To read or not to read

The Literary saloon is a sad, cold bowl of oatmeal.

Is that too harsh?

First off, it looks like it was made back in 1999 (which it very well might have been). It’s clunky, reminiscent of the class websites you made back in third grade when you did that one dinosaur project. Plus, I’m pretty sure that some of the graphics were created using Kid Pix.

I heart digital puppets

I think it also may have been created using this computer.

It’s run by Austrian born Michael Orthofer, who founded his main website The Complete Review in 1999 (was I right or was I right??) and then this complementary blog two years later. He’s written lots of reviews and literary criticism and, based on the lengthy list of publications and interview links, seems to know what he’s talking about when it comes to literature (he tweets, too?) It’s organized by day instead of posts, listing all the entries for the day under the same heading, which is a little confusing. The content he covers ranges from general events going on in the literary world (Translator William Weaver passed away; who won the Prize for literature), some commentary on others’ writing about issues in the literary world (“ Judging pseudonymous (and other) work”), and then some promotional posts for newly published books. But really, nothing quite that interesting.

He mainly writes to inform, but since there’s not too much opinion, there’s nothing really to keep the reader reading. The writing style is matter-of-fact, list-y, and lacks voice. Usually blogs that are uninterestingly written might make amends by posting some cool instagrams or at least having a nicely designed home page. But this blog really lacks some major aesthetic appeal. We users of the Internet have short attention spans, and are not going to stop and try and read each titles and paragraph to try and find information that appeals to us. WE NEED PHOTOS! PLEEEEZE.

Despite his dearth of web design skills, Mr. Orthofer seems like a well-rounded man, sculpting snow and inline skating in his free time.

But then there’s Relunctant Habits.

This blog has a nice mix of writing and audio, all reviewing books, discussing music and movies, and talking with different authors. As you scroll down, posts vary from interviews, commentaries on society, covering pretty much everything (“We examine why Kachka is a terrible journalist and little more than a middle-aged man digging through dirty laundry;” George Zimmerman’s verdict; “the serpentine history of candy”). And they even manage a little humor! It’s written by a number of people, and actually includes some good photos, too. The only problem is a visual one: the website is designed so the photo of each post takes up nearly the entire computer screen so you can’t really look at the beginning of multiple posts at the same time, aggravating my inner claustrophobe slightly.

this is me reading your blog. please help.

But, this issue is minor compared to all the opinions, humor, and voice Reluctant Habits provides not just on books and authors, but also current events in the world as well.

On changes

Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening[…]Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.

Alice Walker

This was a quote Cal and me pinned up in our locker last year, and we would wonder about how we would each change after leaving, after not seeing each other for months. What would we change our minds about? What would be still important to us?  

But Alice Walker is right. You don’t know this change is happening until you look back. And, there I was, senior year, angsty and bitter and not knowing what was going on with my life and all it was was a little change going on.  

So wise

But how have I changed?

I guess I’ve become more intentional about living and paying attention. Time seems to pass so quickly here, and I don’t want to forget any of it. I think I’m just more aware of everything, which is good...but being too aware can take a toll on you.

I’ve loosened up. I was sort of a bitter old lady last year, but now I’ve realized that some things just aren’t important enough to worry about.

But I've also realized that never again will I take granola bars for granted. Some days they’re all I end up eating. There needs to be some holiday in honor of them or something.

And I've realized a few spoonfuls of peanut butter can count as a meal.

 

It's that good.

And I actually like my family. A lot. Far more than I did in August.

The fam

And I’ve begun to come to terms with society; Instagram and snapchat don’t seem so awful after all.

Quite possibly the best cup of coffee

Back in June when I visited my grandparents in their semi-detached, brick-and-mortar home in England, we went to visit a friend of my dad’s from high school who is a painter—not houses and walls, but portraits of people.

I have vague memories of visiting him and his young family with my parents and brothers couple years ago when I was about twelve or thirteen (unfortunately for him and everyone else, this was also the time that the raging adolescent within me was at its prime: I was spotty, uncomfortable, and timid, and probably pitied quite a bit by the well-meaning adults around me), but most of what I can visualize is a lengthy back garden with a rickety steel-and-tarp swing set. I also remember a bathroom at the very top of the staircase with a toilet that faced the door so that, if you were not quite so intentional about hearing the door click shut, it was possible that it could swing open mid-pee, and, might you jump up out of surprise to close the door before whoever standing at the bottom of the stairs had a chance to glance up, it would be very possible for the trousers around your ankles to get twisted between your feet, tripping you up and sending you tumbling straight down the hard wooded staircase, red-faced and trouserless. 

(Perhaps this was an irrational fear.)

But this is beside the point.

The house was white and nicely hidden behind a group of hedges (so well hidden, in fact, that we drove straight past and had to make a 5 point turn in the middle of the road…) And, there was a dog that was small and fat and part Jack Russell Terrier that came out to greet us.

And oh, the house was a wonderfully comforting chaos. The driveway had cars and wellington boots and cricket bats, soccer balls and watering cans. Walking up the front path, through the door, you were faced with a collection of sneakers, school shoes, library books and toy trucks. It felt like a home well lived in.

My dad’s friend welcomed us in and sat us down at the kitchen table surrounded by his own paintings, school portraits of his three children, and the morning’s mail. Out the window I could see the familiar steel swing set in the long back garden.

And then, he made us the best cup of coffee I’ve ever had.

Now, before this day, my coffee consumption had, like most American youth, been reserved for an espresso pumped with chemically flavored syrups, mingling with steamed milk in a cardboard cup. YUM.

look familiar?

But my dad’s friend had a percolator, a strange contraption that uses gravity and boiling water and steam to drip the coffee through a series of tubes and filters (here you can see how it works). And he also had a Pyrex cup full of milk that he sent in microwave for a few minutes.

A percolator

A microwave (in case you were wondering)

He asked if I wanted my coffee with warm milk.

Warm milk and coffee? I had yet to realize that this is quite a common way to take your coffee, and is alternately referred to as café au lait (or, maybe it was olé...?) But at this point in my life this concept was quite foreign, even revolutionary, and, slightly overwhelmed at the choices, I mumbled something that probably sounded like a vague ‘yes’.

Soon enough, once the coffee had percolated (is that even a verb??) and the milk had microwaved, my dad’s friend poured them, coffee first, into a china teacup. A matching saucer and a biscuit were paired with it, and were placed on the table in front of me.

Now, I don’t know if it was the atmosphere— the cozy chaos of the home and talking with another artist about his work—or if the beans were roasted over some celestial flame, but I have never since had quite the experience of drinking coffee as I did on that morning in June. The coffee warm, and the feeling of contentedness even warmer, I had, for the first time in a while, felt like everything was in place.

And it was good.

Relating the unrelatable (alternately titled: Why Is "Unrelatable" Not a Word???)

I like my movies and books to be relatable.

And, although my sci-fi-loving friend reminds me that, as hard as I try, I will never know what it’s like to be an old Cuban man spending weeks fishing for enormous marlin that are only going to be eaten up by hungry sharks in the end anyway, I’ve always had a soft spot for some good, realistic fiction.

Some of the movies that I’ve enjoyed the most and thought to be ‘good’ are, in fact, ‘realistic,’ in the sense that there are humans and settings that look like our world and conflicts that humans in our world face.

There’s The Way, by Emilio Estevez, about a man who pilgrimages across northern Spain after his estranged son is killed in a freak accident along the same pilgrimage.

 

Martin Sheen's character walking along El Camino de Santiago with his son's ashes

There’s National Lampoon’s Christmas vacation, which caricatures an American family’s Christmas (mis)adventures.

Just getting stuck under giant log-transporting trucks...the usual way to start off the Griswold family christmas tree hunt  

There’s Stand By Me, an adventure about four boys who spend a weekend in the woods searching for the body of boy from their town.

Can I please be friends with you???

There’s Outnumbered, which is actually a tv show, but is a semi-improvised comedy that documents a British family’s everyday life.

This is actually the funniest tv show. Please go watch it now.

But, then when I think about it, there’s Midnight in Paris, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Spirited Away that I also thought to be pretty ‘good,’ which aren’t exactly the most realistic.  

Thinking back to what my friend said to me about how I can’t ever really relate to the Old man and the sea any more than she can to Ender’s game, I realized that really, a good movie, a good book—essentially, a good story—just needs to tap into some part of the human condition, the connection between beings. Humanity and what we experience can be manifested in a bunch of ways, not just what is familiar to us. Whether it’s through aliens or an American family, a good movie helps us understand what seems completely foreign, obscure, and unrelatable and then, through that, helps us understand our own connection.