Finally and somewhat Regrettably, some ruminations on Quenton Cassidy

So you'd think my mom would know better than to tell me to meet them in a Barnes&Noble. I already have a couple books in my possession on deck to be read but of course, loitering in a bookstore waiting for family members my kryptonite started to work and voila, I have four new books added to my list. Some Chekov (to continue my Russian theme), some Cervantes and some Joyce. I finished Again to Carthage though, so that's one down. I now have those new books plus my Murakami, Huxley, and Nabakov. Perfect, I'm set. Enough about books.

My stomach, for all you concerned people out there, is doing much better, which means my mood is better, which means I can start leaving the house on small errands, which means my mood is better, which probably somehow means my stomach is better. So yeah. My tan is slowly fading under the suction of the grey Seattle skies. And the $72 Virgin America tickets from Seattle to Los Angeles are looking damn good right now.

I'm still playing the unemployment game (duh, cause it's fun). And wandering through an entire gigantic Crate&Barrel (what's with all these ampersand business names) just sighing and dreaming of have a little apartment to furnish with all this expensive shit. No actually, I enjoy walking through stores like in order to gather ideas, and it makes me happy that you can fashion most of the shit in there from old or cheaper products. Which is what I do. Especially now that I have at least SOME experience in handiwork. Yeehaw.

In order to aid in my colonial guilt, Bigelow Tea Company has so cleverly named their mint tea "Plantation Mint", thank you. I'm really going to enjoy drinking this now. Also, everyone look at a 'to scale' map of the world and acknowledge how ridiculous it is that Hawaii is a state.

My six year old sister was in charge of dinner the other night. We had baby carrots and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I couldn't help laughing at the sight of my parents and I lifting our PB&J's and beginning to eat together. This laughter precipitated my little sister running from the table to her room. I don't feel bad. While I'm on the topic of my small children: Dancing with the Stars has taken over my family. So anyway, I was watching it with them (it's actually really entertaining) and from somewhere (certainly not anywhere from my family) my little sister has picked up an acute fashion sense and judges almost everything she sees on TV by it. People are good or bad based on how fashionable they are, etc. So one of the professional dancers was dancing a mamba or something and came out in this skimpy dress with a little foo-foo tail thing and my sister, gasps as she sees it and says "oh you've got to get rid of that thing, girl". My eyeballs went belly up and I muttered Good Lord in Heaven.

It only makes sense that I of all people would end up with above and beyond quintessential stereotypical Girl (in every sense of the gendered word) for a sister and while I have fewer stories to back it up, the EXACT same on the other side with my six year old brother. Is it backlash from the early days of me insisting on blurring the gender definitions they struggling to consolidate in toddlerdom? I suppose it could be a lesson learned, and certainly a good one to learn before I actually have my own children. In fact, having young siblings is a great warm-up to parenthood. Because duh, now that I'm a college graduate, parenthood should be my life focus (even as a boy). See what I did there?

So it's morning and I've already gotten off on a ranting type topic, I promised I would do a slight book review (or gut reaction) to Again to Carthage, my recently completed book. And to be sure, I was quite ready to when I was about 3/4 of the way through it. But now that I've finished, reacted to it, not thought about it and let a day or two pass I'm not sure my reaction will be that accurate or fruitful, but let's take a stab at it and see what's been simmering in my subconscious the last two days...(or day, I'm unemployed, is this a...what day is it?)

Can we discuss Again to Carthage without bringing in Once a Runner? Well that's a stupid cliche question, so duh, no. But, I don't want to bring OAR into the discussion too much at large, but simply as a background upon which we can draw Again to Carthage. So. Quenton Cassidy, the protagonist for both books. In OAR, this college-aged elite runner striving for collegiate glory could only speak so straightly to me. However, what I find riveting about Parker's creation of this character in the narrative poem that is OAR, is the way in which the entire novel is focused on specifically the character of this person. When I've been asked to describe the book or "tell me about it"s I've struggled to explain...partially because there isn't much of a plot line in the book (ok, so we're going to talk about OAR for a bit). That's not necessarily true, but when you read OAR, the quality, virtue, and importance of the book, isn't really in the action (well, ok come to think of it, is it ever in a really good novel?) So, the plot story is boring and really, there isn't much to it. That's because the book is an explanation of mysterious personality. A personality we in the running circle know very well, either from teammates or at least a quarter part of ourselves. For those non-runners who read it and know runners, the protagonist becomes so very much alive. I've had non-runners say to me numerous times, "I totally understand a lot of shit with X so much better now" type things. And it's true. Quenton grabs you. Even if he doesn't, it's then a semi-exciting sports novel about a sport that I think rarely gets written about, but regardless. Quenton Cassidy is created through narrative statements. And its strange, because the statements don't really move the plot along. The narrator isn't really narrating anything. There's no story being told. It's like a poetic profile of a certain person. Full of sentences like, Quenton Cassidy, is..... Quenton Cassidy believes this...And so the novel is simply actively drawing a personality that hasn't really ever before received so much attention. And of course, Parker gets it right on. There are bits of the novel where Cassidy does things and says things that add to the creation of his character (duh) but the majority is certainly in the direct statements. Ok. So, we get this beautiful description of Quenton Cassidy, the long distance runner (or miler, if you will) but Parker also respects the fact that the runner is an essentially veiled and mysterious being (alright, I'll concede that humanity is, but as far as literary characters go, the runner remains so....) and so Parker leaves much of Quenton Cassidy veiled. In a certain sense Quenton Cassidy's mystery and incomprehensibility is beautifully dressed with importance, nobility, and all other kind of virtue (so no wonder its palatable for us runners eh?) But Quenton Cassidy is never *really* explained. So here comes my first, well I don't even know if its a complaint...

Again to Carthage, could have started on page 180. In fact, I probably would've liked it much better had it started on Page 180. The first 180 pages are backstory. Parker is catching us up on the gap in Quenton's life between novel 1 and novel 2. He's raced in the Olympics, he's gone to law school, he's been practicing law for a while, etc. And in this catch up, Parker does not utilize the same style of revelation as he does in OAR. In fact, Quenton Cassidy's 'separatedness' from any other literary character, or one with which you could wholly relate, or really human (i'd argue that Quenton's OAR is a deified Quenton, i.e. he's not human) is destroyed in Again to Carthage. Which as my mom points out, could be the point. And yeah, I'll allow, not necessarily, agree, but allow it. I don't like it, even if somewhere I do or agree with it, I don't like seeing my God humanized, normalized, and utterly boring. OAR was not concerned with real life, it was concerned with the conception of Quenton Cassidy. Every bit of information about Quenton Cassidy was handpicked to be romantic, to be inhuman, godly, and utterly ideal. AND I LOVED IT. But in the first 180 pages of Again to Carthage we see Quenton Cassidy as human, and we get inside his head as opposed to observing him. This is the perspective change from OAR to the first half of ATC. And I don't want to be that close to Cassidy. But anyway. So we see Quenton is lawyer and gets bored with his job, we see he has workplace shenaningans like everyone else, we see his vulgar human weakness with Andrea his ex-girlfriend (not the romantic tragic beautiful godly weakness we observe in him in regards to Andrea in the first novel). And really its just depressing. He's just so....normal. And rightly so, he's stopped running, or training shall I say. He goes for jaunts when he can, he stays in pretty good shape, but as the second half of the book attests, there's difference between running and training.

Sorry, this is getting long and probably not at all interesting for those of you who haven't read the books or don't care.

But then. After page 180, Quenton decides to shed the ennui of his non-athlete life (there's also a difference between being athletic and being an athlete) and try to tackle the marathon. With vague and conditional notions of qualifying for the Olympic Marathon Team. However, after page 180, we see Parker revert to his OAR style. We see him step back outside Quenton Cassidy and view him again as this incomprehensible yet familiar person residing somewhere within every athlete that is striving for the impossible with an uncanny likelihood of achieving it. What could be sweeter? So we see Quenton tackle training again, we see him become deified, we see him from outside. His internal monologues become scarce, other people's views of him become more prevalent and we see the Cassidy I loved to read about in OAR. So. The second half of the book is great (i know right?). The marathon while perhaps a bit of stretch, is unbelievably exciting to read and the final gut twister at the end of the book that so thinly disguisedly points at Parker himself brings home EXACTLY the source of this Quenton Cassidy, namely, that idealized version of the runner as s/he sees in her/himself. There is nothing one can do but love it. It's exactly Quenton Cassidy that runners the nation over tap into at the end of race, it's exactly Quenton Cassidy that runners feel complete a badass workout, it's exactly that internal idealized runner that somehow accomplishes what is normally regarded as impossible. Because thats one of the basic things about running right? One of the very first phenomenons. You can do way more than you thought you could. And who does it exactly? Quenton Cassidy.


wow.

that just came out. but i think it's right. sorry to everyone who is currently thinking, what the hell?



i'm taking Lilly to the Seattle Art Museum to get some capital C culture today. Damn, sorry, I'm gonna have to go think about OAR and ATC some more....