Bedside Manner: Ten Commandments

I’ll admit that I’m a brat when it comes to sleeping. I mean, I know I need to sleep, probably more than I do even, but it seems like such a waste when there are so many other things to be doing. So naturally the bookcase beside my bed is littered with the remnants of the things that keep me awake and distracted and doing anything but sleeping.

And for the record, this photo has not been arranged in any way, obviously, or I probably would have cleaned up a bit more.

So here are 10 personal observations about my “bedside manner.”

1: There are a lot of open books. I tend to have at least three books in rotation at any given time. If I had to explain why, I would probably just say different moods of what I want at any given point. Thus, usually there is at least one non-fiction work and one novel in play, and recently these have been sharing space with collections of short stories as I’ve been on a contemporary short fiction kick.

Not all of these open books will get finished, though. Usually I’ll commit to a novel unless it’s fairly unbearable, but especially if histories or non-fiction begin to bore me, I don’t have the patience to plod through something tiresome anymore.

Currently reading:

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: I generally have a tough time getting through McCarthy novels, but they are always worth it for those moments of pure prose that he distills better than just about any contemporary writer. The opening section of this book blows me away every time I read it.

Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer: An absolutely brilliant and thought-provoking psycho-analytic analysis of journalism, the relationship between interviewer and subject, and the narrative fact. Recommended to me by Nick White during a discussion we had about objectivity as an ideal in journalism. Pretty sure I lost the argument, if losing the argument is the privilege of having your mind changed.

Laurence Bergreen, Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe: I have no idea why I am reading this. I do not care anything about Magellan, that era, travel narratives or histories, etc. I’m not even sure why or where I picked it up. It is, however, a great read and Bergreen has a fantastic ability to build compelling narratives from scant information and sources, with language that absolutely thrives on the page.

2: The alarm clock isn’t even plugged in. Not even sure why it’s still on the table. I don’t care what time it is.

3: Probably the two most noted books are buried under others that are simply more interesting. These would be Toni Morrison’s recent A Mercy and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. The latter I read my first year of grad school and for some reason felt compelled to re-read it. It’s an excellent novel, but about 100 pages in, I realized I really had no desire to re-read it. As for Morrison, I like reading her much more in theory these days than in practice.

4: Enjoying the posthumous DFW resurgence. I’d say I was a fairly passive David Foster Wallace fan, but once you’ve wound your way through something like Infinite Jest, you’re kind of committed to an author. I’ve been reading Brief Interviews with Hideous Men because I never had, and can’t quite make up my mind whether I want to read his just published, unfinished The Pale King. I think not, but reading Interviews is fantastic. Foster’s thick sense of detail and ambiguity of the scenes is some of his best (especially the series of “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders”), and so many of the stories are rent with so much more inflection now after his suicide.

5. I have two old plane tickets on the shelf, one as a bookmark. I’ve been traveling a bit too much, perhaps? Maybe.

6. It’s baseball season. Happens every spring - I end up digging into books about baseball. For nonfiction, Crazy ‘08 by Cait Murphey is a great history of the last season in which the Cubs took home the World Series. Although I’ve only been reading it intermittently, it’s a fantastically told narrative. There’s also the requisite W.P. Kinsella novel, in this case my favorite of his: The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. A glorious book that I’ll re-read about every 3 years or so.

7. My attempt at genre. After reading Thomas Pynchon’s latest, Inherent Vice, I was lead into reading some noir fiction - primarily Dashiell Hammett as recommended by Chronicle proofer Mike Crissey. Hammett didn’t take at all. I tried, but gave up. Chronicle music editor Raoul Hernandez would have none of that, however, and gave me a copy of Red Harvest. Great book! I still don’t think the genre is really in my wheelhouse, but a good read is always a good read.

8. The iPad is always accessible. Let’s be clear here: I think the iPad is an amazing invention. I think tablets can and will help reinvent media and how we consume and interact with it. But I can’t stand reading books on it. My mother loves her Kindle, but I’m just not there yet. I believe the tablet has vastly improved the way we consume articles and news and hundred other forms of media and reading; I just haven’t been able to commit to the e-book. Yet.

9. The random CD’s. The Jayhawks CD is here for no particular reason other than there is really no corner of my house that doesn’t have a random CD or two lying around in it.

10. Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac are my bookends. The book of Dylan’s lyrics is just indispensable. It should be on every bookshelf. Kerouac I can take or leave these days. Perhaps I’m too old to be inspired by him anymore, and Some of the Dharma is an especially worthless piece of re-tooled extractions from his writings whose primary philosophical insight is that there is still money to be made in repackaging Kerouac. But it serves as a good bookend.