I read “Anna Karenina” on
the school bus when I was
13. I took it a chapter a ride,
shining a flashlight I kept in
my backpack over the pages in
the winter when the mornings
were dark. It was my favorite
part of the day — a stolen quiet
moment, with just me and
Anna and Kitty and Vronsky. I
knew pretty much immediately
that this would become the
best book I would ever read,
and even though 13-year-old
me was wrong about a lot of
things (I wore a lot of vests that
year), I was right about this.
The book grabbed at my heart
in a way few pieces of writing
— or anything, for that matter
— have since. It made me feel
full — like I was about to burst
with all the feelings it incited
in me. When I finally finished
it, huddled under the covers at
3:00 in the morning, I cried for
an hour, hugging the book tight
to my chest. I woke up the next
morning still holding it.
I’ve read “Anna Karenina” so
many times that I’ve lost track
of the number in the six years
since that first encounter. It’s
like my Bible, and I keep it by my
bed for emergencies. The book
is high melodrama — a story of
infidelity, passion gone wrong,
obsession,
life,
death
and
suicide. It’s grand enough that
the most recent film adaptation
placed the whole thing on a
stage, putting the theatrics of
the story to the foreground. But
despite the opulence and drama
of it all, Tolstoy’s magnum opus
remains the most achingly
human story I’ve ever read. The
characters are so fragile, so
delicately spun to life it’ll break
your heart.
It took me a couple rereads to
be able to see the cracks running
between lines of the story
proper, but eventually I saw
that “Anna Karenina” exists
in two dimensions. There’s the
famous narrative of adultery
and obsession and divorce and
twisted love. But then there’s
also this complicated web of
the
characters’
interiorities
running in between all of that,
filling in those cracks. It’s not
till the very end of the book that
you realize the two layers are
inextricable, how the minutiae
of the characters’ thoughts and
feelings and interactions stack
on top of each other to create
such a towering tragedy. In the
end, it was her inner world that
ruined Anna. She just couldn’t
stand the weight of her feelings.
An early scene, shortly after
Anna and Vronsky first meet:
“She felt as though her nerves
were strings being strained
tighter and tighter on some
sort of screwing peg. She felt
her eyes opening wider and
wider ... something within
oppressing her breathing, while
all shapes and sounds seemed
in the uncertain half light to
strike her with unaccustomed
vividness.”
Or this moment later on that’s
not even a scene; it’s really
more of an offhand description,
but it’s one of my favorite lines
of any book I’ve ever read. Kitty
is lying in bed after she realizes
the scope of her feelings for
Levin, and it goes like this: “‘It’s
late, it’s late,’ she whispered
with a smile. A long while she
lay, not moving, with open eyes,
whose brilliance she almost
fancied she could herself see in
the darkness.”
I feel so holy about this.
Sometimes when I read these
moments in “Anna Karenina” I
feel like I’m intruding, like it’s
too intimate being privy to these
intricacies of the characters’
most
private
thoughts.
It’s
hard to explain why my heart
tightens whenever I read these
moments, except maybe to say
that it feels like a mirror being
held up to the inside of my own
brain. It’s just true, in a way
that goes beyond relatability,
but down to the bone marrow
of what it feels like to be a
person, to be this specific type
of person.
Because it’s just not that I
relate to Kitty. I’ve been Kitty,
young
and
vulnerable
and
lying in the dark with my heart
racing, feeling my eyes shining
so bright I could imagine them
brilliant enough to light up the
room. I’ve been Anna feeling
my nerves tighten with every
passing breath, like the colors
around me are too bright, like
my body is a live wire being
wound up.
Those
moments
woven
throughout the story are what
make “Anna Karenina” the
book that taught me I have a
whole internal world, secret
and entirely separate from
anybody else’s expectations or
opinions of me. I’m so grateful
I found it when I was 13, a time
when every day contained what
felt like a million punches in the
gut. I spent — and still spend,
as I think every young woman
does — too much time paring
down the jagged edges of my
personality, my body, my whole
self. It’s what so many girls
do. Hate ourselves and hurt
ourselves and hack ourselves
into neat pieces that can fit
into the tiny boxes built for us
to live in, until we can’t take it
anymore. A lot of girls survive
it but some, like Anna, don’t.
“Anna Karenina” gave me
the language to articulate the
moments — so rare and tenuous
that noticing them is like
pinning a butterfly’s wings —
when I can feel the full capacity
of all the secrets I carry, all the
things I want to do and feel
and be. Kitty felt it lying awake
in her room,
fully
aware
of herself and
her
shining
eyes.
Lorde
sings
about
it in “Writer
in the Dark”:
“And
in
my
darkest hour /
I stumbled on a
secret power.”
Fiona Apple, in
“Every
Single
Night”: “I just
wanna
feel
everything
/
So I’m gonna
try to be still
now.”
Kesha,
in “Rainbow”:
“Now
I
can
see the magic
inside of me.”
And
Virginia
Woolf, in “The
Waves”: “I feel
a
thousand
capacities
spring
up
in
me.”
The shining
eyes,
the
power,
the
magic,
the
capacities
—
they’re
all
just
different
names for that
same flash of
understanding,
that
moment
of
vivid
awareness
when you can
see
yourself
clearly for the
first
time
in
forever.
Anna
wonders, as she
feels
herself
unraveling
in
real time, “Is it
really possible
to tell someone
else what one
feels?”
By Frank Virzi
©2018 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
10/17/18
Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle
Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis
10/17/18
ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:
Release Date: Wednesday, October 17, 2018
ACROSS
1 Recurring theme
6 Contemporary of
Dashiell
10 Apple debut of
1998
14 Childish retort
15 Group of two
16 Santa __:
Sonoma County
seat
17 2005 reality show
featuring Whitney
Houston
20 War on Poverty
org.
21 “In that event ... ”
22 Kipling python
23 ’60s sitcom
portrayer of
Cathy Lane and
her “identical
cousin”
27 Spin, as a baton
29 “The Simpsons”
storekeeper
30 Leb. neighbor
31 Looks up to
33 Show of rural
respect
35 Army NCO
37 Little piggy
38 Ginger-ale-
and-grenadine
“cocktail”
43 1988 noir
remake
44 Ewe, say
45 Website with
business
reviews
47 Supple
51 Many a
microbrew
53 One in the
middle of
Knoxville?
54 FDR and JFK
55 Chinese menu
standard
58 Announcer Hall
59 Protein-rich food
61 Wish undone
62 Where social
graces are
taught, and what
17-, 23-, 38-, and
55-Across each
has
68 McFlurry cookie
69 Start of a hymn
70 Creeps-inducing
71 Arms of a
starfish
72 Over and above:
Abbr.
73 Silvery little fish
DOWN
1 Will Smith sci-fi
series
2 Laudatory piece
3 French pronoun
4 “You’re lying!” in
a playground
5 “Old” old-
fashioned sorts
6 Old name for
Tokyo
7 Cube creator
8 Bio class cost
9 Slow Churned
ice cream brand
10 Like the vb. “be”
11 Red Sox star
Betts
12 Like angry bees
13 Lock sites
18 Pro wrestling
throw
19 Deepest level
23 Shell out
24 Jungle swingers
25 Rear
26 Impulse
28 Tearful
32 Team with the
most Super Bowl
victories
34 Central spot
36 TV host
Pennington and
Hall of Famer
Cobb
39 Places to perch
40 Bangkok native
41 Big name in
denim
42 Power co. product
46 Peruvian capital?
47 Commit perjury
to protect
48 Former Indian
prime minister
Gandhi
49 “Dog Day
Afternoon”
director Lumet
50 Crude model
used for public
ridicule
52 Elicits
56 Long sentence
57 Turn a midi into a
mini, say
60 Cries of
discovery
63 Platform for Siri
64 Mdse.
65 Malachite, e.g.
66 Many a Monet
67 Permit
Imagine the hottest, most
humid day of the summer. One
of those days where the air feels
like jelly, and it’s easy to sit in
front of the A / C unit for hours,
watching the air blow in and out.
You’re sitting on the porch of a
cottage near some body of water,
listening to the cicadas buzz
loudly through the evening’s
soft glow. A radio is playing
inside the house, faintly muted
Americana flowing through the
open screen door that’s torn in a
few places. You take a sip of beer,
lean back in your rocking chair
and fade into the night, staring
off at nothing in particular,
comforted and happy. This is
what it’s like to listen to Kurt
Vile’s new record Bottle It In: an
aimlessly successful collection
of psychedelic folk that captures
the happiness of uncertainty
in amber, sunlight shining
through even its darkest
moments.
From the beginning of his
career, Vile has truly proven
himself to be the king of good
vibes, consistently pushing
out mellow jams that give
listeners a glimpse into his
rambling mind. Between his
skill for fingerpicking, hazy
psychedelia and his country
drawl,
the
songwriter’s
penchant for creating mood
is unmatched on Bottle It In,
a record that is as meaningful
as it is irresolute. Kurt
Vile’s seventh solo album is
patchworked together, yet
that’s its greatest asset. At
face value, Bottle It In seems
haphazard
—
each
song
follows its own twisting
path through Vile’s psyche,
stumbling upon nuggets of
wisdom and funny quips alike
in an endless daze. The warm
ambiance of Vile’s music is
present in all of his albums,
but here he has achieved
a
perfect
balance:
His
untethered consciousness is
both amplified and grounded
by expansive arrangements
of guitar and harp.
“I was on the ground
but looking straight into
the sun / But the sun went
down and I couldn’t find
another one / For a while,”
he sings on album highlight
“Bassackwards,” a tangential
thought that freezes one summer
moment in time. The virtue of
Vile’s music is in his stream of
consciousness, one that can go
from “Oh girl, you gave me rabies
/ And I don’t mean maybe” in
“Hysteria” to the “Don’t tell them
/ That you love them / For your
own sake” of title track “Bottle It
In” and make the two lines just as
heartfelt. Though Bottle It In may
cover love, friendship, loneliness
and
everything
in
between,
the tie between every song is
Vile’s
honesty
with
himself
and his audience. The singer is
unabashedly on-brand in sound
and subject matter throughout
the record, and it works for him
— the ephemeral quality of his
ambient guitar and off-hand
lyrics veer from bright to solemn
quickly, but everything rests on a
foundation of truth.
It can often be said that the
first three minutes of a Kurt Vile
song will tell you enough about
it to stop paying attention. For
those who only appreciate his
music for its chill nature and
sweet guitar riffs, this is easy to
accept, to turn it on and zone out.
Of course, this is part of Vile’s
allure — but beneath the reverb
and soft percussion is a poignant
message of accepting life as it
comes. To him, life is “just like
a song if the repeats were long”
(“One Trick Ponies”), and he
has a point. Everyone is floating
through the years just like Vile
moves from one atmospheric jam
to the next trying to find his own
sun, watching it fade into the
horizon and waiting for the dawn
to come back again.
On ‘Bottle It In,’ Kurt Vile
is the king of good vibes
CLARA SCOTT
Daily Arts Writer
Bottle It In
Kurt Vile
Matador Records
BOOKS THAT BUILT US
‘Anna Karenina’ & finding
my secret internal world
ASIF BECHER
Daily Books Editor
‘Anna Karenina’ gave
me the language
to articulate the
moments when I can
feel the full capacity
of all the secrets I
carry, all the things
I want to do and feel
and be
If I could answer her, I’d
probably say no — you barely
understand
what
those
moments mean most of the
time, let alone find a way to
talk about them. Unless you
can write like Tolstoy, you
probably won’t be able to find
the words. Instead they usually
become
a
delicious
secret,
a quiet covenant you make
within yourself that forms the
core of your identity. It’s a part
of your world that can never be
damaged or tarnished, though
it can be buried deep inside.
Maybe that’s a good thing.
Maybe some things are worth
hiding. Every now and then,
though, something finds its way
through the layers, into those
innermost parts of you. When
I was 13, this book worked its
way in, and I’ve held it tight
ever since. It’s a part of me now.
I keep it as close as my deepest
secrets.
ALBUM REVIEW
MATADOR RECORDS
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Wednesday, October 17, 2018 — 5A