Twitchy v. Cool

So I am an INFP on the Myers-Briggs personality scale. I absorb and process information intuitively and am always trying to resolve conflicts between people, except for the times when I blow up and create conflicts (that's another story). But I have a really hard time watching political debates because they are confrontational and it makes me very uncomfortable. Also because I am always afraid of something dreadful happening with the person I support. I made it through an hour and fifteen minutes of the debate last night and then couldn't stand it anymore, not from disgust, but just the stress.

But while I wished Obama could have blasted it out of the park, connect big time, definitively win the debate, he remained his cool, calm, relaxed and thoughtful self. He's just not going to go there with the from-the-gut emotion, a la Bill.

But the reason I had to turn it off was McCain. Now there's an angry, twitchy man. He grimaced, bobbed on his feet, gritted his teeth, turned his back on Obama, refused to look at him, jerked his arms. Then when he got the most pissed off, he lowered his voice to a menacing whine and droned on and on and on. I went into the kitchen at one point and listened to him without seeing him and it was literally scary to hear the tone of his voice. It's all on one emotional note--jaw-clenched anger.

This fury and impatience has no place in the White House. He's shown himself over and over these past few months as prone to sudden, irrational decision-making (ahem-Palin-ahem). Flying in and roiling up the financial bailout is another example. If he hates, say, Putin, as much as he hates Obama, will he treat him the same way?

Give me the guy who's comfortable in his own skin. Who's thoughtful, who doesn't get mad, stay mad. I don't want anyone in that house who's going to make things more dangerous than they are already.

And here's a nice analysis of the post-debate polls v. the pundit-nation's general assessment that it was a draw or a McCain win.

The Souffle Has Fallen

The financial markets meltdown is oh, so personal for me. At long last I have a contract on my house, and we have a contract on a house in Nashville, but I cannot even begin to exult. I make plans, I hired movers, but I cannot assume this is real or certain. Because even though all the buyers and sellers involved in my own personal little four-car train of sales is solid and are putting up large down payments, I am afraid that one of the banks involved will collapse before we can close. We are all just the kind of low-risk loans banks want. But the bank has to be there to lend us the money.

This is a financial panic, which means there is nothing rational about it. The entire system is over-leveraged. An enormous amout of funny money was created by frothing up the tiniest bit of actual mortgage debt into a vast confection of exotic financial instruments that, believe me, NOBODY understands. Earlier this year I covered the Financial Accounting Standards Board for six months. They are very smart, and very diligent, but even they didn't understand these collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps and the rest of the alphabet soup.

This is the most brilliant explanation of how it all happened that I've seen anywhere, although I apologize in advance for the racist example the comedians use to make their point. And I will point out that this first appeared in October 2007!

So the deleveraging process is going on now, and it's as if somebody just slammed the oven door on the global financial system's beautiful souffle.

Wachovia may be next and that's my brokerage. I talked to them months ago and they said we'll probably be OK for 99 percent of the money we have there even if it goes under. But if it goes under, and they told me then it was possible it would and just today its stock has dropped 28 percent, my money could be unavailable for an unknown period of time while it all gets sorted out. That timing could be disastrous for our sale/buy.

And speaking of fallen souffles, can you BELIEVE the complete vacuousness of Sarah Palin's remarks about her foreign policy experience to Katie Couric? I have been trying to refrain from politics on my blog, partly because some of my darling camp friends are of a different persuasion, but I can't help myself. It's all too much. This is what has pushed me over the line. And I admit it's a straw on the giant load of reeking, rotting straw on that poor camel's back. But really! Can anyone take this woman seriously? I love the "Putin rears his head" line. And the "when we send those out" line? Send what out? Spy planes? God help us. It would be hilarious if it weren't so scary. It seriously reminded me of this classic moment from the Miss Teen America contest.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

When I finished The Story of Edgar Sawtelle Monday night, I really had to stop myself from throwing it at the wall.

I absolutely loved it for more than 400 pages and then the ending was a total, unbelievable mess--a hodge-podge of literary allusions from King Lear to Call of the Wild to Rebecca to The Jungle Book, an utter betrayal of the fabulous characters--human and canine--that he had brought to full, three-dimensional life.

The whole novel is an adaption of Hamlet, so I suppose I should have expected it to be a *ahem* tragedie. Here we go: Edgar's father dies, he suspects his uncle Claude (get it?), sees his father's ghost who confirms he was murdered (get it?), Claude puts the move on Edgar's mother Trudy (get it?), there's a prologue of buying poison (get it?), and Trudy lets Claude move into her bedroom only a few months after the father's death (get it?). I won't even go into the end. Just read the Hamlet plot summary.

But while I was reading it I didn't even bother with making these connections. Had I done so, I would have liked it much less. As it was, I abandoned myself to the narrative, to Edgar, to the dogs.

I have a Shiloh Shepherd, who are very much like Sawtelle dogs. They are bred for size, intelligence, problem-solving, companionship, health, conformation. I trained with a search and rescue team for a year when I got my dog, whose mother and two half brothers were operational on the team. Then I did sheepherding with my dog, who became the top ranked herding Shiloh so far, despite his often neurotic behavior.

So everything about the Sawtelle dogs was utterly fascinating, and accurate, except one strange slip where someone runs their hand lovingly over the dog from croup to withers, which is the wrong way and would stand the dog's hair all on end. He made a couple of other tiny off notes for me, but nothing that bumped me out of the story.

In fact until the last 50 pages or so I loved it as much as Water for Elephants, which was my favorite book of the last few years. Sara Gruen managed to find the perfect logical and satisfying outcome, giving her characters credit for wit and humor and bravery. Literarily, it should have been right down the line of Water for Elephants, wherever you might place that on a literary-commercial spectrum. So he had NO RIGHT to make such a disorganized, untrue to the characters, senseless hash of things at the end.

With Sawtelle, at the end Wroblewski just throws his Hamlet cards in the air and storms out of the novel. The novel isn't "literary" enough for him to get away with such a downer ending, especially one that had every character acting in ridiculous ways. We have the wonderful dog Almondine cast as Ophelia. We have a Polonius character, and Polonius's son plays Lear at the end. Edgar, who "feigns madness" by running away for damned good reasons, returns for no discernable reason from a Stephen King The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon wilderness experience. This is exactly where the novel's internal logic falls apart and the author begins to sweat and mutter to himself as he brutally shoe horns the story and characters into the Hamlet mold.

Edgar Sawtelle is beautifully written, but has sections that are long and pointless, for example, the sequences with the ghost in Henry's barn. If he hadn't mutilated the ending, I would have forgiven everything. I was that much in love. His characterization of dogs is the best I've ever read or imagined. Trudy and Edgar and Gar, Henry, were all living, breathing, real--until the end when they behaved in ways they never would have. In great fiction, the characters are real. You know them, believe in them, love them, hate them. They live. He had all that going and then lost it at the end. Unforgiveable.

In search and rescue we had a truism: Trust your dog. In writing fiction, perhaps the motto should be: trust your characters.

--

20. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski
19. A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin
18. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid
17. The Voyage of the Narwhal, Andrea Barrett
16. The Shadow Isle, Katherine Kerr
15. The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
14. David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Coriloff Affair, Irene Nemirovsky
13. Th1rteen R3asons Why, Jay Asher
12. Five Go to Smuggletop, Enid Blyton
11. And Then We Came to the End, Fabulous, just like my experiences at a Nashville PR firm, Joshua Ferris
10. The Tenderness of Wolves, Cold, but no Cold Mountain, Stef Penney
9. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Paul Torday
8. Dragonhaven, Robin McKinley
7. The Tale of Despereaux, Kate DiCamillo
6. The Asolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Alexie Herman
5. The Monsters of Templeton, Lauren Groff
4. Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill
3. Inkspell, Cornelia Funke
2. Riding Lessons, Sara Gruen
1. Summer People, Brian Groh

Reread:

16-20. The Eustace Diamonds, The Prime Minister, The Duke's Children, Can You Forgive Her, Barchester Towers, Anthony Trollope,
13-15. LOTR, three volumes.
5-12 Island, Castle, Valley, Sea, Mountain, Circus and Castle of ADventure, Enid Blyton
4. Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
3. The Silver Princess in Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
2. Captain Salt in Oz, Ruth Plumly Thompson
1. Earth Abides, George R. Stewart