What is the difference between a toy and a machine? Here's one way of looking at it, from Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude (thanks to someone for typing this in last year):
"There were two worlds. In one his father paced upstairs, creaked chairs, painting at his tiny light box, making his incomprehensible progress, his mother downstairs played records, ran water over dishes, laughed on the telephone, her voice trailing up the curve of the long stair, the backyard ailanthus brushed his bedroom windows, dappling the sun into tropical, liquid blobs of light against the wallpaper which itself depicted a forest full of monkeys and tigers and giraffes, while Dylan read and reread Scrambled Eggs Super and Oobleck and If I Ran the Zoo or pushed his Matchbox car, #11, dreamily with one finger down its single length of orange track or exposed the inadequacy of the Etch a Sketch and the Spirograph again, the stiffness of the knobs, the recalcitrance of the silvery ingredient behind the Etch A Sketch’s smeared window, the untrustworthiness of the Spirograph’s pins, the way they invariably bent at perihelion when the pressure of the drawing pen grew too much, so that every deliciously scientific orbit blooped and bent at the crucial moment into a ragged absurdity, a head with a nose, a pickle with a wart. If the Etch A Sketch and the Spirograph had really worked they would probably be machines, not toys, they would be part of the way the adult universe operated, and be mounted onto the instrument panels of cars or worn on the belts of policemen. Dylan understood and accepted this. These things were broken because they were toys, and vice versa. They required his pity and patience, like retarded children who’d been entrusted to his care."
*
"Whole days were mysterious, and then the sun went down."
*
"'Let me see it for a minute.'
"Let me see it: you saw a basketball or a pack of baseball cards or a plastic water gun by taking it into your hands, and what happened after that was in doubt. Ownership depended mostly on not letting anyone see anything.If you let a kid see a bottle of Yoo-Hoo for a minute he'd drink what was left of it."
*
"The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn't."
*
"Then realize that maybe that's all anyone does—fake it."
*
"I dedicated myself to acting as though I'd fit in this atmosphere all along."
*
"It was a form of autism, a failure of social mimicry ..."
*
I cannot help but love a novel that ends with a paean to Brian Eno's Another Green World.
But at the same time I am suspicious of my appreciation of this novel. Perhaps the main character is too much like me, and I am suspicious of identification. We were born in the same years; we have many of the same cultural references. Even the ones we don't really share, we still share as background knowledge of life in the U.S. in the seventies and eighties.
I almost stopped reading The Fortress of Solitude when the main character put on a ring that could make him fly. It seemed too weird to have something like that change in a novel after 200 pages (with 300 or so to go). But the story nicely downplays that bit of magic, until suddenly it becomes central again, in such a way that I no longer found it irritating. None of the characters seemed that impressed by the ring in the end.
And then the vividness of listening to a particular recording while driving: two tales of listening to Another Green World. I remember listening to Dave Holland's Seeds of Time at the end of a drive from Seattle to San Francisco, how Libby and I burst into shouts of joy at the irrepressible "Homecoming."
"There were two worlds. In one his father paced upstairs, creaked chairs, painting at his tiny light box, making his incomprehensible progress, his mother downstairs played records, ran water over dishes, laughed on the telephone, her voice trailing up the curve of the long stair, the backyard ailanthus brushed his bedroom windows, dappling the sun into tropical, liquid blobs of light against the wallpaper which itself depicted a forest full of monkeys and tigers and giraffes, while Dylan read and reread Scrambled Eggs Super and Oobleck and If I Ran the Zoo or pushed his Matchbox car, #11, dreamily with one finger down its single length of orange track or exposed the inadequacy of the Etch a Sketch and the Spirograph again, the stiffness of the knobs, the recalcitrance of the silvery ingredient behind the Etch A Sketch’s smeared window, the untrustworthiness of the Spirograph’s pins, the way they invariably bent at perihelion when the pressure of the drawing pen grew too much, so that every deliciously scientific orbit blooped and bent at the crucial moment into a ragged absurdity, a head with a nose, a pickle with a wart. If the Etch A Sketch and the Spirograph had really worked they would probably be machines, not toys, they would be part of the way the adult universe operated, and be mounted onto the instrument panels of cars or worn on the belts of policemen. Dylan understood and accepted this. These things were broken because they were toys, and vice versa. They required his pity and patience, like retarded children who’d been entrusted to his care."
*
"Whole days were mysterious, and then the sun went down."
*
"'Let me see it for a minute.'
"Let me see it: you saw a basketball or a pack of baseball cards or a plastic water gun by taking it into your hands, and what happened after that was in doubt. Ownership depended mostly on not letting anyone see anything.If you let a kid see a bottle of Yoo-Hoo for a minute he'd drink what was left of it."
*
"The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn't."
*
"Then realize that maybe that's all anyone does—fake it."
*
"I dedicated myself to acting as though I'd fit in this atmosphere all along."
*
"It was a form of autism, a failure of social mimicry ..."
*
I cannot help but love a novel that ends with a paean to Brian Eno's Another Green World.
But at the same time I am suspicious of my appreciation of this novel. Perhaps the main character is too much like me, and I am suspicious of identification. We were born in the same years; we have many of the same cultural references. Even the ones we don't really share, we still share as background knowledge of life in the U.S. in the seventies and eighties.
I almost stopped reading The Fortress of Solitude when the main character put on a ring that could make him fly. It seemed too weird to have something like that change in a novel after 200 pages (with 300 or so to go). But the story nicely downplays that bit of magic, until suddenly it becomes central again, in such a way that I no longer found it irritating. None of the characters seemed that impressed by the ring in the end.
And then the vividness of listening to a particular recording while driving: two tales of listening to Another Green World. I remember listening to Dave Holland's Seeds of Time at the end of a drive from Seattle to San Francisco, how Libby and I burst into shouts of joy at the irrepressible "Homecoming."
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