The Internet.
How would I go about identifying page 123 in the Internet?
The next nearest book at hand is ee cummings 100 poems. Suddenly I feel a part of greatness, because my nearest book doesn’t have 123 pages. The Great Greavsie and Tagger also had this problem.
I pull myself up and reach into my carry-all-on-the-tube-bag and clasp my talons onto the book that will allow me to play the game.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Díaz
“The future appeared cloudy and there was no doubt he sensed his own mortality and that of Trujillo in the fall of Cuba. Which might explain why, when he met Beli, he jumped on her stat. I mean, what straight middle-aged brother has not attempted to regenerate himself through the alchemy of young pussy.”
Now, play: Ani! Martin! Lillipad! Bungi! Funny Girl! (or don’t).
The rules:
1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people
Last night I dreamed […]. It reminded me of something, I didn’t know what. […] I haven’t thought of it for years, yet now it is clear and detailed. I am again exasperated because my brain contains so much that is locked up and unreachable….*
Almost the whole time that I’ve been reading the book I’m reading, something has bothered me – not so much about the book, but rather about me and my unreliable memory: I have a feeling that I’ve read this book before.
It’s entirely plausible.
Some months after moving to the neighbourhood, I chanced into the Fulham Public Library. I don’t know the number of times I walked by, ran by, strolled by, rode the bus by its Victorian façade. The library was like the fire station (which was just a couple of blocks east of its civic cousin): a large municipal building on the high street, a publicly funded place that (knock on wood) had nothing to do with me other than my contribution of council tax that helped provide these necessary public services to my less fortunate neighbours.
I recalled a chance meeting with another American expat – one who lived in Richmond – when years before I had lived someone else’s life** in W1. She had mentioned that she rented videos from her local library. I never met her again, but the fact that she frequented her local library must have taken seed in my brain where it lay dormant until one day I sat losing the annual budget negotiation with the Mista. The Mista proposed a budget based on necessity (a line item entitled “fun fund” would cover our entertainment needs). I touted a more liberal approach.
“Why’s the Misc. line item so small?” I queried.
I recognised there would be little room for discretionary spending according to the Mista’s budget, and books were expensive in the UK!
Isn’t everything when the US market is your basis for comparison?
I ceded the “Misc.” line item. And within the week I joined the library***. And within the month a new phase of my life started: the phase of rediscovery of the noble institution known as the public library. Every two weeks I went in with one set of books and came out with another. It was during this phase that I rediscovered the venerable Doris Lessing****. It was during this phase that I may (or may not have) read the book that I am currently reading.
Or rereading?
Like the library***, there is so much in the ambiance of the book that is familiar; but there are so many sections, passages, sentences that jar me into sitting up straight and paying overly-conscious attention, that I cannot imagine that I could have read this book previously and not remember.
Perhaps I need to buy some Gingko.
This morning as I pulled on my socks (brightly coloured stripy knee-high things), I thought about my mother teaching the five year old me how to put on my socks. It struck me that I don’t follow the technique I remember her showing me, which was so smooth and efficient; if I remember correctly, she folded the sock, turned it ½ way inside out, put my little toes into a little crack she had made, pulled a bit and PRESTO, my foot was snug as a rug in my sock.
This memory came flooding back to me as I sat on the floor pulling on my socks.
Approximately 45 minutes later I was reading the excerpt at the top of this post from the book that I am reading. Rereading?
*Still reading The Golden Notebook?
**Although it was my name and my body that occupied that year in W1, it was a fantasy. It was not my real life. Perhaps I’ll write about it some time.
***Entering the library for the first time, I was struck by the similarity with its US counterparts. The smell of the books, the bulletin boards, the children’s section, the wooden desk where the librarian took my card and stamped the books I was taking out on loan; I could have been in the library of my childhood.
****I had first read only a short story: To Room Nineteen while a freshman at university.
The main character in the book I’m reading* decides she is going to write down everything, every detail, from one day in her life. Throughout the course of her writing about that day, she wonders whether the conscious decision to write about that day has in some way altered the day itself – would the day have been any different if she’d not decided to write about it?
She gets her period, and realises during the course of a debate with a work colleague that she has gone shrill and emotional. She is annoyed with herself for letting her menstrual cycle impact who she is.
I’ve gone well past those pages, and didn’t mark them as I read them, although I thought to, but didn’t (probably because I was in the tube and a pen or pencil or sticky note wasn’t handy). I thought to mark them because they made me happy. They made me feel like I have company when I’m having my period and am not ‘at the top of my game’. I hate myself when I have my period – or at least for a few hours during the cycle. I, too, feel like I ‘go shrill’ if I’m not careful. I’ve never really compared notes about this particular subject with other women. I find comfort in knowing that way back in 1961 a fictional character would make the pages using this very subject. It makes me feel not quite so all alone in my male dominated industry. It makes me feel like I shouldn’t be so hard on myself when I feel as if I overreact or don’t react in the way I should have reacted. I can be very mean to myself.
I’m thinking about this today because my breasts feel heavy. I’ll probably be irritable in the next week; and if customer demands reach a peak, I am liable to “go shrill”.
I understand that the main character of the book I’m reading is going to have a nervous breakdown, or she at least grapples with mental instability. I know this from the book’s back cover; I’m not there – at her total collapse – yet, but there are hints. This makes me sad for her; I don’t fear for my mental health (not anymore; except for maybe the odd hour or so during my menstrual cycle) so there’s no comfort in another’s proximity to a breakdown.
Right now she’s on the tube. She seems to be cracking along the edges. This I can understand. Some thing’s haven’t changed since 1961:
The rush hour had begun. She was being jostled in a herd of people. Suddenly she was panicking, so badly that she withdrew from the people pressing towards the ticket booth …The city at rush hour – it was impossible for her to get from here, the five or six miles to her flat, in a hurry, save by the underground. No one could. They were all of them, all these people, caught by the terrible pressure of the city. […] There was nothing for it except to make herself go forward, fitted herself into the press of people, waited her turn for a ticket, went down the escalator in an ooze of people. On the platform four trains came in before she was able to squeeze herself into a compartment. Now the worst was over. She had only to stand, held upright by the pressure of people, in the brightly lit, crammed, smelling place, and in ten or twelve minutes she would be in her home station.
The tube can be the thing that drives me crazy.
*It’s still Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook.
