When I find I can't remember what comes after "A" and before "C," my mother always whispers...

ok. enough blogging about stupid crap this week.

just so that the last thing anybody reads on Written Off isn't me going on for two posts about how hung up i am on myself and girls i can't get, i'm posting this to clean the slate, a bit -- get the digestive process started, so that those posts can work their way down and out of the bowels of this blog.

consider this as peristalsis-posting.

i just read this book called Bee Season, by Myla Goldberg.
this is what its about: a not very smart eleven year old jewish girl suddenly learns she has a knack for spelling, and goes on to compete in the national spelling bee. oh yeah, and she deciphers the true name of G_d.

i was hesitant at first to pick this book up. my roommate read it and we have slightly different tastes. and then i started reading the first page, as i do with some of my roommates books from time to time to see if they actually are as good as she says they are. and this one was. really, it was mind-blowing. thirty five quickly turned pages later i was hooked, but i had to go to work.

i'm a bit familiar with Kabbalah -- i know its the hip thing to be into now, taylor made to sit right between the south beach diet and plastic surgery, but before famous people made it cool you never heard about it unless you were into things hermetic and esoteric. i knew it from Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, and of course the movie "Pi." and i read up on it on my own a little before and a little after i experienced both of those. its really fascinating, especially if you are from a Judeo-Christian background.

anyways, Kabbalah is an element in Bee Season. and while it was what probably turned me on to the idea of reading it, it isn't the reason why i did. it is just simply amazing. amazing in the most tender, nostalgic, captivating, linguistic, realisic way. its just beautiful and heartbreaking. i never thought an eleven year old jewish girl could be so moving a character for me.

here are a few thoughts:

-i love the way Myla Goldberg writes. she has a great command of the english language and uses it to great effect. vine-like sentances with little barbs of wordplay. she somehow just nails the heart of every scene she writes, leaving out tiresome and generically written descriptions.

-the books is an accumulation of scenes -- there are no chapters -- just vignettes, encapsulated and self contained, usually no longer than ten or fifteen pages. the pacing doesn't feel hurried though; something about the language makes reading it a slow roll.

-she wrote the thing entirely in the present tense. you would think it would get annoying or awkward after a while, but it doesn't -- it somehow feels so natural. i didn't actually notice until about 20 pages in.

-it is a lot like how i have been trying to write -- subject matter, language, diction, vignette style. it gives me hope that maybe one day i'll squeeze out a book. i was almost angry to realize this, as it was kind of a voice i had just discovered independantly of reading the book, but it encourages me to know that it works.

-it reminds me, in theme, not execution, of Borges' "The God's Script" In fact its exactly the same except Bee Season is longer and about a jewish girl and her crazy family rather than a Mayan shaman imprisoned by the Spaniards. and it has a few more pages than "The God's Script" too.

anyhow, i highly recommend it. it clocks in at about 275 pages, and its a pleasure to read. i found myself wanting no more and no less than exactly what the book had offered me, a sign to me of some kind of perfection. it made me blow off morning pages for like three days in a row.

read it. its good.