Wislawa Szymborska, spirited Polish poet - Her poems make me say 'Yes, exactly.'

Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for literature, died on Monday at 88 (hat tip: Bookslut)

I posted some of her irrepressible poems here in 2007, in addition to this excerpt from her Nobel address:

The world - whatever we might think when we're terrified by its vastness and our own impotence or when we're embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, or people, animals and perhaps even plants (for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain?); whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we've just begun to discover, planets already dead, still dead, we just don't know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we've got reserved tickets, but tickets whose life span is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world - it is astonishing.

She is one of those poets whose poems make me say - yes, exactly.


Life While - You - Wait

Life While - You - Wait.
Performance without rehearsal.
Body without alternations.
Head without premeditation.

I know nothing of the role I play.
I only know it's mine, I can't exchange it.

I have to guess on the spot
just what this play's all about.

Ill-prepared for the privilege of living,
I can barely keep up with the pace that the action demands.
I improvise, although I loathe improvisations.
I trip at every step over my own ignorance.
I can't conceal my hayseed manners.
My instincts are for hammy histrionics.
Stage fright makes excuses for me, which humiliate me more.
Extenuating circumstances strike me as cruel.

Words and impulses you can't take back,
stars you'll never get counted,
your character like a raincoat you button on the run -
the pitiful results of all this unexpectedness.

If I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,
or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!
But here comes Friday with a script I haven't seen.
Is it fair, I ask
(my voice a little hoarse,
since I couldn't even clear my throat offstage).

You'd be wrong to think that it's just a slapdash quiz
taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.
I'm standing on the set and I see how strong it is.

The props are surprisingly precise.
The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer.
The farthest galaxies have been turned on.
Oh no, there's no question, this must be the premiere.
And whatever I do
will become forever what I've done.


'The farthest galaxies have been turned on' - a line that refocuses the lens. All this time, we have been lured by her simple, whimsical metaphor of the stage for life. Then suddenly, we are back in the scale of the universe, like a plunge into cold water.

Parallel lives of determination and vigor (Books - A Saving Remnant by Martin Duberman)

Barbara Deming and David McReynolds are social and political radicals who worked during the tumultuous decades that spanned the 1950s - 2000s. Their personal transformation through radical political action is the subject of Martin Duberman's dual biography A Saving Remnant. This sometimes messily organized narrative seemed almost suited to McReynolds and Demings's unusual lives of outward determination and vigor, and their parallel personal journeys which included much internal conflict, however, I was disappointed by the writing, which I found curiously flat and carelessly repetitive. Additionally, in a story whose central characters were active in many political organizations and who published in numerous journals, Duberman gave me too little background to help distinguish the Social Democratic Front from the Students for a Democratic Society or the Socialist Party from the Independent Socialist League from the War Resisters League, and then to keep them distinct from one another as the narrative progressed. This was not the case in reading Duberman's earlier Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community, his inspiring and well-researched book on the Black Mountain artists' colony of the 1930s. Despite writing in A Saving Remnant which lacked directedness or excitement, I ultimately became compelled by Demings and McReynolds's invigorating lives, which were devoted predominantly to pacifist activities and the struggle for equal treatment of black Americans, to see their stories through to the end.

The phrase "a saving remnant" has historically referred to that small number of people neither indoctrinated nor frightened into accepting oppressive social conditions. Unlike the general populace, they openly challenge the reigning powers-that-be and speak out early and passionately against injustice of various kinds....One of my intentions in writing this book is to demonstrate that in the mid-to-late twentieth century in the United States, the "saving remnant" included, in some cases prominently, a number of gay people.

What Duberman is very good at is how McReynolds and Deming's sexuality in the context of the repressive 1950s propelled them into activism. How the fact of their sexuality was formative not only of their relationships but of their whole lives, which were fraught with complexity. He is convincing on the psychological motivations behind his actors and their colleagues, parents, lovers, and friends. He is equally good at immersing the reader in the atmosphere of the turbulent sixties, with Bayard Rustin, Edmund Wilson, Allen Ginsberg, and Alvin Ailey all making appearances in the story. It is striking too, in reading this book in the context of the current Jacobean presidential campaign, that there was a time in recent American history during which people were less jaded about politics and when running for office was not just a function of money.

A Saving Remnant is a story of what medical writer Atul Gawande has referred to as "positive deviants," (I don't write now of McReynolds and Deming's sexuality, but of the singularity of their lives of struggle for the good) people whose divergence from the norm makes a positive and necessary contribution to the advancement of some aspect of our lives. Duberman does us a service in conveying the value of their exceptional lives.

Grown-up fantasy that is more than good versus evil (Books - The Magician King by Lev Grossman)

I had hoped to continue my Tuesday posts on Dickens's Our Mutual Friend today, but I have been so sick that I had to turn to less dense fare. Hopefully I will be able to return to that book this week.

Since finishing Lev Grossman's dark, magical coming of age fantasy The Magicians almost exactly two years ago, I have been anticipating its sequel - The Magician King. The sequel shares the original's strong plotting, dark tone, and layer of ironic commentary on the fantasy form's popularity and most well-used devices. In the first book, a smart, less than popular boy, is trained at a magic school called Brakebills, eventually travels to Fillory, the land of his childhood fantasy, and is crowned king. When we meet him in the sequel, he lives the luxurious life of a king, but rather than being content with ruling the land of his dreams, he is bored and restless. He decides to go on a quest to far off parts of his realm, making some unplanned for and surprising detours along the way. While the first volume focused on power, love, and fantasy, I would say that the present volume was about a sense of belonging and purpose, and ultimately the putting away of the utopian fantasies of childhood .

I felt The Magician King possessed by an angry streak colored by one of its key characters - Julia, or should I say Queen Julia. Parallel to the account of King Quentin's escapade is the story of Julia's acquisition of magic skill and power, not in the exclusive prep school environment of Brakebills, but through sheer grit and determination and at great sacrifice. This part of the novel is still concerned with power. Here the milder ironic comments on the fantasy form of the first novel became snarky barbs. To my eye the prodigious use of contemporary diction like motherfucking, ass-wipe, and fuck-all give the narrative the feel of straining to be relevant and is worn less naturally than the precise and variegated diction of Grossman's English literature degree: kludgy, wuthering, kibitzed, sinecure, and dysthymic semiotician.

I also had the feeling that Grossman, knowing what worked in the first novel, was sometimes pressured to hit his marks again. The direct references to Dr. Who, Harry Potter, and Narnia, that felt like such clever commentary in The Magicians here felt self-conscious and made-for-tv-cute. But any self-consciousness is ultimately subsumed by Grossman's imagination. Here we meet both a talking sloth and an animated map the size of a room which, as one moves closer, adjusts its resolution to more and more detail - like something out of Borges. The wonders of Grossman's imagined worlds, both real and magical, are rendered with real skill at crafting addictive narrative. Finally, Grossman's books are tougher stuff than the good versus evil antics of Harry Potter because he makes grown-up fantasy out of the interior struggles of human beings. His central characters are ambitious, dissatisfied, hard-up, complacent, unsure of who they are, bored, exploitative - but they aren't evil - they're expressing the dark side of any young soul both as they crave fantasy and as they are compelled to move on from it. In this I find them strong narratives of real value.

The alternative to positive thinking is not despair (Books - Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich) - The Tyranny of Positive Thinking I

Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided is a feisty analysis of the American obsession with positive thinking that includes its hypothesized origins, the areas of culture that it infiltrates - big business, religion, psychology - the multi-billion dollar industry that has grown up around coaching and products to maintain that cockeyed optimism no matter what the weather tells us, a debunking of many of the beneficial outcomes claimed by proponents of positive thinking such as improved cancer prognosis or material wealth, and finally the usefulness of negative emotions, stress, and vigilance. The anecdotes as well as the facts (if you choose to listen to them) are delivered in accessible prose with a hefty dose of irony. In addition, Ehrenreich is emotionally open about the part her own experience plays with the subject she writes about as in, for example, this about her wait for test results to confirm or reject a cancer diagnosis:

Finally there was nothing left to read but one of the free local weekly newspapers where I found, buried deep in the classifieds, something even more unsettling than the growing prospect of major disease - a classified ad for a "breast cancer teddy bear" with a pink ribbon stitched to its chest.

Yes, atheists pray in their foxholes - in this case, with a yearning new to me and sharp as lust, for a clean and honorable death by shark bite, lightning strike, sniper fire, car crash. Let me be hacked to death by a madman, was my silent supplication - anything but suffocation by the pink sticky sentiment embodied in that bear and oozing from the walls of the changing room. I didn't mind dying, but the idea that I should do so while clutching a teddy and with a sweet little smile on my face - well, no amount of philosophy had prepared me for that.

and later this about treatment:

In the mainstream of breast cancer culture, there is very little anger... Positive thinking seems to be mandatory in the breast cancer world, to the point that unhappiness requires a kind of apology, as when "Lucy," whose "long-term prognosis is not good," started her personal narrative on breastcancertalk.org by telling us that her story "is not the usual one full of sweetness and hope, but true nevertheless."

Ehrenreich owns up to her point of view not only as a patient, but also as a PhD in cell biology, a rationalist, and a professional skeptic. Her science credentials make her debunking of the blithely and often-repeated connection between positive emotion, immune response, and cancer survival rate particularly good. She gives a layperson's overview of a body of research spanning from the 1930s to 2007. The connection is based on the notion that a positive outlook impacts immune response, but this would only be meaningful if the immune system was playing a role in cancer, a fact for which there is no conclusive evidence. The immune system's role, as far as we understand, is to defeat outside invasions like infection, not alterations in growth that evolve inside our own cells. James Coyne, the author of a literature review of studies of the effects of psychotherapy on cancer in 2007 concludes that

There can be lots of social and emotional benefits. But [patients] should not seek such experiences solely on the expectation that they are extending their lives.

Ehrenreich's point is not merely that she derives no comfort from teddy bears and therefore neither should anyone else, her point throughout the book is that the insistence on optimism is a whitewashing of experience, and that it does not only fail to produce the results claimed by proponents but that the its ultimate outcome can actually be harmful.

But rather than providing emotional sustenance, the sugar-coating of cancer can exact a dreadful cost. First, it requires the denial of understandable feelings of anger and fear, all of which must be buried under a cosmetic layer of cheer. There is a great convenience for health workers and even friends of the afflicted, who might prefer fake cheer to complaining, but it is not so easy on the afflicted.

Well-intentioned as efforts may be to encourage benefit finding, it is generally insensitive to the "unique burdens and challenges" each patient must overcome. Indeed, some studies link increased perception of benefits with poorer quality of life compared to those who perceived fewer benefits following their diagnoses.

Ehrenreich's book doesn't focus solely on her own medical issues, in her chapter on motivational speakers and products like The Secret which promise that positive thinking will produce specific, wished-for results, Ehrenreich takes aim at the notion of the unlimited mind or that "we are the creators of our lives and of our world." Their programs involve such advice as eliminating negative people from one's life and not exposing oneself to negative news.

Of course, if the powers of mind were truly "infinite," one would not have to eliminate negative people from one's life...The advice that you must change your environment... is an admission that there may in fact be a "real world" out there that is utterly unaffected by our wishes. In the face of this terrifying possibility, the only "positive" response is to withdraw into one's own carefully constructed world of constant approval and affirmation, nice news, and smiling people.

Many of these programs claim to be based upon quantum physics, or rather, an incorrect understanding of the rules of quantum mechanics, which apply to systems that are waaaaaay smaller than the brain. The argument put forth by such speakers, mourns Ehrenreich, is that "whatever you decide is true, is true." How the hell can you argue with that?

It's a glorious universe the positive thinkers have come up with, a vast, shimmering aurora borealis in which desires mingle freely with their realizations. Everything is perfect here, or as perfect as you want to make it. Dreams go out and fulfill themselves; wishes need only to be articulated. It's just a god-awfully lonely place.

Although this paragraph is fairly dripping with sarcasm, Ehrenreich gets right to the heart of the fallacy of such claims. Such an imagined system sees the wisher as the only active member of the universe and all other objects and people in it their instruments. Think about it, if your wish involves my decision to, say, give you a job - what is the claim? That I no longer have a free will in making such a decision? That my thoughts and actions become your playthings? And what if I am simultaneously focusing my positive thoughts on employing someone else? What then?

Crackpot ministers and Oprah guests notwithstanding, I would have found the chapter on psychologist Martin Seligman and the "science of happiness" devastating had it not been so funny. By Ehrenreich's account there is little unbiased science going on in the field in which I am currently trying to earn a degree.

So obviously Ehrenreich and I are both misanthropes of the worst kind, and if we want to hate all humanity we can go ahead, by why shouldn't the rest of mankind benefit from thinking only positive thoughts if they want to? What possible harm can it do? Perhaps, cautions Ehrenreich, there are negative people who have something useful to say

...the financial officer who keeps worrying about the bank's subprime mortage exposure or the auto executive who questions the company's overinvestment in SUVs and trucks. Purge everyone who "brings you down," and you risk being very lonely or, what is worse, cut off from reality.

Here is Ehrenreich's chief caveat, if the only information you wish to take in is that which tells you everything is well with the world, you place yourself in "an artificial bubble of constant, uncritical reinforcement." Ehrenreich stresses:

The alternative to positive thinking is not, however, despair...The alternative is to...see things as uncolored as possible by our own feelings and fantasies, to understand that the world is full of both danger and opportunity.

Where were all the regulators who were supposed to be watching our financial system, sounding alarms prior to its collapse in 2008? Perhaps they were all right there, but were only willing to see unlimited credit, and the possibility of 40% annual gains. This economic depression we have gone through should by all rights have carried the message with it that the market does not possess an unlimited ability to self-correct, but both economists and politicians are still trying to bright-side us (and, no doubt, themselves). You might wish to give yourself a dose of Barbara Ehrenreich's sober thesis in a very amusing package as an antidote.

This was the first installment of a self-assigned reading project with the tentative title of The Tyranny of Positive Thinking (see my side bar) for which I also intend to read Adam Phillips's Going Sane and Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist. After this, I hope to provoke a cross-conversation among these books. Read along, if you care to join me.

Breakfast reading, superpowers, and other important matters...

It has been a while since I participated in BTT. Here's the meme posted today.

1. What’s your favorite time of day to read?

I'll read any time but end up reading most often before I go to sleep.

2. Do you read during breakfast? (Assuming you eat breakfast.)

I usually read blogs during breakfast but if I'm at the tail-end of a really good read, I'll sometimes try to finish it over breakfast.

3. What’s your favorite breakfast food? (Noting that breakfast foods can be eaten any time of day.)

Eggs, but I don't usually eat them for breakfast. My breakfast is usually some source of whole grain - toast, cereal, meusli, muffin, fruit - often berries, kiwi, melon, and some sort of fermented milk like yogurt or kefir.

4. How many hours a day would you say you read?

At least one. Between my commute and bed time reading about 1.5 is probably most common, and if you count reading on line and reading for work then probably 2. Although, there are some days like a not so busy weekend or vacation days where I might get in three to five. When I was still in classes it could be more like six or seven on the weekends.

5. Do you read more or less now than you did, say, 10 years ago?

I have always read a lot. I may have gotten in more reading before I was in a relationship, but I wasn't happier.

6. Do you consider yourself a speed reader?

No, although others seem to consider me one. My reading has slowed down with age, but I think I read more carefully and perceptively.

7. If you could have any superpower, what would it be?

Does this seem like a non-sequitur to anyone else? My cliched superpower wish would be flying or teleporting (it would really be cool to go to Paris for lunch and the great bookstores around the Odeon, see a play in London in the evening, and then sleep in my own bed in New York even if the tube were already closed!) , but if I couldn't have that, then I have always considered speed-reading a sort of superpower and I'd be happy with that.

8. Do you carry a book with you everywhere you go?

Yup.

9. What KIND of book?

Whatever I'm reading, unless it's very inconvenient (like my 1300 page neuroscience text book and even that I had to carry sometimes in order to get my assigned reading done).

10. How old were you when you got your first library card?

Probably around four - as soon as I could read.

11. What’s the oldest book you have in your collection? (Oldest physical copy? Longest in the collection? Oldest copyright?)

The oldest physical book and copyright is a French history of America published in 1817. The books I have owned the longest are probably my early childhood books like I am a Bunny, but those are all at my mom's. The one I have held most consecutively in my apartment is probably the Sherlock Holmes volume I got from my Aunt and Uncle when I was around twelve.

12. Do you read in bed?

Every day.

13. Do you write in your books?

I used to write in them a lot more. Now I usually use post-it tabs to mark a place and once I post on a book I removed them so that when I read the book again my conversation with it can change.

14. If you had one piece of advice to a new reader, what would it be?

Forget obligation, follow your pleasure in reading.

15. What question(s) have I NOT asked at BTT that you’d love me to ask? (Actually, leave the answer to this one in the comments on this post, huh? So I can find them when I need inspiration!

Are there any fictional characters whom you have emulated (or tried to)? Who and why?

Which non-series book would you most like to read the sequel to? Do you have any wishes for what might happen in it?

Have you ever fallen in love with a fictional character? Who and what about them did you love?

Have you ever used a book to instruct someone of something or is there anyone for whom you would like to do that? (I don't mean a text book for a class, but a work of fiction or non-fiction that would get a certain message across either through plot or character). What is the book and what do you wish to impart?

False fronts on depression-era Main Street (Books - As For Me and My House by Sinclair Ross)

Although Canadian author Sinclair Ross had to drop out of high school to work, he demonstrates a deep understanding of the human heart and writes in spare, unequivocal prose about life on the prairie during the depression in his first novel, As For Me and My House (1941). In this story of eroded communication between the Bentleys, a preacher and his wife, Ross's first person narrative takes the point of view of Mrs. Bentley through a diary she keeps in their twelfth year of a tense and childless marriage as they assume the parish of a dusty town called Horizon.

And as usual he's been drawing again. I turned over the top sheet, and sure enough on the back of it there was a little Main Street sketched. It's like all the rest, a single row of smug, false-fronted stores, a loiterer or two, in the distance the prairie again. And like all the rest there's something about it that hurts. False fronts ought to be laughed at, never understood or pitied. They're such outlandish things, the front of a store built up to look like a second storey. They ought always to be seen that way, pretentious, ridiculous, never as Philip sees them, stricken with a look of self-awareness and futility.

False fronts might, in fact, be considered the theme of this story. Philip is a passionate artist and non-believer who ends up hiding behind the front of the ministry in order to support himself and his wife. Mrs. Bentley is an accomplished pianist. I learned from reading a little about Keath Fraser's biography of Ross that he also hid behind a front, having been homosexual while growing up on the Canadian prairie in the 1920s. Neither of the Bentley's can talk to the other about the feelings of disappointment and entrapment they feel as sensitive souls who are unable to live from the heart.

Something has happened to his drawing this last year or two. There used to be feeling and humanity in it. It was warm and positive and forthright; but now everything is distorted, intensified, alive with thin, cold, bitter life. Yesterday he sketched a congregation as he sees it from the pulpit. Seven faces in the first row - ugly, wretched faces, big-mouthed, mean-eyed - alike yet each with a sharp, aggressive individuality - the caricature of a pew, and the likenesses of seven people.

You get the feeling from the sheer claustrophobia of their marriage that if either of these two were to give voice to their real feelings, a flood would be unleashed and there would be no stopping it. This diary records its unnamed narrator's growing awareness of how far off track their lives have veered. These two souls have so obliterated themselves, that our narrator doesn't even have a name. Ross's talent for writing about disappointment in small town life brings to mind Dawn Powell's terrific Come Back to Sorrento, though while in her work, you see the subdued sparkle that was the dream, in As For Me and My House you see mostly the cracked facade that cannot hide the the loss. The writing is beautiful and the story not only heart-rending but insightful. Great recommendation, Thomas, thanks!

Dickens Month II - In which the characters, rich and poor alike, attempt to advance themselves (Books - Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens)

250 pages into Our Mutual Friend and Charles Dickens Month, it has struck me that Dickens is something of a naturalist - sketching studies of his characters that are rich enough in detail so that the reader may see them and that always refer to their habitat.

Reginald Wilfer is a name with rather a grand sound, suggesting on first acquaintance brasses in country churches, scrolls in stained-glass windows, and generally the De Wilfers who came over with the Conqueror...But, the Reginald Wilfer family were of such commonplace extraction and pursuits that their forefathers had for generations modestly subsisted on the Docks, the Excise Office, and the Custom House, and the existing R. Wilfer was a poor clerk. So poor a clerk, though having a limited salary and an unlimited family, that he had never yet attained the modest object of his ambition: which was to wear a complete new suit of clothes, hat and boots included, at one time. His black hat was brown before he could afford a coat, his pantaloons were white at the seams and knees before he could buy a pair of boots, his boots had worn out before he could treat himself to new pantaloons, and, by the time he worked round to the hat again, that shining modern article roofed-in an ancient ruin of various periods.

or

Assuredly, this stall of Silas Wegg's was the hardest little stall of all the sterile little stalls in London. It gave you the face-ache to look at his apples, the stomach-ache to look at his oranges, the tooth-ache to look at his nuts. Of the latter commodity he had always a grim little heap, on which lay a little wooden measure which had no discernible inside, and was considered to represent the penn'orth appointed by Magna Charta. Whether from too much east wind or no - it was an easterly corner - the stall, the stock, and the keeper, were all as dry as the Desert. Wegg was a knotty man, and close-grained, with a face carved out of a very hard material, that had just as much play of expression as a watchman's rattle. When he laughed, certain jerks occurred in it, and the rabble sprung. Sooth to say, he was so wooden a man that he seemed to have taken his wooden leg naturally, and rather suggested to the fanciful observer, that he might be expected - if his development received no untimely check - to be completely set up with a pair of wooden legs in about six months.

His most juicily funny chronicles are these creatures' attempts at advancement - a key theme in this novel. This is not terribly surprising, as 1865, the year of publication, came hot on the tail of another Charles's book indexing curious species and describing their advancement - Darwin's The Origin of the Species. Many of Dickens's characters are stuck at a particular rung due to circumstances.

"There am I, continuing with father and holding to father loves me and I love father. I can't so much as read a book, because if I had learned, father would have thought I was deserting him, and I should have lost my influence. I have not the influence I want to have, I cannot stop some dreadful things I try to stop, but I go on in the hope and trust that the time will come. In the meanwhile I know that I am in some things a stay to father, and that if I was not faithful to him he would - in revenge-like, or in disappointment, or both - go wild and bad."

So says a character sure to be one of Dickens classic heroines - Lizzy Hexam. While Silas Wegg, our wooden-legged salesman appears to have sold off his body in advance of his death in order to profit from it.

"I have a prospect of getting on in life and elevating myself by my own independent exertions," says Wegg, feelingly, "and I shouldn't like - I tell you openly I should not like - under such circumstances, to be what I may call dispersed, a part of me here, and a part of me there, but should wish to collect myself. like a genteel person."

Wegg recently took a job reading aloud to Mr. and Mrs. Boffins, a poor but loyal couple who were formerly foreman and caretaker for Harmon - the wealthy dust magnate - but are now his heirs as his son has disappeared. Mrs. Boffin dresses herself in gaudy finery to advance her lot. Mr. Boffin has decided he would benefit from some education and has engaged Wegg to read him The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. While in possession of a fortune from the inheritance, the Boffins offer a generous reward for the murderer of their former boss's son, take in the Wilfer's daughter in order to introduce her to society, and take on a secretary to help them conduct their business. Little do they know that their secretary is not who he has said he is.

What encourages the acidity of Dickens's satire most is the social climbing indulged in by people already in possession of wealth and position but sure, somehow, that if they could occupy the next highest rung of the ladder, their happiness would be assured. It is not class that separates the climber in Our Mutual Friend from those who are aspirational. The destitute, the genteel poor, the lawyer, and the wealthy business owner all seem equally disposed to advance themselves.

Here is my earlier post on Our Mutual Friend.

Bookish things...

2012 has begun as a less than typical reading year in that I am participating in multiple challenges which involve long books. The result has been that I have finished just one book. So I thought I would do more of a Salon-like post, so I can touch on the many books I have in-progress.

Above and to the left is the main culprit, Our Mutual Friend. In order to keep pace so that I might post the last of five weekly posts on Dickens's birthday, February 7, I must read 200 pages per week. That's not a hardship as the book is delightful, but it is just enough to keep me from finishing anything else on the longer side. For that reason, I found I had abandoned Geert Mak's travelogue/history of post-war Europe In Europe, despite finding it fascinating and beautifully written in favor of...

A favorite of Thomas's, I decided to give As for Me and My House, a Canadian classic of life in poverty on the prairie by Sinclair Ross, a go. It is straightfoward, precise, and rich in human content while utterly bleak in setting. I dont' know yet whether it is about succumbing to the destitution or rising above it.

Friends also gave me a belated birthday present last night in the form of Nigel Slater's The Kitchen Diaries, with their notes scrawled next to certain recipes, e.g., this is really good! The many recipes are in the form of a food "diary," in that they are organized by time of year. The recipes look, for the most part, fairly simple and the photographs enticing. I can't wait to try one.


I was reminded of a reading and writing project that I had collected the books for and have been meaning to start for some time by Bookslut. It is loosely about visions of happiness and sanity and how poorly defined these are next to visions of misery and illness. It involves, at this point, the three books pictured above. Adam Phillips book Going Sane is written from the perspective of a psychoanalyst whose basic premise appears to be that the meaning of sanity is so much less fully characterized than the meaning of mental illness. The prolific Barbara Ehrenreich debunks America's tendency towards mandatory cheerfulness in Bright-Sided, something I have referred to as the tyranny of positive thinking. (Actually, I have discovered in my reading that this is not my formulation at all, I must have picked up on it). It is written, at least in part, out of her experience of breast cancer and being subjected to such tyranny. One of the best pieces I have read on this subject was in an unabashed and eloquent essay by Robert F. Murphy - The Damaged Self - about becoming quadrapelegic due to a spinal cord tumor. He writes of its impact on his sense of self, the fatalism and anger he experienced:

They daily suffer snub, avoidance, patronization, and occasionally outright cruelty...but whatever the source of grievance, the disabled have limited ways of showing it...Quadriplegics cannot stalk offin high (or low) dudgeon, nor can they even use body language. To make matters worse, as the price for normal relations, they must comfort others about their condition. They cannot show fear, sorrow, depression, sexuality, or anger for this disturbs the able-bodied. The unsound of limb are permitted only to laugh.

The last of the three books is Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist, whose purpose seems to be (having not yet read the book) to counter what is seen as a bias intellectualism has toward pessimism. He argues that food, income, and lifespan are increasing while child mortality and violence are decreasing and, as a result, people's lives are more prosperous and, therefore, better. I'm not sure whether I will buy the prosperous = happy implication I'm picking up in my as yet cursory look at this book, but it's the kind of argument that gets my dander up. Ridley is a smart writer so I'm curious to have my own biases put to the test. I think this trio will make for some interesting cross-commentary. I have no doubt that Steven Pinker's latest book could make an interesting fourth, but its focus on violence is a bit more circumscribed than I'm looking for. I'd appreciate any other suggestions you good readers might have for books specifically on happiness, optimism, and sanity that might add something to the discussion.

Charles Dickens Month I - In which we are introduced to key players (Books - Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens)

This is the first of my five January posts on Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, which I began reading just yesterday in this month preceding his 200th birthday. I have barely scratched the surface at about 50 pages, but at this point Dickens is just introducing us to the key players and plot set-up, so that's not really a problem. Three households figure here. One is the Hexams. They live in poverty and fetch dead bodies from the Thames. The Veneerings are nouveau riche and one of their social circle, Mortimer Lightwood, is a solicitor in the High Court of Chancery and executor of the will of a man who made a fortune as a Dust Contractor, that is to say, he made his money by employing others to dispose of garbage. The will benefits a John Harmon, but includes a provision that he must marry a young woman named Bella Wilfer. Harmon turns out to be a body recently fetched from the Thames by the Hexams. The third household, is that of Bella Wilfer, her father (who was a clerk for the Dust Contractor), her mother, and sister. They are also poor, but a more genteel variety of poor than the Hexams. The Wilfers rent a room to a shady gentleman by the name of John Rokesmith.

Since we're still early days in terms of plot, I will make three observations. One is that the key players here all make their livelihood off human waste - whether it is dust or bodies. Dickens is definitely a chronicler of the bleak, but here he seems to be at his bleakest. I have always loved the way Dickens constructs character. In his first description of the Hexams - father and daughter - before we even know their names, what we learn is what they do not possess and who they are not. If that isn't a depiction of abject poverty, what is?

He had no net, hook, or line, and could not be a fisherman; his boat had no cushion for a sitter, no paint, no inscription, no appliance beyond a rusty boathood and a coil of rope, and he could not be a waterman; his boat was too crazy and too small to take in cargo for delivery, and he could not be a lighterman or river-carrier; there was no clue to what he looked for, but he looked for something, with a most intent and searching gaze.

That is as opposed to the Veneerings who are:

...bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new aurter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new. All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, they carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new, they were as newly married as was lawfully compatible with their having a bran-new baby, and if they had set up a great-grandfather, he would have come home in matting from the Pantechnicon, without a scratch upon him, French polished to the crown of his head.

The most intriguing character so far is the young son of the Hexams who, although he is poor, goes to school.

There was a curious mixture in the boy, of uncompleed savagery, and uncompleted civilization. His voice was hoarse and coarse, and his face was coarse, and his stunted figure was coarse; but he was cleaner than other boys of his type; and his writing though large and round, was good; and he glanced at the backs of the books, with an awakened curiosity that went below the binding. No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf; like one who cannot.

The contradictory mixture makes me curious of and hopeful for the role the boy might play in the burgeoning mystery that is taking shape.

Charles Dickens Month, in which I finally tackle The Pickwick Papers, um, correction Our Mutual Friend

Thomas led me to Amanda's Charles Dickens Month, which excited me because I realized I could indulge in triple action by reading either a copy of The Pickwick Papers or Our Mutual Friend (but not both) that have been festering on my TBR pile: participating in Charles Dickens Month, the Tea & Books Reading Challenge as they are both biggies, and stay true to the TBR Double Dare all at the same time! Rock on.

Update: Let's make that, Our Mutual Friend.

Art as access to the authentic experience (Books - Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner)

I have finished my first read of 2012 Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner, a suggestion of Brad Listi's and a gift from my in-laws - thanks! This smart, funny, occasionally infuriating novel is about a young American poet's experience of alienation and the art he makes of his experience while on a fellowship in Spain.

I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music "changed their life," especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change. Although I claimed to be a poet, although my supposed talent as a writer had earned me my fellowship in Spain, I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of the absence of profundity.

Adam, our protagonist, sees a man in the Prado weep profusely before a painting. He and the museum's guards follow him through the museum as though he has committed some crime. Adam doubts the man's authenticity utterly, as he seems to doubt the sincerity of almost any human gesture he meets. He has the most profound case of existential angst I have ever seen. Adam seems worried about the veracity of, well, everything. Not least among these is the words he commits to paper. His solution is to compose poems via random chance (of course, this is an accepted method of composition explored by respected writers, composers, painters, choreographers...) for, he claims, poems have no meaning (he is not the first to do this either). He suspects every word spoken to him. Every laugh someone makes in the room must be about him. He seems to doubt even the authenticity of his own behavior. This may have something to do with being a wordsmith and being involved in a culture where he doesn't know the language. It also, no doubt, has something to do with the copious amount of drugs he takes. His solution is to compose most of his behavior for effect. He claims to be conducting an experiment of sorts, an experiment in which he and the people he encounters are the lab rats.

...Teresa was approaching, the ember of her cigarette describing little circles as she walked, the ice audible in her glass as she drew nearer, and I realized with some anxiety that she would expect me to be upset, very moved, that I needed to be so in order to justify my abrupt departure from the others. I turned back toward the fence, licked the tips of my fingers, and rubbed the spit under my eyes to make it look like I'd been crying, repeating this until I felt there would be enough moisture to catch a little light or at least make my face damp to the touch.

Adam may think he is researching experience, but he is really distancing himself chemically and rhetorically out of panic from every touch of experience offered to him. He is the most fantastic liar - telling some incredible whoppers that made this reader both laugh and cringe with embarrassment. Yet, the way Lerner makes interchangeable the language that is Adam's tool of composition and the behavior via which we communicate experience to ourself is the crux of his astute novel and the source of its entertainment.

That I smoked hash with tobacco was critical during this phase of my project, although I was resolved never to smoke a cigarette again after leaving Spain, and so smoked with particular abandon, critical because the cigarette or spliff was an indispensable technology, a substitute for speech in social situations, a way to occupy the mouth and hands when alone, a deep breathing technique that rendered exhalation material, a way to measure and/or pass the time. More important than the easily satisfiable addiction, what the little cylinders provided me was a prefabricated motivation and transition, a way to approach or depart from a group of people or a topic, enter or exit a room, conjoin or punctuate a sentence. The hardest part of quitting would be the loss of narrative function; it would be like removing telephones or newspapers from the movies of Hollywood's Golden Age; there would be no possible link between scenes, no way to circulate information or close distance...

Lerner smartly places Adam in a context of people who seem to inhabit a realer life than he. The social circles he travel in seem suffused with emotional sincerity (possibly true or possibly a function of the way we interpret behavior when we aren't fluent in a language). The political climate Adam inhabits is that of the tragic bombing on Madrid's Atocha Station and Spain's first election post 9/11, a time during which much of Western Europe assumed a superiority to America. I remember traveling to Holland the week after 9/11 and while I was not in favor of almost anything the Bush administration did, I found the tone of the anti-Americanism that I encountered imbued with a sort of punishing moralism. It was full of the accusation that because of my nationality, the way I lived lacked seriousness and authenticity. Juxtaposing Adam against these backdrops of, shall we say, social and political hyper-reality, depicted the contrast of his existential and compositional worries in bold relief.

Lerner indulged in some moments of arty self-consciousness that could almost be excused by the narrator himself being a poet but not quite:

It was worse than having a sinking feeilng: I was a sinking feeling, an unplayable adagio for strings...

There was also a long disquisition on the poems of John Ashbery that, however brilliant (truly), seemed out of place. But despite these moments and despite despising Adam for his jaw-dropping lies and the way he uses other human beings, I became caught up in his story as he wrote his poems and felt the events of his life. I became hopeful that he would unravel the tangle of his lies and win his battle for authenticity by allowing himself to be touched. This made Leaving the Atocha Station a clever, creative, and satisfying read.

2011 - the year that was... (A meme)

Happy 2012. I got this meme from Katherine, who, she tells us, is always walking into things, well into bookstores anyway.

1. What did you do in 2011 that you’d never done before?

Published an article in a science journal.

2. Did you keep your new years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
To be honest, I don't remember if I made any. I'm lucky that I can remember the ones I made yesterday, which will, no doubt, be forgotten tomorrow. Did I want to drink more water?

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Not immediate family but a friend and former student.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
An old friend's father.

5. What countries did you visit?
England and France.

6. What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?
More perseverance, more courage, more opportunities to play.

7. What dates from 2011 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
March 27 - the day I got married.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Tangibly, I passed my oral comprehensive exams and advanced in my doctoral program.

9. What was your biggest failure?
The number of explanations I made was greater than the number of questions I asked.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Not in any significant way, though I took a splendid fall last Spring, but several family members were not as fortunate as I in this department.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
Books, theatre tickets, and a great bottle of red wine at dinner on the first night of our honeymoon.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
New York's Governor Cuomo's.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

Where shall I begin? Actually, I'll wait until I've achieved perfection before doling out demerits.

14. Where did most of your money go?
My honeymoon trip and repairs on the brickwork and roof of my home.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Returning to France.

16. What song will always remind you of 2011?
See number 38.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

a) happier or sadder?

b) thinner or fatter?
c) richer or poorer?


18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Engaged, seen friends, been more accepting of myself.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Get anxious.

20. How did you spend Christmas?
On the road, then at the in-laws making dinner and opening presents with the kiddies.

21. Did you fall in love in 2011?
Every day.

22. How many one-night stands?
None, thanks for asking.

23. What was your favourite TV program?

Madmen, although we don't actual have television, we watch on Netflix,

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
Actually, yes, and it was an achievement. I finally blamed someone I had avoided holding responsible for something for years. Credit where credit is due.

25. What was the best book you read?
See this for fiction and this for non-fiction.

26. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Glyndebourne's new production of Die Meistersinger was pretty damn good.

27. What did you want and get?
Legal gay marriage in New York State.

28. What did you want and not get?
The same 1,000+ benefits that the federal government ties to that non-religious state contract and that straight people receive.

29. What was your favourite film of this year?
I saw few recent films but favorites I viewed last year were:
Pina (2011)
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (2009)
Tie Me Up Tie Me Down (1990)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy (2009 - Swedish Version)
Please Give (2010)
The Best of Youth (2003)

30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I worked - didn't celebrate until the weekend, then we went to the theatre and dinner. 49.

31.What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Equal treatment under the law.

32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2011?
You're assuming I had one. I manage to get dressed every day, but I'm not sure I would call that a fashion concept.

33. What kept you sane?
Did something keep me sane?

34. What political issue stirred you the most?
The opposition toward a step toward healthcare reform supported by those who imagine that their ideology is more important than reform of a very basic service more and more of us need at some time in our lives.

35. Whom did you miss?
My dad. My grandparents.

36. Who was the best new person you met?
Although most of my friends and work acquaintances remained steady, I met a couple of patients who were absolutely remarkable people.

37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011:
It's barely over, I doubt I've mined all the wisdom that can be gained from 2011 in the last 11 hours, especially considering the party we hosted until 3:45 am.

38. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
(or last night at any rate, courtesy of Noel Coward)

Quite for no reason
I'm here for the Season
And high as a kite,
Living in error
With Maud at Cap Ferrat
Which couldn't be right.
Everyone's here and frightfully gay,
Nobody cares what people say,
Though the Riviera
Seems really much queerer
Than Rome at it's height,
Yesterday night-

I went to a marvelous party
With Nounou and Nada and Nell,
It was in the fresh air
And we went as we were
And we stayed as we were
Which was Hell.
Poor Grace started singing at midnight
And didn't stop singing till four;
We knew the excitement was bound to begin
When Laura got blind on Dubonnet and gin
And scratched her veneer with a Cartier pin,
I couldn't have liked it more.

I went to a marvelous party,
I must say the fun was intense,
We all had to do
What the people we knew
Would be doing a hundred years hence.
Dear Cecil arrived wearing armour,
Some shells and a black feather boa,
Poor Millicent wore a surrealist comb
Made of bits of mosaic from St. Peter's in Rome,
But the weight was so great that she had to go home,
I couldn't have liked it more.

People's behaviour
Away from Belgravia
Would make you aghast,
So much variety
Watching society
Scampering past,
If you have any mind at all
Gibbon's divine Decline and Fall
Seems pretty flimsy,
No more than a whimsy,
By way of contrast
On Saturday last-

I went to a marvelous party,
We didn't start dinner till ten
And young Bobbie Carr
Did a stunt at the bar
With a lot of extraordinary men;
Dear Baba arrived with a turtle
Which shattered us all to the core,
The Grand Duke was dancing a foxtrot with me
When suddenly Cyril screamed "Fiddledidee"
And ripped off his trousers and jumped in the sea,
I couldn't have liked it more.

I went to a marvelous party,
Elise made an entrance with May
You'd never have guessed
From her fisherman's vest
That her bust had been whittled away.
Poor Lulu got fried on Chianti
And talked about esprit de corps.
Maurice made a couple of passes at Gus
And Freddie, who hates any kind of a fuss,
Did half the Big Apple and twisted his truss,
I couldn't have liked it more.

I went to a marvellous party.
We played the most wonderful game,
Maureen disappeared
And came back in a beard
And we all had to guess at her name!
We talked about growing old gracefully
And Elsie who's seventy-four
Said, "A, it's a question of being sincere,
And B, if you're supple you've nothing to fear."
Then she swung upside down from a glass chandelier,
I couldn't have liked it more.

39. So in as few words as possible, how would you sum up your year?
I think that song about sums it up. 2011 was not without its challenges, but it was a fortunate year for me, although I know that was not true for everyone.

My best fiction reads of 2011

Of the 40-odd works of fiction I read in 2011 I'm going to name some favorites. I'm still working on Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station, we'll see if I have time to finish it and write about it. This year, I won't break this group into further sub-genres as the representation of YA fantasy, classic literature, or short works are not significant enough. The original reviews are linked to each title, with an excerpt below. My favorite novels this past year were:

The Story of the Night - Colm Toibin
Colm Toibin's 1996 The Story of the Night is a multi-strand coming-of-age novel. In it, Richard, a young gay man in 1980s Buenos Aires comes into himself, learning to love and shedding his naivete so as to operate successfully in the changing political landscape of his country. Argentina tries to grows up to become a playing partner in the international political and economic community. Gay life in Western culture comes out of the closet - in some ways by dint of political determination and to some degree it is forced out by illness. Toibin's three stories meet in the person of Richard. The Story of the Night is compulsively readable, not because the political story is an entertaining thriller, as the blurbs claim. I find Toibin's skill more subtle (or his talent more blatant) in that he takes a rich intellectual understanding of the politic landscape and writes plot of political complexity, keeping its events clear as well as tension-filled. At the same time, he writes a gay love story straight from the heart, that is uncliched, full of character-driven details.

Reading in the Dark - Seamus Deane
Deane renders the indignation of a child who knows he is excluded from the mysteries of adulthood with great conviction. In the case of this novel, these are not just the work-a-day mysteries of sexual relations or violence considered too great for a child's understanding. Our first-person narrator is aware of deep secrets that rule the internecine feuds within his family, secrets of informing and murder that haunt his parents' every waking action. They flavor his life like a strong spice one can taste in every bite of a stew and yet not know what it is. He learns the full story in dribs and drabs, sometimes from unknowing truth-tellers. Deane's talent, is withholding it from his reader as well in such a fashion that the not unfamiliar story of an Irish childhood becomes riddled with suspense, and his coming of age filled with the regret that accompanies the realization that being excluded from this knowledge is no less tormenting than possessing it... Some of his paragraphs could be sung, so beautiful are the processions of simple words that accomplish his rich and deeply-felt descriptions. This memoir-like novel is tinged with deep sadness, but the way Deane renders his story is shear pleasure.

A Long Long Way - Sebastian Barry
What Barry makes most plain in this beautiful book is the confusion and the utter waste of war, even in the case of a noble cause. It ruins the men (and now women) who fight it, the earth under them, the families they left behind. It ruins lives not even totally formed yet. One of its great tragedies, this book tells us, is that it ruins boys before they ever grow up enough to know their own minds.

To the End of the Land - David Grossman
When Ora's son Ofer decides to stay beyond his required military service in the Israeli army to serve in an important military mission rather than hike with her in the Galilee, Ora feels hurt and deserted. She commandeers Avram, her husband's best friend and her old love, who has been living on the fringes since his capture and torture in the Yom Kippur War, to hike with her in a desperate act of avoidance. If she is not there to receive the news that Ofer has been killed, she reasons, he is not dead. She can indefinitely keep him alive by telling the stories of Ofer, his brother Adam, his father Ilan, and herself, to Avram. This is story telling as an act of defense. People approached with love are bottomless, says David Grossman's powerful new novel, no matter how much you know, there is still more.

Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Hardy's last and greatest novel (I think) tells us that people beg for conventions to resolve paradoxes inherent to human nature. They substitute them for deep and independent thinking because they find it so hard to live in the presence of more than one truth. Hardy is not just talking about the uneducated worker, but also of scholars and clergy - the learned men of his time. And when a few enlightened souls discover that they can have richer, happier lives by refusing to substitute convention for lives of courageous independence, those who crave the comforts of convention make sure that they're miserable for trying to do so.

A Change of Climate - Hilary Mantel
Kit... lives in a world in which people are divided into good souls and sad cases. The strength of Hilary Mantel's 1994 novel is that she is not one of the people to so divide the world. This novel is political and domestic, it is ruthless and tender, but it is never preachy. It is comfortable with its contradictions.

Angel - Elizabeth Taylor
Angel is a brilliant study in self-deception. It is wickedly satiric, and a wonderful psychological study of someone who escapes from the pain of the world with fantasy so successfully that she sees no reason to ever leave her hiding place. On the flip-side, however, Angel is also what happens when education amounts to nothing more than learning the minimal skills necessary to make one's living, rather than opening up the student to the possibilities the world has to offer. The adults in Angel's world were all bashed down to size by their circumstances, so they think it practical to curtail their children's dreams to protect them from disappointment...

The Road - Cormac McCarthy
The father and son who are the book's main characters live isolated in a cold, damp scab of a world where there is little sustenance, the other beings are few and impossible to predict, but usually violent, and where the only rule is to survive. But, my gosh, the writing is enveloping to the point of blotting almost all else out, the love between the two characters is deeply moving, and the impression this novel left is indelible.


I don't really see a need to declare a solitary "winner" among this group. The Road and To the End of the Land perhaps stand out among these strong, rich, and humane novels for their sheer indelibility. Looking back on these eight novels, I really had a year of robust and fulfilling reading! The bar is set high for 2012. May you all have a rich and involving year in reading and otherwise.

BIG books in 2012 - (The Tea & Books Reading Challenge)

For Birgit (and her hero C.S. Lewis) size matters, which is why she has posed the Tea & Books Reading Challenge, which demands that we tackle 2 or more books that are 700 pages in length or greater. I am joining at the Berry Tea Devotee level, meaning I intend to complete 4 of these books before Dec. 31 2012. Given that my TBR pile already has five on these monsters, I don't even have to abandon C.B.'s Double-Dare to do it. I thought I had even more, but two of the long books I wanted to tackle this year were both in the neighborhood of 680 pages. As I will be writing my dissertation this year, reading a few books this length will remind me how short the piece of writing I'm producing actually is. I plan to choose from the tomes below:

Gustav Mahler - Jens Malte Fischer

1Q84 - Haruki Murakami

In Europe - Geert Mak

A People's Tragedy - Orlando Figes

and if I can manage it, Simon Callow's massive two-volume biography of Orson Welles The Road to Xanadu and Hello Americans that Sheila gave me about two years ago. It's not the length that intimidates me, it's Callows obsessional enthusiasm expressed in page-long run-on paragraphs with tiny little margins.

and...evidently, I have added Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend.

My best non-fiction reads of 2011

Now it is time for my annual best reads lists of 2011. I will choose from just two categories this year - fiction and non-fiction, beginning here with non-fiction. I read 25 works of non-fiction including the genres of memoir, science, and history/politics. I won't count re-reads, such as two works of Joan Didion's I revisited, as they were re-read because they are favorites. The original reviews are linked to each title, although I excerpt them below. The most memorable given these criteria were:

Survival in Auschwitz - Primo Levi
In 1943 Italian chemist Primo Levi, a Jew, was captured by the Fascist Militia and eventually transported to Auschwitz in 1944, where he somehow survived until the end of World War II. His Survival in Auschwitz, written just a year later, is, on its surface, a remarkably dispassionate document. It records the conditions under which he and his fellow inmates lived to remind the German people, he wrote in his first preface to the book, what they had done, and it is a portrait of people in extremis - what occupies their thoughts, their code of behavior, how they survive, and how they die. To accomplish this he circumscribes the scope of his job (like any good artist)...The way Levi sets his limits allows him to think enough to engage in the act of writing and permits us the possibility of reading it without simply contemplating a void of infinite horror.

The Mind's Eye - Oliver Sacks
Each chapter in this latest collection focuses on a person whose visual system is somehow compromised or enhanced. ..The characters of The Mind's Eye include a pianist who loses the ability to read music, a mystery writer who looses the ability to read words (but not to write them), and several people who are selectively blind for faces but not necessarily for other classes of objects...Whether exploring case studies, the evolution of neuroscience, or more recent avances, Sacks's writing is probing, accessible, and humane in The Mind's Eye.

The Beak of the Finch - Jonathan Weiner
...a rich book detailing the work that evolutionary biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant have done on the Galapagos Islands. They have observed Darwin's theory of natural selection play out again and again and, in some cases, even observed how new species evolve, by watching the islands' famous finches...Aside from the pleasure of his lucid writing, Weiner elucidates the development of Darwin's own thinking as well as integrating his original work with that of contemporary scientists observing the forces of evolution in action. This book makes plain the great theory's relevance to the natural world in which we live and also reveals the unbelievable drudgery of painstaking observational field work.

The Emperor - Ryszard Kapuscinski
The Emperor (1978) was Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski's first book. It is a distinctive blend of political writing, razor sharp psychological portraiture via oral history, and prose that achieves lyricism. It's three brief sections describe the absurd class structure of Ethiopia during the reign of Haile Selassie, Emperor from the 1930s to the 1970s, the foment of rebellion against it, and its eventual downfall, not exactly the expected forum for poetical insight.

The Memory Chalet - Tony Judt
While reading this as the literate reflection of a thinker about history, politics, and class I could not help also seeing it as a metaphor for a free thinker subjected to the tyranny of physical paralysis. I tore through the 200-plus pages of these succinct, erudite and moving essays. I cannot advocate strongly enough for The Memory Chalet as a rich reading experience


These five books were each memorable for their skill at immersing the reader in a world not our own. Sometimes the focus was more on imparting information and other times evoking experience but Tony Judt's memoir The Memory Chalet was remarkable for the way it integrated these two functions completely while making the reading of the prose urgent. It is a stand-out among all the books I read this year.

Living in the World but in Exile from Almost Everyplace (Books - Open City by Teju Cole)

Teju Cole's Open City received strong responses from crack critics and fellow bloggers and made a number of Top 10 fiction lists for the year, persuading me to check it out. In it Julius, a Nigerian immigrant to America who is completing his final year of psychiatry residency at Columbia, walks the streets of New York City. Although the book is short, it does not invite quick reading. The emphasis is not on any sort of plot, but the novel seethes with ideas and scenes of humanity, otherworldly fantasy, and terrific tension.

The form of Open City is a flaneur's diary, only in the case of Julius, his strolls are not idle. He seems to be running from something. Coles's evocation of the complexity and aggression of the city strongly evoked Dostoevsky, but his stream-of-consciousness prose reminded me most of Virginia Woolf as she portrays the inner journey of Clarissa Dalloway by allowing us to trail her as she runs errands in preparation for her dinner party. Cole's novel follows Julius's movements while revealing his experience, mostly related to identity, as it intersects with geography, politics, and culture. The rhythm of Julius's movement is more desultory than Clarissa's and his task less directed. Julius collects information and regales us with his knowledge - about early Dutch settlers treatment of Native Americans, the music of Gustav Mahler, the photography Martin Munkacsi. The writing lingers in this empirical data but knowledge is not necessarily connection, and Julius's experience is one of exile. This, as I read it, was the theme of Open City - not merely exile from one's place of birth, true for both Julius and for Cole - but also the sense of exile experienced by groups which society has decided to set apart by creating different expectations of them. Cole discusses the experiences of blacks in America, Muslims in America and northern Europe, jews, Palestinians, and gay people, and Cole provokes the reader's expectations of what qualities their identities should confer upon his characters, sometimes by meeting typical s expectations of them and at other times by defeating them. If you're black you're supposed to be a thug, not a doctor, certainly not a Mahler lover. If you are gay, you're supposed to be a club boy, not an octogenarian Asian physician...and blacks are all brothers to each other - aren't they?

At the almost empty subway station, there was a family of out-of-towners waiting for the train. A girl of thirteen sat on the bench next to me. Her ten-year-old brother came to join her. They were out of earshot of their parents who, save one or two unconcerned glances in our direction, were absorbed in their own conversation. Her mister, she said, turning to me, wassup? She made signs with her fingers and, with her brother, started laughing. The little boy wore an imitation Chinese peasant's hat. They had been mimicking slanted eyes and exaggerated bows before they came to where I was. They now both turned to me. Are you a gangster, mister? Are you a gangster? They both flashed gang signs, or their idea of gang signs. I looked at them. It was midnight, and I didn't feel like giving public lectures. He's black, said the girl but he's not dressed like a gangster. I bet he's a gangster, her brother said. I bet he is. Hey mister, are you a gangster?

And then, only pages later...

Not good, not good at all, you know, the way you came into my car without saying hello, that was bad. Hey, I'm African just like you, why you do this? He kept me in his sights in the mirror. I was confused, I said, I'm so sorry about it, my mind was elsewhere, don't be offended, ehn, my brother, how are you doing? He said nothing and faced the road. I wasn't sorry at all. I was in no mood for people who tried to lay claims on me...

Initially, I was unsure as to whether I was reading a fictionalized pastiche of Teju Cole's life and little mini-lectures on every magazine article or museum exhibit he was obsessed with at the moment of writing it, or whether I was reading fiction. I came to understand this novel as fiction and then admire its artistry, even if its origins are partly autobiographical, because Cole's writing makes it clear that he has greater insight into Julius than Julius does himself, because his walks accumulate meaning that is greater than the sum of the individual episodes, and because my very confusion between writer and narrator became obvious in time as the book's artifice.

Despite the largely meditative tone, there were some striking moments, including Julius's encounters with his memorably written friend and mentor, Dr. Saito, and a particularly dramatic scene during which Julius, trying to exit Carnegie Hall, gets locked out on the roof. Here, he is suspended between the heavens he can see on that cold clear night from the roof, and the wailing sirens on the street he may fall on to, the mundanity of practical life and the ephemera of Mahler's Ninth Symphony, here, he tells us, he faced a "solitude of rare purity," an arresting evocation of of the complex state we come to recognize as Julius's.

In a visit Julius makes to Brussels, we learn that...

...there had been no firebombing of Bruges, or Ghent, or Brussels. Surrender, of course, played a role in this form of survival, as did negotiation with invading powers. Had Brussels's rulers not opted to declare it an open city and thereby exempt it from bombardment during the Second World War, it might have been reduced to rubble. It might have been another Dresden. As it was, it had remained a vision of the medieval and baroque periods, a vista interrupted only by the architectural monstrosities erected all over town by Leopold II in the late nineteenth century.

During my visit, the mild winter weather and the old stones lay a melancholy siege on the city. It was, in some ways, like a city in waiting...

Julius may seek freedom from burdensome ties in the comfort of information, however, he too seems to live his life in waiting. Contemporary global culture may offer the potential for previously unseen interactions and opportunities but it confers upon modern life almost unfathomable complexity. Coles's novel is a thoughtful meditation on a paradoxical sense of exile that arises in a thoughtful modern man living in just such a world - our world.

Taking on the Double-Dare

Hope you have had a happy holiday - whatever you like celebrating - christmas, chanukah, kwanza, the winter solstice. Now enough singing songs, snacking, toasts, and boardgames, let's get down to the business of reading. C.B. has double-dared us to read only from the TBR pile from December 31, 2011 until April 1, 2012 and I am taking him up on it. See that picture in the challenge icon? That gets pretty close to my TBR stacks and the holidays have only added to it, with enticing copies of Leaving the Atocha Station, and the recent biographies of Catherine The Great and Gustav Mahler courtesy of my in-laws. Although C.B. has not sworn us to not purchasing new books in that time frame, I am even thinking of trying to do that (ha, ha, who are you kidding?). If you care to join us, click on the words double-dared in the third sentence to link to C.B.'s challenge.

2011 - A little end of the year accounting...

In preparation for my soon-to-come best-of lists, I always like to do a little end of the year accounting. I know some people find this ludicrous but I love looking back on the year and categorizing what I have read. I have been aiming for an average of one book per week, which has been a stretch in the past three years with my class reading requirements, however this fall I no longer had classes. The result was that I was able to finish a few more books. Even though I plan to read several more books this year, lets see how the numbers look so far.

2011
Total books read so far: 65

fiction: 40

written in the last 11 years: 27
written in the 20th century: 12
written prior to the 20th century: 1
graphic novels: 1
fantasy/sci fi: 3
written for young readers: 2

non-fiction:25

essays (misc): 2
biography: 2
memoir: 7
history/politics: 8
science/psychology: 11

written by women/men: 24/41
written in English/read in translation: 57/8

Not a bad year so far.

A monument to hope in the midst of the apocalypse (Books - The Road by Cormac McCarthy)

It took me two years to work up to reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road after a friend recommended it. I just wasn't craving post-apocalyptic winter. The anticipatory cloud lifted one day and I no longer felt that I would not be able to appreciate the writing or story for the setting. This little personal anecdote befits the book, having now read it, as it is about our worst fears realized. The father and son who are the book's main characters live isolated in a cold, damp scab of a world where there is little sustenance, the other beings are few and impossible to predict, but usually violent, and where the only rule is to survive. But, my gosh, the writing is enveloping to the point of blotting almost all else out, the love between the two characters is deeply moving, and the impression this novel left is indelible.

I have read McCarthy's The Crossing and was nonplussed with how he could mix old testament gravitas,Western American grit, and deep, elemental emotion. Here, he one-ups even that one experience of his work I have had, by adding economy. This is not because being spare is inherently better writing, but rather because it suits the scarcity of his bleak imagined universe.

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one that what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child had led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared in the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.

In this opening paragraph McCarthy uses four of the five senses. The word 'glaucoma' is employed as a simile for the experience of a character we haven't even met - creating a striking impression of impending death and darkness. Sentences later he adds 'eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders.' Later McCarthy adds 'a blackness to hurt your ears with listening,' and the descriptors 'impenetrable,' and 'autistic' to evoke the characters' experience of the darkness of this world. Before we have met this character, we learn of what he dreamt. I dread reading dreams in most novels because they are generally so telegraphic about what the author would like them to symbolize instead of, as McCarthy does here, conveying character, circumstance, and setting through experience. Dreams may be culturally apprehended as symbols, but when dreamt they are a series of sensory experiences that are only later analyzed for their meaning. In the present, the moment to moment experience of the dream seems clear and sensible. Later we realize some veil hung between us and that world, some unspoken agreement had been made that, as this is a dream, the rules of progression are different and if it is to continue, the rules are to be accepted without question. Because, as the father tells his son, in this Beckettian universe,

You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

Numerous dreams come and go throughout this narrative pointing at both the otherworldliness of life after the great and final mistake of mankind and also the mundanity of life's requirements. Even after the apocalypse we eat and we sleep and we dream. If we are a little child, we must learn the difference between the real world and the world of dreams and between bad dreams and good ones. Even in this world, or perhaps especially in this one, a father must teach his child ethics - which things to value, the respect due other living beings. And even in this deeply damaged universe, the son also teaches his father. Some of the most touching moments in this novel are ones in which the boy's inherent knowledge of what is right is challenged by what his father feels he must do to help them both survive in the extremity of the circumstances. This is an old tale - told often in both classical drama and in modern ones like Arthur Miller's All My Sons or Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities and A Fair Country. This is one of the sacred roles of parents. You can feel the deep struggle in this man who on the one hand must do everything that he can for his son to survive, even while he knows he is dying, and on the other wants to give him the same things most parents want to give their children - a safe, predictable world of full of goodness and generosity, and kind acts

You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by god. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?

Yes.

He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? he said.

Yes. We're still the good guys.

And we always will be.

Yes. We always will be.

Okay.

In the morning they came up out of the ravine and took to the road again. He'd carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin.

What continually amazed me in this story is that a sense of what the world will be and who the boy could be in it is what motivated the actions of the father. He doesn't just sit down and die, he envisions the future and he walks towards it. This is not merely a book, it's a monument.