Vanitas Vanitatum! Or: Life Is a Bunch of Beautiful Crap
I spent the summer reading William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair , and it was kind of a lovely slog. It really is nice to say to myself: I effing did it. Finished that bad boy this morning and felt it all come together in my soul in a way novels really should. Like you've been through a war and a couple marriages and a bunch of other shit, only this time with a large coterie of Victorian wannabes, an English middle upper-class that's frantically finding itself out of sync with reality, and yet clinging to old ways. Um. Like right now. My biggest takeaway is the feeling this whole experience conjured inside my lowly skull: I was 13 and it was summer-break and I was supposed to weed the yard and garden, so I opened all the windows in the house so I could hear Guiding Light on the TV. If I couldn't sit on my ass and watch it, by God, I'd hear it! I was addicted to soap operas when I was that age, that connection to people so alien to my existence they