There are mornings when you struggle to focus on your Henry James book on the bus because two girls of indeterminate age are looming right over your shoulder and one is blathering on, enumerating the ways in which her boyfriend “acted like a girl” last night, and the other is nodding and saying “That’s funny,” but not laughing, because it’s not actually funny, and what you feel is hate, what you feel is quietly superior, until you tune in a few moments later to hear them describing with venom the cast member on VH-1’s Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew whom they despise, and you’ve seen that show, because you’re not really as high-culture as you like to think you are, and you despise that cast member too, and suddenly you are one with these girls, because in the end it’s hate that binds us all together.
IMPORTANT MEMORY:
Alice Yorke, age 15, in a history class debate about abortion being dominated by the insufferable young man who would later be our valedictorian, with only a few seconds left on the clock, whips out a coat hanger as a shock tactic, making everyone in the room (except for her friends, who knew this was coming and in some cases [mine] skipped lunch to watch) extremely uncomfortable.
Yes, I Want to Destroy Your Sweater: Prologue
First of all, The Christmas Sweater is illustrated? I phrase that in the form of a question because I found it surprising and not surprising at the same time. At the start of each chapter is a 4”-by-4” black-and-white drawing that I imagine will elucidate some of Glenn’s more complex themes. Flipping through the book, I can tell you that these illustrations include a sweater, Christmas presents, a snowflake, and a chocolate bar. I’m just eye-balling this, but the size of the font and the fact that every single page has a festive red border with sprigs of holly in the corners leads me to estimate that The Christmas Sweater almost definitely has a lower words-to-drawings ratio than, say, the Harry Potter series.
But what I really want to talk about in this post is the two-page prologue, in which Glenn Beck delves into some genre-bending fuckery that would blow my fellow writing students’ minds, if I had any inclination to share with them this absurd project of mine. The prologue is entitled “The Way It Ends…” which, you know, it’s no Memento but I guess I can give a moderate amount of props to the fact that Glenn is not telling a linear narrative. Except no. Because the prologue begins with the narrator reminiscing about this mysterious Christmas sweater with which, I fear, we shall soon become intimately familiar, noting that he held onto the sweater even long after it had ceased to fit him, because “captured in its yarn were fragments of my childhood innocence—my greatest regrets, fears, hopes, disappointments—and, in time, my greatest joy.” Which, no wonder the sweater stopped fitting him; all these feelings are caught in the yarn. And then there’s a lot of nonsense about this story including “events I never intended to share with anyone” except that it seems as though “my sweater wanted its story told” (emphasis mine—anthropomorphizing a sweater? Bold, Glenn Beck, bold). The narrator tells the reader that the story he is about to share is “my gift to you,” and then—THEN!—he signs the page: Glenn.
Remember, people, this book is categorized as a novel. The main character’s name is Eddie, if the book jacket is to be believed. And yet here—and in the absofuckinglutely bizarre book trailer I linked to earlier—Glenn Beck is taking complete ownership of the events that have yet to unfold. What we’re about to read is not fictional, Glenn is saying, it’s his story, his sweater. Except—no, it isn’t! It’s Eddie’s story, Eddie’s sweater!
There are plenty of writers who are at their most brilliant when testing that tension between fiction and non-fiction—Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That Are The Only People Here” and Rick Moody’s “Demonology” come to mind, and so does the entire oeuvre of Aleksandar Hemon, which we could talk about if he’d ever respond to my request for an interview. These are writers who understand that when a story seems to brim with genuine emotion, their readers will assume the story is true, and so they basically fuck with the reader until the reader maybe feels sort of dirty for having made such an assumption. What these writers don’t do is say, “Yeah, this totally happened to me, but for some reason I’m going to name this character Eddie instead of Glenn so that it’s, you know, literary.”
Glenn is saying, “I am Eddie.” But if Glenn is Eddie, why isn’t The Christmas Sweater a memoir? I have a theory: Glenn isn’t Eddie. I have a suspicion that Glenn wants to appropriate Eddie’s story, because he feels that this story will showcase attributes that Glenn would like his readers to pin on him—valor, precociousness, spirituality, down-home-aw-shucks-Americanity. But he’s just self-aware enough to know that you can’t just make up something and claim that it happened to you (thanks for nothing, James Frey), and so Glenn becomes Eddie and Eddie becomes Glenn and the average reader has already moved past these two pages because they don’t think about these things as hard as I do.
Or, you know, it’s possible that Glenn Beck is just a moron.
The Gates
These are beautiful recollections about a beautiful project.
Ex-Boyfriend worked on The Gates; he helped put them up and keep them untangled, and correct people when they called them “orange”. He got blisters on his feet the size of quarters and Katie hated him because he made fun of her and made our tiny dorm room smell like feet. He had so many saffron swatches that three years later when he moved to LA, you could still find them in the pockets of his jeans or the corners of his room.
I can’t walk past the Dairy in Central Park without recalling the time I visited his team in between my classes the day that they were all unfurled. I remembered admiring how nuanced the project was that every little bit of it was a spectacle.
I have a tiny saffron swatch somewhere in this trunk o’ memories in my apartment, and every time I come across it, I feel a tiny pang of regret that I hated Alice’s ex-boyfriend so much during that first year, when my support could have really been useful to her. But then I remember how much our tiny dorm room smelled like feet, and how often he poured salt in the wound of my boyfriendless existence, and how unemployed he was, and I feel a little better.
Not to pass over the rest of your endeavor, but this is something I experienced recently. I went to the building that houses Fox News to visit another company. Their elevators are not natural. You walk into the elevator bank and have to dial in - on a pad that looks like the one on a touchtone phone - the floor you want. Then you wait for an elevator to come down and display your destination floor. This is weird and confusing enough, and you could easy get into an elevator that isn’t programmed to go to your floor if a bunch of other people are also going up. Then you get in the elevator, and the only buttons inside are open door/close door/emergency.
Once you’re in, you can’t change your mind.
Yes, I Want to Destroy Your Sweater: The Project
This story begins with Kevin. Somewhere in the midst of last year’s Christmas season, the two of us, a freshly minted couple for whom every outing was (and continues to be) an adventure, stood in a Barnes and Noble perusing new fiction releases and Kevin said unto me, “I kind of want to read this Christmas Sweater book Glenn Beck wrote. He’s crazy.” Reader, I admit: I responded to this probably half-heartedly, perhaps rendered partially inebriated by the throes of new love, but mostly because I had no idea who this “Glenn Beck” person was. I’d heard his name before in conjunction with other hateful Fox News monikers, but Barack Obama had been elected president the month before and so I naturally assumed that America had entered some kind of political and cultural utopia, where ideas of merit and compassion and common sense would be given precedence over the delusional drunken ramblings of a few pudgy white men in a room. Right?
Nearly a year later, I not only know who Glenn Beck is, but I quite frankly am a little obsessed with him. It’s a fascination, of course, which is rooted in masochism, but it’s a fascination nevertheless. I’ve watched his television show more times than I’d care to mention now, usually alternating between laughter and open-mouthed horror. I’ve turned on the local conservative talk radio station actually hoping to hear his voice. And now, courtesy of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, I have in my hands a copy of his 2008 novel The Christmas Sweater. This might be a good time to note that my interest in Beck has far eclipsed Kevin’s; his text message responding to my news that I’d secured the book read, “Oh dear god.”
An entire semester of graduate school has gone by now, and all I’ve done is read really good writing—Lorrie Moore and Sarah Waters and Rick Moody and Amy Hempel and every writer we read, we ask ourselves, “Why this way and not another way?” In other words, what is the singular route this writer chose which made this writing excellent, as opposed to heinous? But what we never talk about is that other way—the bad way. The way that the talented people maybe saw on the horizon but from which they ultimately fled. And I have this funny feeling—maybe it’s the snowflakes that border the cover, maybe it’s 4-page list of acknowledgments at the book’s end, or maybe it’s the fact that the author of this tome regularly goes on television to draw maps of suspected communists on a blackboard and then cry big fake tears about it—that this book is going to show me that other way. And I am going to like it.
Think of it this way: I am reading Glenn Beck’s debut novel so that you don’t have to. I plan to regularly parse his glorious words, perhaps tease out some conception of this “white culture” of which he so fond, and share it with all of you. And I hereby promise to give kudos to Glenn where kudos is due—if this book moves me in any way, if I come across a passage or a bit of syntax that doesn’t seem as though it was produced on Glenn Beck’s refrigerator using magnetic poetry, I will admit to it. That would be a true Christmas miracle.
And if you don’t believe that I’m in for the reading experience of a lifetime, here’s a guy who will unabashedly tell you otherwise (stay tuned for seconds :45 to :54, or as I call it, “9 Seconds of Glenn Beck Desperately Trying to Make Himself Cry on Camera, and Failing”)!
Inspired by a Russian friend, the couple became regulars at a Russian-style bathhouse in Lower Manhattan, where he and Ms. Straus would whack each other with supple oak branches, a method of stimulating circulation.
I pick up Glenn Beck's "The Christmas Sweater" from the library in just three hours.
I think this is what they call a red-letter day. Red for Communism, that is!
And here's (part of) a story about the time Alice couldn't account for an hour of her life: ILLUSTRATED EDITION
Wallace: I suddenly feel like I’m in a scene from the Outsiders.
Veronica: Be cool, Sodapop.
Hence the name of this blog.
And here's (part of) a story about the time Alice couldn't account for an hour of her life:
Alice Yorke collected minutes like pennies, and would keep them in an adorable pink piggy bank in her heart, if such a thing was possible. Believe you me, Alice was duly crushed when she learned that this very thing was not possible. So naturally, she was not known to kill time. She wore three brightly colored Swatch watches on each arm, and two on each leg. She was never late, for anything. And she would never, ever, waste precious moments describing the bagels that she had eaten at an establishment called Hot Jumbo Bagels, especially if in those moments she said things like “Jumbo isn’t a word I would use…Hot Just Right Bagels…or Hot Everything I Would Want Bagels…that’s more like it.” This sort of pointless tangent would defy her very nature, and lead to much agony on the part of the story’s sole listener, whoever that poor devil might hypothetically be.
So when young Alice’s lovely and talented bubble gum fairy princess aspiring poetess pop song enthusiast roommate, Katharine Coyle (known to the world as Katie, or more often, KatieCoyle), handed her an engraved invitation to the latter’s swinging karaoke birthday jamboree, Alice had to think long and hard before accepting. Was this swinging karaoke birthday jamboree really the most effective use of Alice’s so-very-precious time? Would the evening’s guaranteed recklessness and depravity cause her to perhaps forget how she spent a few of those delectable seconds, and if so, could she survive the subsequent misery? Though Alice found herself unable to answer these questions, in that she is only 89% psychically accurate, she decided to attend Katie’s night of revelry. In truth, she just really wanted to sing Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl.”
Another story about Alice and love
is the story about when she was having sex with her ex-boyfriend and then “Adia” by Sarah MacLachlan started playing. I think she’d be okay with me sharing this, because she has shared it with every person she’s ever met.
I’m growing very fond of the internet personality of Katie’s friend Alice.
For a period of time when we shared a dorm room in early 2005, Alice was in the throes of new love and I was not. She would play this song called “L.O.V.E” by the Incredible Moses Leroy (which has lyrics about kittens in mittens FYI) and I would mime vomiting and cry in the bathroom. And then I got a boyfriend for a while and started to think the song was pretty good and Alice made fun of me.
This is a story about Alice and love.
Some day we will all look back on Tumblr Proposal 2009 and laugh.
And then we’ll sail away in our flying cars.
Two Thoughts I've Had Today:
- Katie, this impromptu and extremely amateur tap dance routine you’re currently performing while blow-drying your hair is probably bothersome to the neighbors.
- Katie, the volume at which you are currently playing “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” as performed by Jennifer Hudson in the film Dreamgirls may or may not be bothersome to the neighbors.
