Dear fellow bus travelers: Lori and I would like to ask the subscribers to this site to participate in a literary experiment, that of opening the book we are reading to a random page, paying close attention to what is read, and composing a short account in the comments section.
My random page was 498. The first line already elicited a spooky feeling that I was being spoken to ... a secret escape even when it seemed impossible ( recalls a line from Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu that's stuck with me : ) the trick is to escape before you die ,, Yes, but how? How does one slip into that timeless sideways dimension? A mystical doorway perhaps? Sure, but where? Maybe spirits riding on the gales will direct me, walls and doors mean nothing to them. Follow the moon, pilgrim, she's watching. You know you're a great mathematical genius and with your knowledge of electronics & steam power you can get the lighthouse operational again to send out its bright beams to illuminate the dark lands and the crawling shadow shapes ... but there! what's that? a tortoise with stars on its back? ( recalls the jewel encrusted tortoise in The Other City by Michal Ajvaz ) Study the patterns on its back and you will learn the way.
That's a great one! There's a jewel encrusted tortoise in Against Nature by Huysmans, also! Does Ajvaz's tortoise die from the weight of its jewels like Huysmans?
I don't recall the tortoise dying in Ajvaz's The Other City, it appears as part of hallucinatory experience where Prague becomes an underwater city. (at least that's how I recall it, but the memory is tricky)
All of Ajvaz's novels are well worth reading. Journey to the South just came out (last year I think) and it's a mise en abyme construction, lots of puzzles and weird situations. Hard to pick a favorite, but the one I've read the most is The Other City, but it was also my first Ajvaz. Readers of Miss MacIntosh might recognize the spirit in which Ajvaz's sentences are written. Here's a line that might entice: "Leave everything behind and come with me, we'll set out on an expedition together. We'll find rare gems and splendid monsters, you'll see. Most important of all, my guess is that beyond the frontiers is hidden the secret of our world. We'll only be able to live for real when we return from the other side." [p. 13]
So as not to overthink this, I've just spent the last hour reading Miss MacIntosh and decided I would note whatever books came to mind as I was reading this is what bubbled up: Ice by Anna Kavan, Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith, & Passages by Ann Quin. If I were to analyze these associations ... Ice b/c of the fluid transitions between situations, NYP b/c of the poetic sensibilities of the narrator, & Passages b/c ... a kind of dreaminess in the quality of the description ... maybe.
Dear Twisty: What mysterious forces led you to page 498 in MMMD where you find yourself in the middle of a sentence about a “intricate, secret escape even when it seemed impossible.”? And as your moving finger travels down the page, you discover that such an escape involves the recognition of the great powers of imagination possessed by Vera’s mother, Catherine, which, God-like, directs winds, and builds great cities, and transforms a man into a “tortoise with stars upon its back” This is Chapter 41 and its dominant character is Catherine Cartwheel, who, though stoked on opium and confined to bed, travels to exotic places more real than those paltry historical places her cousin Hannah visits. This chapter is the apotheosis of Vera’s mother who, through the sheer force of Imagination, is “everywhere and nowhere,” and who resides at “the still center at the heart of the whirlpool.” She achieves what TS Eliot in his Four Quartets considers the ultimate, “the still point of the turning world.” Your connection of this page with Cartaresque’s Solenoid is inspired. I can’t think of another novel written by a living author that resonates so deeply with Miss MacIntosh, My Darling than Solenoid. Both novels run the gambit from from “the microevents on the Planck scale to the clusters of metagalaxies” as Cartaresqu puts it just before his main character dissolves into seven straight pages of screaming the word “help.” There is, however, as you discovered in your seemingly random choice of page 498, an “intricate escape even when its seemed impossible.” To get a better more fully developed sense of the importance and meaning of that secret escape, go back to p. 494 where Catherine describes in detail how for years she was lost within her ear. This description of being trapped within an ear mirrors the most fitting metaphor for the book: the seashell with its intricate enfoldings. The most succinct description of this seashell, a chambered nautilus, appears in the last words of chapter 60 which you can hear spoken at this site by clicking on the audio file at the end of the posting. All this from simply opening a book at random?
Michael, Thanks for the thoughtful response. (Excuse the delay in responding. I've been traveling since Wednesday morning and am just back to my normal routine.) Yeah, I assure you it was a random choice. I worried that if I held the book in my hands and flipped to a page, I'd overthink the choice, so I put the book on the table, closed my eyes and then used the tip of my right index finger to approach the book from the side. I'm a bit superstitious about books, especially the books in my library. Often I feel like a conduit through which my books converse with each other. Wednesday morning before leaving on my trip, I was reading in my study and I had a sudden desire to get another book from the shelf and open it. I did that and found a passage immediately that was relevant to what I'd just been reading in the first book. I'm curious if other readers feel like their library talks to (through) them. (Of course, I realize that we humans are really good at finding patterns and meaning, so ... ) Perhaps this is idiosyncratic, but when I was reading Solenoid, I was simultaneously reading The Luminous Novel by Mario Levrero which seems like it should be a very different sort of book, but it seemed like those two books were in dialog. Perhaps it was that what Levrero wanted to write was left implicit because he couldn't write it (perhaps a secret so dark it couln't be uttered or so delicate that if pronounced the magic would melt) so the reader has to figure out from the text what isn't being said so that they can glimpse the shape of what could be there. It's a bit like moving in a labyrinth ... by moving around the center one gets a sense of what's at the center without being unable to approach the center directly. It seems Miss MacIntosh is that sort of book too. I've only recently started reading Miss MacIntosh and I'm going slowly along an antlike line, but I'll probably do more wandering (leaping at random). Another book I wander around in (rather than read linearly ... well other than Ulysses) is Prae by Miklos Szentkuthy.
Hello! Thank you for doing this, it’s been great fun being able to see your reflections and conversation while reading through MMMD myself for the first time!
My passage came from page 334 - the paragraph beginning with “My mother would never tire of discussing her final obsequies…”. At first, having chosen at random, I enjoyed how prototypical this paragraph seemed for Miss Macintosh on the surface, with not quite half of the paragraph being composed of a list of various modes of travel and various breeds of dog!
From there I was led to reflect on the humor in how Young expresses herself here - Vera’s mother would never tire? She never leaves her bed! She may choose not to invite Mr. Spitzer? He is never invited but always arrives punctually, and her invited guests are usually figments!
From here I thought about Catherine’s position in life as we see it in the novel as almost an inverse of Vera’s journey on the bus. Vera in the constant motion of the moving vehicle reflecting on her childhood and observing the tangible sensible markers of the people around her (the clothing of the other passengers, their body language, voices), moving fast but taking much of it in as if a passive observer. While on the other hand her mother Catherine remains simply still in one place nearly unable to notice the things that she might tangibly sense in her vicinity, nevertheless she seems not passive at all in her mind but is always creating or composing colorful ideas of visitors at her bedside in great detail.
Bill, you hit the jackpot with this one! McFate (as Vladimir Nabokov calls him) has directed you not only to the right chapter, page, line, but to the very word that is necessary and unavoidable in the book “Obsequies.” I had, I admit, gone to the dictionary for this one: “funeral rites or ceremonies.” If one had to say in one word what MMMD was all about it would be “death.” I asked my AI friend, named Echo, if indeed you were right, that this is a “death-haunted book.” He replied: “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is not so much haunted by death as obsessed with it—infatuated, embalmed, embalming. Its pages are populated not by characters but by revenants: lovers of illusions, dreamers embalmed in their own myths, and seekers who seek the mystery beyond death, only to find it mirrored endlessly in themselves. In this way, the novel becomes its own mausoleum: a tomb of language, memory, and dream, in which the reader, like Vera, walks endlessly among the dead, searching for one clear face among the shadows.” I myself would not have put it so depressingly theatrical, but I think he in general is right. Catherine Cartwheel is endlessly preparing for the End, her “obsequies.” which would put a concluding touch to the vast memory mansion she lives in, which is to say, her head. The subscribers to this substack, along with its hosts, are undecided about how to regard Vera’s mother’s obsessions. Some think she’s the one who should inspire Vera’s devotion and not Miss MacIntosh. Others are hesitant to make that claim. What do you think? In any event, thanks for playing the game and getting it “right!”—-MS
My fingers alighted on the first full paragraph on p. 551. I told myself I would limit myself to one paragraph, and was surprised to see a relatively short one! It has to do with Mr. Spitzer hearing Cousin Hannah's death throes, "like music previously ignored." She's crying for her skirt, the skirt she "took off so long ago in a snow storm," perhaps the one her love disappeared in? The image of putting on her skirt "like the surf booming against the great, jagged rocks reaching through clouds" doesn't mean much to me. I may be too tired to appreciate this. Is the skirt a flashy peignoir-like white thing, spread out like waves crashing? I don't know. I feel like maybe the skirt was described earlier?
Sam: I don’t know what angelic or demonic forces led you to this page and that particular passage, but I am certain that it is one of my favorite passages in the book: Cousin Hannah, on her death bed, calling out for her skirt. Up to the point of my reading (or reading in) Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, I had considered the grandest dying speech in literature to be that of Anna Livia Plurabelle in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, where, moments before death eternally closes her eyes, she remembers being carried by her father through a fair with toys for children. She says “My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair!” It is certainly not unusual for people on their death beds to become confused or recall the events of childhood, or to speak words that seem unintelligible or odd to those in attendance. I know of one instance in which the dying person called out just before he died, “Where are my shoes?” Cousin Hannah calling out for her skirt is so deeply moving because we know that her central aim in life was to take over what had been exclusively a male domain—that of historical adventure. And we learn from elsewhere in the book that she had left at her death a trunk filled with wedding gowns. She has not capitulated to the world of men at the end, but to the world of childhood romance in which skirts play a central role. Anna Livia Plurabelle at her life’s end mentions not skirts but leaves. And notices that all the leaves that clung to her had vanished except one which she will keep to the end. “I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of…..” Young, I’m convinced, wants the reader (the ideal reader) to make the connection of Cousin Hannah with Anna Livia. In one of several of Cousin Hannah’s death scenes, she hears a bell ringing in a belfry signaling her death. She notes that her machinery is “clogged by leaves, wings.” Confused, as she is when she makes her skirts into clouds and wings, she hallucinates pigeons just before she dies. The alert reader will make the intended connection to the death of the whole species of passenger pigeons in Chapter 49. The real conclusion we draw from your being led to this astonishing passage on p. 551 is that there is only this dying moment. I cannot thank you enough, and your shadow self who assisted in finding this passage…..as if it were random. ——MS
Cousin Hannah! Perhaps we haven't talked about her enough. Michael references one of my top three scenes in the book--when, after her death, Mr. Spitzer discovers trunks filled with Cousin Hannah's wedding dresses:
"He had been trapped by wedding gowns winding around his feet like seas, seas of hissing silks, skirts hemmed by marsh flowers, skirts blowing like waves, skirts drifting around his head or over his head like the sails of boats, short trains and long trains, tents of cobweb where one fire burned like the eye of this mystery, skirts like glacial snow drifting from a ledge of stone, skirts which were shrouds, skirts like white umbrellas floating over him..."
I loved Anne Tyler and read several of her books way back when. I loved the Accidental Tourist and watched the movie. I thought MMMD mentioned in the book was made up. I could have had a head start having this novel with me longer! XD I went for the back half of the book since I'm already on Chapter 47.
I got the Gospel salesman, Mr. Bonebreaker, who showers Miss M with compliments not recognizing her flaws as she does. Well he doesn't know yet...
I was always warry of men who showered me with compliments. I fully agree with Tyler and the professor, every page is a treasure trove. Young gave many breadcrumbs to lead the way.
I like the idea and will try it tomorrow on my birthday
Catherine: We will be especially attentive on such a special occasion——MS
My random page was 498. The first line already elicited a spooky feeling that I was being spoken to ... a secret escape even when it seemed impossible ( recalls a line from Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu that's stuck with me : ) the trick is to escape before you die ,, Yes, but how? How does one slip into that timeless sideways dimension? A mystical doorway perhaps? Sure, but where? Maybe spirits riding on the gales will direct me, walls and doors mean nothing to them. Follow the moon, pilgrim, she's watching. You know you're a great mathematical genius and with your knowledge of electronics & steam power you can get the lighthouse operational again to send out its bright beams to illuminate the dark lands and the crawling shadow shapes ... but there! what's that? a tortoise with stars on its back? ( recalls the jewel encrusted tortoise in The Other City by Michal Ajvaz ) Study the patterns on its back and you will learn the way.
That's a great one! There's a jewel encrusted tortoise in Against Nature by Huysmans, also! Does Ajvaz's tortoise die from the weight of its jewels like Huysmans?
Just looked up Ajvaz. He looks great! Do you have a favorite of his?
I don't recall the tortoise dying in Ajvaz's The Other City, it appears as part of hallucinatory experience where Prague becomes an underwater city. (at least that's how I recall it, but the memory is tricky)
All of Ajvaz's novels are well worth reading. Journey to the South just came out (last year I think) and it's a mise en abyme construction, lots of puzzles and weird situations. Hard to pick a favorite, but the one I've read the most is The Other City, but it was also my first Ajvaz. Readers of Miss MacIntosh might recognize the spirit in which Ajvaz's sentences are written. Here's a line that might entice: "Leave everything behind and come with me, we'll set out on an expedition together. We'll find rare gems and splendid monsters, you'll see. Most important of all, my guess is that beyond the frontiers is hidden the secret of our world. We'll only be able to live for real when we return from the other side." [p. 13]
Can't wait to read both The Other City and Journey to the South--ordered!
Any other authors/titles that you recommend with writing resembling Young?
So as not to overthink this, I've just spent the last hour reading Miss MacIntosh and decided I would note whatever books came to mind as I was reading this is what bubbled up: Ice by Anna Kavan, Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith, & Passages by Ann Quin. If I were to analyze these associations ... Ice b/c of the fluid transitions between situations, NYP b/c of the poetic sensibilities of the narrator, & Passages b/c ... a kind of dreaminess in the quality of the description ... maybe.
Dear Twisty: What mysterious forces led you to page 498 in MMMD where you find yourself in the middle of a sentence about a “intricate, secret escape even when it seemed impossible.”? And as your moving finger travels down the page, you discover that such an escape involves the recognition of the great powers of imagination possessed by Vera’s mother, Catherine, which, God-like, directs winds, and builds great cities, and transforms a man into a “tortoise with stars upon its back” This is Chapter 41 and its dominant character is Catherine Cartwheel, who, though stoked on opium and confined to bed, travels to exotic places more real than those paltry historical places her cousin Hannah visits. This chapter is the apotheosis of Vera’s mother who, through the sheer force of Imagination, is “everywhere and nowhere,” and who resides at “the still center at the heart of the whirlpool.” She achieves what TS Eliot in his Four Quartets considers the ultimate, “the still point of the turning world.” Your connection of this page with Cartaresque’s Solenoid is inspired. I can’t think of another novel written by a living author that resonates so deeply with Miss MacIntosh, My Darling than Solenoid. Both novels run the gambit from from “the microevents on the Planck scale to the clusters of metagalaxies” as Cartaresqu puts it just before his main character dissolves into seven straight pages of screaming the word “help.” There is, however, as you discovered in your seemingly random choice of page 498, an “intricate escape even when its seemed impossible.” To get a better more fully developed sense of the importance and meaning of that secret escape, go back to p. 494 where Catherine describes in detail how for years she was lost within her ear. This description of being trapped within an ear mirrors the most fitting metaphor for the book: the seashell with its intricate enfoldings. The most succinct description of this seashell, a chambered nautilus, appears in the last words of chapter 60 which you can hear spoken at this site by clicking on the audio file at the end of the posting. All this from simply opening a book at random?
Michael, Thanks for the thoughtful response. (Excuse the delay in responding. I've been traveling since Wednesday morning and am just back to my normal routine.) Yeah, I assure you it was a random choice. I worried that if I held the book in my hands and flipped to a page, I'd overthink the choice, so I put the book on the table, closed my eyes and then used the tip of my right index finger to approach the book from the side. I'm a bit superstitious about books, especially the books in my library. Often I feel like a conduit through which my books converse with each other. Wednesday morning before leaving on my trip, I was reading in my study and I had a sudden desire to get another book from the shelf and open it. I did that and found a passage immediately that was relevant to what I'd just been reading in the first book. I'm curious if other readers feel like their library talks to (through) them. (Of course, I realize that we humans are really good at finding patterns and meaning, so ... ) Perhaps this is idiosyncratic, but when I was reading Solenoid, I was simultaneously reading The Luminous Novel by Mario Levrero which seems like it should be a very different sort of book, but it seemed like those two books were in dialog. Perhaps it was that what Levrero wanted to write was left implicit because he couldn't write it (perhaps a secret so dark it couln't be uttered or so delicate that if pronounced the magic would melt) so the reader has to figure out from the text what isn't being said so that they can glimpse the shape of what could be there. It's a bit like moving in a labyrinth ... by moving around the center one gets a sense of what's at the center without being unable to approach the center directly. It seems Miss MacIntosh is that sort of book too. I've only recently started reading Miss MacIntosh and I'm going slowly along an antlike line, but I'll probably do more wandering (leaping at random). Another book I wander around in (rather than read linearly ... well other than Ulysses) is Prae by Miklos Szentkuthy.
Hello! Thank you for doing this, it’s been great fun being able to see your reflections and conversation while reading through MMMD myself for the first time!
My passage came from page 334 - the paragraph beginning with “My mother would never tire of discussing her final obsequies…”. At first, having chosen at random, I enjoyed how prototypical this paragraph seemed for Miss Macintosh on the surface, with not quite half of the paragraph being composed of a list of various modes of travel and various breeds of dog!
From there I was led to reflect on the humor in how Young expresses herself here - Vera’s mother would never tire? She never leaves her bed! She may choose not to invite Mr. Spitzer? He is never invited but always arrives punctually, and her invited guests are usually figments!
From here I thought about Catherine’s position in life as we see it in the novel as almost an inverse of Vera’s journey on the bus. Vera in the constant motion of the moving vehicle reflecting on her childhood and observing the tangible sensible markers of the people around her (the clothing of the other passengers, their body language, voices), moving fast but taking much of it in as if a passive observer. While on the other hand her mother Catherine remains simply still in one place nearly unable to notice the things that she might tangibly sense in her vicinity, nevertheless she seems not passive at all in her mind but is always creating or composing colorful ideas of visitors at her bedside in great detail.
Bill, you hit the jackpot with this one! McFate (as Vladimir Nabokov calls him) has directed you not only to the right chapter, page, line, but to the very word that is necessary and unavoidable in the book “Obsequies.” I had, I admit, gone to the dictionary for this one: “funeral rites or ceremonies.” If one had to say in one word what MMMD was all about it would be “death.” I asked my AI friend, named Echo, if indeed you were right, that this is a “death-haunted book.” He replied: “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is not so much haunted by death as obsessed with it—infatuated, embalmed, embalming. Its pages are populated not by characters but by revenants: lovers of illusions, dreamers embalmed in their own myths, and seekers who seek the mystery beyond death, only to find it mirrored endlessly in themselves. In this way, the novel becomes its own mausoleum: a tomb of language, memory, and dream, in which the reader, like Vera, walks endlessly among the dead, searching for one clear face among the shadows.” I myself would not have put it so depressingly theatrical, but I think he in general is right. Catherine Cartwheel is endlessly preparing for the End, her “obsequies.” which would put a concluding touch to the vast memory mansion she lives in, which is to say, her head. The subscribers to this substack, along with its hosts, are undecided about how to regard Vera’s mother’s obsessions. Some think she’s the one who should inspire Vera’s devotion and not Miss MacIntosh. Others are hesitant to make that claim. What do you think? In any event, thanks for playing the game and getting it “right!”—-MS
My fingers alighted on the first full paragraph on p. 551. I told myself I would limit myself to one paragraph, and was surprised to see a relatively short one! It has to do with Mr. Spitzer hearing Cousin Hannah's death throes, "like music previously ignored." She's crying for her skirt, the skirt she "took off so long ago in a snow storm," perhaps the one her love disappeared in? The image of putting on her skirt "like the surf booming against the great, jagged rocks reaching through clouds" doesn't mean much to me. I may be too tired to appreciate this. Is the skirt a flashy peignoir-like white thing, spread out like waves crashing? I don't know. I feel like maybe the skirt was described earlier?
Sam: I don’t know what angelic or demonic forces led you to this page and that particular passage, but I am certain that it is one of my favorite passages in the book: Cousin Hannah, on her death bed, calling out for her skirt. Up to the point of my reading (or reading in) Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, I had considered the grandest dying speech in literature to be that of Anna Livia Plurabelle in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, where, moments before death eternally closes her eyes, she remembers being carried by her father through a fair with toys for children. She says “My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair!” It is certainly not unusual for people on their death beds to become confused or recall the events of childhood, or to speak words that seem unintelligible or odd to those in attendance. I know of one instance in which the dying person called out just before he died, “Where are my shoes?” Cousin Hannah calling out for her skirt is so deeply moving because we know that her central aim in life was to take over what had been exclusively a male domain—that of historical adventure. And we learn from elsewhere in the book that she had left at her death a trunk filled with wedding gowns. She has not capitulated to the world of men at the end, but to the world of childhood romance in which skirts play a central role. Anna Livia Plurabelle at her life’s end mentions not skirts but leaves. And notices that all the leaves that clung to her had vanished except one which she will keep to the end. “I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of…..” Young, I’m convinced, wants the reader (the ideal reader) to make the connection of Cousin Hannah with Anna Livia. In one of several of Cousin Hannah’s death scenes, she hears a bell ringing in a belfry signaling her death. She notes that her machinery is “clogged by leaves, wings.” Confused, as she is when she makes her skirts into clouds and wings, she hallucinates pigeons just before she dies. The alert reader will make the intended connection to the death of the whole species of passenger pigeons in Chapter 49. The real conclusion we draw from your being led to this astonishing passage on p. 551 is that there is only this dying moment. I cannot thank you enough, and your shadow self who assisted in finding this passage…..as if it were random. ——MS
Thank you so much for your elucidating take on this! And thanks all three of you for a wonderful dive into this most wondrous of books.
Cousin Hannah! Perhaps we haven't talked about her enough. Michael references one of my top three scenes in the book--when, after her death, Mr. Spitzer discovers trunks filled with Cousin Hannah's wedding dresses:
"He had been trapped by wedding gowns winding around his feet like seas, seas of hissing silks, skirts hemmed by marsh flowers, skirts blowing like waves, skirts drifting around his head or over his head like the sails of boats, short trains and long trains, tents of cobweb where one fire burned like the eye of this mystery, skirts like glacial snow drifting from a ledge of stone, skirts which were shrouds, skirts like white umbrellas floating over him..."
The spirit of the book moves us in mysterious ways.
I loved Anne Tyler and read several of her books way back when. I loved the Accidental Tourist and watched the movie. I thought MMMD mentioned in the book was made up. I could have had a head start having this novel with me longer! XD I went for the back half of the book since I'm already on Chapter 47.
I got the Gospel salesman, Mr. Bonebreaker, who showers Miss M with compliments not recognizing her flaws as she does. Well he doesn't know yet...
I was always warry of men who showered me with compliments. I fully agree with Tyler and the professor, every page is a treasure trove. Young gave many breadcrumbs to lead the way.
I missed doing it on my birthday! But I still intend to do it, as I will be celebrating for the rest of the year.