Oh and this too

Chuckling Over Here

And this is apropos of nothing, but we are reading Harry Potter to our son, and I've noticed that J.K. Rowling really overdoes it with the adverbs. Just too many of them. And now I am watching Project Runway, and noticing that Tim Gunn uses too many as well. Like, how many ways can a person tell another to consider the "Piperlime accessory wall." "Use it thoughtfully . . . fiercely . . . appropriately . . ." And now in general, I don't want to here any word that has a -ly suffix.

Freedom

Okay, I have successfully finished a popular novel roughly contemporaneous to its publication date and I feel the need to celebrate a little with a meandering and unhelpful review.

Jonathon Franzen's Freedom will definitely find its place on college syllabi as soon as its published in paperback. The theme is right there in the title and any time you stop to remember that, you chuckle, because there it is, in the novel, being fiendishly costly and soul-crushing. Only those who lack freedom seem really free and yet seem maddenly flat, as characters. I'm thinking of Connie and Lalitha here, fellow readers. Freedom's political extremism and wacky family politics recall White Teeth, without having the freshman over-achieving silliness that novel had. Franzen deserves the comparison to Gatsby, if only because a body of water at its center is the locus of the main characters' dreams and aspirations, and so much goes awry for people for whom the reader feels so ambivalent.

Anyway, I'm being vague because the novel is too complex to summarize, and because I only finished it 10 minutes ago and haven't digested it completely. Two thoughts: Clarence Darrow said, "Freedom is a hard thing to preserve. In order to have enough, you must have too much." Freedom, the novel, holds a mirror to that, and makes me wish that it weren't so. I wish we could be freer with less.

Internet "Hiatus"

Unlike my sister, I can't maintain a blog and read an actual book at the same time. In fact, I can barely read books at all anymore, blog or no. The last book I remember reading was Netherland. I am sure there has been one since but if so, I can't remember what it is. So I am dialing down all non-work internet time to read Freedom by Jonathon Franzen. Good so far. More news as events warrant. This means I will only be able to update my Twitter feed like once every other night.

Happy Labor Day!

I'm going to try to spend my Labor Day weekend not watching the funeral march of the Labor Movement that is daily passing through my life. Instead, I thought I'd share a couple of my favorite union videos: