Loss Leaders

Thanks to this morning's unfortunate Walmart incident, we are able to determine that a human life in this year 2008 is worth exactly $131.77.

Our calculation is the sum of the difference between the regular price and the discounted price of the three loss leaders that inspired the crazed mob. Thus:

• a $97 Garmin GPS navigation system would be regularly priced at $148.88
• a $69 Samsung digital camera would be regularly priced at $119.95
• a $128 Magnavox DVD player would be regularly priced at $156.94

I've been trying all morning to put myself into the headspace of someone for whom a cheap GPS system is so important that I'd crunch someone's hyaloid. So far I haven't succeeded.

Somewhere Shirley Jackson is getting very sloppily drunk.

The Liars' Club

In other news, I had a perfectly pleasant, low-key Thanksgiving in which I did nothing but eat, draw, and read The Liars' Club, a book about which I'd been curious because it always pops up on lists of the Ten Best Memoirs of All Time.

These days I'm more into writing a memoir than writing a novel since memoirs sell more reliably. I wish, of course, that I'd fucked my father or had a passionate Sapphic fling with my half-sister since I'm not at all sure that the ramblings of a failed middle-aged businesswoman in and of themselves make compelling reading. ("Why we look alike!" I breathed reverentially as Francesca and I compared labia minora in a mirror…)

Although to be sure I can't quite figure out what's so compelling about Mary Karr's life either. So her mother was crazy, BFD – my mother was even crazier plus since she didn't drink I didn't have the consolation of knowing it was the alcohol talking when she'd abandon me on street corners, telling me my father would be along in 10 hours or so.

Karr's prose, on the other hand, is really first rate. Hard to read though – at least, hard for me to read. I'm a lazy reader; I race through every book I read pulled along by the story. I don't pay much attention to the words on the page, in fact I dislike stylized writing in which the words themselves extort so much attention that they throw me out of the story.

Karr's writing is very stylized. The Liars' Club is as dense as a 320 page poem which makes sense – Karr was a poet before she was a prose writer: By dusk we were on the spaghetti freeways looking for Highway 73 home, and I kept cutting my eyes between my window, where the new glass skyscrapers going up just slid past, and the small rearview mirror, where Mother's eyes were still eerily blank. Nothing showed in those eyes but the road's dashed white lines, which seemed to be flying off the road and deepest part of her pupils, where they disappeared like knives.

Central image of the book is the various reflections in people's eyes, it's the connective tissue as it were. And I found myself wondering about Karr's process here – do the images pour out of her on the first draft? Or they conscious manipulations of the text that appear around draft 3?

The Liars" Club reminds me a lot of White Oleander, another book I didn't like at all while I was reading it but which has stayed with me in the years since.