What We’re Teaching Our Sons – Owen Booth
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4th Estate 2018
My previous reviews of Owen Booth: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/owen-booth/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
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4th Estate 2018
My previous reviews of Owen Booth: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/owen-booth/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
“We promise ourselves that next week we’ll get it right.”
A lot of short short and nifty wise saws, or not so wise!
Good intentions, and philosophy.
More incantatory refrains of the recurrent teaching of our sons. First whales, today. And why one was beached so close to home. In the Thames, was it? I am 71, old enough by far to be a grandfather, old enough to lose my memory. And I mine my own eaves. And I often read Steve Rasnic Tem. Owen Booth here: “And the grandfathers themselves, as boys, searching desperately through the streets for their own silent, unknowable fathers.”
What else can I say? Other than taking them to art galleries, as this text seems to suggest, to see paintings with women depicted over the centuries. I wonder if Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) was one such.
I admire the ironic obliquity of these incantations. But irony of ironies, does one irony cancel out the other irony?
Also I am impressed at my preternatural synchronicity in reading Tem’s Book of Days and this Owen Booth-book in chance oblique tandem.
Also cf Haas’ Sugarland, reviewed a few months ago?
Almost a cleansing catharsis, with snow cover or bald heads and bald bodies. But half of us may be gay or straight or both, half of us may be into or actually IN pornography, and half of us nastier than most, I infer. The irony is that all bodies contain ugliness. But did the snow hide it, or the hair? Women, as mothers, are ironically mentioned for the first time here, as far as I recall. Bodies contain minds, too, I guess. Meanwhile, I think I have extrapolated here further than the book strictly allowed!
A misfired pitot tube, pilot error, or simply fate.
Crying and Europe are the next two,sections, the next two lessons we teach our sons.
I know the feeling. Crying become a refrain.
We tell our sons today of ‘empathy’ and ‘haunted houses.’
Please have empathy with me, O younger readers of my old man reviews, when I refer you to a friend’s story about a haunted house I read and reviewed here literally minutes before reading and reviewing the next part of this book today, as above.
“Consequently, we tell our sons, all our relationships tended to end the same way: in heartbreak and despair and things getting set on fire. Our sons, elbows deep in their Happy Meals, nod knowingly. Now things are different, we tell them. Now we understand that what relationships actually do is provide you with a whole new set of problems to deal with, so you don’t have time to worry about all the stupid, self-indulgent stuff you used to worry about before. In this way, we say, relationships are not unlike children.”
Teaching our sons about mountains ….. and then drugs on the Amazon River.
There is something unique about this book that is growing on me.
Competing with the Book of Days for pithy wisdom and constructive double ironies without bluffing.
“Nobody wants to see The World’s Strongest Man drop dead on television.”
This book is getting stranger and stranger. But is that me? Whatever, a ground-breaking sort of book with perhaps a new invented form of irony, untried till now.
I wish I had read this moving portrait – of separated and divorced fathers teaching their sons about gambling – yesterday.
From the best restaurant in the world, close to the Pyrenees, with a ten year waiting list, to a whole array of libraries, a list of libraries that outdoes Borges, and this book is arguably coming close to something I did not think anyone would come close to, even if I had first envisaged it as something to actually aim at! You only know there is something to attain once you have attained it, almost by accidental ricochet.
Crime and Cryology.
This book evokes thoughts other books can’t evoke. Unless it is the Book of Days. Still amazed at the mutual synergy of these two books being co-read.
“….after surviving seven separate lightning strikes in thirty-five years, he killed himself over an unrequited love affair at the age of seventy-one.”
I am seventy-one.
And so is Stephen King.
See two other cross-references of happenstance this afternoon:
https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/04/01/book-of-days-steve-rasnic-tem/#comment-16283
https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/05/04/out-of-the-dark-steve-rasnic-tem/#comment-16281
The second one explicitly.
“They haven’t got time for any nonsense from the likes of us.”
Indeed.
This book if discovered would be dynamite.
“, which contains the most devastating last line we’ve ever read.”
…although it is not quoted.
These entries are getting more and difficult to negotiate as to perceived meaning and unknown intent.
This is good, though, not bad, for the reader. The book is becoming utterly tantalising. Especially in the context of my other chance-synchronous reading.
OB is today teaching our sons about monsters, like zombies, vampires, werewolves. He is really now being sucked into Tem territory (here just now today). Two books not only in independently mutual synergy but also now becoming two interacting vampires, two monster metaphors.
“‘But still …’ we say.
But still, we’re trying desperately to keep the romance alive between ourselves and the mothers of our sons.“
With set pieces involving specially imported volcanic sand?
Do layered ironies become honest truths? This well-written book is perhaps unique in attempting such an experiment.
“‘Those were the days,’ our sons say.
And we can’t argue with that.”
A most effective portrait of nostalgia and the need for some sort of real-time version of it, not living in the past or the future. Past to future is an agonising spectrum we would otherwise travel along. This book is often very revelatory, if you can use ‘very’ with ‘reVElatoRY’.
Now we teach our sons practical life-skills, and they teach us how to act like Jacques Tati or Laurel & Hardy.
As well as this book presenting the neoironic, we also learn much about poignancy in tandem with it as a literary art form.
In their habitat, and as guarded by their own fathers, and I wonder what they teach them.
A bit of a giggle. Only to disarm some worries I am increasingly having about this book. That it is somehow disarming me. Brainwashing me?
Owen Booth is beginning to sound like the name of someone who should be famous. Or, possibly, infamous, at best.
The wet footprint was always there. It was just that we noticed it today. How we muffled our own furies when we were the sons of fathers and now merely watch as our own sons steal our unexpended thunder.
“Somewhere along the way, we realise, there’s been a terrible mistake. Possibly a sequence of terrible mistakes, stretching right back to the Stone Age.”
And the audit trail of fathers teaching sons teaching fathers teaching sons… is part of that brutal process.
The Child is Father of the Man – Wordsworth
I perhaps understand that line now for the first time.
And someone on Dateline London on BBC News earlier today specifically blamed men for all the pending world violence. Men per se. Fathers and Sons.
“We’re learning about walkabouts and vision quests…”
I can’t quite grasp how I managed to pick up this book at the same time as reviewing the Book of Days by Tem. It is sheer preternatural instinct, I am sure. They are so utterly in mutual synergy, two way filters to each other, and forming complementary composite metaphors, yet I simply KNOW 100% that one writer will not have yet read the other. It’s a matter of time, though.
Tem has a longer hinterland, while OB, a potential upstart, I guess, but so different to Tem in genre and feel, is becoming a Venn diagram, or vice versa.
“We have been accused of being over-cautious, of worrying unduly about things that are unlikely to happen. There are more important things to focus on, we’re told, than the likelihood of invasion by a culture that largely died out at the end of the eleventh century.”
Anxiety transcended, except our sons man the guns in case,…
*
Then the next entry, about HOSPITALS, to match the Tem entries read today…
“About the vast and holy silence that fills a hospital at three in the morning.
We don’t tell them about going home alone in the early hours of the morning, again and again, to houses and flats that would not be filled with life and noise. About trying to pick things up and put things back together over the next days and weeks and months.”
There is really a singular experience to be had with this book that no single part of me predicted before starting it.
“They eat your eyes first.”
This is getting more obliquely powerful by the day. Each entry seems now to talk of bigger things that are at first not obvious. A series of Swiftian modest proposals. Here the beetles are metaphors for plagues and brexits everywhere. Even possibly Ebola Gay. Or was that Enola before it was auto-corrected by my computer?
“And yet we can feel ourselves moving apart, like wandering moons being pulled into eccentric new orbits around the gigantic fact of our children–“
Teaching relativity and not allowing any divide and rule by the children in the trajectories of mothers as well as fathers, or at least the ‘we fathers’ in this book say!
Their mothers are becoming more involved in our thoughts, and how we can have extra-marital affairs, assuming we WANT to do so, especially when we are in the hotel with our sons. Dancing on board a Flying Dutchman sort of pirate ship, where men and women dance but not in time to the music. Seem strangely connected. But only books of such speculatively oblique prose as this one can make the unconnectable connectable. If only we want to do so.
The Aftermath of Disasters, and what indeed can anyone say, beyond what is now already said here? ONLY here, should you pick up this book. By which means we are teaching not only our sons but also ourselves, by dint of this book’s perhaps random synergy with its readers, and its own preternatural booby trap upon itself.
Sonkind as an ironic form of Mankind!
Read these two sections for yourself, without my accompaniment. This book is getting paradoxically stranger as well as truer. By quilted ironies. Mothers make quilts, I have found. Mothers, scapegoats.
I have accidentally found today the most resonant image for this book. Chiming somehow with things we do not yet know need chiming with.
“Our sons, of course, love the idea of war. The chaos. The weapons. The disruption of the everyday order of things. The abandoned tea time and bath time and bed time rules.”
Having just watched the Gordonstoun episode in The Crown on Netflix, we have perhaps other things to teach our sons…
Listed here.
Essential reading, for new fathers, I guess.
Mention of the mothers now increase apace in this book…
The most important lesson here, I think, is that sexual magnetism is nothing to do with the magnetism that our sons learn in Physics lessons.
I grow in confidence and wisdom – even at my relatively advanced age – the more I read this increasingly confident and wise book.
“‘Life on earth evolved around four and a half billion years ago,’ we explain. ‘Initially, life was–’”
A throwback in the ice, I infer, one of the specimens. And Frankenstein’s monster.
(A telling complement to today’s Tem’s Book of Days entry here, ten minutes ago!
https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/22804-2/#comment-15124)
Our wonderful, hilarious sons.
The quilt of ironies now takes on even more revolutionary proportions. I would LOVE to read this chapter aloud to you. It is seminal, speechifying stuff. From Dungeons & Dragons to Fortnite.
Why not? Less dangerous than being here on earth at the moment, I say.
If this sample vanishes from here at any stage, it is because the author or publisher has complained…
The Ones that Got Away
We’re telling them how video games have helped get us through some of the most difficult times in our lives, and how they’ve made us miss out on some other times altogether.”
And a new light is now given on this by dint of recent events concerning Fortnite, where our sons can become millionaires.
The foibles and pretensions of modern art included.
This book is its own happening or installation.
Venn diagram of ironies as a ready-made.
“We don’t want our sons to be defined by their gender any more than we want women to be defined by theirs.”
I sense we ought to stop digging our hole even deeper, but you know we know that you know that we are still digging this hole!
The irony runs so utterly deep now in the fathers, vis à vis their sons’ mothers, and what they need to airbrush. Nothing works, in the end. The sons will do what the fathers once did at their age, I guess. Ignore their fathers. Humour their mothers. I guess.
The irony is now so deep, I think, as reader, I shall become like that character in Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and walk about permanently with an ironing-board under my arm!
In fact that novel, now I’ve thought of it, is a fine complement for this book. And vice versa.
Give them this book, I say.
Climbing the same trees as we climbed, but these trees are different, by being bigger or weaker or older, though.
I note each section seems to contain at least one straight-faced ‘dying fall’, in word-musical terms of its contextual meaning.
“We’re accidentally ending up at the wrong funerals and nevertheless being invited to the wakes on account of our sons being so polite, so nicely dressed.”
“…half the people we know have either got cancer or are thinking about it.”
You know, these entries in this teaching manual get more and more resonant — with some hidden truths regarding humanity in our society — the further you progress into it.
Read the list of ghosts here, it is an eye-opener.
And the final lesson:
“The Ultimate Fate of the Universe” which ties up incredibly neatly in mutual,synergy with Tem’s PASTEL read and reviewed just now here, before reading this.
This is a book I am so pleased I picked up at a whim. A whim that has led to a unique experience of irony and absurdist wisdom. And a counterpane for Tem whose work I have been scrying for some while (still am).
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