause for this activist who has helped shape public opinion about crucial events for over forty years?  Nope.  Appearing in a revealingly sheer Stella McCartney dress, the 73-year-old Fonda announces to the world that she is still beautiful. 

Fonda, who has an artificial hip and an artificial knee (“I set off as many bells and whistles at an airport as I did [at a Cannes fashion show.]”), freely concedes vanity.  She still has the need to show off her figure.  “I wear what will show off my best parts, which are my waist and my butt.”

While I have nothing against people taking pride in their personal appearance, it’s appalling that someone as accomplished as Fonda feels she can only assert her continued relevance through brash boasts of youthful beauty.  Beauty is confining pedestal.  One senses from reading Fonda’s comments that its pursuit has obscured her ability to take satisfaction from other facets of her life.

One needn’t be a cynic to suspect that a septuagenarian’s the outward appearance of beauty is maintained by a fair amount of make-up and, perhaps, cosmetic surgery.  Beauty is a wasteful pursuit.  Worldwide, the cosmetics industry raked in $170 billion in 2007 (the most recent year for which I can locate reliable figures).  Anti-aging facial serums are the most expensive products.  A 1.7 ounce jar of La Prairie “Cellular Cream Platinum Rare” will set you back a cool grand at Neiman Marcus. 

Do these products work?   A 2005 Forbes article suggested maybe not.  While the cosmetic industry touts these products as “clinically proven” to reduce wrinkles, their studies lacked clinical control groups to test their findings.  As Forbes writes, “If these studies were repeated using, say, olive oil, or even a generic lotion of any kind, it is possible that the results would be the same.”

Dollars are not the only thing that being wasted in the pursuit of beauty.  Anxieties and false expectations are being needlessly thrust upon women.

I feel sorry for Fonda.

“I was raised in the '50s,” Fonda says.  “I was taught by my father that how I looked was all that mattered, frankly.  He was a good man, and I was mad for him, but he sent messages to me that fathers should not send: Unless you look perfect, you're not going to be loved.”

As a father of a six-year-old girl, I hope never to wittingly or unwittingly impart that same message. 

As much as we like to believe that we’ve washed away the blatant sexism that has existed to subjugate or otherwise limit opportunities for women in our society, the expectations we place on women to maintain physical beauty place them at a tremendous disadvantage.  Just think of how much time Fonda put in over the years maintaining the comeliness of her butt.  Now think of all that she might have accomplished with that time had she devoted it to some other cause.

During the 2008 Presidential campaign, when Hillary Clinton still fiercely contested for the Democratic nomination, Michael Kinsley wrote a Washington Post thought piece about how much time candidates spent each morning readying their physical appearances.  Whereas a man can quickly shower, brush his hair, and toss on a suit, greater care is expected from women.  Attention must be given to the color co-ordination of their wardrobe.  They must apply make-up and style their hair.  Sadly, appearances matter as much as policy stances.  Should a hastily made-up female politician greet an audience or television interviewer, votes would likely be lost.

These extra preparations, Kinsley conservatively estimated, cost Hillary Clinton twenty minutes more each morning than Barack Obama.

“In most occupations this 20 minutes doesn't make much difference -- especially compared with the disproportionate time that women still spend housekeeping and child-rearing. It will make no difference after the election; no one will care if the president is well-coiffed when answering that 3 a.m. phone call. But in a close-fought election campaign, every minute counts. If you figure 20 minutes a day over a year and a half of 14-hour days and six-day weeks, it comes out to an extra two weeks of campaigning or sleep for a male candidate.”

Just as no one really cares what a president may look like at 3 a.m., I doubt anyone really cares about the state of an actress’s derriere.  When a friend emails us at three a.m. with her emotional woes, we don’t really care if she’s lost a lot of weight lately.  We don’t ask about the wrinkles that might be crowing her eyes, or the brand of lipstick she might be swishing over her lips.  What we want is her emotional well-being, which seems to be the first thing we lose sight of when our thoughts turn to beauty.

Raymond Carver, perhaps the most influential short story writer of his generation, wrote that his children were the single-greatest influence on his life.  He did not mean this in a Hallmark-y  Ain’t kids great? kind of way.

“I have to say that the greatest single influence on my life, and on my writing, directly and indirectly, has been my two children.  They were born before I was twenty, and from the beginning to the end of our habitation under the same roof—some nineteen years in all—there wasn’t any area of my life where their heavy and often baleful influence didn’t reach….[N]othing—and, brother, I mean nothing—that ever happened to me on this earth could come anywhere close, could possibly be as important to me, could make as much difference, as the fact that I had two children.  And that I would always have them and always find myself in this position of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction.”

I have three children of my own, and though I was older than Carver was when my first was born, I know that responsibility well.  My oldest, Stephen (12), is on the autistic spectrum.  Like many autistic children, he has other issues—sensory issues that make him alarmingly uncomfortable in confined spaces, anxiety disorders that at times can prompt him to act inappropriately in public.  Though he is funny and endearingly charming in his own unique way, he is not what you might call socially gifted; he asks awkward questions of strangers and cannot read body language well enough to understand when others would rather he keep to himself. 

My wife and I are acutely aware of how others perceive Stephen—and because of this, we keep to ourselves mostly, at home, renting Redbox DVDs rather than going to movie theaters.  We eat at home even when we’d love to go out for a pizza some nights.  Earlier this week, we had another appointment with Stephen’s psychiatrist.  We’ve been trying different medications, different anti-anxiety pills, but have yet to find the magic pharmaceutical that will alleviate his worst tendencies. 

Through our local autism support community, we’ve met other parents with children like Stephen, and most are just as insular as we are.  Actually, there are no other children *just* like Stephen: Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) can be incredibly broad.  Some ASD children can appear neurotypical, while others may be unable to talk.  Still, as parents, we all worried, perhaps too much, about how other people perceive and react towards our children.  We stay home.  As often as we can.

But there are times when we need to go out.  We need, for instance, to buy him clothes to wear to school, so we brace ourselves for what could very well be a challenging trip to the shopping mall.  Even a trip to local art museums, which he loves, can be disastrous.  He flaps his hands when excited.  He can pivot on his heels and point suddenly to a painting that he particularly enjoys.  Sometimes, he squeals.  Or, especially with Blue-period Picassos, he can plop himself on the floor and stare at a canvas for a half hour.  Though you would think museum officials would want all their patrons to be as ecstatic he can be when confronted with works of art, museum guards are decidedly less welcoming.  We’ve been told, for example, that museums are supposed to be quiet places (this, despite a distinct lack of signage), places where one can not so much as point from a distance across a gallery to a work of art.  Most commonly though, Stephen’s admittedly bizarre reactions have prompted guards to hover around us, surveilling us at very close distances—so close, in fact, as to cause his anxiety disorders to kick in.  Which lead to melt-downs and exactly the kind of behavior that is least tolerated of children in public places.

Sometimes, heaven forbid, we need to fly from across country to see relatives.  We practice coping behaviors with Stephen for weeks beforehand, yet the results are not always ideal.

Recently, I learned that a no-kids-allowed movement is apparently afoot.  “Brat bans” are in force at restaurants and movie theaters and trendy grocery stores.  Kids, even the best behaved, apparently make some people uncomfortable.  Kids squeal; they whine; they laugh too loudly.  And now, they are being banned.

Stephen gets overwhelmed easily.  He worries about things—things that strike me as trivial, like whether his hair is wavy enough, or whether his voice is too low.  Patience is not my biggest virtue.  Rarely do more than a few days go by without me feeling that I have failed Stephen in some fundamental way.  Did I react too harshly when he asked for the umpteenth time in a row whether his voice sounds okay?  He can be trying.

About the angriest I’ve been in recent years came when I found out that a couple in our ASD support community were getting divorced.  The father apparently just decided that being the day-to-day father of an autistic was not within his abilities or desires.  So he fled to Colorado after draining and/or hiding most of the couple’s joint assets.  A messy divorce ensued—which we heard about mostly from the beleaguered wife.

Okay, I know that other people’s marriages should be none of my concern.  Maybe there were other issues.  But what got me was that the couple’s ASD daughter was really sweet.  Our children played with her often.  She was well-mannered, a charmer, an intelligent and high-functioning girl.  While she may have presented her parents special challenges, those challenges we thought were likely small compared with Stephen’s.

I couldn’t believe that some guy would bail on her.                    

Especially since Stephen could be so challenging, so often.

Yet, the No-Kids-Allowed movement isn’t aimed at children like Stephen—it’s aimed at all children.  We are a nation that apparently values comfort over most other factors—and apparently the current message is that presence of children makes a whole lot of people uncomfortable.  That the allegedly uncomfortable people happen to be empty-nesters or DINKs with a lot of disposable income doesn’t help matters.  The reason that the movement is gaining traction is that retailers and restaurateurs and business owners are looking for any way possible to make its most well-heeled clientele happy—even if this comfort is obtained by banning other potential customers from their premises.

This tactic harkens back to the ugly era of segregation.  Southern business owners banned African-Americans from lunch counters and bus seats, because their presence apparently made a whole lot of Southern whites uncomfortable.

Last month, Malaysian Airlines banned babies from certain flights.  Other airlines are considering similar restrictions.  Mind you, Malaysia may very well be the poster-child of intolerance.  Consider how welcoming they are to religious minorities.  Or LGBT lifestyles. 

It’s ironic that this no-kids-allowed movement occurs just as tolerance overall is on the rise.  Last month, gay marriage finally became legal in our nation’s most populous city.  The nation’s Commander-in-Chief is an African American, yet fifty years ago, African Americans weren’t allowed to dine at many of our most exclusive restaurants.  Or country clubs.  Social conservatives still bristle at the sight of two men (or two women) holding hands in public.

When one restricts children from certain venues, one is also restricting access to their parents. 

I should also add that most children (even Stephen on most days) are incredibly well-behaved.

I should also add that nearly all of us, at times, can make others around us incredibly uncomfortable.  Grown adults yell at times, and what they yell usually is a lot fouler than what comes out of the mouth of a typical twelve-year-old.

Just as we have no right to ask that the fans sitting around us in a crowded sports stadium remain silent so that we may better enjoy the spectacle taking place on the field, what right do we have to exact silence on those around us in other public situations?  Can we use silence as or enforce other desired modes of behavior as a means to exclude whole classes of citizens?

AdWeek’s Jim Klara writes that businesses are going kid-free because of market pressure.  Apparently, there is a class of consumers with a “huge swath of discretionary spending dollars” that just would rather not see children in public places.

So what?  Must economic interests always out-rule questions of access?

I’m worried.  Not just for me and my children, but because this no-kids-allowed movement will be a back-door entry back to an era of intolerance.