You think about that already, how many people have not made it to this point, and what’s more, how many people were never born at all; how many singleYou think about that already, how many people have not made it to this point, and what’s more, how many people were never born at all; how many single cells who, if only they had won the genetic lottery instead of you, may have written something more timeless than The Odyssey, discovered elusive cures for what ails humanity, or on the flip side, to be fair, destroyed more lives than Pol Pot. It is useless to speculate on these matters because time is unconcerned with what might have been, but still you think about it, and still you feel both undeserving and impossibly lucky. Then, unbeknownst and within moments of this profound appreciation, you feel both dreadful and completely alone, as if floating through space, which of course, strictly speaking, you are.
You’re on your couch, which often substitutes for your bed, reading Winter Journal by Paul Auster. As you are reading it, you think what fun it would be, if you believed in fun, to write about your experience with the book in the second person, as Paul Auster does, observing his former selves in fragments and blinks of memory. You think about how many hours of your life have been spent on this couch, reading. How many more hours to come? You think about being less than half the age of Paul Auster, and yet, perhaps just as preoccupied with the absolute finality of the grave. You wonder what life will be like, if you endure to age sixty-four, at home, in America, on Earth. You wonder what you may have to live through that Paul Auster will probably not.
Forced to recall the time you were T-boned at an intersection in the station wagon your father was driving at that potentially fatal moment on Halloween night of 2001; a replica of which you have now inherited from him, you read on with horror and sadness, an account that feels all too familiar. You can hear the windows all shattering at once because you have heard it. You can look over and see your father hyperventilating, unburdening himself all at once of the impact, after the protection he provided for you in the form of an arm slung across your torso whilst simultaneously avoiding spinning into oncoming traffic for a double, triple, quadruple whammy of apocalyptic crunching metal. You can exit the car, survey the surreal damage and honestly wonder along with the author how you are still breathing. You continue reading, succumbing to tears and bordering on applause upon finding out that everyone; his wife, their daughter, even the dog, came through without any serious injuries, as both you and your father had. And the strangest thing of all, which Paul Auster, relaying the fortune of a doctor who happened upon the scene, deemed a small miracle, which is tempting to borrow, if his work, and your outlook, were not dependent on chance; your brother’s girlfriend (now his wife) and one of her friends (whom you would, years later, escort down the aisle at their wedding) were meandering down the path by which you were recently almost killed; one of them, you can’t recall who, wearing an angel costume, the corny and clichéd nature of which only hits you at the very moment you write this, and gives you pause in including the detail at all. Your future sister-in-law sees the familiar car, totaled, and then sees you and your father standing near it and calls out your father's name. You now have a ride home from the wreckage and a story to tell. Then, in another instantaneous ecstatic-to-somber switch, you are bogged down by the thought of all those who were not as fortunate as you, your father, Paul Auster, his wife, his daughter, or their dog. You recall a flamboyant and admirable high school classmate who, days before his death in a car accident, complimented you on your anachronistic, overly large ‘90’s t-shirt which you also inherited from your father (complete with cool colored [green, blue, purple] squiggly stripes, imitating a life-line, and multi-outlined dots almost giving the illusion of fluctuating, or static, movement). A fellow college student whom you didn’t know is brought to mind; killed in a fiery crash, along with her boyfriend, the details of which you investigated obsessively for days thereafter; discovering the reason was a drunk driver, who survived. Then, as if clutching to be dragged along behind the previous memory, a news story of two young children killed in a crash in Minneapolis, as a result of someone who decided their time was more important than anyone else’s.
Your girlfriend at the time (God knows where she is now), in junior high; your very first, who, like Paul Auster in his early infatuations, you would bend over and do anything for, and who was prone, and accustomed, to incendiary spats, one example of which resulted in a threat that your demise would occur at the hands of The Bloods, after pinning one of their ostensible members to a table upon witnessing him violently shove your then-girlfriend, your temporarily-eternal-soul-mate; the first instance in which you risked everything for what you thought was love, and how you would do the same now, if the situation presented itself, or indeed, if some immediate occurrence demanded such a swift spring to action; a reaction which could pale in comparison to what shits you may flip if something comparable were to occur in your life now, to those whom you now hold dear.
You could keep writing now, but you want to save some things for your own fragmentary, literary, auto-biographical efforts which, as with this influential and destined-to-be-pre-culminating work, could wind up being some-significant-amount-of-a-lifetime-in-the-making; and if only two people read it, they will be the only two to have ever read it; and then the sun will explode and it will not matter.
More examples of monotonous life experience Paul Auster discusses over the course of his lifetime (that is to say, confined to the contents within his book, and to the limited experience of your significantly shorter life thus far) would abound to which you could relate; injuries and scars, sexual encounters and heartache, death of loved ones and musings on mortality. You are not special or unique in this, but you come to feel that you are, paradoxically, as you learn how severely, and consolingly, you are not. You are confronted with a lifetime of things unlived by you, but that you have come to have a stake in emotionally, through mere chance of these events being recorded for you to come by; to piece together the puzzle of; to plunge the depths of; to solve, from a bird’s eye view, the labyrinth of connections by an astounding concatenation of circumstances.
Meeting Paul Auster was a hell of a thing. You remember because this happened so recently. You wondered what you might say to him. You think that he may be impressed by your ties to Northfield, Minnesota, the town in which you, in fact, would meet him; the hometown of his wife another fine writer, Siri Husvedt, whose sister your mother was close friends with in her youth. You could have set him up for that James Joyce joke you heard him mention in an interview, which involved a woman who asked to shake the hand of the man who wrote Ulysses, to which Joyce responded, in so many words, that she may want to reconsider if she knew where else that hand had been. Another option was to invoke the commencement Paul Auster had with Samuel Beckett when he was twenty-five, the same age as you are now, in a ploy to convey some semblance of serendipity. This seemed hokey, regardless of how inspired you were to hear it. One last refuge was to appeal to his former self which he has written about; to tell him that never, not once, have you felt vindicated, or normalized, for being a bed wetter, not only in your childhood, but as Paul Auster admitted—stringing you along in solidarity—well beyond the acceptable age for being one. Ultimately, after seeing him in front of you, hearing him speak in person, and holding your copy of his book in his hands, you opt for dead silence. Get the book signed and fuck off. He breaks this silence with a humble, reticent, and resounding thank you. You would go on the next day to see him again and, overcoming some of your nerves, express to him how much the hell his work means to you. He seemed genuinely surprised, after having signed the book you are now discussing, to see you were in possession of a first edition copy of The Invention of Solitude, his first published work. He tells you it is probably worth a lot of money, and you respond: as if I’m going to sell it. Even if you did, these experiences are priceless, as are, you come to realize, all experiences. Paul Auster is entering the winter of his life and you are exiting the winter of your youth; a piece of which he now knows, at least temporarily, includes him....more
It was all right. Heck, it was better than all right. It was adequately satisfactory.
I prefer to watch and listen to Tina Fey, so perhaps I would hav It was all right. Heck, it was better than all right. It was adequately satisfactory.
I prefer to watch and listen to Tina Fey, so perhaps I would have enjoyed an audiobook more, if read by the author. Nothing in this book was as funny as her angrily shouting "Ah, Nerds!", or imitating Eleanor Roosevelt before being abruptly cut-off, and subsequently awkwardly recoiling. I am a fairly recent 30 Rock fan (credit to Netflix), and I hate to say it, but watching television in this case may be time better spent.
Amusement was not entirely absent, but she couldn't reel me into her father's story in the way that the likes of Paul Auster or Christopher Hitchens could. I don't suppose I expected any such thing, because this is not a literary endeavor, nor was its genesis a result of any sort of intrinsic catharsis, reminiscence, or outpouring of affection, but a celebrity cash-in much like most comedic memoirs, and thus slightly cynical, and thus slightly disappointing considering how much I have come to respect Tina Fey as a script writer/actor/comedian.
It's probably better than most mass-produced books one can find at Walmart, but it's still a mass-produced book one can find at Walmart. ...more
