{"id":292,"date":"2013-02-03T05:40:31","date_gmt":"2013-02-03T10:40:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=292"},"modified":"2013-02-02T21:48:35","modified_gmt":"2013-02-03T02:48:35","slug":"embroidering-the-tale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=292","title":{"rendered":"Embroidering the Tale"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The two books I\u2019ve finished most recently couldn\u2019t be more different. One was the 2012 Pulitzer-nominated Swamplandia!<\/i>, about a 13-year-old girl who lives on an island in the Everglades and whose family earns its living by alligator wrestling and other dubious pursuits; the other was Michael Chabon\u2019s Telegraph Avenue<\/i>, which takes place in Oakland, California, separated from Florida by three thousand miles and cavernous cultural divides. Yet Chabon\u2019s book and Karen Russell\u2019s have a striking similarity in the way they are written, a process I think of as embroidery. They both use unexpected and vivid images to snare the reader, creating a rich, colorful, multilayered text. Russell isn\u2019t quite up to Chabon\u2019s skill as yet, and some of her efforts fall flat, but then she will pick up again, writing, \u201cWith a grim, spiderlike lacemaking Kiwi\u2019s brain knit his surprise into a dull and terrible knowledge,\u201d followed a few lines later by \u201cA pat of sun slid down the doctor\u2019s biscuit-white face.\u201d I didn\u2019t mark up either book, thought I\u2019d illustrate just by picking a page at random, which I just did with Telegraph Avenue<\/i> and found \u201cFor years he had been on and off various medications whose names sounded like the code names of sorceresses or ninja assassins. . . . each wore out its welcome in his father\u2019s bloodstream without ever managing to lay an insulating glove on the glowing wire inside him.\u201d He could have said, \u201cFor years, he\u2019d tried numerous mood-controlling drugs to no avail.\u201d Thank goodness, he didn\u2019t. Nor did he say \u201cThe old man stood up\u201d; instead, he wrote, \u201cThe old man was up and on his feet like an umbrella opening.\u201d What both books require is the reader\u2019s attention. The images are so startling, so unusual, every page holds a revelation. In an era when writing is often stripped down and fast-paced, these authors\u2019 art demands that readers slow down and luxuriate in the fresh ways they use words to stitch the hues and patterns of the worlds they have created.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The two books I\u2019ve finished most recently couldn\u2019t be more different. One was the 2012 Pulitzer-nominated Swamplandia!, about a 13-year-old girl who lives on an island in the Everglades and whose family earns its living by alligator wrestling and other … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-imagination","category-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-4I","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=292"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":295,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292\/revisions\/295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}